Published on Thursday April 17, 2003 .
When "About the Finder..." was posted a few weeks ago, it seemed like I saw it linked on every site I read that day. And yet, here I am not only linking to it, but two weeks late, to boot.
While a lot of the ideas are nice, I mainly wanted to draw attention to Sircusa's write up of "live search folders" and "iTunes for files (a finder powered by arbitrarily extensible metadata)." First, if just those two ideas were implemented in Panther, I'd be thrilled.
And second, after reading Siracusa's article, I was left regretting that I hadn't written up my ideas for basically what he suggested sooner. Admittedly, my ideas were no more original than his. Mine were also inspired by iTunes, Copland, and the BeOS File System. But I'm now more motivated than ever to start sharing my thoughts on how things could be that much more powerful and usable. Hopefully I'll have something posted in this vein by the end of next week.
Published on Friday December 13, 2002 .
First of all, I read this great article about a Mac user who sold a PowerBook (kinda) through eBay, got scammed, and got revenge the right way that was posted to seemingly every website I read today. My favorite quote by far was:
"I asked for help again in the Mac boards. Two Chicago residents replied, and the next morning, courtesy of Tim, I had 23 pictures of the house, the cars in the driveway (with license plate numbers) and the neighborhood. I'd like to see a Dell user do something like that at 4:30 in the morning for a complete stranger a thousand miles away."
Anyway, reading the Metafilter thread about that article, I came across this old wired article about a boy who was killed by a mail bomb after he scammed someone over the Internet. It's a fairly interesting read, and I spent awhile contemplating the narrative implications of the story's lack of any heroes. Also, the last two paragraphs are notably poignant. It's long, but it's worth a read.
Update, Sun Dec 15 18:28:30 PST 2002: I finally fixed the mac link and the mefi thread link above... Sorry about that.
Published on Wednesday October 30, 2002 .
I've got a midterm tomorrow morning, so obviously I had some reading to do tonight. Here's the list:
And that's in addition to all the time I spent playing with Linkstew's random taglines.
I also played around with the idea of making a new sidebar item that's just a list of articles I've read recently, without any commentary. I don't typically like posting links, because I always end up feeling like I should say something more about them. Since any post requires a title, I always feel like a puny little link would be dwarfed by the other interface elements on the page. So that might happen, but obviously not tonight. I've got "studying" to do.
Published on Thursday April 25, 2002 .
Last night I went to the star viewing on the roof of Campbell hall.
Even to the naked eye Jupiter and Venus were stunningly bright, and Saturn was also easily spotted, and I was able to spot those three even as I was walking to Campbell at dusk. I wasn't quite sure who was Mars and who was Mercury until I got to Campbell hall and someone pointed out the barely visible blips, but Mercury was already so low that I wouldn't have been able to see it from the ground anyway.
After the initial naked eye tour of the sky, we went inside the telescope dome, where we checked out Mercury and Venus and Jupiter and Saturn and the Orion Belt at 225 x magnification. Mercury and Venus were frankly both kind of boring, with their most interesting aspects being the rainbow patterns caused by their light passing through Earth's atmosphere. Seeing the moons of Jupiter was pretty cool, but the telescope didn't want to focus so it was kind of hard to make out any features of the planet. And while the Orion Belt was pretty sexy, it was really Saturn that knocked my socks off. For some reason, being able to see the rings of Saturn through the telescope was just one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.
I think I'm going to have to go to the viewing again next week, when Mars, Venus, and Saturn are all going to apparently be even closer to each other in the sky. I hope it's clear. If you're interested in checking things our yourself, this site provides some nice pictures giving you a clue of what you should be looking for. In particular, it looks like Mars and Saturn and Venus will be doing some interesting things around May 4th which should be visible with the naked eye, and with a pair of binoculars you should be able to make out quite a bit more.
And as long as I'm talking about Astronomy, this java app provides neat demonstrations of the orbits of the moons of the planets of the solar system. In particular, Saturn and Jupiter (with their impressive collections of satellites) are definitely worth looking at.