Log Box
Rob's ColdFusion Blackstone wishlist

Rob Brooks-Bilson has a very interesting wishlist for the next version of ColdFusion. I couldn’t agree more about the enhancements to the CF Scheduler that he requests, and number 36 “Add XML validation against a DTD” is something that a lot of people, myself included, want very badly. I would add an overhaul of Query of Queries to this list, it is problematic quite a bit of the time, and it’s typing infrastructure behaves in a predictable but somewhat ridiculous manner.

NYC Is Smoking Less, too

Gothamist: NYC Is Smoking Less. This is good news, and I am happy to report that my brother Chris is a member of that 11 percent. It’s also proof, in part, that banning smoking in bars is effective. It’s funny to me, because, here in Georgia, I hear a lot of people, and I mean a real lot, saying that they shouldn’t ban smoking in bars. The longer I go without a cigarette, the more I think it is a good idea.

Outkast

Outkast are filming their newest video at the end of my street in an old gas station.

You are calling it what?

G4 and TechTV Merger FAQ: “What will the merged network be called? G4techTV” Umm, I’m not a branding expert, or even a branding novice really, but even I know that G4techTV is an awful name for a cable network. How about just “T!”?

Some Mac OS X Menu Bar add ons
Menu Bar Capture

Rating Bar puts a small iTunes star rating widget in your menu bar, making it easy to rate your music. I currently use the keyboard commands in Synergy to do this same thing and more(displays album artwork at the beginning of a new song, and provides play etc controls). It got me to thinking that it might be useful to list the ones that I use here for other folks to check out.

So those are the first two from left to right. The third one is BluePhoneMenu. It adds a menu with Signal and Battery strength for your Bluetooth enabled and supported phone (I have the Sony Ericcson T61x.) It also does on screen call notification, which is quite handy if you are a headphone wearing fool like myself.

Fourth from the left is the ubiquitous Quicksilver. I'll save everyone yet another description of this invaluable utility. Next to it is SlimBatteryMonitor which saves me some screen real estate on the menu bar for more utilities without taking away the functionality of the Apple battery monitor.

Next to that is the excellent, donationware, Menu Calendar. It gives me the current date without any hassles, access to a monthly calendar, and easy access to iCal. The rest are all Apple provided ones, Airport, Displays, Applescript, Security, Bluetooth, and Sound.

Got any that you can't live without that I missed? That's what the comments are for baby!!

Google Blog launched

Well, in addition to relaunching Blogger, Google launched a Google Blog. Oddly, Evan signs his first post inside of the post itself, and it appears that they have turned off attribution in the posted/permalink section of each post. I’m guessing that this means we won’t have any idea who posted things unless they want us to know:-)

playfair returns as hymn

hymn – Hear Your Music aNywhere: “The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows.”