dsandler.org

Quoth the stuntpilot: “Everybody says you cannot do it, until NASA calls.”

For future reference, scorching your alliances and coalitions with other nuclear nations in the process of chasing after the chimeric threat of nuclear terrorism might be a lousy gamble in the long run.

I am, officially, the last person to get a Gmail account. Whuffies to Adam, who helped me out in this regard.

Things that are immediately striking to me about the user experience:

1. Round-trips to the server are substantially reduced. Eliminated, frankly, for common navigation options. This is a huge win, as server latency is about 50% of the problem with web app interaction (the weak HTML control set accounts for the other half). Update, 10:47: When it has to hit the server, Gmail tries Real Hard to hide it; they make good use of one of my favorite webapp tricks: the image-url-with-side-effects. (“Star” a message and see what happens.)
2. Progressive disclosure all over the place. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a UI that was so chock-full of drawers and pockets, and I think this underscores Gmail’s focus on streamlined, relevant information (rather than the info-overload which seems to be the stated goal of apps like Outlook).

More thoughts (to add to the steaming heap of Gmail opinion already out there) as I spend more time with the app.

Update, 10:48: One of the aspects that’s really tickling my spider-sense is that Gmail combines the access-anywhere of webmail (and, frankly, of mutt-over-ssh, my current email solution) with just a little bit of the flash and feel of a desktop app. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed using email as much as back when I used Eudora in the mid-nineties, but since I need to get at my email from many different places that’s not as much of an option for me. Gmail sprinkles a bit of Eudora into the webmail mix, and you can taste it.

Idea: use basketballs as fishing lures!

Let the Darin g Fireball narration of Konfabulator vs. Dashboard. The shared concept, of course, dates back to the classic Mac OS “desk accessories” and even terminate-and-stay-resident apps for DOS. What’s news to me is the substantially different under-the-hood implementation of K vs. D, and that really makes all the difference. It still sucks to be Arlo Rose, but then again, how long should any of us expect to have exclusive rights to a good idea?

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. (Clearly leaving my favorite title for the seventh and final book, When Harry Met Voldy.)

Oh, the humanity: there’s actually a very thoughtful and thorough review of Spider-Man 2 up at the ‘dot this evening. (Some spoilers, but nothing really revelatory, mostly consisting of some signposts to give you a little advance warning for when the Very Best Parts of the film are coming.)

According to chuys.com, “The Richmond location closed for business 9-29-03. Relocating to Shenandoah; opening December 2003.” Ever since the West Houston location closed, the Westheimer location (near Rice) has been packed. More than ever before. It looks like they opened the Woodlands location earlier this year, but, man, it’s halfway to College Station. Doesn’t look like it will draw much of the River Oaks crowd away. Oh, well.

It occurred to me yesterday that the Konfabulator folks should get together with the Watson people and form a support group for small independent software developers who have had their products burgled and duplicated by Apple for inclusion in the standard Mac operating system distribution.

Q: What were the first words spoken in the newly sovereign Iraq?

A: “Mr. Bremer! Aren’t you staying for the reception?”

Fahrenheit 9/11 did very well in the theatres this weekend, beating out “White Chicks” (which played in three times as many locations) for the top spot. Apparently, in highly left-leaning districts (college towns, etc.) there was much booing and hissing when Bush, Ashcroft, et al. appeared on-screen. I like the idea of audience participation in this film. (Moore’s whole point is that there needs to be more “audience participation” in this country, in general.) Just call it the “Iraqi Horror Picture Show”.

Adam Cadre lavishes happiness and light on Scary Go Round by John Allison. “There have been very few comic strips whose art is as big a draw as the comedy: the list pretty much begins and ends with Calvin and Hobbes. […] I probably wouldn’t read Scary Go Round — much less shell out for spinoff books — if not for the fact that, like Calvin and Hobbes, Scary Go Round is not only the best-looking major comic strip of its era but also the funniest.”

