I’ve been pretty busy lately, what with a move back to Boston and catching up on various work projects (i.e., books), but thought I’d take some time to spew out some random Mac-related bits and bobs…
- If you thought ThinkSecret’s report about the Aperture team was true, you really need to go and read John Gruber’s latest article over on Daring Fireball. Great analysis, and true journalistic reporting. Man, you gotta love John.
- Since writing Running Boot Camp, I’ve been going back and forth quite a bit and working on an update for that book (look for it in the next week or so). One thing I’ve noticed is that battery life under XP on a MacBook Pro really sucks. I’ve also discovered that the only useful piece of software that comes with XP is Spider Solitaire.
- And speaking of Running Boot Camp, if you’ve previously purchased a copy of the PDF eBook, updates for that book will be available as a free download from O’Reilly’s site. Again, keep your eyes out for this update soon. If you’ve got any feedback, or if there’s anything you’d like to see in it, please let me know in the comments.
- One book I can’t wait to get my hands on is Amit Singh’s Mac OS X Internals (Addison-Wesley, due August 2006). I traded some emails with Amit a while ago, and the guy really knows his shit. It looks like this book will be released around WWDC2006, so let’s hope they have copies available at the show for developers to pick up.
- If you use iWeb and you’re tired of the themes already, iLifeStuff.com offers some new themes you can buy and add to iWeb. The themes are $12.99 each, or you can buy a bundle of six themes for $29.99.
- Speaking of iWeb, if you’re using the Blog theme, you’ve probably noticed that there’s no way for readers of your blog to add comments. Enter Chad Brantly’s iComment.
Well, that’s enough bits for today. It’s time to head back to the trench and edit some books.
Ciao for now!
Word, man!
Using words from this particular vocabulary used to be out-of-way in ORA publications.
I don't want to be seen as a prude, but the thing differentiating ORA from eg. Slashdot is writing style and substance, and I certainly prefer it that way.
Cheers!
>> The web is a little different in that many can contribute, but in the time scale of things, will digital memory be more or less permanent? I think less. > Games are played and in all games there is an element of chance. Chance favors no prince or pauper. Of such, history is made.
I hadn't really intended to write this essay, and apologize to those of you who had to slog through it, but overall I think it does manage to articulate a lot of what I see happening right now in the software industry, both proprietary and open. There is a tendency that most people have of looking at the momet that they are in as being somehow unique and privileged, but I am inclined to say that we are rather more accurately about midway through a process that's been underway for nearly twenty years and that will likely stretch for another twenty, that is shaping the interactions between society and the computer/Internet combination. I believe that the "software industry" as we know it is a transient phenomenon, and that the relationship between those who create software and those that use software is a still evolving one - a relationship that likely will end up being far stranger than any can predict. As more things become digital (and this includes life itself, given the increasing power of genomics) resolving this relationship may very well prove to be one of the most significant social issues that we'll have to face in the years ahead.
Right, Kurt. That is the meaning behind "intelligence doesn't scale". It is another way of saying the effect of any long tail distribution is to create locales of competence (where a locale may not be physical but topical space). If members of these cooperate, one can build fantastically complex vertical applications or enable the interoperations of many horizontal applications. On the other hand, the same people will also be competing at some levels so as I said, the manifold becomes lumpy. That's ok as long as on balance, the ecology is self-sustaining. Study models of ecologies where for disease or invasion, the ecology drops below some population threshold and can't recover. Information does that as well depending on the energy model for supporting it. That is why I study low energy transport systems. The human brain is the gold standard for such systems. Open source is the manifestation on the web.
As for AJAX, XAML, XUL, yes. Presaged by MID. (for which I am glad because that project does away with any IP someone might want to grab for those ideas). So depending on the model of one's own economic reciprocity, it is a good idea to expose to visible web if one doesn't mind giving it up for the sake of securing a future (homo parochius) in an open source environment of reciprocal contribution (homo reciprocans