”I just don’t like it, it’s as simple as that. Python just doesn’t work like my brain does, I guess…”
(Via RussellBeattie.com.)
I know exactly what you’re talking about Russell, my brain doesn’t wrap around Python either.
Ruby just worked for me in every way and quickly replaced PHP, Java and Perl for most of my daily needs.
Regarding performance, it looks like version 1.9 is coming in December with a taste dose of performance improvements.
If you use Ubuntu Gutsy, the latest and greatest Ruby packages install flawlessly, as does an entire Rails or Merb stack.
Despite the misgivings about Rails, take a look into RubyGems, it is a treasure trove of tools to add to your Ruby toolbox.
Ten years into the web standards revolution, e-mail client support for standards remains sketchy. A new group is doing something about it. Launched today, The Email Standards Project ‘works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.’
(Via Give HTML e-mail a chance.)
Yay! I used to despise HTML e-mail, but have succumbed to the utility it can provide.
Nothing like the Freetards (as coined by Fake Steve Jobs) to turn on a device that could popularize linux-based computing more than anyone could have guessed.
”Members of the Linux community have complained that the hot new sub-notebook from Asus, the eeePC, may have violated the spirit of the Linux General Public License. Some Linux advocates claim the eeePC has not included required source code with the installed Xandros Linux distribution and does not easily enable users to install another distro. However, there are indications that eeePC fans probably don’t care.”
(Via Asus eeePC Violates GPL Say Linux Stalwarts.)
This is why linux remains a hacker’s paradise and scares the masses away.
Most consumers will call tech support long before they delve into the bowels of the anything called source code, nor care about the utopian philosophical inspiration behind GPL.
Contact the company discreetly, resolve the issue through a future software update and help them ship a successful linux device to consumers, without scaring the bejeezus out of everyone.
What do you want? A soap box or market penetration?
By the way, how does it feel to eat your young?
Finally making the switch to Gmail tonight, but I have a lot of e-mail to move.
So far I have learned that Thunderbird moves e-mail much better than Mail on Leopard.
”Looks like Apple might be mulling over the inclusion of Boot Camp in Leopard according to a statement released to investors last week.”
(Via Will Boot Camp be the end of OS X apps?.)
Of course, some developers will not port their widows applications to Mac OS X.
Those developers will suffer from poor sales, high technical support costs and build a crappy reputation, all of which open the door for competitors.
Macurls.com is a fun little application I wrote while learning Rails. It is a TinyURL.com clone I use on my uber-short domains (f8p.com. g5u.com, lubz.com, pv4.net).
I kept it around because I like seeing the stats for URL usage, and playing with new deployment and coding techniques occasionally.
This weekend I rewrote the application using the new kid on the block, Merb.
Honestly, not a lot of rewriting had to be done. Merb supports ActiveRecord, uses Ruby and deploys using Mongrell.
What did I get out of it?
Merb uses less memory, is faster and helps me follow my mantra - doing more with less.
Worth checking out.
Just turned down my last EC2 instance - yay!
Most of the sites are moved to SliceHost.com, though one is in limbo tonight.
Have to decide if I am going to move MySQL to its own slice, or expand the memory of my existing slice this weekend.
Why?
Mephisto + 2 other applications + MySQL are pushing the limits of 512 MB.
I know how to slim down Mac OS X for hosting, but I don’t know what if anything I can do to slim down Ubuntu - yet.
Just discovered this awesome page at Godaddy, that updates your MX records quickly to use Gmail for Domains!
If Godaddy is your registrar and you are using them for DNS, this is a huge time saver.
”That whole thing where you can run Palm OS apps on Nokia internet tablets, like the N770, 800, and the new 810? It’s not fake, and it seems pretty kickass. Above you see a photo of the VM in action, and I’ve given you a video after the jump.”
(Via Palm OS apps on Nokia tablet in action: Video.)
I get it, but why?
”So, ever since I got the eeePC I’ve loved how easy it is to tinker with. Since I’m not a Linux guy, I dumped the Xandros preload and opted for Windows XP so I could you my EVDO USB datacard and blogging software easier, but I wondered could I install OSX on it? And, after trial and error - you can!”
(Via Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC.)
Impressive effort!
This morning I finished configuring my SliceHost VPS. It went fairly well, being slightly Linux challenged, the Slicehost wiki, forums and support team helped me get everything done in about 4 hours.
Every slice they offer comes barebones, meaning how the various distributions ship. Slicehost simply adds the needed xen tools and default SSH configuration.
