dsandler.org

Brian explains why Half-Life 2 should be the game of the year (er, that is, last year).

Then, there’s the Havoc physics engine. My God, the Havoc physics engine. It is a thing of beauty to behold and to exploit with the gravity gun. There are also many areas that can only be passed through an understanding of physics, as well as several ancillary things that can only be obtained or reached through judicious use of the gravity gun and materials.

Yahoo’s Jeremy Z. just wants to insert a printf() in his plumbing.

Christopher Baus: “I boldly predict that in one year Google will give up and ignore “nofollow” meta-data.” His argument, in a nutshell: “Link data is Google’s number one asset. Today they just admitted that asset isn’t as valuable as it used to be.” Bah. They admitted, instead, that the world has changed, and that A links-to B no longer strictly implies A endorses B.

Update: It seems that there’s a growing backlash against nofollow, claiming it damages the Web or PageRank doesn’t motivate spammers (+) or even that spammers don’t even bother with HREFs sometimes.

I guess my problem is that I keep viewing spammers as essentially rational (which they are) but I totally misapprehend the utility of their various strategies. (Can you tell I’m enrolled in a game theory course this semester?)

Update #2: Via Brad DeLong, an even-handed opinion by Chuq Von Rospach: “Why ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ isn’t the answer. Or is at best only a partial one.” In essence, not only is it free to comment-spam, but it’s also highly unlikely that weblog software will be updated to annotate untrusted links appropriately. I think I can get behind this viewpoint—it’s a great idea, a useful thing to add to our bag of WWW tricks, but it won’t eliminate comment spam tomorrow.

Ed Felten: My Morning Pick-Me-Up.

First thing this morning, I’m sitting in my bathrobe, scanning my inbox, when I’m jolted awake by the headline on a TechDirt story:

California Senator Wants to Throw Ed Felten in Jail

I guess I’ll take the time to read that story!

Prentiss is using his Flickr favorites as input to the Mac OS X photo screensaver. (Might be nice to automate the process to make a fully-formed FlickrSavr…)

It’s about time. Several major search engines are adding link no-follow support to combat comment spam. For years we’ve been able to tell search spiders to ignore an entire page, but there’s been no way to tell them to ignore just one (or several) individual links on a page. Now we can, by tagging each untrusted link with rel=”nofollow”.

Now you can write a news article or weblog entry containing links you care to promote (by allowing Google/Yahoo to increase their page ranking) while forcing any content supplied by readers (i.e. comments) to be ignored by the search engines. No reader-supplied page-rank-boosting links → no more comment spam. Done and done.

More coverage: ArsTechnica, Dave Winer, eWeek article, MSN, Google (entry removed for some reason).

Update 1/20: Of course, removing the incentive to do something doesn’t cause it to disappear immediately. I’m tracking the opposition to nofollow on a more recent weblog entry.

I too noticed that the common ground between Apple’s blockbuster announcements last week was price, size, and headlessness. But John Gruber (as always) puts it much better, and does something I can’t: he gets inside why these products are what they are, when they are.

Even if the iPod Shuffle becomes the best-selling player in the iPod line-up (and, hence, the best-selling player in the world), the word “iPod” is already firmly established in the public consciousness as a high-quality, high-capacity player. Apple has cashed in a bit of the iPod brand value in exchange for a shot to dominate the entire digital music player spectrum, from top to bottom.

Edward Tufte has made available (for a limited time!) a couple of draft chapters from his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence. Advice for the consumer of presentations, the Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations chapter rails against imprecise, equivocating, and deceptive arguments. The chapter on Sparklines (how is this pronounced? “spark lines” or “spar-kleens”?) describes a new kind of inline infographic, no taller than a row of type.

Houston Chronicle: A year later, Metro’s light rail still dividing line. “Some believe the rail will generate something new for Houston: dense ‘urban villages’ where people live, work and play. And some don’t.” (Sadly, people are whining that after a year of ridership, Main Street hasn’t been magically transformed into Westheimer at 610.)

