The cli package is a framework for making simple, correct command line applications in Python. With cli, you can quickly add standard command line parsing; logging; unit and functional testing; and profiling to your CLI apps. To make it easier to do the right thing, cli wraps all of these tools into a single, consistent application interface.

If it does what it says on the tin, pyCLI can eliminate a lot of boilerplate. I'm also interested in the background of who put the module together and whether it's been used in a production system. Otherwise, it looks pretty well designed and put together.

Apparently I was wrong. You can write your own custom player for iOS that taps into the users iTunes database. Seems to be a plethora of such apps in the iTunes music store.

So I'm giving the rather garish Amp Music Player a test drive. At the very least, it seems to do a better job of making track metadata visible. But the overly busy interface doesn't seem quite right coming from the music app. We'll see how it goes.

So I decided to read them all.

Don't know if this is just selection bias, but I noticed there were quite a few Macs in usage, maybe even a significant majority. A lot were laptops with only 4GB of memory. Also enjoyed the gender mix and the eclectic "career" choices.

Some of the more entertaining entries for me included: Amy Hoy, Aaron Swartz, Richard Stallman, Mark Pilgrim, Anne Halsall (reminds me I need to checkout Inkling), and Andrew "bunnie" Huang,

One of the reasons I like reading British sci-fi authors, is that they have enough room in their head for alternative political systems. Witness Iain M. Banks in regards to his Culture series Via MetaFilter:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

In addition, I've got William Gibson's Zero History on pre-order with Amazon. And I'm now reading China Mieville's The City & The City. Really working the cream of the crop.

I confess to being one of those beta testers that startups hate. One of those that begs for an early invite, then doesn't use the system, and doesn't even provide any feedback. In the case of iCurrent, I'm guilty as charged.

I was seduced by Ramana Rao, who's research, companies, and blog I've been following for a long time. The iCurrent vision was definitely simpatico with some thoughts I've long had about personalized news. As soon as Rao announced the product, I immediately asked for an invite.

So what caused me to recently turn off my iCurrent e-mail subscription, with a whole bunch of unread messages? The reasons probably start with this quote from Rao:

We spent the first 6 months building a conceptually complete architecture. Not architecture in the sense of a scalable Internet architecture, but as in a framework with places for the ideas. We implemented enough at coarse 90% levels so that we could assess proceeding. Beyond the airflow simulation, it was wind tunnel tests, and then enough of an airplane to test in real world conditions.

Throughout we interviewed people all over the US (Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida), a typical qualifier being not knowing what “TechCrunch” was.

That should have disqualified me instantly. In addition, I observed the following:

• I read news in my RSS aggregators: Google Reader and NetNewsWire. I don't want to add any other "locations" such as another website or e-mail.
• Rating is work. I know iCurrent demands people in the loop, but for me I didn't want to put in the work.
• The channels that seemed closest to my interests weren't close enough. For example, the house music channel pulled in too many false positives of articles that include the words "house" and "music" or that were simply event announcements.
• The majority of sources were mainstream media, which I've mostly given up on for the news I care about.
• Channels only presented small numbers (< 10) of articles. I'm just wired for much higher rates of information flow.

I wish iCurrent the best of luck. If they can pull off aggregation for the average non-techie it'll be a big winner. I remember Daylife trying to hoe this row and changing course to become a smart content provider for publishers. If there's one suggestion I had for iCurrent, it might be to provide an API to allow others to experiment with human in the loop in those places they can't service, like feed readers.

Flash Update. Turns out iCurrent was purchased by the Washington Post Company back in July. If MediaBeat is right, and the purchase price was in the neighborhood of $5 million, that's not encouraging for personalized news as a business. iCurrent's only investor, Crosslink Capital, put in $3 million over about 3 years. That's probably not an acceptable rate of return for a venture capital firm.

And I don't have a lot of confidence that WaPo can make something significant out of the acquisition. Besides, iCurrent limited to one source doesn't seem all that useful.

I know you don't care about my fantasy team. I wanted to alert the audience to the fact that I will be guiding a new edition of Doom Patrol in defense of my office league title. I was getting a little nervous there, but the commish finally pulled the trigger on the league invites. Unfortunately it's short suspense, as our draft is this Friday evening.

There will be chronicling.

You have been warned.

Despite my disappointment with Douglas Rushkoff's Life, Inc., and a wariness of books taglined with listicle bait (TEN COMMANDS FOR A DIGITAL AGE), I'm somewhat intrigued by Rushkoff's new book, Program or be Programmed.

In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age––and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message.

I'm generally aligned with the sentiments expressed in his recent blog posts, wary of corporatism and mass culture, and interested to see Rushkoff's prescription. Presumably he'll spend less time building the argument and more on actionable measures.

I'm also interested to see how his experiment with indie publishing works out.

While obviously of its time that first post, Live Through This, still reads pretty caustic and pretty funny. A tirade about Courtney Love conspiracy theories, it marked to my mind the beginning of the modern blogosphere. To that point, what resembled blogging was mostly tech oriented, personality driven, or link blogging. Blogging was still all about the Internet and the Web. Suck transcended the form by using the blog format as a mode of serious media criticism, including critique of The Web (tm). Interestingly the only URL in that post that's survived link rot is Lollapalooza's. And of course the permalink for Live Through This.

