John Menick | Archive for February, 2007

Via markthornhill.

As a commenter on the Gothamist points out: “Imagine what would happen if this space-age surveillance and hardline police resources were put to use against actual terrorists, rather than bike-riding college kids.”

I’ve rarely blogged about code-related technology here, but in an effort to break with my own insignificant tradition, I want to add to the chorus of voices decrying the discontinuation of the Google SOAP search API. Not only is the SOAP API going bye-bye, but it’s AJAX replacement is abysmal. Please, Google, bring it back. I’ve installed the SOAP API on every Web site I’ve worked on since Google released it, and now, when I was about to do so again, you’ve gone and discontinued it.

Why is the new code inadequate? Oh, let me count the ways:

1) I love the ads. Cute. My non-profit clients will love them too. How can we turn them off without a clumsy CSS solution? Can someone get back to this guy? He asked his question in October of last year.

2) Formatting? Anyone? Is anyone there? Can someone please update that “Coming soon” in the developer’s guide.

3) Most clients want text (i.e. web) searches of their sites. They couldn’t care less about video or news. Why does it seem like all the developer documents foreground everything except web search.

4) And, oh yeah: Why AJAX? AJAX is wonderful, if you surf the Web with javascript enabled, and if you can install any browser you want on your machine… but these two things aren’t always possible, hence, a broken search page. Why is this thing only in AJAX?

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to spend some time fooling around with an AJAX-based API for search. I would even spend some time messing with one in alpha let alone beta version, but please, Google, if you are going to replace a great product, replace it with one that at least has a complete instruction manual. Otherwise, Yahoo beckons…

Got to love the little greenscreen demo in the article’s photo. I guess those two lamps behind the talking head help matte in the background. It also looks as if here background is not a physical place at all, but an info-graphic.

One of the things that is interesting about the article, at least from a US perspective, is that most of the cameras-in-the-courtroom anxieties rehash what was debated about Court TV years ago. For example: ” And in California, a judge said on Friday that he would allow full television coverage of the rock producer Phil Spector’s murder trial, declaring that it was time to discard ‘fear of cameras in the courtroom.’”

Unconsciously mimicking Court TV Primetime’s “Seriously Entertaining” tagline a representative from Datadiar, the tech company hosting the video, claims: “It may be difficult to understand why we do this for free,” she said. “We are objective. We are in the middle. We are only lawyers and professionals, and offering information. It’s not like television.”

Granted, Datadiar is online, and may be able to claim it is literally not television. (Even though the rep is making a qualitative claim as well.) But can this coverage ever be objective? Will it devolve into entertainment? Sure, it may not literally be TV, but is it worse, i.e. … YouTube?

Just days after a suspicious auction of an infamous window, an eerie new 8mm film surfaces capturing the first lady and President Kennedy moments before the assassination. And it’s released on President’s Day no less.

Except for the footage’s crisp, Kodachrome-bright imagery, there is nothing obviously outstanding about its 39 seconds, but, like the dodgy window, its origins are fairly strange. Is it possible to ask without a hint of conspiratorial innuendo why it was released now? As with the window auction, Dallas Morning News has the most detailed coverage:

After the motorcade passed, [the cameraman] Mr. [George] Jefferies returned to his office, not aware that the president had been shot.

After he had the film developed, “I showed it to a few people and then put it in a drawer, and frankly, I forgot all about it.”

He casually mentioned it more than a year ago to his daughter and son-in-law, Bonnie and Wayne Graham, who live in suburban Fort Worth. They asked to see it, and Mr. Jefferies later gave it to them.

Mr. Graham called Mr. Mack about a year ago to ask if the film might be valuable. The curator not only thought it might have historical value, he asked Mr. Graham if he’d be interested in donating it to the museum.

“I talked about the tax advantages, and he sounded interested,” Mr. Mack said. “As far as I know, he didn’t shop it around before he gave it to us.”

After museum officials acquired the film, they had it professionally restored to bring out the original color and eliminate scratches, he said.

Though the movie is the sixth in the museum’s collection, and is of far less historical interest than the Zapruder film (which is owned by the federal government), its public release generated intense interest.

Simon Sellars‘ Ballardian is an odd enterprise: not just a Web site devoted to the works of JG Ballard, but a blog devoted to events that are in some way Ballardian. Amazingly, it works. For example, see the recent entries on the UK parking bombings, and astronaut Lisa Nowak. “The suburbs dream of violence”…

(For your added reading pleasure, also see Sellars fascinating Guide to Micronations.)

Torrent and more info available via The Thing.

From the BBC:

Japanese firm Fujitsu is pushing a technology that can encode data into a picture that is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera….The technique stems from a 2,500-year-old practice called steganography, which saw the Greeks sending warnings of attacks on wooden tablets and then covering them in wax and tattooing messages on shaved heads that were then covered by the regrowth of hair.

I was too late in finding out about the Werner Herzog talk this Friday to get tickets, but in the meantime there’s Tom Bissell’s The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog.

I have had an ongoing interest in the culture of camouflage, particular when camouflage stops performing its primary function—hiding soldiers—and becomes something else. Soldiers protecting a gray Western city while dressed in green jungle camouflage provide a perfect example of how camouflage not only becomes divorced from its original purpose, but also reverses its role by drawing attention to soldiers.

So, while reading a recent article the Times published on the new Army Combat Uniform [ACU], this paragraph caught my attention:

The most obvious change is its digital-pixel camouflage, a blur of muted tones that many soldiers say seems best suited to desert combat. The old uniform, by contrast, came in bold black, brown, tan and green blotches. In Iraq, many soldiers have worn the older Desert Combat Uniform, a variation on the standard one, but with desert hues. But the new uniform, which will replace both the old one and its desert counterpart, has colors and a camouflage pattern that its designers say is effective in desert, “woodland” and urban combat. Having just one combat uniform saves the Army money.

Effective in three different contexts? Sounds doubtful, especially when the reporter reminds us about the added economic benefits of a three-in-one uniform.

I looked up more information on the uniform today and found that the excellent and indefatigable Tom Vanderbilt had written about the change back in September of 2004 for Slate:

The design energy applied to the ACU went mostly into making a uniform that would be invisible to foes but visible to comrades. Even a ceremonial detail like the traditional U.S. flag emblem has been khaki-ized into muted tan-and-blacks on some uniforms; no longer a symbol intended to be recognizable across the battlefield, it’s an infrared feedback element visible only to those equipped to see it.

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