RIAA On Supreme Court’s Decision In Copyright
RIAA On Supreme Court’s Decision In Copyright Term Extension Act Case.
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Entries for January 2003
Trackback in motion
Trackback in motion. TB looks to be heading toward a critical mass of experimentation
Rocky road skin cream
In order to counteract the masculinity of growing a beard a few weeks ago (don’t ask), I tried some of my girlfriend’s liquid face scrub in the shower. Holy liquid sandpaper, Batman! It turns out that face scrub is just goo with rocks in it, much like what you get when sand accidentally gets in your sunscreen at the beach. Expecting a less abrasive material like toothpaste or even Comet, I fear I rubbed too hard to begin with…I ended up a lot redder in spots than when I began. Still and all, my face has never been so smooth.
Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst on location
Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst on location for Mona Lisa Smile.
I would henceforth like to be referred
I would henceforth like to be referred to as “Jason from the block”.
What happens when Kevin Bacon joins Friendster?
What happens when Kevin Bacon joins Friendster?. A: The universe explodes.
The way of Snood
Snood is one of those little Tetris-like games that eat up hours of my time when I succumb to my nastiest addiction. The high I get off of such games weakens each time, but I still fell pretty hard for Snood. Greg Costikyan explains why Snood and its ilk get no respect:
It is far harder to design a good simple game than a good complicated one. It’s very hard to make a tightly-constrained game interesting; if I can layer a variety of systems, I can produce a widely variant gamespace, and interesting emergent behaviors almost spontaneously arise. Getting something really compelling out of something as simple as Snood is hard.
Note to those who feel the need
Note to those who feel the need to crow about coining new “blog” words: SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY!!!!.
Catch Me If You Can
The best thing about Catch Me If You Can (aside from the nifty retro opening title sequence) is that you can’t tell that Steven Spielberg directed it or that Tom Hanks & Leonardo DiCaprio are acting in it. No heavy-handed Spielberg Tom Hanks vehicle Leo heart throb crap. Just a fun movie.
ps. DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale in the movie. Abagnale now runs a security documents consultancy. This is what he had to say about the movie:
“I have been married for over 25 years and I am the proud father of 3 sons. When I was 28 years old, I thought it would be great to have a movie about my life, but when I was 28, like when I was 16, I was egotistical and self-centered. We all grow up. Hopefully we get wiser. Age brings wisdom and fatherhood changes one’s life completely. I consider my past immoral, unethical and illegal. It is something I am not proud of. I am proud that I have been able to turn my life around and in the past 25 years, helped my government, my clients, thousands of corporations and consumers deal with the problems of white collar crime and fraud.”
Table for one
Last week at the supermarket, I saw a Healthy Choice “Solos” macaroni and cheese dinner in the freezer aisle. Even with today’s take-away culture, the correlation of TV dinners with pathetic loneliness is so strong that I’m surprised Healthy Choice went there like that. The “Solos” label must be the company’s positive alternative to “People who eat this meal will die alone, lives unfulfilled”. Or maybe the latter just wouldn’t fit on the label.
China blocks all blogspot sites
China blocks all blogspot sites. note to the Chinese: we can’t usually get to any of the blogspot sites here in America either
Senor Google no es macho
A company named SearchKing is suing Google. Oddly, this reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Barney becomes The Plow King and starts taking Homer’s plow business away from him.
Nice design review of Safari
nice design review of Safari. “[Apple produced] a browser which abandons both Mozilla’s craptacular user interface and its overblown rendering engine.”
The Great Segway Customer Hunt
The Great Segway Customer Hunt. anyone out there own one of these things?
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is out
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is out. buy it in stores or d/l for free online
Metallifizer - adds/removes brushed metal from
Metallifizer - adds/removes brushed metal from Cocoa OS X apps.
Why are Safari and Sherlock two different applications?
After playing around with Apple’s new Safari web browser for a bit, I am underwhelmed. To the many observations that others have made already (Mark Pilgrim, Matt Haughey, Ben & Mena Trott, Todd Dominey), I will add that the browsers I’ve seen in the past couple years have added little bits and pieces of useful innovation here and there (Mozilla’s tabs, for instance), but none have the complete package of useful features, adherence to HTML & CSS standards, interface niceties, customizability, stability, and speed. Nice as proofs of concept, but none as complete as Netscape 1.1 was in its time.
Safari is still in beta so it might be unfair to criticize too much, but Apple missed an opportunity to innovate the browser in a truly useful way. A web browser is a tool for people to get information from the web. Much recent effort has gone into developing other interfaces through which to do just that. With Watson, Sherlock, and NetNewsWire, you “browse” the web for specific kinds of information with interfaces custom built for each task.
Why the distinction between regular web browsing and web browsing using specialized interfaces for structured data? Using Watson to find movie times is great, but it means having a separate application running…and for ticket purchases, it dumps me back into a web browser anyway. Apple’s Sherlock app offers functionality similar to Watson. Why not merge Sherlock and Safari into one application? Whither Sherfari?
I’ve whipped up a few rough mockups to demonstrate how this would work.
Figure 1 (bigger) shows the current interface for Safari with the addition of an “Apps” button. Ideally this would be a permanent graphical button like the bookmarks button. The apps menu would contain a list of Sherfari applications like Flights, Stocks, Movies, etc.
Figure 2 (bigger) shows the Stocks application loaded into the browser window after being selected from the Apps menu. It works just like it would within Sherlock with a fast, customized interface for looking up stock quotes, viewing charts, and reading related headlines.
Figure 3 (bigger) shows NetNewsWire loaded into the browser window after being selected from the apps menu. Clicking on links in the NetNewsWire app would open those pages in new tabs in the browser. It would be worth the effort for Apple to allow developers to write their own Sherfari apps for tasks that use structured web data. NetNewsWire is an obvious candidate. Ben and Mena could write a app to allow people to post to & manage their Movable Type weblogs. Yahoo! could provide a maps app. How about an app from Amazon for browsing their store? (Watson has something like this.)
Figure 4 (bigger) shows how Safari’s Google search box could be extended (a la Andre Torrez’s Nutshell). The default search would be Google, but you could select other searches as well, either web searches or searches using the Sherfari apps. Selecting “Google News” and then doing a search would load the results page from Google News into the browser window. Selecting “Movies” would load the Movies app into the window with that movie selected.
This keeps all the activity commonly referred to as “web browsing” in one place. Assuming Apple would also add the capability for tabbed browsing, the Safari/Sherlock combo would be a powerful one. The generic web browser part would allow people to load up any old web page while the applications would allow them to quickly take care of frequent tasks through custom interfaces without the need to load potentially heavy or hard-to-use web pages.
Come on Apple, don’t just give us another browser. Give us something that’s so damn useful that we’ll wonder how we ever did without it.
netmood: rate web sites, realtime results in stock ticker format
netmood: rate web sites, realtime results in stock ticker format.
LOTR: The Two Towers, differences between the
LOTR: The Two Towers, differences between the movie and the book.
Google Smackdown
Google Smackdown. I’m tired of seeing that stupid GoogleFight site featured in articles all the time…Paul was first with Google Smackdown.
New Mac stuff
I’m not at MacWorld right now, but through the power of the web, email, and IM, I can tell you what’s on the horizon for Apple:
- Safari, a new web browser for OS X. Beta available today from Apple.com.
- A PowerPoint-like app for OS X. (Keynote)
- iDVD is $50 (includes other 3 iApps). iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie still available for free download.
- TiBook with 17” monitor. 17”?? Wow.
The ethics of linkage
The ethics of linkage. or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Slashdot Effect
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