In what may be another first, blogger Jessica Cutler, "The Washingtonienne," is featured in Playboy's Cyber Club starting today. There is a safe-for-work interview with Jessica on the Playboy site as well.
August 2004 Archives
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Aug31
Jessica Cutler, The Washingtonienne, in Playboy Cyber Club
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Aug31
Congressman Ed Shrock quits over weblog accusations
Ed Schrock, United States Congressman for Virginia's 2nd District, announced yesterday he would not seek a third term in November. He faced homosexual allegations that surfaced on weblogs such as Michael Rogers' blogACTIVE. He received a 100 percent rating from the Christian Coalition in 2002 and was one of 233 lawmakers who supported the Marriage Protection Act. The 63-year-old Schrock is married and has one son. Ed Shrock not seeking a third term is the first instance I know of where webloggers have pushed someone out of federal office. Trent Lott is often cited as an example of the power of the blogosphere but Ed Schrock appears to be the first big affect at the federal level. -
Aug31
Safari RSS at Apple Expo 2004
Today during the Apple keynote at the Apple Expo in Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, spent about 6 minutes discussing Safari RSS and why users should be excited about interacting with RSS instead of their standard HTML sites. Check out the keynote in QuickTime and skip to the 59th minute to watch the Safari RSS demo. -
Aug31
Movable Type 3.1 released
Movable Type 3.1 has been released and is now powering this weblog. :) The new Movable Type Plugin Directory is live as is the Six Apart Professional Network. -
Aug31
Six Apart Professional Network
The Six Apart Professional Network is live but bare bones at the moment. Plugins directory will relaunch soon.
Some interesting things to note. Plugins tested with Movable Type 3 will receive a special mark. Yes! It looks like the TypePad account will no longer happen and will instead be discounts available for "Network members who qualify."
Movable Type 3.1 should be released this afternoon.
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Aug31
Apple announces new iMac design
Apple announced the new 17" and 20" G5 iMac this morning. 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz PowerPC G5, widescreen LCD, and a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics card.
This computer is just what the "it just works" families have been waiting for. I know this computer will make my parents happy and cut down on a lot of office clutter. Add a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for a complete wireless experience you can tuck in a drawer when not in use.
The biggest issue Apple needs to overcome is the price difference over a starter Dell. I priced a Dell Dimension 2400 this morning with a 2.8GHz processor, 17" LCD, DVD and CDRW combo, 80 GB hard drive, and 256 MB of RAM. $849 including a free printer, a difference of $450 or 53%. Will the style of the new iMac win over enough home customers in search of something that works?
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Aug30
Economist on Microsoft search
The Economist takes a look at Ask MSR, Dr. Eric Brill's attempt to deliver a direct answer to a search question. "Ask MSR is still a prototype, although Microsoft is trying to improve it and it may be launched commercially under the name AnswerBot." Eric Brill and Radu Soricut recently authored a paper on factoid questions.We build our QA system around a noisy-channel architecture which exploits both a language model for answers and a transformation model for answer/question terms, trained on a corpus of 1 million question/answer pairs collected from the Web. Our evaluations show that our system achieves reasonable performance in terms of answer accuracy for a large variety of complex, non-factoid questions.
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Aug27
What would you like to see in the next version of Movable Type?
Movable Type 3.1 is four days from release. The Six Apart Professional Network will launch concurrently. After the Labor Day weekend work will inevitably start on the next version of Movable Type. What would you like to see in the next version of Movable Type? If Six Apart does not build your wish list item, a member of the professional network just might build it for the community and/or profit. If your feature is already present in other software, please provide a pointer for background information. -
Aug27
Gene Simmons on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?
In an August 24, 2004 entry Gene Simmons says "Talked today about a possible (..gulp) QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY appearance. They called and asked me if I would do it. I'm a fan of the show. We may shoot on the 28th of Sept." How will Gene be involved in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? My guess is he will surprise a KISS fan after their makeover. It would be hilarious to see Gene Simmons get some grooming or culture tips, but the show's mission is "to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man." -
Aug26
Segway GT golf transporter
This fall Segway will introduce a customized version of their i Series: the GT, or golf transporter. According to Nick Kaye of The New York Times the new Segway "will come customized with a golf bag, cooler, ball and scorecard holders, seat and G.P.S." The Segway's batteries may not last an entire 18-hole round.