The only hick-up I encountered, was that Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) had courier mail enabled by default.
Having chosen a 512 MB slice, with the plan of running Nginx, Mongrel and MySQL, I didn’t want the overhead of the mail server.
It was easy enough to remove the startup scripts, once I familiarized myself with the proper init.d commands.
With Hosted Solutions and Amazon EC2, I relied on their ACL/Firewalls to keep the riffraff out. ON my slice I had to setup iptables. Which was amazingly simple, specially compared to Leopard’s retarded firewall.
The optional backup service lets you take snapshots and have period backups of your slice. If anything goes awry you can restore at anytime through their slice management application. A great value for only $10 more a month!
Slicehost billing model lets you to add and remove slices as needed, only paying for what you use. This is similar to how Amazon EC2 works.
While they aren’t in the same game, on demand computing, SliceHost appears to solve my business challenge of scaling over time, without purchasing tons of hardware and rack space.
Over the next month I will see how performance compares as I move several projects.
Very nice for $48 a month!
Two big thumbs up so far.
November 14, 2007 · 1 comment
Today I snapped up my slice of slicehost.com and so far I am loving it.
By the weekend I can turn down my EC2 instances and move some projects from the Xserves into their new Ubuntu home.
In December I am going to test running my largest project over there, with the hope it can move completely to a VPS solution in 2008.
Hmm. Wonder how long before OpenSolaris will be ready for the VPS market?
For those interested, I am running Ubuntu 7 (Gutsy) running Nginx, Ruby, Rails, Merb, MySQL and a liberal sprinkling of assorted gems.
Email is handled by my own carefully crafted powerhouse servers still.
DNS management is handled through Godaddy and EveryDNS.net.
As for DNS queries, again I highly recommend using OpenDNS. The ability to clear their caches manually after updates is a huge time saver.
Recently I downsized my work setup, moving from a 17” MacBook Pro and 30” Cinema Display to a simple 13” MacBook.
Why dump the nirvana of displays and laptops?
The large display was gorgeous, but having umpteen windows open was distracting sometimes. I found myself either overwhelmed when sitting to close, or leaning forward to read what I was looking at when too far away.
Originally I planned to only dump the display, but to my surprise Apple released the new MacBook on my birthday - must have been a sign, right?
Upon reviewing the specs, I found that it had everything I needed in a laptop, minus some frills and about $1000. As a bonus, I could transfer the 4GB of ram from my MacBook Pro.
After a quick dance on Craiglist, I sold the MacBook Pro in a mere 2 hours, then headed off to the Apple Store to snatch the new MacBook.
For the first week I toyed with picking up a 20” display, but resisted the urge so I could acclimate to the new setup.
Working on a small screen everything is easier to focus on (the perfect resolution?) and thanks to Leopard’s Spaces, I found that I didn’t miss the large desktop monitor.
The reduced screen space also gave me an understanding for the the sprawling mess a lot of web sites have become, something I strive to avoid in my work.
The last benefit is portability.
With the new setup I no longer dread packing up the laptop for a day out of the home office. In fact, I prefer getting out more now.
”Like Ruby on Rails, Merb is an MVC framework. Unlike Rails, Merb is ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic, preferring plugins that add in support for a particular feature rather than trying to produce a monolithic library with everything in the core. In fact, this is a guiding principle of the project, which has led to third-party support for the ActiveRecord, DataMapper, and Sequel ORMs.”
(Via Merb | Looking for a better framework?.)
Ruby on Rails is where I dwell, having used it for a couple year now, but this new framework looks interesting.
This weekend I am going clone MacURLs.com in it and see how it performs.
”Keeping track of what’s new on your favorite Web sites isn’t a big deal if you only have one or two sites to follow. If you have several, however, it can become a time consuming chore that eats away at your day – unless you use an RSS news reader, and that’s exactly what Apple added to Mail in Mac OS X 10.5.”
(Via TMO Quick Tip - Mail: Leopard’s New News Reader || The Mac Observer.)
Tried it. Liked it. Good start, but undercooked.
Some news items are truncated regardless of the original feeds length, no hooks to link to Weblog Editors, like MarsEdit and can not import OPML.
It is a good start and reveals the addition of the PubSub framework now included with Leopard.
”Without my PDA, I once again was stuck at my desk and was missing out on other parts of my life. With the BlackBerry, I am able to go to my kids’ volleyball matches and Irish stepdancing competitions. True, I do I tend to use my PDA when there are lulls, but at least having the device allows me to be out of the office to attend these events while not falling behind.”
