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Jesse James Garrettwrites:

If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? (Okay, besides the iPod.) All the cool, innovative new projects are online.

Despite this, Web interaction designers can’t help but feel a little envious of our colleagues who create desktop software. Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web. The same simplicity that enabled the Web’s rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences we can provide and the experiences users can get from a desktop application.

That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.
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(Photo: Courtesy of William Crawford and Peter Brewin)

Rowan Hooper, WIRED, via Slashdot, reports:

In a world with millions of refugees, numerous war zones and huge areas devastated by natural disaster, aid agencies and militaries have long needed a way to quickly erect shelters on demand.

Soon, there will be such a method. A pair of engineers in London have come up with a “building in a bag” — a sack of cement-impregnated fabric. To erect the structure, all you have to do is add water to the bag and inflate it with air. Twelve hours later the Nissen-shaped shelter is dried out and ready for use.
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Paul Graham writes:

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that’s kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

If there is one message I’d like to get across about startups, that’s it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.
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The BBC reports:

The world’s first digital cinema network will be established in the UK over the next 18 months.

The UK Film Council has awarded a contract worth £11.5m to Arts Alliance Digital Cinema (AADC), who will set up the network of up to 250 screens.

AADC will oversee the selection of cinemas across the UK which will use the digital equipment.

High definition projectors and computer servers will be installed to show mainly British and specialist films.
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Aaron Krowne, Free Software Magazine, writes:

In this article, I respond to Robert McHenry’s anti-Wikipedia piece entitled “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia.” I argue that McHenry’s points are contradictory and incoherent and that his rhetoric is selective, dishonest and misleading. I also consider McHenry’s points in the context of all Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), showing how they are part of a Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaign against CBPP. Further, I introduce some principles, which will help to explain why and how CBPP projects can succeed, and I discuss alternative ways they may be organized, which will address certain concerns.
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Posted by timothy on Slashdot on Monday February 21, @09:28PM:

Baricom writes “Just a few weeks after a major power outage took out well-known blogging service LiveJournal for several hours, almost all of Wikimedia Foundation’s services are offline due to a tripped circuit breaker at a different colo. Among other services, Wikimedia runs the well-known Wikipedia open encyclopedia. Coincidentally, the foundation is in the middle of a fundraising drive to pay for new servers. They have established an off-site backup of the fundraising page here until power returns.”

Anthony and his laser projecting “uClinux”! Anthony is the first person to have successfully produced a fully-working uClinux-powered lasershow controller.
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Nathan Wolfe, in The War Stories Section of The Broadcast Archive, writes:

Of the 400+ member companies of NATE (and nonmembers that should be) that have guys climbing and working on towers, how many of those guys climb the big ones? You know, the guyed towers that thread the sky like a needle with their incredible height. I got that chance, but it was work that needed to be done at night during the customer’s “maintenance window”. My adventure began at 9:00pm when I met my coworker, Mike Croix, at the shop in the San Francisco Bay Area on a midsummer night in 1999.
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Peter Saint-André writes:

As I prepared the slides for a talk I gave yesterday in San Francisco, I started to think about the history of messaging. I came up with the following timeline (the early dates come from Joel Mokyr’s book The Lever of Riches)…
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Ken Belson, The New York Times, via news.com, via slashdot.org, writes:

It is the opening line on so many phone conversations these days: This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.

The taped message is so common that many callers might assume that no one is ever listening, let alone taking notes. But they would be wrong.

Monitoring is intended to track the performance of call center operators, but the professional snoops are inadvertently monitoring callers, too. Most callers do not realize that they may be taped even while they are on hold.

It is at these times that monitors hear husbands arguing with their wives, mothers yelling at their children, and dog owners throwing fits at disobedient pets, all when they think no one is listening. Most times, the only way a customer can avoid being recorded is to hang up.

