brainscat.com

A great list of common misconceptions on copyrights.

I’ve recently found a really informative podcast about poker called the Card Club which is put out by the Lord Admiral Group. I was a bit saddened to see, though, that they only had their three most recent podcasts available for download as they were concerned with bandwidth issues. Thankfully, Cincinnati Sean has graciously allowed me to create torrents of the first two public episodes. Give it a listen and see if you like it.

• Card Club Ep. 2 — Lord Admiral Radio
• Card Club Ep. 3 — Lord Admiral Radio

Zend Studio is my IDE of choice for PHP. It is super stable, has great background checking, remote debugging, and it runs great on OS X to boot. One of the reasons I pushed for the full version at work and not just the personal edition was because of cvs integration. Some of my coworkers are hesitant to access a command line so a cvs client in the IDE is a Good Thing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Zend, you can browse your entire filesystem in a pane, or you can arrange files as you see fit in a project pane. Nothing new here, most IDEs give you that kind of flexibility.

The frustrating part, which I’ve been working up to, is that you can not use cvs commands on files that aren’t in a project. This isn’t intuitive at all, and even right after you use Zend to check out a module, the menu options to perform cvs commands on the recently checked out files are greyed out. You have to then take all those files you just checked out and add them to a project before Zend’s siloed cvs will work on them… Took me a while to find that out.

Today, Bucky The Beta Fish died.

It’s so wonderful.

Previously, my frustrated rant against the lackluster product evangelism by Sun and Apple went off with little to no effect. So, yesterday, I shot off an email to Mary Smaragdis, connected Sun employee extrodinaire. In the span of a few hours, I was able to contact somone in the Sun organization, and receive a meaningful response. This wasn’t tech support or any other front line channel, this was someone who works in the department I was having qualms with. Her quick response reaffirms to me that no other model could have gotten my questions answered faster or better, and no amount of PR can make up for this kind of experience. Blogging is a Good Thing.

Moving on… Mary said she’d bring up my concerns to others in the office and gave me some links that might help. While these are interesting, they can’t possibly compete with a discussion led by a few people “in the know” who are good at summarizing products and new technologies.

• java.sun.com
• java.net
• research.sun.com
• Calvin Austin — J2SE
• Chris Melissinos — Java Gaming
• James Todd — JXTA
• John Clingan — Solaris

Now, if only someone at Apple were easy to reach… Then again, the fact that their organization isn’t transparent at all means I can’t get ahold of anyone and that they just don’t get it.

More Gmail invites available! This morning I noticed Gmail has given me ten new accounts to give to you this holiday season. Post a comment and I’ll send you an invite.

Also, if you have any invites you don’t know what to do with, post a message here and I’ll add them to the pool of available invites. Thanks to Chris Owens for the last round and inspiration.
No more invites here. All were given to the isnoop gmail spooler. Get them there.
Invites Available: 13
Invites Given: 3

Invite Donors: Myself, Dan Lash (6)

So, their’s Synergy:

a tiny Cocoa application for Mac OS X 10.2 (and later) that puts three buttons to control iTunes in your menubar

There’s also Synergy:

easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware.

Normally, I’d suggest a Googlefight, but that just doesn’t seem practial.

Today is one of those days I can’t get ideas out fast enough and it’s very frustrating. It all started with the idea of me setting up a work blog internally. The things I’d like to use it for are as follows.

1. Give project updates as things progress.
2. Clip interesting posts from other blogs to my work blog.
3. Code review with peers.
4. Share experience and tips as I find them.

So, I talked with my friend Ryan about the best interface for clipping from a blog and having a tool grab the pertinent RSS area. Turns out we want the following process to appear to users who want to linkblog.

1. Right click a permalink for a blog.
2. Click “clip this”.
3. Full contents of the article (taken from rss item block) are credited and syndicated in new blog.

We didn’t care if this behavior was in an aggregator like Bloglines, or a plugin to Firefox that posted the necessary information to WordPress. We didn’t care if the tool created a feed somewhere that a WordPress plugin could read, or if it spoke directly with WordPress. What I wanted is a tool to automatically clip a post and make the clip go live on my site.

Inspired, I downloaded another cvs copy of WordPress and started to hack on this. But in the midst of that, I started thinking about how co-workers were going to use the internal blog, and I realized they should be able to read the blog from anywhere. Okay, so I want a private blog that’s accessable anywhere… riight. The only practical, scalable solution for this is to use a VPN. Okay, no biggie, we need a VPN anyways at work. People connect to VPN, they can read the dev-blog and get RSS now.

