January 2009
42 posts
3 tags
The Web and Journalism
Dan Lyons, writing about
Apple’s public relations and press:
The fact is, in the eyes of the media, Apple is the corporate equivalent of
Barack Obama — a company that can do no wrong.
Even in Silicon Valley, where much of the press corps are pretty much
glorified cheerleaders (think of all those slobbering cover stories about the
Google guys) Apple’s kid-gloves treatment stands
out....
1 tag
Doing It Wrong
Santiago Lyon:
George W. Bush went to
Ground Zero, and was photographed at the site on the wreckage with a fireman.
One thing that’s obvious, but it’s worth bringing out there, is that there
are very few casual photographs of the president of the United States. The
whole thing is managed. With the exception of the guy hurling the shoe at
him, these are all photo opportunities that...
1 tag
Timely Spam
Several variants of this in my spambox.
Good day, Respective Sir or Madam!
With your permission, we are sending you information about the most valuable
money grants program, ever released to the American public. News of the
surprising information is spreading like wildfire among good, honest, decent
and hard working men and women struggling to deal with exorbitant food
...
4 tags
Spimes and other Things That Think
Still working my way through the first volume of MEME. One reason I keep
sharing things from the ’90s is that I’m continually impressed by how often
it’s taken ten years for ideas to gain traction or see real implementation.
Today, it’s spimes.
Spimes live in the space between software and hardware — physical objects with
a digital history. Sometimes this means ‘intelligent agents’, or...
2 tags
Back on the Air
For the past day, I was unable to post here, or use Tumblr at all, because I
locked myself out. This was a result of several actions on my part:
I recently began moving some accounts to use an email address at this domain
(ratafia.info) rather than Gmail’s.
I use 1Password pretty heavily, so most of my logins are no longer in my
memory.
There are few sites that don’t use cookies to keep...
2 tags
miscellaneous repository
I’ve created a new git repository to hold bits and bobs of my code. I’m
still looking around to see what I can put in, so it’s a little thin right now.
Among other things, this allows me to finally make a gallery of page designs
that never were. At present the archive begins in late 02001. I began
writing HTML earlier than that — sometime in
01999 — but those files may be gone forever. There are...
3 tags
‘BlackBerry Storm is Off to Bit of a Bumpy Start’ →
Verizon and
RIM, determined
to release the Storm in time for the holidays, rushed the device to market
despite glitches in the stability of the phone’s operating system, according
to people close to the launch.
RIM co-Chief
Executive Jim Balsillie said the companies made
the crucial Black Friday deadline by the skin of their teeth, after
missing a planned October debut. Mr....
3 tags
‘Surfaces and Displays’ →
Nicholas Negroponte and
Joe Jacobson, Wired,
01997:
Now, put that thin coating on the front of the page, and instead of putting
ink in those capsules, imagine stuffing them with ping-pong balls one
one-thousandth of their normal size, black on one side and white on the
other. Then add some lubricant. Assuming you can control the rotation of the
contents of each capsule — independently,...
4 tags
Digital Goods and Analog Books
In the roughly two decades the Web has existed, we’ve all been participating in
an experiment to see what happens with post-scarcity goods: things that can be
reproduced infinitely, at effectively zero cost for reproduction, distribution,
or consumption. The most obvious result is that printed newspapers are
dying, because they try to be as temporarily-relevant and
discardable as email. To be...
git vs Bash vs OS Ⅹ vs colons
In posting my last entry, I discovered an unusual bug that lies somewhere
between git, the Bash shell, and OS Ⅹ, as
indicated by this entry’s title.
I’d been aware for some time that OS Ⅹ treats
colons in filenames in a special manner, because they’re the system’s internal
signifier of subdirectories — much like Windows’ use of \. Although the
character is forbidden in filenames because of this,...
4 tags
‘The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism’ →
Although I’d ordinarily include some excerpts, it would be difficult to select
any particular sections as more worthy of reproduction. The article is lengthy,
but well worth the time it takes to read.
Cleverly, the article borrows heavily from a wide variety of sources,
reinforcing (with deliberate exaggeration) its premise that much or all of what
we do and make is really an echo of those who...
3 tags
Compare and contrast
Theodore Kaczynski’s unnamed essay, 01971;
Iain Banks’ Culture.
4 tags
‘The Crate and Barrel Story’ →
I’m intrigued by the idea of curated retail — presenting the customer with a
careful selection of goods, rather than simply displaying products from anybody
who fills categories or will cut a good distribution deal.
Every display is carefully executed and every piece of merchandise is
carefully edited, according to
Gordon Segal. He believes that a
specialty retailer has a point of view...
