Novell released version 1.0 of Mono today. Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for use on Linux, Unix, MacOS X and Windows system. Release notes.
June 2004 Archives
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Jun30
Mono 1.0 released
Novell released version 1.0 of Mono today. Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for use on Linux, Unix, MacOS X and Windows system. Release notes.
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Jun30
Heart rate and sweat loss built-in to a soccer uniform
BBC News reports on a new soccer jersey developed by David Evans at Northumbria University. Silicon strips at the top of a player's back monitor sweat loss. A heart monitor keeps track of the player's vitals. A vibrating patch on the jersey's arm alerts the player to come to the sideline for some attention. -
Jun29
Visual Studio 2005 Express
Microsoft released beta versions of its Visual Studio 2005 product, including a new line of low cost Express products. All downloads are free for now, but Microsoft does plan to charge for the products in the near future. -
Jun28
Mac OS X Server 10.4 Tiger serves weblogs
Mac OS X Server version 10.4 (codename Tiger) will feature a weblog server.
The Weblog server provides users with calendar-based navigation and customizable themes, is fully compatible with Safari RSS and enables posting entries using built-in web-based functionality or with weblog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API. The Weblog Server, based on the popular open source project "Blojsom," works with Open Directory for user accounts and authentication.
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Jun28
Mac OS X Tiger: Safari RSS
Mac OS X Tiger, Apple's next operating system release, will include a RSS aggregator as part of Safari. Support for "RSS 0.9, RSS 1, RSS 2 and Atom." Apple has a movie online demonstrating the new RSS functions. Interesting that Atom is a side note on a supported format list.
What does the bundling of an RSS aggregator with a Mac OS mean for independent software developers? Safari RSS, in its current form, looks like Bloglines. Desktop applications will have a year to innovate and make their products more attractive to power users. There is still room for applications like NetNewsWire.
I hope RSS support becomes as widely used as Apple's Web Kit or shared Address Book. .Mac synchronization of subscription lists makes sense. So does identification of authors through an Address Book reference (like Opera).
[Update: An hour into the video presentation Steve Jobs gives a demonstration of Safari RSS for six minutes. Includes grouping and tabbed browsing.]
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Jun28
Apple OS X 10.4 (Tiger) targeting Microsoft Longhorn
Gizmodo has a picture from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference of banners directly targeted at Microsoft and its upcoming Longhorn operating system. -
Jun27
NY Times: As Doctors Write Prescriptions, Drug Company Writes a Check
New York Times: "A code of conduct adopted in 1990 by the American Medical Association suggests that doctors should not accept any gift worth more than $100, but the guidelines are widely ignored." -
Jun25
Tantek is now at Technorati
Tantek Çelik is now working for Technorati. The move means good things for the Web, as Tantek can utilize indexing semantic web data from the Technorati database. He also has a much shorter commute, allowing more time for side projects. Tantek was formerly Microsoft's Web standards ambassador and responsible for much of the work on CSS. -
Jun21
SpaceShipOne flight a success
Mike Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne to an altitude 100 kilometers, opened a bag of M&Ms, and returned to the Mojave Desert. The first non-governmental rocket ship to reach the edge of space. -
Jun19
An amateur in the New York Philharmonic
Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times played clarinet with the New York Philharmonic. He had 16 days between receiving the music and stepping on stage to perform but luckily he received help from Stanley Drucker."I was told I would be treated like a regular substitute. The brochure for subs that I was given listed payment of $1,980 for a week of rehearsals and concerts, or $198 for a two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal and $396 for a single concert, although alas, I was not to be paid. (The base salary for a regular player is $104,000, though many earn far more than that.)"
