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Entries for August 2004
Hollywood, remixed
In celebration of Alien vs. Predator’s box office win this weekend, here are a few more “sequel” ideas to keep the gravy train going for Hollywood:
Teen Wolf vs. The Godfather
Terminator vs. Spiderman
Cujo vs. Annie
Gladiator vs. Amadeus
Dirty Harry vs. Mrs. Doubtfire
Popeye vs. Anchorman
Annie Hall vs. Donnie Darko
The Wizard of Oz vs. The Man who Wasn’t There
Gandhi vs. Tootsie
Nixon vs. All the President’s Men
Henry V vs. Lawrence of Arabia
Forrest Gump vs. Rain Man
Rambo vs. Rocky
Kramer vs. Kramer vs. The Princess Bride
Happy Gilmore vs. 12 Angry Men
Unbeknowst to me, Matthew Baldwin covered similar ground a few days ago with his Cinematic Supervillain Showdown. kottke.org: I may not get there first, but I get there eventually.
Seven out of the current top twenty most popular photos on Yahoo! News are of female Olympian asses. Current gold medalist in this particular competition is Sandra Pires, Brazilian beach volleyballer.
Warner Bros trying to use MP3 blogs to pimp their music. They also posted fake messages praising the song.
This is the first level-headed thing I’ve read about the Google IPO in weeks. “The success of a traditional IPO is often counted by the size of the pop but that is ridiculous. A pop means the firm left money on the table — money which was transferred to a handful of insiders who were allocated stock at the low IPO price.”
Surprise, surprise…NBC’s coverage of the Olympics already sucks. I can’t believe they talked over Bjork’s whole performance. What’s the sense of broadcasting it if they’re not really gonna show it?
Haven’t tried it, but Recall Toolbar looks like a neat IE helper. “Recall Toolbar is a personal search engine that helps you instantly find that needle that you’re trying to find again in the haystack of pages you’ve already visited.”
Alien vs. Predator. Alien wins in limericks, mechanical bull, and wet t-shirt contest, but Predator takes backgammon and folk music trivia.
European design trademark could reveal Apple’s plans for a tablet PC. iTablet? iBook++? iCantTypeWithAPen?
The Playboy interview with Sergey and Larry that might delay the Google IPO. Full text of the interview, taken from Google’s S-1.
“GDP matters most in predicting Olympic performance” for a given country. Former Soviet republics are an exception.
The Killers, Hot Fuss
On a recommendation from Justin, I picked up Hot Fuss by a group called The Killers. It’s their debut album, but the band already seems to have it together. Here’s a favorite track of mine from the album: Mr. Brightside (mp3, 5.1Mb).
And if anyone out there in Kottkeland has an extra ticket to The Killers show on Monday in NYC, I’m so totally not doing anything that evening. (Kottkeland? WTF? (I know! Boo! I’ll take it out. (On second thought, I’m leaving it in, but I should probably erase this. (Nope, I’m leaving that in too. [please erase this self-indulgent crap or I’m killing the piece -ed] (Nice try, but it’s all self-indulgent, dumbass. (See!))))))
Repeat after me: inbound links do not indicate either readership or influence. Plus, Technorati’s top 100 data remains dirty.
Giant Argentinian ant colony in Australia threatening natural biodiversity. Colony is 60 miles across. (My headline initially said “art colony”, which is funnier than “ant colony” by the width of a large Argentinian art or ant colony. Fixed now.)
NY Times on the growing number of people who are switching from IE to browsers like Firefox. If you’re still using IE, you should give some serious thought to switching.
al-Qaeda’s TPS Reports
There’s some great reporting in this Atlantic Monthly article about the contents of an al-Qaeda computer taken during the US action in Afghanistan. The computer was used primarily by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, and contains emails and memos to/from bin Laden, the leader of the Taliban, and other top al-Qaeda members. You should read the whole thing, but I’m going to quote a few interesting bits:
Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda’s strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government; amid the group’s penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries, which are manifest in vitriolic memos between Kabul and cells abroad.
Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.
And except from a text found on the computer, written post-9/11:
There are benefits … The operations have brought about the largest economic crisis that America has ever known. Material losses amount to one trillion dollars. America has lost about two thousand economic brains as a result of the operations. The stock exchange dropped drastically, and American consumer spending deteriorated. The dollar has dropped, the airlines have been crippled, the American globalization system, which was going to spoil the world, is gone …
Reading the article, you can’t help but develop a sense of dissonance between who we’re up against and who we’ve been told we’re up against (and our government’s response).