Listened to AM HateRadio on the way back from lunch with Trey. Paraphrasing:

The Post is unafraid to quote Dick Cheney.

On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney’s ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush’s judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

“Fuck yourself,” said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

Leahy’s spokesman, David Carle, yesterday confirmed the brief but fierce exchange. “The vice president seemed to be taking personally the criticism that Senator Leahy and others have leveled against Halliburton’s sole-source contracts in Iraq,” Carle said.

As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the “Defense of Decency Act” by 99 to 1.

File under “totally irrelevant to 100% of the world” (actual percentage obscured by rounding error): The author of ersatz true-life blog-opera “Plain Layne” has unmasked himself. But is this just another persona?

Blog and wiki? WikiAndBlog.

Neologism from the Chronicle (though I can’t say I’ve heard it in common usage in Houston, it does have an excellent ring to it): smoothista.

Oh, well, I didn’t win the What Would Steve Do? contest with my “iFi” home stereo component (local iTunes library, DVR features, etc). Sigh.

Update: Here, why don’t I just post the entire concept, and just get it out there.

From: dan sandler
To: applecontest at engadget.com
Subject: WWSJD? plausible product: the iFi

Admittedly, it’s a bit farfetched, Apple having just announced the AirPort Express. But the recent creation of a whole iPod division tells me that Steve wants to make the iPod brand as well known—or, frankly, better known—than Macintosh. (It’s already started to become a generic tradename, of course…)

So my “guess” is that Steve will introduce a home AV component to the under the iPod brand family: a slick metal box that fits right in with your living room instead of your office. It even has a cool, seventies-retro name.

It is the iFi.

It attaches to your fancy Dolby Digital surround decoder and streams your iTunes over your forest of living room speakers, not unlike the Express, but that’s where the similarity ends. The iFi has a remote control and on-board LCD display, allowing a “music surfer” full control over playback. In fact, it acts more like an iPod than anything, having its own hard drive which synchronizes music from iTunes on your Mac (or PC!) rather than streaming it.

“But wait, there’s more.” It will do for the digital video recorder “market” what it did for the personal digital audio player “market”: drag it out of obscurity and into the mainstream. (Look out, TiVo—your days are numbered.) The iFi hooks up to your television, and your cable or satellite; Apple’s iFi Listing Service (part of the iTunes Music Store? .Mac?) provides television listings (synched over the Internet; none of this “phone home” modem business) and video-on-demand (movie trailers, streaming radio/video, download-and-play content).

Of course, the iFi will stream your iMovies and iPhotos too, displaying them on your TV. That’s just a given.

The iFi can burn playlists to CD, obviously—it’s essentially an iTunes kiosk, putting Apple brands and technology in prominent display in your house, right where your guests will gawk at it.

The iFi is the first “appliance” powered by OS X; the industrial designers will, predictably, have a *field day* as there are very few of the traditional Apple form factor constraints (power consumption, size, weight, etc.). It will be the “must have” gadget of the year, and the margins will be much fatter than those of the iPod. Finally, a product that doesn’t need subsidizing.

As with Apple’s most successful products, not all the ideas are new (see TiVo; the Home Audio Reference Platform (HARP) from Be Inc.; Apple’s own iPod; etc.) but never before have they all been available in one coherent, seamless package to discriminating lifestyle geeks.

All this will come to pass. I promise it!

Some thoughts on blogging work stuff at Microsoft. On that note, PalmSource’s earnings are out. “Net loss for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2004 was $2.9 million, or $0.23 loss per share. Net loss for the same quarter of the prior fiscal year was $3.4 million, or $0.34 loss per share.”

(Posting pictures of your cats is a time-honored tradition of the Web.)

Random insight: I have finally established quite firmly in my mind that the thing I love about the web, and Wikis (collaborative densely-cross-referenced sites, with rapid editing right in the browser) in particular, is that they tickle a bunch of HyperCard-loving neurons that were deposited in my brainstem long, long ago. (The comparison between Wiki and HyperCard has been noted by others.)

