Mach-II for ColdFusion 1.0 has been released. I haven’t had time to take a look at it too closely yet, but it looks interesting.

The New Diamond Age is a great article, which is also the cover story of the most recent issue of Wired, about man made diamonds and their implications for both the jewelry and processor industries.

iChat Streaming Icon lets you automagically set your buddy icon based on any video source, I’m using it with my iSight, and it works great.

I think if I lived in California, I would be casting my vote for Terry Tate, Office Linebacker.

It’s going to be a very long week, we have The 85th PGA Championship going on Thursday through Sunday. You’ll be able to see the fruits of my coding stylings over there then.

If you have Showtime, you really owe it to yourself to watch an episode of Out of Order. It is, without a doubt in my mind, one of the best things on television right now. If I had to make a choice, I would be very hard pressed to choose between it and Six Feet Under on HBO as my favorite show. The writing is just great, and even Six Feet Under doesn’t have some of the great one liners that the writers of this show have come up with. Like most things I like, it is inventive and innovative.

I picked up an iSight a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t really had the time or inclination to set it up and play with it. I only know one other person who has purchased one, and we work in the same office every day so don’t have any real need to videoconference. I finally decided to unpack it and have a go this afternoon during some server downtime at the office. EvoCam makes a great companion piece of software for it, it supports a Java applet based stream that is pretty neat, and does the normal ftp webcam thing that you would expect. It’s very customizable, including timestamps and any other text that you might want superimposed on the webcam image. Best of all, it will only set you back 20 dollars, definitely a good deal, and I will be registering my copy as soon as my trial runs out.

BLOGGER finally has Safari blog bookmarklet support. Perhaps I shouldn’t be spending all this time moving to Movable Type after all. On that note, I was quite surprised to see that Movable Type’s preferred import format is a plain old text file. I’ve maintained an xml version of all my posts, mainly thinking in advance about havign move to either blog software written by me or someone else. It’d be nice if I could just map my xml to their post format and hit a button or something. I guess I can do what I need to do pretty easily with XSLT though.

I’m sitting in my neighborhood Starbucks, taking advantage of tacking unlimited hotspot access to my cellphone bill for 20 bucks a month. When I first did it a couple of months ago, I would rarely see anyone else here with a computer, let alone accessing the net. Over the last couple of months however, the number of people using the hotspot seems to have been going up at an incredible rate. Today, there are a total of five of us, all using Powerbooks. This in what I wouldn’t consider a high tech neighborhood at all.

Well, I have jet lag. Not because I traveled, but because I had to pretend that I was living in the same time zone as London for the last four days while our team covered the Open Championship. The site turned out great, and everything ran smoothly in the Golf Scoring/XML parsing land that my work is comprised of. I’ve actually become a much bigger fan of golf in the last few months working on the site, and it was fun this weekend to see these amazing players challenged with a course and conditions that made them struggle. Now I have to attempt to get my sleep schedule to return to normal.

I think that the thing that disturbs me the most about the two party political system we currently have in this country is that both groups feel the need to stretch the truth or resort to unprovable rhetoric in order to make their points. This is probably meant to muddy the waters for people who take things at face, but it is incredibly difficult to attempt to educate myself on important issues with all of the “doody” floating in the waters.

I went and got my hair cut this afternoon. For years, I had long hair, and I only got a haircut every three of four months, there was no need to do otherwise. Since I went the short hair route six months ago, I have to go every six weeks or so to keep the appearance of neatness. Not that I mind the whole personal grooming routine, I think I actually enjoy it more than most men I know. They mostly seem to want to go in to get their hair cut and spend as little time maintaining their hair every day as possible. Anyway, I’m digressing, this is supposed to be an essay about will power or, more accurately, the battle of the hair styles that occurs on my head every six weeks. I go to a fancy salon, it’s an indulgence that I allow myself, and I really enjoy the whole process of going, changing into the special salon robe, getting a scalp massage, a shampoo, and finally getting my hair cut. While this has all gone well, it’s the styling part, post-haircut, where the trouble arises. While I am keeping things pretty conservative, my stylist likes to make some artisitic choices when styling my hair that I am not certain work for me. He’s an artist though, and I don’t want to belittle his judgement because he probably does know better than I do what works. Don’t laugh at me when I call him an artist, do you have any idea the havoc that a bad haircut can wreak in one’s life? So anyway, I’m sitting here in Starbucks, connected to the Wi-Fi, wondering whether I should be styling my hair when I get up tomorrow the way he styled it this afternoon, or the way that I think it should be styled.

Well, I will say that it seems like quite a lot of squabbling has been going on in blog-land the last couple of weeks. Taking a simplistic viewpoint, it might seem like Dave Winer against the rest of the blog-tool vendors and a smattering of community folks. It seems, from my perspective, that both groups have written things that are somewhat questionable, but I don’t really want to get into a “I’m gonna take a side and here is why the other guys are wrong” position. From my perspective, as a real long term blog maintainer guy, it seems like there was an infrastructure in blogland that worked pretty well, and could be enhanced over time if everyone could work together, which seems unlikely from what I have seen. Since it seemed unlikely that everyone could work together, which, in my perception, has very little to do with the technology side of things, one group decided to build a new set of infrastructure for blogland. It seems like a huge undertaking from the perspective of arriving at a consensus and then properly implementing and testing this consensus in software. These wheels are in motion, and while it does no one any harm for me to express an opinion about this, I doubt there is much that anyone could do to halt the inertia of the situation. So I will just say this, it seems, from what I can tell, that there is no one in this situation who is primarily motivated by the practical good of blogland itself. I find this frustrating, but I am going to go get a nice cup of coffee now, and then I might read a book.

