"I had always had the dream that if I had a clever idea about something, I could just post a Usenet story, everyone would read it, I would become famous, and my life would change for the better. People would take me more seriously, and someone would pay me to work on the stuff that I wanted to work on."
read the comments for views from other disciplines [via]
SiliconBeat speaks with Six Apart's CEO who talks about anti-spam legislation. Comet is also mentioned with a projected release in Q2
"Stung by recent criticism of the company's actions in recent months, Google CEO Eric Schmidt held a roundtable lunch Thursday with a number of journalists in which he talked a lot about the company, how it is perceived, and where...
My domain was trapped in The Phantom Zone for a few days.
Apologies for magical bouncing email and the like.
Jonathan Greene keeps putting the N70 through its paces, this time with a great new photo sharing app called Shozu.
On inessential.com I’ve been writing more about NetNewsWire 2.1: on NewsGator syncing, the new Post to del.icio.us command, and printing. (More to come!)
Brokeback Alpha Dog:
http://www.youtube.com/w/?v=yeBUsLtnxzYas first informed in November of 2004 about Justin Timberlake’s new movie “Alpha Dog” (opens on Feb. 24, 2006).
Timberlake plays a character named “Frankie Ballenbacher” and the movie is based on the real life of Jesse James Hollywood, a drug dealer who became one of the youngest men ever to be on the FBI's most wanted list.
Why would a hardcore criminal get a tattoo that says 溜冰 “ice skating” on his arm?
Perhaps he is a “brokeback” alpha dog.m>Update: Reader Theresa says:
Here's a link to Tinsley Transfers, a company that apparently provides most of Hollywood with its temporary tattoos. It should interest you to see that characters are not only listed as Chinese/Japanese "symbols", but that they are listed under the TRIBAL section of the webpage. Funny, I don't see one that says "Hakka."
Nothing says hardcore more than replacing your eyebrows with tattoos reading "fuck" and "you". This guy needs a hug. (via bo)
I’m surprised by how much I’m missing the ugly blue navbar at the top of my blog. It was such a convenient way to get to my admin pages, not to mention surf to random blogs in languages I do not speak.
(Yes, it’s entirely my own fault I can’t read Spanish or Gujarati. Yes, it’s lovely that wordpress.com is such a multilingual community. But the lack of a language filter did render the ‘next blog’ feature rather pointless for monoglots.)
At least I am not bothered by the brokenness of stats, seeing as how I never look at the things — I cared about stats, too, when I first started blogging, but it soon gets old — and am rapidly adjusting to being logged out every time I switch pages. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my perambulations around the blog hosts, it’s that free stuff doesn’t always work properly. Quite a lot of the time paid stuff doesn’t work properly either. And if this blog was really important to me I wouldn’t be hosting it here anyway.
That reminds me though: time I took a backup. Apologies to anyone subscribed to my RSS feed who is about to be engulfed by every entry I’ve posted ever. Until this place emerges from the primeval ooze into a golden age of data portability, this is the way it has to be done.
Near the beginning of V for Vendetta, a masked avenger named V slashes his initial into a poster. The scene feels familiar: The sword work comes courtesy of Zorro and the logo looks like the anarchist symbol turned on its head.
From the start, Larry and Andy Wachowski, the Matrix brothers, pack Vendetta with literary, religious, political and pop culture references: the Sex Pistols and The Girl From Ipanema, The Count of Monte Cristo and Beethoven, Twelfth Night and Benny Hill.
Though Vendetta is a potential bonanza for a graduate student in search of a thesis topic, it may leave the rest of us scratching our heads.(WIRED)
NetNewsWire 2.1b17 fixes a few bugs found since the public beta release earlier today...
- It now runs on 10.3.9.
- Fixed a bug where, for some people, the refresh commands would never appear and feeds would never refresh.
- Fixed an issue with long startup times (the first time you ran it) for some people.
You can download it from the NetNewsWire betas page. (Just remember that it is, still, a beta.)
via waxy
"The interesting thing is that when participants were allowed to customize their player they continued to add features even when they understood that there would be a usability penalty. The big takeaway for me was that there can be a significant difference between expected utility and experienced utility. In this case, preferences for capability and usability invert after people have a chance to use the product."
Scientists at Cal Tech (their site) have manipulated strands of DNA to create, among other things, a map of the Americas that is only a few hundred nanometres across. That's smaller than human hair or bacteria; in cartographic terms, that's...
"Amazon.com has announced that they’re now offerring data storage as a web service. By itself, that doesn’t sound too interesting—there are surely plenty of other 3rd party data-stores. What’s cool here is how low they’ve set the bar to use it"
Google's opening of the API to their mapping system has been a boon to developers, but the Google Maps official documentation comes across as advanced programming tips for engineers while the examples are simplistic stubs of code without much source to work with. When I tried mapping out users (and nearby users) of my site on their profile pages, I ended up viewing source on other Google Maps hacks I'd seen online and copying that. I got something that worked most of the time, but suffered from memory leaks that crashed Internet Explorer.
Thankfully, someone has stepped up with a complete step-by-step guide to how the Google Mapping API works. It covers all the basics of javascript interactions, how you can do each and every little customization of your map, and it has working sample HTML and scripts for every section. I breezed through the entire site and came away with an understanding of why my maps didn't work previously, how to do them another way, and tips on how to prevent future problems. If you've got any sort of site that could benefit from a map (even your company's contact page), this tutorial probably has some example code you can copy and paste and get working on your site today. — Matt Haughey
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Web developer and blogger Michael Mahemoff has created a cool javascript that you can use to dynamically change your web site's favicon (those cool little icons that show up on your tabs or in your address bar). Why might you want to do this?
Favicons should ideally be easy to manipulate, as easy as manipulating the web page's UI.... For example, a chat app like Meebo could signal that your buddy's trying to contact you, a mail app like GMail could indicate You Have Mail!After checking out the demos, this looks like a pretty easy task to accomplish and is a very cool idea. Unfortunately it won't work in IE or Safari, but it works very well in Firefox and Opera. If you've never created a favicon before, you might want to check out the Favicon Creation Tool.
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Roger Johansson's web development blog 456 Berea Street has a post asking for solutions to combat noise in the office.
He's considering noise-cancelling headphones, but they're usually bad at covering up unpredictable noises (like people talking nearby). The consensus from his comments seem to be that in-ear headphones that completely block out your ear canal are the ticket to drowning everything out. That sounds great, but I get kind of weirded out by in-ear headphones and sometimes you do need to hear a phone ring.
There doesn't seem to be a perfect solution, but a lot of ideas. So readers, what do you do to drown out workplace noise? Got any tips for keeping yourself sane and focused when the world around you is a noisy mess? — Matt Haughey
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