Larry.org

Here’s an example of how it’s fun.

So you’ll begin seeing more videos in my posts I think.

One of the things that I thought might be interesting is it’s ability to help me pay less in Credit Card fees.

So I was excited to see my first “offer” was related to a Credit Card deal.

It makes ZERO sense though.

I had to post it here since their “Help” comment form doesn’t seem to allow attachments.

I can’t tell you how many times I see this kind of wierd disconnect on website copy. I think this is one of the reasons I like the DIY websites better. You cook it yourself you have pride of ownership. Not to be too glib though, I’ve been a party to mistakes like this too. I hope they can fix it, as other parts of the app look worth sticking around for, but this “save money” feature may be just too noisy.

So for the last two and a half years a close friend of mine and I have been working on a labor of love that is finally live.

It’s called Figment, and it’s a game for people that like to make up fake bands.

It was certainly a lot of work creating it, and now that it’s in actual use, it’ll be nice to see where it goes from here.

Now I just have to get all my fake bands into it

Sometimes I’m struck by how poorly historic lessons fit the challenges we face today. Especially with regards to globalization, especially collaboration, management and staff/team development.

Here’s a great video

by XPlane that sums it up quite effectively.

Thanks to out to the folks at The Innovation Weblog for bringing it to my attention.

Sometimes when people ask me why I think Social Media is more important than traditional media, I ask them to find a story they like in social media. Most people don’t do that, it’s what they pay journalists to do for them.

The ones that do, usually have a hard time finding it because social media is “messy” and “there’s lots of noise”. Both of which are true, those are, in my opinion, the two most significant “cons”.

But when I ask them about the story they like, I really find out if they can see around the corners or not.

If you read what people write themselves, you can find some really interesting stories. But when you see how people are replying, commenting and riffing off each other’s stories, you start to get a clue that it’s not about reading. It’s about reading and writing. and recording and shooting video. and sewing and building. It’s about doing, creating and sharing rather than finding, buying and consuming.

It’s also quite cool to see the personal computer actually be used personally by so many people. The last three years are the first I feel the original vision for the personal computer have been realized. While it’s still a small a minority of people that are really getting it done, it’s a huge increase in the idea of what one person can do with an open and adaptable machine (the internet) and a phone or computer. Not “to” or “at” the machine, but “with” the machine, as they find it.

I’m really excited about 2008. I may even get commenting working again on my own blog.

Here’s a deservedly, popular story about what a woman named Susan Reynolds did with the machine when she found out she had breast cancer.

I’ve not been tracking this story very much, but It looks very engaging. It’s really not about what story I’m reading though. It’s about what story I’m engaged in, and there’s a bunch of them. The important part of that for you, dear reader, is social media isn’t passive. It’s dead boring if you just want to read it. You have to create when you find a thought you feel you can contribute to.

UPDATE!

Everything is back to normal.. I did clean install (wiped the drive!) and restored what I needed from backup.. Kind of a brute force method, but I was overdue as I had 3 years of crufty stuff running in my OS.

I'm not completely convinced that a Software update didn't cause the problem. Even after the clean install of the OS, it was taking forever to reboot. After the subsequent Software Update the boots were nice and peppy again.

Clean install did remedy the immediate problem of getting Quicken running again.

Original Post follows in case anyone else runs into this.

---

If I Ctrl+Click->Show Package Contents. Then go to Contents -> Mac OSX this is the icon I get. It somehow thinks it's become a "Classic" app which obviously it isn't.

The OS thinks a couple of apps are Classic apps all of a sudden. All I can think of is the last software update, but really that's just a guess.

Ran Disk Warrior, it fixed a few permissions but it thought everything else was fine.

I deleted Quicken's Folder and reinstalled it from the CD's that came with the computer, but I get the exact same problem.

A few other programs won't launch and I figure it may be related

• Macromedia Fireworks
• Snapz Pro (Universal Binary version)
• Super Game House Solitaire

Many other aps work fine, including some "Rosetta" apps.

I called Mac Tech Support (I have Apple Care) and they suggested I free up some hd space and do an "archive and reinstall", so I'll try that tonight.

I just thought I would post this here in case anyone else is having trouble like this. Please comment if you've run into this on your system, especially since a recent Software Update.

There have been many, many companies that have tried to build a laptop case that opens up to a working surface.



The Higher Ground Laptrap is getting good reviews right now.



