Amazon’s Power is Unlimitted
Wow, they let me change my birthday. Now that’s powerful!
Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
July 2004
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2004-07-31
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2004-07-31
iTunes Rules
Here’s a nice bit of civic participation: the iTunes Music Store is offering single click, FREE, downloads of the 9/11 Commision Report’s Executive Summary, and of speeches from the 2004 Democratic National Convention. What a great way to make this accessible to us. Thanks!
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2004-07-26
Jon Udell on Bloglines
Read more →Jon (and many others) really like Bloglines a lot; I recommend his article – there’s a lot to learn there. I want to address just one point, which is Jon’s prediction of the coming world domination by web apps. There’s an interesting paradox, inconsistency or contradiction here, if you look at the following qoutes from his piece:
“Web applications such as Gmail and Bloglines are already hard to beat. With a touch of alchemy they just might become unstoppable. “ “… that Bloglines, like Zope, handles foldering about as well as you can in a Web UI — which is to say, well enough. With an intelligent local cache it could be...
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2004-07-24
Announcing… The BlogBridge Service ;-)
Read more →
Here’s a sneak preview of something a little bit different. As of the next beta, we will be running a BlogBridge service off our BlogBridge.com site. Initially all it will do for you is keep things in synch as you use BlogBridge on different computers. Keeping in synch means making sure that you have the same ‘favorites’ configured and that your unread information is kept consistent.It does require you to register, by giving us an email address and password to authenticate you. So that whenever you run BlogBridge it will pick up your favorites and not someone elses.
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2004-07-23
Will Wikis Rule the World?
Read more →I was recently asked by a VC friend of mine what I thought of a certain Wiki product. I thought my response to him (with specific product and people references removed) might be interesting. He asked me, “Have you kept track of what’s going on in Wiki-land, and what do you think?” Here’s my answer:
Yes, I have very much kept track of the wiki stuff. After doing eRoom, which is still among the best collab systems out there in my (humble) opinion, I very much believe that there’s a whole next generation of collaboration that is needed. I say this because eRoom and others fall really short when it comes to get mass adoption. Wiki’s might point in that direction.
That said, ...
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2004-07-22
Mac OSX not easy to use!
Read more →Years ago I was a hardcore Mac fanatic. I was one of the creators of a long-gone early Macintosh application called Jazz. I programmed on a Lisa in 68000 assembly language. As I said, a long time ago 🙂 Anyway, for years I’ve been a PC guy, but still with a warm spot in my heart for Mac. Recently we got an iBook in our family and so I had a chance to reaquaint myself with how the world had changed.
After hearing disparaging remarks from Mac folks about Windows XP lack of usability and elegance I was all set to be blown away by OSX. Here some first impressions.
Yes indeed, OSX is beautiful to look at. It wows you with some nifty and novel animations. The level of design, colors, icons, etc. ...
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2004-07-13
[JAVA ONE]Sun answers my question
Read more →In severalprevious postsI’ve wondered aloud: “I can see that Sun spends a ton of money on Java. It must be astronomical. What’s the strategy behind that? How do they make money on that?” Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s President and COO, answers that question directly in his new Blog.
And in the “you can’t win” department: One of my observations about this year’s Java One was that there was a real contrast between the way Java ran this and the way, for example, Microsoft runs the PDC (Professional Developers Conference.) Microsoft works hard at and I think succeeds at paint...
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2004-07-12
Scary Software, Part Deux
Continuing my complaintsabout Java Web Start, as if the message displayed on Windows under Java 1.5 isn’t bad enough, here’s what a slightly older version of Java displays on Linux:
I highlighted the message near the bottom in yellow: “It is highly…” I mean, really, what is the point? I can spend several hundreds of dollars (annually) on a certificate to change that message to “This application was signed by R. Pito Salas and Associates”, and that would assure people who know me personally. I would hope my user base grows beyond that 🙂
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2004-07-10
Scary Software
I love those security guys just as much as the next guy but this certificate crazyness is ridiculous. Look at this message that a poor unsuspecting user sees when they try to run a downloaded java application:
Inspires confidence, doesn’t it? The absurd part is this: I can go out and spend several hundred dollars to get an actual official certificate which certifies tht I am indeed BlogBridge Inc. How does that help anyone?
A guy in Kansas sees that Microsoft or Sun promises me that Verisign promises me that this software is really from BlogBridge, Inc. Big Deal! Who the heck is BlogBridge Inc?
Unless you are Microsoft or General Electric, who knows if they can trust you? It’s a big farce built upon beautiful and elegant mathematics and cryptography which is correct and yet impotent
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2004-07-10
BlogBridge Beta 2 is now available to play with
Hey, check out our new and improved web site. There is lots of new content, particulary a bunch of screen shotsand a greatly augmented FAQ. Also if you want to try BlogBridge Beta 2 (0.5.3) just click here.
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2004-07-10
Java Web Start Sucks Eggs
I’ve written about this before, and after all it is fairly (no, very) esoteric. Java Web Start is Java’s approach to installation and distribution and updating of Java desktop applications. It’s a really nice idea but it just is too full of problems. With a small project like BlogBridge, I guess it saves us some work, and so we use it, warts and all. Anyway, here is a bit that I found that articulatesin great gory detail all the problems. I concur and I suffer with you.
