Linked List: January 25, 2011

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Eric Schmidt Expects to Spend Another 10 Years at Google ★

I’ll bet the under.

Michael Lopp Interviews Marco Arment ★

Marco Arment, on Instapaper’s bookmarklet:

The way it does this is ridiculous: instead of calling a simple GET request to save the page, since an entire page’s contents would quickly overrun any URL-length limits in the stack, it injects a FORM with a POST action and populates a hidden value with the page contents.

But form-data requests from browsers aren’t Gzip-compressed, so the resulting data is huge and needs to be sent over people’s (often slow, often mobile) upstream connections. So I found an open-source DEFLATE implementation in Javascript — really — and the bookmarklet compresses the page data right there in the browser before sending it.

The Oatmeal Winter 2010 State of the Web ★

Spot on.

‘It’s About Us, John’ ★

There’s only one upcoming film I’m more intrigued and excited about than Malick’s The Tree of Life, and it’s this one:

The Other Side of the Wind portrays the last hours of an ageing film director. Welles is said to have told John Huston, who plays the lead role: “It’s about a bastard director… full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It’s about us, John.”

The unedited film has been hidden away in a vault until now amid doubts that it could ever be shown.

Rumours of its release have surfaced repeatedly since it was shot in 1972, but an ownership dispute has always scuppered any plans. However, a Los Angeles lawyer told the Observer last week that the film will finally be seen.

I mean, holy shit.

37signals: ‘We’ll Be Retiring Our Support of OpenID on May 1’ ★

37signals:

We first jumped on the OpenID bandwagon back in 2007 when it was seen as a promising way to make logging into websites simpler. What we’ve learned over the past three years is that it didn’t actually make anything any simpler for the vast majority of our customers. Instead it just made things harder. Especially when people were having problems with the often flaky OpenID providers and couldn’t log into their account. OpenID has been a burden on support since the day it was launched.

Pixelmator Grosses $1 Million on the Mac App Store ★

In 20 days.

Macworld 2011: Industry Forum ★

I write these words to you from 36,000 feet in the sky, en route to Macworld Expo. I’ll be speaking there tomorrow, at a new event called the Industry Forum. Among the other speakers: Jason Snell, Harry McCracken, and Bill Atkinson. Yeah, that Bill Atkinson. Here’s the full schedule and session descriptions, and here’s where you can register to attend.

Google Nexus One Gets Small Update to 2.2.2, Users Still Awaiting 2.3 ★

I thought the whole point of the Nexus series was to put the software entirely under Google’s control — and that users would get timely OS updates? Android 2.3 has been out for over a month, but remains available only on the brand-new Nexus S.

Why Can’t We Walk Straight? ★

Fascinating NPR report by Robert Krulwich, delightfully animated by Benjamin Arthur. (Via Swissmiss.)

Why 3D Doesn’t Work and Never Will ★

Walter Murch, in a letter to Roger Ebert:

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what. But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

I think 3D is fun in very small doses, like in attractions at Disney World, where the movie is only around five minutes long. But I have never enjoyed 3D in a feature. Avatar was closest.

Lawsuit to Taco Bell: Where’s the Beef? ★

Bob Johnson, reporting for the AP:

An Alabama law firm claims in a lawsuit that Taco Bell is using false advertising when it refers to using “seasoned ground beef” or “seasoned beef” in its products. […]

The lawsuit says that Taco Bell’s “seasoned beef” contains other ingredients, including water, wheat oats, soy lecithin, maltodrextrin, anti-dusting agent and modified corn starch.

None of those ingredients are seasonings.