ZACH SCHWARTZ

I was recently admitted to the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. I couldn't be more excited to start in the September.  Now to find a place to live in New York and quit my job.

Researchers in Singapore and Beijing have created a system where you draw sketches, label the objects with keywords, and it composes a photo based on your sketch and labels. This is ridiculously cool. You can download the binaries, but I imagine it's not really ready for public consumption yet.

The BBC has a good interview with David Simon, creator of my favorite television program, The Wire, about what's going on with television. Simon thinks that TV has been "short changed since it's inception" because of advertising, and he's absolutely right. The need to get as many viewers as possible, to interupt the story every few minutes to sell flavored sugar water, and the ideal that missing a ten minutes of the show shouldn't keep you from enjoying it, all these massively drag down TV as a medium.

HBO, he says, is getting it right, by ignoring ratings and advertising. He's correct, but I think they should go further, and start putting their shows online directly, either for a low price per episode, a low monthly fee (I'd certainly pay $5 a month to watch True Blood), or perhaps lower quality video, for free, with an ad at the begining. They could even add social networking components, because hey, why not? I learned about these shows from friends in the first place.

Right now, however, they're simply losing money, as for contemporary shows, there's no reasonable option other than torrents or waiting for the DVDs. Learn from the record industry. Make it easy for me to pay a reasonable price for your content, and I won't steal it.

I'm going to Boston this weekend and thought I'd refresh my recollection of who else I know in the city. Easy, I thought, I'll just look on Facebook.

Not so. Browsing friends doesn't let you browse geographically, only by college, high school, or work (for me, anyway). Searching gives me nothing either.

Ah, but what about that nice 'networks with the most friends' box on my own profile, I thought. A little counter intuitive sure, but at least I could figure out who I know in Boston.

Again, not so. Those links don't work. Each of them simply returns a list of every single one of my friends. That's pretty basic functionality, missing, and buggy.

Luckily, though, I can have my own fake farm, or something. Good job facebook.

I know, everyone waits breathlessly for me to update this website with news about... this website, but that's what's going on here.

I created a nice Django app to handle photos. It works great. But just as I was writing the Ajaxy pieces of it, I realized that one function was missing: integration with iPhoto. From a quick search, this seems like something people are messing around with, but I don't have the time or the scripting expertise to make it work.

So Flickr it is. I'll leave the current static photo page up for now, because I like those photos.

Finally, I've got the html editor FCKeditor working. I was using TinyMCE, but gave up because it was too tricky to work across subdomains (static.zachschwartz.com and such). It turns out, FCKeditor was just as tricky, but hey, now I know more about apache.

Google Maps has introduced a new method for moving around while using street view. It's much more intuitive than the previous method, now you just double click where you want to go.

So yes, this looks almost exactly like the old site, but underneath, it's a whole new beast. What was once WordPress is now Django. At the moment, that means virtually nothing to someone visiting the site, but it will in the future.