“You could have a show on Broadway just playing the calls,” said Mike Schrider, president of J.Lodge, a call monitoring service based in Hammonton, N.J.
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Posted by CmdrTaco on Slashdot:

A number of announcements from the Mac World keynote this afternoon. The iPod Shuffle is pack-of-gum sized, no screen, weighs less than an ounce. Ships today, $99 for the half gig, $149 for a gig. The Mac Mini is the headless iMac… 6×6x2.5 with all the expected plugs, starting at $499. Lot’s of tiger bits, spotlight, virtual folders in Mail.app. iLife ‘05 will ship Jan 22. iPhoto gets folders and video support. iMovie supports HD. GarageBand gets 8 channel recording. iWork includes Keynote 2, and ‘Pages’ the new word processor and ships the same day as iLife.

Taipei 101 tower (archive picture)

Chris Hogg, BBC, Taipei reports:

It’s not often that you get to stand - literally - on the roof of the world.

But I’ve done it and I can tell you that it’s pretty windy. And if like me you don’t have a head for heights, it’s best not to look down.

I was recently given a sneak preview of the view from the top of the 508-m tall Taipei 101 building, which opened on Friday in time to host the New Year Countdown.

At 101 storeys high, it beats its nearest rival the Petronas Towers in Malaysia by more than 50m, to become the world’s tallest building.
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Boing Boing friend Ken Sitz sez: “My CONELRAD project just received a holiday gift from the Library of Congress in today’s announcement that DUCK AND COVER is being inducted into the National Film Registry, thus guaranteeing its perservation. We launched a campaign last March to rally our readers and interested parties to support our official nomination and we just published the first production history of the film.”

The Associated Press reports:

SEATTLE (AP) - Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) on Monday said sales of consumer electronics surpassed book sales for the first time and was its largest sales category over the Thanksgiving weekend, launching the online retailer’s busiest holiday selling season in 10 years.

The company also said it set a single-day sales record during the period with more than 2.8 million units, or 32 items per second, ordered across the globe.

Visitor traffic peaked at an estimated 700,000 users during a 60-minute period, according to Amazon.com’s Holiday Shoppers tracking program.
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The Ann Arbor News Staff and The Associated Press report:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - A Whitmore Lake man was sentenced to nine years in federal prison Wednesday for hacking into the national computer system of Lowe’s hardware stores and trying to steal customers’ credit card information.

The government said it is the longest prison term ever handed down in a computer crime case in the United States.

Brian Salcedo, 21, who was already on probation for hacking into an Ann Arbor Internet provider’s system four years ago, pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy and other hacking charges.
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This is a natural color, 60-centimeter (2-foot) high-resolution QuickBird satellite image featuring the freighter Selendang Ayu that ran aground and broke apart off the shore of Unalaska Island.

Evan Hansen, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, via :

Google has doubled the number of Web pages it indexes from 4 billion to about 8 billion, according to a posting on the company’s Web site.

The increase, announced Wednesday, means Google searchers will now have access to a much larger number of possible matches for queries.

The shift comes as Google faces increasing competition from rivals including Microsoft, which unveiled a test version of a search engine for its MSN Web portal on Thursday.

Jon Henley in Paris reports for the UK Guardian, via BoingBoing:

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement.
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BONNY SCHOONAKKER, South Africa’s Sunday Times, reports:

SOUTHERN Africa is experiencing weird vibes, according to scientists studying one of the more profound upheavals awaiting planet Earth.

This forthcoming revolution is a reversal in the Earth’s magnetic field, an event that occurs every 500 000 years or so.
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DAVID JOHNSTON and DOUGLAS JEHL, The New York Times, report:

WASHINGTON, July 22 - The Clinton and Bush administrations failed to grasp the gravity of the threat from Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and left counterterrorism efforts to a disparate collection of uncoordinated, underfinanced and dysfunctional government agencies, the commission on the attacks said in its final report published on Thursday.
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WorldNetDaily via Rense:

A mysterious power failure at Logan Airport that delayed dozens of flights for more than five hours has still not been explained - six days later.

