Fig. 1. Stingray!
Archive for October, 2004
I meant to submit a NetBSD logo design (way back in January when the competition was held), but never got around to it. Fortunately, the NetBSD folks picked an excellent logo without my help. It is recognizable, clear, attractive, and symbolic, and yet does an admirable job of evoking the old ’94 “Iwo Jima” logo without actually depicting controversial elements of that logo (viz., BSD devils or, you know, bloody World War II conflict).
Seriously? This is what newspapers are complaining about?
If you’re still wondering what Python decorators are really good for (beyond tagging classmethods), check out this Memoization recipe using decorators. Slick.
I gave up, a while back, on learning Ruby—the syntax was too weird and inconsistent, and I already had a favorite lightweight interpreted programming language. But when I see things like Instiki (a beautiful Wiki implementation with all the right features) and Rails (a very slick Web app framework, on which Instiki is built), I’m forced to wonder if I shouldn’t revisit the matter.
Excellent news!! (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Thu 28 Oct 04:40PM (#10658910)“WTF??” is where great science starts.
Re:Excellent news!! (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Thu 28 Oct 04:58PM (#10659043)“OMFG!” as a close second, and “Hey, what’s growing on my sandwich?” a distinct third.
Truer words never said (on Slashdot). (Thread about Cassini probe mysteries.)
John Gruber writes great essays about the Mac ecosystem, and “iPod Mania” is no exception.
The iPod has risen to pop-culture phenomenon status. People aren’t shopping for “digital music players”, they’re shopping for iPods.
You heard it there first: “iPod” is on its way to being Xerox, Kleenex, TiVo.
He’s right, of course. It’s a phenomenon. And it’s hitting at just the right time—when there’s a “middle class” of computer-comfortable users who are ready to buy in. They’re not early adopters, but they’re savvy enough that if they get sucked into digital music, they are totally sucked in. My brother-in-law, a consultant who uses computers every day for work but would never consider making a hobby out of it, has just discovered iTunes. (Erin and I had just a little to do with that, but mostly he finally got curious. Of course, me getting an iPod might have helped nurture that curiosity along; coda the “peer pressure” argument.)
And now he’s iTunes Music Store crazy. (Crazy for him, anyway: ten or fifteen songs in a couple of weeks. He tells me his wife has just discovered it in the last few days, and in that time she’s bought more tracks than he has.)
What’s even more interesting about this is that my brother-in-law is frustrated that the iTMS library is so small. “Go buy the CD and rip it,” I counseled. “No way,” he replied, “it totally defeats the purpose, for me. I only ever want two or three tracks on any album, and so it’s a waste to buy it in the store. But if I can buy tracks individually, I’ll do it.”
So he asked what his other options were, and at that moment he became the perfect example of a music lover just waiting for the music industry to get its act together and embrace digital music! And since that isn’t happening anytime soon, he is the perfect example of those potential file-sharers who are not cheap college students looking to steal music, but instead legitimate customers searching for a way to enjoy music. I told him about the other music services, which have usability problems and even smaller catalogs, and I also mentioned AllOfMP3 (you know, the russian music store selling songs for a quarter a track due to international trade loopholes). His first question: “Do they pay artists at all?” Of course, the answer is “no.”
This, friends, is why reasonable people steal music. Because they can’t buy it, not at a fair price or in a fair way, that meets their (reasonable) needs.
Well, crap! Death Cab For Cutie is playing Numbers right now and I had no idea. That would have been a much cooler way to spend a Friday night than working on a paper, and then, watching Celebrity Poker Showdown. Crap!
Ainsi, un webmaster peut décider, par un outil appropriè, d’importer le contenu du “flux RSS” dans sa propre page Web, et plus largement n’importe qui peut, par une manipulation similaire, recevoir dans sa boite e-mail ou via un logiciel dèdiè les dernières mises à jour d’un site proposant la diffusion de son contenu “en RSS”.
French-language introduction to RSS. The French always come up with great tech idioms; first it was “système d’exploitation” (operating system), and now it’s “flux RSS” (RSS feed). Formidable!
So, it seems highly possible that we might end up with a 269-269 electoral college tie. Then things get really weird.
Yeah, the catalog of 2004′s Scariest Halloween Costumes for kids (including: “shoelace bomber”, “arrested protester”, “Ralph Nader”) is pretty chuckle-worthy. But Tom Tomorrow should get the credit for the scariest costume of them all, since Sparky the Penguin dressed up as a touch-screen voting machine last year.
Typgraphica points out that Clearview, into which a huge amount of research has been invested, has been approved for use on Federal highway signage. (It’s already in use across Texas; I’d been wondering if it was a local thing, or a trend in nationwide signage. Now I know.)
The NPR 100: the 100 most influential musical recordings ever made. Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Bob Dylan; the list goes on and on. (related NPR stories)
Wired: Has TiVo Forsaken Us?