(Via jkOnTheRun: When the BlackBerry dies, the addiction is fully felt.)
Could Twitter, or something like it, tied into your email server, replace this type of addiction?
Twitter pushes updates the same way Blackberry’s pushes email.
Is it about not falling behind? Or the illusion of being involved?
If you want to be involved in other aspects of your life, having a Blackberry conversation distracts from that, while setting the expectation for colleagues that you’re focused on their conversation, which you can’t be while cheering on friends at a volleyball match.
While listening to my backlog of Security Now podcasts, I learned about Paypal’s new Security Key program.
For $5, Paypal sends you a Security Key that spits out a unique number every 30 seconds.
You then use it while logging into your Paypal account by entering the unique number shown on your Security Key along with your password.
Bringing this technology to consumers is a huge step forward in online security.
”Technology Patents LLC may be the new champion for suing 131 companies worldwide—the list goes on and on, naming companies like Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, Telstra, AT&T, Cincinnati Bell, Motorola, Microsoft, Helio, Taiwan Mobile, O2, Rogers Wireless, China Resources Peoples Telephone Company, Yahoo, Sprint, and everyone in between. The company and its founder, Aris Mardirossian, are suing over what he believes to be infringement on two of his patents that address international text messaging.”
(Via U R SUED: Patent holding company targets 131 companies over SMS patents.)
Text messaging, while wildly popular, is a complete mess here in the states.
Being a U.S. business or trying to send text messages to U.S networks is already an expensive proposition. If this lawsuit succeeds it will only get more expensive.
My current data center provider, Hosted Solution, announced they are discontinuing their router-based ACL/Firewall service.
This has been in place for years and frankly provided a lot of security.
Since they were blocking at the outside router, instead of on the internal network things have been very safe and quiet since the day my servers were installed.
Now they are asking us to either implement comparable firewalls on every server, or pay them to install a firewall appliance for $199 or more each month, which will consume one of our paid rack spaces.
If it wasn’t such short notice, I would seriously consider moving the servers elsewhere.
I wonder how this will affect our bandwidth costs, given that malicious traffic will now make it inside the network, past the router they measure our usage on?
Luv me some mouse!
Seriously, I am perpetually trying out new mice.
This morning, while dropping by the Apple Store, they had a new bluetooth mouse from Razer. Known for gaming mice, which I love for their high resolution accuracy.
I picked one up, in black of course, and so far I have to say it is awesome!
The rubberized coating, coupled with the high resolution accuracy makes for quite an enjoyable experience.
Unlike the Apple Might Mouse, the Pro|Click doesn’t seem to have that laggy feel most bluetooth mice suffer from.
It also comes with a spiffy little bag to carry it around in.
Check it out
Being a freelancer and entrepreneur allows the freedom to work from anywhere.
After 7 years, I have found that working outside my home office is both rejuvenating and more productive at times.
The trick is to find a suitable environment to work. My number one priority is internet access of course.
In the Raleigh-Durham area there are a number of options, ranging from free to rather costly.
Panera Bread (Free) - The most laptop and wifi friendly place in the area without a doubt. Free wifi, plenty of space and power jacks everywhere. Best of all the employees don’t give you a second look if you are there all day, and the food is good to boot.
Borders Books (T-Mobile) - Once again friendly, but not as many power jacks or food options. Being a book store it is a much quieter environment than Panera.
Starbucks (T-Mobile) - Again, friendly and the larger locations tend to have comfortable spaces to settle in for work.
Barnes & Noble (AT&T) - This is a last choice. AT&T is expensive and most locations have limited space to work, let alone find a power jack.
If you see a guy working on a black macbook at one of these locations, say hi!
My attempt to use Media Temple’s Grid service went down in flames.
They were polite, but for technical reasons the Rails container didn’t let me setup their testapp, as documented in the knowledge base.
Now I am back in search for a good VPS provider.
Despite having a rack of XServes and Mac Minis at my partner company, I really want to explore the VPS world.
Burstable scalability is increasingly important in the blog-driven world. Where a single Digg can bring your application crashing down in flames.
For the past year I have been running several sites over on Amazon EC2, with good success. Only once did the server soft reboot and everything came back up perfectly.
The major drawback of Amazon EC2 is server instances have no permanent storage. If it goes down hard, you lose everything on the virtual disk.
It is fairly simple to rig up semi-permanent storage or backups by linking up to an S3 bucket, but performance and costs take a hit.
If anyone has any recommendation, please drop them in the comments.
I placed an order with Slicehost.com, but it is 2 weeks until I can get in there.
