Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Disney’s Michael Eisner on Steve Jobs:
“He created the computer, or at least Windows, or whatever he created, and did a good job,” Eisner said to peals of laughter from analysts attending the company conference in Orlando, Florida. (Forbes)
In fairness, this may have been meant as a barb rather than abject cluelessness, so the analysts were either laughing at him or with him, not clear. But if meant as a joke… I don’t get it.
Just completed a major rewrite of my Adding Multimedia to Web Pages tutorial (six pages), covering a variety of techniques for compressing, linking to, and embedding QuickTime audio and video. This is part of our ever-growing Multimedia and Convergence course work and tutorial collections.
Just learned the nifty .qtl trick recently — also, just found out that QuickTime can take a palindrome parameter (wiggy!), and that you can use Apple’s JavaScript library to jump the user to an arbitrary point in a movie. Works equally well with http and rtsp (with the obvious advantage that teh user won’t have to download intermediate material via rtsp).
Type in a few words — the more generic the better — could be words from songs, or from textbooks or from the newspaper, it doesn’t matter — and the whole history of pop music will come rushing back at you, one word at a time. If any of the words you entered are not in the Let Them database, you can point them to a song from which the word in question can be excavated. Freaky and wonderful.
Miles-the-hipster likes the music of toy-piano-band Twink. He bops his head up and down and giggles when I play them. The new Twink album comes with a picture book (no words) featuring Twink the rabbit going out to play his toy piano in the forest, then being joined by other animals with their own toy instruments. Is this music for kids that grownups can also enjoy, or the other way ’round? Be sure to check out Twink’s gallery of toy instruments, as well as the FAQ where they list other bands that have the same name as previously existing bands (I wrote to ask them to add old Air and new Air).
Installed ClamAV virus definition scanner — an open source virus detection module to be used in conjunction with mail transfer agents. cgpav provides the glue to use clamd in conjunction with CommuniGate Pro. freshclam updates the virus definition tables hourly.
Attention! You sent an infected message with the VIRUS: Eicar-Test-Signature It was rejected for delivery.
With the addition of Razor, very little spam is getting through my gateway — Razor made an incredible difference (as I expected it would, since it’s human/collaborative). The remaining gravel in the shoe is all of the autoresponder fallout from MyDoom.
Dumped Red Hat for Mandrake …
Continue reading “Mandrake 9”
Walking the gauntlet of ideological booths and stands that line the main footpath through UC Berkeley and passed a card table draped with a painted sign reading “Informal Debate Society.” The woman behind the card table was holding up a piece of looseleaf notebook paper, on which was scrawled in crude ballpoint ink: “Debate Me Now!” No indication what topics she might be prepared to debate, which made the prospect all the more intriguing. If I had had more time I might have taken her up on the offer. Another day.
Attended an event at Zellerbach tonight with Amy: Former Secretary of State Robert McNamara and filmmaker Error Morris talking about Morris’ new film Fog of War, which is about McNamara’s role in some of the largest U.S. involvements of the 20th century: WWII, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam (and more) and how his thinking has changed over the years. They showed a truncated version of the movie, and then had a sit-down with Mark Danner.
The film excerpts were incredible — new windows onto 20th century history, beautifully rendered. In one segment, McNamara talked about how Americans had already killed around a million Japanese civilians with conventional firebombs before dropping the big one on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — proportionally equivalent to destroying 40% of New York, 50% of LA, 57% of Chicago, and so on for 60 American cities, raising the question of whether nukes were really necessary to end WWII. And even though McNamara was part of the machinery that made it happen, he says that he and others in the administration asked themselves whether they were behaving like war criminals at the time. And he asks whether they would have been tried as war criminals if we had lost, rather than won… and what it is about winning that lets leaders get away with things for which the loser gets punished.
Human beings killed 160 million fellow human beings during the course of the 20th century. McNamara hopes we can do better in the 21st. While careful not to allow himself to make statements about Iraq and the current administration, he did recently come down hard on the war in Iraq in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
The post-screening conversation was a bit rambling. McNamara is getting older, Morris too, and Danner is… Danner. But still, a moving evening. Webcast will be online here.
Japanese screensaver Hotel Magritte, simply stunning if only because it’s so non-computer-y. 2-D woodcut images juxtaposed in some kind of orderly random fashion into black and white surrealist indoor landscapes. The point of view then transported through these as if entering hotel room doors into other people’s dreams. Difficult to describe.
Thanks Simon.
It has whistling on it.