Tomorrow I have a guest strip featured on Sheercore.com (about) - I’m very excited, conversation with Matt always seems to end up with something quotable and this was no different.
So polish your swords, geeks, and watch out who you explain your latest hypothesis to.
Update: I’m published!
Congratulations to Damien and Katie Barrett on the successful birth of their son, Casey Alexander Barrett. Digital cigars all around!
Jodi celebrates Ukraine’s Independence Day, complete with pictures from our 2005 day on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti with the crowds.
How appropriate that we’re headed to Russia for our first trip (of two) for a new adoption 2 years after we were last overseas for Addy’s adoption. Here’s hoping that Vladivostok will occupy a similar place in our hearts as Kiev does.
Jodi and I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend. I’d seen it a couple weeks ago, but wanted to see it again before reviewing it.
The Bourne Ultimatum is, in a word, excellent. The central characters and themes are carried over from the first two movies, but the story never feels like re-tread (stone?) of the preceding films.
I’ve fallen in love with the intimate, near-documentary style mastered by Paul Greengrass (this film and The Bourne Supremacy) and The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman. As viewers we feel like we’re right there with the the characters, lending an intimacy and tension to scenes that might have seemed slow or unimportant had we been watching from a comfortable distance.
While I loved the quiet, intimate moments, The Bourne Ultimatum is at it’s core an action movie, a spy thriller, and the action here is simultaneously both larger, more intense than in the previous films and easier to follow. The hand-to-hand fighting (and there’s a good bit of it) is tight, intricate work, taking place in hallway and small rooms.
The close quarters keeps the camera (and the viewer) right up with the combatants and the sense of intimacy once again heightens the tension. As well, Greengrass emphasizes that assassins can’t be choosers: fights involve books, candlesticks, misc toiletries, razor blades, and towels - whatever is at hand is turned into a weapon and the stakes seem the higher for it.
Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I love me a good car chase, and Ultimatum delivers. The Fugitive may have pioneered the wireless destructo-cam (where small cameras transmitting footage wirelessly are placed in scenery that is going to be destroyed, so as to capture everything up to and including the destruction of the camera), but this movie uses them with wild, reckless abandon. No vantage point is safe from a head-on, or tail-on, or side-impact collision, and the result is shots that had me climbing out of my seat.
Bourne uses his vehicle (a commandeered police/security cruiser) not only as transportation, but as a weapon - stopping suddenly to force a rear-end collision with a following vehicle or reversing direction at high speed into another (sacrificing the entire trunk to put an SUV chasing him out of commission).
In the end, my greatest pleasure in the Bourne series is that I feel like I was taken seriously as a viewer. There are no “winks” at the audience, no 4th wall shenanigans, no tongue-in-cheek references or smart-ass parting shots after each kill. These movies aim to entertain, but they also expect me to keep my brain engaged. And that’s are rare thing in action these days.
4.5 out of 5, um, whatevers.
Adobe has released an API for Kuler, their color-theme community that is tied into Photoshop and Illustrator.
A while back, I did some packet-sniffing between Adobe’s Flash client (on the kuler site) and the servers, did some documenting of what I found, and then developed a quick-and-dirty app that used the rough API I’d worked up. (Note: that app no longer works, though you can get the same data through the new RSS-based API).
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:kuler="http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/"
xmlns:rss="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss" version="2.0">
Nice to see Adobe opening kuler up to more of this kind of thing.
Seth Dillingham is running a software auction in support of the Pan-Mass Challenge:
Where did all this software come from? It was donated by the authors and companies that publish it. Sixty-nine authors and publishers, from major Mac software companies to well known and influential “indie” developers to little shops you may not yet have heard of.
They donated all this software for a good cause. Every dollar raised through these auctions will be donated to the Pan-Mass Challenge, which directly supports the Jimmy Fund, for the research and treatment of cancer at Dana-Farber.
The first auction is up - go bid for some great Mac software, or tell a friend!
Awesome. An IM conversation that Matt and I had the other day has been immortalized in Matt’s new webcomic: Sheercore (Geeks With Swords).