See:

A True Laptop Case
Your search for the perfect laptop backpack may be over. [PC Magazine: New Product Reviews]

I wonder if anyone locally will cary it. Might be worth a look as my briefcase typically weighs 25 pounds. I think I make this bag so heavy cause it can carry so much stuff. If I had a bag that was smaller, I wouldn't be able to make my bag so heavy. Still I'd like to see how it would feel with just the bare essentials.

Really I'm just logging this link for my own reference. This looks like an interesting project and I think it would be worth doing something like this on my own blog here.

Use renice to give DropStuff a speed boost





Very valuable tip that allows me to get more done when using programs that, for whatever reason, run slowly on my iBook 500mhz running OSX.



Another reminder why the unix framework that supports Mac OSX matters.

I noticed a friend of mine's iChat status was displaying what song he was listening to in iTunes. (iChat is Apple's AIM client for OSX, iTunes is the mp3 player.)



So I asked him about it. It's a donationware tool by David Remahl called iChatStatus and it's available here.

Well I got my iBook back on Friday. The hard drive failed and it was cheaper to get it repaired at a certified Apple repair facility than it was to send it in to Apple (as it was out of warranty).



Happily I was able to upgrade the HD from the Apple 20GB max to an aftermarket 60GB max which will come in handy with the digital photos and videos (woo hoo!).

In Measure Twice there's a new thread on The Agenda of Professional Blogs. (As defined by John Udell in his Blogs and InfoWorld article.)



Both John Udell's take on the agenda and the Measure Twice authors blessing of this agend are posts on professional blogs. There are many differences between the two but the Agenda does serve to differentiate between the agendas of any blog and the agenda of a professional blog. So what is the agenda of a personal blog?



I'll take swipe at this using John Udells agenda items as inspiration:



A personal blog (like this one) is used to:

• To promote yourself, your relationships, your perspective and your values (typically) all at the same time.



• To promote understanding between people inside and outside your 'world' on any subject that interests you



• To share your thoughts and perspectives with the world at large



• To learn more about why you understand things a certain way and to invite others to help you shape that understanding



• To publicly communicate directly with a global audience or an individual (or any sized group in between) quickly and easily



• To have a sequential and categorized record of your thoughts so you can refer to them later in life

So given that difference I've made a conscious effort to keep my personal blog personal. When I do start a professional blog I will have to decide which blog gets which entries based on which agenda the entry is serving.

So it occurs to me that there's alot of impact on the more practical morals of genetic engineering that is not being considered. If you can clone a human, is the clone human? Legally, it's tricky. Morally it's trickier. Not sure what the right answer would be. In an age of biological computing a clone could be considered a self aware computer for the purposes of an ethical position against the clone being considered morally or legally human.



Some interesting thoughts there...

This appeared in David Akin's article in the Monday April 7th Globe and Mail. Thanks to Tom for sending it to me. For some reason the article no longer appears on the website.


It's not only got a great quote (i've bolded it below), but David has also included the less popular, positive, use of the word 'hacker' in the headline.


(this is just the first two paragraphs of the complete article.)

U.S. military helps fund Calgary hacker



DAVID AKIN

From Monday's Globe and Mail


The U.S. military believes the work of a Calgary hacker may be its best bet to protect its computer networks from so-called cyber-terrorist attacks. And although Theo de Raadt is happy to have more than $2-million (U.S.) in research support from the U.S. military's research and development office, the source of that funding has made him more than a little uneasy.

"I actually am fairly uncomfortable about it, even if our firm stipulation was that they cannot tell us what to do. We are simply doing what we do anyways - securing software - and they have no say in the matter," Mr. de Raadt said in a recent e-mail exchange. "I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built."

Here's the link to the posted article in case it works later on.

I'm posting this so I can find it later! I've used this a number of times as a quick reference when setting up ssh and cvs. Handy link to have around.



Minimalist Guide to using CVS and SSH

Yesterday my brother sent me a link to an online 'magic trick'. Pretty impressive.



If you're like me it'll bug you that you can't figure this out right away. It also follows that if you can figure it out right away, then you're not like me.



Happily a few googles later the solution is found. Pretty obvious once you read it.



Still it's pretty amazing when you don't know the trick.

I guess I could have both.



It's going to be available March 1st.



I'll have to find someone with one of these in a month or two and see how well the did on the UI.

If you need just one good one, this one has some good insight.



I like to look at the application of technology and this overview is focused on that. Nice insights into collaborative tech.



After 6 months of using CafeLog / b2 I'm starting to feel a bit constrained. I understand that Mike is working (very quietly) on a Smarty Template based version.. .but I'm starting to get anxious.



