Entries Tagged as 'The Internet'

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Google vs. Microsoft: Peter Wilson’s view

Peter Wilson spoke at Ignite Seattle last night (How do I keep missing these?!?). Having been a senior dude at both Microsoft and Google, he has some true insider perspective on each. It is through the lens of what he cares about (cloud computing), it does have some good perspective. What is interesting to me [...]

Monday, June 29th, 2009

iTunes hack warning!

My iTunes account was hacked on Friday, I didn’t find out until Sunday night though because that was when I tried to log in to my account after it had happened.
Watch out for these signs (Apple support didn’t even consider that I had been hacked when I contacted them):
The hackers changed my account ID and [...]

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Server-based DRM solutions are hostile to consumers

I have a long history with DRM (Digital Rights Management): I worked on the Windows Media 7 Encoder team; I worked at two different internet video startups; and as the owner of record label, I experimented with some of the very first paid digital download solutions (all long lost to internet history at this point).
When [...]

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Creative Destruction in the Newspaper Industry

I saw two things today that somehow connected in my mind. The first was an advert for scholarships for computer programmers to Northwestern’s journalism school (link):
Are you a skilled programmer or Web developer? Are you interested in applying your talents to the challenge of creating a better-informed society? Do you want to learn how to [...]

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

I guess it is still too early… Lively bites the dust

There is a bit of schadenfreude here on my part. Lively was reviving concepts from the mid to late 90s and passing them off as something new (including one I worked on). All of the efforts of that time died a slow death, and the thought was that we (they) were ahead of the curve. [...]

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

freebie iPhone app idea for the real estate websites

yes, this one is for you redfin, windermere, et al. Normally, I’d sit on idea like this, but lets be real. I’m not going to write this one. So, as a customer, I’m asking you guys to do it for me.
I want an iPhone app version of your websites.
Obvious:

Get me details on the [...]

Friday, July 18th, 2008

where does StumbleAudio get their music from?

I saw a post today on TechCrunch about StumbleAudio, a Pandora-like service for finding music. I gave it a try, I entered “Godspeed You Black Emperor” into the search field. The first track it decided to play was “Uniform Random Variables” from the Intonarumori “Material” album. MY ALBUM. This was especially funny because my major [...]

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Is this a good or bad thing?

I was washing my hands just now and something struck me.
How does a submarine achieve negative buoyancy by flooding tanks with water when it is still filled with oxygen?
If this had struck me 20 years ago, I would have probably tried to reason it out. Given how little I know about submarines, I may have [...]

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

What I want from data portability

I want to rate my books, music and DVDs once on netflix, Amazon, Facebook visual bookshelf, iTunes and I want the data shared across all of them.
However, I want complete control over how each of them uses every bit of that data and I want to approve who gets to see it, even among my [...]

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

true cross-fading images in flex

A lot of the “cross fades” that I’ve seen for flex were really fade-out/fade-in transitions, so I decided to show a “real” crossfade example. The trick is to use absolute positioning so that the image objects are on top of each other.

[download the mxml file]