Today’s desert island track, Ship of Fools by World Party, from Private Revolution.
This is a timeless classic in my opinion. Every bit as relevant today as it was years ago.
Today’s desert island disc is, Abandon Luncheonette from Daryl Hall & John Oates.
I grew up pillaging my mothers record collection and have nothing but fond memories of this awesome album.
If you are using Internet Explorer you are dumb as a brick.
Yet another major security flaw is exposing Internet Explorer users to hackers, identity theft and them as morons.
I am being harsh. My mom uses IE and my wife has to use IE due to corporate policies.
But just because most people like to play with a load gun, doesn’t mean you should to.
As I told yet another friend whom I converted to using a Mac, the slogan for Microsoft should read…
Like playing with a loaded gun, only funnner! (mispelling intended)
For web developers the real fun will start when people begin using Internet Explorer 7 beta preview, as recommended in the linked article.
What is a beta preview anyway?
Listening to Jonathan Schwartz on an IT Conversations podcast, he said Web 2.0 is about distributing technology before monetizing it, where Web 1.0 was about monetizing before distribution.
The example, Sun originally charged for downloads of Solaris, now they allow downloading before receiving any money. This resulted in 3 million licenses compared to the prior model.
This new business model is actually quite old, it’s called shareware.
Share the technology, be it an application, web site or content, then count on enough people seeing value in it to pay.
All things old are new again it would seem.
I had been using GTD TiddlyWiki for quite a while. While TiddlyWiki kept moving forward, the GTD version has hardly progressed which is to be expected.
A recent news item mentioned a new release of TiddlyWiki, which intrigued me enough to dedicate a few minutes to trying it out.
I liked what I saw, but noticed that there was no documented support for Safari.
So, I grabbed the source to TiddlyWikiSaver, compiled it as a universal binary, and gave new version a shot.
Sure enough it works, mostly.
Except for saving the interface options, saving backups and generating rss feeds, everything else works. You simply edit the interface defaults in the file.
Of course, for the Firefox inclined it all works without the TW saver plugin. ;-)
I just uploaded the version 1.5 beta of MailTemplate for both Mail and Entourage.
This release includes the following changes:
Enjoy.
I missed last week’s music post, must have been longing on the a beach or something. ;-)
Today’s desert island track, The Truth by Limp Bizkit, from Part 1 of The Unquestionable Truth.
An accidental discovery, the guitar hook and energy grabbed me and has never let go.
Definitely has a dash of Rage against the Machine in there.
Check out the video.
Today’s desert island disc is, Harvest Moon from Neil Young.
Neil Young. Instant Classic. Enough Said.
On Monday I will post a beta of the Universal Binary version of MailTemplate.
This update contains a revamped editor interface, ability to select a template with a file in the Finder, preliminary support for a new product by Tom at Abracode, and a few other minor tweaks under the hood.
For those waiting for rich message template, I am hoping to have some level of support for rich messages in early summer, as well as a few other swanky tricks.
I will post here, as well as e-mail everyone when the beta is posted.
It would be great to here from people about how they are using MailTemplate, so drop me a line with your story at lon AT mactank DOT com.
In my opinion, e-mail and text messaging requires a qwerty key pad. T9 Predictive Text Input or other bastardized input methods inhibit the flow too much.
### Nokia E61
### Motorola Q
Only time will tell if either of these are worthy successors.
I am huge fan of first person shooters, and specially online multiplayer action.
Years ago, my friends and I would lug our ancient Macs to my studio apartment just to spend the day and night playing Doom 2, Marathon and Quake.
Later, I purchased a dual channel ISDN line just to get the competitive advantage over 28k and 56k competitors during nightly frag-fests.
When it came to consoles, it wasn’t until the Sega Dreamcast was released that consoles caught my eye.
Quake 3 Arena worked well, but the Dreamcast was mostly limited to modem connectivity, and using a console controller just plain sucked for FPS games.
Next came the original Xbox. Which only came into its own toward the end of its life. Gone was the crippling modem latency, and the controller issue was partly tackled by smart aiming assistance.
This week I tried to find playable games of Ghost Recon and Call of Duty 2, on my spanking new Xbox 360.
To my dismay, it is a difficult and time consuming process.
Today’s console games lack the basic feature which have been a staple for years on PCs.
The ability to find a game quickly!
After growing frustrated, I decided to install the latest Universal Binary version of Quake 3 on my MacBook Pro.
Within minutes I was fragging away with silky smooth performance.
Quake 3 Arena is still the gold standard in my book.
The game browser is fast and easy to understand, players come and go as they wish and one players lag does not bring down the entire game.
Hopefully future console games will take a step back and relearn the lessons from 7 years ago.
While listening to Adam Curry, on the Daily Source code, the recurring topic of business white listing services came up again.
This involves large e-mail providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and others requiring businesses to purchase white listing services through supposedly independent 3rd party companies to insure delivery of their messages.
For example Hotmail will not talk directly to a business. Instead expecting the business to go to the 3rd party and pay huge fees for their services.
