apple

My Dutch skills are weak to non-existant, and without a Google translator for MacArena.be, I’m pretty much stuck with staring at the above video and contemplating the short description provided:

A movie about the technology which Apple has recently patented. It is not a movie made by Apple but by some researchers.

Fortunately, this is an area where video is much more illustrative than words.

I sometimes get accused of blue sky thinking when I speak of the role of technology in our lives, but while I go on about how access to huge volumes of instantly searchable information is changing us, this video shows a rather near future where we can manipulate it ways that seemed like science fiction just the other day.

Props to Alan Baker for pointing this out to me.

Via an IM from Ryan Eby: a pointer to Andrew Escobar‘s directions on how to install Apple’s Front Row.

In case you’re looking: Metaphyzx’s Mac OS Wireless Adapter Compatibility List.

I have plans to apply AJAX to our library catalog but I’m running into a problem where I can’t do XMLHttpRequest events to servers other than the one I loaded the main webpage from. Mozilla calls it the “same origin policy,” everyone else calls it a cross-domain script exclusion, or something like that.

Some Mozilla folks are working on a standard to address the problem, but it could be quite a while before browser support is common enough to build for it.

So Plan A was to use simple AJAX with XMLHTTPRequest. Plan B comes from this crazy suggestion at Apple’s developer site: Remote Scripting with IFRAME. It looks like different functions are subject to different restrictions, so the theory is that a JavaSctript loaded in a page in a hidden IFRAME can call functions from the parent page and do pretty much everything we’ve come to expect of XMLHTTPRequest. Here’s an example they offer.

Crazy as it is it works, and it gets around some cross-domain script exclusions for some browsers, but it still gets trapped by Mozilla.

The first ebook I ever read was Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown on my Newton Message Pad 2000. It had a big and bright screen — “the best screen for reading eBooks on the (non-)market” says DJ Vollkasko — but it could get a bit little heavy at times.

Crackdown is available for free, along with perhaps 16,000 others, at Matthew McClintock’s ManyBooks.net. Downloads are available in 11 different formats, or you can read online.

I’m not sure what to think about Steve J’s WWDC announcement (video stream) of Apple’s switch to x86 processors. Coverage at MacNN, Mac Rumors, Ars Technica, etc. I’m not sure, but it would be easier to take if I wasn’t the only one who saw conspiracy in it. Does this relate to Intel’s recent shoehorning of DRM onto the CPU?

It wasn’t long ago that I was praising Apple for making devices that served the remix world that exists in the void between fair use and copyright infringement, but moves since then have concerned me. I live with iTunes DRM, but can I tolerate DRM throughout the OS all the way down to the hardware? Can I tolerate something that eliminates the (entirely legal) me2me sharing that I expect (and is revered in the analog world)?

Anyway, there’s some mixed news about PPC on X86 emulation that will be part of the next OS release, and I expect the jabbering about the effect of this announcement will last all summer. Here’s some now from MacNN, and PowerPage{#14641}. And here’s something I can laugh at.