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Aug26
Engadget pictures of the Treo 650
Engadget has some pictures and more details about palmOne's Treo 650. Bluetooth, 1.3 megapixel camera, video recording, and a high resolution screen. I want one. -
Aug26
Feedster partners with The Washington Post for best blogs awards
Feedster has partnered with The Washington Post to help readers nominate weblogs for the Best Blogs awards. "Categories include Best Rant, Democratic Party Coverage, Republican Party Coverage, Campaign Dirt, Inside the Beltway, Outside the Beltway, International, Class Clown, Most Original and Most Likely to Last beyond Election Day." -
Aug25
Wall Street Journal on Republican convention webloggers
The Wall Street Journal profiles the 15 official webloggers attending next week's Republican national convention."Asked what they learned from Boston, some of the New York bloggers characterized the Boston coverage as self-absorbed and overly preoccupied with celebrity sightings. The Republican bloggers said they'd stay more focused on the issues and the convention itself -- a chance they'll get next week."
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Aug25
Chicago Sun Times on TypePad
Andy Innatko of the Chicago Sun Times reviewed Six Apart's TypePad offering yesterday. The article seems to be a bit too slanted in Six Apart's favor. The article makes many mentions of TypePad as a place for real publishing, away from the noise of LiveJournal or Blogger.
Blogger and TypePad both allow template selection. Both services allow you to select from a template library. Both allow for custom styles.A Blogger or LiveJournal blog limits you to basic, straightforward blogging and, worse, every Blogger or LiveJournal blog looks more or less alike.
The assumption is that 12-year-old cannot afford to pay for TypePad. The admission price helps keep the area free of casual weblogs, but a 12-year-old can use a weblog account setup by a parent in the same way American Online allows multiple users for their service.Disseminating news and fostering discussion about the potential impact of casino gambling on your community is hard enough. When the blog you've created as a one-stop clearinghouse is indistinguishable from the one that a 12-year-old girl uses to complain about how her Mom totally won't let her get her belly button pierced, you're just making more work for yourself.
Microsoft repositioned Office as a platform instead of a pure software package. Six Apart is moving in the same direction with the Professional Network and should fire up the community once again.MovableType is steadily becoming the Microsoft Office of blogging software: a standard synonymous with power and features that everyone's eager to support.
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Aug25
Olympic medal tally by population
Australian Bureau of Statistics released a chart showing Athens 2004 Olympic medals taking into account a country's population. Bahamas is #1 on the list with a total population of 317,000 and one gold medal. Even though the U.S. leads the total medal count with 25 gold medals it places 29th in per-capita medals. -
Aug25
Neil Turner on Movable Type and WordPress
Neil Turner has a good post about his evaluation of Movable Type and WordPress. Matt Mullenweg (lead developer of WordPress) of addresses some of the points brought up by Neil in the comments section of the post. Neil Turner is one of the authors of the upcoming Hacking Movable Type book. -
Aug24
Comment spam outpacing e-mail spam
This week my comment spam has outpaced my e-mail spam. The comment spammers use varied IP addresses, so an IP block does no good. MT-Blacklist is not working for me at the moment but hopefully I will have it installed when the final bits ship with Movable Type 3.1 next week. MT-Blacklist blocks comments based on keywords and link usage, not just IP block. How bad is the problem? Only 7.7% of the comments submitted to my site are legitimate comments. I could restrict to only TypeKey comments, but even a Six Apart employee does not use TypeKey when leaving a comment on my weblog. I do not want anyone to have to jump through too many hoops to participate in a conversation. My solution is to wait on the new MT-Blacklist. I approve all comments before they appear live on my weblog, so it is just a pain to remove the comments and delete the notification e-mails I receive for junk e-mail. I am sure Jay will make good money from licensing MT-Blacklist. The comment blocking feature is too important for Six Apart to leave to an outside developer. Ultimately Six Apart needs to acquire Jay or roll their own solution. Six Apart's immediate response will be "use TypeKey," which could work well for a restricted audience, but not a broader audience. The ability to comment on a published item is an essential element for a weblog platform. Many publishers are now shutting down their comments because they just cannot handle the signal to noise ratio. User experience is key, and comment spam takes as much away from the user experience as an e-mail box full of spam. [Update: I went through my log files to look for the path taken by the spammer. The worst spammer was a POST direct to mt-comments.cgi from agent "MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0; PCUser," or Internet Explorer 6 on a NT box. Each comment spam follows a pattern yet has a unique identifier. E-mail address is "bob@y" + identifier + "o.com" and the identifier begins the comment text. The linked site contains no links and the spammer must only be interested in PageRank for a future launched site. The best course of action is to change the name of mt-comments.cgi to something different and update mt.cfg. This change will make upgrading a little more difficult, but it is worth the pain to keep the bulk of comment spam away (for now).] -
