I use CitySearch a fair bit when I’m looking for restaurants (new and old), but it’s always struck me as sort of weird (not not weird exactly as too bad) that you can’t say get a map of restaurants and ratings based on distance from your location. That would be a killer app for a mobile device one would think.
- The Joy Luck Fight Club
- Three Proposed Ways to Stem the Email Influx – high level comparison of SPF, DomainKeys, and Caller ID; see also Who Will Win the SMTP Authentication Wars? – an old topic, but worth bringing up since I’ve noticed a lot of talk about Domain Keys. I originally saw DK as being useless, but now think that it’d go well w/ SPF. The latter would do a huge chunk of the (very fast) first pass filteirng, and Domain Keys would then be able to authoritatively confirm (protecting against phishing). Whose knows? Maybe the decreased volume will make up for the huge processing cost (unlikely, as until the economics changes, spammers will have every motivation to work around stopgaps)
- EditThisPagePHP – EditThisPagePHP is a PHP script that let’s you edit the HTML content of a page by following a link on that page. Only two files are required: the core PHP script (editthispage.php) and a data file for your page. The core file can support as many pages as desired.
- phpGACL – Generic Access Control Lists; A PHP class offering Web developers a simple, yet immensely powerful “drop in” permission system to their current Web based applications.
- yes, my GMail is at now at 1000000MB, and my 23MB current usage drops me back to 0%.
- Jon Stewart’s (’84) Commencement Address
I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I can.t help but wonder what has happened to this place. Seriously, it saddens me. As a person, I am honored to get it; as an alumnus, I have to say I believe we can do better. And I believe we should. But it has always been a dream of mine to receive a doctorate and to know that today, without putting in any effort, I will. It.s incredibly gratifying. Thank you. That.s very nice of you, I appreciate it.
- Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush – McSweeney’s counts from Day 1 – 37
A bunch of really useful OS X file sharing utilities from HornWare:
- SharePoints – application + preference pane for setting arbitrary share points in AFS and SMB
- SharePoints Automounter – auto mount points w/o digging through NetInfo
- AFS Monitor – monitor AFS usage (who’s connected, etc)
I’m currently installing a fresh copy of Windows XP on my work workstation (the old W2K install was dying despite not having been used for several months). Even w/ a “dynamic” install, I’m currently downloading 18 “Critical Updates and Service Packs.” Hopefully my machine won’t be compromised while this gets set up.
Sick, just totally sick (new revelations from Seymour Hersh on the Pentagon’s role at Abu Ghraib)
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- Indian EVM compared with Diebold – hmm, not sure about no person-to-vote audit trail, but the rest looks lik eit’s much more effective
Techdirt: How Not to Price (I’ve seen this quote before in a “things I’ve learned” type interview — very good advice)
However, it seems that they’ve screwed up one of the most basic rules in pricing: never take away features and charge for them. You can charge for new features – but taking away features that were included for free before always pisses off your most loyal customers. They feel suckered. They feel like you’ve pulled a bait and switch on them.
Today I got called in for jury duty (made it through 4 days of dodging the bullet). Turns out this week is Juror Appreciation Week, which involved guest speakers, free coffee and donuts, and fun juror games with, what else, early dismissal as prizes. I was wearing my EFF hat and ended up having a brief conversation with a woman who works for a local lawfirm that is considering filing a class-action suit against Diebold and other e-voting companies. I was sort of bummed out about being called in as I ended up missing out on Commencement (John McCain was this year’s commencement speaker) and hitting up the last day of E3.
The day was actually going pretty well (made my way through a large chunk of Free Culture and Eastern Standard Tribe), and it looked like I was pretty much in the clear, but I got called in at 3:30 and will need to report back next Tuesday for juror selection in an attempted murder case.
It should be interesting, however if I’m actually called up, I will have to ask about my juror’s rights. My reading seems to show that I have a right (and of course responsibility) to judge both law and fact. The Juror’s Handbook (err, it’s a trifold) handed out today says that jurors are only supposed to judge fact. Further confusing matters, the judge made some opening remarks emphasizing the importance of our role as judges, but also spoke about and being non-judgemental (I know what he means, but when you put that together it’s sort of funny).
- Basic Juror Information
- Jurors’ Handbook: A Citizens Guide to Jury Duty
- DOING YOUR BEST AS A TRIAL JUROR: SURVIVING VOIR DIRE
- Rejected as a juror
Should I make my way through the selection process, I’ll probably keep a little writeup (to be released after conclusion, of course) of the experience.
