415-564-1347 What is real?
It's nice to know that AT&T has been spending their infrastructure money in Utah. Maybe that's why my calls drop out in Central Park.
Depressed? Got tech blues? That dude looks a real lot like Will Ferrell.
I've always been a fan of the Magic Eightball. I've found it to give very good advice at least 50% of the time. This is an astonishingly higher accuracy rate than most people who give me advice. In that spirit, Magic Eightball Everywhere:
Here's an online magic eightball. It's a Web app. You can also see what other people are asking, although I found that this feature was not for the faint of heart and could be downright depressing. People ask all sorts of sappy questions like; "Does she ever think of me now?" It just breaks my little heart.
More impressive is The Public Eightball. It's an actual Magic Eightball that is hooked to a Lego Mindstorm-based apparatus that shakes the ball for you and displays the result in a Webcam image. Unfortunately, it seems to currently be off kilter, and you can't see the result.
If you don't find either of these to your liking, Yahoo actually has a portal category devoted to just online Magic Eightball Apps. A more thorough listing, with reviews, is here. The same site has a listing of the actual Eightball answers. You can find a scientific dissection of an Eightball here.
If you are running Mac OS X, this dockling will allow you to have a Magic Eightball in your dock.
If you are running Windows, this app will let you have a Magic Eightball in your system tray.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I could not find a standalone Java app or a Linux app that simulates the Magic Eightball. If you know of one, please email me so that I can add it to this post. I'm certain that they are out there somewhere.
This site seems to have the best little history of the Eightball that I could find, but it's not very in-depth.
Wow, this new boards of canada cd I'm listening to is fantastic.
Curious about our President's connections to the villians at Enron? I know you are. Michael Moore has updated the essay that I previously linked to with links to stories and other Web pages with more details.
U.S. Begins Anti-Terror Assistance In Georgia (washingtonpost.com) Well, that headline got me clicking quick, but don't worry, it's not the Georgia I'm in.
The one hundred panel mammoth is up over at waferbaby.
I fired up my Tivo last night before I went to bed, and chose to watch yesterday's episode of The Screen Savers. Who on my screen should appear, but Ben and Mena from movabletype. Nice to see someone who deserves the recognition get it.
dooce becomes another in the proud line of people who lost their job because of what they posted on their personal site. Messed up.
My brother's newest song, "Just Another Punk" is up on his MP3.com page. Check it out, it's fun! Let us know what you think over at Radio Bump in the comments. (Made with a Mac)
BETA Palm Conduits for Now Up To Date and Now Contact on Mac OS X. Now we're getting somewhere on this front. Where is my Missing Sync for Mac OS X?
Marathon: Aleph One I had no idea that Bungie released the Marathon source to the community, and I certainly had no idea there was a way to play Marathon on a Mac OS X/Windows/Linux machine at this point. On a similar note, did anyone else notice that the opening scene in the first board of Halo (the best game for the Xbox, and the one that made me actually get an Xbox) is sort of the same one from Marathon 2?
Davezilla makes me laugh, and coffee then comes out of my nose, which makes me remember to visit his site without hot liquids in my hand or mouth.
This watch syncs with your Pocket PC(there is a Palm version too) to let you carry your contacts with you. It reminds me of the George Carlin routine about your house being just a place to keep your stuff, and when you travel, you bring a smaller version of your stuff, and if you then take a day trip somewhere, you need to com up with an even smaller version of your stuff. It's like that.
The iMac Challenge I'm very confused by this story. Jim Hied is a MacWorld editor, so you would think he knows how much expansion you can do with Firewire ports. You can add virtually anything you might want. However, despite mentioning the ports in the article, he says that the new iMac is "not expandable." It's quite expandable.
PhotoDude notes the Atlanta connection that came through for the US bobsled team. I still can't figure that one out either. It snowed here once this year though, so maybe that's when they practiced.
Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another Fad? Oh my god, a Forrester analyst quoted talking about the future of Weblog technology, well that's the death knell:-) (via Scripting News)
Ogg Drop for Mac OS X in case you were looking for a Mac OS X Ogg Vorbis converter.
infoSync : Hitachi shows CE .NET PDA PocketPC is moving along at quite a clip now.
Canada: 5 USA: 2 The game was closer than the score would indicate. It's their game, and man oh man was their team a powerhouse today. Everything was great about this game, the officiating, the level of effort, the team play, and the attitude of the players. I'm happy, after the disaster at the Nagano games, that we walked away with the Silver medal. What do I have to complain about, I'm an Atlanta Thrasher's fan, and it's going to be a few years before I'm for a team that has the chance to win a Stanley Cup.
Mathowie: The future of music
Sometimes, simple hints are the best kind: Slash Forward
Bush Proposing to Shift Burden of Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers Thanks George, I'm sure that industry feels like it gots it's money's worth on those contributions now. How can anyone, anyone at all, see this as the just way to go about this? (link via the always informative rc3.org)
This browser speed test on Mac OS X, which is on the Chimera site, shows Chimera to be the speed champion. I can't remember the last time that brand new beta software was so substantially faster than the established industry players. I was using it for a couple of days on my TiBook, and can say it was much faster at rendering pages than the other Mac OS X browsers, but also is not complete yet. (Oh and they released a new version on Friday too.)
My free Six Degrees Calendar qarrived yesterday. It's actually a nice, albeit difficult to read from a distance, desk calendar.
CNET: Picture this: Photoshop on Mac OS X Okay, like there isn't enough anticipation for this app's release right nwo to begin with? I mean they have been talking about it for months, they demoed it at MacWorld, the whole OS X community knows it's on it's way. So why announce it two months prior to its actual release? I'm happy it's on its way, and its nice to have a better idea of when, but sometimes I do not understand software companies marketing departments at all.
O'Reilly Network: Steven Johnson on "Emergence"
I've decided I'd much rather know when a site is updated and visit it than have the headlines pushed to me. Thankfully, I can do either.
The gold medal Men's hockey game is coming up. I will, of course, be in the corner of my country, but I have to say that I think that Canada has an advantage going in. Not so much in talent(although you could argue that as well), but more in the fact that the US played a much more difficult and physical game yesterday. It's a physical sport, and they were running out of gas by the end of the game last night. Go USA!!
Slashdot: Linux and Mac OS X This is a great thread.
Hack the Planet Prime:: "If you're going to put a screen shot of your software on the Web, please use the OS default theme." I have a tip to add to this. I'm building an ftp archive of all of the software and utilities that I use on both Windows and the Mac OS. When creating an installer application for your piece of software, please name it something that somehow relates to what it is and can be understood by someone who didn't actually build the software. If I had a nickel for every installer that was named install.exe or just installer, I wouldn't be looking for a job right now.
I've added comments to the Radio Bump site. So now you can tell me just how meaningless the drivel I post is. I, of course, am quite happy about this feature addition. To use the feature, just click on the discuss link below each post.
Andrew J. Williams Affleck: Weblog accessibility. [ via diveintomark] If you publish a personal site, this is a must read article. I know it opened my eyes up to a couple of things.
Final: USA: 3 Russia: 2 Russia gave the US the business, but somehow the US pulled it out. Such effort, such great play. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's Canada vs. USA gold medal game. It should be one for the ages.
USA:3 Russia:0 End of the second, and I can't believe what spirited defense and team play we are seeing from the US.
Wired News: Judge: If You Own Music, Prove It This article has much better detail into the exact words of the ruling.
Napster court win puts labels in spotlight Can you say anti-trust?
weberrific weblog: "Je parle français comme une vache espagnole." Hehe, this was my favorite phrase from French class in high school, well right after le bebe foque. (That's baby seal to you and me.)
pb at onfocus says: I wish there was a test to determine which identity tests I should be taking. There are too many. I think learning which Backstreet Boy or piece of furniture I'm most like would give insights into my personality, but which tests would be most useful for a busy professional like me?
