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Sunday, February 01, 2004

Super Commercial Sunday, 2004

Can you record the game on a PVR, watch the ads, and skip over the boring football parts? I wonder…
John Sculley’s revenge? Details of how exactly the Pepsi/iTunes promotion will work. “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or… well… I guess we’re going to sell sugared water together, eh?”
via jwz: “Residents of Tainan learned a lesson in whale biology after the decomposing remains of a 60-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours.” (link) (dw: Don’t miss the compltely gratuitous d*** jokes)
Hmm, Orkut. Well, it’s much more responsive than Friendster, which counts for something. It seems a bit more useful overall, actually — the forums (kinda similar to LJ’s communities) are a nice touch.
Thanks to Typepad’s support for the Atom API, Jerry Steele rigged up an Applescript/Python combo that uploads pictures from iPhoto directly to a Typepad Photo Album. That’s what a flexible, extensible, symmetric syndication/posting API gets you, and this is only the start.
Everyone’s favorite WMD/litigibot is still in DNS as of this writing. Also, via Groklaw: Looks like SCO actually contributed, under the GPL, files to Linux that it’s now claiming violate its intellectual property. We’re talking about source code RPM’s signed with SCO’s (neé Caldera’s) key! I’m no lawyer, but that looks like a slam dunk for the good guys.
If you ever used a single floppy 128k Mac, you probably experienced the dreaded Disk Swapper’s Elbow.
Steven Frank’s been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. First Panic ships Unison, then Steven previews his own experimental “sideways forum”, Somniphobia.
Sven-S. Porst points out that you can drop shell scripts into the Script Menu on OS X, right along the expected Applescripts. Cool, I never knew that. I imagine that opens it to Python, Perl scripts, and the like, too. Stumbling around the Applescript site I also note a page full of (new?) special bookmarks for Safari, enabling interaction with the iTMS and Sherlock.
“Those of us who either run computers that don’t get infected, mail clients that aren’t stupid and broken like Outlook that encourage infections, or that generally protect themselves so they don’t become part of the problem in the first place do not appreciate being caught in the crossfire of anti-virus tools that seem insistent on sharing the joy anyway, almost as if they can’t handle the thought that we are NOT inundated by viruses, so therefore, they’ll inundate us with bogus messages instead.” (link)