American Idol fans with Tivo
Tivo has been doing more and more cool things with their little box. See , it's actually a Linux computer, with a 80Gig hard disk and a broadband connection to the internet, plus a big screen TV attached to it. Think of the possibilities 🙂 Latest thing I just read about is that you can use your Tivo remote to enter your prediction of who's going to be kicked off the American Idol Island next. Interactive TV is finally here 😉 Check it out! Technorati Tags: americanidol, tivo
Don’t you just hate the term Web 2.0?
Actually, I don 't hate it. It's not clear exactly what it means, but it means something. Is it Ajax, Web services, REST, RSS, OPML, XML? Who knows? But more interesting, check out this amazing list of products that one way or another are connected to Web 2.0. Everything Web 2.0 Technorati Tags: web2.0
When your manager says he doesn’t see you working hard enough
Here's a clever retort that I heard from a colleague today: "When you think I'm working, I'm not working, and when you think I'm not working, I'm working!" 😉 Technorati Tags: management
Very interesting discussion of an OS X Trojan – how it works and doesn’t
Via MetaFilter: "Barbarians are at the gates, testing the locks, again." As I've commented before, Mac OS X users are (appropriately) smug about the absence of viruses on that platform. Some say it's only a matter of time. Here are the interesting technical details of one recent attempt. Technorati Tags: osx
Web 2.0 Calendars?
Mike Arrington waxes poetic about 30 Boxes, an entry in the, apparently, red-hot online calendar space. I 'm not sure I get it. It seems to me that working even when off-line , even when away from my computer, would be top requirements for any calendar product. In other words, a downloadable application (Outlook anyone? iCal? Blackberry?) I'd be worried if I could only access my calendar on live web connection. Sure, GMail is hugely popular, and you could make that same argument there. But GMail lets me synch with any POP-client of which there are many. I use GMail with Apple (Mac OS X) Mail when I am at my primary computer, and over the web everywhere else (including my cell phone.) Technorati Tags: mikearrington, calendar
RSS Alley Geek Dinner: March 29th – 6:30pm – Harvard Square? Should be even more fun than the last one!
Hello sports fans. We are having another super-informal-geeky-but-not- exclusively-geeks geek dinner, this time using the well-known PaB/Free Pattern. Who is we, again? Bela Labovitch, Adam Green and me. We are fortunate that the folks at Top Ten Sources and RSS Labs are again letting use their space. Thanks! What happens at this thing? Well this is the second one that we are organizing. Basically we just hang out, casually munch on cheap food and compare notes on stuff that people are working on. Everyone is welcome, and people who came last time : invite along a friend who didn't come or didn't know about it. Really! It would be nice to have new faces. There's no agenda. We might go around and show off folks latest creations, or not. At any rate we will provide projection facilities for you to use. But this is not primarily a demo-rama, it's more of a network-o-rama. See you there! Here are the coordinates:
When : March 29, Wednesday, 6:30pm to 9:30pm Where : 66 Church Street, Cambridge (near Fire and Ice) Topics of discussion: Web 2.0, RSS, OPML 2.0, AJAX, Ruby, Mashups, Web Services, Startups, etc. To RSVP, click here
Technorati Tags: geekdinner, RSSAlley
Check out Doc Searls Suitwatch newsletter
There are a few really good newsletters that have not moved over to a blog which I read religiously. One of them is Doc Searls' Suitwatch. Doc writes a fairly long essay approximately monthly. It's always interesting and well written. Here's how his most recent episode, about CES in Las Vegas, begins:
"What could be more ridiculous than a city that wants to be like everywhere else? Venice, Paris, New York, Rome and Monte Carlo are all in Las Vegas, embodied as giant hotels, each as cliched as a travel brochure. Nearly all the big theme hotels front The Strip, a wide paved line in a desert no less arid than the hundred empty basins between the hundred stony ranges that comprise the rest of Nevada." (From "The Produced Electronics Revolution, Part I")
You should consider subscribing to this. It's always a good read. It just shows that the form (blog or newsletter or whatever) doesn't matter if the content is great! Technorati Tags: docsearls
Mac OS X Hacked?
This is only a little funny because Mac fans (and I am one of them) can be very smug about OS X security, saying things like: "There has been not a single case of a virus on Mac, ever." Hard to prove or disprove but intuitively it's kind of hard to believe. So when I saw commentary somewhere earlier today that Mac OS X was hacked in less than 30 minutes I hesitated to post about it, thinking that it was yet another urban legend. But now ZDNet has picked it up, and with raised eyebrows and a smile (or is it a smirk?) on my face, I share the link to an article I just saw:
"Gaining root access to a Mac is "easy pickings," according to an individual who won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability." (from"Mac OS X Hacked in less than 30 minutes")
RSS is not a goal…
glenn has been busy today. A series of very intriguing posts, all made today, a Sunday no less. I can remember when glenn insisted on keeping his Sunday's clear of anything non- recreational. You should check out his blog, there's lots of good stuff there. This one caught my eye - "RSS is not a goal" wherein I encountered this especially meaningful (to me) paragraph:
"And in the meantime, if I were working on any kind of RSS/OPML-related application, I would take a day or two to stop and think about my goals, not in terms of today's syntaxes but in terms of the flow of information between human beings, and between machines as our facilitators. I'd want, and maybe this is just me, to be working on something that not only improves the lives of people using the imperfect tools it has to work with right now, but would improve the lives of people even more efficiently if the world in which it operates were itself improved. Sometimes a broken window demands plywood, but as a tool-maker I dream of making something you won't just throw away after this crisis passes." (from "RSS is not a goal")
Indeed - while I spend (too many of) my waking (and sleeping) hours thinking about how to make BlogBridge better , more useful, more compelling, at the same time I agree that RSS, aggregators, Feeds, Blogs, OPML, and all dat stuf are transitionary. They are definitely doing something that humans find very useful, but the whole thing is too much of a hairball. There still is work to be done. Lots of it. glenn, want to help? Technorati Tags: blogbridge, RSS
Pandora helps me discover Beth Nielsen Chapman
I've experimented with all kinds of novel music related services and products. My favorite is Pandora. This is a a site that helps me discover new music that I like. It's introduced me to several artists that I had never heard of before which are now favorites. In this case I am plugging Beth Nielsen Chapman. A wonderful singer songwriter, I think from Europe, that has the sound I really like. It's quite wonderful to create a Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Bill Evans channel discover new artists. It 's great! By the way, also of interest are:
Last.FM - An application that is supposed to do something similar. In this case it's integrated with iTunes, and just watches what you play. Also quite cool, although so far I haven't discovered any new artists with Last.FM
EMusic - This is a majorly large music library (a-la- iTunes store) but with a twist. The music is much much cheaper, and you get it without any DRM. The catalog is spotty but I have found lots of music for my iPod at a fraction of the price. And, here's the clincher: they just gave me 50 songs to download just for trying the service - free of charge!
Technorati Tags: music