there are 12 posts from August 2006

August 31, 2006

fine on lonelygirl15

Jon Fine’s column in the Sept 11 issue of Business Week is on Bree & Daniel and the series of lonelygirl15 videos.

Based on comments from media and talent agency executives, the videos appear to be produced by a small coterie of creative types. They have had discussions with at least one major media company. Agents are pursuing them as well.

So wait..they appear to be produced by creative types…yet they’ve had discussions with at least one major media company?  Fine’s being a bit cute, no?  I agree with him, though, that this is the best bit of summer TV around.  The “who is lonelygirl15” saga makes The Lost Experience seem ridiculously contrived and overblown…  Alvar who?

August 31, 2006

embeddable spreadsheets

I don’t have much to add to the “Google Office” discussion, except to add this note to Chris Anderson’s plea for the ability to embed spreadsheets in pages like you can embed YouTube videos.  We’ve actually had these before, courtesy of HalfBrain.com, which I wrote about back in 1999 during Bubble 1.0.

Written entirely in DHTML, Brain Matter provides the 20% of the functionality of Excel that 80% of the market uses 100% of the time – all in your browser. It’s fast, it’s clean, it’s intuitive – and it’s smart. HalfBrain clearly knows that when you migrate an application to the network, it opens up new ways to use that application. First, they’ve enabled network-based storage of the spreadsheets you create (of course). Second, their site helps shift focus from the tool itself to the use of the tool, by publishing more than 200 interactive calculators that help users do simple tasks like track expenses, plan a party or calculate the value of their options. Finally, they’ve flipped the viral bit, making it incredibly easy to email a spreadsheet to a friend, or to post a calculator on your own website.

The folks behind HalfBrain ended up doing a little thing called Oddpost, and you know the rest of that story

August 30, 2006

it's still plug and pray

Logitech Just spent about 30 minutes trying to get a Logitech webcam we had lying around the office to work with my Thinkpad.  Couldn’t make it work, and gave up after I realized that I spent about 29 minutes more than I should have trying to find and install the drivers for the damn thing.  It’s late 2006.  Shouldn’t plug and play be a reality by now?

There was one nice touch in this otherwise incredibly frustrating experience – Logitech has nice little pictures to help you find the right software for your device. Of course, the package for my cam was a 79mb download (who needs 79 megs of software for a web cam?) that didn’t work.  But hey, at least their web team got their part of the experience right.

August 25, 2006

blank is the new blank

I keep hearing that brown is the new black.  And that  pink is the new blog.  Which led me to the question of just how many pages on the web have the phrase “ is the new " in their title.  Answer?  [About 100,000](http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A*+%22is+the+new%22+*).  Here are the top twenty " is the new results, removing the titles that don't really match the pattern...

  1. Blood is the new black.
  2. Innovation is the new black.
  3. Yellow is the new black.
  4. Fat is the new black.
  5. Sincerity is the new irony.
  6. Caring is the new competitive advantage.
  7. Green is the new black.
  8. Gamma is the new beta.
  9. Secrecy is the new black.
  10. Folksonomy is the new black.
  11. Disk is the new tape.
  12. Blogging is the new black.
  13. R&B is the new hip-hop.
  14. Bitter is the new black.
  15. Gay is the new black.
  16. XML is the new black.
  17. Transformation is the new black.
  18. White is the new black.
  19. Random is the new black.
  20. Teen is the new noir.

The pattern “ is the new **black**" accounts for more than half of the top twenty!  And if you're curious, check out the Google Trend line for "[is the new](http://www.google.com/trends?q=is+the+new&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all)" \-\- it shows a slight trend upward in the past couple of years, and you can check out the top news stories on the term, like the Massachusetts Daily Collegian story titled "[Vengeance is the new Justice](http://www.dailycollegian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/06/4253374060ef0)," which somehow fittingly, 404s.

August 24, 2006

the return of dirk!

And there was much rejoicing, for today marks the return of Dirk, which celebrates the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.  Soooooper genius Matt Webb writes

I’ve rewritten Dirk for my own learning a few times, in Perl again, PHP and Python. It’s my Hello World app, hitting web apps, databases, general syntax, algorithms and performance. I try to write it as idiomatically as possible each time, and squeezing every drop of performance out of the pathfinding algorithm (which I know pretty well by now) lets me learn what’s fast and slow in each language.

Dirk is one hell of a Hello World app.  Go play!  Connect!  Pathfind!

August 24, 2006

amazon's elastic compute cloud

Now this is interesting, especially when combined with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. … Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

You can upload your own image, or use one of their “preconfigured” instances, each of which is the equivalent of 1.7ghz Xeon with 1.75gb of RAM, 160gb of disk and 250mb/s of bandwidth.  And of course it’s integrated with S3.  Pricing is $0.10 per instance-hour (around $72 per month).

