hard deadlines

Interesting piece in today's NY Times, Airlines Study Alternatives to Jets' Black Boxes, looks at the renewed interest in streaming data or detachable recorders in the wake of the Air France crash. Money quote:

These problems have been discussed for years in the industry. What is different now is the attention being paid to the still-inexplicable loss of Flight 447, the apparent inability to retrieve the boxes from the Yemenia Airways Airbus that crashed into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean off the Comoros Islands and the expectation of air travelers that multimillion-dollar airplanes should have more, not less, technological capability than the average Twitter user.
— via NY Times

This will be an interesting process to follow, since fights over expensive retrofits to the passenger fleet often have to be justified by counting headstones. It's not just loss over deep water (uh, not to put too fine a point on it, controlled flight into buildings...) that affects the current cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and digital flight data recorder (DFDR), and sometimes the most significant moments of a doomed flight are unrecorded or unrecoverable. The National Transportation Safety Board has been asking for better recording tech for years (see their "most wanted" item).

RI Nexus, the RIEDC-sponsored hub for the the IT and digital media (ITDM) community, will be coming to Salve Regina on Wednesday, April 22 at 11:30am as part of their college tour.

Program director (and Providence Geeks co-founder) Jack Templin will host a discussion with students about technology job opportunities here in Rhode Island as well as demo the tools and resources available in the RI Nexus community.

From the press release:

Through RI Nexus and its College Tour, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation aims to forge a deeper connection with Rhode Island’s college students, with a focus on retaining the students in the state after they graduate. The RI Nexus College Tour will encourage students interested in information-technology and digital media to remain in Rhode Island to fill high-paying, entry-level jobs in the sector and to use the resources offered through RI Nexus — such as the job and internship boards and company profiles — to further develop their talent and knowledge of the ITDM sector.

The event is open to the public, and will be at the O’Hare Academic Center, 100 Ochre Point Ave. For more information please visit www.rinexus.com

Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of the work these folks do. IT and digital media is one of the bright spots in this state, and it's great to have a resource like RI Nexus. If you're at all digitally inclined, you should check out the site. And every month I say I'm going to get up to Providence for the Geek Dinner, and every month a local meeting comes up that I need to cover. But one of these days, I will. (Do I sound like a typical Aquidneck Islander complaining about what a LOOOOONG way it is to Providence? Uh, yeah...)

I am loving TwitterLocal, a tiny cross-platform (Adobe AIR) app that lets you filter Twitter in real time by location. I now keep two windows, Twirl and TwitterLocal on the desktop all the time. It's like standing in the agora.

Read more at TwiterLocal

Just in case you're wondering, no, the entire Internet has not been infected, Google's alarming notice in search results notwithstanding.

You can check out the geeky, snarky discussion over at slashdot.

This one's got "Tylenol®" written all over it...

Update: And now, just as quickly as it happened, all is well again. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Glad I got the screenshot when I did...

Update 2: ComputerWorld has the story. From teh Google itself on their blog, who acknowledge an error updating their list of bad sites, but point out that the criteria for the blacklist came from StopBadware.org. StopBadware also posted a damage-control note, which pointedly spells out just what they do for Google.

This just gets better and better.

NYU's Mac classroom, 1987, waiting to be unpacked.

I had seen the "1984" SuperBowl commercial, of course, and had laid hands on that boxy ecru first-generation mouse at Macy's in Herald Square, and I knew, from the very first, that the Macintosh was a game-changer. I had been programming since 1973, when our amazing, crazy high-school math teacher had convinced the school to put in two punched-paper-tape teletypes hooked up to a timeshared PDP-8 somewhere off in the Big City. So I knew computers. Or I thought I did. Until I saw the Mac.

It was love at first sight, and it is hard to remember, now that graphical user interfaces are all around us, what an innovation the bitmapped screen was. How natural it felt to move files around by dragging and dropping. And to paint, with a mouse? Anyone who remembers paint programs from the Apple II (and I have a Polaroid somewhere that I will try to dig up and post to Flickr) was agape with wonder at MacPaint.

And now, it is 25 years later. Last week marked the anniversary of the introduction of the modern computer age. Like the Gutenberg printing press or the Sumerian invention of writing, this was one of the flex points of communication technology. Just as it took 50 years after the invention of printing for someone to come up with the idea of page numbers, it took about the same length of time to evolve a human interface into the power of computing. And from that interface came everything we know today about the Web.

In a very literal sense. The Web came directly out of hypertext research that was being done here in Rhode Island at Brown University, where one of the pioneers of the medium, Prof. George Landow, latched onto the Mac early and with the team at Brown built Intermedia, one of the first hypertext systems. Exclusively for the Mac. At the University of North Carolina, John Smith, Jay David Bolter, and Michael Joyce were doing the same thing with a desktop hypertext tool called Storyspace. For the Mac. And at Apple, Bill Atkinson, who had been one of the key programmers on MacPaint, unloaded HyperCard on the world in 1987. Which was, BTW, the year of the first hypertext conference, and the year I was privileged to be part of a very special group at New York University that started teaching freshman composition using that room full of computers from the top graphic. And we started teaching them how to do hypertext essays. In 1987. On Macintoshes.

It was this yeasty, bubbling environment of graphical goodness, that put the face on the World Wide Web. Which was developed on a NeXT machine, Steve Jobs' summer gig between stints as Apple CEO.

We live in an amazing time. Take a few minutes to look back. Check out MacWorld magazine's coverage of "25 Years of the Mac."