Linked List: March 3, 2006

Friday, 3 March 2006

Litigation Cosby Threatens Waxy, You See! ★

Andy Baio got a cease-and-desist from Bill Cosby’s lawyers for hosting archives of Justin Roiland’s “House of Cosbys”. Andy’s going to fight it:

But I’m not removing House of Cosbys. House of Cosbys is satire, and clearly falls under protected speech guidelines. I’m not taking it down, and their legal bullying isn’t going to work. They claim that hosting these videos “violates our client’s rights of publicity as well as other statutory and common laws prohibiting the misappropriation of an individual’s name, voice and likeness and unfair competition.” Sorry, but the First Amendment protects satire and parody of a public figure as free speech.

Apple Order Status Widget ★

Nifty Dashboard widget by Mike Piontek.

reAnimator: Regular Expression FSA Visualizer ★

Oliver Steele’s reAnimator is an absolutely incredible regular expression visualizer. I can’t imagine a better way to visualize how both DFA and NFA regular expression engines work.

Steele’s announcement on his weblog contains a ton of information about how it works.

Public Betas Are a Sham ★

Me, writing at Joyeur:

You’re either ready to ship, or you’re not. Slapping a “beta” badge on your web site logo doesn’t cover for any actual flaws or shortcomings in your software. It’s this decade’s equivalent of the 90’s “under construction” GIF animation.

Screwy MacBook Pro Speakers? ★

Chris Liscio (developer of FuzzMeasure):

Before I received my MacBook Pro, I heard complaints about the quality of the right speaker. Many reports indicated that the speaker sounded overdriven, and distorted. I didn’t notice this initially, until I heard some system sounds at full volume. The system startup sound didn’t sound like this either.

Well, seeing how I have measurement microphones and write acoustic measurement software, verifying a discrepancy was the logical next step. Simply place the measurement microphone about 1” away from each speaker and compare the result.

To my own ears, the right speaker was noticeably quieter, and lacked bass when compared to the left speaker. Also, it sounded horribly distored. I didn’t really need to analyze the graphs to notice that there was an issue, but I captured some anyway.