I’m going to XML World 2000 in Boston next week. If you are going. or are in Boston and would like to get together, let me know.
IKEA has a preview of their 2001 catalog online
From the new set of articles up on WebReview XML Tutorial 3: XSL Transformations. THey also have a really good overview of Cold Fusion for people who want to learn more about it, and where it stands in relation to other middleware technologies.
The new Charlie Hunter CD is really really good stuff. I’m grooving to it right now.
Alien Skin has a free Eye Candy 4000 beta for ya.
Now some XSLT pointers and dialogue. I’ve got really mixed feelings about XSLT, and I’m going to be using it every day for the foreseeable future. It has some great stuff in it, but I feel like it is somewhat incomplete, and that it could have been taken a couple of steps further and made far more useful. The best general resource I’ve found so far is XSLT.com. Their “What is XSLT?" page is an excellent overview of what it is and what it is used for. The updated Chapter 14 from The XML Bible has a good overview section as well. Basically, XSLT provides the tools to transform XML documents from one format to another.
I’ve been through a lot of changes in the past six months, and spending a lot of time by myself on this trip has made me realize many of them that I somehow hadn’t noticed before. Spending time by yourself can be good. I think the biggest change in me is that I appreciate everything in my life much more than I did a few months ago when I was on autopilot. Not to give the impression that everything is rosy in Robertland. Far from it. I’m dealing with very difficult emotions every day, but I appreciate the opportunity to deal with them and make progress.
I’m now very tired of traveling. I’ve had lost luggage, and am now in my third city on this trip.(I leave for my fourth tomorrow morning.) Here’s a great article on TIVO that I ripped off from Ev.
I’m in San Diego now, well actually Rancho Bernardo which is North of San Diego. I’m taking a training class in some new software that my company is using that implements content management and an application framework using XML, XSL, And XSLT. It’s a pretty interesting set of technology. Tonight I begin my travels again, heading North to San Francisco to prepare for a few days of development work at our corporate office. I’ll definitely get into some XSLT stuff in the next few days.
This has got to be a joke right? A 1200 Mhz Mac? Would Apple even allow this to happen? The case design is much cooler looking than Apple’s cube. It can’t be real, can it?
People who were reading a couple of months ago will remember my rant about IKEA’a lack of a Web store. Well, it looks like things are about to change. The article implies that this new store will only serve Sweden, so I still might be waiting until they finish their Atlanta location. (via the excellent Stuffed Dog.)
Every day I wake up and hope that today will be the day I will stop being such an idiot.
Lots of travel on my horizon. In the next three weeks I’ll be seeing San Diego, San Francisco, Houston, and then San Francisco again.
A few people have pointed out that my Windows bug post from yesterday isn’t a Windows bug at all but a bios feature. It’s still stupid:-)
I really like my TIVO a lot, and now I can hack it to add more drive space.
This has got to be the strangest Windows bug ever.
Here’s a step in the right direction: eMusic has a new plan where you can pay $9.99 a month and have download access to every MP3 on their site. They have lots of good indy and major label stuff. That’s less than the cost of one CD. If the major labels were smart, they’d each start a service like this. (via usr/bin/girl)
Update: I signed up for the plan and I'm finding all sorts of good stuff on their site. I'm listening to the Herbaliser's first album right now. This is the way this should be done, no micropayments, freedom to get the music I want and only keep the stuff I'm actually going to listen to. I'm cleaning up one of my extra computers and I'm going to stick it in the back of my walk in closet and store all my music on it. Perhaps I can move the bulk of my CD collection into storage in a couple of months after I've ripped them all to one of the four drives in this machine.
I’m a huge music consumer. I mean really huge. I buy at least two cd’s a week, sometimes more. I have a huge CD and record collection, and music has always played an important role in my life. I look around my apartment and realize that I am the record label’s idea of a best customer. I use Napster every single day at work. Rarely is it to check out music that I have never heard of, and almost never is it to download music I don’t already own. Ocassionally I’ll use it to check out some songs by a group somone has recommended to me directly or via a Web site, but if I like it, I always buy the cd. Part of the reason for my use of Napster is convenience. I don’t have a 100 Gb hard drive to carry all of my CD’s around with me, and I can rarely predict what I’m going to be in the mood to listen to. The other part is laziness. I don’t have the free time to rip my thousands of CD’s to MP3 to make my collection portable. In the end, it’s good news they got the stay, but I think that the labels are being incredibly short sighted and I think everyone knows it but them.
I made some additions to the link box tonight, and I plan on actually doing some work on this site over the next two weeks. I’ve neglected it since my personal crisis a few months ago, and I’m ready to continue now.
Lion meat is on the menu? I usually don’t use this site as a platform to discuss this sort of thing, but I think this is a disgrace.
Details on Kid A, the new Radiohead album from someone who has heard it. It’s due for release on October 3rd.
This BBC article, Stopping the cybersquatters, makes me nervous and happy at the same time. When they start grabbing generic names because large companies want them, I’ll be quite unhappy.
MacWEEK: Inside the Cube confirms many things that I have thought since the Cube’s introduction by Steve Jobs on Wednesday. First, it’s not technically a cube at all. Second, it’s really not any kind of innovation. It’s the innards of a notebook computer with a full size hard drive jammed into a small form factor. It is not technologically unique in any real way from the other desktop computers that Apple sells. Steve, however, knows that he will sell a lot of these cubes and that is what this is all about. I would rather see Cupertino coming out with something innovative, take a couple of chances, and do something that makes me say wow.
CNN has an article on ego surfing. I’m amazed they thought this was worthy of an article in the first place.
It’s about time one of the major record labels did this. I’ve thought for a while that the end result of this whole Napster thing was going to be that the labels would be forced to come up with a strategy for electronic distribution. It’s good to see that this is starting to happen.