April 24, 2008
Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago.
[Researchers estimate] that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.
[…]
Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.
Near as I can tell, we’re simultaneously at inflection points in programming languages and databases and network programming and processor architectures and Web development and IT business models and desktop environments.
Interesting insight(s) from Tim Bray.
April 14, 2008
I don’t actually believe in the “Mobile Web” anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst.
[…]
In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time[.]
Let there be no doubt.
April 12, 2008
Gmail Redesigned is, by far, the most complete and usable Gmail skin I’ve ever seen. I’m not entirely sure why I like it so much — especially given that I initially found the color scheme to be a bit jarring (I’ve since come around to it) — but surely much of my adoration has to do with the author’s dedication and attention to detail; he leaves no aesthetic stone unturned, updates/tweaks the skin almost daily, and, well, the whole thing just works.
Relatedly, I have confirmation from Evgueni that he plans to skin both Google Reader and Calendar (once he finalizes Gmail). I can’t wait.
US war robots in Iraq turned on American troops.
[T]here had been chilling incidents in which the SWORDS combat bot had swivelled round and apparently attempted to train its 5.56mm M249 light machine-gun on its human comrades.
Last August, I linked to an article discussing the deployment of the SWORDS bots to Iraq, which, in light of these events, now reads even creepier than before. From that piece:
[Though declared ready for duty in 2004,] concerns about safety kept the robots from being sent [to the] battlefield. The machines had a tendency to spin out of control from time to time.
[…]
So the radio-controlled robots were retooled, for greater safety. […] A three-part arming process — with both physical and electronic safeties — is required before firing. Most importantly, the machines now come with kill switches, in case there’s any odd behavior.
April 08, 2008
Google App Engine “enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.”
Very, very cool, but what I want to know is when I can start using the “scalable systems that power Google applications” to host this web site. I’m only half-kidding, and something tells me it’s coming.
April 04, 2008
[T]he perfectionist’s creative process is so tiresome that he or she will lose motivation fast. If each blog post takes three hours to be written, formatted, and thought-out perfectly, you’ll publish less often and you’ll discard a lot of ideas that could’ve been great. This is the paradox of perfectionism: your best work is produced when you’re not striving towards perfection. Being a perfectionist is so de-motivating that you’ll wind up producing less and never create the masterpiece that realizes your full creative potential.
I don’t remember Rob interviewing me for this piece, but, umm, he must have. If one thing — other than work — affects the rate at which I post here, post-process photos, etc., it’s the perfection-is-attainable pipe dream I’ve been holding on to since the day I was born; it can be overcoming.
If people use your site enough, they’ll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. They’re not browsing anymore. They are power users. They know what they want. Give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.
April 03, 2008
Scientists want your MacBook for earthquake detection.
[Seismologists] have made use of the sensors built into many new laptops that sense when the computer is being dropped, and turned them into earthquake monitors. They hope to sign up thousands of users to act like a grid of detectors that can sense an earthquake before it does too much damage.
March 31, 2008
Incrementalism and the new new thing.
When Facebook doesn’t deliver world peace, and FriendFeed fails to be better than sliced bread, what will we do?
An astute observation from Jeff Nolan, and something I’ve been feeling for a while now, namely that the web space is becoming a bit boring and everything is starting to bleed together.
Consider Twitter, arguably one of the simplest, most talked about web apps of the last year. While I love the service, and use it constantly, it’s not all that exciting from a technology standpoint, and to that end it offers little novelty over similar services that have been around for years (think of it as one-to-many IM, or IRC with public channels collapsed into a single user). In fact, Twitter’s 140-character limitation is, debatably, its only real “innovation.”
The deltas are approaching zero.
March 30, 2008
Bush’s War is a must-watch, four-hour Frontline special about the Iraq war.
A two-part special series that tells the epic story of how the Iraq war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government.
March 25, 2008
Quotably aggregates the “@username” replies associated with a given tweet. Very cool, and useful.
Relatedly, I’m still waiting for a site (or Twitter itself) to let me link to multiple (and probably related) tweets using a single URI. It’s often the case that someone — who doesn’t follow me on Twitter — asks me about something I’ve discussed there, and instead of having to explain myself again, it would be nice to be able to link to the relevant tweets (as a group).
Tweetburner “[lets you] keep track of what happens to the links in tweets shared with you, by you, by your friends and every other twitterer.”
March 22, 2008
Are we giving robots too much power?
The Onion News Network bringing the funny: “Why would they turn against us? It doesn’t make any sense. We’re the ones who created them. At least the alpha model.”
March 18, 2008
BDI releases new video of BigDog, the robotic pack mule.