Tonight I am moving some of my projects to MediaTemplate.net’s Grid Server.
I tried it when it launched, but it was not fully backed at the time.
After waiting for Amazon’s EC2 to get some form of management for the virtual file system, I finally had to look elsewhere.
I will post my experience later, so far though their support team has been awesome!
Update #1:
8 hours after signing up my Ruby on Rails container is not working.
A server error is holding it hostage and I am in support limbo waiting for an “admin” to fix it, since they don’t support Ruby on Rails development.
They only dove in when I explained that I am just trying to get the testapp running as they outline in their knowledge base.
Update #2
Its the morning and still no Rails container at Media Temple. I disabled it and going to re-enable to see if it might come to life, but now they are trying to charge me $25 again to get what I had before.
Bon Voyage Update
This morning I called Media Temple, only to be informed that troubleshooting their Ruby on Rails Container was a courtesy and completely unsupported. This despite them confirming last night that “their” system was not working as it should.
Nothing is more confidence rattling in a hosting service than being told what you are paying for is unsupported and they are helping you as a courtesy.
I asked for and expect a full refund, we will see what they do.
”Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
(Via Happy Quote (Reviewed at WorkHappy.net).)
No kidding.
November 12, 2007 · 1 comment
With more information moving from Email to RSS, these feeds can now consume as much time as an overflowing Inbox.
After embracing the excellent Inbox Zero techniques Merlin Mann has helped spread, I realized that my RSS feeds had become the new bottleneck and a major time commitment each day.
Funny how removing one obstacle, can reveal a new one?
So, I fired up NetNewsWire and started looking for patterns that made sense.
The original organization, was a mix of folders that had unrelated meaning. Such as Mac news, Cool, Technology, etc.
Useless for any real purpose.
I decided to sort the feeds into groups that helped me prioritize my reading.
I chose not to apply action-based labels to the feeds since it is likely that the feeds will not lead to any actions for me to perform.
The feeds now look like this:
Essential are feeds that I should to keep an eye on.
Profitable are feeds that lead directly to business opportunities.
Casual are feeds that I enjoy from time to time, but are easily marked as read and ignored when I don’t have time.
Internal are feeds that run within my business and are not public.
Technical are for security and technical information that I migrated from email lists to RSS feeds.
Cleaning up my feeds has reduced the time it takes to digest the news from a couple hours to about 20-30 minutes.
Putting the feeds into prioritized groups helped, but there is another level of management you can automate.
NetNewsWire lets you set custom refresh settings for each group or feed.
The Casual group is set to only check every 24 hours and never do it when the feeds are manually refreshed.
This customization reduces distractions during a busy day when the feeds refresh and you want to check for important updates considerably.
Moving to this system has allowed me to capture more value from RSS feeds in far less time than ever before.
”Find emails faster in Leopard Mail
Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing ‘Ros’ quickly found the first email in…”
(Via Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips - Hawk Wings.)
It would be interesting to see Leopard on Dells Precision M2300 laptop.
how long before hackers turn their attention from iPhone hacking, to building one click installers for Leopard on commodity PC hardware?
”What follows are instructions for building and installing MySQL 5 on Mac OS X. These instructions should work perfectly on both Tiger and Leopard.”
(Via Hivelogic - The Narrative - Installing MySQL on Mac OS X.)
”Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits in three countries–including the United States–against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.”
(Via Prince to sue The Pirate Bay | Tech news blog - CNET News.com.)
There has been some backlash this week to the news Prince is going after people publishing his works online.
While he may be overreaching in some places, or his counsel may be overzealous, I think he is right to do so.
It is his work and he has every right to control it how he sees fit.
Prince blazed a trail outside the traditional music distribution system, long before it became fashionable or even realistic to do so.
So, if he wants to tightly control his works that his right as the author of those works, unlike the crazy RIAA thugs.
The Pirates Bay may be facing a real threat in this case.
Prince is the original author of works being pirated using their service, not some greedy 3rd party entity lashing out to protect their crumbling business model.
The real question for consumers, The Pirates Bay and Prince in this case, is do you respect an artists right to control his works, or is The Pirates Bay only real motivation piracy?
Who has a right to their freedom?
Free to share or free to ignore others freedom?
Though I disagree with Russell on some things, like Linux vs. Mac. He knows the mobile market exceptionally well.
In this post he nails the real test of Google’s Android OS.
