Mozilla recognizes that its strengths for normal users are its extensions and customization....So Firefox is aiming to be the best general Web browser - e.g. it wants to be faster for AJAX apps.

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Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing "an extensible bookmarks back-end platform", adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" - all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version.

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Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.

#2) Tearing down the walled garden will enhance the mobile content experience and release value for the industry. The objective should be a free market for content and applications, based on open standards and accessible to all. We think the current fragmentation of formats and channels to market is holding back growth.

#9) The mobile experience is limited to voice and text by in-efficient search and discovery mechanisms. We think any service should be accessible from the standby screen and it should be as simple as dialling a number.

#8) Mobile devices are the natural choice for interacting with communities. Sharing experiences through your mobile device should be as simple as making a voice call. Wegravitymonkey thinks the success of user-generated content, social networking and community interaction through mobile devices will depend on enhancing developing innovative, mobile-specific paradigms of communication rather than replicating the desktop experience.

I decided it would be worth the effort to try to dig up my interview with Paul, (now eleven years old!), and get that back on there through the tubes of the internet. Thanks to the Wayback Machine for saving files that my old computers, hard-drive and laziness about backing up stuff couldn't solve. Here's the article, and it includes the transcript from our hour long chat, too.

I spent more than my fair share of time at the old electronic music studios that were once the Columbia-Princeton studios, in it's final years. And it was truly an amazing experience, not only for the historical significance of cutting tape on the same blocks and tweaking the same oscillators that made those early "masterworks" of electronic music, but for the influence that it had on all my instrumental compositions as well (a fondness for timbral manipulation, an attention to envelope generation as a facet of phrasing, perhaps?).

But down the hall the revolution had already been well underway towards a purely digital creation -- even past the doors of the bastard step-child that was FM synthesis and MIDI. Even now, I fear, I'm still enough of a academic pitch snob (or, as Davy would say, I still retain the buttstix) to find too little to enjoy of the auto-composed music from either "serious" composers or whatever you'd want to call the "techno" kids (I wouldn't know what to call them, but by simply trying to distinguish "techno" as something "other than serious" I do everyone a great injustice).

But composition, like everything else, is shaken by the digital revolution, by the power of the personal computer, and now -- hopefully -- by the real gains brought about by the internet and the Long Tail. The machines of music are always changing, thankfully, and the ears that consume the ouput are as well -- and at the end of the day, the gains of digital productivity hit not only the office, but the parlor room that housed the player piano, too.

Who but the biggest curmudgeons (and lord knows, there are many academic composers who fit the bill) can resist the joy of Electroplankton?

After nearly two-years of on-again and off-again play, we've finally defeated Bowser the end of Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2. Some call this the best in the series of Mario games, and based on what I've seen I agree -- an amazing mix of emergent behaviour for your protagonist (Mario or Luigi), a diverse landscape with challenging scenes, and enough flexibility and replayability to keep you hooked.

In the end, my double-jointed super GBA son actually did all the work to get to the castle -- but he wouldn't finish the job...as he simply doesn't care about "winning" or completing the game. How wonderfully zen.

Two years is a nice commitment for a game, even off and on. Just think that all three movements and score and parts for this thing took a mere nine months.

Much has been written about blogs and participatory journalism, which I needn't re-tell, but instead point to two great examples: Yesterday there was a bunch of underground fires and explosions that ultimately shut off power to a bunch of homes (including ours). Baristanet, a local blog (no, probably, the local blog), covered it, practically in realtime with a combination of posts and comments. While TV, print and radio did get there -- the locals were there first, covering it for all the other office-bound commuters anxious to find out of their pets were beginning to swelter.

Meanwhile, more and more folks are descending upon the one part of the Patriots operation that is open to the public: training camp. The net-famous Mrs. B (Karen Cardoza) has been providing blow-by-blow training camp diaries before there were blogs, and now she's joined by many others -- including some amazing photos from Erdoboy. There simply is no other time of year that regular fans get get this close to the team -- and the minute-by-minute coverage of the practices (and Ed's photos) rival that of practically any "real" journalist (although Mike Reiss is hard to beat, and he has a press pass).

Omaha!

This is a picture of my eyeballs -- I guess to be more accurate, my retinas. I went to my eye doctor's appointment to get dialated and to get examed as last year the doctor found a small blind spot in checking my peripheral vision, and then observed a spot on my retina. A referral to a opthamologist confirmed it was nothing to worry about (perhaps it's fairly common?), but to monitor it every year. So here is a shot, straight on, taken with a big white machine (click for more detail):

On my right eye, way way over at nine o'clock is the vitreous tuft -- it looks like a cannoli (click on the image for a bigger view):


Or maybe like a submarine swimming around the corner of the inky depths of ocean. Or a microbe on a giant grape.

Just had to share. I think it's cool I can have pictures of my body. Proctologist, anyone?

Sarah Trigg's artwork is covered by Karen Steen at MetropolisMag:

A directory of fast-food restaurants in the Detroit Metro Airport; a map of Sprint's cell-phone service across the United States; the grid of Northwest Airlines’ flight patterns: all of these are organic systems that developed in response to need and efficiency, much like the systems within the human body.

