VerticalNet brokers a deal with Microsoft . Traditional business to business publishers had better take notice of this, they are quickly losing this battle through inactivity.
This kind of thing is the beginning of the end for the notebook computer. I know it's very expensive now, but it's no more expensive than notebooks generally were less than five years ago. I, frankly, want one. I especially like the fact that it supports portrait or landscape.
Barnes and Noble is working on a credit card that allows you to earn points towards books when you use it.
In case you live under some kind of technology free bubble, Transmeta announced their new processor today. It is x386 compatible and aimed at the mobile market.(Do you see a theme developing here?) Their first product to market is designed to run a special version of Linux and last for a full day on one battery charge. For an insane amount of detail, go to the Slashdot report .
The lack of updates over the last four days can be attributed directly to the installation of Quake 3 Arena on my home machine. If you smoke and intend to quit, you might find that extended video game forays help you take your mind off the gnawing sensation of your body weening itself from addiction.
Four days and still cooking along on the not smoking thing. I'd like to thank everyone for all of the encouraging emails. It's helped me out quite a bit, in fact more than once I got them while I was craving a cigarette and they encouraged me to push on.
It's been a very focused week at work. We're pushing a project out the door early next week, and we have all been putting in extra effort to get the development done. One of the aspects of this project is an edit interface, and coding it made me appreciate Manila all that much more.
I don't know how many of the same readers we have, but does anyone else use a Netscape browser to access Scripting News ? I get blank pages about 90% of the time with either Communicator 4.7 for Mac or Windows. It just started happening recently. It's one of those sites that I read often enough that I find myself firing up Internet Exploder just to read it.
MacCentral has an article today on the USB Kritter Cam from iRez. I got one for Christmas to go with my iBook, and have been quite pleased with it so far. I still haven't decided if I want cam type pictures of me up on this site though.
I started down a better path today. I'm quitting smoking. It's a nasty disgusting habit, and I want to be rid of it once and for all. I'm using the NicoDerm CQ patch. A little background: in 1997 I quit smoking after almost eight years. I succeeded and remained smoke free until 1999 when I broke down slowly. I made the mistake of thinking I could have the occasional cigarette without breaking. I then slowly spiraled back into the life of a smoker. I put the patch on this morning(I started with the 21 mg version.), and the first thing that happens is a really itchey feeling where you put it on. Now I'm feeling a little spacey, probably because it's more nicotine than my body is used to. I'm not craving a butt now, but I will as the day goes on. It's a wrenching feeling as your body craves the substance it's addicted to. What the patch does is allow you to seperate the two different aspects of the addiction and break each down as a unique battle. I'll keep you informed of my progress. Feel free to encourage me.
The Slashdot interview with Steve Wozniak was posted today. He shares his very perceptive opinions on a variety of subjects.
I'm pretty close to 100% after a brutal bout with the flu. I hate being sick, but when I get better I am always more motivated and focused than I was before I was sick.
There's a hilarious net based matrix spoof going on at this site . He adds panels every day.
I found Apple's Internet strategy announcement's today a little disappointing. The new services they are providing are far from remarkable or unusual. The only thing they did that I think is neat was to integrate the free drive space on their servers directly with the Mac OS Desktop. Since I've got mac OS 9 going on here, I signed up for the free services tonight. The Kidsafe service takes a better approach to keeping things safe for kids than other similar packages have, and the free Web page doesn't seem to be available right now.
It's that special time of year again for Mac users. MacCentral has pictures from setup day at MacWorld SF. One of them makes me think we may see Internet Explorer 5.0 for the mac tommorrow.
Jane and Ted, the closest thing Atlanta has to a royal family, are separating .
Macintouch is reporting that SuSe will be demonstrating a version of their Linux distribution for the Power Macintosh at this week's MacWorld conference. It's interesting to me, because it won my recent five distribution face off as the easiest to install(on my hardware) for Intel. I'm running it on my fast Intel machine at home right now. It would also mark the first major Linux distribution to have a Power PC version.
