December 2003

  • I quickly assembled an Internationalization Gallery to see how folks are designing access to country and language sites.

  • Blade Servers

    I first heard about Blades – a chassis with ‘plug-in’ servers-on-a-card – a few years ago, and IBM is now at the point of heavily marketing them. I haven’t been a sys admin in several years, but these things still make me swoon.

  • The program for the IA Summit is rolling out.

  • Tell Me Why

    The book TellMeWhy tells the story of the first 24 months of design firm karlssonwilker. Hjalti and Jan come from Iceland and Germany, respectively, borrow some money, rent an office in New York, and wait for clients to show up. The book also shows all their work, good and bad. It’s real and sobering and…

  • So I bought an iPod used from a friend. Never has a device been so fulfilling and so annoying at the same time. I love the integration with the $.99-a-tune music store, but: the front panel is too sensitive, there’s no on/off switch, there’s no volume control (without attaching the additional wired remote do-dad), the…

  • Last month I wished recommendations would come from my favorite artists, and now Apple’s iTunes Music Store has ’em. At the moment I’m listening to twenty from the Counting Crows. Now if they only had permalinks…

  • The image displayed across the top of the site…is a 1600 pixel wide panoramic view from the top of my house, in Dorset. The scene was originally captured as a series of photographs, before being traced…to produce the cartoony version you see here… Thanks to an XML feed from weather.com, and some PHP jiggery pokery,…

  • The New Lego?

    Pixelblocks

  • NYC Panorama

    The Manhattan Skyline is one of the more beautiful drawings of Manhattan architecture I’ve seen. Produced on a Macintosh after photos taken from a ship circling the city, they’re a steal at $30.

  • Bill reports that the New York New Media Association has shut down. I’m not terribly suprised, as no one I know who has anything to do with new media was involved there. They seemed to want to create a new fashion industry, laying a superficial business+social scene over what actually succeeded here, which was people…

  • Paul Otlet

    Alex Wright’s article on Paul Otlet is a great read. The video excerpt from the documentary film is a must see.

  • Metropolis Magazine has a new website design, thankfully, as their old site was a prime example of great content suffering a lackluster design. It wasn’t that this architecture and design magazine ignored design, it was just quirky, in a bad way. Whereas a site like eBay is quirky in a novice designer kind of way.…

  • Oh Great LazyWeb Hear My Prayer: An RSS aggregator that converts text to speech and saves the resulting audio in an MP3 file. The result: listen to your favorite blogs’ new postings on your MP3 player away from the computer. Update! James points out this could be done with NetNewsWire and a little AppleScript, and…

  • Audblog is an audio blogging service, allowing you to record an audio post from any phone which gets converted to an audio file on your server. I had the reverse idea a while ago, an RSS aggregator that would convert your favorite feeds into an MP3 file for listening away from the computer (oh LazyWeb…).…

  • I enjoyed the new Lord of the Rings movie, Return of the King, but it was simply too long. I think the first two did a great job of not trying to convey everything in the books and simply be great movies. The last one is as well, until the ending, or endings I should…