Online copy of first English dictionary
Online copy of first English dictionary. most definitely in the public domain
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Entries for January 2003
[insert Adaptation pun here]
The pace of news has slowed over the past month or so, but I’m still posting away on the Adaptation weblog on Susan Orlean’s site and will continue to do so until after the Oscars. If you’ve seen the movie, you might want to check out the site for background about how it all came about.
Particular posts I would recommend are:
Susan says Adapation is “amazing”
Deleted scenes
Behind the scenes pictures
Artist renderings
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and how it relates to reporting
Adding to the pile
Spoof?
New Yorker review
And of course, there’s the book on which the movie was based: The Orchid Thief.
Like bloggers link like bloggers
Like bloggers link like bloggers. weblogs and the growth of a scale-free network
RSS readers misusing the referer field?
Since I began publishing RSS feeds for this site, my server logs are full of referers from various RSS readers. Six of my top ten referers are from RSS readers like NetNewsWire and the brand new Syndirella.
Very few of these are true referers. No one clicked on a link on the NewsGator page to get to my site, yet I have almost 2000 referers from that page in my logs for this month. Checking my logs more closely, it appears that each time an RSS file from my site is loaded by one of these applications, a referer is deposited in the log file. Each time I load a page in Internet Explorer, I don’t leave a referer for www.microsoft.com/ie in the log files of the site whose page I loaded, so why should any of the RSS readers be different?
The definition of referer from RFC 2616 on HTTP 1.1 seems relevant to the question. It states that “The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server’s benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained” and that “the Referer field MUST NOT be sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have its own URI”.
If you need to get inebriated to “
If you need to get inebriated to “bond” you’ve got a psychological problem. love that quote
The cone of shame might be just
The cone of shame might be just the thing for habitual cell phone users.
I honestly love this little tempest in a teapot
I honestly love this little tempest in a teapot. $10 says this is all being taped for a Fox reality show
The New York I love to hate
The New York I love to hate. and I don’t really love to hate it that much
I need a do over
Update: I updated the stereo photography post yet again (you can’t write a weblog without embracing writing as an iterative process). Taking a closer look at how I screwed up the placement of the images for viewing, I found the photo taken from the left-most vantage point needs to go on the right side and vice versa. That way, when you cross your eyes, the left eye sees the photo taken from the left and the right eye sees the photo taken from the right.
Earlier post: This is embarrassing. After advising all of you to “keep track of which is the left most photo and right most photo” in my post about stereoscopic photography, I completely ignored that with my examples. Except for the Lisa/Wiggum pair, each of the examples had the left and right images transposed. This means that unless you were standing on your head, you either couldn’t see the effect or saw it in a kind of reverse 3-D with the far objects near and the near objects far.
Anyway, you should take another look if you failed to see the effect before…they are all much better now. Thanks to David for catching this.
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. by Duncan J. Watts
Encyclopedia of the Marvelous, the Monstrous, and the Grotesque
Encyclopedia of the Marvelous, the Monstrous, and the Grotesque.
The idea of web browser as something more is catching on
Dave Hyatt, member of the Safari team at Apple and former contributer to Chimera, posted a bit on his weblog yesterday about integrating RSS reading into the web browser:
I’ve heard a lot of people state that RSS and news aggregators are for ‘geeks’ and ‘blogging enthusiasts,’ but I simply don’t believe that to be true. It should be possible to make an application for managing a large amount of information flow that is accessible to mainstream users. Browsers are trying to make information easier to manage with smarter bookmarking systems and page management capabilities (tabs), and news readers are emerging that (in effect) push new information to you in as it’s posted and allow you to switch rapidly between different information sets as well.
His comments and the ensuing thread mirror much of the discussion around the Sherfari idea (follow-up). I envy Dave…I think this would be a really fun project to work on for Apple.
Update: yet another post/thread on Dave’s weblog re: Browser++. The ensuing thread is useful only if you like reading about what technically-inclined power users (about 0.0002% of the population) want out of a web browser. User-centered whuzzah?
Fun with stereographic photography
Stereographic photography (or stereo photography for short) involves taking two slightly different pictures of the same scene so that viewing them in a certain way produces a 3-dimensional image. Having seen some examples of stereo photos recently, I decided to do some research and experiment by making some of my own.
To view the images in 3-D, cross your eyes until a composite image forms in the middle (it even works with the thumbnail above). From what I’ve read, a small percentage of you (5-10%) won’t be able to see the effect, so if you can’t get it to work, that might be why.
