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  • 1 min read

New Radio Show: Open Source

Welcome back Chris Lydon! Those of you who have lived in the Boston area for a while (and who are NPR listeners) will recognize the name. Chris has been on local and national TV and radio, and a couple of years ago did some really early, innovative podcasting work (yes, before Adam Curry 🙂 Anyway, he is launching a new radio show, called "Open Source", and he is debugging it in public, which is pretty cool! Check out the show's blog for background and also links to the first three beta test shows. They 're great! Amusingly the latest show on his site is about Wikipedia (of which I am a huge fan) and this is Wikipedia's entry about Chris! (Wheels within wheels!) Technorati Tags: interesting, pbs, podcast

  • 1 min read

Eating your young

I came across this bit:

"Are we going to be a player in VoIP? Absolutely. Are we going to be prepared to disrupt our own business? Absolutely, Why? Because if not, somebody else will." (Techdirt)

It reminds me of stuff I used to say way back when, when I was making the case for building Improv (which was code named "BackBay", and as an R&D project "Modeler".) In those days, of course, Lotus (remember?) was the undisputed PC software leader, with 1-2-3 (remember?) being the wunderkind- unbelievable-cash cow for Lotus. I used to say things like "With Improv we threw out the rule book and went back to basics - what do people really need to build good spreadsheets?" What happened of course was that all that talk was great and even convincing while we were building the product, away from the eyes and ears of our field sales force and sales organization. Once the product was done and needed to be launched and sold, suddenly we weren 't quite as easily prepared to "disrupt our own business." Live and learn! Technorati Tags: improv, strategy

  • 3 min read

What Windows’ defenders should know about Mac OS X Tiger

I often hear folks beat up Microsoft Windows for being a breeding ground for viruses, spyware, and all sorts of malware. Bad Microsoft for being so sloppy! There was a recent exchange between Scoble and Dan Gillmor, where Scoble defends Microsoft against what he feels is an unfair attack:

"But, today, he took a shot at Microsoft that I thought was unfair. Here, I'll wait while you go and check out his post. _" I would have written a different beginning to this story, roughly as follows: In winning and sustaining its monopoly in the operating system and browser markets, Microsoft has exposed countless millions of people to woes from security holes that have become conduits for viruses, worms and spyware. Now the software giant is planning to charge its captive customers to clean up the mess it created." _ Dan, we've done a TON of security work and distributed that to our customers for free (one of the largest operating system updates in our history, Windows XP Service Pack 2, was given away free). We've given away a beta of our AntiSpyware program for months now (after spending lots of money to buy the company that made it). (From Scoblizer)"

People living in the world of Windows may not know that in the most recent release of the Mac OS, "Tiger " there's a security hole so big you can drive a truck through it, that if it had been in Windows, there would have been hell to pay. So being that I live with a foot in each world, and being a fan of irony, I can't help but point it out 🙂 One of the fairly neat features of Tiger is the so-called "Dashboard" - an environment to launch little handy applets (we used to call them Desk Accessories in the old days, remember? Dashboard calls them "widgets") I say fairly neat, because while they look very pretty, in practice they aren't that useful. They are practically a direct knockoff of a product called Konfabulator, which is available for Mac and Windows. But that's not the problem … [Update : the following paragraph has been clarified based on the comment below] The problem is that in the default settings of Tiger, Widgets are automatically downloaded and opened without any warning. Exactly how much of the widget code gets run simply by opening it is not totally clear, but feels quite dangerous, because widgets can contain arbitrary code, with full access to the underlying system. They can even run unix shell scripts! Now there's a simple setting ('Open "safe" files after downloading') which you can turn off to disable this risky behavior. But of course most users will never discover this setting or be aware of the risk. There has been quite a bit of handwringing about this in the Mac community, and speculation that Apple will fix this bug in the first rev of OS X Tiger. But in the meanwhile, let's see if any malware strikes. Certainly if the shoe had been on the other foot (or the shade on the other Windows) there would have been hell to pay for Microsoft! Technorati Tags: mac, microsoft, osx, security

  • 1 min read

Bloglines Killer? Aren’t we being a bit premature?

Richard MacManus made a statement in a post last week which elicited a lot of very interesting responses: "Competition for Bloglines: We're nearly halfway through 2005 and there's still no heavyweight competition to Bloglines, in the web based RSS aggregator stakes." The comment thread on the post is excellent and interesting, so I won't parrot all that stuff all over again. If you are interested, take a look there. (I especially recommend this response from Michal Migurski.) But here's my question: isn't it way too early to be assuming that there's a 'winner' which has to be unseated? Of course I am a big fan of blogs and RSS, but let's recognize that this is still a tiny phenomenon in the greater world and that there will be many variations and combinations, integrations and disintegrations that will have to be invented. I mean, clearly Bloglines is a first generation web based aggregator. Yes, it's garnered an apparently strong following (within this proportionately tiny phenomenon.) But as you can see the comment thread on Richard's post, there are several teams working on reinventions of the idea of a web based aggregator and any of them may turn out to be the Next Big Thing. Technorati Tags: blog, RSS

  • 1 min read

Comment! Spam! Again!

A really interesting article about Blog Comment Spam. This is one person's attempt to really follow all clues to their sources. It doesn't end all that satisfactorily but it's a good read. Coincidentally I just opened up comments on this blog and got hit with 80 bits of spam (and 6 real comments.) For some crazy reason the comment spammers attack a single post. In my case, it was "Hacking the Papal Election" which alone got hit with the 80 comments. Technorati Tags: blog, spam, puppy

  • 1 min read

New BlogBridge web site, including a blog

Good morning sports-fans. We recently totally revamped the BlogBridge web site. Take a look, and let me know what you think. Importantly, it now includes a group blog where the BlogBridge team posts bits of interest to anyone interested in the project. We have started a new series of posts there called: "Did you know" where every day we (try to) post a short article describing a feature or capability of interest to users. Check it out! Technorati Tags: blogbridge, UI

  • 1 min read

Cool iTunes trick

I like to come across music from my collection of CDs that I haven't listened to in a while. Here's what I do:

  1. I create a "Smart Playlist" called, for example, Folk - Unplayed

  2. The "match query" includes Genere is Folk and Play Count is 0

As I play this list, it gets continually shorter as each song is played and removed from the list. Riff on this technique - other genres? Played once only? etc. Neat. Technorati Tags: cool, itunes

  • 1 min read

Mpwacover300 Susan Senator has published a book: "Making Peace with Autism":

"It's her memoir about our family, and how we have dealt with the autism that afflicts our oldest son"

(Susan is Ned Batchelder's wife.) Check it out, and also check out the web site (probably written with Python 🙂 that Ned built for Susan. Image Books Obc 21 Hadden A book that I read recently about what it might be like to be autistic is "The Curious Incident of the Doc in the Night- Time", or the book with the upside down dog on the cover. I thought it was an excellent book whether or not you are interested in autism. It's an engaging and quick read. And if you don't know anything about it, you are sure to get some new perspective. Technorati Tags: interesting, book