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2004-07-10
BlogBridge Beta 2 almost ready
Well we’ve been busy little beavers and are getting ready to release BlogBridge Beta 2. It has quite a few nifty new features! I will write a little more about it tomorrow or Monday. We’ve done a total overhaul of the content of the web site (the look/design is unchanged.) Take a look at our Brand New Web Site
An important change in opening the kimono a bit more is that you will find a direct link from our web site to install and run the beta. You are of course invited to join the beta group, but if you just want to play, go for it. Click here to download and run BlogBridge.
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2004-07-10
Oddpost Sold to Yahoo!
Dave Winer comments on the sale of OddPost to Yahoo. I’ve been an avid OddPost fan for a while and I am glad to see them succeed. It’s an impressive tour the force, an existence proof that you can build quite a nice UI in a browser. One critical detail which is a bit mysterious to me: OddPost today runs only on Internet Explorer, and in particular, not on Macintosh. This, I assume, because the incredibly subtle and tricky code they had to write to pull of their magic made them not-cross-platform. Clearly Yahoo wouldn’t buy them if they weren’t convinced that this limitation could be lifted.
But can it? And how does this relate to the recent dust up around Apple’s statement that they are adding (incompatible) “enhancements” to allow Safari to be better integrated and interoperable with OSX? People are worried about the divergence of standards.
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2004-07-07
Technical tweak to this blog
In tracking down a ‘bug’ in BlogBridge I discovered that my RSS feed for this blog has abbreviated items, that is, without html and limited to a certain number of words. That’s not what I wanted so with this new posting I should have full items. To test this, this line is bold
And this line is bulletted
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2004-07-02
Downloadable Car Horn Sounds!?
Read more →Did you know that you (or your teenager) can buy cool new ring tones for their cell phone? They cost a buck or two and are quite the rage, especially in countries other than the US 🙂 You probably knew this. Did you know that this buck or two is actually only good for a month or two of use of the ring tone, after which you would have to buy a renewal or more likely a new one? You might or might not have known this.
How about the fact (at least I heard it as fact in more than one place, but I cannot corroborate) that downloadable ring tones account for a $3.5 BILLION business. Hard to believe isn’t it?
Well here’s a cute idea (which is so cute, we can bet it will happen) which I heard tossed...
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2004-07-02
[JAVAONE] User Interface Design
Read more →Someone whose oppinion I listen to, Karsten Lentzch, recommends these books about user interface design:
Jeff Johnson: GUI Bloopers: Don’ts and Do’s for Designers Ellen Isaacs: Designing from both sides of the screen Mullet: Designing Visual Interfaces
Background: I went to a couple of presentations by Karsten Lentzch at Jav...
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2004-07-01
[GEEK/JAVAONE] Java Web Start – still falling short
Read more →Java Web Start is a piece of Java platform that’s meant to ease the deployment and updating of Java applications. It’s a great idea, but disappointingly implemented. There were several JavaOne sessions about Web Start. There are some great enhancements coming in Java 5.0 (1.5)
A semi-miraculous JAR compression technology (called Pack200, who knows why) which in some cases achieves a claimed 10-1 compression. You need to know that Java applications are notoriously huge because and so this is welcome news. Beyond this, there are a set of features allowing more control of the placement of shortcuts, onto the desktop, in the start menu, and various other items.
However, disappointingly, I have...
June 2004
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2004-06-29
[JAVAONE] Scott McNealy Keynote
Read more →I had never heard him speak – He’s a lot of fun to listen to – funny and with a sense of his audience. This was a shorter keynote then yesterday. This wasn’t the kind of rah-rah motivational speech that I was expecting. He did drive home a few points, clearly showing what he was most interested in us taking away:
Takeaway 1: Scott wants us to believe that Sun is highly viable. They will not be going away. $4 Billion in the bank, etc. Unit sales are growing – at least over the last 3 Quarters. Takeaway 2: Scott wants us to know that Sun’s support of Java is unwavering. It is very expensive but it does help them to sell hardware. Sun is very keen on supporting the Java community a...
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2004-06-28
[JAVAONE] What’s going on with Java version numbers?
What’s going on with Java version numbers? There was Java 2 (where the version numbers were 1.3 and 1.4) and the Tiger release just coming out is 1.5. The release after Tiger is going to be called 5.0?!
What is going on? Talk about sowing confusion. Not that marketing ever was a Sun strength!
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2004-06-28
Is the world ready for a replacement to Outlook?
Read more →Everyone loves to beat up on Microsoft’s Outlook. Including me! See Outlook Haters Anyone? and Outlook 2003 Rant. It is true that Outlook is a bit of an abomination. It’s large, slow, and as of the latest release, the user interface has gotten that much worse.
Even Microsoft execs agree according to Rafe Needleman (see link above): “I confront Microsoft execs about these and other Outlook crimes whenever I get a chance. The result is usually a ...