I upgraded the OS on my laptop to MacOS 10.4 on Friday. As long as I was updating, I thought it would be a good time to update Photoshop to CS II.

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Also picked up a Wacom Bluetooth tablet. Serious laptop renovation underway. So far, so good.

Very exciting: The Metropolitan Museum has Charles Sheeler's and Paul Strand's short film, Manhatta, available online. Punctuated by lines from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the Sheeler and Strand used the film to introduce European avant-garde cinema to the United States.

Strand, of course, was a wonderful photographer in his own right.

Apple has posted a release of JDK 1.5 (MacOS X 10.4 only) on the support site. Once installed, this release does not become the default Java runtime (1.4 remains the default). This is interesting, as is the paucity of documentation for the release.

[update] Upon actually looking for some documentation, I found release notes, Apple extension docs, and an intro guide updated for JDK 1.5. Good stuff.

[update #2] The performance of the 1.5 build is pretty good, but there appear to be some bugs in Swing.

In case anyone hasn't already seen it, John Siracusa's ridiculously detailed review of MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) is a good read. I wasn't aware of many of the file metadata changes in 10.4, for example.

Hmmm. Some pretty good guidelines for using UML Activity diagrams: overview, actions, control nodes, object nodes, partitions. Activity diagrams always seem to be given too little treatment in UML books.

POTD

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Thomas Whisenand is a student freelance journalist, currently traveling around Asia. His photos are excellent, punctuated by his direct prose. I'm really jealous.

Some good groups are playing Bonnaroo this year.

The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.

Uh oh. I think this one is actually against the rules.

Multiple sources, including DeLay's then-chief of staff Susan Hirschmann, have confirmed that DeLay's congressional office was in direct contact with Preston Gates about the trip itinerary before DeLay's departure, to work out details of his travel. These contacts raise questions about DeLay's statement that he had no way of knowing about the financial and logistical support provided by Abramoff and his firm.

Texas voters should be quite upset with Rep. DeLay's behavior; he was voted into office railing against corrupt Washington politics and pledged, like many of his Republican colleagues, to being honor and dignity back to the U.S. Capitol.

While it is fun to poke at the delicious irony and to ask snarky questions comparing President Clinton's non-profit oral sex with DeLay's very-much for-profit suckling, I find the whole situation depressing.

Depressing because Americans still seem to believe that politicians are not, in fact, people; that they are cut from some other cloth that shields them from lapses in judgment. How else could we muster such outrage, from either left or right, when someone in Washington has yet another transgression.

Depressing because we, politicians and constituents together, are willing to put scandal before country.

Oooh. Melbourne Street Art.