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This photo by Bill Cunningham of The New York Times serves as a reminder that locking your bike to scaffolding is not a great idea. Check out the rest of the bike-themed slide show here: On The Street | On a Roll

The 34th Street Partnership is planning to create an attended bike parking area in Midtown. They have secured space on West 33rd Street and are seeking a sponsor to cover the operating expenses.

To help defray the operating expenses, perhaps the 34th Street Partnership should consider renting the space to a bike shop rather than looking for a sponsor. This would not only defray expenses, but also offer on site repair services.

It’s been a long while since I lost music in a rental car. In 93, a tape player latched on to a killer mixtape somewhere south of D.C. and wouldn’t let go. Unfortunately, since the tape was stuck, the listening options for the next few-hundred miles were either the killer mixtape or nothing. After a few hours, the “killer” description took on a whole new meaning. I was so sick of that damn tape by the time I returned the car that I didn’t bother trying to retrieve it.

No matter how sick I was of that tape at the end of the trip, it was irreplaceable. The consequences aren’t quite as dire in these digital days and I’m not the least bit upset about my most recent loss. I can recreate the CD with a few clicks and I hope someone else gets some enjoyment from the one I lost. Of course, it might have ended up in the garbage bin at the garage on East 43rd Street, although, I’m pretty sure they don’t clean the cars that thoroughly

If by chance, someone does come across the unlabeled CD I left in that Budget rental car with Wisconsin plates, here’s the track information. Enjoy!

1. Dizzy Gillespie – Manteca (Funky Lowlives Remix)
2. Dar Williams – Beautiful Enemy
3. Alphawezen – Speed of Light
4. The Magic Numbers – Forever Lost
5. Elvis Costello – The Beat
6. The Pixies – Here Comes Your Man
7. Todd Evans – Into the Sun
8. Aretha Franklin – Rock Steady
9. The Blacks – Raincoat
10. Buffalo Tom – Soda Jerk
11. Luna – Sideshow by the Seashore
12. John Wesley Harding – The Triumph Of Trash
13. The New Pornographers – My Rights Versus Yours
14. The Decemberists – July, July!
15. Jump, Little Children – Too High
16. The Cardigans – Live and Learn
17. The Besnard Lakes – On Bedford and Grand
18. Michael Franti And Spearhead – Yell Fire
19. Donald Byrd – Think Twice

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Amazon released SimpleDB to limited beta in December. It’s just what it sounds like, a database to add to Amazon’s stable of web services. I’m a little surprised that SimpleDB does not support SQL, but I can understand why they chose to go in the direction they did.

For the full lowdown, check out Amazon’s SimpleDB page or this article on GigaOM which sums up SimpleDB quite nicely.

NetNewsWire and NewsGator’s other client products are now free. Well, almost free. You’ll have to give up some attention data, but that’s not so bad is it?

I had a minor hiccup upgrading to the 3.1 version. This was because I had been using NewNewsWire Lite version. When I tried to launch NetNewsWire 3.1, it failed (crash report details below).

Update from the comments: Brent is on the case and has posted a new build to fix this first-run issue. See his comment below for more information and the link. Thanks for the quick response Brent!

If you encounter the same problem, this is what worked for me: Move the ~Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist file to the desktop. After doing this, NetNewsWire should launch without issue and the preferences file will be recreated. If this works, you can trash the old file that was moved to the desktop.


Process: NetNewsWire [917]
Path: /Applications/NetNewsWire.app/Contents/MacOS/NetNewsWire
Identifier: com.ranchero.NetNewsWire
Version: 3.1 (1200)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [116]

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSCFString timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x515990'


via The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Bug Labs, mentioned here earlier, has announced their initial pricing just in time for CES. Unlike other companies, Bug Labs will offer an early-adopter discount rather than a premium.

Here is the price list from the Bug Labs site:

• BUGbase $349 ($299 w/discount)
• LCD module $119 ($99 w/discount)
• GPS module $99 ($79 w/discount)
• Camera module $79 ($69 w/discount)
• Motion detector / Accelerometer $59 ($49 w/discount)

This pricing seems reasonable, especially in light of early rumors that BUGbase’s retail price would be closer $1,000.

The Bug Labs online store will start taking pre-orders on the 21st of January and the expected ship date is the 17th of March, so mark your calendar.

Back in December, Jonas said “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could highlight an address on a web page and get subway directions to that location?” Cool indeed. I thought a bookmarklet would do the trick, so I came up with this one: HS Directions from ESB (does not work in IE). This bookmarklet will give subway directions from the Empire State Building to an address (highlighted in the browser) in Manhattan. The idea here being that one would use their home or work address rather than that of the Empire State Building. By having this bookmarklet in your browser, you’re one click away from subway directions.

There are some limitations to this method. For instance, the “Manhattan” destination is coded in the bookmarklet, if your destination is, say, Brooklyn, it’s not going to work. If you traveled to another borough regularly, you could have an additional bookmarklet; more than a couple of these would become unmanageable. Further, HopStop takes other variables into account like time of day and such when calculating routes. This bookmarklet doesn’t really help with that.

I went as far as creating a little HopStop bookmarkelet generator that allowed one to select the default start and end points for routes, then it created a bookmarklet on the fly which could be moved to the browser’s bookmarks. This worked pretty well. But, given the aforementioned limitations, I wondered if it would be all that useful. If anyone is interested in this, let me know and I might dust off the old project. It, however, would be even better if HopStop offered a generator like this.

Gregg Pollack, of Rails Envy fame, gave a good presentation on REST web services at the Orlando Ruby User’s Group recently (video here). This is a great primer for anyone trying to figure out what all this REST stuff is about. He also touches briefly on a couple Rails 2.0 features like ActiveResource.

Bits mentioned the human-guided search engine, ChaCha, today. ChaCha offers both browser-based and SMS search. Text a question to 242242 and ChaCha will answer.

I was interested in just how fast a person could answer a tough question. Today, I asked ChaCha three such questions via SMS and, in all cases, the answer came back within 90 seconds:

1. “Where can I get the best burger in NYC?” ChaCha came back with a definitive answer: “Donovan’s Pub in Woodside Queens has the best burger in New York.” Interesting choice. Their reference is an article in the Post. This question is highly subjective, and I won’t even speculate on the best burger in New York, I’ll give ChaCha a maybe on this one–I’ll also try the burger at Donovan’s.
2. “What is the cheapest way to get from Manhattan to JFK?” Once again, ChaCha came back with one answer: “Cabs are the best way, with a set fare, to get from JFK to Manhattan” referencing a UK Yahoo! site. This didn’t really answer my question, I was looking for the cheapest, not the best. Depending on who you ask, a taxi may or may not be the best way to get to and from JFK, but they certainly aren’t the cheapest. ChaCha got this one wrong.
3. “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” We all know there is only one answer to this and ChaCha got it right: “42.” They didn’t really need a reference here, but they provided a link to IMDB anyway.

One correct, one wrong and one maybe, a passable job given the questions. These answers do seem to reflect 20 cents worth of research. That’s what ChaCha pays their human guides per SMS answer (see FAQ). For that kind of money, I’m surprised they got close at all.

I don’t see ChaCha replacing any of the popular search engines. Then again, I don’t think that is their goal. The SMS feature is nice and I really like the simple, definitive answers that come back. Even if they aren’t 100% correct, at least they sound confident. Just don’t ask any life or death questions like “How do I apply a tourniquet?”