Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Dismal Sanctuary of Asya Schween Wow, cool set of self-portraits! I'm Asya Schween. 22. Immersed in incarnadine-hued twilight of my mind. Alone. I read no poetry but mathematical manuscripts and the Holy Bible. I'm a good girl. I will perish. Ta-ta. She was interviewed by dpreview.com, a website devoted to digital photography... Larry Berman and Chris Maher, writers for Shutterbug magazine, first discovered the work of Asya Schween right here on our Nikon Talk forum. Asya's haunting, beautiful and inspiring self-portrature is the perfect example of how digital photography aides the rapid realization of your own photography skills. Asya's work stands as testimony that many who consider themselves amateur photographers have far more inside them. Asya is an exchange student from Russia doing postgraduate work at the University of Southern California. 10:53:20 PM

Roogle me this, blogman OK, so Roogle RSS Search Thingy® (I don't know the new name yet) is all the rage this week. I said it before, and I'll say it again: what I really want is an RSS feedback loop. I go to Roogle and sign up. It asks me for my RSS feed, as well as my OPLM feed. Then daily, it performs a bayesian filter on my weblog, then searches all the other weblogs, filters out all the feeds already in my blogroll, and returns the results in an RSS feed unique to me. As I write in my blog, I get continuous updates on new bloggers that may be writing about the same things as me. As new topics arise and old ones fade, the bayesian filter will change, as will the search results. 10:41:22 PM

Brand As Navigator StatMarket reports that direct navigation - typing a URL into a browser's address bar, or using a bookmark, is increasingly being used to access a website, at the expense of links and search engines. Direct navigation is used 64%, up from 53% a year ago. Links and search engines are being used 35%, up from 46%. I would have liked to see the breakdown between URL's and bookmarks but this article doesn't provide it. [The Trademark Blog] Confirming what we already knew? People are surfing less, now that the novelty has worn off. Interesting new sites get discovered/propogated by Word-of-blog. 10:29:37 PM

Server update My longtime readers know that I've been itching for some time now to move my weblog from Radio to something-Java on my own server box. Radio certainly has a nice set of features, but it feels like a CPU and net hog sometimes, and I don't like having to launch it anytime I launch NetNewsWire. I just want my weblog server up and running somewhere, out of my way... Now that we're moving (hey, we're homeowners now!), I feel like I'm taking one step forward, two steps back. I had to choose a different ISP (Earthlink over SBC), and want to wait until the static IP situation is solidified before changing the DNS. Apple finally released Java 1.4.1, so hopefully I can get a rock-solid release of IDEA soon. The new version looks incredible, and I wish my day job had such a great IDE. Now if I could just remember how to get it to debug webapps in Tomcat... I've also been looking more closely at Roller Weblogger and PersonalBlog. Roller doesn't support the MetaWeblog API (which supports titles, dammit!) and PersonalBlog doesn't have any XML-RPC interface. While I admire the efforts that are going into each, neither one has really blown my socks off. Ultimately, what I've concluded is that I don't want/need ANY web-based editing features built into the server, as I'd much rather use NetNewsWire/XML-RPC to edit from my desktop. So I'm inclined to take a few bits from PersonalBlog and the XML-RPC bits from Roller and create my own weblog server. Then again, bloxsom and blojsom is looking pretty elegent. Ah geez, I guess I'm still trying to sort it all out! 10:18:04 PM

Hello? Just added Deejee and Ye Olde Phart to my aggregator list. YOP was on there before the massive culling of 2002, wherein I brought my list from 30 to 3. In the build-up he seems to have gotten lost in the cracks. Welcome aboard! Glad to be here! 10:03:35 PM

