Watch this video to see the state of the art in putting nonexistent objects into photographs. When this becomes popular, we won’t be able to trust our eyes any more. (Via Cmdr Taco on Google Plus.)
I want this software
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Author Archives: luke
I’m a Bean Burrito Kinda Guy
In the movie “The Blind Side,” Mrs. Touhy objects to the word when Mr. Touhy remarks that the quesadilla saved their “asses.” The exchange might overshadow the salient point, which is that Taco Bell franchisees rejoiced about the sales that the mighty quesadilla would generate for them.
Well, maybe they’ve found the next one:
Taco Bell is testing a new taco featuring a shell made from nacho cheese-flavored Doritos, a product that is quickly becoming a media star as the chain’s parent company hints of plans to “reinvent the taco†next year.
I think that sounds terrible. But then, I’ve always been a Bean Burrito kind of guy.
Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
This was my first computer:
The 512 kB “Fat Mac.” With an ImageWriter, Microsoft Word and Multiplan (the predecessor of Excel), and MacPascal, it set me back about $2,500. That was 1985 money, so it would be somewhere around $5,000 today.)
I was living in Albuquerque and my roommate, who drank deep of the Kool-ade, had been so affected by Ridley Scott’s 1984 “Big Brother” commercial that he ran out and bought one of the original 128 kB Macs. (If I recall, he bought some Apple stock too. I wish I’d done that when I bought my second Mac, an iBook, in 2003.)
Anyway, a couple of years later, I was working at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and Steve Jobs wasn’t working at Apple any more. He came to Murray Hill to give a presentation of the NeXT computer. I didn’t work at Murray Hill — that was the real Bell Labs, where they got Nobel Prizes in Astrophysics and worked on slug brains. I just worked for AT&T’s R&D unit. But I got to see the presentation way down in South Jersey via the magic of teleconferencing.
By today’s standards, NeXT mail wasn’t all that hot: it was basically email with MIME attachments. But I don’t think he was trying to sell Unix workstations to Bell Labs. (Who would be stupid enough to give up a 3B2 with a BLT running Plan 9 for a mere NeXT box? Ahem. Although, to this day, I’m not personally convinced that email improved when it grew to include anything beyond ASCII text.)
What Steve was doing, I think, was giving AT&T some (desperately-needed) business advice. I admire his chutzpah: a kid in his 30’s, who’d just been sacked by his board, telling AT&T how to do business. But that’s what he was doing.
He was telling them that AT&T Mail was a disaster, particularly compared to what he was selling. But more than that, he was telling them to stick to their core competency. Instead of chasing him (or ignoring him and Inventing-It-Here, as Bell Labs was, ahem, wont to do), he said that AT&T should sell him connectivity. Just give him pipes to move his bits around, that’s what he wanted.
People talk about Steve’s “reality distortion field.” But that day, nobody was buying what he was selling.
That’s a hard message to sell to companies like AT&T. There’s some weird virus that infects marketing people at telecoms that makes them think it’s possible to add value to every bit that passes through their network. Indeed, that it’s not only possible, but their company is also capable of doing it!
Yes, yes, it’s a preposterous notion, but nevertheless, telecom marketers are all infected with it. Twenty-five years later, they still have it. They just can’t stand the idea of simply doing their core business well. They’re terrified of becoming a commodity.
Steve Jobs wasn’t worried about becoming commoditized. None of the businesses he built into category killers are commodities. Pixar is head and shoulders above everyone else in the business. The Mac stands out and commands a price premium in a world of commodity computers. Ditto the iPod, the iPhone, and lately the iPad.
Business is infected with the opposite approach. One of my managers at Bell Labs told me to quit improving a piece of software this way: “You’re polishing a turd.” Steve Jobs knew that you couldn’t make a great company by shipping turds, so he kept polishing products until there wasn’t anything turdlike about them.
Good for him. It will be interesting to see if anyone learns the lesson.
MacPorts tip
I started getting messages when I tried to update my MacPorts tools. I can’t say when it started, because I don’t do it very often. (Like maybe once a month. Bad me.) But it would bomb out, telling me
Error: checksum (md5/sha1/rmd160) mismatch for port.
Then it sent me down a wrong path, suggesting it was because my ISP’s DNS was serving ads or something. But it turns out the why isn’t important, because the what to do about it was right there in the FAQ:
$ sudo port selfupdate
$ sudo port clean --dist {portname}
$ sudo port install {portname}
All I had to do was clean out the bad portfile and try again.
Diff Tools
My favorite diff tool is FileMerge, one of Apple’s developer tools, which can be accessed from the command line as opendiff.
But from the command line, my (next most) favorite diff tool is colordiff. It’s called that because it color-codes the output when it’s used interactively, making it IMHO easier to see what’s changed. Actually, colordiff is just a wrapper around the real diff tool.
Another nice tool is dwdiff, which is compares two documents and highlights the different words rather than the different lines. So does wdiff.
(Back to my list of Unixy tools for the Mac.)
Johnny Quest
Lileks was right. This is pretty impressive: a shot-for-shot recreation of the opening credits for the old Johnny Quest animated TV series.
Intelligence and Disease
Why are some places more blessed with smart people? (Yes, I assume that more smarter people is better for a society, and no, I won’t attempt to convince you.) Some recent studies suggest that disease may be the reason for uneven distribution of intelligence:
In our 2010 study, we not only found a very strong relationship between levels of infectious disease and IQ, but controlling for the effects of education, national wealth, temperature, and distance from sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease emerged as the best predictor of the bunch. A recent study by Christopher Hassall and Thomas Sherratt repeated our analysis using more sophisticated statistical methods, and concluded that infectious disease may be the only really important predictor of average national IQ.
The researchers wondered if, since infant humans spend as much as 90 percent of their calories building and growing their brains, fighting disease detracts from that important work.
If this finding is correct, then the uneven distribution of intelligence may be a developmental matter rather than genetics or uncontrollable environmental factors like climate.
This Makes Our Government Look Responsible
If you have problems with our government, as I do, and its misguided (“bone-headed”) mismanagement of the economy, remember it could be worse. You could live in Europe:
The European Agriculture Committee approved 2 million euros (£1.7 million) for research into homeopathic medicines or ‘phytotherapy’ for farm animals.
Try topping that, Washington!
Nice Desk
I’m still holding out for an Anthrocart Elevate Wrap for my desk, but after I get it, I need to add a cone-of-silence bubble like the ones seen here:
(Via Guy Kawasaki.)
Smart Playlists Just Got Dumber
I mentioned recently how handy it can be to create complex “Smart Playlists” in iTunes. Suppose you want to make a smart play list like this one:
It says the songs in this new playlist have to be “My Non Dogs.” (My Non-dogs is another playlist that includes songs that are either unrated or rated 3 stars or above.) But besides not being dogs, this playlist’s songs also need to be performed either by David Byrne or by the Talking Heads. In other words, iTunes gives us a friendly way to construct a query using boolean algebra.
Prior to iTunes 10.4, that was easy enough. There were little buttons at the end of the pane. A ‘-‘ button deletes the rule; a ‘+’ button adds a new rule; a ‘…’ button makes a rule with multiple conditions, as above:
The problem is that iTunes 10.4 got rid of the ‘…’ buttons:
Smart playlists can still use boolean algebra: all my old lists still work. The only problem is trying to make a new one. How do you push a button that’s not there?
The answer is to hold down the option key. Then the ‘+’ buttons become ‘…’ buttons:
I should point out that taking a screenshot is a lot more difficult when you’re holding the option key. The only way I could figure out to do it was by doing a “Timed Screen Grab” using the Grab utility:
