Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Slashdotters encourage you to slashdot DoubleClick’s The Decade in Online Advertising 1994–2004.

Google map of the day: Area 51

Adobe is looking to buy Macromedia, prompting some Slashdot speculation about regulation and whether Flash will now run as slow as the Acrobat plugin does.

Windows has been lying low for a while now, lulling me into a false sense of security. But while I was away from the PC overnight, it decided it really needed the latest update. So it downloaded it and rebooted on its own. Any work I was doing yesterday is now lost.

I don’t remember what I had open; at least I know I wasn’t in the middle of the Great American Novel.

Tiger is coming! The official release date is April 29th. I’m looking forward to Dashboard and Safari RSS. (I love NetNewsWireLite as much as the next machead, but I just don’t have time for a separate RSS application.) I’m sure I’ll enjoy all 200 new features.

iPod link of the Day: iPod icons

GeekPress linked this handy browser security check. I ran it at work (the Place of the Evil OS) and discovered that my Java plugin for Firefox was insecure and needed an upgrade.

I was surprised. I guess I assumed that since Firefox was open-source, it would behave like Safari and keep itself up to date on security issues along with the OS. After all, Java bugs me every other day to download its latest updates. (I have two versions of the SDK and five or six of the runtime environment for work.) You’d think it could update its own plugin while it was at it.

No such luck. I checked out some Firefox plugin advice, but there was no faq entry for “I already updated Java but the plugin won’t update.” I tried updating Firefox to 1.o.2, but still the plugin remained stuck in the Java Stone Age. In the end, I deleted all the Java-related bits from the Mozilla plugins directory and reinstalled the runtime environment yet again, and it finally took.

I was glad to come home to my mac.

Hello Kitty link of the day: a Hello Kitty Xbox

GeekPress linked this WSJ opinion piece on filesharing. Conundrum #3 is the eternal question: “How is it that millions of Americans who wouldn’t cross the street against a red light will sleep like lambs after downloading onto their computers a Library of Alexandria’s worth of music or movies–for free”?

The simple answer is that information wants to be free. It’s not easy to foist a new definition of property on people after five thousand years of civilization in which all property has been physical and nearly all information free. Information might settle for being cheap (e.g., 99 cents at the iTunes Store), but I don’t think the information-pushing corporations have much a chance against piracy as long as they’re selling $100 DVD sets and eBooks that cost more than a paper book.

This blog entry should not be interpreted as an admission of guilt.

Birthday of the day: Apple is 29 today, and Gmail is 1.

Apparently, the WordPress guys have been spamming Google, using their (formerly) sky-high page rank and hidden links to raise shady ad revenues. Google Is Not Amused, so you’ll no longer find search results like this one.

Some WP supporters object to calling it spam, but this is disingenuous. “Google bombing” and the like are frequently referred to as search engine spamming; if you don’t want to be called a spammer you shouldn’t behave like one.

Lego link of the day: Han Solo in Carbonite (thanks to GeekPress)

I followed an ad from Daring Fireball to Rogue Amoeba, because the ad highlighted itself when I moused over it and I liked the effect enough to read it. Of the Roguish products, the one I found most interesting was Audio Hijack. I think I may have some freeware on my mac that does the same thing (audio recording of, say, iTunes radio broadcasts), but AH looks like a nice, cheap alternative.

Another interesting Rogue of the Day is Bansky, who put up his own art in four New York museums. I especially like his motto: “just because we don’t care, doesn’t mean we don’t understand.” Thanks once again to GeekPress for the link.

w00kie at flickr has pictures up of desktop images that simulate transparent screens. Here’s the slideshow version.

Management status report of the day: back from the dustbowl and ready to blog!

In the course of a cautionary tale of font caches, John Gruber calls the Mac OS X spinning beachball a “Spinning Pizza of Death.”

In rumor news, crazy people expect a two-button mouse, though even the folks at Slashdot could tell you that won’t play in Peoria.

In iPod Shuffle news, see a crazy man put a shuffle inside his headphones to create … Shufflephones!