Archive for December, 2007

Continuing my series of predictions for 2008 (also see number one, and number two, about boingboing and yahoo respectively, and number three about semantic apps): to balance out Yahoo’s prophesized resurgence, someone must fall - and I think Apple’s due.
Actually, this is two predictions in one: firstly, DRM will continue to wither, and the sale… »

Well, “suck” is probably too strong a work. How about “Semantic apps will continue to be completely irrelevant?”
2007 was a year heavy on buzz around so-called next generation, 3.0, semantic apps - things like PowerSet & Hakia (natural language search), Spock (people search), Twine (who knows), and so on.
Well, after a year of anticipation, each… »

At heart, I’m a libertarian: I am firm in my belief that the ills that accompany unfettered access to self-expression and communication are outweighed by the benefits - that the abdication of personal responsibility that seems endemic in our society is a call to community action and education - not an invitation to governments to… »

Safeway (the grocery store) features both Starbucks outlets and free, anonymous log-in WiFi access (in Canada/Manitoba/Winnipeg at least). I don’t know what Starbuck’s wireless rates are like in the US, but here they’re exorbitant ($9/hr, etc.) - so if you hang out at the grocery store instead, you can sip the same coffee, nibble the… »

I just switched TechWatching from MagpieRSS to SimplePie. Each of these is an automated RSS feed parser built for PHP, and both feature great features like caching, http-last-modified intelligent requests to lessen the overhead of feed-checking, etc. MagpieRSS, for whatever reason, has died on the vine - i.e.: last blog post is October of 2006…. »

Yesterday kicked off my post-Christmas blogging with my first 2008 prediction - that BoingBoing would continue its devolution into a Cory Doctorow bookstore and link farm for BBGadgets.
One thing I didn’t want to continue with Prediction #2 is the tendency to forecast doom and gloom. Its really easy to pick out organizations that are stumbling… »

Over the holidays, James Thomas pinged me to ask what my 5 predictions for 2008 (cheers, James!). James sees…

Mixx takes off vs. Digg [disagree]: I tend to think not; despite all of the posturing about leaving that takes place anytime there’s a digg-directed digg-storm, the user base seems alarmingly loyal. And, arguably the conditions that… »

After bitching about incompatible power supplies earlier today, I thought it would be appropriate to point readers to Coding Horror’s take on the aggravation of registration keys. The use of commonly mistaken characters in keys (”O” vs. “0″), excessively long keys, clunky entry forms, etc. all make registration keys more evil than… »

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.
Today, another entrant in… »

Over the weekend, a friend was relating how a co-worker fried a terabyte RAID array by connecting it to the wrong power supply. Which got me thinking about how lame the entire hardware industry has been in implementing power supplies, plugs, and adapters.
Given that most hardware uses the same electricity in similar volumes, why is… »