Posts

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the software ecosystem on OSX, so I’m always surprised when someone points me at a program I’ve never heard about before, particularly when it’s better than what I’m already using.

Vienna 2.0 , the free, open source news aggregator and rss reader from Steve Palmer is fantastic. I’ve said how much I like Ranchero’s NewsGator’s NetNewsWire before, but it has been bogging down with the volume of news I’ve been looking at lately and getting slow, particularly using functions like “Mark All as Read” which sends my hard drive spinning and slows down the rest of the system. It is also commercial, and while reasonably priced for the professional version (particularly when bundled with the MarsEdit blogging program), I still prefer my programs open source and free in principle whenever possible.

I have this great friend who I’ve lost a bit of contact with recently who had this great theory about karmas. That basically, there were three of them: apartment, job and friend karma. You could have 2 of them but virtually never three. I always found it charming but kind of wondered about its applicability to my own situation.

I was chatting with a friend as we watched the sunset off the Boathouse near my apartment and were discussing the idea of the “three” theory and what it was that kept you in a place or made you think someplace or sometime was better than any other in your life. After discussing Viktor Frankl and killing off a bottle of wine, I think we came up with a pretty good list :

I’m really surprised at how few things have broken since moving to Tiger. I was relaly expecting it to be much more jarring and for a lot more things to have problems, but with a few exceptions things have been unbelievably smooth.

Quicksilver, one of my favourite apps seems to be having a bit of trouble and even an update today seems not to have fixed it. MenuCalendar as well though it’s more a nice to have than a need to have.

(posted via a Dashboard widget no less!)

OK, so at this point you could probably slap an i in front of anything with an Apple logo and I’d buy it, but I did go out 15 minutes after it was possible to get a retail version of tiger and plunk down the cash for the install.

Due to family obligations, I didn’t get to install it until late last night (after backing up to my very handy iPod) and Tiger installed things in the usual effortless way that Apple seems to excel in, while I played Monopoly against my nephew.

A few days ago, Google combined its amazing GoogleMaps technology with the satellite technology Keyhole which allows you to zoom in geographically with near-time satellite imagery on things from space.

While this is, for instance, very handy for figuring out what your apartment looks like from space and where to direct the aliens when they finally arrive, but obviously not the most practical application of the technology.

More practically and more ethically, imagine you’re an activist. I know more than a few of you are who are reading this. Now imagine using this to show the geological devastation apparent from say, clearcutting, or an oil spill or another sort of environmental disaster. You need a dramatic visual because you know that “if it bleeds, it leads” is the only way you can get media attention on critical issues these days. How about some context? What this thing looks like from space ?

Since I’m moving moved to new digs in a new city, one of the first thing I had to do was to get a new borrowing card for the Vancouver Public Library before a scary portion of my disposable income ended up in Amazon’s pockets.

Out on the internet though, where I basically live most of my professional life, people point at Amazon when they want to reference a book - not the library. What’s a poor, environmentally and cost-conscious book lover to do ?

The mighty Matt articulated the full changes made to Wordpress 1.5 for the Strayhorn release . You’ll notice AWWS is already up and running with 1.5.

Cliff Notes version for the ADD afflicted:

• Easier template and theming system
• Gorgeous new default template (Kubrick !)
• More robust content management beyond blog content
• Great comment management (and better spam blocking)
• Refined administration
• Faster, more secure, smaller, cuter, etc (overall size less than 1.2 !)
• Still free (as always)

I’ve had the release up from about an hour after it was in the wild and I’ve noticed (or perhaps imagined) that it seems to run much smoother. Cleaner code, faster execution, and maybe it’s just my imagination but I actually detect a hint of lemony freshness too.

One thing I’m finding a little difficult since I’m used to develop enterprise wide interoperability options for large organizations and companies is that scaling down to very small workgroups is much harder than it seems in terms of getting them to collaborate but still stick to standards that will allow the group to grow over time.

I mentioned the other week about chucking MediaWiki in favour of the much, much more stripped and simple Dokuwiki for my non-tech-savvy and predominantly dial up enabled political organization here in the Okanagan. That was a major coup. It’s scary how suddenly even luddites are using it. I love the fact they are though. I feel it’s made the whole group much more productive. Oh yes, and free – important for a group on an IT budget of zero.

Ah yes, combining popular civil disobedience and positive environmentalism, I am *compelled<*to point to the this great little howto on setting up your own solar panels and feeding back into the grid. Very handy if you’re out in the boondocks and no one is looking. Of course, today is the first sun we’ve had in quite a few weeks here.

As pointed out in the article, this is probably not legal where you are without proper permits, but let’s face it, microgeneration and conservation are probably a big part of the future and aren’t you just a little tired of the big dead dinosaur co’s and big utility inc. dragging their feet over making it easier for you ? I know in the Valley here, Fortis has yet to allow net metering which is a crime.

Wow. I’m going to say this again, because it is so rare for me to use this word in relation to programming at all: Wow.

In fact, the last time I used it was in regard to my first view of XCode whose ability to remove the grunt work from creating interfaces and allow you to concentrate on coding instead is amazing (sadly though, I’m not a big fan of ObjectiveC and you really need to code in ObjC to get XCode’s full power… though apparently someone has come up with Ruby bindings for Cocoa which I am also going to check out since Ruby seems to save so much pain.