I am not affiliated with, nor do I endorse, The Bumper despite it's name. Let's attempt to turn our Palm sized device into a subnotebook.
I'm looking to learn PHP, but didn't find much in the way of books on the subject. If anyone reading Bump has some hints or suggestions about good resources and methods for learning, please email me.
I finished up the project this morning. As always, it was a huge series of compromises between what I wanted to do and what I actually got to build. The pages are way bigger than they should be, it looks terrible at 640x480, and the navigation is terrible. I'm beat, but not too beat for some Bump.
This week's Onion has a great Blair Witch infographic. Their new site design requires horizontal scrolling at 800x600. 54% of Web surfers are using this resolution.(Statmarket.com)
I deeply respect peterme. This Weblog is definitely deserving of all the attention it has gotten. Strong writing from a knowlegable perspective.
Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) has his new single available as an MP3 on his Web site. I think it's one of the best commercial songs I've heard in a while.
MetaScene, which has taken the role of the Weblogs Weblog, has a great piece with tons of interesting links about Weblogs in reponse to the now infamous Ben Brown article.
I'm on Death March project number 51 this year. Building some decent stuff in Cold Fusion backended by databases. I should be lighter than I have been with updates over the next two days.
Seems like a lighter than normal day on the news tip regardless of my workload. This morning, I stuck my head in a Macromedia seminar for a couple of hours. They covered Flash, Fireworks, and DreamWeaver with a dabble in Director and Generator. Pretty rudimentary, but I did pick up a couple of undocumented tricks so all wasn't lost. I like the way their tools interact with each other.
I received the September issue of Fast Company(It's not online yet.) over the weekend. This magazine has gotten positively huge. I imagine they will be releasing a new magazine soon because they clearly have more ad pages than one magazine can contain on a regular basis. I love it, but now it has gotten so big that I can't carry it around easily. Time for a Palm version of it.
The Industry Standard has an article about what LauchPad is doing with Pointcast after it bought the company. They have launched a site called EntryPoint. I downloaded the software and discovered this isn't just a site, but a new version of Pointcast rebranded and with ecommerce stuff based on eWallet included, as well as a portalized site. My first comments are that they don't have all of the news categories I want to be displayed. It's neat, but not as customizable as I want. If I'm going to give up desktop real estate to something like this, I want it to be exactly tailored to my interests, locations, etc.
I finished the novel The Beach by Alex Garland over the weekend. Quite good, and probably deserving of all of the accolades it has received over the last couple of years. It has some crazy metaphor and analogy in it, and the descriptions of Thailand make me want to pack a rucksack today and leave tonight. Definitely a worthwhile read by a GenX author. I like the theme of searching for Utopia in our constantly shrinking planet. I'm also happy that I finally got to read it since it's been sitting around my house for 8 months. I haven't decided which of the hundred books I want to read that I will be proceeding to next.
Here's the Salon interview with Alex Garland who wrote The Beach from February of 1997 when it was first released.
I took the weekend off from logging to try and fix my ailing Blue and White G3. No dice. It's pretty much dead in the water. I expect to have to replace both the hard drive and logic board. (Essentially meaning I need a whole new computer.) I also took in a Braves game, and slept quite a bit.
I was making my way through a few days of Peterme , and discovered this page about the Broadvision software's backend. This proves that marketing and reality are two very different things.
OK, I find this almost too cool for words. Battlebots I guess I'm a fan of live robotic combat.
Pyra is a site where Web teams can collaborate and track projects online. Seems like a good working set up considering all of the location challenged collaboration that goes on with Web projects. Link via EvHead which a newish Weblog (at least to me) that is both beautiful and content rich, including a link to an MP3 of the Dukes of Hazzard theme on this page . The page that the theme is on also contains the themes from Fat Albert, Welcome Back Kotter, The Love Boat, and many other shows. Very cool.
In a very negative turn of events, the hard drive in my three week old Blue and White G3 died last night. Since I'm a stickler about backing up my data, I only lost email messages from the last week and a half as a result. Of course I now have to deal with the hassle of getting a new drive under warranty and re-installing everything.
I attended the monthly meeting of The Association of Internet Professionals here in Atlanta. There were presenters from Andromedia and Broadvision . Andromedia's products allow for detailed tracking of user activity and data drilldown and analyzation of the resulting information. Really complex stuff. Broadvision has an end to end software product that acts as a personalization engine and content management system. Wish we could afford either, but their solutions are priced for the Hewlett Packards and Home Depots of the world. I like Andromedia's site design much better than Broadvision's. More attractive and professional looking.
