Don’t miss The Smoking Gun’s lengthy exposé revealing the fact that the author of the best selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, James Frey, is actually a novelist. I guess this is going to send Oprah right back to dead novelists when it comes to making book club selections.
The other day I mentioned that my hard drive died and I lost all of the song ratings and play counts from my iTunes library. Some people made some excellent suggestions in the comments about how I might be able to rescue that data. As it turns out, fate was on my side. I had already burned an Ubuntu live CD so that I could test some hardware I had bought before my new Windows XP CD arrived via UPS, and I tried booting up the PC with the dead hard drive from that. Well, I stuck the CD in the machine too late, and it booted up into Windows instead of playing dead. I quickly zipped up the files I needed and used scp to copy them to a server, and ten minutes later I had the old iTunes data on the new PC. ...
Along with Google’s announcement that they’ll be selling video content via Google Video comes the news that they’ve created yet another DRM system. Reverse engineering hackers, start your engines!
Tivo previewed the Series 3 box today, with HDTV support and the ability to record two programs at once. Excellent!
The Edge Foundation’s question for 2006 is, “What is your dangerous idea?” They explain: The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true? ...
As I think about predictions for 2006, I realize that I’ve spent more time thinking about the nature of predictions than about the predictions themselves. I’m going to try to restrict myself to trends, rather than predictions that require specific knowledge about the future plans of various companies, since I don’t have any of that. Here goes: The mindshare of Ruby on Rails will grow relative to other Web application platforms, in spite of the efforts of devotees of other platforms to come up with their own Rails alternatives. I have a theory about why this is that I’ll elaborate in another post. Identity theft by way of stealing databases of personal information will continue to grow explosively. I think there’s still plenty of low hanging fruit out there for fraudsters and I think that this year we’ll see the back ends of large Web sites get hacked and see their customer databases stolen by fraudsters. Wikipedia still won’t be accepted by the academic and journalistic mainstream. The way wikis operate is counterintuitive enough that the establishment will reject it even though it’s obvious that it basically works. JavaScript will be bigger than ever. The trend toward pushing functionality back from the server to the client that got rolling in 2005 will continue to grow. Hopefully Internet Explorer 7 will be good enough to fuel this trend. The blog phenomenon continues apace. I don’t have a specific blog-related prediction, but my guess is that we’ll continue to see more big Web sites add blog-like features, and that more people will try to make their living writing blogs. The raw number of blogs will continue to grow explosively. (I guess I’d say that blogging is a trend, not a fad.) That’s enough for a first try, we’ll see how I did this time next year. My prediction about the predictions is that they are too generic to be interesting or to grade. ...
The main hard drive died in the computer where I keep my music library. Fortunately, I had my music stored on a newer hard drive, so I didn’t lose any data, and besides, all of my music is on my iPod as well. Unfortunately, what I just discovered is that even though the actual tracks are on the still living hard drive, all of the metadata was back on the old main drive, meaning that I lost all of my playlists, play counts, and worst, song ratings. I had rated just about all of the two thousand songs in my library, and now I have to go back and do it all again. Misery. I guess, of all the bad things that can happen to your iPod or your data, losing your song ratings isn’t that bad, but it still means a lot of work ahead. ...
I’m taking a trip for the next few days and won’t be back in the saddle here until January 4. Expect to see my exciting 2006 predictions at that time. (I’d have already posted them but I’m having trouble thinking them up.) In the meantime, happy New Year!
I was a bit surprised to learn that Intel is ditching the Intel inside marketing slogan in favor of the meaningless “Leap ahead.” About 10 years ago, when my anti-Microsoft and anti-Intel feelings were at their height, I thought that “Intel inside” was the most brilliant marketing slogan ever conceived. Given that I thought that the PowerPC, MIPS, Sparc, and just about every other processor available at that time were superior to the old x86, I was incredibly irritated that Intel was so incredibly successful. At the time, I put that down to the fact that Intel, through one simple marketing slogan, had managed to convince people that the maker of their processor actually mattered. These days, it seems like Intel is facing more competition than ever from AMD, and they’re abandoning the branding strategy that led people to think that the maker of a completely interchangeable computer part actually mattered. It seems like bad timing to me. ...
The New York Times has an op-ed today on the benefits of self-examination, or lack thereof: What can we do to improve ourselves and feel happier? Numerous social psychological studies have confirmed Aristotle’s observation that “We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.” If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves. ...