David Foster Wallaces Syllabus

post from Daring Fireball on 29 November 2011 11:03:36 PM. © Daring Fireball

?If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they?re due, running them quickly through the computer?s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them ?because the ideas are good? or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one?s ideas and the quality of those ideas? verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.?

That’s from one of Wallace’s syllabuses. Katie Roiphe, writing for Slate:

Of course, this is not the part of teaching that most people pourtheir hearts into. It?s just a syllabus! Wallace is bringing tothe endeavor rigorous Salingerish standards of not lying, or notbeing phony, that would reproach other more ordinary people ifthese standards did not border on parody, and were not expressedin such a good natured and honorable way.

Don’t just go through the motions. Don’t accept dogma. Look for ways that you might be wrong, don’t look for ways to prove you’re right. Think. Express your thoughts with as much precision and care as you can muster.

That’s why Wallace’s work serves as a beacon, a yardstick, for my own.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2011/11/david_foster_wallace_s_syllabus
_is_there_any_better_.single.html

Digg this

Roger Black on How Crappy Advertising Is
Destroying the Web

post from Daring Fireball on 29 November 2011 10:03:02 PM. © Daring Fireball

Roger Black:

Problem two is the look and feel of advertising. Web publishershave fallen into the Gresham?s Law of the Web: Crappyadvertising drives out the well-designed.
What we have now is the ugliest advertising in the history of themedia. I used to say that web sites looked like the walls of athird-world futbol stadium, but that was unfair to the stadiums.Most content sites look so bad they actually repel readers ratherthan attract them.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://rogerblack.com/blog/post/the_holy_grail_part_i

Digg this

New music learning app for iPad, iPhone, iPod
touch

post from prMac on 29 November 2011 08:32:00 PM. © prMac

Rosano Coutinho introduces iLift, the easiest way to learn music from recordings on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It allows you to slow down music, change the key, and loop. Whether you're learning a fiddle tune, lifting changes for a gig, or playing along with classical recordings, this app will help you develop your listening ability. iLift has a simple interface with no instructions so that you can spend your time learning music instead! We strive to create the best music learning experience.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-34528.htm

Digg this

Regarding TheNextWebs Shit-Ass Website

post from Daring Fireball on 29 November 2011 08:02:55 PM. © Daring Fireball

Joshua Cody tweets:

Need a warning when @gruber links to @thenextweb — 452 HTTPrequests, 3.12MB, 1 minute to load, repeated Badgeville(what?!) errors.

Funny, I actually hesitated before linking to Matthew Panzarino’s Lumia review at TheNextWeb, because I dislike their website. It’s a good review, but I hate reading stuff on TheNextWeb. Even scrolling feels janky. But Cody’s numbers seem ridiculous. Why in the world would a web page require 452 HTTP requests and over 3 MB?

But lo, I measured a few of their articles using Safari’s web inspector, and Cody wasn’t exaggerating. One article at TheNextWeb weighed in at over 6 MB and required 342 HTTP requests. Absurd. I did a reload on the same page a few minutes later and it was up to 368 HTTP requests but weighed “only” 1.99 MB.

Compare that with The Verge, a site in the same design genre as TheNextWeb — comments, like buttons, multiple ads per page, etc. Typical articles at The Verge take about 110 HTTP requests, and weigh about 500 KB. That’s about one-fifth or sixth the weight of typical articles at TheNextWeb — and The Verge uses bigger photos.

How long it takes to load the page is part of the reading experience. Bandwidth is not free, and not universally fast. People are using 3G for chrissakes. If every article on the web weighted 3 MB, you’d eat through a 2 GB data cap by reading only 20 articles a day. Not watching video — just reading.

?

Read The Full Article:
https://twitter.com/jpcody/status/141632439654166528

Digg this

Million Unit Week for Xbox 360

post from Daring Fireball on 29 November 2011 08:02:55 PM. © Daring Fireball

Microsoft:

Entering the seventh year of its lifecycle, Xbox 360 just closedthe biggest sales week in the history of the hit digitalentertainment system, selling more than 960,000 consoles in theU.S. during the week of Black Friday.

750,000 Kinect sensors sold, too. Amazing how popular a closed system — where the hardware and software are designed by a single company — can be.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2011/11/29/xbox-360-sells-nearl
y-1m-consoles-in-biggest-week-in-xbox-history.aspx

Digg this

Matthew Panzarino Reviews the Nokia Lumia 800

post from Daring Fireball on 29 November 2011 05:03:48 PM. © Daring Fireball

Matthew Panzarino:

This device?s brilliance isn?t limited to the hardwareeither. Windows Phone Mango is really, really good. Nearlynothing about Microsoft?s OS works anything like iOS, whilestill feeling very fresh and accessible. It?s exactly theopposite of the way that Android normally feels, which is anuglier and slower version of iOS.

He really likes it, and says he’d switch from his iPhone if not for the dearth of high-quality third-party apps.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/11/13/nokia-lumia-800-the-first-device-that-
would-make-me-give-up-the-iphone/

Digg this

Jeff Carlson on Lions Duplicate Command

post from Daring Fireball on 29 November 2011 05:03:48 PM. © Daring Fireball

Jeff Carlson, last month:

And I will admit that, when working within a document, duplicatingand then saving it later does make some conceptual sense. But whythe delay between creating the duplicate and saving it to disk?Why doesn?t choosing Duplicate open the new window andautomatically, quickly, let you choose how to save the document?

I think it’s because picking a file name and choosing a location in your folder hierarchy are chores. Better to let you procrastinate on these things than to force you to deal with them immediately — that’s my guess as to Apple’s thinking on this. In the pre-Auto Save world, it was dangerous to work on an as-yet-unsaved document, because a crash would destroy whatever work you’d done. That’s not a problem with Auto Save.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://tidbits.com/article/12593

Digg this

Apple Pulls iTether From App Store

Their website is down at the moment. Looks like it was only in the store for a few hours.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/11/29/apple-pulls-itether-from-app-store/

Digg this

Last Call for Daring Fireball T-Shirts

Today’s the last day I’m taking orders for this round of DF t-shirts. We only do print runs large enough to fulfill the orders placed in advance, so, as they say on TV, act now.

My thanks to everyone who’s already ordered. Sounds corny, but it means the world to me when readers directly support Daring Fireball.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/shirts

Digg this

iSyslog iOS System Monitoring, Analysis and
Reporting Tool update

The Gamma Project has announced an update for iSyslog, their professional monitoring tool for iOS devices. Polished and easy-to-use, iSyslog is perfect for users and professionals interested in the overall health of their apps and processes running on their iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. The app helps both end users and experts to check out what's going on under the hood on their device; one can easily detect bugs, analyze apps' sanity and report issues, all without having to be an iOS expert.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-34575.htm

Digg this