...more recent posts
Is Gmail imap acting up for anyone else today? I think this must be google's least reliable, least well thought out service (I don't mean gmail itself, just the imap part.)
Slashdot article on wikipedia's shoe string budget server infrastructure got this funny comment:
How hard can it be to increase the budget or add more servers?
Just go to the Wikipedia page with those numbers and change them. You don't even need to have an account.
Apparently Amtrak is doing some work on a bridge between NYC and Boston, so it's my first time on the Bolt Bus. $17 one way (take that Accela!) Free WiFi. AC in every seat. Pretty nice.
SproutCore is Cocoa for the web:
As Apple's public schedule for WWDC explained, "SproutCore is an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications.Roughly Drafted has an in depth look at SproutCore in the context of its' closed source competitors: Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.
Very interesting. I can't wait to check out the MobileMe web apps that Apple is rolling out using this sort of technology.
is a backwards-compatible modification to the TCP protocol which adds opportunistic encryption. It's designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.
TLS is the solution to protecting sensitive information. However, there's room for a low setup cost protocol to protect the bulk of traffic which isn't currently encrypted. It can't stop a focused attack, but it can assuage untargeted, dragnet sniffing of backbones and spoofing of RST packets.
New iPhones are $199 and $299 (8 GB and 16GB.) 3G cellular (much faster) and GPS and longer battery life (we'll see about that.) Not much else different on the hardware front. Very nice software update though. They are really doing it right. (Maybe I'll post more on this if I get the time.) And their on line (web, email, remote backup) service .mac has been renamed 'MobileMe' and runs on the me.com domain (I'm meh on the name but that's a pretty nice domain - must have cost a few bucks.) The syncing is very tight between the iPhones and MobileMe. Contacts, email, even pictures are synced immediately over the air so your home machines and iPhone (and your shared calendars on your partners iPhone) all stay in sync all the time. $99/year is not cheap, but I think it's going to be so slick that you'll basically have to buy it. Good thing the phones are so cheap now - I guess that's the trade off.
Due on July 11. I'll be there.
IEEE Spectrum magazine has a huge round up of thinking on the singularity.
Free Wi-Fi for AT&T users at Starbucks. Well, sort of mostly almost free. You have to sign up for a Starbucks card and have used it at least once in the last 30 days (just adding money to the card counts as "using" it.) And you have to make an account with AT&T where you agree for them to send you 4 emails a year, plus look at your Starbucks card puchasing data. In exchange you get 2 hours of Wi-Fi a day, limited to a single session (you can't leave and them come back, but I'm not sure if there is any safe guard against creating multiple Starbucks and AT&T accounts in order to get multiple sessions.)
This is a pretty good deal in my opinion, especially for an infrequent traveler like me (where having some sort of 3G modem for my laptop makes no economic sense.) Starbucks do have a great advantage of ubiquity.
Lots of stuff still to clean up, but the main work on the geneva blog engine is finally complete. Yes, this is what was just going to take me a week or so to finish back around the first of the year. I double dare anyone to claim the ability to judge time more poorly than me. Sadly my miscalculations are never off in the other direction.
Anyway, I'm not being too hard on myself - there is some good work in there. It's just funny how everything is harder and takes longer than I think. Still, this is a pretty big milestone. The whole thing is now minimally usable. Probably only take me another decade or so get it to final release. :-)
Yahoo BrowserPlus is a downloadable (semi-) cross-browser plug in that enables a bunch of cool services for developing more desktop like web apps. The javascript APIs allow for image editing, visual notifiers, and for me the big one: the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop into the web app. It's crazy this has taken so long. And the wait is not over since BrowserPlus is still a long way from ready. Worth watching.