Stereo photography turns out to be fairly easy to do if you’re not concerned with exact results, even if you only have one camera. Choose an appropriate scene and photograph it from two different positions a small distance apart, making sure to keep the camera as horizontal as possible. That distance depends on distance between the camera and the scene, but for most pictures, an inch or two of separation between camera positions is sufficient. For the Lisa Simpson image, the figurines were about two feet away and I moved the camera only about an inch between shots. Make sure you keep track of which photo you took from the left side and which you took from the right. That’ll be important when preparing the images for viewing.
Download the photos to your computer and adjust the images in Photoshop (or a similar program) to compensate for any camera unsteadiness. They need to be horizontally & vertically aligned, color corrected, and cropped so that the two photos look as much alike as possible. The easiest way to do this in Photoshop is to paste one image on top of the other in its own layer. Decrease the opacity in the top layer to 50% and adjust to your heart’s content.
When preparing the images for viewing, tall images seem to work better than wide images in getting the proper 3-D effect. Keep image sizes small; if the images get too wide, you won’t be able to cross your eyes enough to see the effect. To view the images, place them side-by-side on the screen or print them out, placing the photo you took from the right side on the left and the photo you took from the left side on the right (if you don’t switch the photos, you’ll get a strange inverse 3-D effect). Then cross your eyes until a composite image appears in the middle.
If you’re interested in trying stereo photography, here are some links to help get you started:
A Crash Course in Stereo Photography
An Introduction to 3-D (Stereoscopic) Photography
How To Take Stereoscopic Photography
A History of Stereoscopic Photography
A Guide for New Stereo Photographers
The Simple Making of Stereoscopic Photography
Better examples of stereo photography than mine:
Stereoscopic Photography of Flowers in Japan
High Quality Stereopictures
Okuyuki’s 3D Photo Gallery
Early 19th Century Stereographs
Stereoviews by Dan Shelley
David’s Stereoscopic Photo Gallery
Stereo Photography of Fluorescent Minerals
Celebrity Stereo Photography
Undesign
Liz Bailey recently wrote an article called Lo-Fi Allstars (PDF) for Graphics International on the trend toward simpler, more usable web design. The article includes a few quotes from me about weblog design. Here’s part of a rambling email interview I did for the article:
Weblogs have definitely affected the look and feel of the overall Web. With weblogs, the design doesn’t matter so much. It’s not even really design, not to the people who just want to get a blog online so they can get their voice out there quick. All they want is something reasonably readable and distinct (and even the distinct part is optional…there are loads of BlogSpot sites that look exactly the same).
The explosion of zero-budget amateur publishing (nearly impossible before the Web) we’ve seen with weblogs, has resulted in a parallel development of zero-cost amateur Web/graphic design. Everyone is a writer. Everyone is a designer. As opposed to the design of personal home pages in the mid 90s where people were designing pages that expressed their individuality and personality, weblog design is much more functional in nature. There’s so much content flowing through the site that the design is almost a non-factor. If people can read the posts and if the design isn’t getting in the way too much, then it’s done 95% of its job.
Weblogs very much embrace the idea that the Web is ever in flux. In the late 90s, many Web design firms developed a ‘prototype, test, reiterate’ approach to information architecture and Web design, with various degrees of success. Webloggers seem to have developed a similar system on their own. The content they post is so fleeting that the weblog is always a work in progress. The writing is never done so why would the design ever be done either? Everything is malleable. Get a bad design up…if it works, tweak it using the feedback from your audience, and if not, throw it away and start over. But quickly, there’s writing to do.
Best practices are huge. If someone else is doing something that works, why change it? If you load up 10 weblogs at random and squint your eyes at the screen, they all look about the same.
If the average person can eat one
If the average person can eat one pork pot sticker in 30 seconds, and the waitress brings a platter of 12 pot stickers, how long will it take five vegans to not eat them?. San Francisco Bay Area Math Test
Converting site to CSS “as satisfying as
Converting site to CSS “as satisfying as buttering individual waffle squares”. amen, brother
Which of these terms do you prefer
Which of these terms do you prefer for a sale of unwanted items on your porch, in your yard, etc.?. excellent survey of U.S. dialects
The J. Crew school of color naming
I spent a good part of the day today looking for a full-time job (my design portfolio and resume, in case you missed the graphic over on the right there). One posting I ran across had this unusual requirement:
“Enjoy working with warm, gentle, sensuous colors, especially seafoam green”
I don’t know what “seafoam green” is, but I’m pretty sure the garish green-yellow color at the top of this page ain’t it.
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