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.

There’s nothing like GeekPress for news of the weird, such as: Scientists Discover the Secret of Popcorn’s Popability.

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.

Here’s a pretty picture I came across through Slashdot that shows just how much genetic material we retain from the Mother of all Mammals, our latest common ancestor. This blog entry at Corante discusses the possibility of resurrecting the Shrew Eve.

Backpedal of the day: BBC Apologizes to Who Star - it sounds like a whitewash to me.

I came, I saw, I wasn’t even squicked. The most disturbing part of “Sin City” for me was its failure to disturb. The violence against eyeballs was minimal, the maimings numbing, and the many messy castrations more calculated to disturb the male half of the audience than yours truly. I’ve seen both volumes of Kill Bill and I found them more squicking, probably because I actually cared about the characters. With “Sin City” I spent most of the movie wondering who was who (except for the cool traitor, who had character to spare).

I did enjoy the comic-noir language and black-and-white atmosphere, and I thought the vignettes were good individually. But I spent too much mental time trying to figure out how each one was connected to the last, considering that the answer turned out to be “very loosely.” In the end I didn’t feel that the movie came together, either emotionally or plot-wise.

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.

Veronica, I, and an undisclosed third party went to CraftBoston this weekend. I got a cool Hilary Law bag and saw some other neat stuff. Here are the few web links I managed to collect:

• Hilary Law Textile Design
• Iron Works of Art
• Yellow House Studio