Over the weekend, I cleaned and purged my house and office. It's always disgusting to me how much stuff I accumulate over the course of time. Things that I think will be useful someday rarely are.

I also watched some of the E! coverage of the Cannes Film Festival. They covered a lot of movies, but the one that intrigued me the most was The Blair Witch Project. Seems like a great idea for a really scary movie. It will be released in July.

I installed Red Hat 6.0 on my FireAnt laptop over the weekend. Linux is getting easier and easier to install and configure. With the exception of some work getting the video card to work properly with X Windows, I had no issues. It's also amazing how much more responsive and speedy it is than the Windows 98 system that I normally boot into.

I heard today that an article I wrote for a print magazine last fall will be re-published as a part of a college textbook. This will be the first time my writing makes it into something hardcover. I'll post more details as I find out how things are going to be set up.

Office 2000 is making it's premiere here in Atlanta at an event tommorrow. I will be sure to post my feedback on that here. I also am going to see Steve Ballmer speak tommorrow and will pass on my notes on that. The New York Times has a detailed story today about the changes Office 2000 brings.

I'm building Ad management into our sites this week. If you have any feedback for me on good solutions, please provide it here.

I know that I still haven't written here about my thoughts on Episode One . I have seen it twice now, and I would expect to get my feelings out soon.

Okay you can call off the search party. I'm here, I'm back.

I'm fine, and my computers were not eaten by Mac OS X Server or anything.

I spent Memorial Day weekend(or Memorius Day weekend according to my brothers dry cleaner.) at my parent's home in Connecticut. I went to the CD release party for my brother's band, attended my youngest brother's graduation from high school(congrats Dave), and hung out by the pool with my family.

Boy did I need the time off. Prior to that, I accidentally formatted a drive full of documents.(always always always backup) I learned that things like installing a second operating system should not be done on two hours sleep and that Direct X is not my friend. I have been working some crazy hours as we are moving our company to a new location at the end of this month and the network admin left three weeks ago.

Expect more regular updates for the rest of the summer.

The Beastie Boys are releasing songs online to benefit the victims in Kosovo.

Since I've been gone, the Palm VII has been released, and Sony has released their robotic puppy .

Have I mentioned that I really enjoy NeoPlanet ?

My copy of Mac OS X Server arrived yesterday. Needless to say, I didn't do anything else last night. Here's an overview of my impressions:

There is very limited documentation that comes with the OS on CD, most of it had to do with installation and configuration. I installed it on my 9600/350 at home. Since this is an unsupported configuration, I had to bypass this part of the installer to get it to install. It, however, installed without issue.(I installed it on an external SCSI drive) After the lengthy install process(the machine reboots three times during the install), it booted without issue. It is very NeXtish, and those of you who have experience with that interface will find this one very easy to pick up. For the Mac User looking to learn it, it might be a bit intimidating at first. There are some of the Mac OS interface elements, but things don't work like a Mac OS machine.

The OS is very repsonsive. I played with it for quite a while on it's own. Getting Apache configured was very simple, and I had it serving Web pages for me within minutes. The OS doesn't currently support serial ports, so in order to get access to the Internet via a modem you have set another machine up as a router. The Mac OS app that is included comes with a basic 8.5.1 install, and seemed very stable and compatible. It felt as fast as running the Mac OS directly on the machine. I ran several applications(Frontier, Fireworks 2, BBEdit, and Netscape) and everything worked the way I expected it to.

The command line interface was exactly what you would expect from any UNIX operating system. I didn't go too crazy, but everything seemed to be where I expected it to be and to work the way I expected it to work.

Tonight, I will be setting it up as a file server and installing Samba so I can get my PC's to share with it. I also want to figure out how to telnet into it as the root account.

Here are some resources I referred to in my experimentation.

Stepwise has the highest quality information and current news that I found. I've been referring to this site since they first announced Rhapsody.

Apple's support site has good documentation and discussion boards that held the answers to many of my unanswered questions.

The MacOS Xclave has some news and current events stuff.

Mac OS X Tips and Tricks has solid information on the workings of the OS. I found the answers to two of my questions here.