Bill Parcells retires. Bad day for Jets fans. Probably a good day for Mr. Parcells though. He read a great poem to his team yesterday which is published in the article. It's a good read in the beginning of the new year.
If you look at this page , you can see(until they change it), that Amazon.com doesn't know how to subtract.(Look at the list price versus their price on the first two items.)
Feeling a bit better today, but not good enough to make it through a whole day of work. I came home early and took a nap. Perhaps I'll be 100% tommorrow.
I spied Twernt in my referrer log, and I like it quite a bit.
Well, here we are, safe and sound, power on, phones working. I was prepared for the worst.
My New Year's wish for everyone is self examination. Look at the date at the top of this entry. It looks strange, doesn't it? We are at the start of something new as a group. A chance to wipe the slate clean and begin again. Here's your chance to look at yourself, and change for the better. I have great hope for myself.
I went to see Any Given Sunday last night. I loved it, but I'm into the whole football thing. The Flash on the site is pretty good too. A friend of mine had told me earlier in the week that he thought it was Al Pacino's best performance to date. There were some great cameos in the movie, including Oliver Stone, the director, posing as a television announcer during the several games that were featured in the movie and Johnny Unitas as an opposing coach. A great cast including, besides Pacino himself, James Woods, LL Cool J, Jamie Fox, Matthew Modine, Cameron Diaz, Lawrence Taylor, and Bill Bellamy. A North Dallas Forty for the nineties with better undertones.
A beta version of Macster , a Napster client for the Macintosh, has been released.
My brother and his girlfriend just arrived from New York to celebrate the new year. Should be some fun going on here over the next few days. He's the first family member to visit me in Atlanta.
Watch out Apple, there' some powerful looking PowerPC machines coming down the pike for running LinuxPPC. This one , the RioRed, looks pretty badass.
Many others are pointing to it today (I found it at rc3.org), but the origin of a browser , about Netscape's evolution, is worth pointing to nonetheless. I remember all of it almost, except for the first couple of beta versions. It's amazing that this was only a few years ago because it feels like forever. I actually still have the retail boxed version of Netscape 1.1 with manual in original packaging. i've been hanging on to it for nostaligia purposes. Perhaps I'll scan the box and manual covers and post them. Any interest in seeing that?
I'm really struggling with the installation of an Ethernet PCMCIA card on my Linux Laptop.(Red Hat) Anyone care to help me through this? The whole story: I've got a 3com Cardbus 575BT card, and the default PCMCIA support in Red Hat is installed. I added the card driver and the Card driver binding to the PCMCIA config file, and the notebook doesn't recognize the card at startup.
They've updated the site for The Lord of the Rings movies. It's even got some shots from the movie that look fantastic. I'm really hoping that they do this epic story justice.
You can pretty much(not surprisingly) forget about getting any decent domain names based on Lord of the Rings characters.
I installed Corel's Linux OS on my Intel box at home this weekend. It's definitely the easiest to install version of Linux that anyone's come out with yet, and it's almost completely appropriate for a novice user. I like the default install of Red Hat 6.1 better, but I had Linux installed in about half an hour.
If you have a color printer, this gift box PDF from lindkvist.com is neat for holiday gift giving.
I ventured out to the mall today after yesterday's really mixed Internet shopping experience. Man, people are out of control, fighting in the parking lot over spaces, running right into each other inside the mall. Really into the holiday spirit. I'm pretty much done with my shopping.
Virtual Plastic has to be the best site I've found that covers customizing and tweaking your Windows based PC's GUI.
I went into some sort of Icon frenzy tonight. You'll find an extensively updated ICON section on the links page.
First, where I think they are the same. Both provide a Web based editorial environment from which to update your site. Both allow you to do this within an HTML framework of your own choosing. Blogger allows you to edit and upload regardless of where you are and where your site is hosted. Manila, today, is strictly limited to editing pages that are on a Manila server, but you can do that from any Web connection just like Blogger. I’m sure that Userland plans to add the ability to use Manila to update sites served on non-Manila servers from static HTML, or even possibly other types of dynamically served environments. Both editing environments are compelling, but Manila’s supports as many pages as you create, where Blogger is focused primarily on pages that contain Weblog entries. This ends up meaning that Manila has much wider reaching applications and can be used for every page of a site rather than just the actual Welog page. The entry interface on blogger is seperate from the actual page of content you are posting(see screen shot above.), and I think that it makes it a more friendly interface for the daily entries that it is focused on. Both environments support multiple author sites.(Which I won’t be using, but others might want to know about.)
