via Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com.

via Whitespace.

via Twitter vs. Why we can’t concentrate? | Swaroop C H – India, Technology, Life Skills.

Thanks to Sam D. for the tweet.

A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and both its technical staff and outside developers.

via Developer Evangelism – home of the Developer Evangelist Handbook:

Thanks for the pointer @mollydotcom

via The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real – Anil Dash.

We could just tick off Sprint and call it “Direct Connect”. It’s a lot like the PTT with a group receiving end.

via Bourne Into Oblivion – The Daily WTF.

My favorite shell commands

Nanoceria are also able to regenerate their antioxidant abilities. “Due to this catalytic property,” explains Seal, “repeated dosing with nanoceria may not be needed, as it is with certain antioxidant vitamins.”

via Nanoparticles Explored for Preventing Cell Damage – US News and World Report.

via Facebook | On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.

Let’s see. I’ll put these few words out there on the internets…cool, my friend just saw it. Not so cool, that creep in the next cubicle is making comments about it. Give it back! Give it back!

Oh noooooooo.

via flipping typical.

via The Energy Challenge – No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative ‘Passive Houses’ – Series – NYTimes.com.

Op-Ed Columnist – While Detroit Slept – NYTimes.com.

Write or Die : Dr Wicked’s Writing Lab.

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to show the results of the presidential election:

Election maps.

I get a lot of requests to add date-shifting support for iPhoto 08 to my iPhoto AppleScripts. But in most cases, the scripts would be completely unnecessary, iPhoto finally built this feature into the application. Here’s how to use it.

Date-shifting in iPhoto ‘08.

This is a nice and handy thing. I can finally get all of my “web-saved” images into a sensible spot.

The Pulse smartpen captures handwriting and simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing, so users never miss a word. Pulse is available in two models. Priced at $149, the 1GB model provides storage for over 100 hours of recorded audio. At $199, the 2GB model doubles the storage capacity and provides more flexibility for downloading future applications. In addition to the Pulse smartpen, consumers may also buy Livescribe dot paper and the latest accessories, such as the Premium Leather Case $24.95, 2-Pack of Journals $24.95, 4-Pack of College-Ruled Notebooks $19.95 or 5-Pack of Ink Cartridges $5.95. The Pulse smartpen, dot paper and accessories are also available for purchase at www.livescribe.com. Livescribe :: Press Center.

Metaphors for Presentations

Years before today’s slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. Then, in 1984, a software house developed a presentation package, “Presenter,” which was eventually acquired by Microsoft and turned into PowerPoint.

This history is revealing, for the metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Could any metaphor be worse? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching—explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism—are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.

Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mercials, which is better than encouraging children to smoke. Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher’s guides, and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

– Edward Tufte, October 16, 2003

This history is revealing, for the metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Could any metaphor be worse? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching—explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism—are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.

Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mercials, which is better than encouraging children to smoke. Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher’s guides, and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

– Edward Tufte, October 16, 2003

9. Keep an Eye on Activity Monitor There may be other things hogging your processor’s attention or sucking up RAM. How will you know about them? By using Apple’s Activity Monitor, which comes with OS X. Activity Monitor will tell you about CPU usage, RAM requirements, virtual memory usage, and whether a given application is a PowerPC or Intel (Universal) build. Check it occasionally to see if there are any red flags – or keep it running for a few days (with one of the useful Dock icons or floating windows enabled) to keep an eye on when things are spiking.

It’s a fine idea, but could be part of the problem.

I have been running Activity Monitor quite constantly since late January.

the underlying “pmtool” loses memory. a lot of memory. It starts off consuming just over 1MB of “real memory” (1.4MB).

After 18 hours that will be about 80MB of real memory. So if limited memory is the problem, and you keep it running for a few days, well…

What can you expect from an Electronic House Home of the Year grand prize winner? For starters, it has to be a great house—one whose occupants don’t like leaving and always look forward to returning. It must have innovative home technology.

Back a while ago I started to experience “loss of minimize” on my system (after update to 10.4.6). The Minimize button, keyboard shortcut, menu item – all disabled. Mostly only happened with Safari left running a long time. Sometimes (most) it would cause all the other applications to lose Minimize as well.

I switched to Firefox for a while. Decided to try and “fix” Safari. Spent a week finding a “culprit” and finally switched back to Safari full time.

Now comes 10.4.7 – back comes the death of Minimize – with a vengance.

