- Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Clichés
- Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar. — Occasionally I wind up using it, but I usually regret it. It’s time to put that meme out to pasture.
- [undesirable counter-example], not so much. — I only ever use it in speech. It doesn’t make much sense in print.
- FTW, O RLY, lol, FTL, OMG, FWIW, btw, PWND, ROTFL, etc. — I am really sick of “O RLY,” but “lol,” “omg,” “btw,” and “ROFL” still get a lot of use in IM conversations. Old BBS and IRC habits, I suppose. But to use them in a blog is pretty awful, and just shows that you’re lazy and don’t have a fair grasp of the English language.
- [negative experience, situation, or description]; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. — Not really funny or witty; just makes you sound stupid. Next?
- [purposefully non-ghetto statement], yo. — Hey, nothing wrong with that! (Unless you’re writing it on a blog, of course.)
There’s more, but you’ll have to click the link to read them.
- Khoi Vinh on Address Book’s Merge Feature
One of the things that I love about the Mac OS is how well-thought-out it is, usability-wise. Very often, I’ll be wanting to do something and will wonder “I wonder if I can do this…” and am pleasantly surprised to find that it works exactly how I’d expect it to work. When people say that the Mac OS “just works,” that’s what they mean.
- Apple iPhone vs. LG Prada KE850
Daniel Eran on RoughlyDrafted:
“The real difference: the LG Prada phone’s interface is based on Adobe Flash Lite, while Apple’s is driven by OS X Quartz and Core Animation, and its applications are built upon the Cocoa frameworks. Flash is great for quickly making animations for kiosks and demos, but it certainly can’t deliver the apps Apple demonstrated. That’s why the Prada phone’s only touted features are watching movies, listening to music, and viewing common file documents. No mention of any web browser at all, no sophisticated email or messaging apps, and only basic support for other common phone features… Imagine a web browser built on top of a minimal subset of Flash, and its suddenly obvious why the iPhone is further ahead than industry pundits seem to understand.”
- Passport applicants find they’re not Canadian
Many applying for a Canadian passport have been informed their chance to remain a citizen expired years ago because of an obscure provision in the Citizenship Act, a little-known law that applied between 1947 and 1977.
The law states that if you lived outside Canada on your 24th birthday and failed to sign the right form, you automatically lost your citizenship.
I hit a similar issue, myself. My dad’s birth outside of Canada wasn’t registered, so as a result I didn’t get citizenship. This is despite the fact that he even lived in BC when he was a child. I have a lot of relatives in Canada, but because of the old law I don’t have a right to citizenship. Kinda sucks, but I’m still determined to get up there and gain my citizenship.
- Why Do Good? Brain Study Offers Clues
“Perhaps altruism did not grow out of a warm-glow feeling of doing good for others, but out of the simple recognition that that thing over there is a person that has intentions and goals. And therefore, I might want to treat them like I might want them to treat myself,” explained study author Scott Huettel, an associate professor of psychology at Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, N.C.
- The Spotlight File System for MacFUSE
SpotlightFS is a MacFUSE file system that creates true smart folders, where the folders’ contents are dynamically generated by querying Spotlight. This differs from Finder’s version of smart folders, which are really plist files with a
.savedSearchfile extension. Since SpotlightFS smart folders are true folders, they can be used from anywhere–including the command line.This is really cool. So cool, in fact, that I think it should find its way into the default OS.
- Tognazzini: Glorious iPhone embodies the genius of Steve Jobs’ Apple
The Macintosh computer did not represent a technological breakthrough either. The mouse was already 20 years old. Pointing interfaces were 20 years old. The Mac was a direct, studied “rip-off” of Apple’s expensive Lisa computer, developed concurrently, but shipped a little over a year earlier. That detracted nothing from the genius of the Mac, for what that team did was to take highly innovative technology and make it (relatively) inexpensive, attractive, and accessible.
That’s exactly what Apple has done again with iPhone. Multi-touch gestural interfaces have been hanging around in the laboratory, screaming for release, for as long as the mouse hung around. I’ve been pushing multi-touch gestural for over 20 years myself, beginning while I was still at Apple, incredulous that everyone has been ignoring it. Apple stopped ignoring it.
- Going To School In Neverwinter
A recent BBC News article reveals an interesting use of Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights game engine. Frustrated with student literacy and math scores, computer science teachers at West Nottinghamshire College in Mansfield, England modified the game’s engine to produce an educational simulation. Since that time the student success rate in key skills has increased to 94%.
- Zombie evolutionary epidemiology
[T]here might also be an evolutionary pressure on zombies. Assuming zombieness is in some sense heritable (why not? nothing about zombies makes sense anyway), there would be an evolution towards reduced virulence (i.e. biting, not killing as often). This is just as how many non-vector transmitted diseases evolve towards more benign forms where the host is not killed (diseases transmitted by vectors on the other hand have a weaker incentive to become less virulent). So the initial zombies would evolve towards an optimal speed to injure enough people to keep the spreading high, but not be too efficient. Maybe this is the “Hollywood optimum”, since it provides with maximum uncertainty of the survival of the heroes.
- ‘Wild Cambodia jungle-girl’ found
A Cambodian girl who disappeared aged eight has been found after living wild in the jungle for 19 years.
The human tragedy of it aside, this is a tremendous opportunity for anthropological study. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been fascinated by the question of what would happen if someone grew up in the wild and completely alone.
I do hope she can be rehabilitated, though.
- A peninsula long thought to be part of Greenland’s mainland turned out to be an island when a glacier retreated.
- Why aliens haven’t found us yet
It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe — and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.
Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look.
