Since I take a lot of photographs with a dSLR, I’m often asked by others for advice on camera purchases.
I think if they saw my photo album, they’d not be asking such questions. In fact, a digital SLR photographer is the last person you should be asking for advice as their needs are different from yours.
But since it was my brother’s wedding and the cell phone just wasn’t cutting it for snapshots, I was enlisted again to advise on a digital camera for the wedding registry.
Chris Shiflett has a nice overview of the “talks that made the cut” for OSCON 2k5 (complete list) and I’m happy that I made the list (and thankfully they’ve only taken one of my talks).
Now if I follow my previous modus operandi, I can expect to finish the talk about 5 minutes before I have to give it.1 But it’ll be good so you better come see it!
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The news have been covering the fallout of a Newsweek article about the descration of copies of the Koran. Today over lunch, I was involved in an argument about this, and have decided to separate out what I know from what I can infer.
One of the new features of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is Dashboard. Instead of talking about what Dashboard is, I want to show you a poorly documented feature (and nice eye-candy) that Apple placed in the Dashboard.
While I’m told to think of them as desk accessories/Konfabulator for Mac OS X, I prefer to think of them as Sherlock 2/Watson done right. That is because Dashboard widgets are basically HTML web pages + Javascript + optional Cocoa binding. As such, most dashboard widgets are simply web views. This means that sometimes your dashboard widget may be displaying something that needs updating from the web and it isn’t. Instead of complaining to that the widget developer was too moronic to include a control for widget reloading, you can reload your widget manually by hitting Apple-R.
When you do so you’ll be given a nice little Core Video eye-candy (click the picture below to “get” it).
The impulse that led conservatives to intervene in a family’s bitter debate over a feeding tube is the same one that makes them turn a debate over a Senate rule on filibusters into a litmus test of spiritual correctness. Surely no holier-than-thou Hollywood pontificator could be harder to take than the sanctimonious Bill Frist, who, unlike Barbra Streisand, can’t even sing.
—Frank Rich, The New York Times
That’s the first time I’ve heard the word “spiritual correctness” and I was shocked at the force of the term. Could liberals have gotten their act together and finally adopted Lakoff’s theory of framing the debate?
But a simple network search shows that the term is most used during the heyday of political correctness as either applying political correct terminology to spiritual issues (such as saying, “the reason I’m dieting is for health reasons, not to look better” or implying that all spirituality is equal.
And yet, “spiritual correctness” defines exactly how I feel right now about the right-wing frames: “culture of life,” “fiscally liberal, socially conservative,” “family values,” and “partial-birth abortions.”
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One thing I’ll never understand is why people follow what Steve Jobs does so closely. Are these the same people that have a secret stash of People magazine?
They’re in good company though. My co-worker (an ex-HP employee) once said that Carly Fiorina has a bad case of Steve Jobs-envy which pretty much hits the nail on the head. Too bad whenever I see a picture of Carly with rock stars, actors, or entertainment executives, I keep hearing the Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the other… One of these things doesn’t belong…”
Now Gawker has a contest guessing the expletives uttered by Jobs as if it is impossible to utter an 8 letter cuss word.
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In his quid pro quo effort to convert me to the Dark side of the Force, Mark sent me this reference to a Gizmodo article.
Go to the site, and read some. The special powers are a nice touch. I wonder which cards are rare? I want the Jobs and Avi Tevanian card. Do you think the Phil Shiller card has an animated GIF of his hands gesticulating while he talks about how “cool” Tiger is? Where is the video of Jonathan Ives talking about the design of these cards?
“I felt like a dope, I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”
—Steve Jobs, CEO Apple, Inc. on digital music Fortune
Mark mentioned that he’s planning on buying an iPod Shuffle and later blogged that iTunes is missing features like skins. That hit me as a blast from the past.
Skins was one of the features that got axed when Apple bought SoundJam from Cassady & Greene to create iTunes. A program called Audion supports that and a wealth of other features for those people who need their daily dose of feature creep in their music player. You can read the excellent history of the player that almost was.
I remember buying MacAMP and later SoundJam MP. I remember being really pissed when I found out that iTunes would be introduced and SoundJam would be shelved. I remember skins. Ahh, let me tell you about those days…
They sucked.
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Now that I finally gave my brother his gift, I was going to blog about the iPod Shuffles I got him and Caitlin. But then on Friday, I read something amusing.
Think that the picture to the left is an iPod Shuffle? It’s actually a photo of the LuxPro’s “Super Shuffle” which DAPreview snapped a shot of at CeBIT 2005 (mouseover for the backside). What a clear case of trademark and trade dress infringement! And just after they were asked by Apple Legal to remove them on Friday, they put them back up the next day because “Apple said nothing about Saturday.” I guess that’s what happens when you live in a country that is perennially sanctioned under the U.S. Trade act.
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It made all the websites yesterday that Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick got hacked leading to a public viewing of her cell phone pictures (some on the pornographic side) and hundreds of crank phone calls to famous people who had the misfortune of being in her address book.
I remember the first time this happened it led to an amusing sound bite:
“It became obvious to her what was going on. She was pretty upset about it. It’s one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails1 is a real invasion of privacy.”
But since I work for a company whose whole business is managing people’s customer data, I am more curious about the security hole that lead to the hack. Continue reading