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Jun18
Imagination Environment
"Imagination Environment," created by David Ayman Shamma and Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University, reads a television stream's closed caption feed and displays related images and other media to complement the television feed. Matthew Mirapaul profiles "Imagination Environment" in The New York Times. -
Jun17
IETF Forms New Atom Working Group
IETF Atom working group is now official. "The proposed WG schedule calls for release of initial Internet Drafts for the Atom Feed Format and Atom Editing Protocol in June 2004. These Internet Drafts would be submitted approval as Last Call drafts in March 2005, and would be submitted to the IESG for consideration as Proposed Standards in April 2005." -
Jun17
Paul Boutin compares movie download services for Slate
Paul Boutin compares RealNetworks' Starz downloading service to the BitTorrent and DivX solution in an article for Slate. "Starz offers fewer movies than BitTorrent, at lower quality, for a higher price." -
Jun16
Nick Littlehales, official sleep consultant for England's Football Association
Nick Littlehales is the official sleep consultant for the English Football Association during the Euro 2004 championships. The Financial Times profiles Nick and his efforts to help the team turn less times per night."The England team's bedrooms were adapted to create Kingsize and Superking sizes providing more room to sleep and relax. A visco-elastic foam pressure relieving layer was added to each mattress to improve comfort and support. The traditional hotel bed coverings were replaced by hypoallergenic pillows and breathable duvets covered in a pure Egyptian white cotton linen to provide coolness."
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Jun15
Mac DevCenter reviews OS X RSS software
Giles Turnbull of Mac DevCenter reviews three RSS software applications for Mac OS X: NetNewsWire, Pulp Fiction and Shrook. (via Scripting News) I am still waiting on NetNewsWire 2.0, due any day now. -
Jun15
NPR's On the Media interviews The Wonkette publisher Anna Marie Cox
Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media interviewed Anna Marie Cox, editor of Wonkette.I think that blogging, as a form of journalism, or as a form of writing doesn't have a lot of rules yet, and it's clear that it doesn't need to try and, and hang, you know, the AP Libel Guide on a blog would be a mistake -- to try and, like, apply your standard journalistic kind of ethical code seems too constrictive for what blogs are. There has to be something that you figure out maybe just on a day to day basis.
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Jun15
Simpsons Season 4 DVD set in stores today
The Simpsons Season 4 DVD set is now available. 22 episodes from my favorite Simpsons season. Selma's Choice (the Duff Gardens episode) is my favorite episode.
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Jun15
Salon.com on social networking online
Andrew Leonard of Salon.com delivers a social networking primer and profiles the different approaches of big name social networking sites such as Friendster, Tribe.net, and Orkut. Marc Canter is mentioned as social networking taken to the extreme but there is no mention of FOAF or how to move common data between social networking providers. The article does a good job examining the privacy trade-offs when a user provides a profile to an online site. "Promise someone a date, or a chance at a job, and they'll happily expose their most intimate secrets." -
Jun14
Walt Mossberg interviews Steve Jobs
Today's Wall Street Journal has excerpts from last week's Walt Mossberg interview of Steve Jobs onstage at D: All Things Digital. The article is available to subscribers only, so I will quote at length.
[W]e've gone from pretty much zero a year ago to about 2% of the legally sold music in the U.S. That's not a giant number, but if you look at it and say it's been accomplished in a year and you look at the trajectory, it's not inconceivable to see it breaking through 5% in the next 24 months as an example, maybe sooner.
We got enormous pressure to do a PDA and we looked at it and we said, "Wait a minute, 90% of the people that use these things just want to get information out of them, they don't necessarily want to put information into them on a regular basis and cellphones are going to do that." So getting into the PDA market means getting into the cellphone market. And you know, we're not so good at selling to the enterprise where you've got, in the Fortune 500, five hundred orifices called CIOs. In the cellphone market you've got five. And so we figured we're not going to be very good at that.
The interesting thing about movies though is that movies are in a very different place than music was. When we introduced the iTunes Music Store there were only two ways to listen to music: One was the radio station and the other was you go out and buy the CD.