A couple of years ago I linked to the initial video of the BigDog and said: “The video will freak you out, especially when you see the robot maintain its balance after being kicked.” Well, BDI has come with more of the awesome in this latest video, which shows, among other things, the BigDog slipping on ice and then regaining its balance (think Bambi), and jumping!
Not only will it blow your mind, but you just may start to realize how close the robots are to ruling us all. ;)
March 16, 2008
The past, present, and future of file systems.
A great read from Jeremy Reimer, and for me, a nice, if not sometimes scary walk down memory lane.
March 15, 2008
TiVo to soon handle YouTube video.
Upon launch of the TiVo-YouTube service, TiVo users will be able to search, browse and watch these videos directly on their television sets through their broadband connected TiVo DVRs.
Nice!
March 09, 2008
The real reason Microsoft about-faced on IE8 standards opt-in.
Microsoft are having to face their own irrelevance in [the mobile browsing] market. They could either stick to the age-old excuse of backwards compatibility, and in doing so totally jeopardise progress with Windows Mobile in comparison to swifter competition in the form of Apple, and Google’s Android - or they could jettison the weight of 10 year old business Intranets and ship a lighter, quicker, safer and more competitive browser to help them shape how people view the web from both the desktop, and the mobile.
[That some human photoreceptors use c-opsin, and others r-opsin,] tells us something about the last common ancestor of animals—that it might possibly have had multiple kinds of receptors and eyes, and that what we observe in the diversity of extant eyes is not that it is easy to evolve an eye, but that it is easy to lose one or the other kind of eye in a lineage.
March 07, 2008
Apple announces iPhone 2.0, releases SDK.
A great summary of yesterday’s iPhone-related announcements.
We’ve received a number of requests from people who want their friends to use the micro-blogging service Twitter, but can’t seem to explain it well. We hope this video helps.
Going gunning with my imaginary friends.
If smart machines are going to become increasingly a part of our everyday lives, maybe videogames are the best place to glimpse our emotional future.
Fortune interviews Steve Jobs.
On his demanding reputation:
My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.
March 05, 2008
Each of [Blue Brain’s] microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind.
[…]
Like a real brain, the behavior of Blue Brain naturally emerges from its molecular parts.
[…]
Consciousness is a binary code; the self is a loop of electricity. A ghost will emerge from the machine once the machine is built right.
A fascinating read.
March 04, 2008
Steve Jobs:
One of the keys to Apple is that we build products that really turn us on.
Yep.
Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.
March 02, 2008
Are our brains wired for math?
[W]e are all born with an evolutionarily ancient mathematical instinct. To become numerate, children must capitalize on this instinct, but they must also unlearn certain tendencies that were helpful to our primate ancestors but that clash with skills needed today.
[…]
The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory.
March 01, 2008
LOST on Earth’s mirror matter moon.
Without a doubt, the most interesting, vetted, and comprehensive theory of LOST I’ve ever read. If you’re into the show at all, you really owe it to yourself to give this interpretation a chance, even if it turns out to be completely wrong. Yes, it’s going to sound crazy, especially from jump, but be sure to see it all the way through — it’s worth it.
February 29, 2008
MGTwitterEngine is an Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API. The entire API is covered, and appropriate data is returned as simple native Cocoa objects (NSArrays, NSDictionarys, NSStrings, NSDates and so on), for very easy integration into your own application.
February 22, 2008
A new strain of genetically engineered mice has allowed researchers to pinpoint, for the first time, the precise cellular connections that form as a memory is created. By tracing a protein tagged to glow fluorescent green as it migrates through individual neurons, from the cell body out through the branching dendrites, the researchers could see exactly which synapses — connections to other neurons — were involved when the mice learned to fear an electric shock.
February 18, 2008
Mysteries of 2000-year-old computer are solved.
Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests it dates back to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon.
Absolutely incredible.
A great look back at Wired’s inaugural issue. Also, Louis Rossetto, Wired’s founding editor, shares his thoughts on the magazine’s launch.
February 17, 2008
Christopher Hitchens and rabbi Shmuley Boteach debate the existence of god.
To call it a debate is kind of laughable and does a disservice to both parties — to Hitchens because he utterly owns it, and to Boteach because the misnomer perpetuates and reinforces his false belief that it was actually a debate.
Sure, Hitchens is an intellectual giant and there are very few people in this world who could actually go toe-to-toe with him, especially on this topic, but seriously, Boteach just comes across as desparate. Indeed, he closes his first rebuttal with this brilliant insight: “All you need to do to prove the existence of god and how intelligent the design of our universe is, is to see how smart Christopher Hitchens is.” Ugh.
Head-tracking for desktop VR displays using the Wii remote.
Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.
Brilliant.
February 14, 2008
So you’re going to write an iPhone app….
As we’re all waiting with bated breath for the release of the iPhone SDK later this month, now would be a good time to pass along some of things I learned while working on MobileTwitterrific. Read this now and you’ll save yourself some headaches when diving into the SDK.