For those of you still on Sprint (clearly you live in a cell tower, because you’re not going to get reception anywhere else), Gizmodo has a really useful breakdown of all phones currently available for that carrier. (Written by a Sprint rep, off the record.)

Ugh. Spammers are hammering on DreamHost websites today, seeking out vulnerable formmail scripts to help them exude their filthy missives. Because of this, the DH mail servers have slowed to a crawl again, so my diary entries (submitted by a mail→weblog gateway) are showing up out of order, delayed by hours, etc. So, I had some interesting things to say last night and early this morning, but, you know, you’ll read ’em when you read ’em.

This follow-up on the Last Comic Standing voting brouhaha copied straight from Tuesday’s Studio Briefing:

Last Comic Standing producer-host Jay Mohr has accused judges Drew Carey and Bretty Butler of “unprofessional” behavior for their criticism of the choices announced on the program. In an interview with TV Guide Online, Mohr maintained that when the judges unanimously agreed on a contestant, he or she automatically remained on the show. However, in one instance, Mohr said, after seven comics were chosen unanimously, it was discovered that although only three spots were left but, 11 comics were named by three of the four judges. So NBC execs picked the remaining finalists. TVGO observed that the show’s producers have no say in selecting the finalists since at least two of them are managed by the show’s co-producer, Barry Katz, who also manages Mohr. “NBC is smart enough to know that if Barry or I were allowed in the room [where the finalists are selected], that would be the absolute fastest way to open yourself up to litigation,” Mohr said.

KirbyBase: a flat-file DBMS in pure Python (or Ruby).

Emmaline was being annoying, so I flipped her off. She didn’t seem to care. Too desensitized, I guess.

Some recently-released indie comix & anthologies: MEKA, Flight vol. 1, agent44 digest, exitmusic.

(really, I’m just taking notes on this for later)

The minimal MoinMoin theme (installs in <wikidir>/data/plugin/theme):

import urllib
from MoinMoin import config, i18n, wikiutil, version
from MoinMoin.Page import Page
from MoinMoin.theme.classic import Theme as ThemeBase

class Theme(ThemeBase):
    name = "my-fancy-new-theme"

    def __init__(self, request):
        ThemeBase.__init__(self, request)

def execute(request):
    return Theme(request)

It’s not quite minimal, of course; I could do without most of those imports. But I’ll probably need them later anyway.

Fig. 1. Spy photos of the forthcoming Power Mac G5′s new “Kool-Aid Flow Induction Unit”. [Snagged from Gizmodo]

I’ve been thinking about the rise of the web as an application platform for a while. But what hadn’t occurred to me until I read Spolsky’s essay last week is this, which I think is quite remarkable: Microsoft totally fucked up when they took aim at Netscape. It wasn’t Netscape that was a threat to Windows as an application platform, it was the web itself.

—from Daring Fireball’s The Location Field Is the New Command Line.

Well, I did quite a bit better than last year, when I completely freaked out; in fact, when the BEEP-BEEP-BEEP went off this morning, I had to explain to a very disoriented and confused Erin what the sound was.

This time it seemed to have been cut off in the middle of the last beep, so that there were five or five and a half shrill tones. I was alert enough by the end of it to get the distinct impression that the sound was coming from the smoke detector, so maybe it just feels a need to stretch its legs every year or so.

Adam actually schlepped out to Spaceport Mojave (why? because the spaceship launch was there!) and came back with his customary “just like being there” narrative of thoughtful photos. [See Scaled’s 6/21 launch FAQ for details about the day’s events and hardware.]

Favorite jokes. (My dad’s favorite joke is “baseball in heaven”, as he’s fond of reminding me any time the topic of “favorite jokes” comes up.)

Mike Melvill opens a bag of M&Ms (plain, apparently) aboard the first 100Km test flight of SpaceShipOne on Monday.