All I can say is finally. Paul Beard brings us the news that CNN has finally joined the rest of modern online society and started offering their content in RSS feeds. It works great. I find it particularly useful because although the New York Times offers feeds, they’re woefully inadequate. The Front Page feed is only six long. That means for most people that unless they continually check their RSS reader, stories are likely to slide off the feed before you get a chance to look at them. Such a fast moving page needs more history in the feed. CNN’s is much longer and I honestly prefer their reporting.
LiveJournal, or more aptly its parent company, Danga, was bought by Six Apart. For those not entrenched in the blogging community and its politics, Six Apart makes Movable Type, the most popular blogging software out there, and TypePad, one of the most popular paid blogging services.
Six Apart essentially sets the standard for what a blog is, and what its features should be. In particular, Movable Type supports Trackbacks which allow blogs to reference entries in other blogs. Most major blogging systems support them (including my software, WordPress).
A large part of living in New England is learning to either love (or at least tolerate) snow. Normally, I’m thrilled by it. I’m not a skier; I just like the way it looks. Sometimes it’s fun to wad up and throw at your friend as he stammers out a greeting to a pretty girl. That or stick it in the tailpipe of the car that he’s brushing off. Best of all, going out in your friends Ford Taurus as he does donuts and makes his car smell like an old boat.
The stability and speed of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) built a strong userbase that continues to this day (even with 10.4 Tiger right around the corner). It haunts developers, keeping them from using neat tools like Cocoa bindings which are present in Panther but not Jaguar. It also haunts its users with old issues that many of us have simply forgotten.
A poster in the Macworld forums recently posted that he mistyped his password and much to his surprise, it was accepted and login continued like normal. Disturbing, no? Even more troubling was that not all passwords were accepted either. This problem was a result of an old authentication mechanism, which used at maximum, 8 characters. But OS X (and more importantly, Keychain) supported longer passwords. The (rather half-assed) solution was to simply truncate the password for comparison. In other words, if my password was areallylongpassword, then only areallyl was necessary for login. Additionally, input passwords were also truncated (therefore making this normally completely transparent for the user). That meant you could tack on extra chracters and it would be acceptable. So, all of the following would work:
As we draw close to Macworld Expo San Francisco, the number of rumors generally increases. The reason is multiple fold. First, supposedly more leaks happen closer to the expo. Second, people’s desire for rumors increases exponentially. Finally, it’s a quick and easy way to draw traffic as a Mac based website. Yes, I’m a traffic whore too, so let’s review
Flash-based iPod # For almost as long as the iPod has been around, this has been the popular rumor. And why not? It seems like a natural progression. Flash memory based MP3 players tend to be smaller and cheaper than hard drive based players. The ridiculous, respect-less rumor wells throw caution to the wind, ignoring hard real analysis (done by such people as John Gruber). It combines tiny size (as if the iPod mini’s compact flash hard drive is bloating it terribly and flash memory is that much small) and low costs (as flash memory is so cheap, still hundreds of dollars for any significant size) to make for a some people’s wet dreams. Ignore the fact that the iPod’s main attraction is having your entire music collection in your pocket. We’ve got a rumor to foist upon the public and get attention. To make the situation worse, iPod sites such as iPodlounge are encouraging the rumor with iPod flash Concepts contest. Dangle some expensive headphones in front of work starved artists and watch as you get hundreds of designs that are either physically impossible or hopelessly stupid. Yeesh.
Little known fact about Netflix, they have multiple plans (beyond their $17.99 3 at a time plan). In fact, they also have a 5-at-a-time for $29.99 and a 8-at-a-time for $47.99. Like the normal plan, that also includes unlimited rentals.
For the frugal user, they also have a 2-at-a-time plan. However, that comes with a caveat. You only get 4 movies a month total. However, at $11.99 it may still be worth it to some users.
Following what could best be described as absolute confusion for its users, the WordPress developers have clarified that WordPress 1.3 will be known as WordPress 1.5 due to extensive changes. It’s completely a placebo effect, but I feel a little more comfortable waiting for WordPress 1.5 instead of 1.3. True, it’s the same thing ultimately, but I’m feeling better.
In related news, they’ve also released a pre-release version of their upcoming bulletin board software, bbPress. I may just move over to it once a more formal version is released as PHPbb is overkill for what I need (due to extremely low volume).
The last regular season week of this. After doing it this entire season I’ve decided something. I have to make some software to do this for me next year. I’ll be looking for help from anyone with PHP and MySQL experience (or those with some interest).
Miami vs. Baltimore Pittsburgh vs. Buffalo New Orleans vs. Carolina Green Bay vs. Chicago Cleveland vs. Houston San Francisco vs. New England Cincinnati vs. Philadelphia NY Jets vs. St. Louis Detroit vs. Tennessee Minnesota vs. Washington Tampa Bay vs. Arizona Atlanta vs. Seattle Indianapolis vs. Denver Jacksonville vs. Oakland Kansas City vs. San Diego Dallas vs. NY Giants
Probably one of the most frustrating aspects of moving from Mac OS 9 or Windows to Mac OS X was the lack of a PDF browser plugin. It can be almost maddening in academic environments such as U-Mass as most assignments and documents aren’t published in HTML. They’re published in PDF because of the guaranteed formatting and handling of special symbols (such as the formulas that plague a young computer scientist).