Netjuke: "The Artekopia Netjuke is a Cross-Platform & Web-Based Audio Streaming Jukebox powered by PHP 4, an increasing choice of databases and all the MP3, Ogg Vorbis and other formats files that constitute your digital music collection. "
Great discussion about personal Web archiving over at Hack the Planet Prime.
Well, I'm off to buy lightbulbs and breakfast cereal, or maybe I'll buy oatmeal and a new battery for my car.
Pete's News Page (where I found the link below) is a great place to keep up to date with Mac OS X pro audio news. He also has written some useful Mac OS X software for midi devices.
Somehow I missed the fact that Evolution released Drivers for OS X for my USB keyboard.(The music kind, not the qwerty kind.)
pic2icon lets you convert pictures you have lying around, say of your cat or you significant other, to Mac OS X compliant icons. People seem to find it strangely annoying to see their face on your desktop.
I'm going to Costco this morning. It's become something of an addiction that I picked up from my mother. Where else can you buy the latest Xbox game and a lifetime supply of toilet paper? Or a new pair of jeans and five pounds of smoked salmon? Regardless, I make sure I eat before I go there now.
For you news hounds that aren't using something that aggregates news like Radio, AmphetaDesk seems to do what Radio does on the news aggregation front, and it's written in PERL.
Ideapad: Gap Music
CNN: S. Korea considering speed skating lawsuit Okay, I saw the replay last night, and I'm no short track speed skating expert, but they read the rule, and it seemed like he did break it. Definitely a judgement call though, and it must be tough to swallow when you work as hard as these athletes do towards a goal.
I'm using Windows XP today. Man is IE faster on this box, with an equivalent processor, than it is on my Mac OS X boxes. I've tried running OmniWeb (no css support to speak of) and OPera on my Mac OS X boxes, but neither is as compatible with the sites I visit as Internet Explorer. Of course, the reason the sites are more compatible with Internet Explorer is because more people use Internet Explorer than any other browser. So the people who design the sites test them against Internet Explorer. We need another browser to get at least 30% market share very badly.
One more comment about my hockey watching. The IOC, very wisely, won't stop the games for American style tv timeouts. As a result, NBC takes commercial breaks whenever they feel like there is a stoppage in play. At least once in the last week, this has meant we have missed goal scoring plays. I understand that without the commercials, there would be no television coverage, but at the same time, the way they are doing things is really frustrating to the fan.
Rob Fahrni, at the core.: "This is a total crackup. Because of the lawsuit we can't charge folks like we used to. " ummm, I'm not laughing. Suddenly, I have an inkling how the rest of the world must feel when Americans force our economic agenda on them. I should do this a bit of justice by elaborating.
So, the only way to make the contracts all the same was to raise the prices for companies who were getting special deals? What about lowering the prices for everyone else who wasn't getting that special pricing? Clearly, Microsoft continues to count their Operating Systems unit as a very profitable one, so why wouldn't this be an option. One reason: Greed.
New Flash Player for Mac OS 10.1.x
Moodstats is a cross platform app, from the Kaliber 10000 folks, for tracking your mood and other daily measurements of your life, and a journal application. It also lets you upload your data to a server once you have registered it so you can see aggregate mood data. Pretty neat, today is my third day so I finally get to see the charting aspects.
Looking back at my blog post during the Nagano games four years ago, I notice that, out of the Nagano Games' sites that I linked to, the only one that isn't still up is the official Olympics site. What's the deal with that? I mean, this is an opportunity to keep history up there.
Yesterday, in between bouts of being frustrated with my computer equipment and software, I watched all four Olympic hockey games that were televised. I've only missed one or two of the televised games since the start of the games. I can tell you that, with a couple of exceptions, this is the best televised hockey I've ever seen, and the best games are ahead of us still. Who would have imagined that Sweden would kick Canada's butt? Who would have thought that Belarus would then beat Sweden? The upcoming US vs. Russia game, twenty two years ago to the day from the upset in 1980, will be hard played.
