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December 1999 Archives
December 31
Apple is apparently tidying up their corporate image even more while riding the wave of Jobs. They'll be eliminating the 'computer' part of the company name and will standardize on a series of 3D-ish solid color logos. The logos themselves, look as if they were stamped out of jello if you ask me. The next question is, of course, how long until Apple gets feeling retro about their identity, and starts using the old rainbow logo again. Anyone remember their 70's corporate typeface?
Motter Tekturaposted by grant at 10:10 AM PST - 1 comments
With all this preoccupation with Y2K and the march of time lately, this doesn't seem to be too out of place. British Prime Minister Tony Blair figures it's time for the UK to
start capitalizing on GMT as the standard timestamp of worldwide e-commerce. Personally, as goofy as it is, I'm starting to warm up to Swatch's
internet time concept. By the way, this was posted @ 831.
posted by grant at 10:01 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
This is a good sign, as of 5am New Zealand time, there are *no* reported Y2K problems with any public utility. So what are people going to do with all their bottled water and extra food when nothing happens tomorrow?
posted by mathowie at 9:49 AM PST - 1 comments
December 30
I'm trying to find some live web cams in New Zealand, since they're going to pretty much be the first people to experience Y2K. The only things I've found so far are
this guys cam,
this busy intersection cam, and
this freeway cam. If there's any widespread panic or rioting, somehow I don't think I'll be able to see any of it on those cams (unless of course, someone is looting that guy's home). Actually, if the power goes out, I guess they'll all be unreachable. Something to watch for around 3am PST.
posted by mathowie at 9:16 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 29
December 28
Want to learn WAP (wireless application protocol) without buying a $300 PCS phone and paying for airtime?
WinWAP is a free WAP-capable browser that runs on win9x/NT and allows you to see pages built for cell phones.
posted by mathowie at 11:49 PM PST - 3 comments
Tonight, I was thinking of replacing my old North Face fleece jacket, so I went to
their site to shop for a new one. Instead of a product catalog or online store, I learned that their copy of Apache worked! Wow, that helps me out.
posted by mathowie at 11:42 PM PST - 1 comments
Speaking of retrotech, the latest group of space shuttle jockies just
upgraded the Hubble to a rockin' Intel 486 chip, replacing the apparently inadequate 386 that previously provided the brains to the wobbly eye in the sky.
posted by grant at 10:41 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 27
December 26
December 25
Here's a gross mis-use of the web:
800-357-7766.com. This mail order company is spamming the airwaves with commercials for their goofy 'tap lights,' and at the end of each commerical, they advertise their website with this unwieldy address. For less than $50, the company could have bought '
taplights.com' and directed customers there, but instead they force people to write down an address that goes against all the reasons why we have the domain registry in the first place. Why don't they just give our their IP address instead? It's about as useful as their phone number domain name.
posted by mathowie at 11:12 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 24
Red Envelope.com claimed that if you ordered your gifts before midnight last night (Dec. 23), they'd have the package to you by noon today. I was listening to an NPR radio program where they tested this and it failed miserably, with nothing showing up as of 5pm today. Looks like e-commerce's weakest link is still the final, but most important, step in the fullfillment chain.
posted by mathowie at 11:08 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 23
December 22
December 21
December 20
December 19
December 18
In a startling piece of cross-media usefulness WebMonkey has just published a reasonably deep article on using cheap cameras, film cross-processing, and Polaroid transfer techniques to squeeze some hipper images out of your repressed creative side. Time to quit Photoshop for a while and get your hand dirty. And I foolishly went through four years of
art college to learn this stuff... But then, where was WebMonkey in the late eighties?
posted by grant at 9:20 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 17
Boy George Nearly Killed by Glitter Ball There is just something so strangely ironic about this, that made me laugh and spew coffee all over my monitor this morning. Apparently witnesses at the scene said the ball missed landing directly on singer's head by just two inches. Darn!
