Aw, Snap! Chrome tab crashes.

I think Google Chrome is a great browser, but even great browsers sometimes fail. In fact, I just had two tabs crash on me. They happened to both be Google Docs tabs so Google can’t pin the blame on anyone else. However, instead of just sitting there dumbly, Chrome informed me that the tabs weren’t responding and gave me the option to close them. This is part of Google’s whole strategy for Chrome. The renderer for every tab is a separate process, so that if something goes wrong, they can be killed individually rather than crashing the whole browser.

While being able to kill the tabs was nice, it’s not what I’m writing about. What I’m writing about is Chrome’s brilliant strategy of, when it fails, being too cute for you to be mad at it. It’s a master stroke. Software that exploits people’s emotions to get people to like it even when it misbehaves! Software has finally evolved to the level of a two year old. The image above is a screenshot of the page Chrome showed me after I chose to kill the tabs. How can you be mad when looking into those poor pixel-art eyes?

Apache logo, courtesy of The Apache Software Foundation

For an unrelated project, I’m writing a section about open source licenses and I happened across language in the Apache license that gives users the right to “publicly display [and] publicly perform” the work. Immediately after reading those words, I sat there for a good five minutes thinking up creative ways to turn the source code of the most popular open-source web server in the world into a performance piece. Unfortunately none my ideas for a song and dance rendition of the Apache source code were very good (in fact, the very concept is wretched. It’d be intolerable to sit though). Though a copyleft, source-code based, visual art installation could be pretty cool… with pages of code pasted to the walls, floor and ceiling. Errant CRTs jutting from the mass of lacquered paper, scanning over the codebase in amber on black. The guts of the enabler of the modern web on display in all their hideous monotony.

A screenshot of the Google N-Gram Viewer in action. Plot shows the relative frequency of the words internet, computer, telephone and robot from 1850 to 2000.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Google Books is an attempt to digitize every book ever written. The project began in 2002 and many libraries, universities and publishers got on board. In 2004 the project stirred up a bit of controversy with lawsuits against Google charging that Google Books (then called Google Print) violated the copyrights of the books it scanned.

History aside, the reason I’m writing about this is that Google has released a load of data on the frequency of occurrence of words and phrases in the entire body of books it has scanned. The goal of publishing the data seems to be to allow academics to research the evolution of language, as used in books. However, beyond just making the raw data available, Google has provided a neat little webapp that is easy enough for anyone to use. It’s fun to play with! As pictured above, I made a plot of a few technology related words (with rather predictable results).

This article is a blog conversion of a manual I wrote for a journalism course this semester. Here’s a the original PDF: How To Make Your Mac Read To You.

Introduction

It’s late at night. Your eyes are blurry from hours of reading at your computer screen but you have pages more to go before tomorrow’s deadline. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could close your eyes and have your computer read those last few pages to you?

You just finished that paper you had so much trouble writing. You don’t have time to find someone to proofread it before tomorrow and you’ve been staring at it for so long you know you’ll read right over any mistakes. Wouldn’t it be nice if your computer could read it to you out loud, making those silly grammatical mistakes sound obvious?

If you‘re using Apple’s OS X, you can do both of those things easily. Apple was one of the early adopters of speech synthesis in 1984 and support for text to speech has been in their operating systems ever since. OS X has been shipped with all Macintosh computers since 2002. Unfortunately Apple is fond of moving the location of speech related menu items between versions, making users find them again. This document will teach you how to assign speech actions to a quick key combination in OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” and how to use the command line tool “say” to create audio files of text to listen to at your leisure. (more…)

Engadget reports on a clock that runs on energy derived from digesting insects that it captures. They incidentally mention a Japanese project that worked on fuel cells that run on blood. The intended use was for embedded medical technology (think pacemakers) where the concept of a non-toxic fuel cell that runs on you makes a lot of sense, but I can’t help thinking of that terrible war of the worlds remake with Tom Cruise where the tripods go around harvesting people to fill their tanks full of blood.

Creepy huh? At least Skynet was solar powered.

