I see you got your little doggie backpack there. I wish I could be as happy as that dog is. Seriously, he looks absolutely psyched to be there! No wonder those little dogs just yip and bite everyone. I would literally tear someone’s face off if I had to ride around in a papoose all day- People of Walmart
Alternative Transportation, Jeremy Brooks
Is my mind just in the gutter, or does this look dirty to anyone else?
40 Stunning Examples of High Speed Photography, SmashingApps
I’ll take class over flash every time.
Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple’s Magic, Gizmodo
Good times.
SFPD is making sure we aren’t havin’ em.
Wherein a New Year’s Eve tale of police harassment is told., DNA Lounge
Wherein a New Year’s Eve tale of police harassment is told., DNA Lounge
So if the big names are accounted for, if the newspapers and magazines and DC Comics and Penguin and HarperCollins are in the bag, I hope Apple can, when they’re not busy doing other things, find a spare minute to completely revolutionize and democratize the publishing industry. There may be money in that too.
DIY, Neven Mrgan
The mid to late 80’s saw an abomination arise. An abomination so large that no matter where you hid eventually you would be splattered in its shit. Wave upon wave of fucked up tastelessness washed up upon our shores. It clung to our telephone poles screaming, “Missing dog!!!” in three different fonts, each bolded, at least one with its innards hollowed out. Our dot-matrix printers cried out in pain as pages upon pages were rendered in agonizing pixelated detail, noisily vomiting out reams of daisy-wheel paper destined to adorn the hallway leading to the cafeteria – “School Dance Friday 7PM”!
Publishing had been democratized. It was loud, it was ugly, it was popular and we feared it would never improve.
But it did.
The mid to late 90’s saw an abomination arise. An abomination so large that no matter where you hid eventually you would be splattered in its shit. Wave upon wave of fucked up tastelessness washed up upon our shores. It clung to our Navigator windows screaming, “Under Construction!!!” in three different colours, each bolded, with at least one blinking. Our browsers cried out in pain as pages upon pages were rendered in agonizing animated gif detail, virtually vomiting out reams of star-field backed text – “AltaVista Indexed”!
The Internet had been democratized. It was loud, it was ugly, it was popular and we feared it would never improve.
But it did.
The mid to late 00’s saw an abomination arise. An abomination so large that no matter where you hid eventually you would be splattered in its shit. Wave upon wave of fucked up tastelessness washed up upon our phones. It clung to our oleophobic touch screens screaming, “Tap to Fart!!!” in only one font but with three different gradients, at least one being yellow. Our devices cried out in pain as pages upon pages were rendered in agonizing ineptitude inducing developers to vomit out the question, “how the fuck did this get past review”?!
Software has been democratized. It is loud, it is ugly, it is popular and we fear it will never improve.
But.
Well, we’ll have to wait and see.
Software Sea Change, Kickingbear
The mythical tech-unicorn that Apple may or may not announce later this month is has already created an entire new product category based on nothing but speculation. How’s that for influence?
Dell Names Secret ‘Slate’ After Non-Existent Apple Product, Wired.com
“Space Shuttle Launch view from commercial flight”
A Matter of Notes
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an abysmal time remembering all the important but small things that happen during any given day.
I’ve tried all the usual tricks: fancy Moleskin notebooks, online services, stickies everywhere, even writing on the back of my hand. The latter got really messy, but that isn’t to say the other options were clean or desirable, either.
Then a couple of things happened:
First, I discovered the magic of pocket-size, thin, lightweight notebooks like the venerable Field Notes (“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”) and a new favorite of mine, Writersblok. The key here is that the format allows them to live in my back pocket all day without me paying the extra weight or bulk any mind. Muy importante.
Second, finally, a solid syncing notes app landed for the iPhone: Simplenote. And while Simplenote is amazing on it’s own (thanks to a great web interface for interacting with your notes), it needed just a bit more to make it truly killer. Enter: JustNotes.
Now that the pieces were all in place, a truly useful and time-tested workflow emerged. During meetings, brainstorms, etc., I scribble like mad in my formerly-tree notebooks. I’ve found that - with my goldfish-like short-term memory - as long as I write enough down about at particular event, I can reconstruct said in my head after the fact, which makes everything much easier.
Lastly, to ensure personal institutional memory of all these bits of chicken-scratch, I cull the most relevant bits from paper and bring them into Simplenote. At this point, I’m able to look up all my notes from anywhere, as long as the web is within reach.
Pretty damn sweet, if I do say so myself.
An SQLite database of the WikiLeaks 9/11 pager data
(Update database to v1.1 on 11/30/09 at 11:49AM)
It contains all alphanumeric messages from the WikiLeaks 9/11 dataset as an SQLite3 database:
911.wikileaks.org.sqlite3db_v1.1.zip, 14MB (uncompressed: 44MB)
There are three tables - textTable (main), emailTable and urlTable - with the following schemas:
-
textTable:timestamp DATETIME, service TEXT, senderID INTEGER, text TEXT, key INTEGER PRIMARY KEY -
emailTable:address TEXT, domain TEXT, textKey INTEGER, key INTEGER PRIMARY KEY -
urlTable:url TEXT, textKey INTEGER, key INTEGER PRIMARY KEY
- The
textKeyfields are pointers to the primary key (key) of an entry in thetextTabletable. - For the
senderIDfield, a string of all zeros is a translation from the same number of question marks in the original message, as I wanted this field to be integer typed.
More to come, including: the script used for generating this database (GitHub project), a more robust script and database (added in v1.1 update on 11/30/09) that will include email and URL lookup tables, and hopefully some cool analysis of all this amazing data.
Lastly: it turns out that this Jeff Clark guy has already done a bunch of analysis along the lines of what I thinking about doing, and it’s great stuff. In any case, hopefully this database will make things a tad easier for others wishing to do interesting analysis of their own.
I just want to drop files onto my Dock icon!
However, since none of the links I trawled included both up-to-date and complete examples, I figured I’d put one together for whoever has to fight this battle in the future. Caveat emptor, but really, it’s as simple as hell, so you can’t go wrong.
DockDrop.zip, 19KB, version 1.0 - GitHub
If you’re interested, the nitty gritty magic bits that need be plumbed up just right:
- Make sure your delegate implements
NSApplicationDelegate, and that it is set as the delegate ofNSApp. - Implement
application:openFile:in said delegate. - Ensure you have a proper
CFBundleDocumentTypesentry in your app’s Info.plist (see the example’s plist).
“Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!
“Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it—and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue?”
Every single day, I get e-mail from people saying they’re switching at the first opportunity, or would if they could. In time, the only people who will stay with Verizon are people who have no coverage with any other carrier.
Every company’s dream, right? A base of miserable customers who stick with you only because they have no choice.
I realize that it’s a business, that Verizon exists to make money. But the part I don’t get is, why doesn’t Verizon calculate the business cost of making customers unhappy?
Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now? (AT&T does it, too.)
We all had a playbook — we just studied what IBM had been doing for decades, and we copied them. (Larry stopped and chuckled a little bit when he said this, and for a moment just stared out the window with this glazed, happy expression on his face.)
Fake Steve. You gotta hand it to Lyons: he sure as shit knows the industry he’s writing about, forwards and backwards.
Slowpoke, cagle.com
