A new beta of NetNewsWire is out.

Syncing with Google Reader is included, which is going to be extremely handy. I'm a little disappointed that each individual feed can only live in a single folder: I'd hoped that NetNewsWire would adopt the Google Reader approach of allowing me to tag a feed with multiple folder names or tags, allowing me to read, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent blog under Columnists, US News, US Politics or Daily Must Reads.¹

The beta is – as is almost always the case with Brent Simmons' work – rock-solid so far. Whilst there are still some wrinkles to be worked out around syncing of Shared Items, how to deal with Flagged Items in NetNewsWire, and NetNewsWire's Clippings feature, the basic functionality is still there and works as well as ever.

There's one thing I hadn't been expecting until I read the beta's description: NetNewsWire now displays an ad in a small pane at the bottom-left corner of its main window. I paid for NetNewsWire back before it became a free application, and I feel mildly peeved that I'm having to view ads as the price of installing a point upgrade. I can't really complain – my NetNewsWire subscription was paid years ago, long before the program was acquired by Newsgator, so there's no question I've had good value for my however-many-dollars it was – but it feels wrong to suddenly have an ad-supported version appear on going from version 3.1 to 3.2. If it had appeared as part of the shift from version 3.2 to version 4.0 it'd feel more acceptable, somehow.

None of which is to say that I won't pay to make the ads disappear as soon as Newsgator make that option available: NetNewsWire is one of the best, most flexible pieces of software I've used. Whilst I've occasionally dallied with using Google Reader as my primary feed aggregator, I keep on returning to NetNewsWire, and I hope to be using it for years to come.

1. I realise that I could always use Smart Lists to combine individual feeds into virtual folders, but it'd be awfully cumbersome to have to add a feed's Subscription Name to multiple Smart Lists. In Google Reader, all I have to do is tag a feed with a few distinct tag values and it automagically appears under each tag. Perhaps feed tagging is one of the changes to come in version 4.0 – here's hoping… ↩

Dracula's Drycleaner Must Die!

[Via MetaFilter]

Ridley Scott is being lined up to direct a prequel to Alien:

Twentieth Century Fox is resuscitating its "Alien" franchise. The studio has hired Jon Spaihts to write a prequel that has Ridley Scott attached to return as director.

Spaihts got the job after pitching the studio and Scott Free, which will produce the film.

The film is set up to be a prequel to the groundbreaking 1979 film that Scott directed. It will precede that film, in which the crew of a commercial towing ship returning to Earth is awakened and sent to respond to a distress signal from a nearby planetoid. [...]

Two thoughts:

1. Please let it not feature Ripley in any way, shape or form. The universe is a big place; there's no reason she should be anywhere near the action.¹
2. Anything less than an '18' rating would be completely unacceptable.

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. You know what would be really good: a prequel where we never see a single human being. Especially not ones called Ripley, Weyland or Yutani. ↩

Maciej Cegłowski describes the Polish constabulary in action:

If you are ever, ever in Warsaw, I highly recommend you flag down a passing cop car and tell them you've been assaulted. You will meet with a kind of unconditional acceptance and emotional support that I didn't know could be found outside one's immediate family. The police will also go apeshit and run around with guns and screaming sirens in a way that very few families do, and for the police it's perfectly legal. I was lucky enough to flag down an entire van full of Warsaw's finest, and they immediately shouted for me to climb in and tell them which way to go. No invasive questions about who I was, no skepticism of any kind, not even questions about what had happened – just an instant desire to kick hooligan ass.

"I was assaulted by four guys just past that bridge!" I yelled when I got in the van. I barely had time to get my foot off the pavement before we were shooting down the highway in the wrong direction, sirens blaring, shotguns skittering around on the floor.

"MOTHERFUCKERS!" yelled the driver. "MOTHERFUCKING COCK FUCKING SONS OF MOTHERFUCKING BITCHES!"

Believe me, the story gets better from that point onwards…

Brent Simmons has posted an account of all the decisions to be made in deciding how to add a single feature to NetNewsWire.

