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Tingly Cheese

We originally bought this English blue cheese on the recommendation of a Whole Paycheck cheese counter staffer. We were looking for a nice blue to melt over a home-cooked filet mignon. Turns out this is also a great nibbling cheese, but after leaving it in the fridge for three weeks, eating it made my tongue numb, like when you go to the dentist. I hope that's not bad.

Technorati Tags: Cheese

Less Than 24 Hours

The Archive turned around the video review in 9 hours. On a Saturday no less. Well done!

What they did with the voice for the compressed versions (I think the sample rate was changed accidentally) is hilarious!

Technorati Tags: Bouncy Ball, Kearny Street, North Beach, San Francisco, Sony Commercial

Video via The Archive

"Your file has been sent to the Internet Archive for free hosting. After it's approved by the Archive curator (usually within 24 hours), you will be able to download your file from the URL: http://www.archive.org/details/BouncyBall."

Now we're talking.

Technorati Tags: The Internet Archive

San Francisco Bouncy Balls Video

Here's the video we took of the bouncy balls.

Technorati Tags: Bouncy Ball, Kearny Street, North Beach, San Francisco, Sony Commercial

Hybrids in the Carpool Lane!

Freakishly cool.

Technorati Tags: California, Hybrid Cars

Google Video Review Process Doesn't Scale

Here I was hoping for a response within a day or so. This thread indicates that most people are waiting around a week and the "Google Video Advisor" admonishes that it may be up to several weeks...I guess my "news" video won't really be news by then, will it :-( ? Why bother having a "news" category?

I guess I'll post a link when their highnesses get around to blessing my poor video.

Technorati Tags: Search Engines, Google

Google Video Client = Videolan Client--?

Since I happen to have a video of one of those bouncy ball sessions in San Francisco (there were several of them apparently), I decided to give Google Video a try. The upload went really well and I was quite pleased at how straightforward and Googly the whole experience was.

Cue foolishness. So, now I'm waiting for someone to editorially review my video before it can be viewed. Even after I OK'd all the legalese twice. And I have no idea when it's going to be done. That sucks. Flickr doesn't make you wait. Surely, they have editorial guidelines, too? I know we had editorial guidelines at Zeal. We just found a way to make it work without having to queue the thing through a small group of people. Oh wait, so did Craigslist, the Wikipedia, TypePad, DMOZ, etc. What happened to the Craigslist/Wiki lesson "Just get out of the way"?

Foolishness, part 2. In the meantime I thought I'd go ahead and watch some videos to see how that part works. How many video plugins does the world need? I already have Quicktime, Real, and Windows Media plugins. I also have DivX on some machines. Now, a Google one, too? OK, so I'll download it just so I can see the damn videos of the kids calling themselves Jackass Jr - Extreme Series. While I get ready to do this, I muse over what constitutes copyright violation to Google. I guess Jackass Jr is waaaay too different than the Jackass series on MTV.

Click "download the client". "Downloading GoogleVideoViewer1.0_win.exe". Um, I'm on a Macintosh, couldn't you tell? Ah! "get the source"...cool, I'll help out by porting the damn thing to Mac OS X. Wait a minute. This is just a patch to VLC 0.8.2 client from the VideoLAN people - they already have a Mac client. What's this patch? All they did is (a) change the name everywhere to Google, (b) neuter the damn thing by removing support for most mimetypes, and (c) not port it to the Mac. To be fair, it looks like there's one bugfix for a mouse hovering problem in there. Anyway, so if I want to support other mimetypes, I can download and install this again as VLC? This isn't what I've come to expect from Google. In fact, this just looks like 37k worth of diff written to market the Google brand :-(.

At the end of the day, I'll bet just applying this line "+ "application/x-google-vlc-plugin::Google VLC plugin;" and this line "+ VALUE "MIMEType", "application/x-google-vlc-plugin\0" to the right places probably gets you most of the way there.

Update: I am about 75% of the way done with a DarwinPorts port of the VLC code. You can be sure that I'll be including a "+google" variant that applies the above-mentioned patch :-).

Technorati Tags: Google

Why I Love Darwinports

The people on the mailing lists are friendly. The project is totally open. There is a lot of development momentum. There are many users. It has the largest number of ported packages for on-Mac distributions. Apple employees contribute. It has an interesting dependencies model. And it looks like it'll be around for a while based on the O'Reilly book telltale.

That being said, 37 bugs showed up in the DarwinPorts bugzilla queue since I looked yesterday and none of the bugs of the previous day changed state. I've personally been trying to help out by creating and/or maintaining modules that were of use to myself, Splunk, or other folks, but I think the DP folks can always use more help. If you've got Mac chops and a little spare time, cruise over and lend a hand.

FWIW, I'm currently maintaining these ports and may pick up a few more if I notice any major abandoned packages:

• xmlwrapp - submitted but not yet committed.
• gsoap
• netxx
• log4cpp
• spread
• py-spreadmodule

Schwarzschild Radius?

I just heard about Looksmart's results from a friend who still had some tender in the pot. Suffice to say, he was not a happy camper, saying "I have never heard the words 'stunned' used so many times in one conference call". I haven't listened to it yet, but hope the folks still there haven't been too badly affected.

Seeing these results and noting Bill Lonerghan's departure, I wonder whether today's consumer-facing search industry mandates a minimum size to compete? With the aggressive recruiting and ultra high spend from the super-successful companies out there, the bar has been raised very high for newcomers. And for those of you who've followed LS for a while, you know that Looksmart isn't exactly a johnny-come-lately, having had a web scale search engine for a few years.

Here's hoping that the team can turn the company around and preserve great products like Furl, Wisenut, FindArticles, Grub, and Zeal. I guess we'll find out whether or not the Schwarzschild radius was reached or not soon enough...

Things I wish Mac OS X did

1. iMail should allow you to create hyperlinks without a silly cut-n-paste. Or at least create a hotkey for that menu item.
2. iMail2: Partially type in the name of someone in your address book in the recipients list of an email draft. Now try to backspace over it.
3. iMail3: Why no hotkey to bring up the message viewer. People want to do that with some frequency.
4. iCal should let you publish your calendar to more than one place.
5. iTunes should allow you to select "filename" as a column to show.
6. The iTunes UI for "stop showing duplicate songs" is lame. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that down at the bottom of the screen was a button that looked like decoration that would allow me to regain control of my playlists.
7. Columns in the Finder's "choose file" dialog should auto-size by default.
8. Why can't I tab between buttons in dialog boxes? I'm constantly going for the mouse.
9. Keynote doesn't let you easily advance a page while in edit mode. Like you'd never want to do that?