http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress A memex, a sketchpad of research. Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:58:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en How could I blackout a site that hasn’t been updated in years? Instead, to protest the pending Internet regulation legislation in the US Congress right now, commonly known as SOPA (House bill) and PIPA (Senate bill), I will spare my social network followers the incessant snippets, and finally, blog definitively ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2012/01/19/on-sopa-pipa/ The "One More Thing" iPhone 4 wasn't much of a surprise to anyone paying attention. I think this FaceTime mobile videochat is the biggest news (of course his "one more thing") — it has vast implications for mobile communications of all sorts (and the notion of telepresence, in general). Will consumers ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2010/06/07/ios/ What about Ubiquitous Computing? Yesterday, Pope Steven P. Jobs convened his disciples to unveil the latest creation of his orthodoxy. In surveying the mainstream, industry and social media response, we have observed the following archetypal reactions to the announcement as negative. We offer these playful animal names to stretch the archetype ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2010/01/28/on-the-ipad/ Informal notes from “Internet as Playground and Factory” #IPF09 Conference at The New School Image from Constant's New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire [google book] By Mark Wigley (( via Google Books )) Expanding upon a micro-thought from a panel discussion “#IFP09 thankyou Thomas Malaby for showing me Constant's New Babylon: a post-monetary ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2009/11/14/new-babylon/ MEMEX TWO POINT OH It only just dawned on me. These status-tweet-feed conflations I've been following and fueling — this is the MEMEX that I've been talking about on these pages. Maybe not MEMEX 1.0 — our trails comprise not only encyclopedic knowledge and book knowledge — they also encompass our ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2009/11/13/memex-two-point-oh/ Adobe Scores a Winning Run Against Apple Today's big announcements at Adobe MAX signal bold moves to strengthen the reach of the Flash Platform while simultaneously heading off Apple's reluctance to offer the plugin in Mobile Safari. By allowing Flash Professional CS5 to export to native iPhone app code, Adobe wins ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2009/10/05/adobes-smooth-moves/ Keep tabs on me Make me an app that would auto-sync the URLs of all my currently open tabs to a shortened URL that I could syndicate at will. For example http://tabs.to/mercurious would redirect to the 11 browser tabs that I have open right now, in your browser. I suppose it could be built ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2009/06/30/social-browser-tabs/ Update Since writing this post, it appears that AT&T has disabled the USSD service reminder messages for Medianet prepaid data packages. Icing on the cake: they also opened the 3G faucet. Considering these significant improvements to the value proposition of GoPhone, we're down to 3 reasons. One can only surmise that executives ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2009/06/22/att-prepaid-stinks/ A Simple, Radical Solution to the Financial Crisis Could we fix systemic flaws simply by printing a new denomination with a picture of a mag-lev train riding through a wind farm on the back of the bill? The Preamble I'm not an economist or an expert on currency markets. But I am a ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2009/04/01/greenbacks/ Two significant events occurred since the last post. O8AMA K8TLYN ((Reference to my daughter, Kaitlyn Carroll, born December 7, 2008. This girl is no mere footnote in history. Mark my word.)) We hope this helps explain the hiatus. These two projects consumed all of my extra time. I'm just catching my breath now. ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2009/02/27/hiatus/ We present a collection of McCain/Palin supporters getting destroyed by the voices of reason: Strategist Smackdown A Democrat mouthpiece annihilates his Republican counterpart. Truly humiliating. via YouTube O'Reilly Hung Out To Dry by Donahue Although a pathetic shout-match between partisan extremists, O'Reilly lost this bout. via YouTube McCain Utterly Destroyed by a Maine ABC Affiliate Anchor If this ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/09/12/mccain-supporter-smackdowns/ Decision 2008 Convention Chatterbox The party conventions have magnetized the polarities of choice for our next president. Indeed, historic moments on both sides of the aisle. "Identity politics" aside, instead, let's just stick to the real issues. Presidential Election 2008 will come down to this decision for the American people, in three ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/09/03/i-just-had-to-say-it/ Will iPhone OS 3.0 make Weather location-aware? Why haven't people