...more recent posts
Woke up at 5:45 yesterday to get an early start on the summer. Drove up to Bear Mt. with Alex and friend Matty (sp?) for a little hiking and introduction to bird watching from the man himself. Like most other pursuits these days, the technology really makes a difference. Good binoculars are a must for enjoying this very peaceful and meditative endeavor. And looking through them all day is not unlike staring at a screen (although a very high resolution one.) Thought a lot (again) about using natural landscapes to model data. Also I realized (although this may not be true) that xml has some serious problems. It might be the case that the data (the content) is itself the most consise (meta-data) description of itself. Or, in other words, it might be that we will not be able to decide on any but the most trivial schemas to share in common. Oh well. Still more thinking to be done.
This is not a real product. There is a strange tradition in the Mac watching world where external (non-Apple) third parties produce concept designs of rumored products. The apple pda/cellphone is one of the more widely speculated on new products (apple never says anything about stuff in development, but sometimes those engineers have a hard time not talking about what they are doing...) In any case, this concept design is looking pretty good. And it's from the same people who previewed a clamshell notebook enclosure well before the ibooks hit the market, so this might not be a total guess. I'm ready for this phone. (Although I'm guessing 2003 before good net access.)
Here's a very interesting piece on the future of computers and information space. Non technical, but obviously written by someone who knows what they are talking about. It's called a manifesto, but I always use the ridiculous phrase 'intuition pump' to describe writing like this. It doesn't go into detail, it just gives enough shape to get you thinking. I agree with almost everything, especially number 20. (from eatonweb)
Apparently, British Telecom (BT) is thinking about suing all ISP's for infringing on one of their patents. What's the patent you ask? Oh nothing really, just a little something about hyperlinks. As in: BT thinks they invented (and patented) the idea of hyperlinks. You can read the patent yourself here. I'd like to see what Al Gore has to say about this one. Who really did invent the internet? Whatever your answer, BT probably isn't it. This suit (if they really do bring it) will definitely go nowhere (prior art? How about Ted Nelson's Xanadu from 20 years earlier?) Still, it's annoying to see companies try to cash in like this. Maybe this one is so outrageous that it will spark some much needed patent law reform. We can only hope.
Making banner ads is probably not a very fun job. But Barbelith has a link to a cool site which features some creative work in that usually dead boring category. (Flash required, I believe, although I have no idea why they built it that way.)
Making the web a two way information space is the primary goal. The Magi Project is on the right track. Every device needs to be boty a client and a server in a giant peer to peer network. There is a lot of activity starting to build toward this end. Check out Ed Dumbill's excellent the state of XML keynote speech for an overview of the XML underpinnings of this near future collaborative web environment.
David Boies is going to be representing Napster in the case brought against them by the RIAA. In case you don't know, he's the guy that destroyed every Microsoft witness for the DOJ. Interesting. Maybe they do have a chance.
Mozilla M16 (milestone 16) is up. I'm downloading now and will report back.
Today (among other things) I've been checking out the icab web browser. It is Macintosh only (how often does that happen?) and very good. Quick download (1.1 mb) here. No installation, no hassles, very well behaved program (this is too rare these days.) Just download and double click and you're off to the races. This is a pre-release version, but so far it appears rock solid (unlike that other preview release browser we won't mention.) The only draw back is that javascript support is lacking at this point, so for some sites it will not work. But for this site (and most others) it functions very well. It's fast. And it doesn't need a lot of memory. I definitely recommend you check it out. The final release promises javascript and CSS level II (!) support. Possibly I'm not thinking clearly, but if feels like they (gasp) tried to make a good product rather than corner the rights to a mountain of money. Go icab.
Oh my god. Courtney Love is my new hero. Here's a transcript of a speech she gave to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference. Long, but very worth it. Here's the quick (very) paraphrased version: "Take my Prada pants - fuck it. All I need is a good back end coder."