Category: Technology

Gnomedex 5.0 Afternoon first day

fucking Microsoft

Microsoft did a very funny ad-skit for their hive blog crap. While it was quite funny, I’m already getting tired of Microsoft and their kind of viral marketing stuff would work a lot better at PDC then here. We’re constantly bombarded by Microsoft logos all day long and now having an informercial between sessions is too much. It is great that MS is sponsoring the conference, but you know we, the participants, contributed a lot of cash ourselves.

The future syndication session very quickly turned into a bitch session about the lack of OPML synchronization tools. A reasonable topic of discussion, but the original one would have been more interesting to me.

I’m glad that my badge doesn’t have my job on it, but my blog. No one has heard of my blog so that gets me out of a lot of annoying conversations, but it makes it a bit harder for me to get the attention of some of the starfuckers I actually do want to talk to.

I thought Phil Terrone was cool before, I think he is cooler now.

having a conference about rss and blogs with crappy intermittent web access is sucky. That isn’t gnomedex’s fault and they are trying to fix it, but it is still kinda lame.

Gnomedex 5.0 morning first day

just my opinions…

this is one of the geekiest things I have ever done.

Dave Winer is cool, but I kept thinking during his talk “It is just a fucking file format, not a lifestyle.” Of course, for him it is a lifestyle. This was more directed at some of the obnoxious comments coming from the audience.

Dean Hachamovitch and his team are being extremely patronizing to us.

This place is lousy with Microsoft people who like to cheer for each other.

They’ve added some RSS stuff into Longhorn. Big Whoop. The one thing that is slightly interesting is that Microsoft will now own your “Common feedlist” so that all your apps with RSS will share a single list of feeds. This is a good idea, but it doesn’t do anything that apps couldn’t do already if they could agree on some stuff (they’ll still need to integrate the MS system-level stuff anyway).

Marc Cantor is still as obnoxious as he was the first time I met him 10 years ago.

Microsoft is embracing and extending RSS and making it available under the Creative Commons license. Good luck with that. More details on the ie blogs.

At Gnomedex

So far, not so good

I’m attending Gnomedex this year. Given that I’m blogging and it ties in with my job and I live three blocks away from where it is being held, it was pretty much a no-brainer. I stopped by this evening to pick up my badge and attend the Google beer-fest, but unfortunately I brought my wife who wasn’t allowed in, so I didn’t get to actually walk into the room (that is kind of shitty, don’t you think?) I did get a free google trucker hat. Big Whoop. So far, I’m not so impressed. I don’t think I’m going to be live blogging (I think I’d rather be a participant than a reporter, thank you). I’m pretty sure that all the talks will be available from itconversations pretty soon and that will be more valuable to you than any goofy blog synopsis. I’ll try to give an update or two tomorrow and Saturday. If you are at the conference, drop me a line and we’ll hook up.

I’m mostly over podcasts

Podcasting is like, so last year.

Last year, it was kind of fun. There were not too many podcasts and it was kind of exciting and new. I subscribed to a bunch of them and tried to keep up and as new ones (even those which were only slightly interesting to me) came out, I’d subscribe to those too. I was getting hours of new audio every day. Pretty soon, I couldn’t keep up. These days, I’m pretty much only listening to the KCRW and WFMU podcasts with the occasional BBC or Adam Curry podcast thrown in. I’m kind of tired of listening to the equivalent of bad college radio downloaded to my hard drive if I’m interested in a specific episode or not.

I think now that the podcasting is established, it is time to move to the second generation of podcasting clients. I think that IT Conversations has it right. IT Conversations gives you a text RSS feed with info about new shows and then you can add any show you are interested to into a custom podcast rss feed. It isn’t that I don’t like Dan Klass or Dawn and Drew, it is just that I don’t have time to listen to every one of their shows to find the stuff I care about. It isn’t like text, I can’t scan it and it takes too much time to listen to the whole thing. I’m hoping that iTunes 4.9 will work more closely to this.

The Apple Phobia

No, not the fear of Apple Computers, the fear that Steve is going to announce new ones

Any Apple customer knows the fear. You check the dates of Steve Job’s upcoming appearances, you time things around MacWorld or WWDC. Not because you can’t wait to hear what new thing is coming out. Because you are petrified about buying a mac or ipod the day before they slash the prices and make the computer you haven’t even received yet a dinosaur. I’m facing that fear right now as I ponder if I want to replace my powerbook before the intel switch.

Everyone knows that the channel is starting to fill with inventory and people are sitting on the fence waiting for those first intel-based macs to be announced. Everyone knows that they’ll be slashing the prices to clear out inventory and that they may announce one more power book revision before the big switch. So you wait. And Wait. Steve doesn’t have another keynote for a while, right? They never announce hardware at Siggraph, right? Maybe now is the time to buy… Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll wait just a bit longer…

Welcome to the fear, my friend.