Airport officials insist airline security was not compromised during the blackout Monday at Logan International’s Terminal E, but backup electrical systems failed to kick in as they are programmed under such circumstances.

Logan is the airport from which two of the Sept. 11 hijacked planes originated. Officials promised a full report on the blackout Wednesday. It has still not been issued. “We’re trying to figure out exactly what happened and why it happened,” said Phil Orlandella, Massport spokesman, last week.

The power outage was caused by an explosion at Massport’s Porter Street electric substation in East Boston around 2:15 p.m. Monday, officials said. The blast shut down the terminal’s security screening systems and other equipment. Power was restored around 7:10 p.m.
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linuxwrangler writes on slashdot.org:the customer is not always right. Best Buy consultant Larry Selden has identified “demon customers” like those who file for a rebate then return the item. OK, I get that one (hey Best Buy: dump those customer-despised rebates and you won’t have that problem…). Other categories like customers who only buy during sales are more interesting. Best Buy declined comment on how they are dealing with those customers. Some stores have actually “fired” customers. Welcome to the end result of all that customer information data mining.”

via BoingBoing.net:

Disposable mobiles purchased specifically for the purpose of illicit sexual liasons. A Boingboing pal in the UK says reports of this odd social trend are legit — throwaway phones allow sekrit lovers to communicate by SMS or voice, on the downlow. Snip from the blog where [Xeni Jardin] first read the phrase “shag phone”:

I heard someone (honest) talking about their “shag phone” the other day. He was a married man having an affair with a lady who was also married. It seems that one of the first heady rituals of the affair was to purchase a “his and her” pair of Pre-pay shag phones.

Only they knew each other’s number, so when the phone rang, they could answer in an appropriately passionate way. While much the same effect could be achieved with caller recognition (assuming they were mobile literate), there was more than just a romantic gesture involved with this behavior. Technology still can’t hide your phone bill from a suspicious spouse. And it can’t hide your amour’s frequently dialed number from prying eyes. Better to get a pair pre-pay phones with no incriminating phone bills or records. A small example of how the mobile is impacting on 21st century life.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

With Venus in transit at the Sun’s edge on June 8th, astronomers captured this tantalizing close-up view of the bright solar surface and partially silhouetted disk. Enhanced in the sharp picture, a delicate arc of sunlight refracted through the Venusian atmosphere is also visible outlining the planet’s edge against the blackness of space. The arc is part of a luminous ring or atmospheric aureole, first noted and offered as evidence that Venus did posses an atmosphere following observations of the planet’s 1761 transit.

The image was recorded using the 1-meter Swedish Solar Telescope located on La Palma in the Canary Islands. For the Institute for Solar Physics, Dan Kiselman, Goran Scharmer, Kai Langhans, and Peter Dettori were at the telescope, while Mats Lofdahl produced the final image.

Excellent movies of the transit - including one of the emergence ofVenus’ atmospheric aureole - are available from the Dutch Open Telescope, also observing from La Palma.

Alex Steffen writes on WorldChanging:

Under the right conditions, organic waste, from compost to sewage, can be processed to decay into slurry and biogas — fertilizer and fuel. Superflex is building biogas systems for small villages in Cambodia, Tanzania and elsewhere:

“Superflex has collaborated with Danish and African engineers to construct a simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family. The system has been adapted to meet the efficiency and style demands of a modern African consumer. It is intended to match the needs and economic resources that we believe exist in small-scale economies. The orange biogas plant produces biogas from organic materials, such as human and animal stools. For a modest sum, an African family will be able to buy such a biogas system and achieve self-sufficiency in energy. The plant produces approx. 4 cubic metres of gas per day from the dung from 2-3 cattle. This is enough for a family of 8-10 members for cooking purposes and to run one gas lamp in the evening.”

I remember hearing that back-to-the-land types in the 70s found biogas systems unstable and dangerous. Superflex claims to have solved these problems through “the innovation of a pressure equalisation system and a provocative new construction method and design” but I lack the background to say either way. Still, distributed biogas sounds like a great idea.