Linked List: November 27, 2007

Tuesday, 27 November 2007

Laboratory Conditions 

Five-part documentary — a new episode each day this week — from the crew at Coudal Partners, shot on location in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

LaunchBar 4.3.3 

Update to Objective Development’s launcher/miscellaneous utility. (I never know how to categorize LaunchBar and Quicksilver.) Interesting new features include support for .scptd AppleScript bundles (great for packing up AppleScripts with self-contained shell script resources for “do shell script” calls out the shell) and an “argument” parameter for custom x-launchbar:execute search templates that lets you pass in large strings as input without worrying about escaping them for the shell.

iPhoto Buddy Donations Going to Charity 

Rick Neil, developer of the iPhoto multiple library manager iPhoto Buddy, is donating all proceeds from the app this year to two charities.

Zip Quick Look Plugin 

Freeware Quick Look plugin, shows the contents of zip files in a nice list.

CandyBar 3 

Major upgrade to Panic’s $29 utility for customizing and organizing icons; now includes Pixadex’s features. Leopard-only, and includes all sorts of Leopard-specific features, like support for 512-pixel icons, and resources to change the appearance of your Dock.

Wired Profile of Universal Music CEO Doug Morris 

From Seth Mnookin’s excellent profile of Doug Morris in Wired, regarding the music industry’s inability to deal with the digital download revolution:

Morris insists there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.” Morris’ almost willful cluelessness is telling. “He wasn’t prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology,” says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. “He just doesn’t have that kind of mind.”

Kind of obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention, but it’s telling that Morris still doesn’t regret not hiring someone who understood what was going on back in 1999 or 2000. I suppose it’s more likely that he does regret it, but is unwilling to admit it. (Via Vulture.)

Books Versus Documents: What’s Wrong With So-Called ‘E-Books’ 

Jon Stokes:

In short, electronic “books” are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the “book,” then it has missed the mark by a mile. The basic problem with the current e-book + reader combination is twofold: the single-page format, and the lack of ready markup and annotation features.

Spaces ‘Application Assignments’ and AppleScript 

Nifty AppleScripts from Jesse Newland for managing Spaces’s application assignments (e.g. “assign this app to space 2”). These scripts let you manage these assignments without going into the Spaces panel in System Prefs.

Ack, a Clever Grep Replacement 

Grep alternative written in Perl, so it uses Perl’s (superior) regular expressions. Ack is smart about things like .svn directories, skipping them by default, and it comes with a bunch of command-line switches that make it easy to filter the files you’re searching by file type.