Buy a TiVo lately? Sometime in the next few months, your machine will quietly download a patch that makes it respond to a new copy protection scheme from software maker Macrovision. The app puts restrictions on how long your DVR can save certain kinds of shows - so far, just pay-per-view and video-on-demand programs. It’s the first time your TiVo won’t let you watch whatever you want, whenever you want. We asked TiVo general counsel Matthew Zinn why he thinks Hollywood will settle for an inch when it can take a mile.
National Geographic: Was Darwin Wrong? (The dramatic answer inside!)
Within seconds of the final out, boston.com had changed to this (thanks to Rod for the screencap).
“One day soon this orgy of relief and joy, these tears shed for relatives who lived and died without seeing this moment, it’s all going to seem a little silly.”
Of course, I called my dad, native Bostonian that he is. I said to
him, “Maybe your dad finally got that appointment with the Babe, you
know, and said to him, ‘Come on, this is getting ridiculous.’” He said
to me, “You know, this is amazing, something I never thought I’d see.
But I’d trade it in a heartbeat for a Kerry victory.”
William Gibson points to the essay series On War, by William S. Lind, which simply must be read.
Who am I? At present, I am a center director at the Free Congress Foundation. But in 1976 I began the debate over maneuver warfare that became a central part of the military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. Marine Corps finally adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine in the late `80s (I wrote most of their new tactics manual).
(Translation: this guy knows his stuff.)
Whoa. Big fat Morgan Stanley research report on RSS. (Courtesy Zawodny)
[2:30] <Adam> I’m still annoyed that ABC made Lost 1 minute longer, so it causes season-pass conflicts with West Wing.
[2:31] <dsandler> Adam: I, too, am pissed off about that.
[2:31] <dsandler> TiVo did what they always do: posted a helpful note to subscribers. But this is like Google putting up a little memo at the top of bad search results, saying “Some web sites seek to optimize their search results, so these results may not be relevant to you.”
[2:32] <Adam> Yeah.
[2:32] <dsandler> There is NO REASON not to implement and roll out (immediately if not sooner, thanks to ABC/NBC stunts like this) a “Record partial episodes in event of overlap” feature.
[2:32] <Adam> Although I would expect that there is a team at Tivo coming up with a “resolve these silly conflicts properly” feature.
[2:32] <dsandler> At LEAST we should have “Start recording N minutes LATE” to match “N minutes early”, but we don’t even get that.
[2:32] <Adam> Yeah! I noticed that this morning, too.
[2:32] <dsandler> (There is no “properly” if 1 minute of Lost overlaps the first minute of TWW. You have to pick one or the other if you have a single-tuner-TiVo.)
[2:33] <Adam> I couldn’t easily delay West Wing by a minute, nor could I have Lost stop recording a minute early.
[2:33] <Adam> So I had to create a manual recording of Lost.
[2:33] <Adam> And lose a minute! Oh no!
[2:35] <dsandler> The last minute is usually important! We chose to create a manual 0:59 recording of TWW.
[2:35] <dsandler> (Record By Time And Channel)
[2:35] <dsandler> Sucks, totally.
Build status in the systray. I actually built something like this for our builds at PalmSource; the hardest part was getting reliable information from our ad-hoc buildfarm. Remind me to snag some screenshots sometime.
Danah Boyd revisits her version of the “red vs. blue” metaphor: Walmart Nation vs. Starbucks Nation. (original piece from August)
Heh, heh. (Background: SGL. Hey, I didn’t know you could buy it from Amazon!)
Total lunar eclipse schedule for Wednesday, Central time:
Penumbra entry: 7:06p
Umbra entry: 8:14
Totality: 9:23
Midpoint: 10:04
Totality ends: 10:45
Umbra exit: 11:54
Penumbra exit: 1:02a
[4:15] <darryl> > i must report to you with a sad heart that this halloween, i am dressing up like katamari damacy. this is sad because none of you will be able to do this without coming off like a copycat. so i called it.
[4:15] <em> damn!
Update 10/28: Darryl sez: “Glady says that you really need to properly attribute this to Drew from Toothpaste For Dinner because he’s an Internet celebrity and people will find your post and think that I’m cribbing his idea which is why he posted his message in the first place.”
Well, there it is, the iPod U2 Special Edition.
Frankly, I think it’s cooler than the iPod photo. I mean, who wants to look at photos on a cell phone screen? (Yeah yeah, AV adapter, etc.) I’m glad they’ve replaced Chicago, however. (Sorry, pal, you were just using too many pixels!) Now, I know the current iPod screens support grayscale (at least 4-bit, I’d imagine)—how hard would it be to get a nice, anti-aliased font, and maybe some grayscale reduced-size album covers, all in an update for current iPods?
One for the ol’ portfolio, I guess: Business Card For A First-Year Law Student.
NYT Science section: The Red Sox will lose because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
“The worst thing about working at the IAEA is that nobody can hear you say ‘I told you so.’ On account of all the explosions.”
“I told you: He’s scarily evolved.“ Salon fawns all over Christian Bale, just in time for him to become Batman (and a household name).
Ugh. RSS techniques for Search Engine Optimization. The SEO guys make me ill.
Rod is now hooked on XM radio.