A couple of alums also managed to survive and thrive a bit as well. Ana Marie Cox went on to fame as a Wonkette. Heather Havrilesky does a lot of work for Salon. If you read anything intelligent, you've probably run across Terry Colon's illustrations. I wonder if Jake Tapper ever regrets contributing as James Bong.

Suck's been gone for over 9 years. I still pour out some chardonnay for ya homie.

Information informs. Analysis enlightens.

Classic Institute.

According to Wired, Dr. Who might have paid a visit to MIT's 6.01. As a 6-3 alum, I have to quibble with Annalee Newitz's "the infamously hard and awesome introduction to computer science class." Awesome? Yes! Infamously hard? No. Famously well taught, so that many folks from other majors would take it? Definitely.

Update: Better story via MIT itself. The Doctor: 1 / Harvard: 0.

Photo courtesy of Melanie McCue through a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license.

So I hit some pretty important milestones at work and decided to give myself a summer treat. I ordered the hardcover collection Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! from Amazon. A little over a year ago, this edition hit my radar, but I hadn't gotten around to purchasing a copy. Partially because of the price, which was $50 from the only place I could find it online, at the time.

Well Amazon had it for $37. Since I'm an Amazon Prime member, I got it in two days for no extra charge. What's not to like?

The book arrived just a little while ago. And boy does Chaykin's art still look good, even 27 years later. Definitely amped up to revisit Reuben Flagg's (mis)adventures again.

Firefight! All Night! Live!

• Introduction (L. Sprague de Camp)
• Letter from Robert E. Howard to P. Schuyler Miller (Robert E. Howard)
• The Hyborian Age, Part 1 (Robert E. Howard)
• The Thing in the Crypt (L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter)
• The Tower of the Elephant (Robert E. Howard)
• The Hall of the Dead (Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp)
• The God in the Bowl (Robert E. Howard)
• Rogues in the House (Robert E. Howard)
• The Hand of Nergal (Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter)
• The City of Skulls (L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter)

I cheated a little in that I didn't bother to read the Introduction, Letter from Robert E. Howard to P. Schuyler Miller, and The Hyborian Age, Part 1. Sorry if I remember the material wrong, but I wasn't interested in reading extensive world building and fanboyish claptrap.

In this series of stories, Conan is pretty young, basically a teenager. He wanders away from Cimmeria into the more "civilized" western nations of the area. Most of his initial adventures are as a thief, but by the end of the book he's become a trained mercenary. Interestingly in the first two-thirds of the book, the stories read with much more of a mystery feel than swords and sorcery.

As one can see, this is again a mix of Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. The straight Howard stuff is pure gold. The Tower of the Elephant, The God in the Bowl, and Rogues in the House are all well paced and written, if occasionally a bit flowery, reflecting the pulp heritage of the era. Special nod to Rogues in the House for inspiring the classic cover art by Frank Frazetta. Carter didn't do too bad a job finishing up The Hand of Nergal. The other three stories are pretty pedestrian. At the moment, I can't even remember the plot of The Hall of the Dead.

And just an observation, but I'm pretty sure every story up until The City of Skulls featured some form of the phrase, "Conan, naked but for a loincloth..." C'mon guys, break out a thesaurus once in a while.

Virgin's gone nuts! Now they're offering unlimited mobile broadband through their Mi-Fi device for $40 a month. There's no contract required and pay as you go. Nice!

Of course unlimited probably means "not too much over 5GB please or we'll shut you down." But still it's a savory pricepoint. $40 is south of what AT&T charges you for tethering on their data plans. So you can get the upside of Wi-Fi sharing for multiple devices at a lower cost. And relative to tethering the Mi-Fi is probably no more inconvenient.

Via Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS

Okay, so that DJ Pierre mix (Parts 1 and 2) that I spotted on the Toronto Mixtape Archive was surprisingly poor. Pierre never hit a memorable groove, a couple of times it seemed someone bumped the tables, and worse there were a few beat matching train-wrecks. That being said, his mix incorporated a few high quality tracks that I hadn't heard in a long time. One was What is House Muzik?, a DJ Pierre classic.

Another was Green Velvet's The Preacher Man off of the Velvet Tracks EP. At the time The Preacher Man was startling in that Curtis A. Jones basically ripped of some (probably South Side Chicago) preacher's sermon and threw it over really hardcore pounding Acid beats and tweaks. And still the most popular game we play...is house!. Whatever, it worked. You can still throw that in a mix today, 16 years after its release, and get people on the floor to scream.

I'm holding on to the somewhat rare transparent green vinyl 12" edition, keeping it in storage. And I've got memories of hitting the SF club scene with Cajmere in the early 90's. We were both grad students at Cal Berkeley and into the burgeoning San Francisco House/Techno scene of the time. He was in Chemical Engineering and bailed out after his master's to pursue a music career. Turns out to have been a pretty good choice.

My little laptop supports two finger scrolling on the trackpad.

Woohoo!!

While this feature is overall great for browsing the Web, it really obviates some complaints I had about NetNewsWire. Now I can easily scroll through the headlines in a folder without opening all of them. And I can easily switch between scrolling the headlines and scrolling an item body.

Manna!!

Yes, I am easily amused.