| Jarvis Cocker | Damon Albarn | |
|---|---|---|
| Member of: | Pulp | Blur |
| Born in: | 1963 | 1968 |
| English: | Yes | Yes |
| Also in Gorillaz: | No | Yes |
| Wrote song “Common People”: | Yes | No |
| Wrote song “Clint Eastwood”: | No | Yes |
| Related to Joe Cocker: | No | No |
People who I’d like to hear on NPR’s “This I Believe” segment:
Amy Goodman
Paolo Freire
O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba (unlikely, since he’s dead)
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Walter Cronkite (due to his one line in this trailer)
Studs Terkel
a brief sampling of people who might make my ears bleed:
Bill O’Reilly
Cory Doctorow
Samuel P. Huntington
Tom Cruise
Ann Coulter
Seriously, anyone can write one. L-Dopa might should write a group manifesto and have a computer voice read it. When it inevitably gets on. Because we could ever agree on anything. And essays written by committees always go well. Especially when concerning core beliefs.
~jeff
Scott Stevenson is a scary-talented kind of guy — not only is he a talented programmer, but a thoughtful and intelligent guy to boot. He moderates the useful Omni Mac OS X mailing list, he has an immaculately designed blog, and he’s a regular contibutor to the super-useful CocoaDevCenter. He’s got an excellent and well-illustrated Cocoa tutorial up that will teach you how to make a simple notepad — definitely worth a read if you’re interested in dabbling in Mac OS X development. Every tutorial should be this well laid out.
~jeff
It’s the best kind of fun: mandatory fun!
~jeff
Iggy Pop, on the other hand, knows what he wants and he knows how to get it — via 18-page, over-the-top parodies of concert riders. It’s unclear after reading this if Iggy expects to get anything at all, but good for him and Jos the roadie (who wrote the document) for going way over the top on this one. And I am so with him regarding the cauliflower. (Via Valleywag)
~jeff
Of all the iPhone features, this is the one that seems to have completely missed the target. It would be like Blackberry having three lists: One for mail with more than 100 characters, one for mail with fewer than 100 characters, and one for mail sent from more than 3000 miles away. What sense would that make? What Apple has done, when you think about it, is just as random in terms of the user… I should not have to visit three different places on my phone every few minutes to see what is happening.
…I’ve been wishing for a “unified inbox” for years now; this is the one device I’ve seen that might have both the technology and refined user interface to make that happen; he’s right to flag it as a big ol’ missed opportunity.
~jeff
Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.
~jeff
MobileSafari: Is it me or is there no way to open a window in a new “tab” (actually, “tab” doesn’t quite work here, actually, so I call them “cards” — it seems to me like the extra windows slide around in the background like cards in a magic trick). Pressing on a link pops up a cute notifier that tells you where the link goes — maybe multi-touching on that pop-up could open a new card?
~Jeff
(iPhone pic of Jon Klein’s iPhone)
That’s the only way to describe the growing revelation among the geek community that Apple’s new iPhone will be a closed system (like the iPod) and not an open one (like the Treo). Excitement is high for the iPhone, and when Jobs first referred to the software running on the iPhone as “Widgets”, I — probably along with every other nerd — imagined he was referring to the bundled combination of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and occasionally compiled binaries that comprise Mac OS X’s Dashboard Widgets. Visions of rapidly developing my own custom widgets to control my appliances and check on my dog danced in my head, but apparently according to Jobs this would be verboten, and the official reasons are weak:
“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
Weak. But on the other hand: I can kind of understand their position. I’m one of the first people to want to tinker with any gizmo I buy — I have a modded XBox, a PSP that plays homebrew emulators, a Yamaha P-120S electric piano I’ve opened and fiddled with many times. I like to fiddle with things. My brother, however, goes even further than I do: he often fiddles with things to the point where they don’t work anymore. I actually know a lot of people like this. I think, for those people, having the iPhone and the iPod being a closed system actually might save them a lot of grief, “saving them from themselves”. Apple Inc. is increasingly in the business of making appliances, and very few people outside of the sweaty geeks from Make Magazine hack their toaster. That’s probably a good thing, because at the end of the day, you really just want your phone to work.
However, primarily I suspect the reason for the “closed” nature is not because of reliability issues — even on the incredibly spindly and crashtastic Palm OS third-party apps are allowed — but instead because pretty much any gizmo that touches Apple’s DRM is going to be a closed hardware platform from now on. If you release an SDK, the first thing people try to do is crack your DRM. Apple is now (surprise surprise) the world’s leading producer of DRM encrypted media, and it’s not actually in their best interest to give the hacking community clues on how to strip off the FairPlay DRM that protects their media from file sharing networks.
So will we ever see third-party/homebrew apps on the iPhone? My prediction is “not as long as it plays iTMS media”… so, no.
~jeff
It seems that Apple hasn’t been entirely forthcoming with security holes. Supposedly, companies were reporting to Apple, who was then ignoring the warning.
In this blogger’s world, if you don’t announce your weaknesses, someone will do it for you. Supposedly, this crew has already pressured MS into having frequent and regularly scheduled security updates.
I tend to keep a stack of about 5 passwords in rotation. Some are better than others, but I remember all of them. I use the shorter ones for low-security systems, and the stronger ones for more important things. Unfortunately, it means I tend to use the same password for lots of important systems, which means if my password is lost one place, I could be really screwed. The challenge is coming up with strong but memorable (usually phonetic or at least rhythmic in some way) that I can keep track of. There are all kinds of password generators out there, some of which will try to create memorable strings. Apple’s own password generator, accessible inside the Accounts pref pane is pretty good.
Using keychain applications doesn’t really help a great deal. I can store all of my vital passwords in one place, using one password to secure them. Of course, if someone gets into that… The trick seems to be finding a methodology that is both convenient and safe. Google creating a good password, and you get some good hits.
This article at Wired is what got me thinking about it. It has an interesting explanation of the vectors common password crackers use.
…and there is, but typically, these asset tracking solutions fall down on two counts:
Enter Spiceworks. It’s a free network monitoring package that is one of the best thought-out products of this type I’ve ever seen. It’s a web-based app (yea Ruby!) that runs on a local server, and after a painless install all it requires you to do is enter admin password(s) for your local workstations and servers. After that, Spiceworks runs around your network and collects serial numbers and system specs, checks on installed software, catalogs your network devices, and generates reports on printers and servers. You can even set up automatic email alerts to notify you if your servers are filling up, or if Todd from accounting installed WeatherBug again (friggin’ Todd!).
It’s not a real-time monitoring package — the most it checks on your stuff is every half hour, and it doesn’t do detailed network bandwidth monitoring. For that kind of thing, you’d probably want to use something like jffnms or Nagios. But I’m genuinely impressed by what a rich feature set Spiceworks manages to have without losing simplicity, and without seeming bloated or unwieldy. Spiceworks also does an excellent job of integrating the remote functions into the local user interface, giving the user one-click access to the online help, forums, and other useful resources.
The most interesting thing to me is the revenue model; as you use the Spiceworks web-based interface, it shows you a unobtrusive banner ad along the side. That is, apparently, how it can remain free software. As much as I loathe the idea of more ads being pasted everywhere — no one wants their software to look like a Nascar racer — competing solutions cost hundreds of dollars, so I can deal with a couple of unobtrusive ads.
Biggest/only downside? Right now it only runs on Windows XP, although it’s web-based, so after you get it installed you can access it via Mac OS X or linux. Hopefully someone’s working on that right now.
~jeff
Asphinctersaysmeow?