Do you know David Gallagher? If not, then you should use Google to search for David Gallagher. I think that David Gallagher will end up the most famous David Gallagher on Google soon enough.
It's nice to be back in the world of the living update. For the record, whatever happened to my install of Radio was undoubtedly my own fault. Nothing that I couldn't rebuild using my Blogger archives and my existing templates etc...
I, Cringely | The Power of X Another essay extolling the virtues of Apple entering the Intel based OS market. I don't see it. In my opinion, despite the fact that it might be good for Microsoft to see some real competition on the desktop, it would be the death of Apple. Apple is a much smaller company than Microsoft. Apple is not capable, at this point at supporting the sheer volume of hardware available on the Intel platform. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think so. Apple's only real credible advantage is the cohesion between their hardware and software. I just don't think they could make as much money changing their business plan to a software only one. They are a hardware company. How many companies can you name that made a huge switch like that successfully?
Wired News: PCs Are Incorrect on TV Is Hollywood trying to say that good guys use Macs and bad guys use PC's? I guess that would make me half good and half bad.
Well, it's a beautiful day here, and I need to drain the water out of my pool cover. Enjoy your day.
Sosumi is a Mac OS X Aqua replacement.
Joel on Software - The Iceberg Secret, Revealed: "Customers Don't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. "
For my non-weblog reading visitors, you might find this site an interesting view into the Olympics. It's a weblog being updated during the games by someone working them.
Blog This "We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution." (via dangerousmeta via Serious Instructional Technology)
Is Apple Planning an iPad Running the Palm OS? Taiwan Tells All . Okay, I am sooo tired of this meme now.
iHam on iRye: "iHam on iRye is a set of three applications used to control iTunes over a LAN or WAN network."
Secure Shell Helper is a Cocoa app for Mac OS X that lets you configure your Secure Shell options. Can you guess what I did tonight?
Stepwise: Building OpenSSH on Mac OS X. I would have had a much harder time doing this without this tutorial.
I watched Olympic Curling tonight for about three hours on CNBC. It's actually quite like the Italian sport of Bocce, but on ice and with brooms. I enjoyed the chess match like atmosphere as teams plotted their strategies. So I guess I'll have to make fun of some other Olympic sport now. Maybe pairs figure skating....
O'Reilly Network: Why Use a Command Line Instead of Windows?. I've actually been asked this question a lot when proclaiming my enthusiasm for the new Mac OS and it's command line interface. If you are curious about this particular subject, this article is a well written explanation of the reasoning and usefullness of the Command Line Interface. Not sure how I missed it when it was first posted back in November.
LaunchBar for Mac OS X. I don't think I've mentioned this before, but if you are using Mac OS X, you must check this utility out. I've been using it for the last couple of months, and finally registered it today. It just makes things easy. (I think I initially discovered this software via Have Browser, Will Travel.)
NY Times: The Future of Cellphones Is Here. Sort Of.. The best overview article on 3G wireless that i've seen to date.
74th Annual Academy Awards Nominees. Some real good stuff this year, even though it really wasn't a banner year for great films. I very much would like to see Ben Kingsley win for Sexy Beast. It was an incredible performance.
I guess I'm not getting what the fuss is all about with this CSS versus tables thing. I have three or four tables at my house that work fine. In fact, I'm typing on one of those tables now. Why would I replace them with some CSS thing? Can I put my coffee on it?
Nokia Contact Sender is a great Mac OS X app that lets you send VCards to your Nokia phone. I just saved myself about an hour of typing on the keypad.
PHPGeek :: Home of PHPTriad and more Holy Windows XP Web interface Batman!
Ars Technica: Microsoft .Net Overview "In a remarkable feat of journalistic sleight-of-hand, thousands of column inches in many "reputable" on-line publications have talked at length about .NET whilst remaining largely ignorant of its nature, purpose, and implementation."