American english has a serious deficiency of truly shocking expletives. Perhaps it is the paradoxical climate of verbal permissiveness where almost any profane utterance makes frequent appearances in popular media that has desensitized us, and thereby rendered our expletives impotent. When an american wants to use an expletive powerful enough to startle old ladies and make mothers hide their babies, there is really only one option these days. It is unfortunate that when american culture diverged from british culture, certain expletives were left behind. Words like bloody became mundane rather than profane. When we hear them used as utterances of frustration or anger, they sound more quaint than shocking. If it were not for religion, the only expletives we would have would be base remarks about excrement or improper sex.

People of the United States, use your expletives sparingly! Save them for when you truly need them or before long they may be about as shocking as exclamations from a 50′s sit com. Or better yet, invent your own horrifying epithets.

Numerical Apocalypse

A verdant world

dappled with light meets its end -

divide by zero.

The Blue Screen

Microsoft tells me,

General Protection Fault

cry out with despair.

Nothing gives me an appetite for music quite like long hours of coding. Over the last few months that I’ve been working on this project I’ve bought quite a few albums to keep me company while I work. Here’s a list (in no particular order) of the ones that have found their way into regular rotation.

• Little Dragon – Little Dragon – Album – This is a great album. Definitely on the indie/low-fi side of things. Something about the intimate, unpolished feel of the vocals just draws me in.
• Sara Bareilles – Little Voice – Album – Good songs, great singing. I suppose this might run a little poppier than my usual tastes but.. what can I say, I like it.
• Macaco – Ingravitto – Album – I heard about this one on NPR actually, wait wait! It’s not stuffy at all. It might get stuck in the “World Music” genre (which basically means “Anything that isn’t in English”) but it’s more of a “Tight Rhythmic Alt-Pop” If you’ll allow me to make up a new genre.
• Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero – Album – Another great album. A work of dark storytelling, it is very cohesive as a unit. If you check this out, get the album rather than picking off a few songs.
• Nine Inch Nails – Y34RZ3r0r3mix3d – Album – Despite the title (quick, somebody tell Trent Reznor that writing in 1337 isn’t cool anymore), if you liked Year Zero, pick up the remixes. I’m usually disappointed by remix albums. Usually there’s about one that’s worth listening to and the rest either add nothing, or are far worse than the originals. All the remixes on this album either add something to the original or take it in a totally different direction. Especially cool is the remix of Another Version of the Truth, this isn’t really a remix, “cover” would be more appropriate. It is completely re-envisioned by the Kronos Quartet (a non-traditional string quartet for those who are unfamiliar) and Enrique Gonzales Muller.
• Ok Go – Oh No – Album – This isn’t really a new album, but I pop it on when I need something peppy. If you’ve seen that You Tube video with the treadmill dancers, you know Ok Go. Good songs, playful mood.
• TV On the Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain – Album – This isn’t a particularly new album either, but it’s found its way back into my rotation. I’m not sure how to describe this music except, the opposite of pop. It took a while for me to get into it, but after I’d heard it half a dozen times I really started to like it and hear things I hadn’t heard before in it. And yes, it has a very silly name.
• Various Artists – Markus Schulz: Amsterdam ’08 – 4 disc set – I first bought this album on iTunes because I felt like listening to some techno and it was $9.99 for the whole 4 disc set. Considering I was trying to get some music to carry me through the rest of the night coding, it was a great buy. Economics aside, it’s a great album for listening to while working on something else. It’s pulsing, ethereal and doesn’t demand my attention away from my work.
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV – 4 disc set – Okay, I had to put this one on here too. I was trying to resist so I didn’t come off as a NIN fanatic, which I’m not, I’ve just really liked what he’s been doing lately. This album was sold only through the NIN website, using a distribution model similar to Radiohead’s recent In Rainbows. Just another reason to love it, $5.00 for four discs. Four short discs, the material could have been put on three discs but it was separated for thematic reasons and hey they weren’t actually making very many discs considering that the main distribution method was via download.
• ADELE – Hometown Glory – single – This track was featured as the iTunes song of the week a while back. It’s the only disc by ADELE that iTunes has at the moment unfortunately. I like the B side better than the single.
• Danger – 09/14 2007 – EP – Another iTunes song of the week got me to pick up this disc.