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2007

  • 1 min read

iPhone Lacks Conversational Aspects

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Check out this
post from Opus Research:

iPhone may be a tour-de-force for the touchscreen, but it's inexplicably
odd to introduce a new smartphone with so few speech-based features. I
can hardly express how profoundly disappointed I am that this shiny, new
thing - the first must-have product since Nintendo's Wii - has less
voice processing than Tickle-Me Elmo.

(from: iPhone
Lacks Conversational Aspects)

The point of the whole essay that stuck with me is the incongruence
between offering a product that requires 100% visual focus and that as
often as not will be used while driving a car." As he says: "With
all the attention focused on the fancy, new screen and multi-touch
controls, I can only imagine what the safety implications are for in-car
use."

  • 1 min read

Another good article about choosing passwords

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I am getting more and more paranoid about this. Lately I have started to
use an application called 1Passwd (which also includes a FireFox plug in.)
Anyway. check out this
post from Schneier on Security:

"[snip…] So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should
choose something not on any of the root or appendage lists. You should
mix upper and lowercase in the middle of your root. You should add
numbers and symbols in the middle of your root, not as common
substitutions. Or drop your appendage in the middle of your root. Or use
two roots with an appendage in the middle.[snip…]"

(from: Choosing
Secure Passwords)

Read the whole thing!

  • 1 min read

Do you really really really want an iPhone?

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Check out this
post from Lifehacker:

So you want an iPhone when it ships in June (who doesn't?), but you're
locked into a contract with your current provider. Try Celltrade, a
service that helps you transfer your contract responsibility to someone
else and effectively walk away without paying a hefty penalty.

(from: Ditch
your phone contract with Celltrade)

  • 1 min read

Drama in Blog Time.

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A very interesting commentary on the phenomenon of blogging. Is what we
write 'of little consequence'? Does the fact that we post again the next
day say that we ourselves feel that way?

Check out this
post from What Will You See Next?:

That's 75 million people who are eager and willing to read material of
little consequence that will be replaced a day later by more material of
little consequence. The judgement "of little consequence" is actually
that of the writer rather than me or any other reader. When you
routinely replace your writing on a daily basis, consigning another post
to the black hole that is the world's blog archive, you implicitly make
the judgement: goodbye. I have some 700 posts on this site and 690 of
them have not been viewed since soon after I wrote them.

(from: Drama
in Blog Time.)

Food for thought…

  • 1 min read

The best twenty Mac apps you’ve never heard of

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Some good mac applications referenced in this
post . I particularly like Service Scrubber (never could really find a
use for that Service menu, sorry!) and CocoaMySql which looks like a very
nicely done graphical UI for MySql databases. Check out this
post from Lifehacker: The
best twenty Mac apps you've never heard of

  • 2 min read

A cautionary utility computing tale – or the dark side of Mashups

Check out this post from Between the Lines:

[snip…] "Yesterday Amazon's S3 service suffered an outage that lasted more than long enough to miss the company's self-imposed goal of 99.99% availability, at least for the next couple of months. Last November, Google Calendar was unavailable for the better part of a day. And famously, Salesforce.com suffered a string of outages this time last year. Unfortunately, my business relies on all three of these services." [snip…]

(from: A cautionary utility computing tale)

Recently I talked to someone who was trying to convince himself that they should built their new product on top of Amazon's Grid Computing platform (EC2). I know of another company who has built their new product on top of Amazon's Distributed Storage Service, S3. In our own case, the thumbnails for BlogBridge Expert Guides and Library come from Amazon's Alexa Site Thumbnails.

Cautionary tale indeed. It's the other side of the wonderful world of mashups and web 2.0 and web services and all that jazz. If I build my product on the back of your service, then the quality of what I deliver depends on your carrying through on your promises. Not a very strong position to be in.

This is fundamentally different from building a product that uses components (i.e. operating systems, libraries) delivered by others because in the end I do get a complete product that I can test and verify before I deliver it to a customer.

Just food for [GEEKY] thought.

Technorati Tags: mashup, mashupcamp, web2.0

  • 1 min read

DayLife: very nice new News Site

Notwithstanding the fact that Mike Arrington, an investor, doesn't like DayLife too much, I just spend a few minutes looking, and I think it's very very nice.

I'd say it's definitely worth a look.

The other investors seem to like it better. Ironic state of affairs, aint it? Unless it's a totally subversive way for Mike Arrington to get attention to the site. Wouldn't that take the cake?

Check out DayLife itself 🙂

  • 1 min read

[GEEKY] Eclipse 3.2.1, CVS and SourceForge.net on Mac OS X

If you need this tip, it will save you a lot of time. 99% likely though, you don't need it and it will read as complete gibberish. But I feel compelled to share it because it's totally obscure and I just spent 2 hours trying to figure it out.

Problem:

  • Eclipse 3.2.1 just ceased to be able to grab code from SourceForge.net via CVS. It would give an error: "Invalid argument or cannot assign requested address"

Configuration

  • Eclipse for using CVS on SourceForge requires ExtSSH (which means, use the Eclipse bundled SSH client, rather than some other utility that you have on your computer -- don't ask.)
  • Mac OS X, 10.4.9, all patches applied
  • Eclipse: 3.2.1 - brand new download

Solution:

  • In Mac OS X Network settings, TCP/IP, make sure that IPv6 is configured and shows an IPv6 Address.

Thanks for listening.