RSS readers and desktop blogging tools are the two kinds of applications I try out quite frequently, so I’m always happy when I see new products on the market from either category. It is not necessarily an issue of not being satisfied with what I am currently using1 insomuch as curiosity and wanting to see how people tackle old ideas and try to rethink them and bring better solutions.
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Recently, I have come across blog posts where authors and commenters alike were considering that the whole open-source fad is going to cost a lot of programmers a lot of money and quite possibly make it very hard to earn a living by writing code.
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Tonight, thanks to Twitter 0-day information, I managed to snag an invite for beta-testing viewzi.com
Viewzi is a new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.
Oh, and it’s bolder, richer, and more fun.
That is certainly true, as the whole interface is very nice and, after a quick-run through the different views offered, the purpose of each becomes immediately obvious. Picture searches, video searches, shopping searches or just plain’ old trying-to-find-some-information searches.
Therein, however, I feel there may be a minor problem. «Continue Reading»
The output supplies more decimal places than we need and uses labels that may not be helpful [...] But, as usual with software, we can ignore distractions and find the results we need.
The above is taken from my Statistics book. It was written as a comment to an illustration of the output of some statistical software. It is the embodiment of what is wrong with software nowadays, why a lot of people still don’t get it and don’t use it.
Ars is running a lengthy piece on modularized Windows and why it would suck. There are quite a few reasons why I do not believe this to be true, mostly looking at the increased control modularized Windows would bring to all categories of users.
I have recently attended a talk given by Michael Geist on the subject of “E-Publishing and the Law” through the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Here are some of the things that Dr. Geist spoke about, as well as some of my observations.
From a Computer World article detailing the reasons a CTO switched back to Windows after a stint on the Mac:
If you keep informed of the movements that are going on in the computer security world, you would know that this week Vancouver was host to the CanSecWest Security Conference. Last year, CSW organizers had “Hack a Mac”, whereby owning their testlab Mac made it yours – plus a nice cash prize.
To take things further, this year the contest was extended to one representative of each of the major platforms: a MacBook Air, a Vista and an Ubuntu Linux. The MBA was first to fall, and while I tried to keep off comments about it… I can’t.
Joel Spolsky (the famous Joel writing “on software”) had a lengthy comment today yesterday on the impending war between the supporters of IE 8’s standards mode versus the rest of the world (as he argues it, that means the majority of web developers out there) that will have their websites broken in IE 8. (Mark Pilgrim hosts a translation of the article which pretty much captures the essence of the thing.) While he makes a compelling argument as to why he believes IE 8 will eventually revert to the old way of rendering, I take issue with some of the finer points of the matter. Specifically, I believe, for once, that Microsoft is not the only one to blame for the current state of the web and they should not backtrack because it might be a cause of inconvenience to some people in the short term.
I enjoy podcasts. I seek the more technologically-oriented ones because, hey, I have some idea about what they’re talking, but there’s always room for improvement. I was sad when Binary Revolution Radio stopped broadcasting, but I focused on other things. I have listened/watched to TWiT & Co., CommandN, Digital Underground, Hak5, SECTHIS. Some of these I still follow. Others, not so much. Even if nobody is perfect, it’s hard to ignore some of the pretty big errors in reporting I came across while listening to some of these.
