Debug rooms.
October 30th, 2007 — 7:17pm
Archive for October 2007
Ars Technica’s Leopard review.
October 30th, 2007 — 1:47pm
If you’re the kind of person who needs to know about the kernel improvements and GUI changes of an operating system in excruciating detail, you probably already know enough about Mac OS X Leopard to make your purchasing decision. If, however, you have somehow remained ignorant, this 17-page monstrosity by John Siracusa may be just what you’re looking for. He doesn’t even talk about Time Machine until page 14!
(Really, though, it’s an interesting review. Just don’t expect to understand everything he’s talking about, and set aside a good-sized chunk of perusal time.)
Jessica Hagy interview.
October 30th, 2007 — 1:25pm
Writer Joel Turnipseed is filling in for Jason Kottke this week and will be posting a series of interviews with prominent bloggers. Today’s interviewee is Jessica Hagy of the excellent Indexed, a collection of funny, insightful graphs and diagrams drawn on index cards.
The NFL in London.
October 28th, 2007 — 10:40am
There’s a football game today at Wembley Stadium in London — an American football game. At 1PM EST, the Miami Dolphins will play the New York Giants in the only regular season match ever to take place overseas.
A Miami Herald reporter found the Brits less than impressed with our exported sport:
”One problem with your football is all of that padding,” volunteered Brian Bennett, 26, a Stoke fan who works on bicycle as a courier. “In rugby they let you know they’re men. But your footballers hide in there, isn’t it?”
A friend of his noted how silly it is that ”50 play on a side in American football.” I mentioned yes, but only 11 play at a time. He said, “Then why you need 50 then!”
Over at the Selhurst Park concession stand, I found Emily Waller unwrapping a steak- and potato-filled crescent pie.
”Football here has a fluency, an elegance to it even as the elbows fly,” she observed. “Whereas from what little I know of American football, it’s full of starts and stops. Doesn’t the game hiccup along?”
Ouch.
Adium 2.0 to include voice and video chat.
October 27th, 2007 — 10:14pm
Awesome news from the developers of the Mac IM client Adium: voice and video chat are in the works! As usual, there’s little indication of how much progress they’ve made, but it ought to be worth the wait.
Hilarious referrer of the week, part three.
October 27th, 2007 — 12:35am
Yeah, it’s a not a new week yet, but that’s okay.
david gallagher nude photo blog
Feature #301.
October 26th, 2007 — 5:06pm
I love it. Mac OS X: Now with 25% more smug superiority! (Here’s a bigger picture.)
Some restrictions may apply.
October 25th, 2007 — 7:58pm
If someone steals a base during the World Series, Taco Bell is going to away a free taco to everyone in America. UPDATE: The base has been stolen! Taco Day is October 30th.
What’s the catch? Well, let’s take a look at the fine print.
HOW TO OBTAIN A FREE TACO: If an eligible base was stolen during the Games, Taco Bell will make an announcement through selected media channels, including a press release and its web site (www.tacobell.com), that eligible consumers can obtain their free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 (if base is stolen in Games 1 or 2 on October 24 or October 25, 2007) OR November 6, 2007 (if base is stolen in Games 3-7, October 27, 28, 29, 31, November 1, 2007) (“Redemption Date”) only.
All right, so you need to show up for your taco on a specified date. Fair enough.
To obtain the Free Taco, consumers must visit any participating Taco Bell® restaurant in one of the fifty (50) the United States or District of Columbia between 2:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. (local time) on the Redemption Date only and request a Free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco. Free Taco’s will not be offered on any other date or time, regardless of circumstance. Limit one (1) Free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco per person.
Okay, we’re down to a three-hour taco window. It’s a bit inconvenient, but they can’t have the freeloaders from swelling their lunch and dinner crowds, right?
On a side note, I’m digging the capitalization of Free Taco.
Participating Taco Bell restaurant manager reserves the right to deny Free Taco to any person he/she reasonably believes has already received a Free Taco or has engaged in any other fraudulent activity.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. Did they just use “Free Taco” as an uncountable noun? Because that’s pretty awesome. “Hey, you spilled some Free Taco on your shirt.”
More importantly: The manager gets to decide if I’ve gotten a taco already? That’s bullshit. Is he going to call up the other branches? Look for taco stains on my fingers? Smell my breath?
All eligible consumers: Everyone in line at a participating Taco Bell restaurant before 5:00 p.m. local time will receive a Free Taco, even if it is provided after 5:00 p.m.
Well, that’s nice of them.
Free Taco offer is subject to store availability and Taco Bell reserves the right to substitute an item of equal or greater value if due to unavailability.
Fat chance. What, are they going to run out of beef and give you a plate of nachos instead?
All restaurant managers decisions are final regarding to Free Taco offer.
Not if I bitch and moan enough. My breath always smells like this, you insensitive bastards!
As a condition of the offer, consumers agree: (a) to release, and hold harmless Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Enterprises, Inc., MLB Advanced Media, L.P., [etc., etc.] from any and all claims, demands, losses, promises, causes of action, and liabilities, in this contest/promotion or any use/misuse of the prizes awarded hereunder including a Free Taco,
Aww. And I was going to misuse my Free Taco so hard.
(b) under no circumstances will entrant be permitted to obtain awards for, and participant hereby waives all rights to claim, punitive, incidental, consequential, or any other damages, other than for actual out-of-pocket expenses;
I’d love to know what legal situations they’re hoping to avoid with this crap. Maybe they should have offered soft tacos Soft Tacos to mitigate the choking hazard.