I couldn’t remember any web thing that Firefox wouldn’t do, but I still don’t like the lack of a left-hand margin of sufficient size on the toolbars. It just doesn’t look great. But you know? It works! More things work better/differently than with Safari (read that WordPress editing, phpMyAdmin)

• Safari Bookmark Exporter
• Schubert PDF plugin
• Web Developer add-on
• Sage (RSS)

This comes after? I guess so.

PDF plugin required. Standard QuickTime rendering of PDF is not fun at all. Safari/Preview combination was pretty sweet. Usually I scan (with my eyes) the document in the browser, leaving full reading to Preview. A simple button press gets me the PDF in Preview where I can save/print/whatever.

Web Developer add-on – neat tool. First nugget is “Disable Javascript”. I read online news about squash (the sport). I post links with occasional comment on my blog. I use WordPress bookmarklets to make things easy. Some sites don’t want this to be. You can “break” the ability to highlight/copy text on a web page via Javascript. sigh. Using Safari I would actually do a View Source, copy the piece of text I wanted, then continued to WordPress. Now all I have to do is do 1 menu selection to turn off Javascript, highlight text, press-it, turn on Javascript. The first part is now trivial, just need to remember to turn it back on.

Haystack powers allyoucanupload and will soon power all of Webshots (Webshots is a photo sharing community with 19,000,000 members who have uploaded over 375,000,000 photos).  Allyoucanupload is an image hosting service that we built to run alongside Webshots.

by way of Scripting News

I went to look at both allyoucanupload and Webshots.

So how far does my picture actually travel?

Click here to actually see some detail ;-)

When would I decide to “throw” my picture into the cloud? The only reference that I have is the URL I get back. I already “lost” a couple of GIF files into the object store.

Interesting.

Central Desktop:

What is it?

Central Desktop: Easy to use  collaboration software.  It can be used it to create custom "extranet" workspaces. It includes tools to manage software deployments, assign tasks, track progress against milestones, document versioning, and more. It just does a whole bunch of stuff pretty darn well.

Reviewed by Doug Mitchell

Looks interesting, wonder if this will help Face??

(Via WorkHappy.net: killer resources for entrepreneurs.)

(Via Sam’s random musings.)

Yes, Sam. This might be exactly what would make a good start. Lots of questions about “getting the data back out”, and about the utility for the novice.

At $99/month it might be easily justified as a “funding a project” cost and run a 6 month experiment.

Some of us “abuse” our tools.

I just recently created a single frame movie (using iMovie) that has an image in it.

I have copied this movie into iTunes any number of times.

What I do is add metadata that helps me track and find my home-brewed DVD recordings. Each copy of the movie gets the metadata for the movie(s) contained on my DVD.

I have Smart Playlists (in a playlist folder) that allow me to track and catalog my movies.

Yes, my simple list that might be 2K bytes of information has grown (4KB per movie) but what the heck, that’s only 1MB for tracking 250 movies. A small price to pay for the convenience.

If I was really insistent about it I could track down an image for the film (IMDb?) and use that as the single frame.

Import image into iPhoto, create a “slideshow” movie, put the movie into iTunes. That takes about 400K, so it isn’t really an option.

Now if iMovie had some Automator controls…or was AppleScriptable ;-)

Needless to say, the Apple Web isn’t going to put up with that kind of abuse. One of the more friendly responses was from Les Posen, who actually took the time to answer each of Winer’s somewhat rhetorical questions about iTunes. The fact that Posen’s post is so long should alarm people. I think it proves that Winer has a point.

Some would suggest that the terseness of my response to Dave’s questions is a bad thing (see The iPod is too fancy for its own good post on my blog). Length of a response shouldn’t alarm people, except that they might actually have to read something. Here’s a terse answer.

• You can tell if a “tune” is on the iPod by looking in the iTunes. The iPod is listed in the Source panel. Highlight the iPod and the list of tunes shows up on the right. You can tell if a tune is on your computer by looking in the “Library”.
• If you have copied a tune to the iPod you have 2 copies. One on the computer, one on the iPod.
• If you do a “Get Info” on a tune in the Library you are shown where the corresponding file is. You can also use the menu command “Show Song File” to open a Finder window at the location of the file. When tunes are on the iPod the “Show Song File” is disabled, and a “Get Info” does not show the location of the file.
• To delete – highlight the tune and use the delete key, or the menu option “Clear”.

Turns out that the iTunes help covers most of the issues raised. Typing in simple questions in the help system’s “Ask a question” box locates answers quickly, within 1 or 2 entries by rank.