Well, its been a week without updates. I have some things to blame, including a full day without any utilities(the cable company hit a gas main outside my complex this weekend), rebuilding my brother's Band Web site from scratch(I never seem to be satisfied with any work I do.) and hard work on several intiatives at work. One of my goals is to get back to daily updates this week, so here goes.

Episode One hype is at its height this week. I am trying to ignore it, and at times embrace it. Lots of negative reviews(Time, Newsweek) and some positive ones. Does it really matter? Will it stop people from going to see the movie?

I think that this movie is insulated from this. I know that no one that I have spoken with even gives a hoot what critics say about any movie. As usual, I prefer to evaluate things on my own, and I invite you to do the same.

On that subject, there are some Episode One icons for your computer and some really visually striking desktop wallpapers at IconsPlus .

I got an email letting me know that darth-sidious.com is for sale on EBay. I have too many unused domain names as it is.

I went to the Apple WWDC satellite broadcast here in Atlanta. I am happy that they seem to be delivering on what they promised one year ago. It's refreshing because they were changing direction once a year. The new Powerbooks look nice, and I am going to try and budget myself so that I can get one. I wasn't too excited by the Sonata demo, but they are building in features(albeit more elegantly) that have existed in the Windows world for a long time. Sherlock II and Quicktime 4 reveal clues as to what the interface elements for Mac OS X will be.

CamWorld's latest rant is about Weblogs . Cameron has really good perspective. To do this right, I would have to devote more time to it than I can. Will this stop me from doing it as much as I can? Absolutely not, I enjoy doing it.

Web Review goes more into depth on the engine that the PlayStation II will run on. Without a doubt, this machine is designed to be far more than a traditional console gaming unit. I'm happy that they are building support for the first unit's games into the new one.

I'm loving the new Beth Orton CD . I had to work my way through six pages from bethorton.com to actually get to her real site. That's not good usability folks.

I am so tired of MP3 hype. Just listen to some music. The music industry is not getting it.

I have no energy. I seem to be in some kind of funk that is beginning to interfere with things. Perhaps I should get more sleep.

I also have become very excited about the release of the new Star Wars movie.

In case you missed it, here's a great Star Wars line story posted to a newspaper site recently.

If you don't want to ruin the movie for yourself, don't read the titles of the songs on the soundtrack. After months of avoiding "spoilers" on the net, I ruined the plot for rmyself by looking at the soundtrack.

Lucasfilm posted four new television commercials yesterday. They are quite good.

I was out at Toys 'R Us Sunday night at midnight for the release of the Star Wars Episode I toys. What a madhouse. There were somewhere between 150 and 200 people in line. Things were surprisingly civil considering. It seems like the figure everyone wanted was Darth Maul. All of the figures and other stuff is available online at shop.starwars.com . The figures are really nice and very detailed. I managed to get a whole set. I think I may be trying to make up for a lack of Star Wars toys as a kid the first time around.

There has been some discussion on the Camlist over the last couple of days about Weblogs , the reasons for doing them and their evolution. I like getting my thoughts out, and if people want to read it, that's great. I am not looking at making this page anything more than that, a neat place for my thoughts and Web links. It's cathartic, and I find that the people in my life have learned a lot about me from reading these pages. It's a journal of my mental process that I can go back to when I want to. It also helps me draw conclusions I might not otherwise find. I think that it's kind of dumb to do it for the other reasons stated in the article I linked to above.

I'm still looking for the holy grail of high speed access at home. Now I want static IP's and to build the serving of everything in house. I discovered a company that is doing this with DSL for $135 a month through the ScriptMeridian list. They are coming to Atlanta soon. This would be perfect(and I would finally get Frontier on my server).

TidBITS has a review of PhotoGIF that is worth reading if you make Web graphics.

Now that MCI Worlcom is considering entering the ComCast bidding , we here at Bump would like to say we have no intention of making a bid. 

Joseph Lowery's Dreamweaver 2 Bible is now shipping.

With summer approaching, it might be a good time for a visit to the Waterguns museum .