(c) all causes of action arising out of or connected with this Offer or any Free Taco or any advertising, marketing, promotion or publicity materials in connection therewith, shall be resolved individually, without resort to any form of class action; and
In other words, “You can’t bring a class action lawsuit against us because we said so.” Sounds like a software license agreement.
(d) any and all claims, judgments, and award shall be limited to actual out-of-pocket costs incurred, excluding attorneys’ fees and court costs.
Ah, yes; the out-of-pocket costs of a free taco. They’re clever, those Taco Bell guys.
By participating, consumers agree that all issues and questions concerning the construction, validity, interpretation and enforceability of these Official Rules, participant’s rights and obligations, or the rights and obligations of the Sponsor in connection with the Sweepstakes, shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of State of California, without giving effect to any choice of law or conflict of law rules. By entering, entrants consent to the jurisdiction and venue of the federal, state and local courts for Irvine, California.
This, of course, is because California has the loosest free taco laws in the nation.
Jesus, that’s the most fine print I’ve ever read in my life. I think I need to take a nap.
The purported death of classical music.
October 25th, 2007 — 7:33pm
Matt Haughey makes a case for classical music as the future of the music industry:
1. People rarely spend money on classical music itself. I bought a Bach or Mozart CD once when I was 19 when I needed background sound while studying. For the last few years, whenever I want to hear some classical, I just put on the one radio station that plays it or I pick any random classical listing in iTunes’ streaming music area and let it play. It’s basically free and plentiful.
2. Old classical music has no copyright, anyone can cover anything by Beethoven and not owe anyone a cut. You can remix sheetmusic from the 1700s all you want and call it your own. If you’ve got access to an orchestra and a recording device you can go nuts making music and never need a lawyer for any of it. Everything before 1923 is in the public domain: it’s like a Creative Commons wet dream.
3. Classical music fans are tech savvy and embrace the internet. The majority of them rip music, and a sizable chunk own iPods and pay for downloads.
Despite these doomsday notions, classical music remains an industry and there are tens of thousands of professional classical musicians worldwide that make a living from it.
The linked New York Times article may surprise you. Money quote: “On Apple’s iTunes, which sold a billion tracks in its first three years, classical music reportedly accounts for 12 percent of sales, four times its share of the CD market.” That’s pretty sweet, Charles.
Hilarious referrer of the week, part two.
October 23rd, 2007 — 10:20pm
128GB flash memory in 2009.
October 23rd, 2007 — 9:33pm
Samsung late Monday announced that it had produced the world’s first working NAND flash memory based on a 30-nanometer manufacturing process, promising a greatly increased storage density over today’s chips. The smaller manufacturing technique was made workable through a new technology known as self-aligned double patterning. By stepping up the use of lithography, the company is able to write both a coarser, more conventional pattern of memory cells as well as a finer pattern that fills the gaps; this makes the best use of the available space, Samsung says.
In a high capacity, multi-level cell (MLC) flash design, the improvement should allow for 64-gigabit chips that can combine to produce a 128GB memory unit; this would hold as much as 32,000 songs or 80 full-length movies at DVD quality, according to the company.
The iPods in 2010 are going to be insane.
Portal.
October 19th, 2007 — 11:59pm
(A word of warning: Others recommend experiencing Portal without any prior knowledge, and I’m inclined to agree. There are no big spoilers here, but there’s something to be said for going in with a clean slate. If you’ve already finished it, or have no interest in computer games and would never play it anyway, read on.)
First, for the non-gamers: Portal is a quirky puzzle game bundled with Valve’s Half-Life 2 compilation The Orange Box.
When the game opens you wake up in a testing facility. A droll AI encourages you to make your way through various obstacle-laden rooms — there will be cake at the end of the experiment, she promises. I don’t want to give anything away, but I’ll say this: some other stuff happens too, and it is awesome.
Anyway, the conceit of the game is the handheld “portal gun” you’re given, which creates orange and blue spatial warp fields that embed themselves into most flat surfaces.
Yikes. Did that make any sense? A YouTube clip is worth a thousand words here:
(link)
As you can see, it’s a fairly simple concept that has some fairly unexpected consequences. Jumping fifty feet down into a portal and then, maintaining my momentum, shooting out of a wall like a cannonball was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in a video game.
For those who have finished the game:
- Schlaghund’s Playground has the best analysis of Portal I’ve seen.
- Jonathan Coulton, who composed a song for the game, wrote about his experience working with Valve (and posted lyrics and chords).
- And finally, from the department of questionable analysis, Heroine Sheik has the lesbian critique. Who says video games aren’t art?
Asshole footprint.
October 16th, 2007 — 10:59pm
Vanity Fair brings the funny with a test to determine your asshole footprint:
For ages 14–25
1. Do you refer to attractive members of the opposite sex as “smokin’ hot”?
2. Do you leave vitriolic comments in the “Comments” sections of blogs and Web sites, even if you’re commenting on something innocuous, such as an old Linkin Park video?
2a. When leaving such comments, do you use such rote Internet pejoratives as “asshat,” “douchebag,” and “‘tard”?
3. Are you convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the world recognizes you as the next Andy Samberg?
4. Do you write a dating column for your school paper or local weekly?
5. When you are being photographed, do you flash gang signs?
6. Are your birthday parties televised?
7. Is your name Skylar, Tyler, Taylor, Cat, Bryce, Morgan, Brandon, Braden, Hayden, Jaden, Brianna, or Keegan?
I’m pretty sure I know a few people who fit at least five of those.