So today I checked out:



Drupal - need globals turned on.. but otherwise very impressive. This one may displace b2 for me if they fix that feature.



pMachine - great 'testimonials' but no go on the license and the requirement to post their logo.



Note I'm really focused on 1) PHP/MySQL implementations and 2) Something I can use XML-RPC to post using the MetaWeblogger API or some similar utility.



Also just for fun checked out NetNewsWire for news feed gathering.. seems pretty nice.

This site is very interesting. It's pretty amazing actually how many different answers you can get for simple words. This is sort of a semantic feedback loop generator. Pretty wild.

So I suppose this was inevitable. Now that it's happened, so what.



Well I'll leave that up to the Application developers.



Still it's pretty amazing that someone bothered to do it. Though it was clearly easier to do than Linux on the X-Box given the hardware mods that the X-Box required. I guess Apple either didn't think this would happen or thought it was silly to spend their time making it hard to do by locking down their hardware to such a silly degree. I tend to think it was the latter, and that Apple is giggling their ass off that someone did it at all.



Free as in Freedom, indeed.



Thanks for the link Steve.

Reading the book Eric Meyer on CSS this week and it's pretty good. Following up on some of the author's links he pointed me to Favelets which are sort of like CSS tweaking bookmarklets.



For those of you not as geeky as me a 'Bookmarklet' is a bookmark in your web browser that augments the loading of a page with a bit of programming. They can be kind of fun and quite useful.

This article has lots of good links for DMX extensions from the guy that wrote the DMX Missing Manual book for OReilly.

Distributed, or Peer to Peer, Applications still have lots of room for improvement because currently none of them really demonstrate enough business value to unseat the Client Server model. There's some people that would very much like to change that of course. Here's an overview of why we need a better solution and a link to one company that's trying to change it now.


There have been two proof of concept applications that are 1) looking for signs of extraterrestrial life and 2) gathering data to figure out how to fold proteins. Both of which are worthy and interesting in their own right and certainly in dire need of spare CPU cycles. Thing is, both these efforts rely on custom developed data processing clients. In the two examples above I have to install SETI at Home or Folding at Home on my computer to start receiving, processing and returning data.


I've heard these data processing clients called P2P applications but for large data processing problems like this there is a centralized server or server farm controlling the data flow so to my mind P2P doesn't seem right.


Thing is that many projects that could benefit from picking up CPU cycles from a network have more complex data processing requirements than either of these two shining examples. These two examples don't demonstrate that we can apply a distributed application, they demonstrate we can distribute the data processing associated with a client server application. To put it more simply, if the data needs to be processed in many different ways how would a distributed data processing application know how to chose which way to process the data. The answer is to build a distributed application that can not just process finely chopped up data sets but can also apply rules and conditions to how and why it will process that data.


Neither SETI at Home nor Folding at Home provide any sort of demonstration of applying businesses rules. Green Tea Technologies, Inc. Has some interesting ideas and apparently a working solution that does. Could be real interesting to see who picks it up. Certainly the BioInformatics crowd could stand to benefit from a solution like this that is more application oriented and less data processing oriented.


Thanks for the link Mariane!

Today I updated the b2 code that runs this blog to the latest version. If there are any problems please let me know!

Well the wedding is over. Daniel is married and there's still a bunch of family in town.


I introduced my cousin and nephew (8 years old) to GeoCaching thanks to Laura getting me a GPS unit for Christmas.


Fun to trudge through the woods with family.


Daniel's and Hilleary's wedding was big fun. I'll be posting some photos this week.

So I've been looking for a solution to play some sounds on a client's site and I spent quite a bit of time on it this weekend.



Happily I finally found a way!



Sonify.org's Flash Sound API came to the rescue.

Well today I bought a new camera. It's a sony and it's nice and small.



Here's an example picture Laura took with it.

I know the fact that I like this site further indicates that I am a geek but this site saved my butt today and I wanted to make sure others knew about it.



The implication being someday others will read this blog :).



Jasons Driver Museum

These guys should get all sorts of recognition for what they've developed!



It's nice to see that computers can be used for such interesting artistic expression.



I just saw the entire pipe dreams video on PBS and it's amazing. I actually missed it was computer animation for the first 30 seconds or so.

This thing



Looks promosing.



Thanks Joel!

This is a must have. Wired Magazine turned me on to this. I'm trying it out so if you get my voice mail.. don't be alarmed by the tone.



It also works if you edit the sound file down to the first beep!