I'm still amazed at the quality of photographs coming through Flickr - through the "Interestingness" filter, as well as through some of the more specific tag feeds I subscribe to.
Here's a snapshot of my Flickr Favorites - and this only holds the last 4 days or so of new additions.
We had a great hacking session today, with Josh piped in over iChat and VNC from California, and King and I hunkered around his collection of Cinema Displays. We managed to replace our krufty jGenerator-powered flash file wrapper class with one based on JSwiff, in under a day.
JSwiff takes care of the nastiness of dealing with the .swf file format, and provides an extremely helpful XML intermediary - you can convert any .swf file to this xml format, modify the xml, then render back as .swf. Very handy for what we need to do.
Ars Technica has a great reaction to the RIAA's reaction to Steve Jobs' comment about the RIAA being greedy.
Now, the RIAA is claiming that it would be totally fair, and that the consumers would support or even demand, that the record labels get to charge more for songs sold via iTunes, and to get a cut of iPod sales. Even though they have to spend roughly $0 to market music via the iTMS, and spend exactly $0 to sell music through it. And they spent exactly $0 to design, manufacture, market and distribute the iPod. But, they need a cut of the pie.
I just switched the default theme of this blog to the latest K2 theme by Michael Heilemann at binarybonsai.com. Michael created the Kubrick theme that I was using before (and which was also adopted as the default for all new WordPress installations).
K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.
Check out the cool ajax-powered search dealie - just start typing a query, and out pops a list of matches. Pretty cool. Comment submission also uses some ajax juju, but it's a bit funky at the moment, and isn't quite fully baked yet. Still, quite cool.
The Pachyderm project uses jGenerator to wrap images in a flash .swf container for display in the final product. That process does a few things that are pretty handy:
(left) tombstone in "closed" state. Click the arrow widget dealie to expand it to view the full tombstone (right)
Spam Karma 2 just keeps on chugging away, protecting my blog from the scum sucking spam roaches of the world. The roaches are getting marginally more intelligent - starting to try to game the spam blockers.
In the wee hours of the morning, some spammer from somewhere in Asia tried to get onto some kind of whitelist by posting a couple of innocuous comments - with no bad links or scary words. Those 2 comments got through, and then they immediately tried to dump spam into the blog. Those comments were automatically killed by Spam Karma 2. It was able to make a distinction from harmless (although pointless) comments from link spam-infested roach fodder.
My "golden ticket" invitation to wordpress.com came in today, so I surfed over and spent 30 seconds setting up a new blog to see wtf the deal was. Wow. That is one slick and easy blog setup tool. I shouldn't have been too surprised, having already seen a preview of it implemented on James Farmers' Edublogs.org site,
It's got a nice 'n easy "presentation" selector utility - pick a thumbnail of a theme, and it's set as the design for your blog. Doesn't get any easier... Might be too easy, though, since there's no way to customize a theme once you've selected it.
We're using jGenerator for the Pachyderm project - to replace the abandoned Macromedia Generator product - for wrapping images in .swf files for display within Pachyderm presentations. The .swf files provide value-add stuff like "tombstone" data, and a lightweight, unobtrusive form of DRM.
However, jGenerator has been rather neglected for 3 years now, and as a result it's starting to show cobwebs etc... Remember my friend Murphy? Largely a result of these cobwebs.
I had a total blast at Northern Voice 2005. It was probably the most laid-back-yet-productive conferences I've been to. It was structured, but not corporate. Loose, but not chaotic. It had a very strong feeling of community - a grassroots "feel" to it, even though many of the "big names" of the blogosphere were there. It was a total community event, and I met so many people from such a wide variety of backgrounds - a real eye opener.
It took over 2 weeks, but I finally got the pictures off of that Sony funkicam. They're generally really nice photos, but the camera was apparently set to "auto photo screw up" mode. Every image has a bright red datestamp burned straight into the image like gramma's camera does. Why on earth would a digital camera burn a timestamp into the image, when EXIF does a better job without screwing up the picture? grrr....
Cole just wrote 2 announcements regarding the Big ADCE Kickoff (which is great and exciting). I got both announcements via RSS feeds, and clicked through to see the full posts. I'm going to use pictures here to make it about as painfully clear as possible.
First, there's the announcement on his ADCE Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning blog:
Then, there's the announcement on his own blog:
I originally posted this entry on May 18, on the Apple Digital Campus Exchange (ADCE) "Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning" weblog. I'd post a link, but everyone (including myself) would have to login to the ADCE system to read it. So I'm reposting it here in the hopes that it might make some difference. I'm not holding my breath. I was almost convinced that a walled garden might have value, but on further consideration I have to agree wholeheartedly with Alan - and won't be posting to the ADCE weblogs unless/until the walled garden is opened up to everyone.