...more recent posts
Apple announced new MacBooks yesterday. That's the new monicker for the old iBook. Very nice machines. The high end now comes in black in addition to the traditional white still offered across the line. But it's $150 more for no apparent reason. That's kind of silly. Otherwise these machines are great, and plenty powerful. Starting at $1199 (well, $1099, but you need at least 1 GB of RAM, so $1199.) I'd just get the cheapest one (with the added RAM.)
Unfortunately I need to milk my 867 TiBook for a while more. If I can make some money by January I'll get the Memron MacBook Pro when it comes out, but that's a pretty big "if".
Anyway, I know at least 3 people who were waiting for the MacBooks so maybe I'll get to play around with one.
Just off several solid days of coding. It's so fun to be able to dive in deep and not come up for a while. It's hard work, but at the same time I feel lucky to be able to do it. I wish I could explain more what I am working on. I'm not very good at that though (or writing documentation which is sort of the same thing.) In any case, the deal is that I am about to put this software behind several customer sites, but once I do that I effectively freeze any substantial overhaul of the software, since I can't break compatibility (like different URL schemes, say,) with already running sites, and I don't want to have a bunch of different forks of the same project (because that's what happened last time and it is a nightmare for maintenance.)
So everything is going to run on the same version of the software, and I need to have the core of it set in stone before I start or it's just going to be a headache. And after this past week (well okay, I was useless on Sunday, but otherwise...) I'm pretty much there.
Now I just need a little attention on the mail server to stem the spam deluge and I will be ready to go. Not finished, by any means, but ready to start finally. God I am slow. But I guess slow is better than nothing.
Hopefully I can write something about the software at greater length. It really is sort of interesting. It goes way beyond blogs.
Video downloader Firefox add-on:
Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion... and other 60+ video sites! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc)! Directly!Very nice. Of course it's always possible to download the movies yourself, without this add-on, but sometimes it takes some real detective work viewing the page source to figure out what the "real" URL of some embedded media is. And if you can't decipher HTML you really probably can't do it without this. Might get me to switch. I'll certainly just jump to Firefox for those situations.
VideoDownloader add a small icon on the status bar at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. Just click that and download the video you are watching!
Eye.Fi is building 802.11g wireless (WiFi) networking into standard sized SD memory cards. They are targeting the digital camera market. Details are a little thin at the moment but this might be amazingly cool. My question is, how will this work? I mean, okay, I pop this SD card into my camera so now it has WiFi. But how do I use it? How do I configure it? My camera's software has no idea it is there. This part doesn't make any sense to me yet. My guess is that it can only connect with a computer that is running some custom eye.fi software which would sort of defeat the point (if I'm near my own computer I could just plug my camera in - I want WiFi so that when I'm out walking around the city I can use all the open networks to be uploading my pictures in real time.)
Kodak and Nikon both have WiFi camera models, but they suffer from the same problem I describe above. What we need is a WiFi camera that can find and connect to random open access points and then upload (probably smtp) to where ever I want on the net.
I basically never want to see anyone go to jail, even people I intensely dislike, but it's hard to work up much sympathy over this one: spam king Alan Ralsky has been busted. The rumors, as one would expect in such a situation, are that the feds have him so badly he is going to rat out the entire global spam network. We'll see, but it's a curiously pleasant thing to think about. And it's not too hard to believe that spammers would immediately turn into rats when faced with even a small amount of jail time.
I'll bet the real numbers (which we will never know) are astounding. I wouldn't be surprised if the reality was something like: the top 20 spammers in the world account for 10 percent of the traffic on the internet. Yes, I just totally made those numbers up. But I'll bet it's something like that. Others will step in to fill any shoes that are sent to prison, for sure, but the sheer outrageousness of scope that the top guys are operating with will not come back if they sweep up all the big guys.
I'll wait for the spam huntress' take on it, but I'm cautiously hopeful.
From the geeks on the CentOS list, the butterfly effect: a mesmerizing java applet of a Lorenz Attractor.
The demonstration shows a graphical representation of the time variation of three variables X(t),Y(t) and Z(t), coupled by non-linear evolution equations.... This tiny difference in the initial conditions becomes amplified by the evolution, until the two trajectories evolve quite separately. The amplification is exponential, the difference grows very rapidly and after a surprisingly short time the two solutions behave quite differently. This is an illustration of the butterfly effect - the idea in meteorology that the flapping of a butterfly's wing will create a disturbance that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere will become amplified eventually to change the large scale atmospheric motion, so that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast.
Finally. How many years have I been talking about cell phone cameras replacing traditional point and shoot models? But the industry moves so slowly! It's been so frustrating. Like monitoring the pitch drop experiment.
Anyway, it looks like Nokia has finally done it. The N93 is packing a 3.2 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, mechanical shutter, auto-focus Vario-Tessar lens camera. It's not going to be as good as your brand new digitcam, but it's going to be good enough I think.
The transformer style swivel phone allows for configuration in a mini video camera mode, and can take decent vga quality video at 30 fps. And while Nokia has had photo uploading capabilities for a while (tied into their lifeblog system,) these new offerings come with flickr support baked in. Very cool.
Plus, this thing has "802.11b/g connectivity, a TV output capability, an FM radio, and EDGE data support in addition to the triband GSM and UMTS capabilities...." Nice. (Will an American carrier really ship it with 802.11 support? Color me still slightly skeptical.)
On the down side, it is pretty big. More photos are here. I don't mind it, but some people will be turned off by the somewhat clunky design. For them Nokia has the more traditional candy bar style N73 which sports the same great camera.
Of course it's not actually out yet. :-( Looks like some time in July. Not sure I can wait that long as my need for a new phone is rather desperate. If the treo 700p drops in May I will probably jump. But at least my *next* phone after that really is going to replace the digital camera that I don't have yet either (but that's another story.)
Good job Nokia.
Hey Mark, if you don't want to post NAB notes to your page, or that super old red.com camera thread, feel free to post them as comments here. I'd love to hear about anything interesting you see, or just reports on the general atmosphere. You know, you could do it in all your spare time. :-)
Songbird is an open source cross platform music player built on the Mozilla engine. They've got a blog. Still very early, so who knows if this will pan out. But if it does, and it's any good, this is the key piece I need for the second phase of my business plan. Of course so far I am not even up to phase one yet. Still, I'm excited about songbird and will be watching closely.
Dave Hyatt (one of the lead Apple Safari guys) has an interesting blog about how they are thinking ahead to how the web will handle future high DPI screen resolutions. This is something people who make websites - and especially websites where graphic elements are important - should also be starting to think about. Those 500 pixel wide images look fine on < 100 DPI displays, but are going to be way too small on a 600 DPI screen. Ordinary bloggers probably don't have to get worried or anything, but the tool makers need to start planning.
If you are curious to dig in yourself, start with Hyatt's second post which can act as an intro. Then his original, much longer post which outlines how Apple is starting to think about the options. And then Ars Technica's always enlightening John Siracusa steps back and looks at what this issue means on a larger OS wide scale.