The Tale of the Radioactive Boy Scout. Kids, don't try this at home.
Nature Magazine: "Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable." - Tim O'Reilly quoting Larry Wall.
Clay Shirky: Hailstorm: Open Web Services Controlled by Microsoft
The Strange Tale of Denial of Service Attacks. I wil let you form your own conclusions about the vulnerability of the types of computers talked about in this long, but excellent, article.
Related to the above story is this Register article: Windows XP will make Internet unstable. Maybe that's Microsoft's ultimate plan; to ruin the Internet as it exists today so it can supplant it with it's own proprietary version that works only with MS-centric hardware and software. In fact, if WinXP does end up causing instability of the open standards-based Internet, expect the Internet to fracture into two: a non-Microsoft Internet and a Microsoft Internet, with the latter being completely based on Microsoft's .NET, Hailstorm, and Passport technologies.
Jef Raskin: The Humane Touch: Bad Design Can Be Costly
Buy yours now. Parachute pants are coming back in style...
Looks like the Country Music Association is starting to use the Internet more. I keep getting mis-directed emails intended for them. Their domain name is cmaworld.com. Hey, at least now I know that Tim McGraw and Faith Hill are expecting their third child. Oh yeah, and Rascal Flatts is to perform at a Backstreet Boy Benefit. Whoo, don't hold me back...
The Darwin Collection: Free software for Darwin OS and Mac OS X
Sun Microsystems and CollabNet (my employer) have launched yet another web site called SunSource, which is devoted to Sun's involvement in Free and Open Source software development.
Mac OS X: "The advantage of the smaller apps, besides price, is that the development is decentralized so individual components get updated more frequently. You end up with a variety of applications with powerful abilities rather than one specialized app which of course means greater freedom of choice."
WinXP/OfficeXP: "It thinks it can profit by creating new kinds of software to augment and draw data from their applications....map of hundreds of activities--writing, numerical analysis, diagramming, multimedia presentations, e-mail, project managing, training, virtual conferencing, and on and on..."
A good article on web accessibility and section 508::
"Katherine Richardson expected a few people for the Web accessibility training classes the Agriculture Department's TARGET Center arranged for department webmasters. But when a standing-room-only crowd mobbed the Washington center to learn how to make Web sites operable for disabled users, she had to turn away some technophiles."
Also check out usability.gov. Excellent information.
Jon Udell: "I'm convinced, more than ever, of the value of weblogging as an important new form of business communication." Jon Udell is the author of the best O'Reilly book ever written, Practical Internet Groupware, now out-of-print.
But of course. Why would you expect anything different from Microsoft? Lock in, lock in, lock in. Note that gateway.gov.uk gives you a standard IIS error page, but that www.gateway.gov.uk doesn't. Ha ha ha ha, what morons.
Esther Dyson (former chairwoman of ICANN), along with some other people, have formed the ICANN At-Large Membership Study Committee. I remember getting my At-Large membership in the mail a year or two back, but when I tried to acknowledge my membership registration, I found the site too confusing and gave up. I recall there being some controversy over this...
Color Scheme Stats: For the month of May (to date), here are the number of requests for the background images that make up the various color schemes of CamWorld:
bg_grid_white.gif: 20407 (default color scheme) bg_grid_grey.gif: 6773 bg_grid_blue.gif: 1842 bg_grid_green.gif: 1034 bg_grid_yellow.gif: 774 (called 'Gold') bg_grid_red.gif: 515
What this tells me is that most people either prefer the default white color scheme or they don't bother to choose a color scheme. Long-time readers will remember that the default used to be grey, but I changed it to white a while back for the index.html page (50,530 requests for May, to date). Also note that these numbers don't reflect actual site traffic as the majority of my repeat readers have these images cached in their browsers.
Jeff Veen: Stalk Your User
O'ReillyNet: Office XP: Product Activation Gone Berserk, Part 2
InformationWeek: Enterprise Management: Disillusionment
Wow, look at what Google found. A new CAMworld page. I've never physically run away from a web site before, but this one had me headed for the door (once it loaded).