Kottke points to what he calls a dumb /. thread on MT’s new pricing structure. I’ll admit that SNR on /. (everywhere really) is horrible (and slashbots are typically clueless [yet strongly opiniated of course] when it comes to web tech), but with the FoF and moderation filtering (increased to 5 now, sadly), I have to say, overall discourse isn’t that bad. I’ll almost never come out of a thread without seeing an insightful, informational, or eloquent argument, which is a hell of a lot better from most of my offline conversations. (I’ve added my preferences to the link (I think most people aren’t even aware the numbers are for filtering posts); sadly you can’t see my Friends/Foes list applied; I use it aggressively to flag posters who present interesting/informative posts — I would use it even more if it would do background passing of status changes, but that’s another issue entirely).
I’d been blowing off the whole licensing thing because well, it doesn’t really effect me. For my personal sites, I don’t use MT, at school, the Director of the Program is Joi Ito’s brother-in-law, so if licensing becomes a problem that’s probably near the bottom of the list, and at work (err, also at school), we would love (well, love may be too strong of a word) to pay for support, as we have rolled out a couple MT installations in limited production capacities [the single-cpu license clause has got to go; I don’t even think we have any single-CPU servers]). However, scrm’s post (referencing drunken monkey’s erm, critique touches on a very good point and made me very glad that I didn’t install the alpha or beta MT3 releases.
I’m not going to spew invective, because I like, know, and trust Ben, Mena, and Anil (but er, not the gawd knows how many other employees there are now), but hmm… it’s a pickle.
You ready a beta release of a piece of software, and ask people to beta test it. Mention nothing about paying, or even that you are considering changing the license. Being the loyal folks they are, lots say “OK” and you give them the software. They upgrade to it, and there’s no way to downgrade.
Then, about 5 weeks later, you say, “Oh, by the way, most of you will have to pay to upgrade out of beta”. Keeping in mind that most of the people who are the most loyal to MT, and therefore the most likely to have signed up for the beta program, are the ones who take MT to its’ limits by using multiple blogs for things like link sidebars, book reviews, photoblogs, etc., and a lot of them no longer qualify for the free version because of the three blog limit.
That’s pretty harsh. Given the timing, I’d be willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that it probably just wasn’t well thought out (lots of easy ways to fix it). Or I guess you could just pin it on the evil VC? 🙂
See also: those who bought MT 2.6 commercial licenses
Note, I haven’t been following this closely enough to see if there’s going to be another non-developer edition released w/o the stupid author/blog limits for personal use, nor how the licensing is enforced
The reality is that they have effectively eliminated power users from the upgrade path by giving them three choices: a)dont upgrade, b) fork over what I feel is a fee bordering on extortion (my simple little personal site would have run hundred of dollars to upgrade), or c) become a criminal. These are the users who in some some cases have spent years extending MT and are among it’s most vocal supporters.
Adding insult to injury, to even download the thing now requires a TypeKey registration. Isn’t this directly contrary to SixAparts previous claim that TypeKey would not be required? Compounding this is the detail that sites running under the free license will no longer be reflected in the recently updated list something they failed to mention the times I voluntarily donated.
I have no problem paying for software and think that MT is worth the money, but I do feel the rug has been pulled out from under me. This is a major change that many of us were expecting to see in the vaporware MT Pro, not something we anticipated being part of what, in terms of functionality, is a minor point release.?
- Digital Web gets a facelift. Congrats too all, looks great
- MusicPlasma – I’d seen the link around, but hadn’t actually tried it until last night. This thing rocks. Pulls Amazon related artist information and puts it on a dynamic Kartoo-like visual topic map
- speaking of maps, noticed that Marcos Weskamp‘s stupendous Newsmap is now sponsored by The Hive Group, the self proclaimed “world leader in treemap technology. Marcos’ flash-based newsmap spanks the Hive Group’s Java-based Honeycomb demos from a UX perspective…
- Powerpoint To Flash Conversion Tools – The PPT2Flash Top20 – there’s a reference to a ‘manual way’ — I should really write up/publish how I did Lessig’s Free Culture presentation (partly manual export, with some custom vbscript macro for dumping out a timing array from the ppt, and a small ActionScript presentation engine)