Aug23
Technorati receives new funding
Om Malik reports that Technorati either has or is about to close its first round of funding. $6.5 million at a company valuation of around $12 million. (via Anil Dash) -
Aug21
Mark Cuban on future content distribution
Mark Cuban talks at length about replacing the world of DVDs with portable hard drives. He tried a few methods and thinks out loud about how hard drives could work as a distribution scheme. -
Aug20
Share your feed unsubscribes idea
I add and delete RSS and Atom feeds from my news aggregators every week. I publish my OPML file on occasion and services such as Dave Winer's Share Your OPML index the file. Anyone could run a diff of the OPML and modified date and track my subscribes and unsubscribes. What's lost in the data is why I unsubscribed. I think this unsubscribe data would be valuable to publishers, especially as syndication becomes more corporate. Maybe someone unsubscribes to my feed because they do not like my posts about soccer. I could create a feed that includes or excludes certain categories, or I might already have that capability and the user is not aware of the variety of feeds. A user might dislike a feed with only titles and unsubscribe from the feed. All ideas that could motivate a publisher to change their offerings. I imagine a business (Bloglines, Feedster) could charge owners of a feed for information regarding why a user unsubscribed. User retention spending already exists in the publishing world, and the service would be an easy sell to companies tracking online subscriptions. The first step is centralized sharing of subscription lists. Bloglines and Feedster already allow OPML imports. The second step is allowing tool vendors to pass a change to your servers using XML-RPC or other formats. An aggregator user could choose to share his or her complete list as well as the deletes if they opt-in. Of course the company would offer consulting services to help feed publishers create best practices and grow their subscriptions. Such a service would be the Nielsen ratings of the online syndication world. -
Aug19
Telematic insurance
Insurer Norwich Union will place 5,000 black boxes in cars in the U.K. to collect data about driving and travel habits. GPS coordinates are used to determine a car's route, usage time, and speed. Data are uploaded to the insurer's computer system and you receive a monthly bill based on your personal driving habits and risk factors. A car hooked up with GPS and telematics is also more difficult to steal.
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Aug19
Microsoft's geography lessons prove costly
Paul Brown of The Guardian writes about the hundreds of millions of dollars mistakes in geography have cost Microsoft. The company has now launched geography classes for its staff. "[I]n all cases the mistakes made were simply through ignorance but this was not how they were seen in the countries concerned. They were all seen as deliberate policy." (via Techdirt) -
Aug19
Alcohol Without Liquid
Alcohol Without Liquid (AWOL) is a new machine that allows bar patrons to inhale liquor in a mist instead of drinking it. It takes about 20 minutes to inhale one vaporizer shot of alcohol. Most locations charge $10 plus the cost of a shot. It looks like an inverted bong.The user chooses which alcoholic spirit will be used and the alcoholic spirit is loaded into a diffuser capsule in the machine. The oxygen bubbles are then passed through the capsule, absorbing the alcohol, before being inhaled through a tube. The resultant cloudy alcohol vapor is then inhaled from the end of the tube via a device that converts liquid to vapor.
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Aug19
New York Times on classroom weblogs
Jeffrey Salingo of the New York Times writes about weblogs in the classroom in today's issue.
Parents are also able to follow along and they can see what is happening in their child's classroom, and encourage the child to post a question at night while it is fresh in their minds. Very cool.For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching. Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box and clicking a button.
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Aug18
Yahoo! Search blog
Yahoo! now has their own search blog. It is powered by Movable Type. Jeremy Zawodny has some more information as well. Jeff Weiner, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search, has the first post. Comment threads are open. They even link to the Google Blog. -
Aug18
MTIfNonZero: Undocumented Movable Type template tag
Movable Type 3.0 introduced the MTIfNonZero template tag. If you would like to take action in your template only if a tag has a non-zero entry, use MTIfNonZero for valid XHTML. Example:<MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"> <ol> <MTComments> <li><MTCommentAuthorIdentity> wrote something.</li> </MTComments> </ol> </MTIfNonZero>MTIfNonZero tag is currently not listed in the Movable Type template tag documentation but should be and it works. -
Aug18
Halo on the big screen
Cinefour theaters in Logan, Utah has put together midnight Xbox tournaments on Friday nights at their movie theaters. Teams of four play against each other on the theater's huge screens. The theater charges $60 for the team of four and $3 for each spectator. -
Aug18
Athens 2004 Web site linking policy
The official Web site of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games has a hyperlink policy they would like all Web sites to adhere to.- "Use the term Athens 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent."