Let's look at how many ways are there to watch movies. I can go to the theater and pay my 10 bucks. I can buy my DVD for 20 bucks. I can get Netflix to rent my DVD to me for a buck or two and deliver it to my doorstep. I can go to Blockbuster and rent my DVD. I can watch my DVD on pay-per-view. I can wait a little longer and watch it on cable. I can wait a little longer and watch it on free TV. I can maybe watch it on an airplane. There are a lot of ways to watch movies, some for as cheap as a buck or two.
And I don't want to watch my favorite movie a thousand times in my life; I want to watch it five times in my life. But I do want to listen to my favorite song a thousand times in my life.
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Jun13
New York Times on fair use in the digital age
Tom Zeller Jr. of The New York Times writes about copyrights and multimedia in academic institutions. "Many scholars, librarians and legal experts see rich promise for the use of multimedia materials in research and education. But the possibility of litigation over file-sharing and confusion over digital copyright protections have scholars feeling threatened about venturing beyond the more familiar world of printed texts." -
Jun10
Scientific American on Microsoft Research
Gary Stix wrote about Microsoft's Research division and its history in Scientific American June 2004 issue: "Can Microsoft's assemblage of all-star researchers transform computing?"
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Jun09
News.com adds description to its RSS feeds
News.com now has descriptions (not just headlines) in its RSS feeds. -
Jun09
Cal Athletics LookSmart search partnership
LookSmart will develop a branded search property for Cal Athletics available at CalBears.com, CalBearsSearch.com and via a toolbar application. "Each time users click on a paid listing, a portion of the revenue will go to support Cal Athletics." It would be nice if they had a Grub promotion to help utilize all those idle computers and open bandwidth. If all search engines provide a similar impression of a result to their users, the move towards cobrand benefits could be big. Think of iWon.com of years ago. -
Jun09
Bridging the Internet and the TV
Today's announcement from TiVo regarding downloaded Internet content available on a personal video recorder got me thinking about how independent content authors now have the same path to the end consumer as Viacom, Disney, and General Electric. As I read the New York Times article profiling the new TiVo service, RSS enclosures came to mind. Microsoft might still use IPTV, but other software manufacturers can build support for RSS enclosures into their software with little overhead. What does this mean to the average user? Average users are able to push content to targeted subscribers. It could be the latest video feed of a rock band's concert, or a child's birthday party video sent to family around the globe, but it will be waiting for the viewer on a variety of devices. Only bandwidth stands in the way. -
Jun09
Ask Jeeves Purchases Tukaroo Inc.
Ask Jeeves acquired Tukaroo Inc., a San Jose-based desktop search technology company founded in 2003. Tukaroo was founded in 2003 and launched their first product January 20, 2004. Tukaroo's desktop and local network search bar includes a preview window for photographs and all documents. Advertisements are integrated into the local search window. -
Jun08
Salon: Invasion of the spambots
Sam Williams of Salon writes about the emergence of intelligent agents crawling pages and inserting content in weblogs and wikis. "[B]ot writers and copiers find that there are enough newbie operators out there to serve as unwilling page-rank boosters." -
Jun07
CC Lemon Simpsons ads
Japander.com has CC Lemon ads online featuring the Simpsons family! (via Boing Boing) -
Jun07
AirPort Express with AirTunes
Bring iTunes to your home stereo system with AirPort Express. The AirPort Express can be used as a wireless bridge, and has a USB port for your printer. $129 retail.
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Jun06
New York Times on Google PhDs
Randall Stross of The New York Times takes a look at the hiring practices of Microsoft and Google, specifically focusing on their approach to PhDs.Working in Google's favor is its practice of putting new Ph.D.'s to work immediately in the exact areas where they have been trained - in systems, architecture and artificial intelligence. Google, the company, may falter, but Google, the human resources experiment, is unlikely to be the cause.
Microsoft has yet to disavow old templates for hiring. Its chief college recruiter, Ms. Roby, says that among computer science Ph.D.'s, "it's less likely to find someone with the desire to work on projects that will ship every 24 or 36 months.