4 tags
MEME 1.03 →
David Bennahum, 01995:
Thanks to the microprocessor things get so much more powerful so quickly that
there is a real fear of not being “backwards compatible”, meaning the files
from 01982 should still somehow run in the word-processor from
01982, even if it is 01995. This kind of
uncertainty scares people with really big pockets, people who have thousands
of employees and can spend...
4 tags
‘Agents of Alienation’
Back on the tenth, I read a somewhat unusual essay by
Jaron Lanier seemingly railing against
AI.
The premise of the essay seemed to be that we can’t program artificial
intelligences that are actually intelligent, so using them requires that we act
as stupidly as the software. Lanier is quite negative about the whole thing,
and seemingly feels the entire concept is hopeless and debasing.
This...
2 tags
On venture capital
Just a quick one adapted from a few of my tweets (1, 2, 3).
Dan Hanttula, 01999:
Furthermore, a business teacher once told me, “you don’t get investment
funding unless you’re taking a company public, or planning to be acquired.”
The first internet bubble burst hard, but everybody was happy to get right back
on for the second bubble (roughly 02005–02008) and throw around just as...
4 tags
How to easily back up your delicious bookmarks
Jason Scott:
Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow
whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they
say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please:
Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.
Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a
“sharing” site...
3 tags
‘Wikipedia Beefs Up for Multimedia’ →
For example, users are uploading public domain classical music, and some
recordings can last a half-hour. Documentary films that are out of copyright
are also being uploaded, and some users are struggling to keep files under
the 100MB limit, according to Vibber.
Vibber’s long-term goal is to let users upload feature-length, high-quality
videos, but in addition to capacity limits he...
3 tags
‘Building Sights’ →
Russell Davies:
The shame that always strikes me though is what a waste this flat bit of
nothingness is. Couldn’t there be something better that could be done with it
while the real estate people wait for the economy to get stupid again? It’d
make a brilliant little park if you could quickly turf it over. Or stick some
temporary astroturf on it or something. Someone needs to invent...
2 tags
‘The Mac on Skis’, 01984 →
Esther Dyson, writing for the Digital Deli
anthology:
Here our metaphor begins to break down. Short skis really don’t work as well
at high speeds, for good skiers. But that’s not necessarily true of short-ski
computers. Currently, the Macintosh has only limited memory, but that’s more
of a financial consideration than a fundamental design problem. There’s no
reason the Mac can’t get...
4 tags
‘And Then They Came for Me’ →
Lasantha Wickramatunga, an editor of the Sri Lankan
The Sunday Leader, was assassinated on 8
January, 02009. He had written an editorial to be published in the event of his
death.
It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on
another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s
sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police...
4 tags
‘Superman Comes to the Supermarket’, Esquire,... →
Norman Mailer’s lengthy article on the 01960 Democratic National Convention.
Although the whole thing is well-written, I was particularly taken by the
section on America’s struggle between two personas: the boring, everyday ‘real
world’, and the world of dreams and heroes. It’s too lengthy to republish here,
but I’ll give a few excerpts.
Since the First World War Americans have been leading...
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Bookmarklet to show today’s stats in Google...
I currently use Google Analytics for traffic stats here. Although the interface
defaults to only showing information through the previous day, clicking the
down arrow on the date selector allows showing today’s information. After doing
this for a week or so, I noticed that the date range is actually stored in the
URL, and thought ‘well why can’t I have that
automatically done for me?’.
The code...
9 tags
Transcript and commentary for ‘Opening...
Transcription of Citizen Garden episode 9, ‘Opening Preconditions’.
This one was informative for me because although I was vaguely aware of
Ma.gnolia’s plans for their version two release, I didn’t know about
the technical aspects — requiring OAuth, self-hosting, and open source code.
The discussion about using OpenID and related ‘open web’ technologies to
automatically tell web services where...
1 tag
Hosting troubles
It appears that whatever server was hosting my
CSS file has decided to stop responding, so I’ve
temporarily put a whitespace-vacuumed version in the page header. Hopefully
this is only a temporary issue.
Update: Ten minutes later and it seems to have fixed itself. Who knows!
4 tags
‘The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by... →
I tend to forget how fortunate we are that the Internet is largely
decentralized, free from the control of organizations that would force us to
pay for the right to do anything.
There are still plenty of walled gardens, but over time they open or
crumble.
5 tags
‘Audience Atomization Overcome’ →
Journalists are supposed to be the people that question assumptions, but
they’re just as stuck in a worldview as everybody else — especially on
political issues. As a commenter notes, the illustration is similar to
the Overton window.
The essay’s title is derived from the idea that people are increasingly
interconnected and more able to find new information sources: that is, we are
becoming...
3 tags
‘As We May Think’, 01945, The Atlantic Monthly →
Vannevar Bush’s famous essay predicting the course of technology in the
twentieth century.
His section on the memex contains a paragraph that serves as an effective
mission statement for many of the sites that inspire me, and one I hope to
prove worthy of:
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it
with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and...