- Send a request letter to the Internet Department with a description of your site, reason for linking, the unique URL containing, the link, and your e-mail contact.
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Aug17
Deep Lake Water Cooling System
Enwave's Deep Lake Water Cooling is now cooling the downtown core of Toronto. Cold water is drawn from the icy waters 83-meters below Lake Ontario. The water pipes cool a closed system of water pipes that cool downtown. Enwave has enough capacity to air condition 32 million square feet of building space capacity: approximately 8000 homes. 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide are removed from the air. Enwave has a video online explaining the system in more detail. (via Metafilter) -
Aug17
Six Apart Professional Network press release
Six Apart on Monday issued a press release about the upcoming Six Apart Professional Network. Over 1,000 people have pre-registered to join the network. Anil Dash's title changed from vice president of business development to vice president of the Six Apart Professional Network. Although the network was announced it will supposedly not be live until Movable Type 3.1 launches. -
Aug17
MT-Blacklist v2.0e released
Jay Allen released MT-Blacklist 2.0e today. The new version is compatible with Movable Type 3.0x releases but not compatible with 3.1 beta. As the developer of the #1 Movable Type plugin I am curious how the licensing and donation system is working for Jay. Jay asks for $100 per author for commercial use of the plugin and $5 per author for educational and non-profit use. For a 5 author installation with each author using MT Blacklist Six Apart would receive a licensing fee of $200 and Jay would receive a licensing fee of $500.As the perl hacker/source code reader might be able to surmise, there are a lot of surprises (big, awesome surprises) still asleep under the hood. Some of them will be released with the plugin pack and some later on when I have the time to implement them properly.
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Aug16
Los Angeles Galaxy fires Sigi Schmid
The Los Angeles Galaxy announced the firing of Sigi Schmid in a conference call this afternoon. The Los Angeles Galaxy currently have the best record among the ten teams of Major League Soccer. Sigi was in his sixth season as the Galaxy's head coach. He coached the Western Conference in the All-Star game on July 31. It is very unusual for a first place team to fire its coach. Over the last five games the Galaxy tied four and lost one. It will be interesting to see how the Galaxy positions itself given the expansion of Chivas USA next season. -
Aug16
Feedster to add RSS advertising
Feedster plans to incorporate contextual advertising from Kanoodle in its RSS search subscriptions. Feedster will also sell its own sponsorships for some of the RSS feeds. There will be one advertisement every sixth headline and users can pay $10 a year for a feed without advertisements. The ad-free feed will be licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use. The eWeek article mentions the dispute regarding advertising in RSS feeds. I have no issue with advertising in RSS feeds and realize that it is bound to happen just as e-mail carries advertising messages as a trade-off for the costs of production. Users are used to content appended to the bottom of an e-mail from Yahoo!, Hotmail, or even a corporate disclaimer, and we have learned to mostly ignore those messages. RSS advertising is a bit different because the advertisement is anitemand receives the same status as this posting. The best way to get around the problem of advertisements intermixed with other items is to classify the advertising item as a member of the advertising category.<category domain="http://www.kanoodle.com">Advertisement</category>The above code would allow feed aggregators to apply advertisement style markup to differentiate the advertising item from the standard post's item. Feedster can demonstrate this style modification in their aggregator: MyFeedster. Search engines create a valuable service on top of other people's content and make money from the writing of others. I am thankful for the traffic driven to my site from Google and other engines and realize these search services exist because of the ability to advertise. My immediate reaction to Feedster's RSS advertising was "they are mucking up my content!" I then took a deep breath, realized that 250,000 feed subscriptions generating 5 million pings a month is not easy to maintain, and I currently have an observational mentality. I claimed my feed weeks ago but I am still unable to edit my claimed feed. Hopefully the demands of advertisers will help create a more reliable service. I would like to see Feedster provide publishers with the ability to purchase their own ad-free Feedster feeds on behalf of their users. Restricted to a RSS or OPML feed, here are your results. If I am willing to pay for the ability of my users to receive results based on my RSS or OPML feed I will advertise the ability on my site and we both benefit. If you have a Movable Type weblog and would like to provide your users with a RSS feed of your search results, please see my search template information. -
Aug15
New York Times on the impact of Microsoft Office
Steve Lohr of The New York Times takes a look at Microsoft's Office unit and its future.As a stand-alone business, Office - which on average sells for about $275 - would be slightly larger than the second-largest software company, Oracle, and far more profitable. Only the Windows operating system, the other pillar of Microsoft, is slightly larger.
