Google launches beta of Desktop Search. Windows only…hopefully Mac support is on the way?
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Entries for October 2004
Inner ear protein is likely a “key to hearing”. It helps convert sound waves into electrical impulses that the brain can understand.
Light painting photography by Chris Becker. “Light painting is a technique in which light sources are projected or “painted” in selective areas during the camera exposure.”
Business motivation
A friend of mine has always maintained that if Apple had emerged from the 80s as the dominant PC company instead of Microsoft, Apple would be the 800-pound gorilla of the technology world and we’d all be grousing about Apple and MS would be playing up their position as David to their Goliath (much as Apple does now). But I don’t think that ever would have happened because, as Steve Jobs explains in this interview with Business Week, Apple was not about sales and market share but products and innovation (emphasis mine):
I used to be the youngest guy in every meeting I was in, and now I’m usually the oldest. And the older I get, the more I’m convinced that motives make so much difference. HP’s primary goal was to make great products. And our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs — not to be the biggest or the richest.
We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit — both to make some money but also so we can keep making those great products. For a time, those goals got flipped at Apple, and that subtle change made all the difference. When I got back, we had to make it a product company again.
It took Apple (and Jobs) awhile to come to this realization and recognize it as a strength — hindsight is 20/20 and it certainly helped that Apple just couldn’t compete on price, the primary factor in how people choose consumer electronics — but now that they’ve realized it, they’re back on track. Apple is basically a luxury computer and software company, akin to Gucci, Bang & Olufsen, and Calphalon in their respective industries. They aim to produce well-designed innovative products, provide a high level of service, and charge a premium for it. Much has been made of Apple’s paltry OS/hardware market share, but when you think about it, when a designer label can capture even 5% of a market that competes heavily on price, that’s an impressive achievement.
The results of Timex’s Future of Time design competition. I love the fingernail watch by Napoleon Merana.
This Philly cheese steak goes for $100. It’s got Kobe beef, truffles, foie gras, and heirloom tomatoes on brioche with truffle butter. Where’s the caviar?
The 20 greatest equations. Euler’s equation is my pick for #1. It’s got e, pi, i, 1, and 0…beautiful.
Dear diary readers
It’s been awhile since we’ve talked, all of you and I. Here’s what’s going on with me:
I took the day off yesterday. Recovering from sickness.
I’m trying out TextMate after hearing good things about it from Jason Fried. I’m not a huge fan of BBEdit, so I’m always on the lookout for good text editors. Still getting the hang of it.
Last week, I saw a guy almost get hit by a van while crossing the street. He was pissed and understandably so. He was in the crosswalk with the walk signal and the guy in the van was super aggressive in trying to get through; the guy actually had to run out of the way to avoid being knocked down. The guy was so pissed that when the van finally stopped to let him pass, he reached through the window and beat the driver on the head with his cell phone. As a sympathetic pedestrian, I almost went over there to help him.
You can’t even begin to imagine the fascinatingly insightful concept I was explaining in this photo. Perhaps “I can’t believe my eyebrows are so bushy” or “That bottle of water…it’s like, whoa.”
If you look in the Activity Viewer and see that the Finder process is pegging your CPU at 90-95%, ask yourself if you’ve dragged a photo from iPhoto to the Desktop. If so, trash it and try to empty the Trash. If you cannot empty it because the file is still in use, run Force Empty Trash, reboot, and you’re golden. God bless Google for helping me with the answer.
I owe you a post about McSweeney’s #13. Jesus, that was more than 2 months ago. I’m sorry. (I also owe you a Last 100 Posts roundup. Sorry.) (Oh, and I also owe you the answer to the Ken Jennings question, but I can’t actually tell you what it is yet. Nor can I tell you why I can’t tell you. Sorry.) So basically, I’m really behind on a lot.
I miss when this weblog was more freeform. Stupid post titles and permalinks.
Got a new camera. Results soon.
So what’s up with you?
The Onion’s 2004 Election Guide. “Nation’s Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue”.
The six degrees of terrorism: Saddam linked to bin Laden through love of Kevin Bacon movies. That’s some damning evidence.
New kind of ape found in the Congo?. Sounds like that Michael Crichton book of a few years ago.
