| Wednesday, December 19, 2007 |
16:05 - Bad day at the office
http://glumbert.com/wii/view.php?name=baddayoffice
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I'm not buying that any of this footage is candid (who sets up cameras in these locations? Who behaves like this knowing he's on camera?)
But that doesn't make it any less hysterical.
Via CapLion.
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| Tuesday, December 18, 2007 |
16:53 - One for the "Sweet Merciful Crap" file
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Sometimes Apple just creeps me out with the things they put into their software that they can't possibly expect anyone to use or even notice. Photo Booth, which is included by default in Mac OS X, is a perfect example.
There's a mode where you can take "four quick pictures" rather than a single still or movie clip. When you do, the icon of the four shots appears in the strip along the bottom as a simple glued-together mosaic, and that's how it exports if you drag it to the Desktop. But if you click on it...
That's a real-time transformation right there, the oblique tilt and the shadow; but that in itself is hardly news, in the age where up to three live video feeds can be arranged around a reflective black tabletop in iChat. No, what's insane is what happens when you click on one of the four photos in the mosaic.
Go on, try it.
Did you see that? The overhead light reflection that they superimposed on the animation of the picture coming up close to the camera?
Is that or is that not just psychotic?
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| Monday, December 17, 2007 |
14:32 - Oh yeah, I've got one of those too
http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Leopard-Phrasebook-Developers-Library/dp/0672329549/
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James isn't the only one who has a new book out. I've got one too.
(I don't have the wherewithal to set up one of those neato referral-linky-boxes just now, so bear with me.)
In complete honesty, I'm not even sold on the concept for this book. The idea of the "Phrasebook" series is that the book is small enough to pass for a "pocket" reference, and is aimed at, say, a tech journalist who's attending his first Linux Expo and wants to know how to translate all those arcane CLI commands everyone's using into plain English. And that's all well and good for Linux and other hard-core CLI Unixes; but when it comes to Mac OS X, the goal is less clear. I could have just transposed the entirety of the Linux Phrasebook to OS X-ese, which is just a matter of adjusting a few command-line options; the rest is more or less the same. But OS X is, after all, a GUI-centric OS, and there are plenty of tips and tricks to be found in the GUI layer alone, many of which function as perfectly serviceable alternatives to the CLI "phrases". So I interspersed the CLI coverage with as much GUI trickery as I could, even though it compromised the whole "phrasebook" metaphor. (It's now more like a "guidebook" or something.)
Also the thing necessarily became a bit larger than I think was intended, and they had to cut out some material to keep it under the 300-page limit. (Either that, or I uncannily managed to submit exactly 299 pages, without even knowing it.)
So I'm not totally wild about how this one turned out, and it's entirely possible that it's not of interest to anyone reading this blog except maybe my parents. But with all that foot-shuffling and downplaying and underselling out of the way...
...Hey! I've got a new book out! Buy it buy it buy it!
Ahem.
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Brian Tiemann
