Linked List: June 5, 2008

Thursday, 5 June 2008

Future Photoshop UI Changes 

Adobe’s John Nack on the new UI idioms in the upcoming Photoshop CS4.

Web-Based Clone of Keynote From 280 North 

Chris Heilmann:

The most amazing thing about this is happening under the hood: the developer wrote a library that abstracts browser rendering engines using Canvas, SVG and Flash (on a per-need basis) into a unified language, Objective J, which is — as the name suggests — a mapping from Objective C to JavaScript.

(Thanks to Joe Clark.)

‘OS X iPhone’ and ‘OS X Leopard’ Banners at Moscone West 

Looks like Apple is unifying the names of its OS variants, too. “OS X Leopard” drops the “Mac”, which I don’t recall ever seeing in promotional material from Apple before. And “OS X iPhone” is different from the “iPhone OS” name they were using back in March at the SDK/IT roadmap event.

Bruce Schneier: Are Photographers Really a Threat? 

“Movie threats” pretty much nails it.

37signals Affiliate Program 

Jason Fried:

We’ve found the recurring revenue model to be a great fit for our business. Customers pay us every month to use our products. We felt it was fitting that anyone who referred a customer our way should also earn a piece of that recurring revenue. So that’s what we’ve done.

Great idea, and great reporting tools. As usual, the sign-up process is super simple. You can make me rich by signing up for accounts using these links: Backpack, Highrise, Basecamp.

Bodog Sportsbook Taking Wagers on WWDC Rumors 

Real betting for real money, but there’s a limit of $50. Even if insiders attempted to put a bundle down in multiple $50 bets spread over many accounts, the odds would change before they got a chance to put much down. Via Jason O’Grady, who has a succinct explanation of how these type of betting odds work, and also has some comparisons showing how the odds have changed in the last few days.

John Siracusa’s 2008 WWDC Keynote Bingo 

Always fun, and the design this time is truly inspired.

10.5.3 Fixes DNS Problems Plaguing Some Leopard Users 

Craig Hunter has the scoop on a little-publicized fix to the way Leopard initiates DNS lookups.

How the Web Was Won 

To commemorate the 50th anniversay of ARPA, Vanity Fair “set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward.” Here’s Bob Metcalfe on his first demo of Arpanet to AT&T executives in 1972:

Imagine a bearded grad student being handed a dozen AT&T executives, all in pin-striped suits and quite a bit older and cooler. And I’m giving them a tour. And when I say a tour, they’re standing behind me while I’m typing on one of these terminals. I’m traveling around the Arpanet showing them: Ooh, look. You can do this. And I’m in U.C.L.A. in Los Angeles now. And now I’m in San Francisco. And now I’m in Chicago. And now I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts — isn’t this cool? And as I’m giving my demo, the damned thing crashed.

And I turned around to look at these 10, 12 AT&T suits, and they were all laughing. And it was in that moment that AT&T became my bête noire, because I realized in that moment that these sons of bitches were rooting against me.

U.K. and Canadian iTunes Stores Get Movies 

Rentals are for 48 hours (as opposed to 24 here in the U.S.) for both stores.

Time Machine Kernel Panic Backing Up to Time Capsule 

Earlier this week, my MacBook Pro kernel panicked three times in six hours. It had never kernel panicked even once before. All three log files (which are written to /Library/Logs/PanicReporter/) implicated “backupd”, which is Time Machine, and which I was using to back up to Time Capsule. Turning off Time Machine made the panics stop.

Ends up my friend Nat had the exact same problem last month. The same thing that worked for him worked for me: using Disk Utility to repair the sparse disk image on the Time Capsule containing the backups for my machine. This is a nasty, nasty bug, though — most users would be screwed, because they’d never even figure out that the culprit is Time Machine, so they’d keep getting panics when, after restarting, Time Machine next starts a backup.

How Do Neurosurgeons Use Cell Phones? 

Not held against their ears.

Gary Krakow Says Apple Needs to License BlackBerry or Windows Mobile 

Hard to believe this isn’t a joke.

(Fake Steve is wrong about Krakow’s employer, though — he hasn’t worked for MSNBC for a few months, and is now employed by TheStreet.com)