”Simple test: Will you be able to take the Android OS as it exists on Monday and hack it so it runs on an existing device? Will there be hacked Windows CE devices, or even the odd phone running the OS that day or within the week? That’s the supposed differentiator between Google’s offering and established mobile operating systems out there: Windows Mobile, Symbian, Moto’s Linux variant, the iPhone OSX variant, etc. None of these guys will let any joe just take their code and install it on any device they want, right? If the GOOG isn’t full of BS, then that’s what we’ll see in a few days.”
(Via RussellBeattie.com - The simple test for the Android OS.)
Interestingly, a commenter on Cranky Geeks may have nailed the real motivation for Google pursuing the Android coalition.
They are simply trying to disrupt the market in order to maintain their dominance as they race into mobile advertising.
To keep Facebook, Yahoo and everyone else guessing and running in circles.
After all, Google cleverly pushed the bidding up on Microsoft’s Facebook investment and walked away, making Microsoft look desperate.
Is Google the new Microsoft?
Very interesting!
”Heroku: An Online Rails Development and App Hosting Environment”
(Via Heroku: An Online Rails Development and App Hosting Environment.)
This article says what I have failed to put into words in the past.
”There is really nothing religious about our use of open source. We use it because it’s better on the scales of merit that we care about. For infrastructure software, such as web servers, databases, server operating systems, programming languages, and web frameworks, the scales of merit lend themselves incredibly well to open-source development. Thus, we use it and are passionate about it.
For desktop operating systems? Not so much. There are just too many disciplines involved that programmers are not naturally good at and don’t have sufficient levels of taste to prepare masterfully. And programmers constitute the vast majority of builders in the open source communit”
(Via Ask 37signals: Why OS X and not Linux? - (37signals).)
I use Mac OS X on the desktop and open source for deployment for the exact same reasons.
With every new major release of Linux and Solaris, I take a look to see if either is coming close to the desktop experience I now enjoy.
Call me a fanboy or part of the cult if you like, but it really is true that I get more done using the platform I have than any other.
I need to post a list of the tools I can not live without, that I have not found true equals for on Linux or Solaris.
”The Sparkle framework just nails the process of providing an automatic update mechanism for Cocoa applications. I’m really impressed with how smoothly it works and the idea of using RSS as a notification mechanism, in the form of an appcast, is perfect. In fact, it works so smoothly that the part of me that automates everything wanted to take it one step further and make pushing a new version of a Cocoa application I’m working on as easy as pushing a button. Sort of like using Capistrano with Rails, but from within Xcode. After all, once Sparkle is wired into an application, doing the rest of the work to build archives, create feeds, and upload things seems like a real drag. So, last night I sat down and hacked away on it and have come up with a first cut solution.”
(Via James Duncan Davidson – Sparklemation.)
”At nine feet long and 1,800 pounds, you’d think that it’d crumple up like a beer can if it got hit by something bigger (which is just about everything) but company officials claim that it’s ‘basically built like a race car, with the steel cage technology that protects the occupants.’ It’s apparently supposed to be able to grab four out of five stars in government crash tests (it’ll be tested once it’s on the market).”
(Via Smart cars coming in January. Would you buy one? - Crunch Gear.)
Our Honda Hybrid is reaching 70k miles and we are looking for a replacement next year.
After driving the hybrid for a couple years, I can not imaging getting a car that doesn’t get at least 40 MPG.
Amy has kept meticulous records on our current car, for a blog she has still not gotten around to starting, and we get 40+ MPG most of the year, except for a couple months (boiling summers in North Carolina) each year.
At $25k though for a Honda or Toyota, I wonder if a couple smart cars are better than a single hybrid?
What is the carbon offset for Smart vs. Honda vs. Toyota?
About 1 month ago, I had a life changing event.
As someone living with Crohn’s Disease, I live with a certain level of unease. Never knowing if I am on the verge of what is called a flare. A flare is when the Crohn’s rears is head and tells your body to attack itself literally.
Well, after some tasty Chinese food one night, I awoke the next morning in substantial discomfort - something you grow accustomed to with Crohn’s.
Unlike previous bouts, this one dragged on for 3 days and grew worse each day.
On Sunday morning, I called my doctor and explained that something serious was happening - my body was not working or feeling at all normal.
He instructed me to go to the emergency room right away.
At Duke University’s E.R., tests confirmed what I had hoped I would never experience - I had an obstruction of my intestines.
Meaning nothing was passing through me. In fact things were backing up into my stomach - not good.
For the next 4 days I would have an NG tube down my throat, pumping what can only be described as toxic waste out of me, in an effort to avoid surgery.