3 tags
Now with comments
Another administrative note: I have enabled support for comments, by way of
Disqus. This is somewhat experimental; if the system proves troublesome or
invites spam I will remove it.
The choice is somewhat haphazard, I’ll admit — I’ve not yet used Disqus on
another site, and I’ve become hesitant about relying on Web 2.0-type services.
Despite this, I thought I’d give them a try. The system has...
3 tags
Archive of Apple’s data detector subsite →
The copy is fun, but it’s certainly not the modern Apple voice — it’s written
from the perspective of somebody who knows that you have to deal with the
whims of flawed technology, but hey, here’s something to help. The current
style is more of one that says ‘We are artists and life is beautiful. Our
products will help you appreciate the wonderful world.’ It’s more restrained,
but no less human.
4 tags
Tracking down data detectors
Today I’ve been looking for information about the origins of
Apple’s ‘data detector’ technology. Although it
was available in some form starting in the late 90s, it seems to have
disappeared at some point, resurfacing with the release of Leopard.
(See also.)
In Leopard, there’s a private (i.e. Apple-only)
framework, which can be found...
10 tags
Transcription of ‘Phish My Phail Whale’
Transcription of Citizen Garden episode 10, ‘Phish My Phail Whale’.
This took about four and a half hours to transcribe, and another to edit for
publication — not a very good rate, but this is my first attempt at
something like this. I think podcast transcription is important, if not
necessarily exciting — even ignoring the accessibility issues of podcasting,
transcriptions allow search indexing...
2 tags
Posts now simulcast at GitHub
I’ve copied and pasted most of the stuff I’ve published here into Markdown
files that are published in the GitHub directory for this site. As
noted in the README over there, I’ve used a
few tricks to capture most of the information that I’m using in the background
here at Tumblr, in case I move to another service (which I’m almost guaranteed
to do eventually). I should figure out a way to record...
3 tags
‘The Second Coming — A Manifesto’, Edge, 02000 →
Another Gelernter piece. I’m about done now.
The manifest seems to be effectively one for cloud computing. The whole
thing is certainly worth reading, but I’ve pulled out some highlights for
commentary.
Theme of the Second Age [of computing] now approaching: computing transcends
computers. Information travels through a sea of anonymous, interchangeable
computers like a breeze through...
2 tags
Beginning work on the ‘Ricardo’ theme.
A brief note to mention that I’ve put up the theme’s beginnings. It’s almost unstyled right now; colors are present, and a few of my other design ideas, but there’s a lot of work left to do. Forgive the clutter as I work out what I’m doing.
I’ve also moved the feed over to FeedBurner. It gives a little separation from Tumblr, but mostly I did it for Atom support.
Here’s a screenshot for...
2 tags
Chaos in the background
Today I began work on a new Tumblr theme. I decided I’d start keeping everything related to the blog in GitHub, and develop ‘live’ by pushing CSS updates and working in the Tumblr editor. Great idea, but there’s a problem: trying to load the CSS file doesn’t work right. Most of the time there’s a delay of at least a minute before it loads, even when it’s already in my browser cache. In my cursory...
2 tags
‘Lifestreams’, 01997, Wired magazine →
In contrast with the 02003 comment about how stream entries that lack a preview are ‘worthless’:
On the other hand, proofreaders definitely have their place, and there is a
consensus among the user interface researchers I spoke with that Gelernter’s
ideas could use a little more copyediting. As Don Norman, the Apple fellow
and cognitive psychologist puts it, “Gelernter is a brilliant man...
3 tags
‘Computer Visions: A Conversation with David... →
On lifestreams
Those are the goals of our lifestream (or “information beam”) project. In our
view of the future, users will no longer care about operating systems or
computers; they’ll care about their own streams, and other people’s. I can
tune in my stream wherever I am. I can shuffle other streams into mine — to the
extent I have permission to use other people’s streams. My own...
4 tags
NewsGang Live, 28 December, 02008 →
Pondering health care and the future of the web.
3 tags
Online avatars
In order to have a single image representing me, I need to put it in the following places:
Address Book.app
Dopplr
Facebook
Flickr
myOpenID
Twitter
Tumblr
… and stuff I only use occasionally: Gmail, Vimeo, iusethis, YouTube, FriendFeed, and so on.
There are a variety of roads to the goal of a single profile image — Gravatar, the hCard microformat, and OpenID, among others — but none...
3 tags
2 tags
JavaScript bookmarklet for a word count on...
Sometimes I read lengthy articles or essays online and I’m curious how just how much the author has put down. I could copy the text into a text editor and find out, but why leave the browser?
It’s pretty easy to write a code snippet that gives a dumb count—meaning that it simply assumes a space indicates a new word. The answer probably won’t be exactly correct, but I’m not editing a magazine so...