Scott’s got a good Buddy Hackett story on his blog type thing.

My favorite discovery of the week so far has been Freshly Mixed. It’s a great archive of 407 DJ sets in a variety of styles. It includes some great sets by some really high profile folks too. The only downside is a registration process that requires a valid email address, which made me a little uncomfortable, and download speeds of the massive files are a bit slow, even over a very high speed connection.

Heh, well I almost don’t even know where to start and where to end with this post. I have so much stuff going on in my head. Last week, after tidying work things up after the weekend’s tournaments and what not, I struck out on a mini-holiday to sunny Miami. Late June in Miami is supposed to be their offseason, and the general idea was to keep to myself, relax, and destress as much as possible. I’ve always enjoyed taking off on my own like this, being in a strange city alone doesn’t appeal to most people, as far as I can tell, but there is something about the anonymity of it that I really seem to enjoy. I could tell, even from the reactions of the people who work in the hospitality industry down there, that most people seem to view people who are on vacation alone like they are some kind of freaks.

Well, Miami is a beautiful city, the weather was gorgeous for the most part, despite forecasts which said otherwise, and the people were friendly and fun. For the first couple of days, I chose to keep to myself, lying by the pool and reading books, so many books in fact, that I had to run to a nearby bookstore during my lunch wandering the second day to pick up some more material to keep me busy. I will leave the book notes for another entry in the next few days. As the trip progressed, I met some awesome and interesting people who I spent a bunch of time with. I firmly believe that things happen for a reason, and I return with a reinforcement of that opinion. I return refreshed, happier, and far less stressed out than when I left. I wish I could have been gone more than five days, but, fear not, I'm heading up North for some quality time with my family, which is long overdue, this weekend for a couple of days. In the meantime, there seem to be a sheer multitude of work things that need my attention. I guess I should make a couple of notes about places I went to in Miami that I would recommend, since I took pretty copious notes and a bunch of pictures while I was there, but that will have to wait for now.

Well, there’s a lot of coverage of the WWDC keynote elsewhere, so I’ll just give a couple of opinions and call it a day. First, Panther looks great, there are a lot of changes at the system level that make sense and were expected. The new features all make sense strategically, and put them solidly ahead of MSFT in the OS innovation department yet again. MSFT has attempted to create buzz for Longhorn, something that won’t see the light of day for another two years at least. I can only imagine all the innovations we’ll see from our friends in Cupertino in the same time period. Second, I’m drooling over the new hardware architecture. It puts Apple in a place where they can plausibly compete with the Wintel architecture, even if they are only slightly behind in performance, the OS is so much better that it makes for a good argument. By the time the machines hit the streets, the top end Wintel machine will be faster than the one we saw today. Regardless, I will be replacing my aged tower when these machines hit the streets, and I’m excited to see what they, and Panther, can do.

I also know where I am going to be tomorrow night. If you live in the ATL, you should come down to MJQ and represent.

I guess I know where I will be tomorrow at 1 pm ET.

I like the new version of Blogger, but I wish that all of the features they offer me on my Windows machine/IE were there when I logged in with Mozilla or Safari. It’s definitely an improvement from a performance perspective, although I haven’t really discovered any new features that I find terribly useful. The interface is much bluer.

What a busy weekend. In addition to my normal golf tournament babysitting duties, we have the Club Professional’s Championship running this weekend, and weather has been the opponent for the tournaments all weekend. I’ve still managed to fit some pool time into my schedule, with regular exits to use the Wifi network at the nearest Starbucks. Because I have a T-Mobile cell phone, my Sidekick actually, I get unlimited access to the T-Mobile hotspots for $19.99 a month, and it has worked out great. In Atlanta, there is no shortage of Starbucks locations, so I can bring my machine wherever I go without fear that I’ll be far away from VPN access to work.

This review of a shareware metronome application is the funniest thing I have read in June. (Thanks Buzz)

Europe outlaws business model patents.

“On June 13, at approximately 9:45 p.m., our friend and co-worker Lay Kian “Canny” Ong was abducted from the parking lot of the Bangsar Shopping Complex in Malaysia." This needs more exposure. If you’ve got a blog, and feel like linking to this post or that site, it would be great. She is a friend of a good friend of mine, and everyone is worried sick about the situation. There’s more information on how you can help at the site. Update: They found her, but sadly, she was already dead. If more news about this story appears, I will make certain to link to it. It really is a tragedy, and my thoughts are with her family and friends. Another Update: Here’s an article, which is very disturbing, about the body they found.

A watch with up to 256 Mb of Memory built into it that you can access via a handy USB cable that is also built into it. Seems to me that this is an industrial espionager’s wet dream.