Singer Barry White dies at 58

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Velvet-voiced R&B crooner Barry White, whose lush baritone and throbbing musical compositions oozed sex appeal on songs like “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” died Friday. He was 58.

White, who had kidney failure from years of high blood pressure, had been undergoing dialysis and had been hospitalized since a September stroke. He died about 9:30 a.m. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his manager, Ned Shankman.

His canyon-deep, butter-smooth vocals emphasized his songs’ sexually charged verbal foreplay, like on 1975’s “Love Serenade,” which began with White purring: “I want you the way you came into the world, I don’t want to feel no clothes …” [CNN]

For the ‘OOPS’ file:

Flickering bulb that was piece of art is mistakenly repaired

A repair man has fixed a flickering light bulb on a Glasgow street sign not knowing it was a valuable piece of art.

The ‘faulty’ lightbulb was in a neon ‘Empire’ sign on Brunswick Lane and was the central part of a £200,000 work by Turner-prize winning artist, Douglas Gordon. [Ananova]

So I’m mostly recovered from moving my site to my friend’s hosting company. Overall it was fairly painless. My biggest gripe is with Movable Type’s default handling of permalinks. With a default Movable Type installation your permalinks are only permalinks if you never ever delete a post or only have one blog on it. I really think they should have something in the documentation or even a standard setting that makes links more permanent. While it wasn’t necessarily moving my blog that caused my problem, I was planning on moving it anyways and it would have come up then anyways. I actually think they need to change their default archive structure too. When you have around 3000 posts in the same directory it gets to be a pain to work with if anything goes wrong. The issue is that a lot of people who set up Movable Type are still fairly new to blogging and aren’t even aware of issues like this until it is too late. It would be great if there was a kind of checklist of things for new MT users to think about when setting up their blog. Just so that they are aware of possible issues.

On the plus side, since all my links were going to break anyways I was able to move my whole site into just https://ezoons.com/wp-content/uploads/imported-legacy/. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess.

Yesterday was the First International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference. And of course, there’s a blog too. Eeks! [via Boing Boing]

Marty Indik: “Confusion is always the most honest response.” [Quotes of the Day]

Over at Surfin’ Safari, Dave asks for some feedback on Safari’s web page display. He actually asks for a top 10. I actually am not sure I can even come up with that many. I do have one gripe to do with how javascript is handled though. There are numerous blogs I go to that have comments and use javascript to indicate how many comments there are. If I make a comment and then revisit the page it seems to keep the whole thing cached and won’t update the count until I force a reload. This is the only browser I’ve run into that treats Javascript this way (at least that I’ve noticed).

Oh, and I thought of a second one. I use Movable Type for my blog and there are some administrative tasks that run for a longer period of time and send text to the browser showing what it is doing (importing posts for instance). In something like Camino you’ll see each line as it is sent to the browser. In Safari two things happen. First, you don’t see any of that text, you just get the little spinning dial in the tab. Second, it times out with an error after around 60 seconds (though the script does seem to keep running on the server). This was driving me crazy when I was migrating my blog recently.

So today I took the webcam plunge again and picked up an iSight. I used to have an old QuickCam VC, the old one where you had to plug it into your keyboard and parallel port. It was a pain in the ass and never really worked that well. I got some video conferencing stuff to work at one point, but it was flakey as all heck. I think I might even still have it stashed in some box in my closet. I have to admit, the iSight is quite sexy, Apple did a really nice job designing it. I have it clipped to the screen of my laptop right now. Setup was easy. Had it wired up within minutes of opening the box. I’m actually waiting for someone to be available so I can try doing video chat.

Now for the part where I babble about how cool OS X is. One reason I wanted the iSight was to play with having a webcam. I looked into webcam software for OS X, but it was all lacking one feature I wanted. The ability to publish to a remote machine via scp (secure copy). Looking at the different software I noticed a few of the packages had AppleScript support. For those of you who aren’t familiar with AppleScript, it is an English-like language used to write script files which can automate the actions of the computer and the applications which run on it. With OS X, Apple expanded the capabilities of AppleScript to allow it to run shell commands. That’s the feature I was hoping to use.

In the end I chose EvoCam because it looked fairly easy to use and it would let me run an applescript script after it did an image capture. After a few false starts, I came up with a one line script:

do shell script “/usr/bin/scp /Users/gblake/webcam/webcam.jpg gblake@remotehost.com:~/public_html/webcam/”

That’s all it took. I’m psyched that it was that easy to do. Add this to the list of reasons I really dig OS X. I’m going to have to play around with it some more.

It seems that some bands don’t want to sell individual songs at Apple’s Music Store.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Rock bands The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica are refusing to make their music available as individual downloads on Apple Computer Inc’s (AAPL.O) iTunes online music store, a representative for the bands, said on Wednesday.

That move comes in response to Apple’s decision to allow users to buy single tracks and is intended to protect the future of the long-playing album, the format that has dominated the music industry for decades, an agent for the bands said. [Reuters] [via MacNN]

What’s most surprising is that Apple won’t sell on albums with no tracks being available on it. I think some for some bands it makes sense for them to do this. Though I think it might make sense for them to just release one song of the album, just to give people a taste. It’s pretty interesting seeing how all this is playing out. I know how much Apple wants to sell things by the song, but if they don’t bend on this they’re doing their customers a disservice. I’m sure there are lots of folks who would be glad to buy a whole album by some of these bands. Though it might be an interesting compromise to sell some individual tracks on older albums, and maybe only sell new albums by the album.

A bunch of my friends had already gotten the PodiumPad, and all of them raved about it. So yesterday while at the Apple Store I decided to pick one up. I love it already. So often I kick back on the couch and want to have my TiBook in my lap. The only problem is this sucker can get hot. So in the winter it’s fine, but once it gets warm out at all it sucks. It’s also nice having the machine at a slight angle. I definitely give this product a thumbs up.

The Blobs attack!

Chilean scientists work to ID mysterious sea creature

(CNN) — Is it a fabled giant octopus, a monster squid, or perhaps a piece of a rotting whale?

A huge, gelatinous sea creature found in the Southern Pacific Coast of Chile continued to baffle scientists Wednesday while they waited for a DNA analysis. Elsa Cabrera, director of the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago, whose team found, photographed and preserved the find, received inquiries from around the world.

The more they looked at the creature, the more they became convinced it was a giant octopus known as Octopus Giganteus. A specimen of that octopus was believed to have washed up on the Florida Coast in 1896, but samples of the animal’s skin were lost and its species was never confirmed, said Dr. James Mead, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution where pictures of the specimen are stored. [CNN] [via Adam]