Entries in Nifty Stuff (31)
Happy 15th Birthday, World Wide Web!
Fifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:
(Thanks to Cary Gibaldi for the photo)
Note the nerd humor with the binary numbering of the years…there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t. I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.
This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:
It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.
The CERN directors took some convincing. “The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the Web was going to be,” Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau told the BBC. “We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore CERN couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away. We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favor of that.”
Adam
in Technology, Nifty Stuff, Culture, frog design, Humor
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Meanwhile...
Sorry for the lack of postings recently, things have been pretty hectic lately and I just haven’t had the time or brainspace to put together any posts that seemed worthwhile. In the meantime, for your amusement here is a hilarious video — a Lego animation accompanying a comedy sketch by Eddie Izzard. I just became aware of it, though I guess it’s been around a while, and the same animator has done a number of other funny pieces (follow the links on YouTube to see the rest). This one is the best though, IMHO.
Normal programming should resume soon.
Recreating Omaha Beach...with 4 People
Pretty amazing what you can do with some smart planning, a few props, a few days, a little bit of money (in film terms) and some computer enhancement:
Adam
in Technology, Nifty Stuff, Apple
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Adam
in Nifty Stuff, Culture, Advertising
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Fire map
Fires are ravaging Southern California at the moment, appearing almost out of nowhere and being fanned by seasonal Santa Ana winds. Right now it’s about one mile from my sister-in-law’s house (2.5 miles yesterday), but so far she hasn’t been told to evacuate.
The website of the San Diego Tribune has produced this very helpful - and well-designed - map that shows where the fire is, pictures and links to videos of houses, where the evacuation areas are, and where shelters are. Nicely done mash-up with Google maps, and quickly done too.
Adam
in Design, User Experience, Nifty Stuff
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