The Canvas Gallery and Cafe shuts down weekend WiFi

The Canvas Gallery and Cafe, located in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset district, no longer offers its patrons free wireless Internet access on Saturday and Sunday. There are now signs throughout the space to inform patrons of free wireless Internet Monday-Friday “with purchase.” This change in policy happened within the last week, as I was at the café and online last Sunday. I assume the change allows for greater turnover during weekend hours. I know of other businesses who choose not to offer wireless access because of this same turnover concern. Is wireless Internet access another perk reserved for off-peak hours? [Update 7/19: Wireless access is now 7 days a week. New signs were added to ask patrons to please spend no more than ninety minutes at a table on Saturday or Sunday.]

Sam Ruby: Each format has its strengths

Sam Ruby posted a long and interesting writeup on the differences between RSS and Atom, and what tool builders need to worry about. “[I]f you want to support any version of RSS completely, you essentially need to support all of them.” “If you can’t generate unique ids for entries, then perhaps Atom is not the format for you.” “Atom has more required elements than RSS. Atom adds type attributes to titles and links to resolve the ambiguity described above. It has separate elements for summary and content.”

Wired 12.06 : Cracking the Code to Romance

Annalee Newitz writes about geek approaches to online romance in the June 2004 issue of Wired magazine. The article starts on page 156, and is now online. Christopher Filkins and his FOAF-based Dating Syndicate. Marc Canter‘s People Aggregator is mentioned as another dating engine built on FOAF. Kevin Burton is named “The Sniffer” for his use of AIM Sniffer to pick up women in wireless Internet enabled San Francisco cafés. Jonathan Moore is profiled as “The Stalker” for his use Unix shell scripts and Netcat to pull e-mail addresses from wireless networks and match the data with a Friendster profile. “Today’s dating hacks will be tomorrow’s Friendster or Match.com.”

Yusuf Mehdi speech at Goldman Sachs Internet conference

Yusuf Mehdi, head of Microsoft’s MSN division, spoke yesterday at the Goldman Sachs Internet conference at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. Audio of the speech is available online in Windows Media Audio and RealAudio formats. Some interesting comments on MSN Search throughout the talk. “All of our aspirations…pivot on on Hotmail and Messenger.” Why do you download a toolbar when everyone already has one? For integration into all of the MSN services of course. Search is front and center, but not the primary motivator for the install. MSN Search handles 2 billion queries a day. Over 10 million people have installed the MSN Toolbar. The new search system “will, as far as the consumer is concerned, be an end-to-end system for searching across any data type.” Yusuf admits that search efforts are largely driven from the research group and apply knowledge and product features from across Microsoft. He emphasized that their search efforts are not just focused on Longhorn. Search on your PC for media and files. Search the intranet for specific data just as you would search the Internet. Searching a social network, e-mail, and private subscriptions such as Wall Street Journal. MSN Search has a “very big investment targeting personalization.” There will be less requirements to sign in, and Passport will provide a more behind-the-scenes experiment. MSN already has such features working inside of its MSN Sandbox with features such as MSN Newsbot. During the question and answer session an audience member asked Yusuf how Microsoft can compete for top talent with Yahoo! and Google. Yusef responded that Yahoo! and Google do not have anything close to Microsoft Research and technology talent would love to play with the billions spent in this division every year. I was not very impressed with the answer and was hoping for more information since I have yet to see MSN Search in the Bay Area. It was also interesting that Yusuf focused on Microsoft Research instead of emphasizing the ability of his own staff. [Update: Microsoft has the full transcript online.]

Apple Mac OS X 10.3.4 Update

Apple released Mac OS X v10.3.4 update today.

Key enhancements:

  • Improved file sharing and directory services for Mac (AFP), UNIX (NFS), PPTP, and wireless networks
  • improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers
  • Improved disc burning and recording functionality
  • iPods connected via USB 2.0 are now recognized by iTunes and iSync
  • Additional FireWire audio and USB device compatibility
  • Updated Address Book, Mail, Safari, Stickies, and QuickTime applications