New Scientist on Everything and More: “There
New Scientist on Everything and More: “There are moments where David Foster Wallace pulls off a very convincing impression of maverick writer Dave Eggers’s style”. How embarrassing for the reviewer
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Entries for October 2003
Important: glitch in Apple’s Panther erases connected FireWire drives
Important: glitch in Apple’s Panther erases connected FireWire drives. Disconnect all external drives before upgrading…or don’t upgrade at all to be safe
Random Friday stuff
It took me a whole Strokes album to get to work this morning. Which is actually not a long time, but still. (“Strokes album” is a unit of time in the hipsterverse equal to about 37 of our minutes.)
Currently wondering whether it was a bad idea for me, as a man, to take a One-A-Day Women’s Formula multivitamin pill earlier this week. I don’t feel any different so far, but I’ll keep you posted.
When discussing the planning of the September 11th attacks over the phone, the terrorists used the code phrase “Porsche 911”. via Greg.
More multivitamin worries: I can’t remember if I took my vitamin pill already this morning. I feel like I didn’t, but if I did and I take another one, will the extra pill kill me? I am concerned about what 600% of my Daily Value of riboflavin will do to me.
What’s the deal with boingboing?
What’s the deal with boingboing?. Is God getting revenge for the SARS art stuff or is Carl’s server just a little wonky?
Retooling Expose and Cmd-Tab switching on Panther
Apple’s new OS X update, Panther, has been out for a few days now, and many are cooing over the Exposé feature which allows the user, with a single keystroke (and then some mouse motion & clicking or a few more keystrokes), to navigate to any open window they desire. I think it’s a nice feature in theory but clunky in its implementation.
Apple also improved the Command-Tab switching between applications, pretty much mimicking the behavior of Windows by displaying in the middle of the screen a palette with the icons of all open applications which you can tab through until you can get to the one you want. Which is a godsend for an old Windows hand like me because in my experience, Cmd-Tab switching is the one of fastest ways to switch between open applications.
While some are saying that Apple unfairly ripped off the Cmd-Tab feature from an application called LiteSwitch X (Proteron is obviously ignoring that they ripped it off from Windows), I think they missed a chance to take Cmd-Tab to the next level while, at the same time, making Exposé truly useful.
Here’s what I propose. Ditch the existing clunky Exposé behavior (perhaps except for the “Show Desktop” keystroke) in favor of a combined Cmd-Tab/Exposé behavior. Hitting Cmd-Tab would bring up a palette of all the open windows (not just applications) and would also Exposé all open windows. Continuing to hold down Cmd and hitting Tab would cycle through each icon in the palette (which would need to be smaller to not overpower the Exposéd windows) but would also highlight the corresponding Exposéd window. When you reach the window you need, you let go of the Cmd key and the window pops open. Click on the image to the right to see a full-size screenshot of how this would work (*roughly*). You could certainly augment that basic behavior with existing Exposé features like the ability to use the mouse to navigate to the window of choice or to quit an app by Cmd-Qing while the focus is on that app’s window, but for the basic functionality that will be used 90% of the time, all you need is Cmd-Tab.
That’s it. Two keys for fast, easy switching between open windows that combines the best of both the existing Cmd-Tab and Exposé approaches…no mousing, clicking, or switching keystrokes required. There are a number of potential problems with this approach (such as the icon palette partially obscuring the Exposéd windows, which really isn’t that big of a deal because the minimized windows are essentially acting as icons and therefore don’t need to be fully shown…plus the tiny windows all look the same anyway), but I believe the simplicity would more than make up for them.
The curtain is peeled back slightly on
The curtain is peeled back slightly on the Lafayette Project, er, Kinja.
NES controller belt buckle
NES controller belt buckle. Just push “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start” to get your pants off
W3C officially provides evidence of prior
W3C officially provides evidence of prior art that would invalidate the Eolas patent.
Unfortunate case of someone getting fired for a weblog post
Unfortunate case of someone getting fired for a weblog post.