The editorial environment on Blogger 2.0 is also more mature.(Thus the 2.0 in its name.) It features a search engine that allows you to pull up your entires with certain strings in them. When I have two hundred daily entries in this new site, it would be really useful to have this feature. Manila provides the same functionality, assuming that you have the search engine turned on and indexing your site. Blogger also allows you to preview and then edit your posting before actually publishing it to the site. I would like to see more customization of the editorial environment in both apps. I would like to have one place as a site editor with all of my links to frequently visited sites and the edit interface for the site. This is possible with Manila through some template customization, but I haven’t gotten to that stage yet.
My recommendation right now is determined by your situation. If you have an existing Weblog type site and already have a hosting environment and space, you’re better off using Blogger. It will take far less reworking to get things up and running, and you won’t have to sacrifice any other server side stuff you currently use such as PERL, Cold Fusion etc.. If you don’t have these things, the space on Userland’s Manila server offers you a chance to set things up from scratch and benefit from Userland’s ongoing improvement of their offering. If you have your own server box, you can buy Frontier and set up your own Manila framework for your self and others.(I have a retired desktop machine serving 9 sites) It’s worth mentioning that Userland has been improving their software on an almost daily basis. I have my copy of Frontier automatically update itself over the Internet every night, and those new features will appear in the interface seemingly out of nowhere. I love that.
Now, my dilemma. I like both environment’s, but I have more content on my site than just the Weblog entries, and I have some plans to add to that content so I like the fact that Manila offers me the full site editing functionality. I’m not currently using anything server side with my site, so that’s not an issue. Bump has been hosted by Mindspring since before I even had the domain name, and the hosting includes mail and dns. In order for me to move Bump to Manila, I’ll either have to bite the bullet and build that stuff for my Manila server or continue to pay Mindspring for the space without actually using it. Another issue that I haven’t touched on are my legacy Weblog entries. There is no easy way to move the two years of entries that I already have into either system’s framework. I could do this with Manila by doing it by hand in the Guest Database framework that Manila is built from, but the amount of labor that would take seems pretty monumental. So I remain undecided, but leaning towards using Manila.
Well, I've let this site slip again. I've been cleaning up the remains of a long running project at work, and playing with Manila, the BeOS, Red Hat 6.1, and Yellow Dog Linux. I miss being able to spend a lot of time playing around with technology. This site will be back in full force starting today.
I've also put a little time in with Blogger, and have two redesigns of this site to choose from now. I built one in Manila and another with Blogger. They are really similar in some ways, but way apart in others. I have the apartment to myself this weekend with Kate out of town, so I'll try to clean them up and point to them for your feedback.
One of the surfers who is a long time source of material for this site solved my shoe buying issue by pointing me to MO . They've got all the Simple shoes I could ever want.
This site has a bunch of tech support phone calls. You may have heard some before.
This excellent editorial piece explains why the current standard set of thinking about Web business models as either Business to Business or Business to Consumer is to simplistic. I think most forward thinking Web strategists have realized for a while that this hybrid approach is where things are going.
What this site lacks in usability it makes up in having links to hundreds of Web Development resources. I'm going to need a few hours to take it all in.
Please ignore my link to Bookit. Upon installation, I discovered that it's crippleware, making it impossible to tell whether or not it would really be useful without first paying a $5 fee. However, the crippled version managed to crash my machine twice before I trashed the whole thing.
I've never mentioned it here before, but I have trouble with my feet. it seems I was born with some extra bones in them(which means I have more bones than you so ha.) I break these extra bones if I'm not careful, so I have to wear special inserts in my shoes. Anyway, what I'm getting to is that Simple makes my favorite shoes and sneakers because they are wide enough for my huge, extra boned feet. They have a good loking site too. Although they haven't figured out yet that they could actually sell their shoes online and make it easier for people to find them.
