Tried out iChatAV (audio) tonight. A much better experience than expected. Very little lag, and surprisingly good audio quality (going across a 15″ and 12″ Powerbooks on DSL/Cable).
Category: Legacy
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 16, 1953
D.C. Metro Blog Map – blogs in the D.C. metro area, arranged by metro station. For some reason, I don’t think this would work in LA. Via Jaime, who’s started a blog up again.
Holy, crap, this two-parter Observer article is a must read: The last resort
When you have a teenager on the rampage, who are you going to turn to? In America, parents send their troubled offspring to Jamaica’s Tranquility Bay – a ‘behaviour-modification centre’ which charges $40,000 a year to ‘cure’ them. Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to gain access to the centre in five years, wonders if there isn’t too high a price to pay
Reading Marc Andreseen’s recent comments about browser innovation go me thinking about alternatives for web navigation… specifically, what the weaknesses currently are, and how to improve them.
- threading/path navigation – currently, browser histories don’t keep track of the path of you’re browsing: which links you’re following, in what windows (or tabs!), etc. If they did, not only could you very easily pick up where you left off (also for crash recovery), but definitely help you find things, especially when combined with
- historical search – yeah, everyone’s talked about this before, but it still doesn’t seem to exist. In the world of cheap 200GB hard drives, why can’t I keep a searchable cache of all the pages I’ve browsed? Well, it’s not for any technical reason
- statistical bookmarks – would be neat if various filters could be applied to your history corpus to autogenerate bookmarks out of visiting patterns
- intrapage bookmarking/annotations – it’d be nice if you’re location in the page would also be stored. This could be done in a combination of ways – character offsets, xpath, rolling checksums / character diffs. In fact, it’d probably have to use all of those if you’re storing against changing pages (of course, local cache would help alleviate some of this).
- browser lookahead – prefetching simple HEAD requests right now to show link status overlays w/ size/type/status info would be a nice addition to the current prefetching implementation
- tabbed browsing manager – coming soon?
Non-nav improvements:
- syncing – bidirectional profile auto-syncing
- better blocking – for images, other media types that let you block by URI fragment, or properties, or any combination thereof
- site-by-site plug-in control
- fine grained transfer control – the ability to do absolute/percentage based throttling by host, window, etc.
I read a recent mention of Wesley Clark; it seems like a Dean / Clark ticket (Google turned up an interesting discussion from back in January) would make a lot of sense.
From a great post by Matt McIrvin:
This election, if lost, won’t be on the nuances of the issues anyway, it will be lost because of the more electoral efficient disbursement of GOP voters, a more enthused and loyal GOP electorate, and a GOP that will have $200 million dollars to craft its message. The 2002 midterm elections as a guide, show that in close races the swing voter did not perceive a difference on the issues between the Democrat or Republican and/or they did not know what the Democratic position was. There needs to be a very clearly articulated difference. Everyone knows what the GOP stands for Tax Cuts and Defense Spending. People are fuzzy on what the Democrats stand for, I think Fiscal Responsibility and Civil Liberty is a good start.
I’ve been mulling over names for my new 12″ Powerbook which finally came in. The ideal name should have personality, serviceable both as a term of endearment or disgust, oh, and be available as a hostname.
The list so far:
- gimpy
- jack
- whuffy
- al
- blogger
- random
I finished my CTCS 505 (Survey of Interactive Media) class. Holy crap am I glad that’s over. I don’t know if I could have taken much more of it. The professor wraps up the class by reiterating that one shouldn’t know too much about the technology involved, and then went off talking about postmodernism as having a modern core (okay… maybe), and then all technologies as modern. I’m sorry, if you can’t see the Internet, and specifically the Web (I might also expand that to all ‘digital’) as a fundamentally postmodern architecture, well, whatever. I’m glad these people are doing their ‘critical studies’ and ‘academia’ thing instead of polluting this space.
On the bright side, now that the class is over, well, it’s over, and that’s a good thing. I should have a few months to try to be really productive. Seeing true uselessness will hopefully spur me on to avoid being so.
Both my co-worker and I were quite impressed by Howard Dean’s NPR Morning Edition interview, transcript). He responded very well to some pretty pointed questioning by Bob Edwards. My co-worker noted these were the kinds of questions you wouldn’t be able to ask dubya—you’d get thrown out of the press room.
I think I can win, in fact, I think I may be the only Democrat that can win. And the reason for that is, that, first of all, we have 38,000 volunteers in… all the 50 states. The next person, last time I saw, had 1,300. There is an enormous hunger in this country, not just by Democrats, but by independents, to see somebody in the White House who stands up for principles that are good for the country, centrist principles. This president has moved so far right that our guys have chased after him trying to get themselves elected.