August 2006

August 28, 2006

Volcano music!

Volcano music! Through the process of sonification, scientists can turn seismographic patterns into musical scores, which are playable using a cheap MIDI interpreter. I also like the mp3 based on web server activity. Via Mark Hurst’s newsletter.

Ilya

August 25, 2006


August 24, 2006

“X have Y words for Z”

There is something strangely fascinating how closely documented recent, Internet-related topics are on Wikipedia. We have exact dates and the context of terms being coined. Snowclone, disemvoweling, splog. It’ll be interesting to see if these neologisms survive, and if the way we “write history” will look more like this.

Ilya

August 23, 2006

Creamaid: get pay for what you say

Creamaid connects advertisers with bloggers. They offer bounties to write-up stories on featured companies. Moderated, of course. They’re calling it a conversation widget. Okay, if you say so.

While I think that something like this could be used constructively, I expect that this’ll just lead to more whoring-guised-as-blogging. Surprisingly, Creamaid was featured (in Finnish) in today’s print edition of Taloussanomat. Based on a Technorati search, it doesn’t seem to have made a big splash in the blogosphere yet.

Ilya

Cleaning up a bit

I’m dumping a bunch of duly noted items that I never got around to posting. Oh, and I finally fixed my title so that it links to the main page.

Ilya

Asides may be apart, but they still should be within

In February, Om Malik spun off The Daily Om, a link blog. Malik wanted to devote GigaOm to longer, meatier pieces, and not drown them in the chatter of “asides.”

I don’t know how Malik is publishing The Daily Om, but publishing separate “blogs” (or feeds, or types of posts) should be possible with standard blogging tools; it shouldn’t be necessary to set up a new blog — at least not on the admin side. Unfortunately this “one site, one admin” problem is much worse in the traditional CMS world.

Ilya
  • This Financial Times article on blogging (via Kottke) takes a refreshing look at blogging, but I still don’t accept the pitting of weblogs against traditional media. I guess the challenge is much more acute from the trenches of the press (declining readership, lost ad revenues), but what the hell? Weblogs are never never going to overthrow the press. Blogs make the media better. But if the host dies, the parasites go hungry.
  • Paige Pooler is the illustrator behind Joyent’s fantastic illustrations.
  • Loose Teeth Press is Joey Comeau’s (of A Softer World) publishing house.
  • Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work. Design patterns for comics? Fascinating.

August 20, 2006

  • Swift is an Apple WebKit based browser for Windows.

August 19, 2006


August 16, 2006

Understand, by Ted Chiang

Understand, a novelette by Ted Chiang, explores superintelligence, as in “at which [point do] quantitative improvements — better memory, faster pattern recognition — turn into a qualitative difference, a fundamentally different mode of cognition”.

Ilya

August 14, 2006

  • Vitamin’s article on creating HTML emails will surely come in useful one day soon. Newsletters can be a bitch to get right, and all too easy to royally screw up. And since we’re talking about people’s inboxes, the potential damage is much more serious than a few display errors on a web page.

August 8, 2006

Color theory, not bots

Colors on the Web is one of many resources on color theory for web designers. I’ve felt these might be useful tools, but when I recently tried using a few of them, it didn’t really do too much for me. I like my own (possibly offensive, I admit) color schemes too much.

Ilya

August 6, 2006

Pala vaihtoehtoista arkea

Vaihtoehtoisen arjen toinen lähetys oli videomuotoinen podcast Mark Pilgrimin tapaan. Nautin lähetyksestä suuresti, parjatusta kuvanlaadusta huolimatta. Onnittelut Villelle, lisää tällaista!

Ilya

Tiny apps everywhere

The Mac culture of tiny little apps is taking a little getting used to. I notice I’m a wary of installing anything I’m not sure I’ll be using a lot of — a throwback to my years of avoiding Windows-rot. I don’t listen to podcasts, but Neat Little Mac Apps looks good.

Ilya