A couple of years ago I used to use a universal bookmark manager on my Macs named Webquick. It disappeared and ceased to work with current versions of the operating system. In the time since then, I haven't found anything that was easier than using my links page to keep track of things. It makes sense for things I visit all the time, but what about "the big list" ?Well, Bookit looks like it might be the answer to my need.
Userland launches http://www.editthispage.com . If you registered on their site as a user prior to December 1, you get a free manila Web site for 60 days.
Bump Design (which I am not afilliated with in any way.) has a really well designed Flash site.
I haven't written about new Weblogs that I find useful in quite a while, mainly beacause of a comment that somone made in regards to this site being primarily about Weblogs. However, there have been so many new ones created in the last couple of months that I like that I wanted to take a minute and tell you about a few of them that I'm impressed with.
Backup Brain is hosted by two people, and it makes for an interesting mix of content. One of the authors, Dori Smith, and I met last year at a Web conference when all of the Frontier people at the show went out to lunch. I like the tone and content of this blog.
Megnut is maintained by a member of the Pyra posse. They seem to be a real special bunch considering how good Evhead and this newer(to me) site are.
Lake Effect has grown on me over the last month. I take back my earlier comment that I don't like the color scheme.
I like TurlyMing's simple design and strong content. Also based in the Weblog capital of the world, Atlanta.
O'Reilly, by far the best technology book publishing company, is finally coming out with a book about the Mac OS . I swear they get about 5% of my salary every year.
A Day Without Weblogs may have come and gone, but what is important is that you remember what it was about in the first place.
Userland Software started marketing Manila yesterday. They have a nice pull quote from me listed on their release announcement site . It's strange to see my name associated with the others quoted. My manila server is moving along, and I added two new sites today. I am finding all sorts of ways to use the software that I wouldn't have thought of just knowing what the feature set was going to be. It's changing the way I write a little because it's so easy to update. When I find something, I don't hold back, I write it into the site then. Before I would hold things until one moment of the day and then update. It's a good change.
After almost two months, I finally feel like I'm hitting my stride at my new job. It feels great. It's a lot more compressed than any of my previous jobs, and it feels good to be squished.
PayPal.com offers an interesting micropayment service between friends, co-workers etc that is email based and also hooks up to your Palm OS Device. This would really come in handy when it's time to split up those lunch tabs.
Manila Update: Server now has 7 sites running on it. No performance complaints at all.
I'm not digging the new Industry Standard redesign. It looks to me like it was done by committee, and I think it lacks cohesiveness. The other design fit the personality of the magazine and site content better IMHO.
The little guy wins? Am I in the right place? I thought the big corporations and their fancy lawyers always won these sorts of cases. Will wonders never cease?
I've started a Manila based log site that will be aimed at people interested in Gadget technology named GadgetLand . it's the first public Manila site that I have worked on. I expect the template to change quite a bit as time allows me to customize it.
The people who brought us the Powerpage and Nobeige.com have started a Palm oriented site at Palmlounge.com
I had a great Thanksgiving. I traveled home to Connecticut and spent it with my family, some of whom traveled all the way from California. We ate way too much, and had some great talks. Thanks Mom and Dad.
The trip also made me realize that there are a whole group of people that read this site that don't read other Weblog sites every day. I leave things off here assuming that everyone will have already read about them somewhere else, and that's just not the case.
Userland released Frontier 6.1 today. I've been using the betas for a few weeks now, and have set up a server running their Manila framework. It's really, really, easy to set up and configure. It's also really easy to use to build sites. I expect to chronicle my experiences, and those of the others who are using my server to create sites, right here on Bump. Someday soon, Bump will be a Manila site. Update: I'm up to five sites on the box now. People are digging it. I'll post a list when people have stuff up and want to be pointed to.
Omnisky is offering a special deal to people interested in beta testing their Palm V wireless modem and service that includes unlimited usage and a lifetime discount. Unfortunately, there's no coverage in Georgia.