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Aug13
PHP 5.0.1 released
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Aug13
RetroPads
RetroZone takes original controllers from NES, Super Nintendo, Genesis, Atari, and Intellivision and converts them into USB game pads. You can now have emulation with the real controllers.
I already have one of the top-loading NES systems from 1993 with the "dog bone" controllers. I like to have the full system, but finding and storing the games is difficult. Emulation combined with a nice controller is a good solution.
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Aug13
eBay acquires 25% of craigslist
eBay acquired a 25% interest in craigslist by purchasing a former craiglist employee's equity stake. There is a craigslist forum with reactions, and it looks like Craig has had to deal with some bad comments that are definitely undeserved. -
Aug13
Movable Type 3.1 pings Technorati
Movable Type 3.1 adds Technorati to a list of selectable pings. Currently Movable Type weblogs can ping weblogs.com and blo.gs if the option is selected in their configuration space. My configuration screen does not currently show the Technorati ping option, but the hooks are in the code and database. [Update 8/17: The Technorati checkbox appears in the configuration space starting with version 3.1b2] -
Aug13
NeroSoft TimeTrax: Record XM Radio to MP3
NeroSoft TimeTrax is an application for XM Satellite Radio subscribers with XM PCR hardware that allows users to convert the XM Satellite Radio stream into individual MP3 (with complete ID3 information) or WAV files per song. You can also limit your recordings by artist. See the documentation pages for more details. (via Gizmodo) -
Aug12
Six Apart buddy icon
Here is a Six Apart buddy icon for anyone who is interested. I received this image tonight on a flash media drive given out at the Movable Type 3.1 party.
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Aug12
Whatever happened to the Six Apart Professional Network?
When Movable Type 3.0 was released on May 15 a professional network was planned and better communication with developers promised. The Plug In to Movable Type 3.0 Developer's Contest came and went and to developers not attending the BlogOn awards ceremony it seems the network remains silent. The contest page has not even been updated with the list of winners. Two months later and Six Apart may have succeeded at getting developers out of the woodwork. Designers, consultants, IT/IS managers, and enthusiasts are still untapped areas of the idealized network. Movable Type 3.1 highlights the ability of independent developers through its plugin pack. The new version and its plugin pack provides a great opportunity to work with developers to benefit the platform. It's time to make a move, reach out, and build a better platform. I would love to help build the network and work on some solutions of my own. Hey Anil! Hire me! What does Six Apart need to do to build a better network and expand its platform?- Create an official site (or subdomain) for the Six Apart Professional Network. There will be categories for plugin developers, tool developers, specification developers, designers, and consultants. There should also be a rants and raves section to collect information on how Movable Type and TypePad are used.
- Certify plugins, designs, and tools as certified for TypePad, Movable Type, or both. Pass a series of validation tests specific to the version of a product or specification and receive a nice looking logo to display on your own page and within your Professional Network profile.
- Classify all submissions for easy directory access.
- Create a rating and review system for community participation and active screening.
- Assign a Six Apart consultant to answer any questions from members of the developer network regarding demand for software or services.
- Allow community input regarding default templates. The current templates do not validate as strict XHTML and use inconsistent attributes (onClick vs. onclick for example). Designers have an interest in maintaining a strong default template for easy skin creation. Help the experts do the work for you.
- Six Apart road show. Take a domestic road trip, stopping at Apple Stores and other technology locations along the way. Introduce people to TypePad and Movable Type and the world of blogging in general. Meet with Professional Network members and general enthusiasts at each stop on the tour to educate them on how to get started and what the network can do for them.
- Hold community meetings. WordPress does a good job at this.
- Create an advisory committee of the most active members of the professional network in their respective disciplines. This committee could be designated a title such as Professional Network MVPs.