I'm listening to Jack from saturn.org's Internet Mixed Tape . It's got some interesting music. Most interesting to me is that I haven't heard most of it before.(I love the Faith No More song he included.)
My Netscape seems to have some channel updating issues. Scripting News and CamWorld channels aren't updating. (Maybe Dave and Cam have decided not to do this syndication anymore.)
The Blair Witch Project is proving that Internet marketing works. Of course, it helps to have a strong product.
Another early Weblog: www.gulker.com . He maintained an early list of what he then called News Pages because of our use of Frontier's NewsPage suite . You can find that list on this page .
Rebecca's Pocket has it going on. I love the first column where she lists what she's up to, reading, listening to, etc... The work section of her site reveals some interesting online development and design nuggets I had heretofore missed.
have browser, will travel ponders the explosion of Weblogs. I tend to think there is nothing wrong with linking to other Weblogs one finds amusing, interesting, and well written.
News.com reports that Microsoft is holding features back from its partner's version of Internet Explorer.
After a long effort, Dave Winer gets Symantec's permission to release some of his early software. I haven't ever seen MORE or ThinkTank. My only frame of reference is what he's been doing over the last few years with Frontier That's cool.
It always feels strange to roll the month of postings here over the the archives section. I look at the number of months I have archived now, and I realize that I couldn't have imagined doing this site for as long as I have now.
Damn, CamWorld's been redesigned. It loads faster, and I like the look and feel of the new page better. It lacks some of the zest the other page had color-wise. Overall, I like it.
Extensis , maker of some excellent Photoshop plug-ins and graphics tools, launches CreativePro.com a portalized site for the graphic designer and web designer. I was a beta tester for this site, and I think they did a good job of bringing together partnerships with other sites, and unique content which they developed on their own. It still lacks a Web log.
Bare Bones Software has updated it's Mailsmith email client to 1.1.4. I own a copy, but I gave up on it a few months ago because it was slow and sort of buggy. I think I'm ready to give it another chance.
I hadn't noticed that Builder.com had been redesigned to look exactly like all of the other CNET sites. I don't dig it. I don't think my company's readers would want all of our magazines or sites to look exactly the same either.
Here's a CNN story on Java running on the Palm V at the Javaone conference. I'm gonna look into this tonight.
You too can Weblog with Pitas.com , it seems to be built in PERL.(No coding required.) Here's the one I built this afternoon. Only three links up there so far. I'm sure that most people who would use a site like this wouldn't give a Weblog proper care and feeding.
One of the original Weblogs worth noting: RasterWeb . It's the site that inspired me to log in the first place.
The type controversy seems to be over. Nothing but positive comments. RANT: Why can't things work the same on every platform for even the same browser and version? This frustrates the hell out of me, increases the cost of development for companies dramatically, and generally sucks.
Kikaze had some really nice things to say about Bump. Somehow I missed them over the last few days.
New Weblogs are popping up left and right. Makes me feel like some kind of old timer. Introducing the daily doozer and Anythink .
We're having a large open house at my office today to introduce my company's New York based executives, our clients, and the local media to our new name and location. Here's what I hear so far: blah blah blah.
I'm having more fun doing this logging thing now than I ever have.
My last ditch effort at keeping everyone happy with the size of the text: No text formatting at all.(Keep it Simple Stupid) Send any complaints to the usual place.
Herman Miller's got some DHTML going on over at Jugglezine Still their frame implementation leaves something to be desired in my eyes.
I know this one has already made the NYT and that everyone else on the Weblog circuit has already stepped in and spoken up, but I have to talk a bit about lemonyellow . Quite smart and very dense, but it brings out the best in me.
I've got my designer's hat on today. I'm finishing the redesign of one of the dreadful sites I inherited when I took my current job. I'm still pounding away at it so I'll have to make today's post brief.
The PowerPage reports on an NTSC video out solution for the iBook.
Going against normal Bump policy, I cribbed this link from CamWorld. I thought Blair Witch was scary, so I guess I understand why they wouldn't want to show it . I especially like the nice Christian woman who calls the movie "gory." Clearly, she hasn't seen the movie(yet).
John Dvorak calls the masculinity of any man using an iBook into question . I'm sure he'd find that set of comments real funny while I was kicking his ass. :-)
I got my first piece of Bump hate mail over the weekend. I guess that must mean I am writing something worthwhile here. Well I gotta go push some text around...peace.