posted by grant at 9:08 AM PST - 2 comments
December 16
There have been minor scuffles over the past year at UCLA that balloon into 'riots,' which then get covered in the local news. I work at UCLA and I can tell you that the local/UC police have overreacted before. This past June, students got together to drink champagne by one of the big fountains. It's an tradition going back at least 15 years, but for some reason last year, there were about 20 police in riot gear standing near the fountain at night, and at least one officer stationed there 24hrs. a day for the entire finals week. A couple students were arrested for protesting the police presence, but everyone else there was just plain perplexed as to why they showed up in the first place. Yesterday's event at UCLA looks to be the same thing again. Local residents complaining about an old tradition, in which the police overreact. The sad thing is this is happening everywhere.
posted by mathowie at 1:53 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
After answering a few questions here, a presidential candidate with the traits closest to what you specified will appear as your best choice. My choice came up as Bill Bradley, which seemed funny to me. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, I ignore former actors, musicians, and sports stars in political races. I had no idea Bradley stood for the things I support. Looks like I'll have to break the rules and watch this guy.
posted by mathowie at 1:08 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
I just noticed the great tag line on the
More Like This weblog: "Axial tilt is the reason for the season." I love it, I'm going to use that on all my holiday cards this year.
posted by mathowie at 1:03 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 15
Oh god. According to
this weblog (scroll down to the bottom), the 'I kiss you' guy is going to be in San Francisco tonight.
posted by mathowie at 11:35 AM PST - 2 comments
December 14
Stirring up the chum again, Slashdot has posted their
Top 10 Hacks of All Time. Covering everything from Edison's lightbulbs to the AK47 to the Apollo 13 mission, the post-article commentary is lucid as always.
posted by grant at 9:32 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
This Wired News article has one of the funniest Y2K-related quotes I've read lately. According to Jon Arnold, the CIO at the
Edison Electric Institute... ''Every New Year's, there's an outage somewhere, and it's usually because a truck hit a utility pole, a squirrel crawled into a transformer, or there's a winter storm. The bottom line is that stuff breaks all the time.''
posted by grant at 9:19 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 13
According to this system requirements page, all of Microsoft's fancy-shmancy new cordless-intelli-wheely-eye-mouse products need 30 MB of available hard disk space! For installing a mouse driver? Is this just code bloat, or another nefarious scheme to infiltrate our personal data? Cleverly disguised mouse drivers that secretly send password files and system configurations to Redmond. On the up side, the Mac version of the software only requires 15 MB of disk space.
posted by grant at 6:12 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Today I was talking to a friend about how much I miss seeing Mr. Show on HBO. They haven't had a new episode in months, so I went to their
official site and they're talking about making a movie soon! I couldn't find mention of it anywhere else, not even at the
IMDB. I did find some interesting fan sites like
this one. I also noticed they're selling
bowling shirts among other goodies at the HBO store site.
posted by mathowie at 3:31 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Jim Clark, former head of Netscape is launching
Shutterfly.com today. They're specializing in printing photos and shipping them to you for $2-$5 each, depending on size. What I don't see is an explanation of how they're going to take my 72dpi digital photo jpegs and turn those into high quality 300dpi+ photo prints. Good luck guys.
posted by mathowie at 1:21 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 12
December 10
December 9
Wow,
The Fray is
being featured on Adobe's site, congrats to
Derek. I find this quote from the review kind of funny: 'Literary ability may not be crucial to getting a story published on the Fray, but honesty is.' I've always thought the stories were very well written, guess I'm worse of a writer than I thought.
posted by mathowie at 10:35 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
A group of folks from the
evolt.org mailing list decided to do something to protest etoys's recent actions. One person purchased a domain, another setup web space, a couple people wrote some articles and
I designed the site. Keep that boycott going.
posted by mathowie at 10:16 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Alexey Pajitnov , the creator of Tetris has had a remarkable life. He developed one of the world's most recoginizable (and mind-numbingly addictive) games - and in the process, managed to survive through all sorts of incredible bureaucratic and corporate nonesense. Speaking of corporate nonesense, he's currently an employee of Microsoft.
posted by grant at 8:59 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Ever noticed that the also-rans who have yet to be acquired by one of their peers seem to glom together like cornmeal in water?
