It has seemed for a while now that the Watchmen movie was doomed, but it looks like Paramount has recently launched an official Web site for the movie. Paul Greengrass is the latest in a long series of directors associated with this project, David Hayter‘s is the latest screenplay, and as for casting, well, nothing official and the rumors are just out of control.
I hope they don’t screw this up.
It’s been close to a month since the FOX 1.4.0 release and I still haven’t begun putting together a “What’s New” document to help folks (including myself) make the transition to that version. The reality is that if I take the same approach as I did for the FOX 1.2 release, and wait until I’ve documented all of the changes before releasing the document, you’ll probably never see it.
For that reason, I think a better approach is to try to report on everything in a series of articles. I still need to try to outline what each of those articles would cover, but in a lot of ways this could make the information a lot more “digestible” for the reader. For example, one of the things that I was dissatisfied with in “What’s New in FOX 1.2″ was the grab-bag feel of some of the sections, like “Miscellaneous API Changes”. By organizing the material into a number of shorter articles, I have the opportunity to group related changes together and provide more context.
I knew that Dave Thomas was working on a book about Rails but didn’t know that any real information about that book’s status was available. To answer that question, Andy just posted an article pointing to the entry for Agile Web Development with Rails (available for purchase “on or about” July 4, 2005) at the Pragmatic Bookshelf Web site.
One flaw I’ve noticed with 43 Things since I started using it has to do with how people add new goals to their lists. When I’m going to add a new goal, the first thing I do is search other peoples’ goals looking for similar (if not identical) goals. Unless you’re doing something really unusual, there’s a good chance that someone else is doing it too, and that’s a big part of what makes 43 Things so interesting to me. As discussed in the FAQ, shared goals provide an opportunity to share information, get inspiration and so forth. The problem is that a lot of people apparently don’t search for previously established goals similar to theirs, and so they just make a new entry that duplicates an existing entry but uses a slightly different title.
Here’s an example from this morning. I’ve recently picked up a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, in an attempt to get my act together, and I thought I’d add this as one of my 43 things. When I visit the 43 Things site and search for “gtd”, it finds 17 goals (including “gtd”, “try GTD”, “Learning GTD” and “master GTD”) that contain that acronym in their title . One of those seems to have been declared the “winner”, with 38 people sharing that goal, but a number of other entries that are basically describing the same goal have only one or two people attached to them. It gets worse, though: if I instead search 43 Things for the words “getting things done”, there are a number of other possible matches.
I initially wondered if the tags associated with goals might offer a way out of this mess, but they really don’t. Yes, I can search for goals that have been tagged with gtd, but for the problem at hand that’s not really any different from searching for gtd in the goals’ subject lines: if you don’t do that search before you enter your new goal, you can still manage to enter a “new” goal that’s just a dupe of some other goal. The problem is compounded by the fact that, as far as I can tell, 43 Things doesn’t allow you to edit a goal and associate tags with it unless you’ve already “signed up” for that goal. As noted by Clay Shirkey, the real value of using folksonomies comes from “aggregate interaction”, or to use smaller words, when other people assign tags to your data.
Saw on freshmeat.net this morning that Sander has a new release of the Goggles Music Manager. Looks like the first release of this software was back in November of last year, but somehow it slipped under my radar screen. Sander’s Goggles DVD Player has already attracted a lot of fans over the last few years, and given the similarly clean UI for Goggles Music Manager it seems likely to do the same.