David Emery Online

Outed

My name is David Emery and I’m a sad geek.

Better to just get it out in the open, although I hazard a guess you might have realised already.

The content of today’s post – as you may have also guessed already – is boring, sad, geeky and also repeated everywhere across the rest of the internet. I am, of course, talking about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

I’ve now had it installed for about a day and all in all it’s really very nice. It’s not a massive revolution by any means, but it’s packed full of features that are really pretty great to use on a day to day basis. Greatness by a thousand cuts or some such. There are lots of tweaks to almost everything – none of them really very large, but all of them useful, and lots of them that are to the underlying structure which should ensure we get some pretty startling 3rd party apps coming out for Leopard.

The biggest improvement for me has to be the myriad of improvements to the Finder. The networking is so much better, which has been a real bug-bear for quite a while, and the integration of VNC (called Screen Sharing)...

Attention

It’s always about the ‘next big thing’, isn’t it?

This seems to be true about almost every aspect of the technology-based industries, and possibly none more so then the web. Not only content with the pursuit of the new, though, people have got to have a buzzword to go with it:

AJAX
Social Networks
User Generated Content
RSS
OPML
GeoTagging
The Semantic Web

The list is almost endless.

The latest ‘thing’ seems to be something called APML – there’s a good write-up about it here. APML stands for “Attention Profiling Markup Language” which obviously means absolutely nothing, other then for making an acronym that’s half decent.

The whole gist behind APML is that it’s a way of sharing your “Attention Data” with applications. The best way of getting your head round it is using Last.fm as the model: Last.fm has all this data about what music you’ve listened to – this is attention data – and if Last.fm adopted APML you’d easily be able to get this data out of Last.fm and use it with other applications and sites. So, for example, you could automatically populate your Facebook “Music” section on your profile with data pulled directly from Last.fm.

All sounds potentially useful,...

Answers

Last week David Pogue, writer with the New York Times, posted a list of questions that he – even in the position of a tech writer for a huge institution like NYT – simply doesn’t know the answers to. The list can be seen here: Pogue’s Imponderables

Here are some answers:

Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expensive ones?

Because people staying at cheap hotels are much more price sensitive then ones staying at expensive hotels. People staying at the pricer establishments are probably not paying themselves anyway.

What happens to software programs when their publishers go out of business?

They stop being sold. Obviously.

Would the record companies sell more music online if it weren’t copy-protected?

Yes.

Do cellphones cause brain cancer?

No.

What’s the real reason you have to turn off your laptop for takeoff?

Because airlines a really scared of lawsuits. And: they can.

Why can’t a digital S.L.R. camera record video?

A Digital SLR uses a mirror that normally deflects the viewpoint up into the viewfinder so you can frame the shot using the same view the sensor is going to get. When you take a shot the mirror flips up, revealing the sensor. Hence, while you’re composing a shot the sensor...

Catch up

Right.

I’m back.

And what a lovely time I did have. I’m not going to bore you all by force-feeding you holiday snaps, but if you’re that way inclined feel free to check them out on my flickr. On my return I came back to 9622 unread items, so today I thought I’d do a quick roundup before getting back into the swing of things properly tomorrow.

Yes, it’s Friday Links on a Monday.

Total Music, Uh-Huh
I don’t really understand how they (Universal) think that their position is tenable in any way shape or form.

The Second Step in Photography
When reading posts like this (in fact, almost anything in the giving-advice-on-the-internet genre) it’s always worth remembering that other people’s situations are totally different from yours. As I mostly do gig photography (without a press pass, and hence never close enough) I have never wished for a wider lens (on my G7 it goes to 35mm at its widest); in fact, I very rarely shoot fully wide open at all.

Apple’s iTunes Plus now world’s largest DRM-free music catalog
Can I get a ‘hell yeah’? I do love what a bit of competition will do.

P2P vs Radiohead’s “free” Rainbows: why...

Friday Links XXXIV

Adele
This is the new site we’ve just launched for Adele. I really like the way the large use of video has turned out, as the footage is so strong.

Aluminum & Glass: Apple’s Integrated Product & UI
I like that Apple is aligning its physical design with it’s UI design; they did it back when Mac OS X came out (all translucency and pinstripes) and it’s nice to see them realign again.

Yahoo’s Ian Rogers To Music Industry: “Inconvenience Doesn’t Scale”
I know I’ve talked about this already but I wanted to highlight TechCrunch’s slightly odd campaign against the music industry; I guess it’s just down to Michael Arrington’s affiliations with Amie St. which goes to show how ‘unbiased’ they really are over there.

Ave Satanus
I find the cult of Scientology utterly fascinating.

Chris Glass: 43 Folders
What a lovely post on a beautifully designed site.

Amazon S3 gets a SLA. Exhale.
I’m getting quite impressed with the way Amazon S3 is looking – I wonder if they handle really high traffic well?

Fun hobby of the week: Twitter-tracking dirty words
What fun!