Take a look at who Be is partnering with for their Stinger internet appliance software:
Bitstream - clearly a runner-up to Adobe in the typeface technology department; and
Opera - who are trying desperately to be the alternative browser of choice. Who's next? Corel, and their latest BeOS port of WordPerfect?
posted by grant at 8:44 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 8
Powderlog, the snowboarder's weblog looks like the first specialized weblog I'm really going to like. It seems more portal-esque than a weblog, but that's ok. I wish it were customizable though, I'd love to be able to have the links to my local resorts in the sidebar. Oh yeah, that reminds me, I'm going to code the ability to customize the floating link thing this week.
posted by mathowie at 3:47 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 7
Got a windows box? Think your machine is secure?
You're probably not. This is a nice free port scanner utility for wintel boxes, give it a test and make sure you don't have any weird services running.
posted by mathowie at 12:04 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 6
iCraveTV is streaming free, live network television feeds using RealNetworks software, and the big guys are steamed. The broadcasters are citing copyright infringement, but the guy running iCraveTV, William Craig, says he's perfectly legal. I think it's pretty ballsy, but legal? Apparently, since he's 'casting from Toronto, Canadian cable laws allow the retransmission of broadcast signals sans the licensing fees, as long as the signal doesn't get altered.
posted by grant at 9:51 PM PST - 3 comments
I have to agree with
'The Wrong Approach' by
OSAll staff writer Brian Martin. Martin postulates that nearly every system on the planet could be secured with one simple step: making default installations totally locked down as opposed to the status quo of totally systems. 'I say it could be done in one month. In reality, most unix vendors could sit down and change their default settings in a matter of days.'
posted by tdecius at 6:57 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 5
It's nice to see something on the web living up to it's name. Raremusic.com is a rare instance of truth in advertising. In a world where pablum like Bush and Limp Bizkit qualify as 'alternative' (whatever the hell that means) this site is a godsend. It hasn't been updated in a dogs age but there's plenty of sounds here to keep you busy, some great, some funny, some just weird. For instance, If you wondered where that flute in the Beasties 'Sure Shot' came from, they've got the source. Also, theres a Moog version of 'What's New Pussycat?' that must be heard to be believed. Requires the latest Shockwave plugins.
posted by jonmc at 10:55 AM PST - 1 comments
December 4
For the life of me, I can't figure out why anyone would name their software
this. Oh, it's a Hotline client... now it all makes sense.
posted by grant at 9:10 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
December 3
I've pointed to fark.com before, because I find it one of the more amusing weblogs. While I was searching for pointers to MetaFilter today, I noticed they have
their referer logs in a public folder. What's great about it is seeing the search terms used on AOL's search engine. There's a few gems like "pokemon porn," "catholic girls playing in the mud," and "how to fake your own death." I see similar AOL searches in MetaFilter's logs. AOL is used by some freaky people.
posted by mathowie at 4:09 PM PST - 2 comments
December 2
I've always liked webmonkey, it's been one of the finest resources available, but with their recent redesign I can't seem to find things as quickly as I used to. Plus I can't find a link anywhere on the site to their
Webmonkey Radio feature. Once a month or so, I remember it exists, and I have to physically type "/radio" after webmonkey.com to see it. I missed a couple episodes, so now I've got some webmonkey-radio-catching-up to do.
posted by mathowie at 11:29 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Down on Mickey D's? Spending way too many sweaty, sleepless nights trying to get the image of a mad clown out of your head? Try
McSpotlight - a behemoth mass of anti-burgerflogging data, legal issues, rumors, and other juicy McInformation. Be sure to test your McDIQ with the
The McSpotlight Quiz.
posted by grant at 6:42 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
I'm adding new functionality to MetaFilter. I'm testing out
a floating, draggable menu for links. The links are static for now, but will be customizable by users. It should work in IE4+ and NS4+, post a comment with your OS/browser if you find any problems. I'm also playing with the stylesheet for this page, since I just noticed the spacing between posts looks awful in IE4.5 on the Mac.
posted by mathowie at 4:34 PM PST - 3 comments