An Incomplete Annotated History of Weblogs
Aaronland: Weblogs, Theory and Practice
Happy Memorial Day. I love national holidays that take place on Mondays. It's like you get a free day to do whatever you want. Like, if you did absolutely nothing all weekend but play video games, you still have an extra day to get your shopping and laundry done. But I managed to get my Diablo II character (an Amazon warrior) up to level 28, and I also tried out the Secret Cow Level (hard!).
Don Bruns has a very touching story over at Fray. Go read.
Gotta love this site: www.camborg.com just for its URL.
Information wants to be free. Don't lock it up behind subscription models.
The New York That Really Never Was.
Sweet love of the DSL gods. After 14 months, I finally have a DSL installation date for tomorrow. Let's hope Verizon actually shows up.
An old, but good, rant about Visio.
The Center for Controlling Plagiarism.
Possible captions for this photo:
It's time to update the list of links on the left side of this site. Send me your recommendations. I'm looking for high-quality sites/weblogs that load in all browsers. No Flash, no lame browser redirects (unless a Netscape 4.x version is available). I make no promises that I will link to a site if you recommend it. If I visit it and like what I see/read, I'll add it to my list. Please, no self-promotion.
Slashdot: Preview of Diablo II - Lord of Destruction. I can't wait!
Apple: Web Development & Mac OS X
I'm back, but updates may be sporadic for a while. Probably every other day instead of daily.
A couple of recent articles about Microsoft have led me to believe that they will continue to use the Internet as a giant R&D lab, picking out the good ideas and technologies, and 'enhancing' them to work only with MS-centric products and services. For the historians among you, this is exactly what they've been doing since the company was founded. Why stop now? It's the classic "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" business practice.
Jason Levine: Death is not always the worst option
MIT Media Lab: Being Real [via dangerousmeta]
Birds learn to copy cell phone rings. Ha! This reminds me of the time when my family lived in the South Pacific. It was very normal to let the local [harmless] wildlife share your home with you, and my family had several little chameleons that lived in various parts of our house. There was one that lived on the wall in the kitchen, one in the living room, etc. They were almost like pets. One day, we decided to collect the lizards and play with them -- by breaking out a pack of fluorescent construction paper. The way those little lizards tried to adapt to the colors of bright orange and bright green was simply amazing.
Damn, I wish I could program my TV to automatically lower the volume during commercials. FOX and UPN are the worst culprits in increasing the volume during commercials. It's like advertising has become so ineffective, they're trying all kinds of tricks to get people to pay attention. Update: Brad Morse tells me to try hooking a volume stabilizer up to my home theater system. Good idea!
Othermedia: How to choose a content management system.
Still on hiatus. Events have come up in my life very recently that have required me to focus on things other than this site. I am confident that I will back within a reasonable amount of time. Please stay tuned.
I am working on a new section of CamWorld that I can't tell you about yet, except that it will be very personal and intimate and nothing at all like what I've done before. Like everything else at CamWorld, though, it will be a place where people can learn about what I'm doing, what I''m thinking, and educate themselves in the process. Please stay tuned.
Here's a fast re-cap of the notable events of the past three weeks of my life: On May 6, I rode the BikeNewYork 5-boro tour. About 45 miles total. I was stupid enough to forget to apply sunblock and six hours in the sun fried the backs of my hands. Second-degree sunburn with blisters and three days of swollen hands. Not a fun experience. I haven't been this badly sunburned since I was a kid living in American Samoa in the South Pacific. It's been two weeks and my hands are almost healed. Last night (May 19) I went to see the American Ballet Theater's performance of The Pied Piper. Wow, wow, wow. If you're in New York this week, go see it. It's completely amazing.
I couldn't resist. Here are a few links:
In the U.S. this monkey man would probably be a little green alien.
A Partial History of Computer Conferencing in Ann Arbor
If you're not truly disgusted yet by the Bush presidency, read this article and then go take a hard look at yourself in the mirror if you voted for him.