Editor's note: please let me know if you find the size of the text on this page readable. If you don't, please let me know which platform and browser you are using. You can email me at this address.
Photoshop users: MetaCreations is giving away their new KPT Equalizer plug-in until July 31st. To download it, go to this page .
You can now tell if I am online by looking at the flower at the bottom of the page that looks like this:
I'm digging around in Weblog land, getting ready to do a stint getting some of these new ones up on the DMOZ Weblog listing . It's interesting to see what others are doing.
Looka is one that is new to me, and I like Chuck's writing style. We seem to have a lot in common.(He even drives a New Beetle.) He also saw The Blair Witch this weekend and has his thoughts up on his site.
I've decided. with some prodding from Jim over at have browser will travel , that Bump will be a daily from here on out. I don't have a multitude of time, but I know that I could write every day if I focused on getting it done.
I like the content on CrossFader (especially given the name since I was a club DJ for 5 years), but it's very hard to read the small white text on a black background. That's not going to keep me from reading.
Since Lycos is using the Open Source DMOZ directory database, I am now listed as an editor on Lycos' site . Hotbot uses the same database too, and look how far behind the times the version they are using is. I've been an editor for a couple of months, and we have added 23 Web logs since they updated last.
I finally got to see The Blair Witch Project last night(well it's actually 3 am now so it feels more immediate than last night). An interesting movie, and the reactions of the crowd matched the movie itself. The theater was packed, and they are actually sold out all weekend now. I would say about half the audience(and about half the group of people I went with) liked it and the other half didn't care for it as much. I really liked it, and fell into it. As a result, it scared the shit out of me. It's very psychological, and if you let it get ahold of you, you're in for an interesting ride. I would recommend it highly, but I don't think everyone gets into these kinds of thrillers. I got a little seasick from the documentary style footage, but I think it added the right effect to the movie. In interviews I have seen with the people who made the movie, they referred to the Seventies television show "In Search Of..." I saw this influence throughout the movie. They leave a lot up to your imagination, and that's what gets you. It allows you to imagine the worst scenario, the one that scares you the most.
One thing that is worth noting is that the Web site takes on a different role than the typical Hollywood movie site. It adds to the mythos they built in the movie, providing more background, facts, and details than the movie could. It also contains audio of interviews that didn't make it into the movie in their entirety. I like this, I got home and began crawling through all this additional material.(While looking over my shoulder.) It seems like they are adding stuff all the time. I would hold off on the site until you have seen the movie.
More iBook icons , these are from Hide who is another of my favorite icon authors.
Instant message system to debut .(SiliconValley.com) Microsoft is entering the fray with their own Instant Messenging software. No doubt it will be a bundled part of Windows and promptly create all sorts of problems for ICQ and AOL.
The iBook Design FAQ . It reveals that the iBook has no fan. Which means it should be a fairly quiet machine. The iBook Keyboard FAQ reveals that the Function keys are easily programmable for every day tasks(launching software) which sounds really cool to me.
I've thought more about the concept of the wireless machine, and the iBook. How about using it as a low flow web server? That could be interesting. I'll have to give it a try when I get it.
After getting a fair amount of negative feedback about the size of the type on the main log page, I've switched it back to the default size. I liked reading it the other way, but I guess I don't read my own site on a regular basis so that point is moot.
If you have any other design or content suggestions, please forward them to me. the redesign of these pages is not far away, and I'm looking to automate the back end of this site in the process, making changes going forward far easier to make. Do you like the new design of the links page?
So I broke down and ordered myself an iBook . If it were going to be my only computer, or even my only portable, I don't think I would have. I now picture myself roaming about my apartment and having access to the net everywhere without cabling. Of course, I won't be getting the thing for a couple of months so I have a lot of anticipation ahead of me. I'll share whatever experiences I have with it on this page when it arrives.
I don't think I mentioned Halo which is Bungie's newest game. They announced it yesterday, and it will be shipping early next year. They also showed it off at the MacWorld keynote yesterday. It has to be the most amazing looking game I have seen yet.(The site's not bad either.) There is a screenshot up on the site, but I don't think that it even begins to do the game itself justice. There are already fan sites for halo too. This one seems to be the most complete, and it contains more screenshots and a movie that can be downloaded. The gray text on a white background is a little annoying.