Offspring from Frog Design Amazing array of concept designs called "Offspring" from Frog Design and Motorola for a new line of wearable devices that connect to each other via Bluetooth. Among them, a Wearable Digital Assistant that uses voice recognition instead of a numeric keypad and has storage for music and video files; the Wristable (pictured at right), a version of the wrist version of the Wearable Digital Assistant; and special eyeglasses with a built-in heads-up display, a digital camera, earbud headphones, and a microphone; a wearable mini-digital camera. Read [Gizmodo] I'm not sure which sci-fi show inspired me, but I was building wrist computers out of Legos when I was ten! Droooooool 9:58:11 PM

The SJ Merc interview with Marc Andreessen The SJ Merc interview with Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape) asks if he has a blog. "No," he said. "I have a day job. I don't have the time or ego need." People used to say stuff like that about email, believe it or not. [Scripting News] It sounds like Marc hasn't taken a good look at weblogs. Heck, his own company created RSS! 9:45:34 PM

Werblog: Why blogging isn't a fad Why blogging isn't a fad Arnold Kling offers one of the best explanations I've seen of the value of blogging as a distributed information filtering mechanism. "This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them."[via Werblog] I guess this item itself has high general value within the local domain of bloggers who blog about blogging. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] So, the question is, how many people need efficient information filters on a daily basis? Lawyers, journalists, marketers... who else? 9:43:48 PM

Blogging Goes Mainstream When It Hits CNN Blogging Goes Mainstream "'Just like the Internet was 10 years ago, blogging is popular with an underground culture that is doing it for the love and passion,' said Tony Perkins, who edited the recently folded Red Herring technology magazine and last month launched a business blog called Always On Network. 'Now there are people like me coming along and trying to figure out how to package it,' Perkins said. 'It's time to take it to the next level.'" [http://www.cnn.com/ ] This is a reprint of an Associated Press article from last week, but what's interesting is the poll on CNN's site asking if readers have ever used a blog. Assuming that bloggers aren't deliberately skewing the results in an attempt to get BigCos to stay away from blogs (like that could happen now), 55% of the more than 1300 people that answered the poll picked "No and I probably won't." That's probably accurate because if "using" means "working with," by the time they use a blog, it will be integrated into whatever software they are using. If "using" means reading a blog, they still won't know because to most folks it will just be a web site with short entries arranged chronologically. [The Shifted Librarian] 9:37:48 PM

The Rise and Fall of CE Software What a sad tale. They merged with a shell public company, so they could be listed on NASD. They tried to acquire technology, but failed to acquire talent, and they moved some of their products to Windows years after competitors had staked out the market. Now they’re just a has been with no where to go but down... But for now there's no happy ending to this tale. A year or two after its merger in 1990, CE drifted into a period of bad decisions. Revenues have been shrinking for years (1999 revenues were $3.8 million, down from 1995's $12.9 million), and the company has posted losses for all but two of the past seven years. Efforts to develop new products have failed. Two acquisitions turned out to be duds. Customers have drifted. Christian Gurney, the soft-spoken, 35-year-old chief of the holding company, acknowledges that the company has been dying. Perhaps CE's execs should have paid more attention to the name of the shell company they merged with, Anubis. As it turns out, Anubis was a fearsome figure in ancient Egypt. Half man and half jackal, it was the god who led the dead to judgment. 9:13:57 PM

SCOTUS Makes Millions Of Lawyers Very, Very Happy Plastic::Work::Health: The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that stress over asbestos-related illness is cause for damages. Cry havoc, and let loose the lawyers of personal injury... [Plastic] ...and the insurance companies writhed in pain. 10:55:11 AM

The Never Ending Escrow So, we were supposed to close on Friday, but one of the sellers left town and didn't finish some paper work. Then we were supposed to close yesterday, but the bank didn't "see" the wire transfer in time. Finally, this morning, we are officially home owners! 10:52:06 AM

Surfers paddle for peace in choppy waters... Surfers paddle for peace in choppy waters of bay / Protesters say orange alert barred them from access to waves at Fort Point [SFGate: Bay Area] We went to Baker Beach on Sunday, and stumbled onto a dozen surfers posing in front of their signs before heading off to the Golden Gate bridge. Funny! 10:04:11 AM