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Jun05
Ronald Reagan is dead
CNN: "Former President Ronald Reagan died Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93" -
Jun05
Gerry Adams on prisoner abuse
Gerry Adams: "News of the ill-treatment of prisoners in Iraq created no great surprise in republican Ireland. We have seen and heard it all before." -
Jun05
Mars Opportunity Rover to enter Endurance Crater
The Mars Opportunity Rover will attempt a 25-degree slope next week as it enters Endurance Crater. Risky move, and the rover will have to reverse out. Hopefully it hits solid rock the whole way and does not slide on sand. -
Jun04
A boy raised as a girl with his identical twin brother
John Colapinto wrote a really interesting article in Slate about the life of David Reimer. David Reimer was born a male, had a bothced circumcision, and Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins performed a surgical sex change. David was raised as a girl. He had an identical twin, perfect for nature versus nurture research. He later had his female parts removed and male parts and hormones added. Mind bending stuff! David Reimer committed suicide on May 5. -
Jun04
Nike Art of Speed weblog
Nike now has a weblog published by Nick Denton's Gawker Media. "Nike commissioned 15 talented young filmmakers to interpret the idea of speed. Over the course of 20 days, this weblog will introduce these innovative directors, their short films, and the digital technology behind the scenes." (via Scoble) -
Jun03
BitTorrent 2 protocol
The P2P Weblog posted an e-mail from Bram Cohen listing the some of the features of the BitTorrent 2 protocol. Merkle hash trees, UDP trackers, and more. -
Jun03
So you'd like to...grab an expert OPML file
Amazon has the "So you'd like to..." guides to share product lists spanning a unique category. iTunes Music Store has iMix. What are the data structures for the online publishing world's self published guide lists? Users of news aggregators in search of new feeds might browse a directory such as Syndic8. While viewing a channel, they see a few guides containing this feed. So you would like to... be a Web standards guru, learn photography, keep up on world news, etc. Guides could be published using OPML. It is Share Your OPML, at a very targeted level. The user would consume a CSS, SQL, San Francisco Giants bundle similar to an iMix listing in iTunes. Grab a feed at a time or load the full OPML. -
Jun03
Aluminum Cube
A lucky office worker had his cubicle remodeled in aluminum. The perfect setup for an aluminum PowerBook! -
Jun02
New York Times on RSS
NY Times: "[I]f you can control yourself, you may find that R.S.S. is the best tool yet for taming the Web." The Bob Scott graphic is interesting. Open the information spigot for the NBA and J Lo! -
Jun02
Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer
The trailer for Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, is now online. -
Jun02
Atom Community Meeting IRC chat logs
An IRC chat log is online from today's Atom Community Meeting. (via Finally Atom) -
Jun02
Atom Community Meeting Report
Tim Bray will update his blog throughout the day from the Atom Community Meeting. Also live at irc://irc.freenode.net/#atom. Wish I could be there. -
Jun02
Nike Mayfly
The Nike Mayfly running shoe wieghs 4.8 ounces and has a recommended lifespan of 62 miles. Only 5,000 of the $45 shoes (72 cents a mile) will be sold nationwide. ESPN notes that "Nike's Mayfly was inspired by the ideal set forth by Nike founder Bill Bowerman, who envisioned a shoe that would provide enough support for a runner during a race, but would fall apart once that runner crossed the finish line."
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Jun02
Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta
Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta is now available for download from Microsoft's Web site. The software only works with Windows XP. New design, better sync abilities, and an integrated online digital media mall. -
Jun02
Call the condom ambulance!
Reuters: In Sweden, "amorous couples can call the telephone number 696969 and a white van featuring a large red condom with wings as a logo will deliver them a packet of 10 prophylactics." -
Jun01
No More Sony Clies
Brighthand: "Sony announced that it will no longer develop and sell Clie handheld models to the United States market"
