Listening to: Heart - Pet Shop Boys

Tagging
is in… and Flickr does it as well as anyone…
here is an example - my photos:

 3 
 2005 
 andy 
 art 
 billandted 
 chalk 
 chinesenewyear 
 chinesenewyearparade 
 cubast 
 culturejamming 
 dragon 
 excellent 
 feb 
 fog 
 free 
 graffiti 
 gumivorelove 
 jeffsoto 
 jones 
 mephisto 
 mephistojones 
 morning 
 mumia 
 newzealand 
 regmombassa 
 rexroyale 
 sambroad 
 satyr 
 stencil 
 tag 
 trashe 
 wellington 
 wellingtonart 
 wellingtonstreetart 
 whatsnew 

Actually I need to thank Glutnix for
his work on my graffiti photos… He categorised them all.

Now I was going to fix the little CSS issue above… but it looks cool

Listening to: New York City Boy - Pet Shop Boys

NanoChromics
Display: More ePaper You Can’t Buy

Ntera is at DEMO this week with their contribution to the growing line of digital
paper prototypes. The NanoChromics Display (NCD) brings to the house a patented nanotechnology
process (meaning that’s all we really know about it) and a dose of titanium oxide,
the chemical what makes paper white.

X-Space
R/C UFO

First shown at the Nuremberg Toy Exhibition in Germany, this X-Space UFO was reportedly
first designed by two kids. Gyroscopes keep to level, while four high-speed electric
motors allow it to navigate with a moderately high degree of precision. The framework
is carbon fiber, which is good—these sort of things often suffer from forced
landings in the farthest reaches of the backyard.

Wearable
Warnings Electro-shock Coat

London designer Phil Worthington’s prototype coat is covered in strips of fur
that become electro-statically charged when the wearer is uncomfortable. The charged
fur stands on end, sending the universal “back off” message that any one who’s ever
tried bathing a cat should be familiar with. If the personal space invader persists,
the fur begins to crackle with energy and finally shoot a hundred thousand volts through
them if they actually touch the coat.

I sooooooooo need that jacket.

Listening to: Domino Dancing - Pet Shop Boys

Analyst:
Apple and Sony, best friends forever?

Yeah well, my best friend who doesn’t know it yet Cringely and
I have been raving about
this for weeks now, but some Merrill Lynch analyst has said
it now so maybe it will take off: Steven Milunovich has the peculiar
notion that Apple and Sony could be working together on an “iTunes-like iMovies
Store.” Yeah, what he said.

Freeware
February: SSH Tunnel Manager (more for my own notes)

If you think your email, chat or browser traffic is safe from prying eyes when
you’re on a public wi-fi network, think again. Your usernames, passwords, email
messages - even chat transcripts - are freely available to anyone who knows how to
intercept them (and believe me, it’s not all that difficult), in real time and
in clear, unscrambled text. Scary, eh? What’s scarier is that people who SHOULD
know better, are leaving themselves vulnerable every day.

Listening to:  Some funk-a-lious noise or other

Day 92 is now
online.

Listening to: For Your Own Good - Pet Shop Boys

F**king awesome! We’re getting a stand-alone-will-work-on-XP
version of IE7.

UPDATE:

• Gates
  Highlights Progress on Security, Outlines Next Steps for Continued Innovation (In
  the words of His Billness)

• Microsoft
  Caves to IE Critics (Microsoft Watch)

• Internet Explorer 7 Beta This
  Summer (OSNews)

• Internet Explorer
  7 beta due out this summer (ArsTechnica)

Listening to:  The Drone of Drones

Found this on BBC World:

Irish actor Farrell will play Sonny Crockett, the part played by Don Johnson in
the police drama.

Foxx - nominated for an Oscar for his role in Ray - is to fill the role of Ricardo
Tubbs, Crockett’s sidekick.

The project is being written and directed by Michael Mann…

Given that Mann was heavily involved in the original MV… it might just be a tolerable
movie (disclaimer: I am a Mann fan)

Listening to: Lucky - Fly My Pretties

Found on BoingBoing:

Listening to: We Can Make A Life - Fly My Pretties

Six
Degrees of a User

How many people are between you and real users? Each person in the middle is another
point-of-communication-failure, and by the time the message gets back to the real
engineers, god only knows what’s happened to it.

We had a phone call with Tim O’Reilly a couple days ago about some communication
problems of our own, and his theory was that we were all suffering from “The Telephone
Game”, where each iteration of the message lost information. Entropy sucks.

How
to break through…

Inspired by Hugh at gapingvoid,
we made this hierarchy to talk about with our other authors. But it applies to any
product or service today. And the today part is important, because in the past, a
big enough marketing/ad budget could win market share, even if your product was just
like everyone else’s.

Even the biggest ad budgets can’t save you today.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that if what you make is totally f’n amazing, you won’t need
to advertise. The good folks on the net will take care of that for you, assuming
you’re keeping up the conversation.

Spiral
learning

Spirals show up everywhere from fractals to nautilus
shells. Software developers know the spiral as iterative
development–a model in stark (positive) contrast to the old linear waterfall
model.

One huge problem with the waterfall model is that in its traditional form, it’s
not based in reality. It assumes that it’s entirely possible for each stage to be
done perfectly (and permanently) and then thrown over the fence (or cubicle wall)
to the next group in the system. Nice theory, that. The guys doing the requirements
finish their job and then, hey, they might as well all go on vacation. Their work
is done. And so on down the line until the product is delivered to the users. The
name itself (waterfall) describes the key limiting characteristic of the waterfall
model–it’s one way only. Water doesn’t go back up.

Listening to:  Fly My Pretties - Fly My Pretties

Glee! The Economist now has RSS feeds! (Src: Infectious
Greed)

Listening to: Fly My Pretties - Fly My Pretties

Nokia has released a series
of new phones… finally a good range of mega-pixel cameras!

• Nokia
  6680 Official (Gizmodo)

• Nokia
  6681 and Nokia 6682 (Gizmodo)

Looks like I could be retiring my 6600 in the next few months.