Category: Software and Programming

Someone once described the President of the Galaxy as Zaphod, he’s just this guy, you know?. A while back, I stumbled across the name Orli Yakuel in TechCrunch (here, for example), and assumed she was some entrepreneur-VC-startup mover and shaker.
Well, Haaretz has a profile of her, Muse 2.0, and turns out, she’s just this chick, you know?

Of course, I didn’t buy Haaretz today, I bought Maariv (ugh; I can’t believe how hateful that paper has become), which has a peculiar list of “Internet celebs”, a very odd list of YouTube and MySpace personalities, with Om Malik tossed on top as a concession to tech blogs.

Used to be, if you wanted a dialog-box sort of thing in a web application (they called them CGIs back then), you’d use trusty old window.open(). These days though, pop-ups are considered evil incarnate, and all the kids think that rolling your own dialog with AJAX and DHTML and what not is the coolest.
Which is why I tried to get one of those widgets to actually behave itself.

I noticed today that Bloglines have improved their RSS reader by stopping it from refreshing the navigation frame every time you click on it. Yawn.
However, I discovered that Google’s RSS Reader has also been overhauled, and that while it seems like most of their changes are aimed at making it more like Bloglines and every other RSS reader out there, which is to say more like an e-mail program, it also has a more obvious “River of News” interface now: like an LJ friends page, you see all the items organized on the page in reverse chronological order, rather than (as Bloglines does) sorted by their sources. The Google reader also has a fancy gimmick of marking items as “read” only once you scroll past them.

Since I uploaded my list of subscribed feeds from Bloglines to Google a while back, when I first tried out the site, reading it is an odd experience, because there’s a great deal of feeds which I’ve since dropped still there. It’s a glimpse into a past where I used to look at (if not read) more stuff. Anyway, maybe I should make the effort and try using it regularly.

Greg Costikyan plays a game called Cinema Tycoon, a resource management game about running a multiplex, and wonders:

I found myself thinking: Man, this so does not play into my fantasies about what it would be like to run a multiplex. Maximizing profit?
Probably the owner cares about that, but…. What I’d really like to be doing is boffing the chickie in the ticket office, and sneaking out back for a joint with the projectionist between reel changes.

Wouldn’t be that hard to do as a game, really; a straightforward resource management game, only you’d be trying to maximize the amount of fun your character is having, rather than profits–without getting fired, of course. In fact, maybe there’s a whole genre of “Slacker” rather than “Tycoon” games here.