February 12, 2008
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
[…]
Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn’t think it’s possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex–too weird and unpredictable–to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can’t most companies do it reliably?
February 08, 2008
Yahoo! today reminds Gruber of Apple a decade ago.
In a broad sense, Yahoo reminds me a lot of Apple a decade ago. Good products, a large base of dedicated but restless users (many of them outright “fans”), and a staff full of talented engineers and product designers — but lousy, visionless, ineffective management. What Yahoo needs is a Steve Jobs — someone who will ruthlessly focus the company on products that are better, more popular, and more profitable.
Russell Beattie on application development.
Users will give the benefit of the doubt to just about anything that looks nicely designed. That is to say, you can have a product that does everything including shining your shoes, but if it looks like crap, users won’t ever be happy with it - and any flaws they do find will be magnified substantially.
[…]
[H]aving a real designer add their magic is key, because in short, a good design makes the user like or even love an application before they’ve even used it.
February 07, 2008
One computer to rule them all.
IBM has launched an ambitious initiative, called Project Kittyhawk, aimed at building “a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application.” Forget Thomas Watson’s apocryphal remark that the world may need only five computers. Maybe it needs just one.
The evolution of various tech companies’ logos.
This is fantastic, and with a little history thrown in to boot.
February 05, 2008
TuneRanger connects all your iTunes-running computers together over any network. Music, video, and playlists can then be synchronized, copied or merged with the click of a button. Buy a song on one computer, add an album cover or star rating, and all changes are updated everywhere.
February 04, 2008
An air traffic controller explains why flights are often delayed.
The reason is as old as it is simple — greed. Airlines can make more money selling 70 airplanes worth of tickets per hour than they could if they limited themselves to the 60 airplanes per hour that the runway can handle. In fairness to the airlines, it’s not in their interest to limit themselves. It is easier to sell the tickets and blame the delays on the weather or the “antiquated” air traffic control system. Especially if the flying public doesn’t understand runway capacity limits and therefore fails to notice that the “antiquated” air traffic control system is delivering more airplanes to the runways than the runways can handle.
A nice read.
Working Class Heroes MacBook Air case.
If there’s a cooler sleeve out there, I don’t know about it.
February 03, 2008
Audi R8 Super Bowl commercial.
By far, my favorite commercial of the evening (and I’m not just saying that because I’m obsessed with all mechanical things German ;). The Godfather reference, the sinister-looking R8, the “Old luxury just got put on notice” line — brilliant.
While there were a few other good ads, most of them were boring and forgettable; luckily, it was actually a decent game (OK, you’re right, but the fourth quarter was fun).
Macworld reviews the MacBook Air.
As a longtime fan of small laptops, I embraced the MacBook Air with some trepidation. But once I slipped that three-pound laptop into my backpack and threw the bag over my shoulders, I realized that sacrificing some storage space and some processor power was ultimately worth it for me.
An exhaustive assessment, but nothing you haven’t read before if you keep up with this sort of thing. If interested, Ars Technica’s review is also worth a read.
Relatedly, my MacBook Air should be in my hands no later than Tuesday. I can’t wait!
Google responds to Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!
This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Google launches Social Graph API.
With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.
January 31, 2008
Gartner says Mac market share to double by 2011.
By 2011, Apple will double its U.S. and Western Europe unit market share in Computers. Apple’s gains in computer market share reflect as much on the failures of the rest of the industry as on Apple’s success.
This doesn’t surprise me at all — the snowball has been gathering speed and girth for a while now.
January 30, 2008
Jalopnik reviews Microsoft’s Sync.
The final word is that I would recommend the system. Once you get over the initial setup and learning curve hurdle, the Sync pays for itself in terms of convenience and functionality.
Artificial letters added to life’s alphabet.
Two artificial DNA “letters” that are accurately and efficiently replicated by a natural enzyme have been created by US researchers. Adding the two artificial building blocks to the four that naturally comprise DNA could allow wildly different kinds of genetic engineering.
January 29, 2008
Tool use is just a trick of the mind.
[Researchers] conclude that when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.”
Second Rotation is building the easiest destination on the Web for people to sell consumer electronics and gadgets. We’re also impacting the problem of e-waste. By buying unwanted gadgets and putting them into the hands of people who still value them we help extend the useful life of items that would otherwise end up in landfills. If an item has no market value, Second Rotation will ensure it is recycled responsibly.
In the case of consciousness, we cannot simply change our perspective to see the solution. We are all stuck with the first-person point of view. So, the result is we persist with questing for the qualia as such.
Yet if consciousness is a trick, then of course this quest is a fool’s errand. It will make no more sense to try to explain the existence of qualia than it would to explain the existence of the impossible triangle. What we should be doing instead is trying to explain just how we have been set up—and why.
