Pickberry vineyard’s wireless sensor network
BBC News: “Pickberry in Sonoma County is using a wireless net to gather data from sensors in its fields that monitor key conditions such as temperature, humidity and soil moisture.”
Summer’s best and worst album covers
Whitney Matheson created a list of 10 best and 5 worst album covers of the summer for USA Today. (via Jason Kottke)
I am so disappointed when I buy a CD with bad liner notes or none at all. Keep the good stuff coming and I will place the work on a shelf in addition to my hard drive. Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy was an early work to buck the trend of plastic conformity.
Selling a Google Gmail account is a prohibited action
Google updated their Gmail program policies as of June 28, 2004. Users may not “sell, trade, resell or otherwise exploit for any unauthorized commercial purpose or transfer any Gmail account.”
Why soccer is more American than baseball.
Daniel Gross writes about the capitalism of soccer and the protectionism of American sports in Slate.. “American sports are virtually all socialistic while the European soccer leagues more closely resemble the entrepreneurial capitalism we Americans fetishize.”
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.] 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.
