When
· Naughties
· · 2007
· · · May
· · · · 31 (4 entries)
Gears · On Google Gears, I’m definitely in the skeptical What is this “being at work while offline” of which you speak? camp. I wasn’t convinced when Adam Bosworth was singing this song five years ago and I’m still not. Doesn’t mean having programmable persistence in the browser isn’t a good idea, though. Browsers already cache heavily, of course, but not in a way that’s sensitive to the needs of any particular Ajax code. I mean, consider a mapping app; if the computer knows where I am, why shouldn’t the browser pre-populate the cache with a few hundred local map tiles? They don’t change that much. And so on. Gears at least seems pretty lockin-free.
[17 comments]
[17 comments]
Going, Going, Gone · In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, a William Gibson elegy (probably to vanish behind the paywall), lamenting cities’ crushing their history and our memories without even noticing. Right here in Vancouver we’re seeing it happen in real time, in months not decades. The Canada Line project is digging a seven-storey-deep ditch down the middle of what once was a thriving commercial street that runs more or less up and down the city’s prime meridian. While we crack bitter jokes about speciation setting in among the rodents either side of the Big Ditch, and mutually-incomprehensible dialects among the humans, the merchants aren’t laughing at all. Read The Village a Train Ate in The Tyee (an excellent publication). That’s my village, and we’ve been regulars at the restaurant in the picture; Simon has cleaned up more than one bowl of miso soup spilled by our kids. The locals say nobody told us what we were letting ourselves in for, and that’s true, but it seems irrelevant now. So sad.
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
Verschärfte Vernehmung · Godwin’s Law, you say? I don’t think so. Andrew Sullivan points out prior use of the term “Enhanced Interrogation”, promoted not only by the malevolent thickheads of the Bush administration but by most of the Republican candidates for President; prior use, that is, by the Gestapo. Meanwhile Dick Cheney argues that the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution are tools for terrorists. Has the American right wing completely lost its mind? I even had to unsubscribe from Instapundit; I thought I ought to keep in touch with one articulate camera-loving righty, but there was one too many waves of nausea provoked by his “Al-Qaeda tortures much worse than we do and the Mainstream Media ignores it” whining. I had come to think, in mid-life, that while I will never really be conservative, there are smart honorable people on that side who have good points to make. That may be true outside the United States, but in the American context, near as I can tell, at the moment “conservative” means “pro-torture” which means “scum” ...
[15 comments]
[15 comments]