Facebook Apps Contribute 37% of Recent Growth
It’s always a great idea to...

Reshuffle

So, I hope you’ve all been paying attention this week.

All this talk about music. All this activity. All this hype.

Apparently this is the end of the record industry.

Somehow I don’t quite see how this adds up. In fact, I think the record industry hasn’t looked better then this for quite a long time. Are we really supposed to believe that all this activity – arguably music is more popular now then it has been for years – is somehow going to see an end of the selling of music?

Moving back to the content of the post on TechCrunch linked to above, this Madonna deal is hardly revolutionary. How is signing a multi-million deal to release records with Live Nation any different from signing to anyone else? Sure, they’re not one of the traditional majors but they are a huge behemoth of a company, being responsible for a large about of all sorts of aspects of live music. It’s certainly pretty equivalent to signing with a major – they’re certainly much more like someone like EMI then they are an independent, and they’re releasing 3 studio albums of hers; sounds like a record company to me…

The next “nail in the...

Rainbow Day

I wasn’t originally going to talk about Radiohead today.

It seemed a little too obvious. But sometimes you just have to go where the world takes you.

Today has been all about Radiohead. It has been all about Radiohead everywhere. Since about 7:10 this morning there’s barely been more then a few minutes where I haven’t been able to hear ‘In Rainbows’, whether directly via my iPod or speakers or from another room or on the radio. At any point today when I’ve walked through the office it’s been on in every room; a simple trip to someone’s desk compromising a nice 30 second preview of each track along the way.

Everyone on Twitter I follow seems to be listening to it. Everyone on iChat has had the track names flicking past as their status all day. My Facebook news feed has 11 references to it from people’s status updates.

Radiohead have made recorded music exciting again.

In fact, I think this is the most important aspect of this whole thing. Forget the whole ‘pay what you want’ thing – which is a very interesting experiment, but an experiment none the less (and one which will only work with certain fan demographics). No, by far...

Rissington

Tally ho, chaps!

Welcome one and all to all you Rissington Podcast listeners – it’s sure nice of you to stop by!

It all of you regular readers who don’t know what I’m talking about, the Rissington Podcast is a new Podcast by Jon Hicks and John Oxton about all sorts of things; normally with a web/online bent, but the latest episode has a firm Radiohead bent and hence they brought me on to share a few opinions on the whole thing.

And as anyone will tell you, once you get me rabbeting on about music, it might be slightly hard to get me to stop…

I’ll be honest, the whole interviewing process – having not really done one before – was far less painful then I anticipated. I had always previously assumed that it would be horrible, akin to whenever I try and talk to any large group of people – getting stage fright, clamming up etc. Luckily enough it seemed to all go quite well, no doubt in part down to the hosts interview technique (which was mostly an attempt to get a word in edgeways).

I would like to point out at this juncture however, that my voice...

Music on your face

If you were paying attention to my last Friday Links post you’ll see that I linked to a post about the possibility that Facebook might turn into a MP3 store – a fully fledged iTunes and Amazon rival.

It turns out, though, that they may be doing something much more interesting.

According to this post Facebook is not working on a iTunes rival, but a fully fledged platform for musicians and record labels. So, they’re not going after Apple at all…

...they’re tying to kill MySpace.

It’s funny, and quite typical of the pace of the industry (that can be so easy to forget sometimes), that a year (maybe even 6 months) ago the idea of a credible competitor to MySpace sounded pretty laughable. Sure, there were plenty of other networks milling around trying to get a slice of the pie (Tagworld, Haystack, iMeem et al) but none of them ever seemed like they would catch on (and it turns out they didn’t).

The big difference previously between MySpace and Facebook has been the absence of music, and in fact it doesn’t seem to have made much if any dent on Facebook’s popularity. It’s a pretty good indicator of how relevant the music...

Friday Links XXXIII

Cranky
I can very much associate with this.

Designing for a security breach
If you’re making something with any decent number of users it inevitable that there’s going to be some security breaches – be prepared.

Rsizr: Groundbreaking Image Editor with “Seam Carving”
Oooh – nifty!

TechMeme Top 100 is ‘Top 100′ of what, exactly?
I’m still not sure exactly what a blog is – the line between a news site and a blog can be pretty blurred. Whether there should be a line or not is a completely different question…

Microsoft in London
Steve Balmer: It’s unclear who benefits more from the current patent regime; the small company or the big company. Probably the small company – Sorry, what?

iPhone: Context over consistency
I love the way the download icon points down to the iPod icon.

Flash Player 10 (Astro) Sneak Peek at MAX Chicago 2007 Keynote
I like the look of the 3D features, and the idea of doing really nice typesetting in Flash is quite intriguing…

Proposal: Multipart Web Requests
Nice idea.

Video Proof: Halo DS Was Real
I really wish this was released – it looks great!

Microsoft’s new Zunes: officially in 80, 8, and...