Linked List: March 21, 2007

Wednesday, 21 March 2007

If You Can Read This, You’re Hired 

Beautifully cryptic job ads for an expert typographer, set in dingbat fonts. (Via Design Observer.)

Nominee for Worst Prediction of the Decade 

Rob Glaser, CEO of Real Networks, to The New York Times in 2003 regarding the “closed” iPod:

“It’s absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 (percent) to 5 percent of the player market. … The history of the world is that hybridization yields better results.”

Not looking good for this prediction.

‘Four Thumbs Up’ 

Fake Steve on Walt Mossberg’s review of the Apple TV.

Calvert DeForest, a.k.a. Larry ‘Bud’ Melman, Dies at 85 

Here’s DeForest in my very favorite segment in Letterman’s career. YouTube, unsurprisingly, has scads of other clips.

Letterhead Fonts Embraces DRM 

I sympathize, because font bootlegging has been rampant since the dawn of desktop publishing. But this isn’t the answer. Does anyone know what they’re doing at a technical level that keeps their fonts from working with font managers?

If it’s really “DRM”, how does the system know how to use them? Mac OS X has no support for any sort of encrypted font format that I’m aware of.

Scott Stevenson on Cross-Platform Apps 

Scott Stevenson:

Maybe the most important thing you will ever need to know about Mac development is this:

Mac users will generally favor an app with a better experience over the one with more features.

And he’s right that Skype is an excellent example of a cross-platform app done right — the Mac version looks, feels, and works in a completely Mac-like way.

YouTube: Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards 

Two of the patron saints of Daring Fireball. The ratio of genius-to-mumbling is off the chart. (Thanks to Amy.)

Kottke on Twitter 

Insightful:

Also like blogs, everyone has their own unique definition of what Twitter is (stripped down blogs, public IM, Dodgeball++, etc.), and to some extent, everyone is correct. Maybe that’s when you know how you’ve got a winner: when people use it like mad but can’t fully explain the appeal of it to others. See also: weblogs, Flickr.

The way I see it, Twitter is to IM and SMS what weblogs were to email and Usenet.

Escaping URLs With Unicode Checker 

Sven-S. Porst offers an alternative to my JavaScript bookmarklet builder, using AppleScript and Unicode Checker.

Black Ink 1.0 

Crossworld puzzle game from Daniel Jalkut’s Red Sweater Software. (This is the other app he recently acquired from another developer — it was formerly known as MacXword.)

Chris Ware Animation for ‘This American Life’ 

Wonderful story, cleverly told. “The cameras really changed the way we behaved.”

JavaScript/CSS Font Detector 

Open-source JavaScript routine to test whether any given font is present on the viewer’s web browser:

We try to create a string with a specified font-face. If the font-face is not available, it takes up the font-face of the parent element. We then compare the width of the string with the specified font-face and width of the string with the font-face of the parent element, if they are different, then the font exists, otherwise not.

Clever!

David Chartier: ‘Clarification on the MacBook Wi-Fi Hack “Conspiracy”’ 

David Chartier at TUAW expounds upon his role covering the MacBook Wi-Fi saga. I just don’t get why George Ou ever was, let alone still remains, so upset about Chartier’s TUAW post or Jim Dalrymple’s Macworld story.

The truth is Maynor and Ellch must have “falsified” something, because at various times, to various people, they both claimed to have an exploit against the MacBook’s built-in AirPort driver and not to have an exploit against the built-in driver. Chartier’s “SecureWorks Admits to Falsifying MacBook Wireless Hack” story wasn’t exactly right, but it was more right than wrong, and this line from that post is as good a summary of the whole sad saga as any:

The problem here is that this experiment was not one of those quests for truth — it was a quest for, in the words of Mr. Colbert: truthiness.

The Macalope on the Latest From George Ou 

Ou is still angry about the whole MacBook Wi-Fi thing, but, as usual, his diatribe makes very little sense. The Macalope makes what sense of it there is.

What I enjoyed most about it is where Ou admits that he got Lynn Fox’s private phone number from a confidential email from Maynor — i.e. one that Maynor had asked Ou to keep confidential — and so what does Ou do? He calls her at that number. Two minutes later she’s on the phone to Maynor angry at him for distributing the message. What a dope.