I’ve always been with Calvin on the subject — ”I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
- Why less is more
Tony Long writes a rather compelling article on why we should telecommute whenever we can. Personally, I’ve always thought it absurd that, for every job I’ve ever had, I have to be present at the office every day at a time of the day that’s completely antithetical to my circadian rhythm, even though every one of them were jobs I could do from home with a remote desktop connection or a Remote Access Service connection.
- “You could call iPhone perfect”
The touch-interface works flawlessly, in terms of both technical function and user interface design. Whatever you want to do — select an album to play, make or take a call, compose and send an e-mail — your first impulse is almost always the correct one.
This is the simplest phone ever.
And there are no lags, no pauses, no waiting for the slickly animated UI to catch up with you, even when you’re scrolling through a stack of album art that’s flopping past your finger in 3D: It’s liquid.
That’s the difference between Apple products and everyone else: things just work.
- OMG CYBORG CATS!!!!!11
Basically, veterinarians are able to implant microchips into blind cats that allow them to see again. Pretty cool, huh?
- Ancient reptile fossil with two heads found
“My first reaction when I saw that fossil was of the ‘Oh my God!’ type,” said lead researcher Eric Buffetaut of the Center for National Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France. “It’s something you would not really expect to see, because the chances of such a freak being fossilized are so slim.”
- Doomsday Clock now at 5 minutes to midnight
The threat of a second nuclear age and the expected consequences of climate change push the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight.
Well, shit.
- Canada’s anti-drug strategy a failure, study suggests
Is this really a surprise to anyone? I just hope that it actually leads to some change in Canada’s schizophrenic drug policy.
- Why Apple Makes Me Cry
I don’t think I’ve ever cried, but those keynotes do get me pretty stirred up.
- Cisco: “We have met all elements required by all authorities to maintain our mark.”
Cisco also “does too have a girlfriend.” She lives in Canada. You wouldn’t know her.
- Hawking’s future is ‘Serenity,’ not ‘Star Trek’
What amazes me the most about this article is that Prof. Hawking actually watches Firefly. Where does he find the time?
- Hands (and fingers) on the iPhone
[L]et me tell you with personal experience, it’s much more impressive when it’s in your hand — or more to the point, when your finger’s running across its multi-touch screen. […] It feels small, and quite thin. The screen is remarkably responsive — I could sense no delay between when I pressed an on-screen button and when the phone responded to that finger press. I typed on its on-screen keyboard with my index finger, and after about a minute I felt that I was already well on my way to be a proficient iPhone typist.
A week later, I’m still floored by the UI of the iPhone — and I haven’t even used one yet! I really hope that this responsiveness in the UI doesn’t take a hit once you start putting more applications and widgets on it. (Especially widgets, since there’s already a slight lag with Dashboard when initially loading widgets.)
- Cingular’s Glenn Lurie is out of touch with reality
While “there are bad guys out there that unlock phones,” Lurie said, Apple and Cingular are taking unspecified steps to make the phone more difficult to unlock and use on other GSM carriers in the US.
Bad guys? Bad guys? If the U.S. Copyright Office says that people can legally unlock their phones, then how can they possibly be “bad guys?” Wouldn’t there first have to be a crime before it can be considered wrongdoing? Furthermore, why is it a “bad guy” move to want to unlock your phone if you’re going to be travelling internationally and don’t want to pay international roaming charges?
The fact of the matter is that people want to unlock their phones. Because of that, it’s not going to matter what they do to make it harder to unlock the iPhone — it won’t be long before enterprising hackers find a way.
- The iPhone: a User’s Guide
My favourite one is Chapter X, “Using the iPhone to assist European antitrust authorities in understanding the difference between ‘tying arrangements’ and ‘legitimate competition’ in online music sales.”
- A 1951 toy atomic lab that included real radioactive uranium
My only question is: how did A.C. Gilbert get ahold of the uranium in the first place?
- Did NASA accidentally kill life on Mars?
Dirk Schulze-Makuch presented his theory in a paper delivered at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle last Sunday. Basically, it proposes that Martian life is likely to be biochemically different enough from Earthlings that the Viking landers’ experiments would have not only missed them, but killed them as well.
- Japanese not completely unimpressed with iPhone, but pretty close
I was discussing it with Kristin the other night, and she pointed out that not many people actually own computers in Japan. But that would make me wonder how they get music onto their iPods in the first place. But either way, the Japanese have had more advanced phones for years now, so it’s easy to see how the iPhone would be just another phone to them.
- “Mac OS X” and “OS X” different terms now
That is to say the core operating system at the core of Mac OS X, the computer OS used in Macs, and “OS X”, the embedded OS on the iPhone. More on this soon in a separate fireball, but do not be confused: Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
That’s actually a very good point. I grow more and more curious about this embedded version of OS X.
- Seth Jayson likes the iPhone, is still an idiot
Not only does he turn the iPhone into a referendum on Microsoft’s Zune (a bizarre comparison, since the Zune is only a portable media player), but he paints it as though he always thought that Apple knew what they were doing all along. His writing still sucks — he even misspells “sayonara” — and given his track record I’d be hard-pressed to believe anything he says; even if it’s the truth.
- Wired’s Gadget Lab poll on Cingular and the iPhone
The funny part is that the article says that more people say that the iPhone being locked in to Cingular is a dealbreaker, but if you look at the poll results, the opposite appears to be true. (At least as of this writing.)
- Cisco hits Apple with lawsuit over iPhone
Basically what happened is that Cisco wanted to make some money without doing any work. So they resurrected a product from the mid-90s amidst the buzz of Apple’s impending iPhone in hopes that Apple would use Cisco’s trademark, leaving them open for a lawsuit.
But Apple did register the “iPhone” trademark in the U.S., and it was granted in September 2006. And over the past couple years, Apple has been registering the iPhone trademark in countries all over the world, including the UK and Australia.