There seems to be no shortage of articles on Apple's comeback these days. Today's NY Times has a piece , and there have been several others over the last couple of weeks. I have to say that while I am optimistic about their business from a financial standpoint(how can you not be?), there are some serious things on the horizon that will determine their long term viability.

If they can deliver their next generation OS in the right time frame, and it is a high quality product, then I will be a lot more comfortable. As it is, they haven't seeded it to developers yet, and I wonder when they are going to start including this group in their development process(WWDC is a good bet, there are plenty of sessions listed that apply to Mac OS X.)

Pathfinder is closing From where I stand, this is all about the existing media companies not getting the Web. Not spending their money wisely and using business models imported from their print roots have hurt these types of enterprises quite a bit.

I somehow missed the Austin Powers Icons at Iconfactory

There are some Planet of the Apes icons at the Icon Planet site. I really liked those movies, they remind me of Sunday television when I was a kid.

Bungie has posted some MP3's from their Myth II and Oni game soundtracks at MP3.com .

All kinds of good game related Macintosh news today. The place to go for this kind of news is Mac Gamers Ledge . While I might not check it every day, I do check it a couple of times a week to see what is going on. One of today's announcements is that Aspyr Media is bringing EA Sport's Madden NFL 2000 to the Macintosh. Mac Users have suffered without good sports games for a long time so this is good news.(I usually buy these kind of games for either PlayStation or N64.)

Starbucks is reportedly going to invest big bucks in a new online venture that is not related to its core coffee business. My curiousity is running rampant.

Builder.com has a great overview tutorial on SMIL.

I just don't see how this could possibly be profitable. 

I'm analyzing the log files from March at work today. It's a ho hum job, but it gives me some peace in a normally chaotic work environment.

Scripting News is active again after Dave's vacation. It's funny to me how much I have come to depend on the Weblog circuit every day to keep myself informed and entertained. I really missed Scripting News while it was inactive.

My.Userland.com has been really active with new channels. More and more sites I read daily are appearing there, so I'm quite pleased and starting to use it more. Webmonkey and Fray both are now on there.

Connectix Announces Temporary Suspension of Virtual Game Station Shipments

I know that Sony has to defend their intellectual property or they lose rights to it, but I think that this really is a small thing in the larger spectrum to them. Playstation's life cycle is winding down as they get ready for the launch of the PlayStation 2 and this will only sell more games. I think they will drop the suit at some point in the near future.

I'm awaiting a copy of Mac OS X Server . I'll let you know what I think when it arrives.

Quicktime 4 is cool.

I found out Monday that a good friend of mine, who is also a co-worker, is leaving the company and the state. It's a tough time to be in technology, people are changing jobs every six to twelve months.

Take my Browser Please

I don't understand why people design their pages for only the latest browsers. There are so many ways to deal with this situation, and with more and more people accessing my sites with handheld devices of some sort, I want everyone to have the same amount of fun. I understand 

Apple Computer has lost a $26.4 million suit in which Apple Corps., the Beatles company, was suing them for the use of the Apple name. Apparently, Apple Computer agreed to not enter the music business as a part of an earlier agreement, and they have somehow violated that agreement. ouch.

Creative Labs has entered the protable MP3 player market with their NOMAD line of players. They have one-upped Diamond's RIO players by adding both voice recording and an FM tuner. They don't list Windows NT or Macintosh compatibility though.

I'm using Inspiration to diagram the two personal Web projects I'm working on today. It's really convenient, and cross platform software for this purpose. It also exports the charts in HTML, GIF or PICT format for easy communication with clients.

I'm currently reading Information Rules by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian. It's a really good book diagraming the economic concepts behind the network economy. Expect a review in the book section this week.

After giving it some thought, I've decided to go with the Amazon.com affiliate program with book links here. I had signed up for the Borders affiliate program as well, but it seems that the Amazon program is easier to use. I'm not looking to turn Bump into any sort of money making venture, but some free computer books now and then for the effort doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

The last month must have been more taxing(no pun) on me than I thought. I haven't really had much energy, either physically or mentally, over the last week. I'm trying to rest myself, and reading some books because that always seems to get my mind into a more active mode.

I found this site to be well done and very moving. It's a tribute to the author's deceased pooch.