My brother's band, Die Laughing, joined the MP3 revolution yesterday with the posting of two of their songs to MP3.com. These are really good and well worth checking out. I'm really proud of him for sticking with his dream, and for producing some really high quality work that is worthy of industry and fan recognition. Now if I could just finish a site for him that is worthy of his music...
I went to the MacWorld simulcast here in Atlanta this morning. Apple introduced the iBook , a consumer iMac-like portable. You can read more about it and see pictures on their Web site. I'm sure the usual Macintosh news sites will do a great job covering it.(You can find my recommendations in this area on the links page.) I want one of these to match the Blue Terror. Update: I am unable to reach the Apple Store to place my order:-).
As a part of the same announcement, Apple announced a product line that incorporates the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard called AirPort . pretty cool
More interesting is what they are doing with QuickTime . They are setting up the Quicktime player as a streaming media portal. I think it makes good sense, and I am thinking that Real Networks should be very concerned about this.
I listened and watched to the Allaire Spectra (the product formerly known as Tempest) webcast earlier. It looks like a strong product, perfect for a company like mine that is looking for strong customizable content management that works with a variety of existing database systems, LDAP directories, and other enterprise wide applications. Seems like this framework will be a good jumping off point for CF developers who want the basic functions it provides but are capable of extending it beyond that to suit their companies needs. This product will turn up the heat in this area quite a bit(plus it has features out of the box that other content management systems don't have.) and it is pretty cheap at $7500.00 a server. They are also trying to meet the needs of Business people that need things like realtime data reports that are customized.
Webcasts are a great resource. I like being to gather this industry knowledge from my office. I just wish that they worked better. With all of the congestion on the net, it dropped out of me about 50 times. (Despite the fact that I have 100 baseT access to a t-1) Seems like the reporting functionality of the product will be a huge selling point with our Business and Sales types.
Things at my office are changing really rapidly now. I'm having a hard time keeping a grip on it all. We really have launched ourselves as an Internet business unit so the next few months should be trying and interesting. I am having somewhat of a tough time dealing with non-technical folks being involved in our Internet business. It seems like this happens a lot in our business: one person spends a ton of time architecting a strategy and building a worhtwhile product, then a normal suit type comes along and gets to take credit for the profits from that hard work. In the meantime they manage to muck up the strategy so longer term accomplishments are watered down and more difficult. I've seen this happen over and over again, so I'm fighting it tooth and nail.
Well I now have set up and played with my new G3 tower quite a bit. It is quite fast. I feel guilty about how much moola I spent on it and the other things to go with it now, but I'm sure I'll get over it. I also bought a VST Firewire drive . It is also quite fast, but seems a bit finicky. VST is about to release a software update, so that may take care of it.
MacCentral is covers the release of the new low cost Palm IIIe. I love the week of MacWorld with all of its new product releases.(Palm also released a USB connection kit.)
I also picked up a copy of Casady & Greene's SoundJam yesterday. It is a software package containing an MP3 encoder, and MP3 player(which supports streaming MP3), and various extras and interface enhancements. I played with it yesterday for a couple of hours. It sounds good, at least as good as the other products in it's market. I still like the interface on MacAMP better. The encoder is decent, with quality that rivals the other available encoders for Macs.
I also downloaded a copy of the MacAMP 1.0 Preview release . It's interface is what you would expect from @Soft, and it is definitely the leading product in this area. They have added a set of plug-ins that actually display within the player interface that are quite nice. It sounds really good(I'd put it and SoundJam even on this front). My biggest beefs with it now are that it doesn't really do CD Audio the way I want it to. SoundJam will automatically download CD information over the net and it supports encoding, which MacAMP does not. Of course, MacAMP 1.0 is not a finished product and I am interested to see how it progresses. I think that SoundJam will also be worked on quite diligently over the next few months considering the competition and all of the industry focus on MP3.
Mark Delfs reviews the Pontis MP3 Player which supports both Macs and Win32.
I upgraded my Macintosh system at home. A brand new Blue and White G3 arrived at my office this morning. Needless to say, I'm quite excited about the upgrade.
The Register covers Apple's relationship to Palm Computing and possible partnerships that could be in the works.
I heard a few days ago from the Atlanta Cold Fusion User's Group that Allaire was going to release an enterprise level Web content management system that was XML based and had ecommerce hooks. InfoWorld has a story covering Tempest .