complained about this? Does this imply Weather might have been built on a yet-to-be announced Dashcode iPhone workflow? Dashboard Widgets as iPhone Apps. Seems like the natural course of mobile ecosystem evolution. Web Standards as native app dev to expand the developer ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/08/23/why-does-iphone-weather-lack-corelocation-support/ Aurora Feint: The Beginning by Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron game type: Block puzzle role-playing game hybrid (MMo) game platform: for iPhone and iPod Touch OS 2.0, free on iTunes App Store [gallery] Game Brief A superb 10-week opus by 22 year old designers Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron, Aurora Feint is, indeed, a beginning. Their ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/07/29/game-review-aurora-feint/ Open Source Native App for WordPress Although we began work last year on Safari based WordPress Theme and Plugin suite that had potential to offer the untethered convenience of mobile blogging, we were beat to the punch by Automattic/Effigent. Built on the iPhone SDK as a native Cocoa Touch app makes ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/07/25/being-able-to-edit-wordpress-is-awesome/ Although we have been graced with some quality free iPhone software already (see our "essential dozen" below), the wündervice still lacks The Killer App. What's The Killer App? To put it one way, when urged to flick icons on microquest for stroke amusement and no app earns a tap, then I'll know ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/07/24/killerapp-is-vaporware/ In a stroke of irony, the iPhone Dev Team, the folks who brought the world consistent jailbreak and SIM unlock tools, could totally save Apple's ass right now, as their activation servers are toppled due to the massive user-base (6 million) trying to update to firmware 2.0 on the 3G ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/07/11/jailbreak-irony/ Perhaps Thousands of iPhones Bricked at the Moment Any iPhone user (2.5G and 3G), who needs to activate their phone with iTunes is out of luck right now. Apparently slammed by activations or launch glitches, now is not the time to perform an update or restore function on ANY iPhone, as ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/07/11/iphone-20-launch-day-topples-activation-servers/ 1000 Cellphones debuts at world's largest media arts exhibition, Synthetic Times 2008, Beijing Video clip on YouTube David Carroll, Sven Travis, Benjamin Bacon, and Haiyan Huang debuted their mobile media installation, "1000 Cellphones" at the opening of Synthetic Times 2008, a media arts exhibition at The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/06/15/1000-cellphones-beijing/ It took Apple 45 years to even come close to this. Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad MIT thesis was covered by Create Digital Motion after I posted the video clip from MIT's New Media Reader featuring Dr. Alay Kay from Xerox PARC give a lecture on Sketchpad. The video clip has since garnered ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/05/27/sutherland-back-to-the-future/ Academic Site Earns New Distinction The professorial site's URL identifier has been streamlined to an expressively concise: »»» dave.parsons.edu Update your bookmarks. Here you can see Ivan Sutherland busy updating his link to my site on the TK2. http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/04/08/daveparsonsedu/ LOCKDOWN In a stunning sweep and a victory for Apple any way you slice it, an unnamed party has purchased the "iPhone DevTeam" Pwnage tool demonstrated on YouTube, widely announced for release today. The team has been disbanded and the jailbreak and unlock scene will probably never be the same again. Surely ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/03/31/notorious-iphone-devteam-bought-out/ Her Majesty the Queen of Impressions Returns to the Boob Tube Back in the glory days when the Simpsons first aired, I remember watching The Tracey Ullman Show afterwards, characterized by her zany characterizations that I was probably too young to fully appreciate. She's back, but this time on premium cable, ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/03/31/tracey-ullmans-state-of-the-union/ Launches of iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR Foreshadow Possible Strategy Steve Jobs "just says no" to Flash on iPhone. Well, on first glance, that's just what he says now, and we all know, like a good episode of Lost, there's always more to unpack and nothing is what it seems. ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/03/31/iphone-sdk-flash-air/ Specula-palooza Rocks On The latest in Flash and iPhone rumor-mongering suggests a YouTube plug-in for Mobile Safari will accompany this summer’s Touch OS 2.0 update. An uncorroborated claim indicates that this plug-in is contained within the recently seeded developer iPhone SDK 2.0 beta firmware. This would theoretically enable embedded YouTube movies to ... http://www.mercurious.com/wordpress/2008/03/31/youtube-plugin-rumor/