August 2005 Archives
Funny, considering Loic is heading Six Apart Europe, and he just linked to that URL :-).
Movable Type 3.2 is out. I have played for an hour with the last beta and can confirm that installing and upgrading have been significantly improved. At last TrackBacks can be moderated and there's an anti-spam mechanism built-in by default (only time will tell if it's solid). I spotted a few new features that will please the corporate webmaster wondering about that blog farm (e.g. the ability to restrict TrackBacks to an installation to avoid leaks outside the firewall, and better blogs and templates management, I also spotted one LDAP script but I haven't found what it does yet and the documentation is silent). Still no luck regarding a wysiwyg editor, we're stuck with wysifuc for yet another release. The User Manual has been improved (it's not finished yet and sports a funny "Beta Docs" badge), but is still missing a Blogger Manual (guys, where do I send my users who don't care about setting up a blog, but just want to start blogging and struggle on image and file uploads?)
I have a couple of blogs in the pipe, I guess a more torough review is in order...
If that's not intelligent design, then what is?* The American education system is taking a fascinating direction, which surely heads towards more intelligent students. I only hope the whole country will take example on the Kansas School Board. This way, Europe won't have to increase too much its budgets for education and research to remain competitive with this new theocracy being so intelligently designed over there. I sure would feel better now, had I been taught intelligent things instead of stupid scientific theories at school. For example intelligent falling instead of gravity (what was Newton thinking smoking?).
Don't miss Boing Boing's $1M Intelligent Design challenge to whoever can produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Or their post on Pastafarianism. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster entry on Wikipedia (if it's on Wikipedia, then it's a fact for sure, but hurry up, the article has been flagged for deletion).
Now where did I put my Lovecraft books? I need to check one or two things about Cthulu.
(*) Yes, that's Intelligent Google Juicing, you can play it too.
Macworld runs a story titled Microsoft exec defends RSS rebranding. I must admit that I'm with those who'd love to have a simple, human-like way to depict feeds to the layman. RSS feeds is as self-explanatory (and appealing) to "normal" people as URL. Plus how do you deal with Atom feeds? I mean the ones that just happen to carry exactly the same purpose.
When I introduce the notion of feeds to people, I call them news feeds. When they ask how to find them, I tell them to look at some rectangular orange button that reads "RSS" or "XML", or "Syndicate this site", or for the lucky ones using Firefox or Safari for the special icon that marks the presence of a feed. Speak about simplicity! I don't even try to mention Atom. "Call ’em what you bloody well want" says Tim Bray.
Geeks tend to despise marketing, but sometimes they should learn about the importance of describing something in a simple manner, and how to market it to the public.
How do you call feeds when you describe them?
The Apple Mighty Mouse makes noise, so that when you click on its buttons ("what buttons?") it, well, clicks. I wonder how long it will take for someone to develop a hack so that, when you squeeze it, it will squeak.
And don't miss Of the Mighty Mouse at DrunkenBlog. Oh, and a last bit of Google juice for Unsanity's Mighty Mouse which will disappear in the search engine's oubliettes with just a squeak.
Single-button looks, multibutton charm, here's the new Apple Mighty Mouse. A perfect example of how Apple has come to master an art of solving interesting dilemmas, such as how to finally catchup and produce a multibutton mouse, but without buttons (because we told you multiple buttons, or even buttons at all are evil), and without acknowledging you've been wrong after decades (I used three-buttons mice before Microsoft Windows existed) and, at the end, boast that you're the best mouse designer in the world.
And it's not even wireless :-P.
OK, I want one :-).
P.S. Besides telling you that you can click, roll, scroll and even squeeze that thing, they forgot to tell you that you can move it like, say, a mouse (it's also an optical mouse).
The fine folks at TextDrive have just launched their first 'focused' web hosting plan: Strongspace, a secure place to gather, store, back-up and share any type of file online. The web interface is super simple and intuitive, and the geeks will appreciate the possibility to use SFTP, rsync and Unison directly (plus Strongspace plays nice with Basecamp).