Here comes the Sun (and not in a nice way like in that Beatles song)
Attention, citizens of Earth! The time for talk has passed; we need to take action. Our nearest solar neighbor, who goes by the seemingly benign name of “the Sun”, is currently making what is the latest in a series of aggressive moves against our planet and its inhabitants. Here are just a few of the Sun’s many past & current actions against us:
- Aided by tiny electromagnetic evildoers called “photons”, the Sun is providing the fuel for Kudzu’s takeover of the American South.
- The Sun is in league with several large Earth corporations for the nefarious purpose of raising the temperature of our planet in order to melt the polar ice cap, flooding our continental coastlines, and making the land further inland into valuable coastline. And who owns this soon-to-be-valuable land? You got it, the Sun.
- Deadly UV rays coming directly from the Sun are causing skin cancer in millions and turning George Hamilton into a tan freak of nature, while doing nothing to help poor Michael Jackson with his paleness.
- In a spectacular display of greed, the Sun, at its current fuel consumption rate — which can only be called “recklessly high” — will burn itself out in several billion years, leaving the inhabitants of Earth without heat, light, and eventually little else as well.
And now the Sun has launched its latest offensive. On Tuesday, the Sun fired a level X17 solar flare directly at the Earth. The flare, which is “headed straight for us like a freight train”, will impact our magnetic defense shields sometime on Wednesday and, according to our solar defense experts, could disrupt satellite communications, take out large chunks of our power grid, and seriously injure our brave astronauts orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station. This latest attack could be the 2nd or 3rd largest on record, leading some to speculate that the Sun is deliberately escalating the conflict and that peace between our celestial objects is becoming impossible.
Haven’t we had enough? I say it’s time to stand up to the Sun and its cronies (Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, I’m looking at you here). Let us throw down the oppressive Copernican Regime and show the galaxy who’s the boss of this so-called “solar” system.
Only 5% of the universe is ordinary matter,
Only 5% of the universe is ordinary matter, most of it is dark energy.
The Strokes, Room on Fire
When you listen to the new Strokes album for the first time, you feel a little ripped off because it sounds so much like their first album. After the third full listen, it becomes as familiar as that favorite pair of jeans that somehow got lost in the back of the closet but which jeans you’re delighted to find and start wearing again almost daily. Comfortable.
Strom Thurmond once filibustered in the Senate
Strom Thurmond once filibustered in the Senate for 24 hours and 18 minutes.
Grady Little to be canned, the Red
Grady Little to be canned, the Red Sox universe hums in harmony once more.
Kill Bill Volume 1
This film answers the question, “what if you took a guy who grew up watching kung-fu films and gave him $60 million to make his own kung-fu film?”
Authors Guild to Amazon: publishers can’t give
Authors Guild to Amazon: publishers can’t give permission for full text search of books.
Guidelines for focusing on learning
We went through some diversity training at work recently. The woman who came into speak with us gave out the following set of guidelines for learning:
1. Release the need to be right.
2. Welcome one another’s thoughts and opinions.
3. Suspend judgment.
4. Listen for understanding, not rebuttal.
5. Make personal statements by using “I” rather than “you”.
6. Clarify first what was said before you challenge someone.
7. Take time to reflect.
8. Lean into discomfort.
9. Respond first to what was said before making your point.
10. Have fun.
I was immediately struck by how much I see people not doing any of the things on this list. Religious leaders, politicians, the media, the pro-life and pro-choice advocates, environmental advocates, and just about anyone calling themselves a pundit. We’re all just yelling at each other, attacking, formulating strategies, so sure of ourselves and our convictions that it isn’t even worth listening to anyone who disagrees. No one cares about learning or understanding and progress is measured in opposing viewpoints that are averaged out into solutions no one wanted or can even understand the value of. What a sad state of affairs.
Search query for “word ’ word” throws several JavaScript errors
Search query for “word ’ word” throws several JavaScript errors. At least in IE
New Amazon feature: search on the full
New Amazon feature: search on the full text of over 120,000 books. Wow!
Jesus, who hit Gawker with the ugly stick?
Jesus, who hit Gawker with the ugly stick?. My poor design…
Whatever happened to Moreover?
Yahoo! News recently began offering RSS feeds based on a keyword or keywords, making it easy to follow the news about both specific topics like “Apple iTunes” or more general topics like “biotechnology”. You can slice and dice the news any way you like. Anil Dash calls this “an obvious and clever feature” — which it is — and also wonders why no one has done it before.
