SENT finally going live

Back last winter, I wrote about submitting some photos to the SENT camera-phone exhibition. The exhibition, which combines works by invited artists and celebrities as well as thousands of submissions by the public, is finally going to happen, starting July 10 in Los Angeles. You can even look at some of the public submissions online, though with the random one-image-at-a-time loader, I still haven’t seen any of my images. (Boing-Boing, SmartMobs)

Inside scoop about Safari RSS and more

I figured that Dave Hyatt, ex-Mozillan in charge of Safari and one of the only Apple employees blogging, would be all over Monday’s announcements about RSS and Dashboards in Mac OS X 10.4. I was right:

  • Dashboard, in which Dave explains that Dashboard panels are HTML + CSS + JavaScript
  • Dashboard II, in which Dave traces the lineage of the Dashboard concept back to Mozilla and browser sidebar panels
  • The Search Field, in which Dave writes about the extension of the Input element that makes the new Search field omnipresent
  • Safari RSS, in which Dave talks about version numbering and product naming
  • Dashboard III, in which Dave talks more about the architecture (including security measures to prevent execution of malicious embedded code) and Safari 2.0’s new support for WinIE’s drag events
  • Plugin Scriptability, in which Dave makes clear the connection between the new plug-in formats coming down the wire and Dashboard widgets

I wasn’t all that excited about the Dashboard on Monday, but I am now. I get excited any time a rich new programming platform gets born.

Alive

Apologies for the post outage. We flew with the dogs to Lisa’s folks in New Jersey yesterday, which is always a long day without blogging. Lisa’s folks picked us up from the airport and fed us some fantastic pulled pork barbecue, which more than made up for the trip (four and a half hours in coach with two dogs that don’t want to go to sleep is always a joy).

Today I hooked up our wireless base station to her mom’s computer and am happily blogging away from the kitchen counter. WiFi is one of those inexhaustable reservoirs of delight. Every time I set up a wireless network in a new place I get that giddy feeling of freedom all over again.

Life imitates fiction

A story from the weekend I haven’t told yet: I had to stop by the U-Haul on Saturday to take care of my grill’s propane tank. When I stepped into the store, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was playing. And all the clerks—the long-haired one who appeared to be in charge, the tall thin taciturn black-haired one messing with the reservation computer, the heavyset guy running back and forth to the lot getting rental trucks ready—were singing along. I found myself unconsciously singing too: Magnifico-o-o-o… And the guy who walked in a second later behind me started doing it too.

And here I thought that only happened in the movies. Apparently it happens in slacker Seattle, too.

Apple WWDC 2004: RSS is everywhere

Courtesy MacRumors’ coverage of the WWDC Keynote, it looks like Apple will be adding an integrated RSS aggregator and search capability to Safari in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). My first thought was, “Somebody buy Brent Simmons a drink.” Brent is at WWDC, and his company, Ranchero, has one big product, NetNewsWire, which is the current leading aggregator on Mac OS X.

But on second thought I’m not sure how much this will hurt Brent. It may even help him. I think the interesting scenario for Safari is less around aggregating feeds and more around ensuring that the feed doesn’t look like gobbledygook when you click the link. If Safari’s changes mean that the user experience for finding and subscribing to feeds improves for Joe User, then the whole RSS-sphere wins because it makes more people understand what RSS is about and adopt the technology. There will still be a market for power apps like NetNewsWire when people tire of reading feeds in their browser and want a more refined experience—and at that point they’ll understand the value and be able to make an informed decision about purchasing the product.

Put another way, this move by Apple broadens the potential base of RSS adopters to people like my kid sister and my mother-in-law, neither of whom would be likely to download a specialized RSS reader application voluntarily.

Sonic Youth Lollapalooza’d but not out

I think that the unexpected cancellation of the Lollapalooza tour could be the best thing to happen to music this summer. Proof? I get to see Sonic Youth at a small club in Seattle instead of at a big festival. And while their show at Bumbershoot 2002 was fantastic, the small club show should be a lot less…safe, certainly if their show on the Thousand Leaves tour that I saw at the 9:30 with Craig is any indication.

Those ungrateful journalists…

…don’t they understand that talking to the President is a privilege? What do they think they’re doing, providing a public service or something? Certainly the journalists in Ireland appear to feel entitled to ignore the White House’s pre-interview briefs and treat the president with something less than kid glove deference:

The Irish Independent learned last night that the White House told Ms Coleman that she interrupted the president unnecessarily and was disrespectful.

She also received a call from the White House in which she was admonished for her tone.

And it emerged last night that presidential staff suggested to Ms Coleman as she went into the interview that she ask him a question on the outfit that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit.

Anyone who still believes that the White House doesn’t seek to control its presentation in the media, please raise your hand.

Oh, and “admonished for her tone”? After last week, there’s only one thing—following the administration’s own example—that one can say to that accusation… (Thanks to the Rittenhouse Review for the tip (scroll down); you can also access the audio of the aborted interview.)

Lizard brain? or buried memories?

Boston Globe: Unearthed skeleton linked to 1812 war. One of the things that I miss about Boston here in Seattle is the sense that Boston and the rest of the northeast have about 384 years of American history lurking, literally, just under the surface. The following note in the article brought that home: “Two hundred soldiers died in a pneumonia epidemic in the winter of 1812-13, [Dr. John Crock, director of the University of Vermont Consulting Archaeology program] said, and were buried in the cemetery north of the hospital in use then — near where North Street and North Avenue now meet. That cemetery, with the graves marked by wooden crosses, gradually disappeared from the town’s memory….”

(Of course, that’s nothing compared to the 397 years of history in Virginia, just a few miles from where I was born. But I digress.)

My point was, this is why I love Boston. It feels more lovable because it feels more human. Humans—we all—have memories buried just below the surface. They make us who or what we are. There are things buried deeply in my psyche that make me who I am. The same is true of Boston. Seattle, on the other hand, sometimes feels somehow shallower. Because America’s roots are younger there?

(Apologies to all my Seattle friends who I just offended in this post, as well as those (like myself) who would point out that Native American civilizations in this area go back quite a bit further than the settling of this city.)

New virus: Download.Ject

Major new virus sweeping through last night and this morning, designated Download.Ject. It appears to spread via unpatched IIS 5.0 servers (the specific vulnerability may be MS04-011) and could cause problems for clients who don’t have the most recent Internet Explorer patches. Make sure you visit Windows Update and install all available critical patches. More news as it comes…

BillBlog

Seattle Times: Bill Gates could join the ranks of bloggers. Interesting, though the article actually says that Mary Jo Foley of MicrosoftWatch says that Bill will start his own blog “real soon now” and Microsoft spokespeople say he would “love to do his own blog at some point in the future, time permitting.” I was going to make an Eric Rudder joke here (Eric is notorious for only updating his blog every couple of months), but the article actually beat me to it. Another tongue in cheek prediction: being linked by Bill will become the holy grail of blogging at Microsoft and will somewhat diminish the thrill of getting linked by Scoble.

Via Scripting News and other places.

Belated Blogaversary

I can tell I’m really busy. On June 11 I missed observing the occurrence of my third blogaversary. (I was a little prompter about it on Blogaversary 1 and 2.)

It’s been an interesting year. I started to get serious about photography, discovered Kinja, started blogging about work, and bored all of you stiff with dog and house stuff. Oh yeah, and the redesign. And BloggerCon. —Heh. I was just getting ready to lament that I hadn’t done so much technology blogging this year, but I really don’t know that I missed it too much.