David Byrne is actually still doing stuff? A friend just clued me in that he's got a presentation going on December 4th to talk about his book "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information", a coffee-table book of art (comes with a DVD, too) all done from within Microsoft's Powerpoint. Kind of a neat idea, but I wasn't too impressed when I actually saw it, but it was still kinda cool.
I get so much crap for liking this guy- I guess it's sort of a Michael Jackson thing. Yeah they might not be doing a whole lot now, but in their prime? I'm not ashamed to admit I own "Thriller" or "Off the Wall", and I'm sure as hell not going to be ashamed to own everything the Talking Heads ever did, and David Byrne was key to making the Talking Heads what they were. He pushed the lyrics, pushed the boundaries of the music video genre (Burning down the house is still one of my fav videos of all time, but perhaps I'm just dating myself)... there was a reason this guy was on the cover of Time.
But since then, I just haven't really been able to get into where's going. He's always had the follow-through to season up whatever idea he was trying to convey artistically, which I haven't seen in his albums since he's been solo. Haven't really seen it here either, even though of course I still buy them (and Bowie's... Jackson is too weird now even for me to buy his stuff).
I get what he's saying... that Powerpoint sort of encourages this drab, cookie cutter mentality where all the millions of presentations done with it look suspiciously homogenized. If you actually did these things day in & day out (as some people do) you'd prolly never want to see another bullet point in your life, or swipe transformation. No creativity, even though really you're using a creative tool that just happens to happens to encourage herd mentality.
Pretty standard Warhol-esque pop-art, which is cool, and a kind of a neat idea. I guess I just don't get the follow-through, as well, the art created isn't all that great, and doesn't make you go "That's Powerpoint?!?!". I dunno, perhaps if he'd found a way to incorporate the cookie-cutter designs into something else I'd enjoy it more. Still, if you're in LA, it'd prolly be a damn cool presentation.
posted on November 30, 2003 at 12:14 AMYou know, I'm honestly starting at what point someone wanting to just do Cocoa/Java code is going to be able to not touch Carbon whatsoever. Admittedly there are some things like Quicktime that are going to take a lot of work to get there, and may never get there due to it's massive Carbon legacy... but this is just too damn frustrating.
At the moment I'm trying to get the screen/computer not to sleep while I'm doing a bit of Obj-C code. The only thing I've been able to find has been UpdateSystemActivity, which is only available through Carbon. Grr! Arg! This OS feels too damn schizophrenic sometimes. Almost everything related to power management doesn't seem to be available to Cocoa code.
At any rate, the below code seems to work fine:
OSErr UpdateSystemActivity (
UInt8 activity
);
I'm just annoyed that I'm having to use it.
I'm not a big fan of haxies anymore, or crazy-ass UI enhancements that slow everything down. I generally know what I want to do, and in general (especially with the advent of OSX) the computer works slower than myself, so anything that causes a regression better be making it up in my productivity in a big way.
So far, that pretty much just means MenuMeters, VirtualDesktop, & DockDetox. There was an iChat haxie I was using before the advent of iChatAV so I could type more than one line (seriously, look at that and tell me that UI hasn't gotten wholly messed up at Apple), but that's about it.
VirtualDesktop is pretty much good to go, with the caveat that it really has some Expose problems going on, but they seem to be mostly cosmetic. I have some other issues with this product, which I used to be heavily involved in (um, my name is prolly still in the credits). Good people (it's one of the few shareware programs I've actually purchased), just were going in a direction where I thought it wasn't worth the effort. Pretty much everything I thought was going to happen has happened, which I'm sure they aware of. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the Expose issue, or what the technical details are. I'm hoping they'll just be able to recognize that expose has been invoked, and stop it's own window views, and if you select a window that isn't on the current Desktop it will automatically switch you over to it.
MenuMeters works, but isn't really optimized for 10.3 yet, and has to be manually started. I love this app though, especially since the code is available.
The lack of DockDetox is really getting to me. I just love this app, especially in 10.3 where there seems to be some sort of UI-priority going on that can make a dock bounce really hiccup what you're doing. Looks like it's going to be december. There are few things I hate more than a bouncing dock icon, it's just plain stupid. Why there are simply badges one can apply (stop sign for error, exclamation point for needing your attention, etc) is beyond me. I hate the fact that I have to install the whole APE haxie, but it's worth it just for this one piece of software.
Back home from Texas, which was fun, but Continental has officially made my sh*t list, which is sort of annoying as they used to be a favorite airline. I got home to 10.3.1 waiting for me, as well as the jaguar security update I'd been pining for...
...but no love for airport. Nothing, nada. I really hate having expensive laptop computers that can't use their wireless cards. It's KNOWN that there are issues with snow ABS's and 10.3, there have been even in beta... come on, fix it! It's almost as though it can't keep a DHCP lease, and it only affects 10.3 machines coming onto the network.
If it's not obvious by the spacing between updates on this (or my other) sites... yea, I'm quite a bit behind, in just about every way.
My to-do list has just gotten a little out of control, and I've had to implement a sort of info-triage, meaning certain things get higher priority at the moment. If you want a laugh, take a look at my inboxes to the right, and you'll see what I mean... some are getting harder hit than others.
The good news is that I'm wrapping up a slew of projects over the new while, which feels, well, really good. Really hoping to decompress a bit when I fly out to Texas at the end of the week, and catch up on a lot of the backlog.
Hmm. Theoretically, this is supposed to happen... so where the hell are the back patches for this and this and this?
Yeah, they've had some really nasty and stupid bugs going on with 10.3, but really. The userbase of 10.2 is about 1,000 times that of 10.3 at the moment, so it just sorta looks as though they're stalling it out.
Grrr.