Genes can recognize similarities in each other.
Genes have the ability to recognise similarities in each other from a distance, without any proteins or other biological molecules aiding the process, according to new research published this week in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. This discovery could explain how similar genes find each other and group together in order to perform key processes involved in the evolution of species.
January 27, 2008
Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.
Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them?
The most interesting article you’ll read all week.
Just a few years ago, America’s hold on global power seemed unshakable. But a lot has changed while we’ve been in Iraq — and the next president is going to be dealing with not only a triumphant China and a retooled Europe but also the quiet rise of a ‘‘second world.’’
HTML 5 differences from HTML 4.
HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4″ describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes.
The life cycle of a blog post.
A nice infographic, especially for those unfamiliar with this sort of thing.
Mapping the most complex structure in the universe: your brain.
ATLUM uses a lathe and specialized knife to create long, thin strips of brain cells that can be imaged by an electron microscope. Software will eventually montage the images, creating an ultrahigh-resolution 3-D reconstruction of the mouse brain, allowing scientists to see features only 50 nanometers across.
January 24, 2008
How can America’s rich teach their children the value of a dollar?
American blue bloods, perhaps, have a strategy for coping with their inherited wealth—wearing the ratty sweaters, pursuing the eccentric hobbies—namely, pretending it doesn’t exist. But this strategy is hardly applicable to any generation that makes its fortune. Members of that generation almost always believe it’s their right to flaunt it, to savor it—they’ve earned it, haven’t they, through ingenuity and hard labor? Yet the newly rich inevitably discover that it’s very hard to have your cake and eat it while raising healthy, hardworking children.
[…]
To most conscientious rich people, all you have to say are two words to put the fear of God in them: Paris Hilton.
A very interesting article from New York Magazine.
January 23, 2008
This note describes the MacBook Air computer based on the 1.6 GHz or optional 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo microprocessor, introduced in January 2008. It includes information about distinguishing features of the computer, including components on the main logic board: the microprocessor, the other main ICs, and the buses that connect them to each other and to the I/O interfaces.
We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a “news feed” for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.
Today we’re launching in three American cities: Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
January 21, 2008
For nearly 50 years, the central dogma of biology has been that genetic information is contained within DNA and is passed by rote transcription through RNA to make proteins. Tiny changes in the information content of the underlying DNA are what then drive evolution. But this information may not be the sole determinant of biological identity. Indeed, it’s becoming clear that we do not even know what ‘genetic information’ means any more—certainly it’s not a simple, linear sequence of biochemical ‘characters’ that define a gene. Even evolution might not be driven solely by the appearance of random mutations in DNA that are inherited by subsequent generations, essentially as Darwin supposed. The central dogma is being eroded, and it now appears as if DNA’s cousin, the humble intermediary RNA, plays at least an equal role in genetics and the evolution of the species.
While neuroscience accurately describes our brain in terms of its material facts — we are nothing but a loom of electricity and enzymes — this isn’t how we experience the world. Our consciousness, at least when felt from the inside, feels like more than the sum of its cells. The truth of the matter is that we feel like the ghost, not like the machine.
If neuroscience is going to solve its grandest questions, such as the mystery of consciousness, it needs to adopt new methods that are able to construct complex representations of the mind that aren’t built from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole.
January 19, 2008
What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive? What would crumble fastest? From the ruins of ancient civilizations to present day cities devastated by natural disasters, history gives us clues to these questions and many more in the visually stunning and thought-provoking new special Life After People, premiering Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on The History Channel.
Definitely recording this one.
January 18, 2008
$90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10.
Researchers [] have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.
January 17, 2008
Half of 26-year-old’s memories Nintendo-related.
[A]pproximately 47 percent of Jenkins’ hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the Charlotte Hornets 82-81 in NBA Jam: Tournament Edition.
It was hard to choose an excerpt for this one. How can you not love The Onion?
January 15, 2008
Apple introduces the MacBook Air.
I was probably one of the first 10 people to order this online as soon as the Apple store went live again this morning. I’ve been waiting for this thing for almost two years and am really happy it’s finally here. That said, I am a little disappointed that there is no 32GB SSD option; the only SSD available — a 64GB model — is an extra $1000 (more than half the original cost of the entire machine), which I just couldn’t convince myself to spend (even though I know I’m going to regret that decision every time I hear the drive spinning up and down).
January 14, 2008
Showcase, a wonderful interface for Quicksilver.
January 12, 2008
Apple hoists “There’s something in the air” Macworld banners.
First thought that popped into my head: sub-notebook (and a revamped notebook line) with integrated WiMAX and/or HSDPA/EV-DO.
