...more recent posts
Joyent Slingshot will allow Ruby on Rails developers to deploy their web apps both on line and off line (on Windows and Mac OS X at least) when it launches in April. This is in a similar category to Adobe's Apollo that I have written about lately. These hybrid web/desktop application technologies are the cutting edge right now, and they are opening up some very intriguing possibilites.
More on Slingshot. Slingshot screencast.
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.(via Kottke)
Hitachi is about to release 1 TB hard drives. Supposedly they perform on par with Raptors. $399, but strangely, available first from Dell bundled in expensive gaming PCs. Hopefully it won't take long to hit the open market. Seagate to follow in Q2 of this year.
Adobe launches Apollo. I mentioned this in passing back in November, and now here it is. Nicely done Adobe. Apollo lets developers write cross platform applications using HTML, javascript, and Flash, that run on the desktop instead of in the browser. This has the potential to unlock a lot of creativity. I'm downloading the SDK now and will report back when I get a chance to play around with it. For now I am guardedly optimistic on this one. And six months ago I was thinking Adobe couldn't do anything right.
The freeware ScriptExport is an iPhoto plug-in that lets you process photos with your own shell scripts. I need this for a project coming up. Excellent.
Geek (attempted) humor: Absolut Hacker.
Also making waves on the music front is the Slacker music service. It's a free streaming radio service, plus a portable playing device that can also stream over WiFi or Satellite connections (portable player coming "soon".) The company behind it, Broadband Instruments, has some big name executives from Diamond / Rio, MusicMatch, and iRiver. You can't listen to exactly what you want, but you can configure "radio stations" that will play particular artists you have selected, plus other artists that Slacker thinks are related to those you have chosen. The free service allows you to skip 6 songs an hour, while a future payed service will let you skip more.
Engadget has some more info.
Pretty big play. My guess is it won't work.
SNOCAP Announces Alliances with Major Labels (sort of....)
The company revealed today that it would now be offering tracks from major indie labels like Sub Pop, New Line and Dangerbird. While this seems innocuous enough at first glance, I should point out that all of these labels operate under the Warner umbrella, making the announcement far more savory.
Perhaps I'm being overeager in my assessment, but I envision this as a key break in the DRM-dam. A vast army of listeners get their music from MySpace and I'm certain that, with it offering DRM-free copies of popular musicians, this number will grow exponentially. I'm confident that we'll begin seeing far more announcements from major labels in the very near future.
I'm not as confident, but this certainly is moving in the right direction. In a strange way the iTunes store might actually force the labels in the DRM-free direction merely in an effort to kill the Jobs juggernaut they unwittingly created. Still, when push comes to shove, I just don't see the labels being able to swallow the medicine. They're too used to getting payed.
Funny diagram of programming language hierarchy. Wouldn't Python be on top of Perl though?
Last night I went to my first ever opera, Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata, at Lincoln Center. Apparently this is a fairly standard "first" opera to see. Very enjoyable. Lincoln Center is beautiful. We ate before hand, and then during the first intermission you go back and sit down at your table for dessert. Nice touch. Not sure if I'm converted to a big fan or anything, but it was a great evening. I'm hoping to give the symphony a shot next (although I've been to that once in the past.)
Here's a horrible phonecam shot I felt like a total dork taking. You can see the screens in front of every seat that translate. They are *highly* directional, so you can only see the LEDs if you are looking directly straight at it - no peripheral vision distraction at all. Pretty cool. I guess these were something of an issue for the real buffs when they first put them in, but it's very helpful if you can't speak Italian.