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Aug12
Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed in Playboy
The September 2004 issue of Playboy features a seven-page interview with Larry Lage and Sergey Brin. The interview occurred on April 22-a week before Google filed its registration statement. The interview may violate Google's quiet period and result in a cooling off period imposed by the SEC. -
Aug12
Designer iPod cases
CITY magazine summarizes some of the designer iPod cases currently available. Some designs need a makeover for the new iPod design (headphone cable position, no cutouts for small buttons). $265 for Dior Homme or Louis Vuitton designs: just slightly less than the iPod. (via Cult of Mac) -
Aug11
Jon Lech Johnasen cracks Airport Express encryption
Jon Lech Johnasen, Mr. DeCSS, discovered Apple's public key for Airport Express audio streaming. He also released JustePort, a command line utility to stream MPEG-4 Apple Lossless files to an Airport Express. The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA. -
Aug11
Salon: Must-download TV
Farhad Manjoo of Salon writes about technology for trading television shows online. While TiVo asks for permission from the FCC to release its TivoToGo service, developers using BitTorrent and RSS have created a similar system without restraints.In recent months, a host of developers and TV enthusiasts have been working on ways to improve online trading -- they're building sophisticated networks to record and encode and distribute shows, and they're improving peer-to-peer transfer systems to make downloading easier. The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two Internet innovations, the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular Web syndication standard. Together, these systems enable a computer to automatically find and download a user's favorite shows -- something like having a TV station designed just for you.
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Aug10
Microsoft announces Windows XP Starter Edition
Microsoft announced a five-country pilot program for Windows XP Starter edition, a cheaper version of Windows tweaked for beginning users. Users can have up to three programs and three windows per program running concurrently. The display is set to 800x600 maximum and there is no home networking support. 128MB of maximum RAM. Seems like Windows XP Starter edition would also be a good candidate for Wal-Mart. -
Aug10
Bag Borrow or Steal
Bag Borrow Or Steal is an online handbag exchange that brings some features of Netflix into the fashion world. Monthly fees start at $20 and are as high as $99 for access to the nicest handbags. You can borrow up to 5 bags at a time but each swap will cost $10 to cover shipping. If you like your borrowed bag enough you can buy it. (via BoingBoing) -
Aug10
New feature: Search my weblog as a RSS feed
When I reworked my site last week I was unhappy with the persistent search features of Feedster and I could not get the results I was after using Technorati. Feedster did not have a full index of my site. Technorati accepts URL or keyword, but not both. So I created my own solution.
Using Movable Type's search template I crafted a RSS 2.0 file as my search result. It validates, but is served as text/html.
If you would like to subscribe to any search result on my weblog you may edit this link, replacing *term* with the search term of your choice. If you would like to implement this idea on your own Movable Type site, here is my template source.
I am sure the PHP support in Movable Type 3.1 will make these features easier to implement. I will leave my Feedster mention in my standard search results and keep this RSS keyword search result as a tool for the power user.
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Aug09
Roxio sells consumer software division to Sonic Solutions for $80 million
Roxio is getting out of the consumer software business. Today Roxio announced the sale of its consumer software business (Easy Media Creator, PhotoSuite, VideoWave, Easy DVD Copy, and Toast) to Sonic Solutions for $70 million cash and $10 million stock. Roxio will change its corporate name to Napster. -
Aug09
Salon on Six Apart
Farhad Manjoo wrote an article about the history Six Apart for Salon. I never realized that the events of September 11, 2001 made Mena think that blogging was a bit trivial. I feel the opposite is true. When a major event happens people are looking for an outlet. Craig's List was full of postings from people coping with what just happened. My relatives in Ireland wanted to know how we were reacting and what changed. Everyone was watching and listening for the latest news.If the entire point of creating a blog is to talk about yourself, or to get people talking about you or the things you care about, then it matters what judgments people have formed about the particular blog tool you use. Traditionally, for instance, LiveJournal has been a place of closely connected teenagers; you could try, if you wanted, to publish your well-researched foreign policy musings on an LJ blog, but chances are not many people are going to take you seriously.
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Aug09
Atom Publishing Protocol and Movable Type
Ben Hammersley published the first draft of a chapter from his upcoming book, "Hacking Movable Type," dealing with the Atom Publishing Protocol and Movable Type. I never noticed my Atom authentication token in Movable Type until I read Ben's chapter. It provides an interesting overview of the Atom Publishing Protocol implemented in Perl. -
Aug06
Genetic Savings and Clone clones cats
For $50,000 Genetic Savings and Clone will clone your household cat. For a one-time fee of $900 plus $150 annually you can store tissue from your cat or dog for future cloning just in case nine lives are not enough. The company plans to start cloning dogs next year.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the Sausalito company.