August 14, 2006

kids these days

Back in the olden days I worked at this great little software company, and we had our offices in this great little building South of Market.  Now, this was back before Web 1.0, back before Wired came to the neighborhood, back before Cafe Centro and the ball park and the mixed use condo / office building that stands where the motor home park used to.  Anyway, this building we were in had no air conditioning to speak of, had very few windows, and when someone rolled their chair over the coax network cable someone in development would eventually shout “Hey!” but only eventually because there wasn’t much networking to do back then. 

Where was I?  Oh, yeah – no air conditioning.  When it got really hot in the summer one of us would hit up the CEO for a $20, head down to the bodega on 3rd and Bryant and buy them out of popsicles, ice cream sandwiches and anything else that was frozen.  We’d hurry the delicious treats back to the office and hand them out before they melted all over our XTs.

Kids these days not only get air conditioning and networking that actually works, they also get natural, locally-sourced, trans-fat free custom made IT’S ITs wrapped in the corporate logo.

August 09, 2006

quilts from gee's bend

Geesbendmama_1 Everyone I’ve talked to that’s seen The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition at the (new) de Young has been blown away.  But not everyone knows that the de Young isn’t the only place for hot quilting action in the Bay Area this summer.

First, the Haines Gallery has an exhibit of Gee’s Bend Quilts up through August 26; Haines is on the tpo floor of the 49 Geary art mall building near Union Square

And two of the artists from Gee’s Bend – Lousiana Bendolph and Mary Lee Bendolph have made prints with Berkeley’s Paulson Press.  Paulson’s closed for the month of August, but both the de Young and Haines exhibits are showing prints from their project.  (Self-important blogger disclaimer – the Paulson folks are friends, and my wife used to work closely with them.)

As the kids are saying on Vox, [this is good].

August 08, 2006

cody's, dead and buried

Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue closed last month, causing untold numbers of hands in Berkeley to wring with self-righteous indignation at the heartless march of capitalism, the encroachment of mega-onliners like Amazon and the decline and fall of literacy in west coast civilization. 

There’s been plenty of press coverage of the Berkeley icon’s closing; Anneli Rufus’ long and thoughtful piece in the East Bay Express is the best one I’ve read yet.  She covers the sturm and drang of the demise of Cody’s with just the right amount of gentle skewering…

When Berkeley looks in the mirror, it perceives a book town, a lit-cred Lourdes linked with so many bards and rebels and laureates alive and dead that reciting their bibliographies would take all day. Not just uninflected authors but, to a large part, activist authors with a cause. Rare is any city so spellbound by its own legacy. For better or worse, Berkeley is a living theme park, forever conjuring a heyday that Cody’s crystallized. “Tie-dyed Tears,” one blogger proclaimed.

Worth reading if you spent money at Cody’s, have ever stepped foot on Telegraph Ave., or have an interest in retail bookselling…

August 04, 2006

the eames film festival

You’ve bought the furniture…now see the movies!  Design Within Reach is putting on an Eames Film Festival in their stores around the country.  Brilliant marketing move; further associate the DWR brand with Eames, and drive a slew of design geeks into the stores.  I’m sure the one in SF will be packed, especially since there will be a presentation from one of the grandchildren.

I’ve only seen Powers of Ten (and have watched The Simpsons homage probably two dozen times on YouTube with my daughter); would love to see the others.  Turns out you can buy a box set of the Eames films for about $70.  The experience of which would definitely be enhanced in the comfort of the lounge chair and ottoman set.

(NB – All my favorite design-y type blogs have posted about this today; I wonder how many learned about it from DWR’s nicely done (if just a bit too frequently delivered) email newsletter?)

August 04, 2006

an advertising question

So you know the ads they show behind the catcher during baseball games? The ones that are composited on top of the green screen?  I’m curious…

  • Do the networks composite in different ads for different markets?
  • Even if they don’t (let’s say the economics are better for a national campaign), does the technology exist to do that?
  • When the game’s repackaged and sold on DVD, are new ads composited in?

I’ve heard of certain television series’ using chroma key technology to enhance product placement opportunities; I’m wondering if/how this type of technology is being used (in real time or not) to deliver optimized place- or time-shifted advertising.

Anyone have any experience here?

August 02, 2006

sorkin's back...

…and thank God for that.  I’m hoping that NBC either (a) deliberately leaked this to YouTube or (b) has enough smarts to let this stay up there and drive interest in the new show.  It’s worth the 10 minutes out of your day…

Update: it’s now gone, daddy, gone.  You’ll have to wait for the real thing to see Judd Nelson do his Network thing so well.  I’m hoping that even without HD you’ll be able to see a vein pulse in his head…