It’s times like this when I think about all the cool stuff Moreover did in 1999 - 2001 (including Anil’s obvious and clever feature), and how much of a shame it is that it never amounted to much.** Moreover correctly predicted that syndication (and RSS in particular), web services, and weblogs would be a big deal and built — or had plans to build — infrastructure and applications to take advantage.
In 2000, Moreover had a news portal not unlike Google’s current offering…stories from thousands of news sources arranged in hundreds of categories. In addition to the HTML portal, that same news was also available in a variety of formats for syndication purposes, including RSS. In late 2000 or early 2001, Moreover started offering keyword searches on their news database, available in HTML, RSS, and a bunch of other formats, precisely like the Yahoo! News offering except with many more sources and the ability to restrict searches to particular categories (i.e. a search for “Apple” that included only articles in the technology category).
Moreover also wanted to add weblogs into the mix. In collaboration with Pyra, they built NewsBlogger. Newsblogger had two basic features: 1) search for news and then 2) blog it. When you look at the heavy use of RSS and what the most popular topics are in weblog land, it’s not hard to imagine how Newsblogger, if it had developed into a proper application, would have been used heavily (the post-9/11 warbloggers would have used the hell out of something like this). Readers become writers. Moreover also wanted to start scraping weblogs and adding that content to their news feeds. News becomes conversations. Really interesting stuff, stuff that’s happening right now with political campaign weblogs, professional micropublishing, RSS, and weblog search efforts (Lafayette Project, Technorati, Daypop, etc.).
News feeds via email was offered by Moreover as well. News via IM was available in an alpha capacity. And given Moreover’s flexible web services platform, sending news to cell phones and portable wireless devices would have been easy (and actually, they did have WAP feeds in 1999).
Although they had correctly bet on all this stuff becoming important, Moreover unfortunately abandoned the consumer market for the safe confines of the enterprise market, as did almost every other company in early 2001 when the dot com bubble goo was raining down upon the industry. Which is a shame for us because we’ve had to wait a lot longer for all these useful tools, services, and technologies and a shame for Moreover that they’re not at the forefront of this still-developing space, building on those innovative ideas that they weren’t able to execute on.
** Disclosure: I worked for Moreover as a Web designer in late 2000 to mid 2001.
Chip Kidd
From the book jacket, the lazy reviewer’s friend:
Chip Kidd is renowned and revered as a maverick graphic designer. Specifically, Kidd’s book jacket designs for such major New York publishers as Alfred A. Knopf are among the most significant and innovative of our time. This richly illustrated book-the first critical selection of Kidd’s design work-looks closely at this contemporary visual pioneer. Veronique Vienne presents a full and nuanced view of Kidd, discussing how he has developed celebrity status as a designer, design critic, lecturer, and editor. She also relates how Kidd is greatly influenced by popular culture, noting his vast collection of Batman memorabilia. Vienne concludes by examining Kidd’s editorial involvement with books on cartoonists as well as his own first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, published in 2001 to critical acclaim. Chip Kidd reveals the fascinating life and career of a revolutionary graphic designer with a winning public persona, whose ambitions now also lean toward editing and writing. The book will appeal to anyone involved in design and popular culture as well as admirers of Kidd’s extraordinary creative spirit.
After-the-fact advertising can change your perception of
After-the-fact advertising can change your perception of a product, service, or experience. I’ve had this happen to me
Schneier on why profiling fails when looking for terrorists
Schneier on why profiling fails when looking for terrorists.
Understanding Comics
I was reading a piece by David Sedaris the other day and it contained a passage wherein something happened and a character in the story reacted to it, which is not unusual except that he somehow found space inbetween to write 2-3 additional sentences without interrupting the flow of the story. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks about this idea in the context of comics:
See that space between the panels? That’s what comics aficionados have named “The Gutter!” And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics! Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.
While McCloud relies on human imagination to fill in the gaps, Sedaris recognizes one of the endless numbers of gaps that may be filled in a prose narrative and does so great effect.
The Coen brothers edited their latest film
The Coen brothers edited their latest film with Final Cut Pro.
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