Pictures of Seattle's interesting new public library.

I'm so disappointed that it was a hoax.

PearPC is an architecture-independent PowerPC platform emulator. Pretty cool. Check out the screen shots of it installing and booting MacOS X.

[via d2r]

I'd like to make a humble request to geeks world-wide. When comparing two technologies / languages / APIs, please, please stop comparing lines of code. It has been a long, long time since compilers, linkers, and operating systems cares how many lines of code it takes to open a window. It is a dumb metric. Your language isn't better because it does the same things as mine in 70% the code.

[None of this applies, of course, to embedded developers. Some of you still operate with absurd size restrictions.]

POTD

I missed this earlier. Novell is releasing as open source the Connector software it acquired as part of Ximian.

This makes it very, very inexpensive for companies to migrate from Windows/Exchange on the desktop to Linux/Evolution. It also makes it possible for a number of other applications to be Exchange-enabled. Very interesting.

Diego Doval is considering the reasons for the delays and incomplete features in Microsoft's next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.

"I say this because monolithic design is a tendency difficult to avoid, and this has been very much on my mind lately. You start pulling pieces together (for different reasons) at compile-time, and before you realize it you en up with a set of highly interdependent binaries. (Regardless or language or platform, all modern platforms support dynamic binding to different degrees). And it's deployment where things start to slip, because it's there that the potentially different versions of a component have to be reconciled. In other words, deployment is one of the largest half-cracked nuts in software development."

His points about deployment are well-taken. The news.com article he quotes is also interesting. They both suggest an interesting question: why has Apple's MacOS X delivered some features on par with longhorn, years earlier than Microsoft?

One thing to remember is the MacOS X team. It is made of both Apple and ex NeXT engineers. It is a team rich in failure: one commercial OS failure, and several failures that never even shipped a product.

Failure is a good teacher.

While I find this rather annoying, it is still some good Flash.

Long, interesting thread on Philip Greenspun's 'blog about batch converting images from Olympus raw to JPEG, adding a border, and a copyright at the bottom. Something this straightforward shouldn't be this simple.

"Now, doing market research is a very good thing, but was that all they went on? Once you get past the whining freeloaders who reject all pricing as improper, the heart of the issue is that while MT is the flagship of the massively connected conversation movement, it appears that the organisation driving it is now powered by more conventional forces such as the requirements of the VCs funding them and as such has dropped out of the conversation. In these Cluetrain days, that's fatal. It's not enough to listen to the conversation; success in business will increasingly depend on participating in the conversation." [via WebMink]

Yea, that's great. Love the groovy "participate in the conversation" talk.

But I can't eat a fucking conversation.

All the people who work on MoveableType have to eat. And pay rent. No amount of Cluetrain logic will turn us all into air ferns. Sometimes I get nervous about how much business planning has been based on a book that, by all appearances, was written by four guys taking acid.

Alexandra Kerry showed up in Cannes in a rather daring dress. I think this was a ploy to get European support for Kerry.

One way to tell if it is a wig, is to monitor length over time.

They wig, you see, won't change in length. I'm still not sure.

It looks like BEA might be releasing parts of its Weblogic Workshop as open source.

"As of August, 2003 George W. Bush spent 27 percent of his presidency on vacation. This is the most vacation time that any modern US president has taken." [Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush]

via wisn

Apple has released a COM-based SDK for Windows, allowing access to iTunes, AAC files, and FiarPlay DRM technologies.

This is pretty cool, because it means that developers can write plugins for WinAmp or MediaPlayer to handle AAC and DRM-protected AAC files purchased from the Apple Store.

So, having some downtime today, I'm watching the Abu Ghraib prison abuse hearings on CSPAN. They have been very interesting so far.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that things are being positioned so that the general military comes out looking good, but that someone else takes a fall. I'm guessing that someone else is military intelligence, CIA, or civilian interrogators.

I just discovered the summarization service built into MacOS X.

Select any text, then select the "Summarize" item in the Services menu. Cool stuff. Summarization and vector representation services are available as APIs in Cocoa.

Ooh. This is fun: Make a flake.

I'm out of commission for a while. I ate something that made me rather ill. I'll be home at least until Thursday.

Blaa.

The New York Times has some more information about the Colin Powell / Press Aide gaffe. They have identified the aide as mily Miller, deputy press secretary to Colin Powell.

Wow. Dave Winer announced the release as Open Source of the kernel that runs Manilla and Radio. He didn't mention what license UserLand will use, nor exactly when, but a very interesting development nonetheless.

Did anyone watch Meet The Press yesterday? Russert was interviewing Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Toward the end of the interview, Russert starts asking Powell about his pre-Iraq war presentation to the United Nations and the claims he made.

At that point, it appeared that one of Powell's press aides pushed the camera away from Powell, and tried to stop the interview. You could hear Powell arguing with the aide, after which he demanded "put the camera back on me," and continued answering the question.

I have two thoughts:

• I'd love to hear the backstory on this
• Perception or not, Powell is coming out of this mess looking like really good guy, full of integrity.