Scott Adams lives in my house:
In my house, when it’s “time to go†someplace, I put on my jacket and go stand near the door. Once there, time stands still. To me, “time to leave†means “go stand near the door.†To other people, it signals the start of an infinite sequence of events that may or may not culminate in leaving.
:-P
I’ve come to to love reading Wil Wheaton’s blog: WWdN: In Exile. Today he describes meeting a fan who worked 10 years to get autographs of the whole ST:TNG cast - Wil was the last she needed:
Oh! One of the top five moments? A woman waited in my autograph line after my performance and carefully set down a cast photo from season three. Everyone else had signed it, even Patrick and Brent.
“You’re the last one,” she said, eyes gleaming. “I’ve been carrying this around for ten years to all these conventions, and I can’t believe I’m going to finally finish it!”
I signed it as carefully as I’ve ever signed anything, and when I finished, I looked up at her. Tears fell from her eyes.
“Thank you so much!” She said.
“Thank you,” I said, “I’m honored that I got to be part of this moment.”
Thanks for sharing that with us, Wil.
(Don’t think the post title is creepy - I was a Trekker for many years, and I can easily recall the sense of wonder and awe that Roddenberry’s universe inspired in me, dreams that Enterprise tread on and crushed like so many bugs.)
Ok, so last week Jodi and Adelina were off in Colorado (I’m sure Jodi will blog it soon), so I was home alone quite a bit. So what did that mean? Hackery!
After exploring some machine tagging and some UI bits and pieces for machine tags on the site, I spent some time completely rewriting my machine tagging code. I started with blog:via as my first machine tag, then quickly added tags for movies in Netflix (netflix:id), books at Amazon (book:isbn) and other Amazon products (amazon:asin). Here’s a post with a blog:via tag and a book:isbn tag. And here’s one with a netflix:id tag and an amazon:asin tag.
I’ll admit, the implementation is still a bit scattered. This blog is powered by WordPress, so to start with the tags themselves are added to posts via a custom field called ‘machinetags’ - one entry for each tag:
WordPress’s template tags make it easy to get at those values as an array, which I pass to a WordPress plugin I wrote just for this. The plugin builds the initial display for the related items, adding ids and classes as hooks for the next bit.
When the page loads, I wrote some javascript (using JQuery) that attaches custom event handlers to the click events for the “more posts” and “view” links. The handlers fire off ajax calls, so that I’m not making a lot of ajax calls as the page initially loads (which would increase page load times for something that only some readers are going to be interested in).
As you can see here, clicking the links loads related content inline:
So far, all my tags live here on this site, attached to my posts. Jeremy Keith uses this same strategy, and adds a “tags in the cloud” tactic - assigning adactio:id=... tags to photos on Flickr, then doing a Flickr search to pull in photos when a post is viewed. I may explore this a bit more - I’ve been thinking about using Amazon’s tagging feature to add a monkinetic:id=... tag, then doing the lookup that way, but for products it feels more appropriate to have the hook/tag on this end.
Machine tagging is going to succeed or fail on the strength of the APIs that services offer. Amazon, while not being a posterboy for Web2.0, has an amazing REST API that is pretty easy to work with once you get the hang of it. (I’m using a technique that - acronym alert - runs Amazon’s XML output through an XSL stylesheet hosted on my server via Amazon’s own XSLT service to produce JSON.) I use it for looking up books as well as any other product Amazon offers.
Netflix, on the other hand, has no API, and I had to resort to figuring out the URLs that use Netflix’s internal movie ID to make a link to the site and grab the cover thumbnail. I would love to actually show the movie title and average rating, but there’s no api for it.
I also looked at IMDB but could not find even so much as a predictable way to devine a movie poster image from an IMDB title id, so while I may add imdb:title=... tags to some of my posts, I won’t be able to provide related content inline. This is really a pity, as both Netflix and IMDB are probably afraid that if they provide easy access to their content via an API, competitors might use it to disrupt their market. Well, that might be the case, but there are a LOT of us out here who would love to send traffic to both Netflix and IMDB in more interesting ways.
As Dave says:
People will only trust a service that gives them complete freedom to come and go as they please. Further, they’ll want to come back if you send them to cool places.
Dave, not all Sun people look like “young versions of Scott McNealy”. :-)