But shit, I don’t get RSS, Bloglines gets it for me, and there’s no chance in hell of them getting into my VPN. The whole point of putting it on an intranet is so Bloglines and other people can’t read it. >_<

How do I fix this? Install Bloglines behind the VPN so it can access the site and serve me my feeds over a secure connection. But I can’t install Bloglines, I don’t own it.

So, Mark Fletcher, I know you’ve been concerned with a revenue model for Bloglines. If you’re reading this, please, take heed. Either offer a separate Bloglines installation to my employer for a reasonable price, or open source the Bloglines engine. Bloglines has overcome the performance problems I’ve complained about before and I’ve come to love your service because of the user interface. I hope that you see that your unique value, to me, is in your interface, not your centralized service. For the most part, AmphetaDesk does the same centralized aggregator deal, but its interface is terrible. You’re kicking ass when it comes to centralized aggregator user interface.

Even if your strategy for Bloglines is as a portal, as you imply in your recent writings, there’s no reason licensing of your engine can’t provide supplemental revenue. Google does it, I don’t see why you can’t. Allowing custom installations is valuable to the enterprise market with VPNs, it’s valuable to anyone who can’t use your service because it belongs to you alone. Better yet, make the engine extendable, let me customize it. Create great hooks for a plugin system. Open source Bloglines, and sell dual-licenses like MySQL. Give discounts to educational institutions. Really add to the Bloglines web-service, give us way more options than we have now. I don’t care how I get to customize it, as long as I can for a reasonable cost.

You see, as it stands, your centralized hosting hurts me. I know it allows users to get feed suggestions and search feeds for topics, but I’d really be interested in hearing how many users actually are using that functionality. My guess is few, though I may be wrong.

Bloglines is a great aggregator and there are many things I’d like to modify and tweak but I just can’t. Take the clipping solution I’d like above. This would be so simple if when bloglines clipped a post, it offered to keep the original rss item block instead of a link back to Bloglines. If your clipping feature built a custom rss of my clips, I could easily use it and syndicate the “best of” my blogroll. Alas, you probably won’t implement this feature in a timeframe reasonable to me, but if I could could somehow extend your system… well, then the sky would be the limit.

So, I’m in the market for a TabletPC. The problem is, nobody has what I want. If I or my employer is paying over $3000 for something, it better damn well be exactly what I want. Sadly, as far as I can tell, nothing in the TabletPC world meets all these expectations, but if you know about something that does, drop me a line.

• Slate Form Factor
• Detachable Keyboard (a la hp tc1100)
• Docking Station with movable “easel”
• Resolution greater than 1024×768
• > 12 Inch Screen
• Transflective Screen
• Bluetooth
• WiFi (802.11b, I don’t care about g, but it’d be nice.)
• > 60 GB 5200 RPM Hard Disk
• Pixel Shader 2.0 capable video card
• 1GB Ram
• Dual-Head capable (through docking station)
• USB 2.0, Firewire
• Mic Array
• SD Card Slot
• 4 Hour Real Battery Life
• Weight Under 5 lbs.

To sum it up, I want a slate tablet, that can hold a keyboard like a laptop, and dock at work with two monitors. Furthermore, it must be powerful enough to run most apps and some basic games while providing a decent battery life.

Tracy urges TabletPC users to leave it in ink, and reminds us that typeset has less soul.

Tim Bray recently wrote an easy to understand summary of the possible directions development on multi-core processors is heading.

Tim Bray outlines developing for multi-core processors, and where the techniques for such development are heading. It’s a simple overview that’s useful to developers unfamiliar with that territory.

Some days, I just can’t write, and things don’t make sense. Hopefully the new version of this news is more easily understood.

Ahhh… after a two day road-trip, I’m back in East Lansing and in the land of broadband. It is a Good Thing.

Found a great online regular expression testing page.

I always wondered how the gas pumps knew if I had enough money for the gas I was about to take. Today I found out because this morning, I attempted to renew my subscription to Everquest 2, and my transaction was denied. Having a much larger available balance on my credit card, I became quite worried as to why it wouldn’t approve. After placing a call to customer service, my creditor explained to me that the merchant had made the error and never asked for funds, so all is well with my credit account. Phew.

He then wanted to confirm the available balance I saw with the one he saw and all was well except for one thing. He asked, “Did you purchase gas from the pump on Tuesday?”

“Yes, sure did, about ten dollars worth. Is there a problem?” I replied.

He went on to explain that everything was fine, and that I should adjust my balance because when you purchase gasoline from the pump, the machine validates that your credit card has at least one dollar of credit, no more. This is immediately posted away from your available balance, but the actual amount of money spent isn’t requested from your creditor until after a few days. So, you actually pay $1 to pump the gas, and pay the rest later. Go fig.