I'm a sucker for this sort of writing about the decisions behind a programmer's work. I especially liked the part where Simmons reflects upon the proposition that improvements in system specifications can invalidate long-standing assumptions about how a user interface works:

When I first sent this to private beta testers, they liked the feature, but thought it should have some kind of feedback.

Well, of course there was feedback – some text and a spinning progress indicator in the status bar. But, unsurprisingly, people didn’t notice it.

I thought to myself, "You know, 10 years ago, that would have been fine. It would have been the right thing to do, to use the status bar."

And I wondered why that was no longer true. The answer, I think, is monitor size. With bigger displays people create bigger windows, and it’s much less likely they'll notice something in the status bar, since the status bar is so much farther away from where their focus is.

I'd tend to take advantage of a significantly larger display by arrange more windows on-screen rather than making any single window larger, but perhaps that's just me. Besides, I don't think most users pay attention to application status bars nowadays, regardless of window size.¹

1. For what it's worth, I think using Growl for this sort of notification would be ideal – I love it even more today than I did in 2005 – but for some inexplicable reason not all Mac OS X users have seen the light. I suppose Simmons has to cater for the heathens too. ↩

Medical Afflictions of the Cartoon World.

Nicholson Baker meets the Kindle:

It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside the box were some puffy clear bladders of plastic, a packing slip with "$359" on it, and another cardboard box. This one said, in spare, lowercase type, "kindle." On the side of the box was a plastic strip inlaid into the cardboard, which you were meant to pull to tear the package cleanly open. On it were the words "Once upon a time." I pulled and opened.

Inside was another box, fancier than the first. Black cardboard was printed with a swarm of glossy black letters, and in the middle was, again, the word "kindle." There was another pull strip on the side, which again said, "Once upon a time." I'd entered some nesting Italo Calvino folktale world of packaging. (Calvino's Italian folktales aren't yet available at the Kindle Store, by the way.) I pulled again and opened.

Within, lying face up in a white-lined casket, was the device itself. It was pale, about the size of a hardcover novel, but much thinner, and it had a smallish screen and a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom made of tiny round pleasure-dot keys that resisted pressing. I gazed at the keys for a moment and thought of a restaurant accordion.

[Via The Awl]

Not one, not two, but three sets of solar eclipse-related images:

• The shadow of this week's solar eclipse as seen from orbit.
• A composite image of the solar corona, taken during a March 2006 eclipse but still worth a look.
• The Big Picture brings us its customary compilation of stunning images. Escpecially #3.

The secret origin of the bollard:

It seems that the armaments manufacturers were worried that the government would reuse the captured cannons for its own military forces, and hence the firms wouldn't be able to sell more cannons to the government. After representations to the government, it was agreed that the loss of business would close several companies and as a healthy arms industry was (and still is) considered to be vital to national security, Parliament agreed to scrap the French cannons.

It sounds like an urban legend, but I haven't found a better explanation so far.

Forgotten Bookmarks posts pictures of printed material – notes, pictures, letters, advertisements, you name it – left between the pages of second-hand books. Fascinating stuff: sometimes poignant, sometimes educational, sometimes just plain odd.

I'm not sure why Harry Potter is milking that cow, and I'm not sure I want to…¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. I haven't read any of the books and I've only seen the first four films, but I don't remember any scenes of wizard-on-ungulate action. I'm fairly sure I would remember a scene like that. ↩

In the wake of the Kindle/1984 fiasco, you've got to give Jeff Bezos credit for issuing such a straightforward apology:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

The next question is what Amazon will do differently next time a supplier screws up and supplies them with a title they don't have the appropriate rights to. Will they…

• Stop selling the title and compensate the rights holders out of their own pocket, leaving the books on customers' Kindles?
• Contact people who purchased the edition of a book they should never have sold to them and offer their customers a different, legitimately published, issue of the title?
• Send purchasers an email giving advance warning that as of date/time X the title in question will be disappearing from their library and their account will be credited with a refund?

