Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 42 of 72.
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….
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….
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….
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…
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…
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….
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.”…
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….
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….
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.”…
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.”…
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. A Blogger or LiveJournal blog limits you to basic, straightforward blogging and, worse, every Blogger or LiveJournal blog looks more or less alike. Blogger and TypePad both allow template selection. Both services allow you to select from a template library. Both allow for custom styles. Disseminating news and fostering discussion about the potential…
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….
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….
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…
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)…
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….
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…
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….
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)…
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…
Jeffrey Salingo of the New York Times writes about weblogs in the classroom in today’s issue. 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. Parents are also able to follow along and they can see what is happening in their child’s classroom, and encourage the child…
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….
Movable Type 3.0 introduced the MTIfNonZero template tag.
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….