Question of the day: What’s your estimate on the amount of mobile storage available on the iPods of NYC’s citizenry?. “Are we talking many, many terabytes? Or are we talking even petabytes of music storage?”
Dr. Strangelove hit fairly close to the bone. That’s what makes it such a good film.
You can skin Gmail with a custom stylesheet in Firefox. Nice little hack.
After being in intensive care for three month, micropreemie Eric is finally home. The biggest and warmest congratulations go out from me to Eric and his family.
The beginnings of a Dropcash API. Which reminds me, I have a lot of Dropcash stuff on my plate…and some stuff to write about it as well.
Web 2.0 wrap up
So, the Web 2.0 conference was pretty good and I’d like to thank John and Tim for inviting me to participate. There was a fair amount of hype present, but that’s to be understood (and I’ve been guilty of a fair amount of irrational cheerleading on this issue myself). Largely, I think that Web 2.0 as it was presented at the conference is a bit of a pipe dream** (partially because guessing about what the Web is going to be like in 3 years is bound to be fraught with difficulty), but there is a lot of neat stuff happening that feels like it’s part of a new kind of Web.
Everyone at the conference had their own definition of what Web 2.0 was about, but I think Bezos got it right when he said it was about machine to machine communication versus the machine to human communication that typified the early days of the Web. And that’s nothing new..it’s just that it’s starting to really take off as an idea that people are buying into, both literally and figuratively. Portable structured data formats (e.g. XML) have been around for several years now, but it wasn’t until an ecosystem evolved around RSS (blogs producing freely available content and newsreaders to read said content) that people had tangible evidence that, yes, this structured data thing has legs.
** Bloggers, journalists, please don’t quote this part out of context because if you keep reading, there’s a Sir Mix-a-Lot-sized but after it.
Big Brother 2.0
Right now, the face of Jerry Yang, Chief Yahoo!, is up on the giant screen here in the ballroom. A few rows back, a gray-haired gentleman snoozes in his chair, occasionally snoring audibly. It’s the 2004 version of George Orwell’s Big Brother: The Man is up on the screen telling us what to do and we’re snoozing instead of touching our toes.
Web 2.0, Day Two Plus
Jot - Bringing structured data to wikis. Actually let’s not use the word wiki, because Jot isn’t that. It’s part Word, part Excel, part database, but deployed through a Web browser and published as Web content (as well as email and probably in other ways as time goes on). If you had asked me a year and a half ago what software I would like to build if I had the money, time, and programming chops to do it, a wiki-ish program with structured data capability where you don’t have to worry about people learning the wiki-ish formatting syntax would have been near the top of the stack. (The last remaining big wiki problem is that the fundamental unit of wikis is the page. Wikis need to be less dependant on the page (think chunks instead, like weblog posts)…TiddlyWiki is a good step in this direction.)
Rojo - Sigh. This is moving toward what Kinja was supposed to be.
I stupidly left the music panel yesterday before Danger Mouse could drop some science about the music industry:
Artists are responsible, because for some reason we think we should be millionaires for making people smile. But I don’t worry too much, because it will be over soon. There won’t be a market for making people smile because kids will just do it for free.
Thanks to Veen for the quote (visit his post for another good DM quote.)
Mary Meeker - Don’t forget about China. There is huge Web/mobile/gaming business going on in China right now. If you believe Jared Diamond’s hunch (which I do), the so-called dominance of Western Civilization in the world is just a blip on the radar as far as China’s actual dominant position goes.
Six Apart gets $10 million in a series B funding round. Mena said I had to post this or she would come in through the MT backdoor and delete my archives.
An introduction to using pattern in Web design. After Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you
And if you’re living on Internet time, perhaps even if you have seen it. The most overused phrase at Web 2.0, aside from “at the end of the day”, is some variation of “next generation” applied to software or services. Every new app being talked about here is next generation or revolutionary or __[fill in the blank]__. The sheer amount of supposed novelty being blasted at the audience is exhausting…everything is changing the world in a significant way. I imagine many of the attendees — those who read 900 Atom/RSS files in their newsreaders daily perhaps — find this energizing, but it saps my energy. No wonder Meg left the biz to focus on something a little less suppositious.
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