May you live in interesting times.

O’Reilly Network: Email Encryption for OS X

Blogger bucks premium-services trend. “A Google representative said the formerly paid services will be rolled out in the free version in the next few days, but that syndication and posting by e-mail will take longer to offer. "

Danger: HipTop OS 1.1 Sneak Peek A little birdy told me October 15th or 16th.

Pixies To Reunite For Tour, Album. Oh yeah, oh yeah.

I pretty much never link to other bloggish sites anymore. Which isn’t to say that my default reading list has gotten any smaller, or that I am not out looking for new voices to listen to every day. Out of the ones I have discovered in the last few months, the one that stands out in my mind is EXP. His photos are simply stunning, and I love the simple yet effective site design.

2ktshirts

dooce: Battle of the Bump

A Place So Foreign and Eight More

Apparently, I can use my new phone with this remote controlled mini car. Cool!

cemetary has to be one of the best Flash/Photography pieces I have ever seen on the Web. Big ups to “sellout” Todd for the HREF.

So last weekend, I ended up leaving my phone in a cab at the end of Saturday night. I couldn’t remember which one of the many Atlanta Cab companies I had used, as I picked the cab up outside of the Dark Horse here in Atlanta. I awoke the next morning, realized I had lost my phone, and called it several times with no luck. Eventually, I gave up and went and purchased a Sony Ericsson T616. It seems like a great phone so far, I love the Bluetooth and iSync support, and I just installed Salling Clicker. Pretty neat to be able to use the cellphone as a remote control for my Powerbook. Should be even more interesting when I delve a bit more into the scripting side of things.

Macromedia asks: What are you into?

Gamefly.com is like Netflix for console video games. Seems like a great idea, and I have been wondering why no one has jumped on this sooner. Update: always behind the times, I am. Check this post out for a complete rundown of these services.

sunspot.net - plugged in: “Though many amateurs may be looking for, and finding, holes in Windows, the FreeBSD Unix code that forms the foundation of OS X has been prodded by legions of expert programmers for 30 years.”

Tony Blair for President

Ars Technica: Macintosh Browser Smackdown is a well put together article about the state of the Macintosh browser market including the speed, compatibility and support of standards in current browsers. Most interesting to me, of course, was the fact that they used PGA.com as one of their test sites. I don’t think that something I have worked on has ever been used in this manner. Equally interesting was the ability to compare our load times against ESPN.com across all of the browsers. As a team, we know we have some work to do in the page weight and markup department on the main site, some the issues resulting from an image heavy design, others from limitations imposed by the content management system that we use.

Considering I’ve read all his books except for his newest, just released one, Diary, it’s pretty surprising that I hadn’t made it to Chuck Palahniuk’s Web site before today. Lots of good stuff over there, I ended up knowing how to pronounce his last name properly, and with a list of ten other authors I plan on checking out.

Paul Thurrott says: “Is Windows inherently insecure? Of course not. We’re targets because we represent 95 percent of the computing population. Attackers aren’t going to attack Mac OS X users for an obvious reason: The OS has only a few users. If we all jumped ship to Linux, for example, that platform would then come under attack.”

I keep hearing this argument from people, that Windows has more exploits only because it is more widely used. I have to take issue with this gentleman's statement, and those of a similar nature. I understand the context he is coming from, that he has built his career around reporting on Microsoft, so he is subjective, but I believe he does his readers a disservice with this particular set of statements. Of course one of the reasons why there are more exploits for Windows is that it has marketshare. Where I take issue, however, is with his implication that Windows is just as secure an operating system as Mac OS X or Linux. It simply is not as secure. Linux has a large amount of the Web server market, yet I haven't heard of a worm bringing down thousands of Linux machines across the Internet. This isn't to say that Linux is without exploitable security flaws at all, I've had machines that were attacked or exploited. In virtually every instance, it was my fault for not patching something. Microsoft is more concerned with getting product out the door than they are in getting things right on the security front. This has made each of us who use a Microsoft OS beta-testers. The second and more relevant reason why there are more exploits for Windows XP than Linux or Mac OS X is that Microsoft has provided people who wish to develop exploits with a lot of facilities for creating them, so it is far easier for someone to create an exploit. I would like to see some of these very biased Windows journalists admit this fact for a change, it's as annoying to me as partisan politics in this country, throwing practicality and fact to the wind in order to advance a very biased viewpoint linked to a career path.

Here's a Slashdot thread with some interesting information on this subject.

Truncat is a sequel of sorts to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

I really enjoyed reading this Ernie Ball Story on News.com. Nice to hear someone debunking the idea that “you can’t run a business without Microsoft products.” Especially amusing to me because my bother Chris' wardrobe consists of almost nothing but Ernie Ball shirts. Big up to Have Browser for the link.

A week ago, the latch on my 12 inch Powerbook, which has become my primary computer over the last couple of months, broke. I could no longer close the lid. I dreaded sending the machine back to Apple because it meant being without it for several days, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised. I backed everything up, because you never know, and dropped the machine off at the local Apple for shipment back to Apple on Thursday. I was absolutely shocked to get a call yesterday to let me know that it was back and I could come pick it up. That’s the best turn around time I think I have ever had on a computer repair, and they had to replace the whole bezel, so it wasn’t a trivial repair. They also replaced the missing feet from the bottom of the machine that have been missing since I bought. All in all, a great experience, thanks Apple.

The application formerly known as Hydra is now SubEthaedit? Um, not a good name, sorry guys.

I’ve been trying out Thunderbird as an Outlook replacement on my PeeCee laptop. I don’t think that I could be happier with it, aside from some wonkiness with its address book, it is a perfect snappy replacement for Outlook.

The Matrix Revolutions