Jackson Fox

Rafe Colburn brings up a scary thought:

If I fear that any CD I buy will silently install a bunch of crap on my computer, Apple’s DRM doesn’t sound quite so bad. At least I know what I’m getting.

I hadn’t realized it until I read this, but I honestly fear buying CDs these days. I just don’t trust that the CD will work at all, will not break my computer if I try to listen to the CD, or allow me to convert the music to a digital format. I think this fear has been building for months (if not years), but the Sony fiasco has pushed me over the edge. I would rather buy my music in digital format because I know exactly what I’m getting. This is sad — I lose out on the ability to share my music by buying from the iTunes music store (via iTunes on the local network at work), I lose sound quality, and I lose flexibility (to convert to a different digital format or use it on a non-Apple music player).

Update: An article on Canada.com says the consumer-at-large has started catching on that copy-protected CDs aren’t worth buying

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More weird spam. This time weblog comment spam where every link (all 500 of them) was tagged as “nofollow.”

I found a rather fascinating bit of wiki spam on the ASIS&T 2005 Annual Meeting Wiki today. This is probably the first time I’ve ever seen polite spam.

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My current non-work project: The ASIS&T 2005 Annual Meeting Wiki. I like MediaWiki — it’s stable, easy to install, and the wiki markup isn’t awful — but it’s entirely too difficult to customize the look-and-feel.

Did anyone make note of the date when JavaScript became cool instead of a pain-in-the-ass? Two new (similar) examples: TiddlyWiki Macros and Start.com Gadgets. In both cases JavaScript can be used to create plugins for a website. The Start.com version is neat in that your plugins are digesting and displaying RSS (aka any damn datasource you want). Admittedly, I don’t know for sure that you can’t do that in TiddlyWiki, but I didn’t see a mention of it. Of course, TiddlyWiki itself is an insanely cool application written completely out of javascript.

Dave Winer:

Listening to CNN, they’re talking about this great new technology called FTP. Really, no kidding. It’s actually older than CNN. What happened to fact checking.

I suspect they were talking about FTTP, aka Fiber to the Premises.

1. Launch your new site
2. Watch every geek on the planet notice and link to the site
3. Take the site down without explanation
4. Watch the geeks get restless
5. Explain that you were just testing things and the site is really going to launch tomorrow

The result? For about 12 hours every geek on the planet thinks you can’t keep your site on the web without it completely collapsing — on a Sunday no less. Here’s hoping MSN Virtual Earth is worth the hype (we’ll see on Monday).

My favorite photo gallery tool is PhotoStack. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles that Gallery has, but the templates are less nasty and the whole program has a very small footprint. However, PhotoStack can be a little tricky to get running on Dreamhost.

1. Download PhotoStack 2.1b7.
2. Unzip the files into a new directory.
3. Edit config.php with you host settings. For the FTP, you will need to change $ftpSSL to ‘no’ (FTP-SSL is not SFTP).
4. Edit /organize/photos-* and /organize/album-* and change $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] to $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] (fix found in the PhotoStack forums)

Havoc Pennington:

I believe we have legitimate and non-evil reasons why we can’t ship Mono.

Which is frustrating since apparently they can’t/won’t tell the community what those reasons are. Mono has all the cool toys: Beagle, Tomboy, Muine. Java has OpenOffice (ick). RedHat is basically saying we have to pass on some of the best app development being done for GNOME right now. So what happens if Mono becomes part of the GNOME core? Is there a fork?

Update: Check out “Language Subtext” at beatnikblog for a good overview of how things are shaping up (towards the bottom).