Journal: News & Comment

Links of interest (2005-09-21):

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

These have been accumulating for awhile. Welcome to autumn.

• "Even George Bush seems to have found his match with the Silence Economy. Millions of Americans voted with their dismay, unsubscribing from the Feed that told them what a good job was being done."
  
  
• The Opera web browser is entirely free now.
  
  
• "Microsoft realigns for next wave of innovation and growth" »» "Whoever wrote this press release probably used to work here. Or maybe they just had some help."
  
  
• Why software sucks and what to do about it.
  
  
• Vancouver's ActiveState and the Vancouver XML Developers' Association are presenting lectures from two people I know: Roland Tanglao and Dave Shea.
  
  
• The difference between search engine optimization, search engine exaggeration, and search engine deception.
  
  
• Cool little icons in any colour you like, cheap.
  
  
• Did you ever think that someone could make a better screw?
  
  
• Almost every time I give a talk about websites, someone asks me what website editor (Dreamweaver, GoLive, etc.) I use. They're surprised when I tell them I do everything in a text editor. Here's why.
  
  
• Just follow these 10 simple steps and you, too, can be seen in fine dining establishments like Jamba Juice and speaking on panels for conferences like Distribucate 2.0, Fred, Bloggerstock and Elfdex.
  
  
• "When will managers and marketers realise that we know they're talking shite? The only people fooled by management-/marketing-speak are the manager and marketers."
  
  
• Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.
  
  
• "What they hadn't told attendees before the last day of the conference: The tags also brought the photos into an RSS stream that automatically sent them to be displayed on the screens around the conference hall. 'If you want to put some racy pictures up there,' Scoble said with a laugh, 'you have a couple more hours to do that.'"
  
  
• Putting the SLAX distribution of Linux on an iPod nano.
  
  
• Drowning New Orleans (October 2001), That Sinking Feeling (February 2003), Gone With the Water (October 2004).
  
  
• Qoop lets you turn Flickr photos into a book.
  
  
• Inequality and risk? Well, not so much.
  
  
• "This argument is founded on the assumption that one particular untestable hypothesis—no matter how fantastic—is different from all the others, and that we must give it more credence than equally provable ones about space aliens, pastafarian gods and the like."
  
  
• Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite make a movie. No, it's not special effects. They really did make a movie.
  
  
• In many respects, Apple Computer doesn't know what the hell it's doing with XML file formats.
  
  
• Way too much math detail about how iTunes decides how to play higher rated songs more often, if you choose that.
  
  
• Toast 7 may be worth buying, especially since it can span large disc burns across multiple CD-Rs or DVD-Rs.
  
  
• Linotype has a free font management tool for Mac OS X.
  
  
• A quick visual tour of how the Mac OS has changed since 1984. Only the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000 did not have an Apple menu in the upper left corner. (Someone should build a widget that replicates that pretty little audio player, though.)
  
  
• Some (U.S.) legal background on sampling and mashups.
  
  
• Some of the XML- and JavaScript-based components of Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) could very well be cross-platform for Macs, Linux, and mobile devices.
  
  
• The dismaying lock-in of browser-based email.

 |