I Heart New York: X Icons has Mac OS X Radiohead icons.
Long day here at the Bump Clubhouse. I decided to finally install the Sonnet Technologies ZIF/G4 upgrade card in my Blue and White tower that I am using as my home fileserver/home Apache server. I bought the card open boxed about two months ago, but hadn't the time or the inclination to install until today. It was such a good deal that I couldn't pass it up. Well, lo and behold, I took the card out of the box and it isn't a ZIF G4 at all, but a PCI G3, someone had pulled the ole switcheroo on Microcenter. I took it up there, and they let me return it after all. Even though I bought it in November. Good story of customer service and a big up to Marchand and Jim over at the Marrietta store for taking care of me. So now I have a much faster server. Yay.
Marvel Entertainment - dotComics I had no idea that Marvel had some of their comics online.
AdamIser : Adium Adium is a Mac OS X AIM client written in Cocoa.
This will verify that Radio now lives on a server, not on my local machine. This will allow me to access it from any computer with Internet access.
I'm still looking for work. If you have an opportunity, or know someone who does, I build great Web apps using Cold Fusion, PHP, and all sorts of databases. I have good, Fortune 500 client experience, and can do client interaction as well as development. I've been a developer for several years, and have also managed a department of developers. In addition to full time work, I'm interested in either contract or project work. Oh, I'm based in Atlanta so, unless I can telecommute, the job would have to be here. If you know of anything, please email me.
Oh, and not to take anything away from the Russian skaters who did win the medal, but the Canadian skaters who ended up with the Silver got screwed out of the Gold. Everyone who watched the broadcast, and seemingly everyone in the arena but the judges knew it. It's a shame for the sport of figure skating really. There are people who don't watch it except for the once every four year Olympic competitions. I, for one, have a hard time with sports where judges determine the outcome to begin with. Referees or umpires are one thing, they can have some effect on the outcome, but when judges have enough leeway to make someone who obviously gave an inferior performance win, I take exception.
Mac OS X Tip: If you use BBEdit 6.5 and Mac OS X, you should check out the Shell Worksheets feature they added in this release. It allows you to execute command line instructions and get results inside a BBEdit document. Very interesting stuff.
AppleSkinz are pretty cool looking. I might need to get a set for my upgraded G3 Tower, assuming they fit.
Radio Services alpha release. I can't help but think that Mac OS X gets cooler every day. It seems like there are so many nuggets of goodness in the OS to discover that it's almost overwhelming.
ZDNET: FTC's working for a spam clampdown Well, I doubt very much that this effort will be successful, but I can hope, can't I? Over the last few months the amount of spam I'm getting has risen to an almost unbearable level. Even with fine tuned mail filters, some still ends up in my inbox. (link via Camworld)
Las Vegas was very enjoyable. One of the real high points was going to see Blue Man Group. I'm not sure how I haven't seen them before, but I loved it, and highly recommend it.
Radio UserLand : How to import posts from Blogger and Movable Type Just in case you missed it.
That last post wasn't meant to be grumpy, and I really don't mind answering questions. Heading out the door in a few minutes.
Just a quick note about my blogger entry import project. It's true that I have imported all of my blogger entries and my pre-blogger entries into Radio with Userland's help, but Userland will be releasing the code and docs for this process once they have cleaned things up, not me. Please wait until they do so because anything you get from me right now won't be documented well. I imagine that they will be getting it out in the next couple of days. Not that I mind answering emails on the subject, but that I would prefer that everyone get this code with good documentation and support from Userland.
Network Security Updater for Microsoft Office v. X This fixes a denial of service vunerability that was caused by their network licensing checker.
Confessionalism - Fuck You Gallery It's a sort of takeoff on the mirror project. (via davezilla)
Updates will be sporadic today, as I'm traveling to Las Vegas this afternoon for a weekend of relaxation and fun. I still have to pack and get the house ready for the cat sitter. I, of course, put that off until the last minute. I believe that the hotel where we are staying has high speed Internet access in the rooms, so I should get some updating in this weekend in the mornings. I'm hoping to finish the design here in the next few days, it would already be done if I could natively run my graphics apps in Mac OS X.