Guy Kawasaki has decided to shut down the Evangelist . For the non-Apple people in the crowd, this was a daily email list that spread news of an Apple oriented nature. I guess with Apple's resurgence(their financials look better than Dell's right now), he doesn't feel like there is a need for it any longer.

A group of people have gotten together and are proposing a metric time standard that is loosely based on Swatch's Internet Time. They have added a date element, which Swatch was lacking.

FatBrain.com, an Internet and storefront technical bookstore, is offering $15 off any order until Monday, April 19.

Fonesync lets you synchronize your cellular phone with your PC. It works with the Nokia 6120, which I currently use.

A Hacker's Haunting Vision of a Reality Within Illusion is a New York Times story talking about the basic idea behind The Matrix. To a certain extent, we become servants of anything we create.

Daryl Strawberry arrested, Lakers waive Dennis Rodman. These athletes have the world in the palm of their hands, yet they throw it away on the smallest of things. It bothers me.

The Industry Standard has fantastic infographics in every issue. Recently, they began to sell them as Powerpoint slides from their Web site . A great idea. They kept the cost down, but the information is for a very specific group of people. It differentiates the information and makes it unlikely that they will have competition for this specific idea.

I'm currently looking for a new host for Bump, if you wish to recommend a hosting company,mail me. I'm looking to resolve multiple domains to a single directory, and I must have my own mail server. Database integration via Cold Fusion is something else I would like, and I need to have access to a RealAudio server. 

XMLTree has a list of sites that are maintaining an XMLed version.

I watched American History X on DVD last night. It's a tough movie that made me do a lot of thinking. There are some really brutal scenes, but I still recommend it. Racism really bothers me. The site is pretty good, but you have to go a few layers deep to get to the content.

There is some really solid information and some great pointers at the CSS Pointers Group .

This Red Herring article talks about the deal between Microsoft and Audible. This will allow Microsoft to incorporate the Audible software engine into it's Windows CE devices, making them portable book players. There is a part of me that loves this idea, but I still don't buy the Windows CE platform. Sure it has a larger feature set than the Palm, but do I need a larger feature set? Still, I think that if something like this doesn't hurt battery life, why not?

The New York Times has a piece titled Record Companies Wary of New Microsoft Technology . They are right to be wary.

Macromedia updated Dreamweaver to 2.01.

I spent a lot of time yesterday rebuilding my home network from scratch to accomodate some of the new hardware I've picked up recently. I now have a home setup that is really convenient. I'm using one of Belkin's Omniview boxes to hook three computers(Windows, Be, Mac) up to a single keyboard and monitor. It saves me a ton of desk space, and allows me to experiment more. Now if I only had fast Internet access. 

I'm digging into some XML research tonight after a long day of usability sessions at the conference.

Microsoft's XML resource center is quite extensive. You can also download their XML Notepad from there. It's a very useful, but obstinate tool for working with and viewing the structure of XMLized files. I'm going to use it to edit Bump's RSS files for the next few days.

There is an annotated version of the XML 1.0 spec at XML.Com

Builder.com has a good tip article on Dreamweaver. I am becoming increasingly impressed with Macromedia as they integrate their tools to work together. It presents quite a challenge to Adobe to produce. It's the kind of competition that I always wanted to see in the page layout market.(I guess that may be finally happening now.)

I really have grown to like my Gateway FireAnt. Very light and fully functional. Now that I have Frontier 6.0 up and running on it too, I imagine that I will be using it more and more.

The Hamster Blast does exactly what I wanted the Hamster Dance to do. There are other alternatives(including a Pokemon page) at http://newgrounds.com/assassin/index.html

The Brain is cool.

I went to see the Matrix over the weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and highly recommend it. It's the first cyberpunk movie since Bladerunner that I really liked. Great effects, but the key was a really good story.

I absorbed a lot of interesting links over the last few days, and I'll be sure to report them as I work my way through them.

I've been attending the Web Design 99 conference over the last two days. Some great stuff, and I find myself wishing that I had more time to dedicate to a single site rather than having to split my time and effort across so many markets. It's tough to keep everything straight and to keep up with everything.