Interesting times…

[Via rc3.org]

Bill Gates' Facebook page.

[Via Memex 1.1]

What song does your iPod play when Shuffle-Fail strikes?

Mine is Take On Me by a-ha, because I have Album by Artist as my default sort mode. If I were sorting by song name it'd be Vampire Weekend's A-Punk.

Two words: Kermit goatse.

A lot of people are distinctly sceptical about the announcement that Associated Press plans to crack down on unpaid use of articles on the web:

Each article – and, in the future, each picture and video – would go out with what The A.P. called a digital "wrapper," data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

AP are keeping quiet about how this can be done, but perhaps it's a simple four-step process.

1. Update their robots.txt file.
2. Build a proprietary, DRM-laden news client that runs over the internet but bypasses the web entirely.
3. ?
4. Profit!

It worked for Apple with the iTunes Store. Why not for AP?

"If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we're going to do that," [A.P. president and CEO] Mr. Curley said.

I think Mr Curley is underestimating the size of the business opportunity that presents itself. If AP's techies have really come up with a bulletproof way to let your content out on the web and have people link to and embed it whilst ensuring that you can track its use and demand that they pay for it¹ then AP can make billions out of licensing their wondrous new technology to the music industry, the film industry, the book publishing business and the games industry. C'mon guys, think big!

On the other hand, it could turn out that within an week of AP releasing their new toy into the wild there'll be a Firefox add-in to unravel their 'wrapper', then within a month there will be plugins and bookmarklets to do the same for any modern web browser.

[NYT story via Fimoculous]

1. Leaving to one side, for the time being, the question of how this proposition interacts with the concept of fair use. ↩

Paul Graham on Makers and Managers:

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done. [...]

[Via rc3.org]

Interview With the Genie:

2. You are under contract to your master for three wishes. Your master decides to use his/her last wish to wish for more wishes. How do you respond?

[...]

Candidate B: Here's the one thing the public knows about being a genie: You make…wishes…happen. Yeah, OK, there's more to it – subtle gradations of the Necroid Plane and speaking the language of fire – but no one gives a flying wank. Now, I ask myself: How badly do I want to serve? If you want a reputation as a closer, you make it look like you shit wishes, pardon my French. It's about optics. You can't will an extra wish into being? You go out and make it happen with your two hands and your sweat. Your master wants his own personal flying dragon? You find a giant albatross, slap on some metallic paint, and saddle her up. Not big enough to ride? Get five albatrosses, stitch them together, and you got your master a dragon with five heads. ABGW. Always Be Granting Wishes.

Amigurumi lemmings.

So cute…

[Via jwz]

Kill or cure?

Help to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.

[Via Ben Goldacre]

Sometimes managers deserve exactly what they get:

Not too long ago, the CTO at Dudley H.'s company had a startling revelation: there should never, ever be a need for technical support. If a client has an issue using one of their products, then the problem is most certainly in the product. Maybe the UI is a little confusing. Maybe it's not documented enough. Maybe the documentation isn't clear enough. Whatever the case, every client issue means that someone – be it the developer, tester, or helpdesk technician – didn't do their job properly and should strive to improve themselves.

[...] Being the loyal employees that they were, Dudley and his fellow helpdesk technicians began developing these reports.

ISSUE #88334

Client Issue:
"You're wrong, check with Bob Williams. I spoke with him last week, and his answer contradicted what you're telling me now."

Problem Point:
Even though Bob Williams hasn't worked for our company for two and a half years, the technician should have the names, addresses and phone numbers of all past employees committed to memory. This would allow the technician to contact Bob while the client holds. However, if Bob no longer works at the company because he is dead, then the technician will need to call upon his powers of transcending the mortal fabric of existence — which should have been covered during his first week of training — to contact Bob in an alternate dimension.

Improvement Goal:
Transport backwards in time and confront Bob regarding the contradicting misinformation he has apparently been spreading to clients. Then pinch him unmercifully.