The evolutionary primacy of the brain’s fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties. The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions—neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa. So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear (”I know that dark shape in the alley is just a trash can”), it takes great effort and persistence. Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits.
January 09, 2008
SnūzNLūz Wifi donation alarm clock.
[E]verytime you hit the snooze button, the SnūzNLūz will donate a specified amount of your real money to a non-profit you hate.
The untold story of how the iPhone blew up the wireless industry.
Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2 (the abandoned iPod phone was called Purple 1). Teams were split up and scattered across Apple’s Cupertino, California, campus. Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone’s transmitter. Even the iPhone’s hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes. By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.
January 08, 2008
Mac Pro goes eight-core before Macworld Expo.
When a new Mac Pro that Apple advertises as “the fastest Mac ever” doesn’t make the cut for the Macworld Expo keynote, even the more jaded among us start salivating.
Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. […] For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes.
Life is a collection of kludges taped together by chance and filtered by selection for functionality; it all works magnificently well, but if you look under the hood you are simultaneously appalled by the sheer inelegance of the molecular gemisch and impressed with the accumulation of complexity.
[…]
If a fly were software, it’s software that has been patched and patched, and patches have been put on patches, until almost all vestiges of the original code have been obscured in the tweaks. It’s the antithesis of planning and design—it’s ad hoc co-option and opportunistic incorporation of chance enhancements. It’s evolution.
Video of a man making a vacuum tube.
While only slightly more exciting than it sounds, it’s well worth a look.
January 05, 2008
Officially-licensed action figures from one of my favorite movies of all time. Characters available: Sloth, Data, Chunk, Mouth, and Mikey.
January 03, 2008
At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the [three-ounce] volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away. The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it’s going to steal them anyway, and either you accept it or you don’t fly.
A great read.
Basically, the script pulls down all your tweets and stores them in an csv file. It then runs some statistics on the csv file and then copies the resulting stats to the OS X clipboard to paste into each table within Numbers.
Save the “outcast” and socially-awkward descriptors, this long and very thoughtful piece does a great job of dissecting me and explaining why I do some things a certain way. If you know me personally, you’ll probably get a kick out of reading it. I actually called up the girlfriend and had her read it out loud while I was on the phone with her; her constant laughing (to fight the sadness?), and quips of “yep,” “oh, dear,” “very true,” “oh, justin,” and “wow,” said it all.
December 22, 2007
As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.
One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services. We’re now launching a new project within Mozilla Labs to formally explore this integration. This project will be known as Weave and it will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.
Kaspersky inadvertently quarantines Windows Explorer.
The security company’s systems had decided that a virus called Huhk-C was present in the explorer.exe file, leading to its confinement or, in some cases, deletion. As Windows Explorer is the graphical user interface (GUI) for Windows’ file system, this made it difficult to perform many common tasks within the operating system, such as finding files.
OK, so these things happen, but come on, this is pretty funny.
Paleo-Future: “A look into the future that never was.” Wow, what an awesome site.
December 21, 2007
Stimulating just one neuron can be enough to affect learning and behaviour, researchers have found. The results, published this week by Nature, conflict with the long-held notion that many neurons — in the order of thousands — are required to generate a behavioural reaction.
Amazon’s docs do a pretty good job of describing SimpleDB, so I won’t try to reproduce them. Instead, I’ll focus on observations, and I’ll emphasize a few important points that are buried deep in the docs.
I must have this Pininfarina-designed “Luna” desk. Oh, right, it’s $13,000. Nevermind.
December 20, 2007
December 19, 2007
Laws of nature, source unknown.
‘Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you.’ This would explain why math works so well in describing the cosmos. It also suggests an answer to the question that Stephen Hawking, the English cosmologist, asked in his book, ‘A Brief History of Time’: ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?’ Mathematics itself is on fire.
The Eye-Fi Card “is a wireless memory card. It automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.”
Brilliant.
Unhappy? Self-critical? Maybe you’re just a perfectionist.
In short, these are people who not only swallow many of the maxims for success but take them as absolutes. At some level they know that it’s possible to succeed after falling short (build on your mistakes: another boilerplate rule). The trouble is that falling short still reeks of mediocrity; for them, to say otherwise is to spin the result.
Uh-hum.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.
December 15, 2007
Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.
Google develops Wikipedia rival.
Entries can’t be edited or revised by other people, in contrast to Wikipedia. However, other readers will be able to rank and review others’ entries, which will then be interpreted by Google’s search engine when displaying results.
I have to admit that I don’t quite grok this; save the human element added to PageRank, how is this really different from a multi-author blog with comments?
UPS doesn’t like to turn left.
Last year [], the software [employed by UPS to minimize its use of left hand turns], helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.
Woah!
December 14, 2007
Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.
Man, Amazon is everywhere lately.
