Category: Geek

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Leopard Preview

At the risk of participating in the echo chamber, Apple unveiled a preview of OS X Leopard at WWDC today. Not attending this year, but looks like a fairly substantial release. Following on BeOS / X-Windows heels, Spaces finally gives the Mac a version of Workspaces. No mention yet on how many you can have, and little info on how they’re navigated, but it’s certainly an improvement over nothing at all (though I confess I stopped missing them sooner than I thought I would when switching from BeOS to OS X).

Very cool stuff on extending iChat for collaboration with desktop applications (though I can imagine some scary security issues here when a remote user convinces you that they’re your sysadmin “just need access for a few minutes” — wondering what the security model for this will be.

Time Machine uses built-in version control to let you rewind to previous versions of the file system, undelete long-gone images, etc. Nifty but not earth shaking. A feature probably growing out of awareness that most users are utilizing maybe 10 or 20% of today’s gi-normous hard drives. [Addendum: Turns out you need to have a 2nd hard drive installed to use Time Machine, a fact which will relegate the feature to use only by the hard-core, and perhaps some institutional implementations. Would like to see Apple offer a non-destructive partitioning scheme, so users could not only take advantage of Time Machine but also do all kinds of other things, like set up Boot Camp or other VM without starting from scratch.]

Since I like to imagine that someone is actually listening on the other end of the OS X Feedback form, I’m stoked to see the addition of a stationery feature to Mail.app — I wrote Apple about a year ago saying that stationery was the one killer feature in Eudora that no other mail client had seemed to grok (though I don’t care about fancy mail formatting, I always found the ability to craft boilerplate responses I could call up instantly an invaluable feature in Eudora). The macslash.org take on stationery is that they’re going to make it even easier to send “craptastic HTML email.” Which is probably true, as unfortunate side effects go.

Music: Tom Verlaine :: Wheel Broke
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WP-Digest

Tired of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why WPBlogMail (which sends weekly Birdhouse email updates to subscribers) would choke on 3rd-party WP plugins (but only when run via cron). Plus I wanted to pull digests via lynx, rather than handling everything manually in PHP (lynx –dump has some great formatting options). And I hated the name. Finally decided it was time for an entirely new architecture for the system, so started work on WP-Digest.

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Photosynth

Some very cool stuff going on in Microsoft labs. Photosynth is an image browser from another dimension. Give it a giant pile of photos shot from anywhere within a single location (a beach, a museum…) and it will intelligently find edges, determine positions, and stitch together images into a massive 3-D soup of relationships through which users can surf, zoom, spin, dig and dive. No human intervention or tagging needed to build the relationships. Watching the demo, I’m wondering how much CPU it takes to burrow through an environment like this at reasonable speed, or how long it took to calculate the stitching (even creating high-quality QuickTime VR movies can take all night, and this is way beyond anything QTVR is capable of).

Demo is in WMV format (of course). I’ve been appreciating the Flip4Mac module that allows QuickTime to play WMV content.

Music: Marais & Miranda :: What Is A Mammal?

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RAIDiator: Infrant Home NAS / RAID

When I lost a secondary MP3 drive to disk failure a while back, it was like being hit upside the head with a blunt object – a reminder that I had no good way to back up my main MP3 collection, and I could easily lose all my music at any moment (and not just the music, but five years worth of collection tweaking work). This month, finally filled the 160GB main music drive to capacity. Meanwhile, the drive that hosts backups for Birdhouse, plus Amy’s and my home backups, had been flirting with capacity for a while. Decided I couldn’t put it off any longer – time for a fully redundant, high capacity network-attached RAID.

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Spam Plants

Spamplants Romanian-born computer artist Alex Dragulescu turns crap into gold — he’s developed a computational analysis system to transform ordinary spam into renderings of organic-looking plants (though some look more like sea anemones to me). via c|net:


For the Spam Plants, he parsed the data within junk e-mail–including subject lines, headers and footers–to detect relationships between that data. For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an e-mail sender and matches those numbers to a color chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a color, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the color of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it’s sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant’s ability to grow.

Dragulescu has also done similar projects with architecture, weblog text, transit, etc.

Music: Lou Reed and John Cale :: Nobody But You
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TCP/IP Over FireWire

A few years ago I noticed that OS X started offering “FireWire” as one of the tcp/ip connection types, alongside ethernet and modem. Sounded intriguing, but couldn’t imagine a situation where it would be useful.

The brilliance of this arrangement dawned on me over the past couple of weeks, as I found myself in a house with a DSL connection but no router — DSL modem feeding their eMac directly. To get my laptop online without taking their machine off the network, just enabled connection sharing on their Mac, connected a FireWire cable from it to me, and I was online, slickr-n-snot. All of my posts here over the past two weeks were made over FireWire.

Heck, you could even plug a laptop into the back of an external FireWire drive. Effortless.

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Why I Don’t Do Link Exchange

For years, I’ve received email requests to engage in link exchanges with other sites. Because Google and other search engines base a site’s PageRank in large part on the number of incoming links to that site, many webmasters and SEO types see pre-meditated link exchange as an easy way to build rank.

I refuse nearly all link exchange requests, to this or any other site I manage. On occasion, webmasters have taken umbrage at my refusal. Because I’m tired of explaining why I don’t do link exchange, this page exists to explain why I think the practice is wrong.
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Cambrian House

On the heels of the crowdsourcing meme — Cambrian House is going all-out to leverage the wisdom of crowds to conceive and build new products. How it Works: “You think it, crowds test it, crowds build it, we sell it, you profit.” Though I’m not sure why the testing comes before the building in that diagram, the idea is cool, and the site is building up a nice database of ideas waiting to be worked on. Hmm… looks like this is bigger than I thought: “CambrianHouse.Com was rated by Alexa.Com in the top 100 most searched Canadian websites.”

Why Cambrian?

The term Cambrian Explosion swiped from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos when describing the initial internet boom, is recycled by Reiss: “[M]idtown Manhattan’s valley of old media dinosaurs is besieged by a Cambrian explosion of digitally empowered life-forms: podcasters, bloggers, burners, P2P buccaneers, mashup artists, phonecam paparazzi. Viewers are vanishing, shareholders are in revolt, advertisers are Googling for the exit.”

Additional evidence that Cambrian House “gets it” — the use of vikings rather than pirates in their iconography (pirates are sooo 2004), and their stealing liberally from the BeOS desktop.