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Stories from the set of the run-through for the pilot ep of NBC’s Alyson Hannigan vehicle. “David Schwimmer was the director of the pilot. He spoke to the audience for a short while, and he seemed very nice and glad that the small crowd was present. […] It amused me greatly that a ‘magic box’ and the words ‘the chosen one’ both were a part of the show. Seriously – I couldn’t make this stuff up.” Plot spoilers at the end, so, you know, if you’re not into that sort of thing, look out.

I know it was on Slashdot (so you’ve probably already seen it) but I have to mention this and file it under “UI”: TrailBlazer, a web browser (built on Apple’s WebKit, so it’s basically Safari) with a 2D, branching interface to browser history. A thumbnail preview of each page you visit is captured for the history interface as well. Working on BeIA, Chris and I spent hours drawing these history diagrams on the whiteboard, trying to boil them down to some sane linear ordering for the browser component. It never occurred to us to just copy those whiteboard drawings into the product, but maybe that’s because we didn’t really have the horsepower to do so at the time (we were struggling to browse the web at 800×1024 on a 300 MHz Geode).

As muxway put it,

treemap + news = newsmap

Clay Shirky’s latest NEC essay is entitled Situated Software, and it deals with the phenomenon of software written by—and for—a very specific subset of the potential user population. I find that I spend a lot of time writing software, both for my job and for personal projects, which fits this model. I have dozens of software projects which I’ve spent a good deal of time on, yet are far too specific in problem domain (and user group) to even bother trying to release to a wider audience.

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More coverage of the DreamHost DDoS downtime from dave peck, and others: Andy Budd; Mike Steinbaugh; and Chad Dickerson, who points out that Feedster is supremely helpful in finding out about this kind of breaking news in the weblog world. In fact, using Feedster at just the right time—that is, in conjunction with an event of particular interest to you—is a very interesting way to discover an ad-hoc community (in this case, concerned DreamHost customers).

Fig. 1.  MASTER USING IT AND YOU CAN HAVE THIS.

Seen on Engadget: Nintendo Launches Classic NES Games For GBA SP.

• Donkey Kong: The best game featuring a plumber rescuing a princess from a big ape pretty much ever.
• Pac-Man: Hel-lo? If you don’t know this game then where have you been?
• The Legend of Zelda: Dude! How classic can you get? The righteous Link whips Ganon and saves Zelda. Link rules!
• Super Mario Bros.: There are pipes and coins and these grody goombas and you just stomp away.
• Excitebike: It’s a rad motocross racing game that lets you rip around a track and kick up dirt and stuff.
• Ice Climber: Like, duh. You climb the ice and whack monsters.
• Xevious: Go to space and shoot stuff with your wicked spaceship.
• Bomberman: Drop bombs on the baddies.

Not only that, but they’re coming out with a “limited edition” Game Boy Advance, with red A/B buttons and black NES stripes on it. Ultimate retro.

Fig. 2. Bitchin’.

Jeremy points out:

Since we were discussing advances in space science, I figured I’d forward this on to you. Its received little coverage in America, likely due to the fact that it was Europeans who found it and Kobe is going to trial (one must have priorities): “Methane on Mars could signal life”.