December 12, 2007
The question reminds me of a wakeboarding story from years ago. I had just started my first run of the day and was doing some crazy aerial maneuver when my back foot came out of the boot; upon landing, my heel dug into one of the bindings and I was left with a pretty gnarly cut. Given that we had just got in the water, I wasn’t quite ready to call it quits, so we beached the boat and I ran up to my house to dress the wound. With Super Glue. I just pulled the skin back, filled in the hole, and put weight on my heel. As good as new.
December 11, 2007
If robotics appears poised to ride the same rocket that carried computing from silly to serious in our lifetime, it seems prudent to wonder in advance how ‘bots will change war, work, even sex in our children’s lifetimes - the only real issue in that last regard being which generation becomes the early adopters, and whether robo-shrinks can help them deal with the emotional fallout.
Lazy programming “is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed.”
December 10, 2007
Instead of evolution happening only due to random mutations that survived selective pressure, we can see how by adding chromosomes to or exchanged between species, that thousands of changes could happen in an instant. Now they can happen not just by random chance but by deliberate human design and selection. Human thought and design and specific selection is now replacing Darwinian evolution.
Fluid, a site-specific browser for Leopard.
Using Fluid, you can create [site-specific browsers] to run each of your favorite webapps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any webapp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, and logical separation from your other web browsing activity.
Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up – and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought – indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.
A journey to the center of your mind.
In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.
December 09, 2007
[The New York Times Magazine] looks back on the passing year through a special lens: ideas. Editors and writers trawl the oceans of ingenuity, hoping to snag in our nets the many curious, inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of the past 12 months. Then we lay them out on the dock, flipping and flopping and gasping for air, and toss back all but those that are fresh enough for our particular cut of intellectual sushi. For better or worse, these are 70 of the ideas that helped make 2007 what it was. Enjoy.
The 10 most irritatingly impossible old-school video games.
Talk about taking a walk down memory lane.
December 06, 2007
The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels. You can include a Chart API image in a webpage by embedding a URL within antag. When the webpage is displayed in a browser the Chart API renders the image within the page.
Pretty damn spiffy.
December 05, 2007
The Mac OS X Leopard Windows API myth.
Proponents of the Mac OS X Leopard Windows API Myth are so convinced that Apple desperately needs to wedge Microsoft Windows into Mac OS X that they’ll run with any hint that might suggest a plausible way for this to happen. The latest take on the subject is that Mac OS X Leopard loads PE files and requests Windows DLL files, which more than a few pundits have determined must be a new development because Tiger didn’t do this. Therefore, they’ve decided that the only sensical conclusion to jump to is that Apple is secretly implementing the Windows API so that Macs will be able to run Windows programs natively. They’re wrong, here’s why.
Google Mac Developer Playground.
Many developers at Google work on interesting open-source projects, some full time, some in their 20% time. This page is a collection of several such Mac-related projects.
December 04, 2007
December 02, 2007
BMW uses Internet Protocol (IP) to network automotive controllers.
In order to guarantee the short response times required, we used features such as QoS and traffic shaping. Our experiments with prototypes demonstrated, that the real-time behavior far exceeded the requirements — even when we ran multimedia applications across the same network.
November 30, 2007
The secret to raising smart kids.
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability — along with confidence in that ability — is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
November 29, 2007
Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary Online.
The Visual Dictionary Online is an interactive dictionary with an innovative approach. From the image to the word and its definition, the Visual Dictionary Online is an all-in-one reference. Search the themes to quickly locate words, or find the meaning of a word by viewing the image it represents.
This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.
Modified Gmail Macros is like Gmail Macros, but completely customizable.
November 28, 2007
Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript.
The web is somewhat up in arms about Beacon particularly because it just stinks of privacy violations, at least if you care about things like companies tracking your every move online. This post is going to dig deep in Beacon and see what makes it tick from a purely technical perspective.
The theory of moral neuroscience.
[E]mpathy works to prompt us to help our neighbors but attenuates with social distance. That we should be but little interested, therefore, in the fortune of those whom we can neither serve nor hurt, and who are in every respect so very remote from us, seems wisely ordered by Nature. Wisely ordered or not, modern neuroscience is showing that Nature has so ordered our moral intuitions. But we do not have to be the slaves of our evolved moral intuitions. By showing us the neural workings of our moral sense, neuroscience is giving us the tools to understand and improve our moral choices.
Google launches “GPS” for non-GPS phones.
The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map — it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).
[…]
[It’s] available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices.
Until GPS radios come standard in every mobile “phone” (and they will), this seems like a viable stopgap.
What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not only our own pain—something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do—but also the pain of others. That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human. Why it’s an essence that so often spoils, no one can say.