The article includes two sidebars, one contains two letters from a young suicide bomber (one to bin Laden and one to his wife) and the other contains tips for al-Qaeda operatives travelling abroad:
Don’t wear short pants that show socks when you’re standing up. The pants should cover the socks, because intelligence authorities know that fundamentalists don’t wear long pants …
Underwear should be the normal type that people wear, not anything that shows you’re a fundamentalist.
You should differentiate between men and women’s perfume. If you use women’s perfume, you are in trouble.
To paraphrase Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis playing opposite Dana Carvey as George H.W. Bush in an SNL Presidential debate skit: I can’t believe we’re losing to these guys.
Olympic officials are not allowing fans to carry items bearing branding from non-Olympic sponsors into event venues. The idea of the Games are nice, but the Olympics are put on by a big, stupid, greedy, monolithic, corrupt, antiquated organization.
Who knew that video game characters (from Soul Calibur) dancing to Hot in Herre by Nelly could be so funny?. This is pants-wettingly amusing.
“Security” personnel on the NY Waterway ferry from Hoboken to Manhattan hassled this guy over a book he was carrying. “Sir, I feel that I need to confiscate this book.”
Some “Web as platform” noodling
In the discussion of Flickr and Feedburner’s spliced RSS/Atom files, Harold said:
I’m beginning to think that feeds (and content tagging) should be the starting point, not an offshoot. Until now, our tools have produced web pages then feeds. I’m thinking we need tools that create feeds and then let us combine them into web pages.
To put this another way, a distributed data storage system would take the place of a local storage system. And not just data storage, but data processing/filtering/formatting. Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr’s authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner “listen” for new content from all those sources, transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.
Think of it like Unix…small pieces loosely joined. Each specific service handles what it’s good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars, TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it doesn’t much matter…whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then you just (just! ha!) pipe all these together however you want with services (or desktop apps) handling any filtering/processing that you need, and output it to the file/device/service of your choice. New services can be inserted into the process as they become available. You don’t need to wait for Gmail to output RSS…just pipe your email to Feedburner and they’ll hook you up.
There are, of course, plenty of hurdles to overcome:
- Currently a bit hard on wallet. When you’re paying $5-20 per month for each one of these services (in addition to $50/mo for broadband and $45/mo for your cell phone), living the connected lifestyle is expensive. If a company like Google can offer bundles of these services, it might get cheaper.
- Data needs to be portable. If Flickr starts to suck, you should be able to easily move all of your photos to a better service.
- Redundancy and failing gracefully. What if Blogger is unavailable when I want to rebuild my Web site after my Flickr photostream has been updated (see my MTAmazon plug-in problem)? Does the rebuild just fail or is the data cached somewhere?
- You need to get everyone to agree on interop/formats/etc. Fortunately, it seems like companies are a lot more willing to do this than 4-5 years ago (Amazon, Google, Flickr, Upcoming, & TypePad all have APIs or allow data output via RSS/Atom).
- Security. Lots of passwords and personal information will have to be passed around for all this to work. How about some commitment from these companies to keep this data as secure as they can?
This, then, is the promise of Web services. Nothing new, but it’s nice to see things continue to head in this direction.
Related reading:
- GooOS, the Google Operating System (kottke.org)
- Inventing the Future (Tim O’Reilly)
- The Web as a Platform (John Battelle)
- Deepleap was an early attempt at some of this stuff (Lane Becker)
1966 speech by Robert McNamara on national and international security. “The decisive factor for a powerful nation already adequately armed is the character of its relationships with the world.”
Mr. Sun takes the kids to an Usher concert, hilariousness ensues. “The oldest momentarily rose above his inbred dorkitude and made body and hand movements approximating getting his freak on”.
Gigli
Boy, does hype work both ways. Gigli wasn’t nearly as bad as the critics said it was. Mostly it was just an overreaction: with all the Bennifer buzz, this should have been a better movie, it wasn’t, and it got slammed accordingly. I mean, it wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t Ed (or pretty much any movie with a monkey playing the title character). As usual, Roger Ebert explains things pretty well.
Physicist Paul Davies suggests looking for messages from extraterrestrials in our DNA. For those of you chuckling, “sounds like a Star Trek episode”, it was an episode of Star Trek.
Bag Borrow or Steal is like Netflix for designer handbags. What a fantastic idea. I wonder what other types of goods might be rented in this fashion?
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