...more recent posts
Everybody is blogging the emerging technology conference. It's almost like being there. Doc has tons. Aaron has 1, 2, 3 days worth. Wes has typically good stuff. Does this (take Wes' for example) constitute a new writing style? Technical stream of consciousness? Actually quite easy to read if you have some background. Data dense, for sure. Joey DeVilla has lots of notes too. There's more, but how much are you really going to read?
O'Reilly has a big conference on emerging technology going on now. As has become standard with these events, 802.11b wifi connections are everywhere, and many of those attending have laptops from which they blog the various meetings in real time. This is where a lot of the business world will be in a few years I think. Anyway, Rob Flickenger set up a program called EtherPEG that sniffs the local network for .gif and .jpeg images. He then collaged them for some very interesting results.
If you've never heard of EtherPEG, its a Mac hack that's been around for a while that combines all of the modern conveniences of a packet sniffer with the good old-fashioned friendliness of a graphics rendering library, to show you whatever GIFs and JPEGs are flying around on your network. It's sort of a real-time meta browser that dynamically builds a view of other people's browsers, built up as other people look around online.Check out the results here. Very cool.
MB went to Bentonville Arkansas yesterday. If you're in the retail world you know there is only one reason to go to Bentonville. She sure has a weird collection of jobs being part restauranteur, part graphic designer, and part local political figure. She used to be just a graphic designer. I can barely remember those days though. Neither of us worked at all the first year we were together. Now we eat dinner together but do almost nothing else.
Sleeping alone is really something if you're not used to it. I'd almost say I liked it, except I know what I really like is sleeping alone occasionally. I didn't wake up until after 11:00! That's something I haven't done in years. I think I needed a long sleep.
David McCusker worked out his problems with Lisa. This makes me happy. Although only hearing from one side (his) has made me suspicious of her. Like I'm protective of him, which is weird since I don't know him personally. I guess because I don't know him, and because he writes clearly about relationship issues in a way I don't do in public, there is a lot of transference that can happen from just reading the words. If I actually knew them I wouldn't be surprised to feel less engaged by the whole episode. Anyway, I hope it continues to go well. For all of us.
The CEO as well as the founder of Napster have both resigned. I'm confused as to why this is being so widely reported. You'd almost think this was important in some way. But Napster has been dead for a long time. Once they shut down the free trading it was obvious they could never transition to a pay service.
There are still file trading networks. And they have more users, trading more files (including copyrighted music files,) then Napster ever had. And they continue to grow. I believe the RIAA will eventually be crushed by these networks. But all this has absolutely nothing to do with Napster.
I fixed back links (I'm dropping 'reference logging' in favor of 'back links') so they no longer register links from the same page, or links from that pages archives.
I can't see any difference between mozilla 1.0 RC1 and RC2. Maybe it's mail or news changes. For browsing both are rock solid (although I've found most everything is rock solid on OSX,) fast, and thoughtfully designed (tabbed browsing, cookie support, and full javascript controls come immediately to mind.) Apparently RC2 should run on MacOS 8.5 and 8.6 although I've yet to confirm this. You can get RC2 here.
Our friends from Montana have safely departed. What a week. It took me all of Sunday and Monday just to recover. Although we didn't specifically plan it this way, after not seeing them for 4 years we will now be seeing them again in 6 weeks when we head out west. That made saying goodbye not so hard.
Ren is one amazing kid. He seemed to take to the city as if it was perfectly natural to have so many millions of people packed into a couple of square miles. Best quote from bed at the end of a very long day and night: "I hear the beautiful music of all the people who don't want the lights to go out." Indeed. I have a feeling we'll see him again in NYC.
Apple is expected to introduce new rack mountable servers today at 9:00 am pacific time. Possibly another product as well. We'll be watching.
Dual screen laptop (via /.)
There is no spoon notes that David Watson
[has come] to the rescue for Radio users who would like to add "autolinking" or automatic "backlinking" to their blogs. He's created a little webservice called "getReferers" that automatically generates a list of links to the sites who are linking to you. It then helpfully puts that list at the end of your page. Allowing your readers to see who is linking to you helps to put your comments in contextHe (she?) also mentions what's different about my implementation: "By the way, I think the way JimsLog handles this referer feature is the best I've seen because it indicates referers by post." Thanks. I don't know enough about how radio works, but if you can script with it on the level of apache environmental variables then it's pretty easy to have your backlink system only activate on requests for specific posts, rather than general links to your page (for me, in my system, this just means watching for a numeric query string - like ?4454 on the end of the REQUEST_URI - which will always be a link to a specific post.) I'd love it if radio got this feature.