its whats inside that counts…
A fantastic image of an apple powerbook taken using an x-ray scanner…
Monthly Archive for May, 2005
a reasonably painless switch to a new server has just been completed. More space, more bandwidth and better stats…w00t!
Also best of all…subdomains! Meaning this page can now be accessed by blog.edwilde.com…
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Found a fascinating article by non-other than Franz Zappa, written in 1983 it is giving a heads-up to the music industry that if they continue in their misguided ways that doom will befall them. Which is kinda what is happing now…
The bulk of the promotional effort at every record company today is expended on "NEW MATERIAL" . . . the latest and the greatest of whatever the cocaine-tweezed A&R Brass has decided to inflict on everybody. More often than not, these 'aesthetic decisions' result in mountains of useless vinyl/cardboard artifacts which cannot be sold at any price, and are therefore returned for disposal and recycling. These mistakes are expensive.
He goes on to suggest a new form of digital distribution of music, veeery simalar to the iTunes music store's business model except charging monthly for music based on genre. He also mentions the Long Tail concept of media demand (although obviously not by name).
The other article I must mention is one based on a simalar tack, just generally talking about the demise of existing mass-media corporations in favour of internet content, and the mistakes that they are making right now which is sealing their future.
Mmmm…cultural revolution in progress…
A Proposal…by Frank Zappa Here
5 Ways The Media Commits Suicide Here
This is pretty accurate if you ask me, although I dont believe it is the 'new' digital divide, it is just another digital divide. There are still people who are stuck in the first iteration…bless em.
Try to imagine doing your work today without email. It's inconceivable. I think the tools of the digerati are going to be just as essential in just a moment or two. You can wait until Microsoft issues them all as a dumbed down package, but if you do, you'll not only miss the texture and understanding that comes from learning as you go, but you'll always be trying to catch up.
This concept is from Seth Godin, one of the digirati/a-list bloggers, (as is Doc Searls incase you were wondering)
A nice collection of images of flowers taken with a x-ray machine. There are plenty here, the artist has been doing this for sometime it would seem.
Just wish they were a little (a lot) bigger…
The best mac case mod ever!
Although I am guessing the machine doesnt actually work…
Some cool robot sculptures made out of everyday things. Give it another decade or so and these guys will move, interact and probably attempt to take over the world 
They also kinda remind me of the Automator robot…
This is what I spent most of yesterday doing…a simple widget which performs a search on my favourite engine.
Much like the firefox plugin it was the graphics which took the time, rather than working out how to get it to work. In the outset it was supposed to just be a simple search box with logo and no frills, but i guess i got carried away and simply had to add something to allow the user to flip it over like a proper widget.
For anyone interested in creating them, they are really simple (although the following paragraph might not be).
The base code is done using xhtml and css to design a layout, this uses javascript for functionality coupled with some dashboard specific functions and librarys. The graphics are simply 24-bit png's and you need one for the front and one for the back…it really is very simple, especially once you find that apple give you most of the code for flipping etc. Then you chuck in a couple of property lists (equivelent of ini's for PC) and an icon image, rename the directory so it has an extension of .wdgt and bobs-your-uncle. You can also referance unix commands, shell scripts and applescript with a widget too…but I didnt really need to head into that jungle for this.
The only really complex bit was making the graphics look ok when surrounded by slick apple-made widgets…oh yeah, and debugging the javascript to make it flip. I later found the problem was in the css…doh!
Download the Widget (.zip, 37kb)
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Well, every other blogger is rapidly installing the new OSX and blogging about it, so I thought I would do the same?nothing like conformity is there? Just for those non-geeky or Windows fanatics who really cant understand what the fuss is about, I couldn?t either when I when I was a PC-only person, the OSX tiger upgrade is kinda the reverse of Windows SP2 downgrade. Instead of breaking a bunch of stuff and removing functionality and compatibility with their own applications, apple chose to actually improve their system…and did it pretty well.
Install was a little worrying (since my original panther disks are over 100miles away) especially when it locked up on the first boot, then hung for a few minutes on the second. I am guessing now, since it is working fine that this was spotlight doing the rounds. Spotlight is a native search which is hardcoded into the os and filesystem, rather than hunting through your disk file by file every time you want to find something, it keeps a metadata-base which allows for far faster searching. For example, I have 1,2013 files which contain the characters ?and?…it listed them in just under 20 seconds. I think this was sort of what windows was aiming at when they put disk indexing into ntfs volumes, except like most windows ideas, it didn?t really work.
Dashboard is great fun, and the widgets are painfully easy to make, made my first one on the same day I installed the os…this does lead me to believe that there are going to be a plethora of superb widget ideas by this time next year, at the moment they are really just going through the standard ideas which konfabulator has had for a while. I do have some ideas for widgets I would like to make in the future, although for the most part they are simply to make my life easier, rather than be useful to others…but who knows…
Haven?t played with automator yet (a kind of macro-maker for os/program actions), although I have heard it is pretty powerful. I expect my first one will be something to take this text out of word and plug it on the blog, cant imagine that would be terribly difficult…
I do think that apple has been a little cynical is generally replacing popular applications with in-built ones. konfabulator is the obvious one, dashboard completely blows it out of the water in terms of speed, as well as ease of creating widgets. Spotlight really seems to replace Quicksilver, especially since it took it?s keyboard shortcut too. I am still not sure whether I prefer quicksilver for finding applications though, it is a little faster than spotlight for this, as spotlight looks for everything.
I also have some peeves with tiger, generally most people love it and I haven?t really seen many negative comments about it. Well…I am gonna be negative for a while…first, and most irritating, every time I switch to the mac using the kvm switch a little wizard pops up asking me to identify my keyboard, this is horribly windows-esq. panther seemed to recognise it fine…the new iSync util is bugging too, it now demands that I install an application on my phone to sync with it, and the application is HUGE (in phone terms) and is now the biggest app on there, 4 times bigger than the one which controls winamp and all it does is allow for functionality which I already had. The Wi-Fi seems more unstable than before, after sleeping it sometimes cant find my adhoc network. Actually I cant really think of any other significant peevs, other than the fact that everything is slightly slower and I seem to be able to crash firefox much more easily than before…I am putting both of those down to my lazy upgrade installation, rather than a prim and proper format install.
All in all, I would say that tiger does pretty much everything that a paid-for operating system upgrade should do. It adds enough features to put a bit of a thrill into using it, as well as lays the groundwork for some very innovative ideas and ways of working.
Imagine if windows was this exciting…