Archive for February, 2003

Dan Gillmor:

“Google, which runs the Web’s premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.”

Wow, that’s pretty huge. It brings up all sorts of questions. I’m starting to be afraid of Google — that maybe we start relying on them too much, but it’ll sure be interesting to see what they do to improve Blogger. This is certainly good news for them, and well deserved.

Nick Denton comments on the Google/Pyra deal, as well as Dave Winer.

We’ve invented a game at work called Bucket Ball. It involves a trash can with a diameter of 8 and 3/4 inches and an
8 and 1/2 inch 4-square ball. The difference of 1/4 inch is incedibly important, as over or under this amount would
result in gameplay that is either impossible or too easy. The gameplay of Bucket Ball involves elements of basketball,
tennis, bowling, quarters, and chess. Anything can happen in the BBL.

Two players sit in a chair at either end of a 14 foot long by 3 foot 2 inch wide “court”. The bucket sits at dead center.
Each player tosses the ball toward the bucket. One bounce and in results in 1 point. Two bounces and in the bucket
results in 2 points. Three bounces. 3 points (this have never been done before in competition or otherwise).

The first player to achieve 3 points wins the match. Knocking over the bucket with the ball results in a foul.
the opposing player receives two shots — one foul shot and his or her regular turn.

Strategy plays a large role. The bucket can move around the court as a result of the ball hitting it. It is only
reset to center after a point is scored or a foul. A person can only win by scoring exactly 3 points. In other words,
he or she cannot score two consecutive 2 point shots in a row. The player must score a 2 point shot and a 1 point
shot to win, or three 1 point shots

Scoring of the game is much like bowling (illustrated below). Three boxes for the 3 necessary points for victory.
Each box marked with an “X” for each point scored. If a 2 point shot is made, one “X” is marked across two boxes. Similarly if the ever elusive 3 point shot is achieved.

Our first championship tournament is next Thursday, and I of course will be covering the events on this site.

To practice what they preach, DevEdge has redesigned using a table-less CSS layout. Eric Meyer has added CSS drop-down menus and text sizing among other features. It’s always great to see site after site redesigning using CSS for layout — leaving those 5 year-old browsers behind (but still being accessible to all).

Konfabulator is an interesting new OS X application that lets you make it do whatever you’d like it to. Developers can create “widgets” using XML and JavaScript that do various tasks — reading RSS feeds, to-do lists, weather updates, stocks, calendars, etc. A full tutorial walks you through the basics. The beauty is that the possibilities are truly endless while more widgets are created and made available to plug right in.

A Mighty Wind:

“Christopher Guest follows up his acclaimed ensemble comedies Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman with a docu-comedy about three folk groups from the 60s who reunite for a memorial concert in New York City following the death of a legendary folk manager.”

Wow. The trailer for this looks incredibly funny. All the same cast memebers from Best in Show are back. Can’t wait.

Tantek has posted a new view all images favelet. It will open all the images on the current page, in their own relatively sized window. Really helpful when pulling a page apart, or when needing to get image dimensions quickly (when using IE/Mac).

Went to Dave Winer’s live weblogging session at
Harvard last night.
About 30 or so people showed up for what turned out to be some pretty interesting discussion. I wasn’t exactly sure what “live weblogging” would be.
Do all of us just sit in a room and write on our weblogs? Actually, it was much more sensical than that. Dave would “post” a topic, and a
(live) discussion “thread” would emerge. If a topic seemed to be dragging along, or taking up too much time, an entirely new one would be
offered.

Some of the highlights included:

• Dan Bricklin (one of the creators of the lengendary VisiCalc program) talking about something his company is developing called RSS feed for small businesses that includes
  relevant information like directions, contact info and descriptions of what they do. Interesting application ideas were thrown around –
  if a mobile device could tap into these feeds based on location, for instance. What’s nice is that it puts the updating of this information in the hands of the business, and not a third-party directory or search engine.
• Dave talking about the two forks that have evolved for RSS, and how the importance is not on the format — but on the tools and
  applications that support it. It was good to hear this.
• How Harvard is much like Mircrosoft, in that it likes to get its name out there wherever it can. Surprisingly, this means good things for
  weblogs at Harvard — essentially giving every student the opportunity to self-publish under the Harvard name.
• A guy named Peter who runs reinvented.net said that no one has ever linked to him. Dave
  immediately asked for his URL. “Donna, you got that? OK, You’ve just been linked to.” Peter went on to say that he doesn’t care
  who reads his weblog (he’s been writing it since 1998). The purpose of his blog is soley for his 2 year old son — so that he
  will be able to read it when he’s older to see what his Dad was thinking during the time he was growing up. What a motive for blogging. A great
  reason.
• The guy who wrote RSD was there talking about how adoption for his format for linking services and
  weblogging software was adopted by systems like Blogger, MoveableType, Radio, etc. took just two days.

Donna Wentworth (Copyfight) has
blogged the entire discussion on her site. Which is just strange, yet
useful at the same time.

Safari has updated today. Looks like they’ve fixed a number of CSS bugs already. For some odd reason, the navigation on this site did not work in previous versions, but the update has fixed.

GasPriceWatch.com:

“We monitor gas prices across the country so you can get the best deal in your area. Search our database to find the lowest gas prices in your area. Prices are updated frequently by users like you.”

Cool idea. My zipcode came up with nothing, but then maybe I should become a spotter.

Cuban Council (the biz site of some of the people behind Kaliber 10000) is one of the more original portfolio sites I’ve seen in a while. What I like most about it, is that it’s one long scrolling page. Really exceptional design stuff going on here.