Luckily, I had self-administered morphine to keep the pain at bay and let me sleep in small bursts of an hour or two.
After 4 days of testing, poking, x-rays and hospital life, I got lucky. Things cleared up without surgery.
You might think there is not much to be thrilled about from this experience.
Well, I had a private room, morphine, lost 25 pounds and got a chance to reset my priorities both mentally and physically.
I am healthier than ever, eating, exercising and living a more balanced life.
All because of some Chinese food at an inopportune time.
Life is great!
Sadly, I can not imagine having chinese food again.
”Opera Mini 4 enables you to take your full Web experience and digital lifestyle with you — everywhere you go. Whether you want to access your mail, RSS feeds or bank information, Opera Mini is fast, safe and secure. Opera Mini 4 delivers several new features for quicker scrolling, navigation and page rendering. Opera Mini 4 is free, so download it now!”
(Via Opera Mini™ - Free mobile Web browser for your phone.)
Would love to see this added to the iPhone. I think its features coupled with the touch screen would be interesting.
”We are very charged up today to announce the much-anticipated (by us, at least!) public-beta launch of Defensio’s new spam filtering web service for blogs (and other social web applications subject to spam).”
(Via Defensio Unveiled! - Defensio, the blog.)
”OpenSocial, the attempt by Google and the tens of other social networks, has been hacked twice within a few days. The first OpenSocial application to be hacked was the RockYou application on Plaxo called emote. Now, it seems the same hacker has compromised another OpenSocial application on Ning called iLike”
(Via Google’s OpenSocial Hacked for the 2nd Time - Rev2.org.)
I wonder where the weak link is? In Plaxo and Ning, or is in OpenSocial?
The Android platform will be made available under one of the most progressive, developer-friendly open-source licenses, which gives mobile operators and device manufacturers significant freedom and flexibility to design products. Next week the Alliance will release an early access software development kit to provide developers with the tools necessary to create innovative and compelling applications for the platform.”
(Via John Battelle’s Searchblog.)
Hopefully this leads to some compelling mobile devices. It is certainly less than consumers expected today.
By the second half of 2008, when they expect the first Android handsets to hit the market, we should have Nokia’s iPhone challenger and the second generation iPhone.
It will be interesting to see where the chips fall.
This week I made a major mind-shift in my attitude towards blogging and everything I write.
As my grandmother would say, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything.
That is a bit extreme, but it is the rule I want to blog by.
Too much of my past writing was mainly criticism.
If I like something, find it valuable, cool or useful, I will write about it.
If I hate something, find it useless, I will ignore it and not subject visitors to my sites to those things.
In retail, you vote with your dollars. In blogging it is with words.
Today, most web content can be accessed on on mobile devices. Though you are at the mercy of how each site chooses serve mobile content - if at all.
Mowser cleans up and presents content for mobile devices in friendlier more efficient forms.
Mowser doesn’t just handle web sites, it also provides efficient access to RSS feeds and search engines in mobile friendly formats.
Mowser, which is developed by Russell Beattie, does it really, really well.
I don’t know the details of how Mowser works its magic, but its definitely more sophisticated than older efforts and a work of passion on the part of the developer.
After using it for a week, I prefer Mowser-powered browsing to regular browsing on my phone.
Content flies through the sluggish AT&T EDGE network, and the addition of Tech 100, Politics 100, Feeds and Search on the home page are awesome for casual browsing while on the road.
There is a lot more to Mowser than I have touched on and even understand after just a week.
I highly recommend it for anyone using a mobile device to access web content.
Big thumbs up!
Last night I bought a new Macbook, one of the swanky new ones Apple just released.
As an experiment, I let Time Machine do a complete backup of my old Mac before powering up the MacBook.
When it was done, I plugged in the Time Machine drive, powered up the new MacBook and select import from Time Machine backup.
Having over 70 gigs of of data, I headed for the couch and enjoyed Spiderman 3.
Later I returned to see how things fared.
One word, wow!
Nearly everything was there, working correctly. Bookmarks, iTunes, Password, Applications.
Virtually flawless.
You have to endure numerous authorizations to tell Keychain to let applications access the passwords, but it all works.
There is one caveat though - developer tools was only partially copied, including some I had installed in /usr/local.
Firing up DVD and reinstalling the developer tools from the Leopard disk fixed that in couple minutes.
Very very impressive for a first release!
I not imagine not using Time Machine from now on. It is reason enough for anyone to upgrade to Leopard.
Cool. The site launches tomorrow November 1st at 9 AM.