My father announced his retirement this afternoon, and called me about it today. I'm glad it was his decision, and is what he wants. He's a great guy, and it's pretty lame that I don't tell him that more often. When I look at myself, I think most of the really good stuff that's there is due to him in one way or another. I worshipped him as a kid. He may not have known it at the time. As I got older, I found myself time and time again judging myself by standards that were set by him. Here's wishing you the best in your retirement Dad. You certainly have worked hard as long as I've known you:-)
O2 xda might be the nicest looking PDA yet.
news.com - Giants forging Web services consortium This might as well be entitled "Giants forging giant press release."
If you thought yesterday's link was scary, try this one on for size. 1997 baby, and now it's right here living in my database. You don't know how good that makes me feel. I spent most of the day today doing the grunt work necessary to make this happen. This involved turning my pre-Blogger posts from November 1997 to March 2000 into XML files. Once I got there, the work we did this week with Blogger import took over. Now everyone has easy access to all the meaningless drivel I wrote back then in addition to the drivel I'm turning out now. I'm sure that's just what the Internet needs.
Word of warning, don't link to stuff at the permalink level on this site for the time being. There will be dust, and it will settle. Linking at the day level is fine, that shouldn't break.
Wanna see something scary? Check this out. (Thanks Dave and Aaron.)
Browse3D What is this?
MacSlash: Sony vs. Apple For The Digital Hub Title I a lot to say about this. I have, almost exclusively bought Somy home electronic components over the last two years. You can count among that number my Sony Wega XBR Television, my Playstation 2, my portable and console Minidisc players/recorders, my DVD player, and my receiver/amplifier. I also have both Apple and Sony laptops, and a Sony Clie handheld. I think that, if these two companies actually teamed up, they would both benefit. It's doubtful that would ever happen. I think a more realistic competition comparison here is actually Sony vs. Microsoft. Look beyond the obvious battle for game consoles here, and you will see that Microsoft has plans for the living room that directly compete with Sony.
Browse3D What is this?
Bitwise Operator: The Plain Truth About Piracy Everyone should read this article. Especially those of you who are pirating software over the Internet. It's very depressing to me that the people doing this don't understand that they are messing with the ecology of software development. (via Mr. Barrett)
Trillian Won't Heed AOL's Message I'm sort of torn on this one. AOL is providing a service, they own the servers, they pay for the bandwidth. This stuff is not free. It's up to them to decide if what they are providing is an open network that people can write other clients for or not. The only real chance they have to recoup their costs is through pushing advertising out to the client software. Now, if they were smart, they would write an API that allowed other clients to become certified for their network which required the ability to push ads out to the client. Then they wouldd get the best of both worlds, other people would be doing some of the innovation work for them, and they would still get the advertising revenue from the third party clients.
So who will it be, Rams or Patriots? I have yet to hear anyone in the analyst community that thinks the Patriots will win. Then again, no one thought the Patriots would get past the Raiders and Steelers either. I tend to agree with them, but I hope the Patriot's defensive mastermind coach has come up with something to make the game interesting.
Updates are going to be sort of sparse this weekend. I have lots of house stuff to do because I'm having some folks over to watch the Superbowl, and I am still working on getting my blogger entries into Radio as posts. We made a lot of progress on this yesterday. If you are really interested in this stuff, you can read my notes here. I wouldn't use anything you find there for now. Eventually, there will be documentation of everything that actually works.
A List Apart: Web Services
Is it a coincidence that the Scripting News post Dave mentions me in today is titled "hit a bump"?
Voting for the Anti-Bloggies has begun.
A happy third birthday to Axodys. (Belated)
Arstechnica Cookbook of Bachelor Chow I don't cook for myself nearly enough, but I do actually know how to cook.