I've gotten to see some really dynamic speakers, and to see people like Jakob Nielson, whose work I have followed quite diligently over the Web, speak first hand. His talk was excellent, and drove home and validated the way I feel about site design. I'll definitely be working on the two projects that I am doing personally slightly differently as a result.

I also got a chance to go to lunch with a group of Frontier users who were attending the conference. I really enjoyed this "session" quite a bit, and it was nice to put faces with some names.

In the meantime, with the fade out from my death march at work combined with my attendance at this conference have conspired against regular Bump updates. I promise that this isn't a trend that will continue, and with the projects that I have planned for the next two months, I'm sure to have an active mind and site in the coming months.

So that's it for now, I hope to get things straight here in short order. A careful study of this site's usage statistics shows that nearly everyone is running a 4.0 browser, and I think I am going to start implementing some more complex things here to speed up load times and provide better navigation. Any feedback you might have would be very helpful to me.

I am now going through serious decompression after my sleigh ride through the valley of ultimate work.

I meant to get to Bump yesterday, but I had over 1500 email messages to read and plenty of work that had backed up on me in my absence. I find that these really tough times at work stimulate my thinking process, and I develop some of my best ideas during them. I'm proceeding now at an even clip and intend on taking at least one day off later this week to relax a little.

Bump is now a channel at My.Userland.Com. This is a great place to create a news page that catalogs all of the available channels. Dave Winer has opened things up by not binding folks with a restrictive legal agreement. I'm just happy that Bump is now syndicated in two places that make it a convenient stop for everyone.

I am still attending the ThunderLizard Web Design 99 Conference and would love to meet anyone out there who is attending and reads Bump.

A friend pointed out StatMarket to me.(Thanks Dee) Really good browser information to refer to when building sites.

I am getting a Web Certification at No Wonder . To get your certification you have to answer 100 questions from people searching for technical support over a three month time period. You are reviewed based on your answers.

That's all I have time for now. I'll let the flood gates open over the next two days as I catch up on my browsing and reading. 

I've been working 14 hour days, so I haven't had any time for Bump.

I'm traveling for the next four days for work. I may update on Friday if the opportunity presents itself. Please check back next week for more updates.

Sunday, and I've put in almost ten hours already today. The first project I am trying to put to bed is 90% done. Got some graphics to make and one large coding malfunction to figure out, and it's done.

There is an insane amount of Star Wars Information on the New York Times Star Wars Page . It includes tons of articles, but also links to the trailers on the net and other resources. They also have a long profile on George Lucas today.

Thunderlizard has handouts from their past shows up on their site . some of this information is really good. Best of all, it's free.

I've been experimenting with a right navigation bar for this site that contains links and the search engine for the site. I can't find a combination that I like that doesn't either look like other sites or clash with the current green color scheme. Looks like I'm going to have to rework the navigation banner.

Robot Wisdom has become a daily read for me again. I seem to almost forget about sites sometimes. Jorn has a running thing going now with WebCams. Worth an amusing look. 

I'm at the office, coding away. I thought I would take a Bump update break.

The answer to the previously mentioned Palm V alarm issue seems to be soft reseting the device through the reset button on the back. Two of us have tried this with great success. Just make sure you don't erase your data.

I'll be attending the Web Design '99 Conference. If you are too and want to meet up, please shoot me an email.

Wired News has a story about a contest that Kipling , the maker of the excellent line of Hacker bags, is running. It seems that no one has been able to break their code yet despite a mention on Slashdot . I have one of their computer bags and I love it. 

Blockbuster is buying a stake in DIVX? Bad move. That technology was close to dead(losses over $100 million a year for the last two years.)

Dan Schafer's most recent Builder.com article, IE 5.0 improves on earlier releases but complicates Web builders' lives is a fantastic overview of the problems with Internet Explorer 5.0 from a developer's perspective. It's another case of the browser vendor just ignoring the developer community. It makes me really angry. They had a great opportunity with this release to finally implement a bunch of things we have been asking for, and they blew it.

HeyIdiot.com sells one thing: stock in itself.

