Embracing Chaos

I went to watch the latest Harry Potter movie last night with some friends. One of the previews was for a new Bourne movie, The Bourne Ultimatum. Typical lots of cars getting smashed and then at the end, on the text page, a URL: www.google.com/bourne From across the theater I heard a “Woah!” I think from Brady. Why? Because even without touching a web browser, this constitutes an apparent change in policy for Google. Advertisers with enough money can now buy marketing URLs on the highly trusted and respected google.com domain. In other words, they’ve sold out. People intrinsically trust…

...full article

I’m gonna make a guess at to what Apple’s going to announce in August. I’m thinking of the next gen iMacs with huge high-res touchscreens. They’ll support apps like the iPhone has with draggable windows and the cool 2-finger resizing thing and all that. It’ll merge Microsoft’s Surfaces technology with the iPhone’s UI and end up with something closer to the UI from Minority Report than anything we’ve yet seen. Or maybe they’re not there yet, and it’ll take another year or two. But this is what I think they should do.

...full article

A number of folks have been courting me for positions as a software development engineer recently. Many of them sound really fun. I love writing code, and even though it hasn’t been my professional focus for years, I think I’m still alright at it. But I’ve had to come to a sober realization that I simply cannot take a job where writing code is my primary function. I’m just not physically capable of it. I just about cried during a job interview once when explaining this. People come in my office and say “that’s a cool keyboard.” My response is…

...full article

So Apple is releasing the Safari browser for Windows. My first reaction is “great, just what we need — another minority browser.” It’s a funny move for Apple because IE will probably remain the #1 browser for quite a while just because of inertia, even as Firefox gains shares based on markedly superior features. So realistically the best Apple can hope for is #3, which really isn’t their style. Their claims about speed just aren’t going to win over users because application performance just isn’t that important for browsers on full-sized computers. On small computers with limited CPU people generally…

...full article

I recently started using Outlook 2007 for corporate e-mail as a POP3 client. Since “upgrading” whenever I receive e-mail, the whole system locks up for about 3-15 seconds. Doing something. Who knows what. Task Manager says Outlook has the CPU, but it’s got it with a high enough priority thread that basically nothing else can run. No other office apps. Even Firefox is non-responsive. Now my machine isn’t the switftest deer in the forest. But it’s got a 2GHz processor and 2 GB of ram so it’s not exactly archaic. What takes so long I have no idea. After a…

...full article

A little while ago I heard an interesting story on NPR about collaborative music software. They described a series of websites that empower geographically separated musicians to create music collaboratively. Using sites like ejamming, Musicians can find additional band members, share tracks and mix your own tracks with those of your partners across the net. They even hint at being able to practice with each other live, although I’ve never tried it. All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up. For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album…

...full article

A fair bit has been written about a security fix for IE that Microsoft pushed out about a month ago — the now infamous KB931768 fix. This security fix has a bad habit of making IE unusable for a lot of people, particularly Vista users, because of problems opening the “navcancl” file. A couple of coworkers and I have had a slightly different problem. For us, as soon as we open IE, we get a file download dialog asking what to do with the HTML file that it should be displaying, and IE shuts itself down instantly upon answering the…

...full article

Everybody’s reporting this morning stories about how Yahoo has launched the first legal lyrics website. This is an impressive feat considering how complex rights to song lyrics are. Two companies, Gracenote (formerly CDDB) and a Canadian startup, LyricFind, have been working for years to aggregate the rights to popular song lyrics to create such an offering. At CES this year, both were actively trying to drum up business. LyricFind has partnered with AMG to distribute their lyrics. Yahoo chose the better-established Gracenote as their data provider. I’ve spent some time looking around this morning, and I can’t find any lyrics…

...full article

First, I’d like to welcome everybody landing here after searching for something on Google. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I know Google has been crawling my site nearly since its launch, and I’ve been passively wondering when would this site show up in Google’s search index. It’s been in Yahoo and MSN for ages, and getting more and more links from high profile sites all the time. Well I just got the answer: as soon as I gave Google money. Surprised? As a birthday present to myself, I bought a few adwords like: Your Brain in a…

...full article

I’m sure by now most of you have heard that last summer congress legislated a new start to Daylight Savings Time this year. Instead of the first Sunday in April it’s going to start on the second Sunday in March from now on — March 11 instead of April 1 this year. Overall I think this is a good change — I’d prefer daylight savings time year ’round, except for that part where kids get run over going to school in the dark. But it is of course playing havoc with computer systems everywhere which have the DST rules built…

...full article