The fees seem to range from a few thousand to 10’s of thousands of dollars.
Adam is right. Today he has no choice but to pay these fees if he wants to guarantee delivery of his businesses e-mail to these providers.
But users need to understand that free e-mail costs us all.
The costs are delayed broken communications and higher prices when businesses have to pay what is extortion in a sense.
Forget DRM, the erosion of e-mail’s usefulness and metering of internet content are the real threats to the Internet as we know it.
Unfortunately, big business doesn’t see the Internet as a universal resource for everyone. It is simply another profit center, where obvious volumes of traffic indicate opportunities.
Though, Adam has to pay for a more obvious reason. His investors would never let his business and their investment be hampered when they can throw cash at the issue.
It is hard to stick to your values when someone else holds the purse strings. When you are an up-n-coming big business.
This is very very interesting.
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
Can’t wait to see how developers put this to use.
While reading Russell’s post about Box.net, I couldn’t help but wonder, how many these services will the world support?
The dominant business models seem to be advertising supported or recurring fee.
How many services are people willing to pay for? Every month, quarter or year?
What will be toll to access your internet?
Just a thought. Not a criticism.
Steve was right, at least for me.
I managed to build a universal binary of MailTemplate in 10 minutes. This included tracking down a discontinued API call.
It still needs testing, and the installer needs to be thoroughly tested.
Hopefully a test release will be released later this week.
After working with the MacBook Pro over the weekend I can say I am impressed.
This coming from someone that owned every 17” Powerbook released, and a variety of other Powerbooks going back to the Duo 230C.
The speed increase is dramatic when using Intel native applications, regardless of it being a GUI or command line application.
There are noticeable slowdowns when using major PPC applications like Adobe Illustrator or games like Age of Mythology. But impressively, every PPC application I have run works flawlessly.
Luckily most of my daily tools are already native, including all major browsers except Opera.
Some of the tools I rely on daily, which are not available in native format include:
On another note, Apple really nailed their default configuration, at least in my case.
I purchased the 2 GHz model with 1GB Memory, and unlike previous releases, the memory consists of a single 1GB chip.
No more tossing out 256 or 512 MB chips when maxing out the memory in the Powerbook.
I do wish it shipped with a S-Video port or adapter, and a Firewire 800 port.
If anyone is in the market for a PPC 17” Powerbook in excellent condition, please check out my auction.
Browser testing can be very time consuming. Which is probably why so many sites are not fully tested.
Using a capture service to see how designs really look across browsers and platforms can really speed up development.
Last year I began using Browser Cam and Browser Shots.
Browser Cam is a commercial offering, comparatively fast, covers a huge number of platforms and browsers, but is fairly expensive.
Browser Shots is a free open source offering, though they do offer priority queueing for a small donation. It does not cover as many browsers or platforms. But it features full page captures.
If you are inclined to sign-up for a Browser Cam account, you can save cash by using a site like Fundable to purchase a multi-user account with a group of like-minded developer/designers.
My preference is Browser Cam do to the range of browser/platform combination and relatively faster service.
Jeffery Veen has a nice post about social software adoption.
Email is conversational and collaborative, but ephemeral. Wikis can be somewhat disruptive to the flow of communication in a group, but are great at recording a first draft of institutional memory.
I am relieved to hear his comments on the struggle Adaptive Path went through in adopting a system for share their internal knowledge.
And I thought I was the only who struggled with this? ;-)
With all the moaning about singles and music downloads killing the record format, why not allow customers to purchase X number of tracks from an artist, label or genre?
Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be embraced by any music executive or RIAA attack dog.
Apple has rolled out their Multi-Pass feature for the iTMS.
It appears that only The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, from Comedy Central appear to be using the features.
Can the Channel-Pass or Season-Pass be next?
Get all content from Comedy Central for a low yearly fee?
Can you hear that sound?
Its the sound of old-school media executives keeling over.
Yesterday, on the [Gillmor Gang](http://f8p.com/34ubqr ) podcast, one participant said that any PVR/DVR devices lacking a cable tuner (ie. Mac Mini with Front Row) was DOA in the marketplace.
Steve Gillmor was as stunned as I was.
Along with countless others, I do not adhere to old-school media rules.
I don’t have a television, cable or any hardwired pipe to my living room, for them to take advantage of.
My entertainment and recreational time is random and doesn’t conform to their push mentality.
Today, it is about pulling the content you want, when you want and viewing it where you want.
I finally picked up an Xbox 360, and despite my continued criticism of Microsoft’s launch process, it is an excellent replacement for my original Xbox.
Microsoft definitely got the online marketplace right. Downloadable trailers, demos and skins really takes the idea of a connected console to the next level.
One nice surprise was the ability to play DVDs without having to purchase the remote.
Also, I wonder how much of the Virtual PC technology they acquired is in the 360?
Jan Kneschke has released version 1.4.11 of Lighttpd.
This very capable web server has recently been deployed on Sourceforge.net.
I use it for all my servers, and can not speak highly enough about its speed and flexibility.
