Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Gilbert and Sullivan review Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

by

The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,
And its “private browsing” mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.
There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;
You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.
You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;
And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.
There’s a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,
And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.
Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk –
You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.
There’s a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,
But it works and doesn’t slow you down – and these days, that’s enough.

— David Pogue, in the New York Times

(via adavies42, on /. — I originally didn’t notice the poem in the NYT article thanks to their horrid online formatting)

April Seattle Weblogger’s Meetup

by

I finally made it out to another Weblogger’s meetup! It was long past time, as the last time I’d made it out was back in November. While I don’t have much basis for comparison, it seemed to be a pretty good turnout again, 20-some people all told, I’d guess. People I know were there and can remember names or websites for include Anita Rowland, Chas, Chris Prillo, TDavid, Jake, Dayment, Jeannie, and Samantha, plus a bunch more people that my brain couldn’t hold onto names or URLs for. I’m sure Anita will have a full attendee list soon.

I’ve tossed some photos up into a photoset, named and tagged as much as possible. Of course, if anyone can identify any of the people I had to leave unnamed, comment and tag away!

(Photo courtesy of Chris Pirillo)

iTunes “Cornflake Girl” by Amos, Tori from the album Under the Pink (1994, 5:07).

Friday cat Tribble blogging!

by

“Friday Cat Blogging” is a well-known, oft-derided, but much loved cliché in the weblogging community. However, for those of us that don’t have cats, while we might enjoy looking at everyone else’s, we sometimes end up feeling a bit left out.

However.

I may not have a cat…

…but I do have a Tribble!

And so begins “Friday Tribble Blogging!”

Friday Tribble Blogging, my apartment, Seattle, WA

Isn’t he cute? :) He’s nestled up on my bed right now, napping on my pillows. They look so innocent when they’re asleep….

Google Video PC only (for now?)

by

This really shouldn’t surprise me, but Google’s just-announced 1 has continued their tradition of being Mac-unfriendly at launch.

Google Video Uploader Installer.exe

At this point, they don’t even provide a backup web-upload option — just the Windows-only uploader application. Pity, that, as Ourmedia.org seems to be going through some growing pains (I uploaded a video three days ago, and it’s yet to actually appear in a useable form on the site), and I’m looking forward to being able to host some of my more bandwidth-intensive experiments on servers more powerful than mine.

Still, I’ll hope that this is just a temporary thing, and as with Gmail and Google Maps, Safari/Mac OS X support will come along before too long. In the meantime, though, I’ll just have to keep poking along as I have been until now.

Update: As of May 18th, they now support Mac (and *nix) uploading thanks to a Java-based uploader.

iTunes “Blister in the Sun” by Violent Femmes from the album Violent Femmes (1982, 2:24).

Bloggers in my neighborhood

by

Here’s an interesting little web toy: feedmap.net. Give it your weblog address and (if necessary) physical address, and it returns a map of other weblogs close to you in the real world.

Apparently there’s about 154 other webloggers close to me though it seems to be a fairly loose definition of “close” — the map radius extends from Bremerton to past Sammamish east to west, and Woodinville to Renton north to south. Not terribly surprising, given how tech-centric Seattle tends to be, but fun to know.

Time to start clicking around to find out who all my neighbors are!

Search Engine Wars

by

Statcounter has introduced a new section to the statistics they track titled “Search Engine Wars” — it’s a graph of how much traffic your site gets from each search engine. Out of the last 1,100 hits to my site, here’s what it shows me:

Search Engine Wars

Admittedly, my site isn’t representative of the ‘net as a whole, but from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look like much of a battle.

iTunes “Injected With A Poison” by Khan, Praga from the album Pragamatic (1998, 5:06).

WordPress, Inc.

by

Congratulations to Matt on turning WordPress into WordPress, Inc. — and to [Jonas](http://www.jluster.org/ title=”Jonas Luster”) for being the first hire at the new company!