I downloaded Internet Explorer 5.0 last night and played with it quite a bit. Not much has changed to the eye of the Web user. I like the Radio component, which lets you listen to your favorite radio station while browsing. It took forever to download, even over a T-1, so there must be more than a few people joining in the fun.

Be continues to roll with a PC bundling deal in Europe. Go BE!! News.com has the story .

Silicon Valley's Awesome Look at New Sony Toy The New York Times covers the PlayStation II. Is this the beginning of the end for the PC? Not for me. Sounds really cool though.

I had a network volume go down this morning at work at the worst possible time. When I'm stressed out, I tend to smile and laugh alot.

Tim Bray, the creator of XML, talks about XML support in Internet Explorer 5.0 . It's actually something of a primer on real world use of XML for Web jockeys.

In his most recent, and very insightful, DaveNet , Dave Winer reveals that Userland will be doing an RSS engine like My Netscape, but open and less restrictive legally. This could be the thing I was talking about a couple of days ago, allowing us to do our own interfaces.

Mac OS Rumors is reporting that developers are looking at doing an XML interface as a part of the Darwin project. This could be of huge help in furthering the use of XML on the Macintosh.

One Week to the show. I have 5 projects that dead end next week. Going to be a fun, hard week.

Today also marks the release of Internet Explorer 5.0 for all of the Windows platforms.

News.com has a special report covering the release, it's implications, and its effects on the marketplace as a whole.

CNN has some coverage too.

You can also download it from Download.com

I'm not going to have time to experiment with and comment on it today, but I will write it up in full later this week.

The New York Times covers the Better Business Bureau's foray into online privacy monitoring. I think this is a really good thing. Being on the back end of things, people want to do all sorts of things with collected data that I'm not comfortable with. I stand really firmly on this stuff at work.

This move also encroaches on trustE's territory. Which one of the two seals is better? The Industry Standard has an article covering this today.

I've discovered a major issue with my Palm V, the alarms don't sound when the device is turned off. This makes it useless as a reminder. Apparently, this is an issue that Palm Computing is working on. I'm also still waiting for the modem that I ordered with the Palm V two weeks ago.

Builder.com has launched a new column called Critique of the Week . This week they look at the Hartford Courant, a paper I delivered as a kid. 

Reminder from yesterday, Bump is now live on the My Netscape Network channel system . To add my page to your My Netscape , follow this link

For those of you who don't want to go there to see what it looks like, here's a screenshot of the Bump Channel.

Macintouch has good unbiased coverage of the Mac OS X Server release event yesterday.

StepWise , a site maintained by a well respected long time OpenSTEP developer, has some notes on Mac OS X Server too. He had access to it in the limited beta release cycle, so he's pretty well tuned in.

I am encouraged by the pricing, and by the iniative of the open sourcing. I want to see more though. Open Source the whole thing. I worry that this is more of a media event thing than an actual committment, but we'll find out about that down the road.

Work will be crazy for me over the next ten days, we have our largest trade event coming up next weekend. You may see a small lack of consistency with regards to updates. Well, it does say sporadic in our statement of purpose above.

I've been playing with AvantGo on my Palm V over the last day and a half. I think it would be useful if I only wanted to read the sites, but I like to follow links, so it frustrates me. For me to cache all of the material I would want, I would have to have a Palm with 16 Mb of RAM.

PC WEEK has an article that reviews what the original Palm creators are doing called Catching up with the creators of the Palm They are moving towards a more consumer oriented device based on the Palm OS. based on what a good friend told me of his recent trip to Germany, they use the Palm in some very different ways there now. It all makes a lot of sense to me.

I picked up a copy of Fireworks 2.0 using their upgrade discount yesterday. I used it a little last night, and it seems to be much improved over the previous version, which wasn't bad at all. I think they have unified the UI in a better way. Builder.com has a review that I more or less agree with that was posted this morning.

Microsoft is attempting to move into the distributable digital audio market. There is a Wired News story on the subject this morning. Seems they have some pretty stiff competition from some companies, including Sony, which are already in this space. This has the potential to become a real mess if one standard isn't agreed upon. I like MP3 just fine, but I understand that there are piracy concerns.