Lavonardo

Firefox 3. Allegedly on june 17th.

Count me in.

I’ve always been interested in typography. And with the introduction of Fontstruct-tool, it’s now possible to carve just the set needed. Or a horribly maimed approximation thereof. The latter is far more likely.

Unsurprisingly, Jonathan Zittrain’s brand new book, Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, is available for download under a CC license.

The book clocks in at 300+ pages, and I for one will read it printed out. After all, lugging a laptop to a park is far less preferable than dealing with actual hardcopy.

Nifty collections such as Noupe’s come in useful when browsing for new ideas and techniques. Not that I’m really looking for any significant updates here, just randomly seeing what’s available.

[ via Schizoblog ]

Based on the length of this Vanity Fair article on the birth of the internet, it’s much preferable to read this off a paper copy. So, mr. Newsagent, pencil me down for a copy of the July issue.

Pintprice.com, the cost of a beer in 202 countries.

My inner geek (well in check most of the time these days) is somewhat delighted with the arrival of goosh - a shell-like interface to Google’s search engine.

Obviously, the word “shell-like” must be interpreted very broadly in the above. Goosh is by no means a real shell, with piping of greps and all kinds of useful chaining of tools. Right now it’s nothing but a gimmick, but one that’s certain to drum up absolute barrelfuls of web traffic.

Meh, Google did not yet release the Google Earth plugin for Mac yet.

And there’s no word on its future availability, either.

Same thing happened with Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Telescope, a Mac native version was not released concurrently with the Windows implementation.

Both seem very interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant experimentation with the likes of Bootcamp or VMWare Fusion. But these two definitely pile up in the scales already weighed down with Civilization 4.

Rule #1 for using countdown flash applications to drum up excitement for a new film/album/whatever: rememeber to disable the counter when the said entity arrives.

Following the declaration of independence of Montenegro, there’s a new top level domain in town to consider when setting up a vanity page: .me.

Something old: Webmonkey is back.

Something new: Ars Technica is acquired.

Whether either change has any effect on the magazine remains to be seen.

Charles Stross is one of the authors whose works I’ve found very pleasant recently, and his blog provides good, thoughtful reading occasionally as well.

Two recent entries have been exceptionally good, and come heavily recommended to all.

The one on recent research on Fermi paradox appeals to my inner cosmologist. If universe is indeed infinite, shouldn’t there be an infinite amount of advanced civilizations. Not really, as Drake equation famously uses multipliers to whittle down the number.

The other, on the diminishing bang/buck ratio of web pages just explains how awkward things have recently evolved. To ship out a six kilobyte article, the web page is bloated to 950 kilobytes (including an amazing twenty-two separate javascript files). OK, the disease is obviously not ubiquitous, but the case study of Salon probably is a good approximation of the common norm.

How could the western civilization survive without Wrongcards - electronic cards that are equally inappropriate for every occasion.

A List Apart began a nifty-looking series of articles on getting started with Ruby on Rails.

Been intrigued by the concept for a while, and looking for a therapy project - will definitely look into this.

EDIT: OK, so it’s not a series, really… Just two articles in a row on the very same subject. Fooled me for a while.

Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur so percolated to the top of the to-read stack based on Skrubu’s review.

Know thine enemy, and all that jazz.

Just got to love wikipedia for the breadth of the material - the recent “featured articles” have included such topics as Chrono Trigger (video game), Lisa de Giocondo (Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous subject) and the tomb of an antipope.

Can’t beat the feeling of getting accidentally educated.

EDIT 17.4.2008: Fixed the first link. Oopsie.

That’s why the Japanese have switched to using appropriate search terms in advertising. In faux search boxes in the ads themselves.

South Park goes free.
Every episode will be available on the web.
And the logic behind this move (by Trey Park and Matt Stone, the show’s creators) is nothing short of genius:

[we got] really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.

Yeah, it’s seriously ad-plagued, but still a better way of catching up with the new episodes than trying to figure out when the finnish channels broadcast them.

… they want their “irrational exuberance” back. Right now.

No other explanation seems to be fitting for the rumored $400 million valuation for RockYou! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the company name).

After all, providing an facebook-application that allows easy posting of static and live images just is a sure recipe for gigabucks.