Reminds me of The 6th Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. As governor he should pay a visit to Genetic Savings and Clone, preferably by helicopter.
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Aug06
Ireland is the lost island of Atlantis?
Geographer Ulf Erlingsson believes Ireland is the island of Atlantis referenced by Plato in 360 BC. Ireland is the only major island of the world with a plain in the middle. He believes Dogger Bank, an isolated shoal in the North Sea, provides the story of the sinking of Atlantis. -
Aug05
Movable Type 3.1 Sneak Peek mixer
Six Apart just announced their Movable Type 3.1 Sneak Peek mixer next Thursday, August 12, at 5:30 p.m. It's in San Francisco, so I will definitely be there. -
Aug05
Tor: Onion-routing system for anonymous activity
Ann Harrison of Wired News writes about Tor, an onion-routing system developed and funded by the U.S. Naval Research Lab. Tor allows data routing through nodes that are only aware of their previous node and next node. Tor is distributed as free software under the 3-clause BSD license. -
Aug05
Weblog design
I never really liked the design of my weblog. When I moved from Blogger to Movable Type I was more worried about getting every entry converted to the new system and lost sight of structure and design issues. I finally decided to do something. I have changed my XHTML to include more lists, spans, and divs to create more specific blocks of code. Each entry is part of an ordered list and has its own unique list item id. I might have gone too far when I made some lists with one item, but those lists have room for expansion so it seemed to make the most sense. The next step is to make the page render in a pretty format on browsers that follow standards. Then I will make some hacks to allow other major browsers to display the page correctly. Finally there will be much better search functionality. Small steps in the right direction. Please pardon my dust. -
Aug04
Slate: California's SUV ban
Andy Bowers noticed a sign near his house prohibiting vehicles over 6000 pounds and upon further investigation discovered most large SUVs are technically banned in entire cities.Just as most of us instinctively check our speed when we drive by a police car, these luxury truckers should think twice about cruising illegally down Wilshire past a Santa Monica cop. If a few Tahoe owners got slapped with tickets for driving while overweight, the rest of them might actually start learning where their vehicles are legal.
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Aug04
Microsoft to launch weblog service in Japan
Microsoft will launch a trial weblog service in Japan on August 10 followed by an official launch later this year. The service will be powered by T.O.S Co., Ltd and Microsoft aims to have one million users in its first year. My guess is the weblog service will be an extension of the ASP-based home page software T.O.S already has: Maho no I-land. -
Aug04
Benoit Mandelbrot speech on August 19
Benoit Mandelbrot, Yale professor and inventor of fractal geometry and the Mandelbrot Set, will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on August 19 at 6 p.m. Mandelbrot's new book, The Mis-Behavior of Markets, applies fractal theory to financial markets. Should be an interesting event! -
Aug03
Army comissions 10 teraflop supercomputer using AMD Opterons and Linux
The Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center in Maryland will receive a new supercomputer named Stryker to model the behavior of new weapons materials. Stryker will contain 2304 AMD Opteron 2.2 GHz processors in 1186 separate systems. Capable of a peak performance of 10 teraflops, Stryker will be one of the most powerful Linux computers in the world. Linux Networx currently powers Los Alamos National Laboratory's Lightning computer with a peak performance of 11 teraflops. -
Aug03
We the Media full text available online
O'Reilly Media published the entire text of Dan Gillmor's new book, We the Media,under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. Chapter PDF files are available for download. -
Aug02
The Guardian interviews Nancy Cartwright
Emma Brockes of The Guardian interviewed Nancy Cartwright, voice of Bart Simpson, about her life as a voice actor. This month Cartwright is performing her play, My Life As a 10-year-old Boy, in Edinburgh. -
Aug02
Public Patent Foundation: Linux potentially infringes 283 patents
The Public Patent Foundation has found that version 2.4 and 2.6 of the Linux kernel potentially violate 283 not yet court-validated patents. 98 of the patents are owned by Linux allies such as Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and Sony. IBM holds 60 patents, HP holds 20 patents and Intel holds 11 patents. The kernel potentially violates 27 Microsoft patents. Open Source Risk Management has a PDF press release on the Public Patent Foundation's findings.