To painter Sarah Trigg, these urban patterns even look a little like cells, dendrites, and organs. Taking inspiration from secondhand surgery textbooks, airport layouts, and fuzzy aerial photos found on the Web, Trigg maps fictive terrains that are part landscape, part bodyscape.
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Found via kottke.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language....

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

I've been toying with some concepts about tags, shared tags and the ability to uses tags as an engine for various things...trying to find any sort of emergent behaviour that may mesh well with my various interests. While it's easy through del.icio.us to see the crowd, I'm wondering how I can dig up the wisdom (see also, Clive's Slate article and his recent pong post).


So I tossed together an experiment in processing, using some of the parsing code I had from Shrunq, and a java library called Classifier4J. It grabs each and every URL available from my del.icio.us feed, and parses and classifies each. The result is a 3D representation of my tags, where their Z-location is based upon the "ranking" of the tag -- much like a tag cloud -- with the actual terms used for classification pulsing behind. Once it's loaded you can click to have it grab pages to test, to see how well random webpages match up to the classification that we've created.


I've already written about this, so I'll do an incredibly silly thing, and quote myself:

I've started to amass a bunch of links in my del.icio.us account. It's not just a bunch of random junk, but it's stuff that I made a point of noting that I had to remember -- at least enough to go to del.icio.us to post it. Tag clouds are cool, and it's a nice way to quickly see the tags, and thus, topics that are most interesting to me.

But I wanted to know more about each tag, to know more about what's under each: What makes that topic more important to me than that topic? How are my tags interrelated? Are there things that connect seemingly disperate topics -- such as "buddhism" and "J2ME" and "wifi"? That is, other than me?

There. I make a lousy quote. See the applet in action, read more, or watch the thrilling video. There are certainly some next steps to this -- just not sure exactly what.

If you'd like to check out a cloud brain based on your tags, let me know, I can build it from my laptop. I've thought about building it out so that people can request it online, and my server will automatically queue and create the necessary data files -- but I'll only write that if enough people are interested...

JSR 179 & OEM Location APIs: Location is a tricky one. The APIs themeselves don't require signatures, but getting the SDKs and tools with which to compile apps that use them on CDMA phones require additional approval. Nextel historically opened up the GPS APIs on the phone to anyone, and the only requirement was a phone-triggered privacy consent for location transmission; that's still the practice we're following for all Nextel phones. On CDMA phones, it's different--the location infrastructure that allows the GPS chip on the phone to get a location fix uses the data network more extensively than does the infrastructure on iDEN, and every location fix carries an actual monetary cost to Sprint. Our position determining equipment (PDE) servers on CDMA are sized based on certain usage assumptions, and a sudden spike in the frequency of location fixes that could result if that SDK were freely downloadable. We're working on changing all of that so that it's no longer a problem to distribute the SDKs, but it'll take some time.

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I know that these things don't necessarily say what many would like to hear -- that it's all free, that all you have to do is get a cell phone and go for it, and that there's nothing standing between you and mobile glory. But there are options:

Try it on an iDEN phone....

Try it on a non-phone...

Drop us a line....

Link.

Well, at least the deal is in place, and the cap has risen to $102M for this season with two days left for everyone to digest the deal and sign any of their own players to new deals before free agency. There will be some interesting manuevers, surely, and the Patriots have some deals to make of their own.

Interestingly, the Pats released #55, Willie McGinest right after the new CBA was signed. Why then? Of course, both sides knew that this next year of his contract was inflated at $7M and that a re-do would be in order. But with the cap suddenly higher with the new deal, there was no imminent pressure to release Willie -- is there another deal on the table that needs the space? Deals that wouldn't have been done without the new CBA?

McGinest is the rebirth of this franchise. You can draw lots of lines to various sources to the Patriot's success. The Krafts, of course. Belichick and Brady. But from the depths of the league in the early 90's, with Parcells, Bledsoe and #55, the Patriots began their upward ascent. Battling back from numerous injuries -- playing through 'em all, and now in the latter part of career playing smarter and stronger than anyone would have guessed. And, we're told, a total leader in the locker room.

Watching the footage of the Super Bowl parade in Boston, where on the podium #55's giant arms draped around Belichick like giant bear restraining it's child (then later goading the coach to dance). McGinest is as much a factor in the rebirth of the Patriots as the rest of 'em. And Ernie Adams -- maybe he's really the wizard behind the curtain. I hope McGinest returns for another tour of duty -- although I wonder if taking a 2 or 3 year deal from Cleveland might be too much to pass up.

Save the swap for Corey Dillon a few years ago, the Pats haven't done much in free agency, so I don't expect much again this season.

I think the Boston Herald (Online) has subliminaly sent a message, and one that many football fans echo:

Settle it now, for the difference in money now is not worth the costs to the game, even this season, by messing with what works....or at the very least, the system we've all gotten used to.

And before all those folks at the Globe get smug about typos on the Herald website -- at least they didn't print that error out along with your credit card info and distribute it, actually, more like abandon it, at locations all around town.

The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.

Nice to put some research and numbers behind it. It's interesting that the study focuses on email, and not instant messaging. It's easier, in the fragments of discussion that pass in IM, to get across details of expression...that plus the fact that I'm much more likely to toss in a smiley in IM whereas I won't in email.