[…]
For grossly imperfect creatures like us, morality may be the steepest of all developmental mountains. Our opposable thumbs and big brains gave us the tools to dominate the planet, but wisdom comes more slowly than physical hardware. We surely have a lot of killing and savagery ahead of us before we fully civilize ourselves. The hope—a realistic one, perhaps—is that the struggles still to come are fewer than those left behind.
The Email Standards Project “works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.”
Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.
Man killed by exploding mobile phone battery.
Update: “South Korean police say what they thought had been a death caused by an exploding mobile phone was actually a ruse used by a co-worker to cover up an accidental vehicular homicide.” See here.
November 26, 2007
Zip Quick Look plugin lets you “see inside” zip files when you open them with Quick Look.
November 25, 2007
A more exciting but also more speculative possibility is that alternative life-forms have survived and are still present in the environment, constituting a kind of shadow biosphere. At first this idea might seem preposterous; if alien organisms thrived right under our noses (or even in our noses), would not scientists have discovered them already? It turns out that the answer is no.
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
A wiring diagram of the brain.
New technologies that allow scientists to trace the fine wiring of the brain more accurately than ever before could soon generate a complete wiring diagram — including every tiny fiber and miniscule connection — of a piece of brain. Dubbed connectomics, these maps could uncover how neural networks perform their precise functions in the brain, and they could shed light on disorders thought to originate from faulty wiring, such as autism and schizophrenia.
The search for immortality — or at least the exponential extension of human life — is hardly new. But now the hedge fund set has joined the quest, and some big money and names are betting on a “cure” for aging.
November 24, 2007
OmniFocus public beta released.
Task management shouldn’t be your full time job. We’ve built OmniFocus to take a load off your mind by managing your tasks the way that you want, freeing you to focus your attention on the things that matter to you most. Finish that novel. Spend more time with your friends and family. Grow your business. Let us worry about keeping your goals and tasks, both personal and professional, in one ordered, easy to access system that you can depend on.
I’ve been waiting on this app for a while (and apparently I’m not the only one). For the past few months, I’ve been using Vitalist without issue, and really like being able to access/edit it from anywhere (it’s web-based), but a “local” solution could probably work just as well, using a combination of Back to My Mac and the rumored ultra-portable.
By using Google Gears with the Firefox Greasemonkey plugin, you can inject Gears code into any website that you want. Don’t wait for your favorite website to enable offline support — do it yourself.
Fake Steve Jobs on Thanksgiving.
Apple employees, I know you’re thankful for having the incredible opportunity to be working at Apple during its golden era, aka The Reign of Splendor under Good King Steven. I know you’re grateful to me for coming up with such briliant product ideas and letting you work on them. How sweet is that, right? How awesome is it that sometimes you come to work and for one reason or another you’re walking across campus and you get to actually see me? Amazing, right? A few of you have even been blessed by having me speak to you. Then you rushed back to your cubicle and told all your coworkers. Maybe you blogged about it. Or you raced home and wrote it down so you can tell your grandchildren about the day I spoke to you and just like that, cured your polio.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: FSJ is required reading for all Mac enthusiasts.
November 21, 2007
The Mac Developer Roundtable podcast.
In the first episode of the Mac Developer Round Table Daniel Jalkut, Marcus Zarra, Uli Kusterer and Faser Spiers discuss Leopard from a developers point of view.
Nice.
How to program Google Android.
The only way to judge an SDK is getting in there and writing an application that does something cool, so I’ll take you through the development process for my first Android application.
Amazon Kindle hands-on and questions answered.
We got a unit, played with it, and shot it from all angles including the hidden SD card slot and the surprise “pleather” protective case. In this post, [we] answer many of your most pressing questions — hell, maybe all of them — including browsing the web, playing music and transferring books and more
November 18, 2007
Apple’s site can tell you a lot about the new end-user features of Safari 3. But a lot of the goodness is on the inside, in the WebKit engine that powers Safari. Here’s a list of ten of the most exciting engine enhancements since the Safari 2 version of WebKit, with lots of details and demos.
Fire-resistant, waterproof hard drive.
If all of your backups are local, you may want to check this out.
November 16, 2007
Get rid of Leopard’s translucent menu bar.
Before you try this, realize it (a) requires a restart, and (b) is modifying a system-level variable, and may cause bad things to happen.
Nice — one less thing I have to figure out how to fix. Be sure to read the comments.
November 15, 2007
Run Greasemonkey scripts in Safari.
Very cool, and brings me one step closer to being able to use Safari as my primary browser (not an option until it works with Google Browser Sync).
Marvel Comics offers digital archive subscriptions.
Marvel has put the power in the hands of the fans by making thousands of comics—ranging from Golden Age classics to the most recent Marvel masterpieces—available online, including the first 100 issues of FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN plus so much more.
I’m not into comics, never have been, but I imagine this is a pretty big deal for those that are.
