Hello from Laura Jane on Vimeo.

Box of Clouds

Here is an evocative little artwork created from an old keychain photo viewer. I imagine a post-apocalyptic future where this object is found by a young girl who dreams about what the sky must have looked like before it was obscured by layers of smog.

This is probably a harbinger of much artwork to come, created from the detritus of our discarded consumer electronics. Come to think of it, that would be an interesting theme for an AMODA exhibition.

Courtesy Boing Boing

via Adam Lindsay

1. “The following plug-in has crashed : Shockwave Flash.” I get this error message about once per day. After this happens, Flash video content is unplayable in any Chrome window, so the browser must be restarted. This is frustrating since so many sites use Flash to serve video, and the main reason I wanted to switch to Chrome was because Flash content frequently causes Firefox to crash. This one is a deal breaker for me.

2. No way to specify how to deal with file types. In other browsers, I can choose to view PDF’s with Foxit Reader instead of the bloated and slow Adobe Reader. I can’t do this in Chrome.

3. No browser plugins. I miss my Firefox extensions, especially the delicious bookmark add-on.

4. No master password. Like other browsers, Google Chrome will store your passwords so you don’t have to enter them when you visit Facebook or your online banking site. Unlike other browsers, there is no master password, so anyone using your computer has access to all your accounts, too.

I suspect that one or all of these things are coming in the next few releases. In the meantime, I may be checking out the Internet Explorer 8 Beta. Google Chrome claims to be a beta version, too, but then again, what “beta” means to Google is anyone’s guess.

Body Navigation by Recoil Performance Group from ole kristensen on Vimeo.

Illuminated - Motion Capture Dance Animation from Kevin Abbott on Vimeo.

Jansen’s book, The Great Pretender, looks interesting as well. Along with Douglas Hofstadter, Buddha, and a host of prophets through the ages, Jansen believes that the ego is an evolutionarily useful fantasy created by our daydreaming minds.

STRANDBEESTEN_TRAILER from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.

via Anima Ex Machina

I feel sorry for Kirk Watson, who was Austin’s mayor during the 90’s boom years, and is generally remembered fondly for bridging progressive and business interests. He is clearly aiming for national politics and this could hamper his ambitions (not to mention Obama’s). I wish he had prepared. This just goes to show that even state senators base their judgments of candidates more on feelings than facts.

I couldn’t find any information online or in the Flash developer documentation about how to tell the standalone Flash Player to stop caching, or where it was caching the data. I did some poking around on my system and discovered that it actually uses the same “Temporary Internet Files” folder used by Internet Explorer (in Windows XP):

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

To clear the cache, you can browse to this directory and delete the files by hand, or you can go to Control Panel > Internet Options > General and click Delete Files and click OK.

Perhaps this is documented somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t easy for me to find. Hope this saves someone else out there a little time.

“Prevail” may be too strong a word, since I think people will continue to use multiple technologies to create web apps, but I do think that Flex/Apollo stands a good chance of becoming the most popular platform for web application GUI’s in the near future. To me, the only reason companies would choose AJAX over Flex is that currently, most web developers have no experience with Flex. I suspect that as people become aware of killer new applications like Scrapblog, companies will be saying “we want something like that”, and more developers will be forced to take the plunge.