Listening to: Forever - Minuit

Ari has snapped some great shots of Waitangi Park at dusk:

Waitangi Park

Originally uploaded by arriba.

Listening to: Lock the Doors Block the Roads - Minuit

This is a great little video of
the process used to create the recent
video iPod fake photo. I love it because the production values of both the fake
and the subsequent video are very very high.

src: TUAW

Listening to: Dance Anthems - BBC Radio 1

Mike Evangelist is has kicked off a series
of posts on boycotting HD disc products on
the basis that they are engineered to removed fair use and first sale rights:

This is important. I really want you to understand what’s going on with the video
industry’s push towards HD. Under pressure from Hollywood, they are engineering a
complete removal of the concept of fair use. They are setting up systems that will
completely control how, when and where you can use content that you buy. Even worse,
they can retroactively change the rules!

It will be well worth paying attention to.

Listening to: Some crunchy dance remix of ‘Westend Girls’

This morning I had some issue that I thought I might be able to solve by using Firefox
and all the ‘neat’ developer tools that are available. So I launched into getting
my app working on Firefox. Well it was pretty much a syntax issue that I could’ve
solved quickly if I had been thinking about things properly. So after futzing about
for 3 hours I have the following:

• More experience with Firefox (being OS centric I really only ever use IE or Safari)

• Knowledge of the fussiness that is javascript in Firefox

• An app that now works in Firefox

• and this is the stuff that might be useful to others:

If you’re using tinymce, scriptaculous and mochikit and you want it all to work in
Firefox make sure your includes are in the following order:

1. scriptaculous (prototype)

2. tinymce

3. scriptaculous

4. mochikit

5. your stuff

Listening to: I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor - Arctic Monkeys

As part of a plan to beef up my dev infrastructure at home I have installed Airport:

Airport
is in the house

>

Yet again another utterly painless Apple experience (ignoring the cashectomy). It
just worked.

Now I can control the music on my stereo using my cellphone. I could tell that the
missus was secretly impressed when the stereo faded back when a call came into my
cell.

UPDATE: Oh and then more complex things such as port mapping is also a breeze. Fantastic!

Listening to: Discopolis - Lifelike & Kris Menaca

Tinfoil
hat time:

On March 25, 2003, President Bush signed Executive
Order 13292, a hitherto little known document that grants the greatest
expansion of the power of the vice president in American history. The order gives
the vice president the same ability to classify intelligence as the president. By
controlling classification, the vice president can in effect control intelligence
and, through that, foreign policy.

Listening to: Talk (Thin White Duke Remix) - Coldplay

Before Christmas I was doing some Python work on my Nokia… passing data across the
Vodafone network and then sending it to my Mac via Bluetooth. It was then I discovered
that Vodafone down samples gifs and jpgs moving across their GPRS data network. I
kinda forgot about it until this morning. I had a very annoying experience of
trying to up sell some design work and all the work looked awful - a very bad place
to be if you’re pitching the importance of design work. The laptop (not mine) was
using a Vodafone data service… and all the images that I was using simply undermined
my arguments about the skill of the designer. Just as well my forceful charm came
to the fore

Listening to: True Skool - Coldcut feat. Roots Manuva

This gives
me a giddy feeling (in that ‘throw the horns and mosh at a Shihad concert’ kinda
way)… it’s so counter logical:

With the right set-up, the theory suggested, the computer would sometimes get
an answer out of the computer even though the program did not run. And now researchers
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original
design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works.

How cool is that!!!? Wait it gets even better:

This scheme could have an advantage over straightforward quantum computing. “A
non-running computer produces fewer errors,” says Hosten. That sentiment
should have technophobes nodding enthusiastically.

Who says the universe doesn’t have THE most wicked sense of humor…. it’s either
that or it is a Monty Python fan.

src: /.

UPDATE: This combined with laws of thermo-dynamics dictates that I will never clean
my room or my desk - sorry Andy.

Listening to: The air conditioners

Homeless people have become more common in NZ over the last 15 years especially as
the social welfare and mental health system got shot to hell in the late 80’s and
early 90’s. Having said that, there would be a total of about 20 visible vagrants
in Wellington central… so they are unusual enough to be recognised, in some cases
they are well known and in other cases almost dignitaries (*). Blanket Man is, currently, one
of Wellington’s most famous… it turns out there is even a wikipedia
page dedicated to him.

(*) There was one guy a few years back who lived in a nest in the green belt. He was
the most shy and retiring person I have ever come across - you could almost see his
bubble of social phobia as he walked down the street. By all accounts he was exceedingly
polite and a very very gentle person. In the winter of 2003 he was found dead in the
gutter. 300 people turned out for his funeral.

Listening to: Why (What’s Goin’ On?) - The Roots

PCMag.com has a set
of screenshots from Windows Vista Build 5308. It is looking very slick now.