Technology

I just ran across my first phishing email referring to Amazon.com! Usually they’re “from” Ebay, PayPal, or MySpace. Anyone who knows me knows I’m far more likely to be interested in an email from Amazon. Tricky…uh…phishermen? :)

For some reason, the question of age and web innovation has popped up again. It can be summed up like this: Are people over the age of 30 likely to create anything really new or special on the Web? (Disclosure for the rest of this entry: I’m 36.) For Clay Shirky, age means you simply have too much experience to deal with a new world as effectively. The most successful innovators will be the young ones who take the new things for granted. ...

Surprise! Apple has released the Safari browser for Windows. It does seem to be a bit faster than Firefox at page rendering, although I wonder if the extensions I have in Firefox slow it down a bit. We have noticed so far that some some sites don’t seem quite ready for the news that Safari usership is about to expand. Yahoo! Mail Beta doesn’t seem to like it very much, and Google occasionally offers some Mac-specific downloads. ...

I’m pretty sure mashing up pictures of cats with various feeds is a work of genius. :) The Phantom City, in cats. My Twitter, made more interesting. Phantom-Thought makes everyone sleepy. Link courtesy of Climb to the Stars. Update: Tried out a few other feeds, and discovered Ed Cone’s blog has one of the best matchups between cat pictures and blog entries possible. Must be the shorter title. :)

I really want to get a MacBook Pro, now that I can do my work (Apple) and play games (Windows) with it, and the Pro models were just updated. So, I’m salivating over the concept of paying the Mac premium for a laptop, checking out the 17", 1680 x 1050 display version – I’ve gotten too used to 1600 pixels’ worth of space at work and home to go to the 15" display – when suddenly I realize they now have a 1920 x 1200 version as an upgrade. ...

I’m reading an article about a framework in ColdFusion designed to handle object dependencies, and the author relates everything to making a car – A car object needs an engine and transmission – to make things clear. That’s a metaphor with a long history, but I don’t build cars. I handle users, reports, forms…mentally translating from cars to those kinds of collections of data doesn’t really put me ahead at this point. Too bad we have the Factory pattern name; I think it just encourages it. :| ...

A tool called Gender Genie tries to tell whether you are male or female by analyzing your writing. I’ve tried a few pieces, and so far I’m hitting 50% male, 50% female. Interesting thing is, though, my email messages tend to be more “female,” according to the algorithm, while my blog entries are more “male.” Hmmm, might explain why I keep getting spam that reads like this: I’m a hot girl who’s coming to your town and would like to meet up. Send me an email at [email address]. - Steve ...

Scientists have simulated a mouse’s cortical hemisphere on a supercomputer, running at about 10% of the speed. It doesn’t really have the structure of a mouse’s brain yet, but I suspect with one mouse wandering past the Do Not Enter signs, and one lightning strike, we’ll have an Artificial Mouse Intelligence any day now. Maybe we can use it against the human-brained, cyborg mice? Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

If Chris Knight was running a log on a BBS before people started logging on the Web, does it mean it was the world’s first blog (weblog), or the world’s first slog (BBSlog)? :)

When Sam Zell, who has just become a major player in the newspaper industry, is making comments like these published in the Washington Post, I fear for the future of newspapers affected by this sort of ignorance: In conversations before and after a speech Zell delivered Thursday night at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, Calif., the billionaire said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators. ...