I haven’t met Matt, but he was kind enough to contribute one of the “pink” themes for this site, and I got to hang out with Jonas some time ago when he came through Seattle. Congrats to you both!

ecto powered

by

Powered by ectoI’ve been using and recommending ecto for quite some time now (as well as its predecessor, Kung-Log), but as long as Adriaan’s starting to run a weekly “ecto powered blog” showcase, I figured I might as well make it a little more obvious and pop a “Powered by ecto” badge into my sidebar. Who knows if he’ll ever actually showcase me, but it’s worth a shot, right? ;)

(And on a totally unrelated note, take a brief look at the timestamp on this post. That’s what happens when I lie down for a short nap mid-day and wake up four hours later and have a neighbor who insists on keeping the volume on his TV loud enough that it actually wakes me up — and that’s not an easy thing to do. Complaints have been made, but progress hasn’t. This sucks.)

iTunes “Eye on the Gold Chain (Cut Chemist)” by Ugly Duckling from the album Journey to Anywhere (2002, 4:05).

It’s official: Flickr now part of Yahoo!

by

The rumors were true, as it turns out, and the official announcement was made today on the FlickrBlog: Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr.

Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!!  Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

While I’m sure this is good news for both Yahoo! and Flickr, I have to admit that in some ways, I’m a little less than thrilled that Yahoo! is the winning buyer. While the Flickr post assures us that “nothing will change”, that’s the mantra we get every time there’s a merger of this sort, and I just hope it’s true.

My main concern is simply that I’ve never been overly impressed with Yahoo’s Mac support. The main offenders are Yahoo! Messenger — admittedly, a downloadable program and not a web-based offering — and Yahoo! Chat. The Mac version of Yahoo! Messenger has perpetually lagged years behind the PC version in terms of what features it offers, and I’ve never been able to get Yahoo! Chat to work reliably under Mac OS X.

Flickr, on the other hand, has worked flawlessly for me from day one, I quite happily paid to upgrade to a Pro account some time back, and was just recommending them to my brother last night when he and I were talking about how horrendously slow the family photo gallery hosted on my server can be (I can only afford so much bandwidth, after all).

Still, I’m not about to entirely write them off — as I’ve said, Flickr’s ben great so far, and I’m hoping that the acquisition by Yahoo! will be primarily a case of Yahoo! getting to add an incredible set of services to their system, and not one of Flickr being forced to dumb things down to coddle the lowest common denominator of Yahoo! subscribers.

Besides, I’m very curious about this section of the post aimed at those of us who have already paid for Pro accounts:

I liked Flickr BEFORE you even heard of it!

You shall be recognized for your discerning taste in web sites!! I bet you also liked the Flaming Lips before they appeared on Beverly Hills 90210, and for that we salute you. Pro account holders will get super mega bonuses, to be announced soon.

Super mega bonuses, huh? Gotta like the sound of that!

(via Jonas)

Update: Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny has some encouraging things to say about the merger:

The first time I used Flickr, I knew it was something different and something important. It took me a while to figure out and try to articulate exactly what that was, but I took my first swipe back in September when I called it a Next Generation Web Service.

[…]

Since then a lot has happened and I’ve had the chance to meet the Flickr team a few times. That has only convinced me even more that they have what it takes to really change things. Combining their mix of tagging, communities, syndication, open APIs, and interactive UI with Yahoo’s services and millions of users will lead to even more great stuff.

As Caterina wrote, this isn’t about just throwing millions of users at Flickr or bolting Flickr onto Yahoo! Photos. Think more deeply about it. There are many parts of Yahoo that will be Flickrized in the coming months. And with more resources available, Flickr itself will be able to grow like never before.

Sounds like the concerns I’ve brought up are rather well-known in the Yahoo!/Flickr camps, which is encouraging. Time to just sit back and see where things go from here.

(via Stewart in FlickrCentral)

iTunes “Medusa Bitch (cry.on.my.console)” by Prodigy, The from the album Always Outsiders Never Outdone (2004, 2:37).