Apple and Intel roundup

More on this massive announcement

So everyone is weighing in on this and I’ve been reading tons of commentaries. Here’s some of what I thought were the most insightful.

First of all, Apple has Steve Job’s keynote up so you can watch it for yourself. The one thing I got from that which I hadn’t seen covered yesterday was the fact that Apple has more PPC machines in the pipeline. What this means for those of us trying to decide if we want to get one of the last PPC powerbooks is that we might want to wait a bit longer to see if there will be one more performance boost before the Pentium-based machines show up. The other thing that was interesting was that the Pentium-based machine Steve was demoing on was using a “standard-issue” Pentium which might put to rest some of the speculation around a custom intel chip. Also, the responsiveness of Steve’s demo machine which was using a 3.6 GHz Pentium didn’t seem that much better than my 867 MHz PB.

eWeek’s article about how the transition will affect developers was interesting, but could have had more depth. Steve made it sound like most of the OS X developers had already made the switch to Cocoa and X-Code, but what he neglected to say was the majority of the developers using Metrowerks and Carbon are the oldest developers for Macintosh, with the largest codebases. Don’t expect too many new big features in your favorite mac apps releasing in 2006.

SiliconValley.com has a nice article on some of the other potential benefits for Apple by moving to a processor family with more vendors and options.

Dan Farber has his own summation of the techno-pundits on his blog.

David Berlind has got some great insights in his blog

Thomas Claburn of Information Week has confirmed that while Apple won’t let OS X run on non-Apple hardware, it won’t prevent other OSes from being loaded on Apple hardware. This is a pretty important detail. Imagine being able to dual-boot XP and OS X on sweet Apple hardware… I don’t think Apple should try and become an OS vendor since one of the reasons that OS X is so much more stable and secure is because of it’s limited hardware surface. Some insane percentage of crashes in XP systems is due to driver issues according to Microsoft. Apple has avoided this with their strategy and I think that is a major part of Apple’s appeal.

Peter N. Glaskowsky at eWeek presents a very interesting perspective on the whole deal.

Apple and Intel. Official.

The good and bad

I’ve never been a fan of Apple because of the processor, it is the OS that I like. This is going to be interesting.

the good:

  • Macs should get cheaper. Thanks to the economies of scale, Intel chips are cheaper than PPC chips because they make a lot more of them. This should make macs using Intel chips significantly less expensive than they are right now.
  • Macs should improve faster. Since Intel is developing chips for both PCs and Macs, Apple will get the benefit of the R&D that is done. Since the PPC chips were such a small part of IBM’s business, they weren’t as dedicated to improving them as Intel is.

the bad:

  • This transition will be full of FUD for both users and developers alike. As a OS X developer, I’m now forced to transition my projects to X-Code which I’ve been avoiding until now. X-Code is improving, but it has a long way to go to being a first-class IDE. Not that I’m a big supporter of Metrowerks either. I don’t link having choice be taken away. As a user, I was contemplating getting a new Mac PB this year. Do I wait for the new Intel-based machines next year, or do I get a new one now and hope that apps will still run on it once the transition to the Intel-based macs is complete? If I decide to get a PPC-based mac, do I wait for the inventory clearing sales? Are there going to be any more improvements to the G4 Powerbooks, or are they going to be frozen until the new Intel-based ones come out?
  • Is OS X going to be forced to take stuff that Microsoft is forcing into the hardware level? Microsoft has been trying to push more and more security features into the hardware in recent years to try and circumvent the virus writers and the music pirates. Is Apple going to be forced to support these things? I definitely hope not. Having OS X get dragged around by Windows is the last thing mac users and developers want.

Trying to switch… 99% there

The final (for now) entry on switching my business to the mac

So, I’m almost there. I’ve got my records and accounting in FileMaker Pro, I can create and manage invoices and expenses there. The most interesting thing about the process was figuring out how to translate how my business works into FileMaker. I never realized how complicated my business was. I have direct sales, consignment sales, digital sales, and then consignee sales (I sell CDs from some local artists on my site). Additionally, I have to pay royalties from all these sale types and publishing as well. Then I have expenses related to releases and general expenses. It was some hard work to capture all this, and it gave me some real respect for the consultants who do this for a living. It took about 40 hours of work to get it all done and I still need to figure out how to make the reporting work so that next year at tax time it will be easy. The best part of it is that I pretty much don’t need Word or Excel at all any more.

The one thing I haven’t dealt with yet is how to get my database up on my website. It is an NT server and I figure I can do it using ODBC and something exported from FileMaker, but it will take some work. I’m going to wait on that until I have to.

Aside from that, I can definitely recommend the switch. It has been all systems go.