Power On Software has acquired Now up to Date/Now Contact . This is good news. These products were very popular with both myself and my family and friends. They had been languishing(the products not my family) under Qualcomm's ownership.
I've been reading Iconocast for a couple of years now, but I have never gone back to the site to look through old issues. This page of archives is great.
I went to see American Pie over the weekend. While it's not for the prudish or faint of heart, this movie was excellent. I would compare it to a combination of Porky's and Stand by Me . The gags were funny and I thought the writing stood up to any of the classic comedies that I love so much. The cast, most of whom are relatively unknown, gave great performances.
Looks like Apple and Swatch are cross promoting Internet Time and the iMac.
What a week. We moved our office about 14 miles North of where it was previously. As you might expect, not everything about the move went well. The movers dropped the Linux box that we use as a combination Firewall/DNS Server for our network. I was forced to rebuild the machine from scratch under pressure, and we somehow pulled it off. Now we're hooking up the 125+ workstations. I ended last week working 98 hours.
Dan Gillmour talks about instant messenging in his latest column . (my ICQ # is 24193712)
Apple Readies launch of own portal, ISP This makes logical sense considering the recent moves by Gateway, Dell, and AOL to convergence in this arena. I hope they remember the mistakes they made when building eWorld.
Saturn.org is another new Weblog. I find the design inspiring, and it makes me want to finish the redesign of Bump all that much more.(I've had the same design for 18 months.) Link courtesy of have browser, will travel.
I've been watching the Women's World Cup matches. The US team just advanced to the finals. I really like to watch soccer.
Slashdot is sold to andover net. In a cursory glance through the boards over at Slashdot, it seems that not everyone is happy about this. I wish them well in the most genuine sense possible. I guess these must be the same people who stop liking a band when they become popular. Please!
Writing about how Jim is a hockey fan yesterday has made me realize that I haven't mentioned that the Thrashers now have an actual team of players. I'm getting excited for there to be NHL hockey in the town I live in. Of course, we have one guy who can put the puck in the net right now, but I'm still excited.
The corporate move at my office is moving into full swing. I'm working ridiculous hours between now and Sunday so expect my updates here to be very sporadic.
Apple ponders Handheld With MacWorld coming up, I'm interested to see what products are coming down the pike from Apple. If p1 is good, I expect to be waiting for mine along with half the Apple nation. If not, I'll keep saving for that G3 PowerBook I've been lusting after.
CMGI to Make AltaVista a 'Megaportal' Interesting. I've thought that this brand has suffered under its previous ownership. Perhaps now this garden has a good tender.
I finished Kurt Anderson's Turn of the Century this week. It's really the best book dealing with convergence culture on a fictional level that I've run into yet. It's amazingly up to date as far as trends in the Internet business go. I would definitely recommend it. While it's not the same type of book, it gave me the same kind of feeling I got the first time I read MicroSerfs (Which was one of my favorite books ever.) The characters in this book are strong at times, but generally the main character is sort of a dork.
If you are looking for the Austin Powers font, there is a reasonable facsimile here (it's name is Action Is)
Starbucks has a magazine. First thing I noticed about it(which you can't see on the Web.) was that they had a product placement for one of their advertisers, Nokia, on their cover. This is somewhat shady. The project is a collaboration between Starbucks and Time. I'm still waiting to see what Starbucks big Internet business plan is.
NoteTab Pro seems like a really well designed text editor for Win32. I feel like a BBEdit orphan when I edit my pages from my PC's despite some really capable tools. I've been kicking the tires on this one and it seems like it might be the best one I've tried yet on Windows.
Seems like my experiment is working.(see yesterday's entry) I like taking the extra time to compose and think about what I am going to post here. It also seems to make me want to be more regular about updating since I can do the writing in bursts when I discover something I want to write about.
I updated the Links page with additional content and changed the layout so that I scroll less. It still looks better on a Mac than a PC, but I can work that out as the week unfolds.
Despite everyone's talk about how important portals are, I think that a successful one is more than a collection of links to sites that are relevant to an industry. While this site is useful to me, I would rather just have a page I built myself with the relevant links(I'm updating my personal portal right now actually.) This one is closer.
I'm trying something new with Bump and my other Web writing. I am making an effort to compose it outside of the context of HTML in Microsoft Word 2000. I'm finding that Dave Winer is right() and that I wish that the tools I use to create my Web code were better writing tools in general. Not that I am going to actually create any kind of Web page in Word, but it's easier to get my thoughts down clearly without the tags.