November 13, 2007
Ultra-portable Mac to be announced at Macworld Expo.
I genuinely feel like I’ve been waiting on this thing for years — oh wait, I have. I’m hoping beyond hope that this rumor is true (though it still means at least two more months of waiting!).
Nutrition information of fast food items compared.
I’ve compared the nutrition facts of the most popular foods from over 20 popular fast food restaurants to see how each restaurant’s version of the same food stacks up against the others. If this isn’t enough to convince you to eat less (or none) of this stuff, it will at least give you the information you need to make the better choice and avoid making the worst one.
Very cool, and you can even sort the tables by category (e.g., calories, carbs, etc.).
Scary fact gleaned from one of the tables: Carl’s Jr. has a burger with 1500+ calories.
November 12, 2007
Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users, built by developers like you, will be a huge part of the Android vision. To support you in your efforts, Google has launched the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million in awards — no strings attached — for great mobile apps built on the Android platform.
November 11, 2007
Ryan Block drops a 64GB SSD into his MacBook Pro.
This is really how everyone’s laptop experience should be: free from worries about platter scratches or head crashes from bumps or drops; silent, cool drive operation; super fast access to your data.
For the 32,768th time, Apple, please give me an ultra-portable, or at least bring back the 12″ PowerBook so that I can outfit it with a solid-state drive.
Does Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ contain hidden music?
Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note. [T]he notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo’s particular writing style.
Path Finder now supports Quick Look.
The 4.8.2 update resolves a lot of Leopard incompatibilities, but some problems persist.
November 10, 2007
James Duncan Davidson on the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font.
Ever since I found it, Bitstream Vera Sans been my favorite monospaced font and I use it in all my text editor windows when working with monospaced text. The best part about it is that when you kick up your font size a bit—say to 12pt, which is what I usually run to ease up on the eyestrain—it just gets better.
I’ve been using this fixed-width font for years, especially for coding, but am now trying out (and loving!) Inconsolata, which I found through the comment thread.
November 09, 2007
Paramagnetic paint changes color at the touch of a button.
Before the vehicle is painted, a special polymer containing the special ‘paramagnetic’ iron oxide particles is applied to the car’s body. An applied electric current then adjusts the spacing of small crystals within the iron oxide particles and therefore affects their ability to reflect light and change color. […] When the vehicle is switched off, the car returns to a default color of white.
Lift the Leopard download quarantine.
A Vista-esque feature of OS X Leopard is that it tags web downloads (not just from Safari) as such and then warns you about running downloaded apps or scripts. Archived (e.g. zipped) files inherit the tag from their tagged container. This is an annoyance to power users. Luckily, being a power user, I can do something about it. ;)
November 08, 2007
Anatomy of Linux synchronization methods.
This article explores many of the synchronization or locking mechanisms that are available in the Linux kernel. It presents the application program interfaces (APIs) for many of the available methods from the 2.6.23 kernel.
iphonelogd “will read your iPhone’s call log and will copy the calls into an iCal calendar of your choosing, with a description and the caller’s name, if available.”
[We at Google] would like to provide a little help to make [Greasemonkey] scripts more robust. Instead of finding elements by XPath or DOM traversal, this API provides accessor methods for getting common screen elements. Instead of forcing you to monkey-patch (ahem) our internal functions, this API provides callbacks to call your functions when specific events occur.
Awesome.
November 07, 2007
Gmail Macros now works with the new version of Gmail.
I wrote about Gmail “v2.0” a few days ago, and the breaking of this script was my only real complaint. Thanks for the quick fix Mihai.
To Infinity and Beyond! — The Story of Pixar Animation Studios.
If you are struggling with what to get me for x-mas, struggle no more.
November 05, 2007
Use Quick Look from the command line.
Leopard ships with a command called ‘qlmanage’. The -p option shows a preview of the file passed to the command.
Google announces the Open Handset Alliance.
[T]he Open Handset Alliance [is] a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience. Together we have developed Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.
Not quite the gPhone many were expecting.
A built-in wireless receiver gets a daily weather forecast from Accuweather.com, and blue LEDs will flash to let you know if the forecast is rain or snow. The LEDs located at the bottom of the handle will flash in proportion to the chance of precipitation for your area; if there is a 100% chance, it will flash quickly, and if a 10% chance, it will flash slowly.
I almost have to buy it.
November 04, 2007
November 02, 2007
Google officially announces OpenSocial, which provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites.
November 01, 2007
A story of ants, aging and altruism.
Ants not only work hard and are prepared to lay down their lives for their fellow ants, they also take bigger risks for the good of the colony as they get older – and they can even assess how much time they have left in life.
October 31, 2007
October 29, 2007
If you’re resigned to reading only one review of Leopard, let this be it.