In Jason’s roundup of the Adobe-Macromedia acquisition, he alludes to Tim Bray’s comment that Adobe may drop Flash, and proffers Ajax as an alternative for web developers — a bit of jumping the gun, if you ask me.
Last fall, Kevin Lynch, the Chief Architect of Macromedia, asked to meet with me regarding my work on the Gmail API, under the guise of hinting at potential employment opportunities in the Experience Design group *. Essentially, he and his associate, an ex-Microsoft guy they poached from the ASP.NET group, wanted to know how the Gmail Ajax system worked, and how it worked so quickly. We also covered their new Flex platform, their take on the Lazlo project (supportive, but would ultimately rather see all efforts focused on Flex), and uses of the XML socketing support that was introduced in Flash 5.
Most of the conversation is relevant to Jason’s roundup, so here are my notes:
* I think I got played by Macromedia here. During the meeting, Kevin offered to “hook me up” if I found any of the job openings to be interesting. He sent over an email with a couple jobs links, to which I replied with interest to one of them. No response. I sent 2 more emails over the next few weeks, but never heard from him again. Seems like they were just digging for some free information.
Update: Kevin emailed me in response to this post:
…am concerned that you think I may not have been forthright with you — I was very open with you and connected you with openings that I thought might be a match, but apparently they weren’t. I’m sorry if the team didn’t reply to you, they should have done that.
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The combination of Pitt and Soderbergh and Lewis wasn't enough to keep the Moneyball movie afloat...Sony canceled it "days before shooting was to begin".
Accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.
Sony was probably looking for something more BIG RED TEXTish.
Tags: books Brad Pitt Michael Lewis Moneyball movies Steven SoderberghBen Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!
Tags: baseball Ben Fry infoviz sportsThings will be significantly slower than usual around here this week...I am on vacation. Aside from some sporadic updates, I'll see you next week.
Tags: kottke.orgThe New Yorker has an iPhone-specific site up. (thx, @level39)
Tags: iPhone The New YorkerFrom Joseph Clarke in Triple Canopy, a comparison of the histories of the American megachurch and corporation.
Tags: Joseph Clarke religionLakewood and America's twelve hundred other megachurches -- congregations that draw between two thousand and fifty thousand people per weekend -- are not simply vast machines for passive spectatorship. Sunday services are convergences of worshipers who spend their weeknights at prayer groups, Bible studies, ministries, and missionary training sessions. Successful megachurches are like well-run companies, with intricate corporate structures devised to keep each member personally engaged; their pastors are like chief executives, maximizing the productivity of laborers in the evangelism enterprise. Jumbotron notwithstanding, the architectural and organizational tropes of the megachurch are best compared to those of the modern white-collar workplace.
It looks as though the Netflix Prize might have been won through a combined effort of the top two teams. (thx, bergmayer)
Update: All teams have 30 days to better the current high score before the winner is declared. But, someone has won the Prize. (thx, all)
Tags: Netflix Netflix PrizeNew father Paul Drielsma thinks that the language around fatherhood needs to change.
Tags: language parenting Paul DrielsmaScour the parenting forums on the Internet and you'll find the common lament that "DH" (darling husband) expects a medal whenever he "babysits" junior for a few hours. I have little sympathy for DH in these cases, but maybe a step in the right direction would be to stop using language that suggests hired help -- to stop referring to DH's job in the same terms as somebody who could legitimately stick his hand out at the end of his shift and demand a tip. DH isn't babysitting, he's parenting, and just changing that one word changes, for me at least, all sorts of connotations.
The clothes from Irina Shaposhnikova's Crystallographica show look as though they were created with 3-D rendering software but haven't quite finished rendering yet.

(via today and tomorrow)
Tags: fashion Irina ShaposhnikovaA short appreciation of the SR-71 Blackbird, an airplane that was literally faster than a speeding bullet.
"It wasn't like any other airplane," he told me. It was terrifying, exciting, intense and humbling every time you flew. Each mission was designed to fly at a certain speed; you always knew the airplane had more. It was like driving to work in a double-A fuel dragster."
The skin of the plane's fuselage was a whopping 85% titanium, which was purchased, during the Cold War, from the Soviet Union.
Update: See also SR-71 Groundspeed Check, Google Map of where all the Blackbirds are, and SR-71 Disintegrates Around Pilot During Flight Test:
Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 sec. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. The SR-71 then literally disintegrated around us. From that point, I was just along for the ride.
(thx, doug, clay & tom)
Tags: airplanes SR-71David Galbraith calculates that if buildings by famous architects were priced like paintings, a Le Corbusier building would be worth more than the entire US GDP.
The top floor of Corbusier's Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.
In terms of signaling, it's difficult to hang a house on one's parlor wall...buying a Corbusier means living in it wherever it happens to be located, at least part of the year.
Tags: architecture art David Galbraith economics lecorbusierYou've likely seen this comparison of Harry Potter and the first Star Wars movie but that comparison has recently been expanded to include not only Potter and Star Wars but also The Matrix and Abrams' Star Trek.
Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.
Update: The connecting theme is the monomyth. (via @adamlgerber)
Update: Or perhaps Potter is really Young Sherlock Holmes? (thx, stephen)
Tags: Harry Potter movies Star Trek Star Wars thematrixLinks provided by kottke.org.
Macromedia may be a bit concerned about Ajax competing with Flash’s XML socketing
http://johnvey.com/blog/2005/04/adobe-flash-cs2…
Trackback by kottke.org remaindered links — April 20, 2005 @ 5:32 pm
The naming of “Ajax” and “XML socketing” all seems too fancy. Aren’t we just talking about HTTP POSTs/GETs of payloads that may or (more likely) may not be formatted as XML?
Comment by pb — April 20, 2005 @ 6:26 pm
Adobe and gmail
Some interesting industry gossip. Why would Adobe want to know so much about gmail?…
Trackback by Firefox — April 21, 2005 @ 10:17 am