Hey, did anyone else notice that Apple has silently dropped support in Mail.app for the X-Image-Url header? It would fetch a small graphic from the given URL to display in the header of an email, a feature inherited from NeXTSTEP’s Mail.app. Yeah, it’s something of a security hole, but it was a fun feature. I had been intending to exploit it by stuffing some kind of graphical message meta-data in there; of course, when I tried it, Mail.app ignored the URL I supplied.

Maybe inline graphic data is the only safe option—perhaps the Face header proposal, or some kind of specially tagged MIME part.

Mail.app will still show icons in email messages, but only if there’s a picture associated with the email address in your Address Book. (example above: Mail.app uses my iChat icon)

“You must really love 柠檬.”

1. It’s often Bejeweling elsewhere.
2. The rest of the time, it comes in third:

Since the iPod has caught on, I think digital music players have displaced a lot of folks’ PDAs from that coveted number two spot (right after mobile phones, of course).

Via : delver.org: “A $499 Mac? How terribly crass.” A Slashdot gem.

Rod Begbie: I’ve Never Listened to a Podcast. (Confession: neither have I, except for Joe’s, which are pretty coherent and easy on the ears.)

What I’ve figured out over the years is that my brain is always doing a bunch of tricky preprocessing on visual input to compensate for this. I’m not exactly sure what it does, but it works through subtleties in tone and decides whether something is red or green, and then plugs this color into my visual field, so that I see distinct and vivid shades of red and green (and blue).

J Rob Wheeler attempts to document the undocumented features of his color vision. I don’t have any trouble with blue, but my mild deuteranomaly causes me green/brown issues of the sort he describes. In particular, there are things which look green in one light and brown in another, and once clearly identified as one or the other, the assignment “sticks” in my head. (Unfortunately, this sticky information is not always correct: There is a sweater I have which my brain has decided is brown, even though in full-spectrum light it’s clearly a vine green. It just got stuck as brown, and so brown it will forever be.)

(See the article referenced in Dynamic Colorblindness Correction for context.)

Amar gets it right: “only music critics are listening to new stuff all the time. The rest of us (me at least) are going backwards and forwards simultaneously.”

A little bit of déja-vu back in DC: my old favorite radio station, WHFS, was (abruptly) converted to a Spanish-language “tropical” format. From DCRTV.com:

At noon Wednesday, Infinity killed off alternative rock WHFS (99.1 FM). It’s now Spanish language El Zol, with “a current hit blend of Caribbean and Central American dance music.” […] WHFS was born in the 1960s on 102.3 FM in Bethesda, and became a maverick free-form progressive rocker by the early 1970s. It moved to Annapolis-based 99.1 FM in 1983. After a variety of owners, it evolved into a mainstream alternative rock outlet serving both DC and Baltimore, with studios in Lanham.

More links: R&R, WHFS/Washington Bids Farewell To Alternative.

2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.

Well spotted, Harbinger.

With the MacWorld keynote about to start (15 minutes from now), Boing Boing reports: “apparently there was a separate speech for press or European viewers or something this AM in San Fran.” A German site has a report:

Und plötzlich, praktisch ohne Vorwarnung, hält Steve Jobs neben dem schon bekannten iPod Mini einen zweiten Player empor: der iPod Micro. Flashbasiert soll er sein, 1 GB Speicher, was für 240 Songs genügt und meine Güte, ist das Teilchen winzig. Und: KEIN DISPLAY!

Update: Now that the keynote has come and gone, it’s obvious that this was a clever fake. (The account of a Euro-keynote, not the actual Apple products, which do exist, although the “iPod micro” is actually the “iPod Shuffle”.) I wonder why people feel compelled to develop ever more clever hoaxes. Is social engineering governed by the same forces that result in computer viruses?

Oh, I meant to ask—did anyone else notice that the green fountain pen (figuring prominently in last week’s ‘Alias’ season opener) was almost certainly a Namiki Vanishing Point? Once I saw the retractor I knew they’d either botched the prop (supplying a ballpoint instead of the FP called for in the script) or it was a Vanishing Point. As the camera approached, you could see the spring clip on the opposite end of the pen; as far as I know, the VP is the only pen of any kind which is configured this way. (It’s also the only pen that needs to be: fountain pens should always be stored nib up, to avoid gushing and spillage, and so it makes sense to put the clip on the nib end.)