...more recent posts
Sure MP3s are cool, but now that Napster is trying to go legit and all the huge consumer electronics manufacturers are supporting the format, what does a young trend bucking anti-corporate music swapper have to do to stay ahead of the curve? Download the latest (beta4) preview of Ogg Vorbis, of course. It's the really free really good digital music CODEC. Or if you're like me, and you still find yourself using cassette tapes, but want to sound like you're on the cutting edge, you can just read this interesting interview with the guys behind Ogg. Burn baby burn.
Baaaa. I made zero progress yesterday, but I may have screwed some stuff up, so at least I wasn't completely ineffective. It's remarkably hard to work for eight hours on something you are not accomplishing (but I guess that's where the screwing stuff up part came in.) Must get out of the house today. Perhaps it will put itself in order while I'm gone. Seems about as likely as me being able to do it.
Spent yesterday in linux land. I think the new box is going to be called tulip, although I still have to consult my tree specialist about that. Anyway, I'm now able to telnet into tulip from the iMac, as well as browse html pages on tulip from Netscape on the iMac. But I couldn't get FTP to connect (or, it seems to connect, but then it just hangs while getting directory information.) This is a problem, because I need FTP working to upload the latest PHP and MySQL. But after I get that done, I'll really be getting somewhere. Hopefully today will see some good progress.
I don't care who owns my bases. Bring on the backlash.
Here's a nice explanation of "web bugs" which are the limited case where cookies can be a security problem. The maddening thing, as he points out, is that it is not a problem with cookies, per se, but with the lame way they are implemented in Netscape and IE. Cookies are your friend. Your browser is probably not.
Ev (nice new design) has apparently done some research about click through rates for blog banner ads at weblogs.com. Seems that the average click through rate is around 0.6%. But check out the top 6 banners, which all get over 2% of the people who see them to click. Hmmmmm.
802.11b is a standard for wireless ethernet connections. Lucent calls it wavelan (although, did they just change the name?) and Apple calls it airport. Whatever the name, 802.11b allows you to set up short range wireless local area networks (LANs.) You plug one part (the base station) into your phone line (or DSL, or cable modem line) and the other part into your (portable) computer. Now you can move around your house, or out into the yard, and your computer will stay connected to the web by wirelessly talking with the base station. Cool. But even cooler is that you can set up multiple base stations, and if you have everything positioned correctly, your roaming portable computer will sense the different base stations as they come into range and automatically switch off (like cell phones - especially PCS phones - do when you are moving around.) So the question, then, is wouldn't it be cool if people (especially those living in densely populated urban areas) started blanketing certain regions with publically accessible 802.11b base stations. A free wireless internet could be built in the traditional decentralized grass roots way. Oh wait, people are already doing this.
Macworld Tokyo was yesterday (well, last night Eastern US time.) Pretty much as expected, but there are always a few surprises. New speed bumped and CD/RW sporting imacs (G3s at 400/500/600 mhz.) Apple missed the ball on CD/RW (they were pushing DVD/RAM for the last 2 years) but now that they have changed course they have easily made up for lost time. Big Cube price drops, with the entry level 450 G4 now dropped to $1250. And a huge price drop for the all singing all dancing Mac 22 inch Cinema Display. Now only ("only!") $2999 (from $3999.) This is actually pretty good, seeing as others have 18 inch flat panels (sgi) for $3200+. These prices should continue to drop fast as flat panel technology is rapidly improving. Maybe $1999 by Christmas?
And for gamers, and other tech spec freaks, the big, almost totally unexpected news, is that the new NVIDIA GeForce3 (previously known as the NV20) is going to be available for the Mac. This is huge news for Apple, as WinTel has always had a lead in the gaming market. But the GeForce3 is not only coming to the Mac, it's coming to the Mac before WinTel. Amazing. I wonder how Jobs cut that deal. Must be pretty hard to convince a manufacturer to support your platform when you have < 5% of the market. Anyway, this is going to take gaming to the next level. (Yes, I know that is meaningless hype-speak, but this will be the most advanced graphics card.) They had John Carmack on stage (master mind behind Quake, and all around programmer hero) and he was demoing a preview of the Doom3 engine running on MacOSX. He says that full cinematic 3d quality is now possible. All the 3d characters are rendered in Maya (!) which was also demonstrated running on OSX. I've never been into these games, but I am certainly interested in the state of the art, and I keep wondering when we're going to get to these 3d virtual worlds I started reading about in '89. We're still a way off, but clearly making progress. And the GeForce3 will at least give the battered Apple some bragging rights.
I mentioned ZZZ online before, but I think it's worth repeating. I've really been enjoying it. The guy who writes it is a total nut. Sort of a Popular Science on the web, except much better.
From slashdot: Microsoft has clarified their man Jim Allchin's rather insane comments that open source software threatens the "American way". They didn't mean that. They meant the Gnu Public License (GPL) threatens the American way. Maybe they are finally understanding. I can't wait to read Richard Stallmans comments.
This is doubly funny, becasue even on Slashdot (in the comments at least) Stallman is regularly attacked in just this way. "He's a communist!" "He wants to share everything!" "Did we mention he's a communist!" I just always thought these were little republican 13 year olds.