Posts

Looks like Amazon.com’s free shipping promotion was a success. I can tell you that I took advantage of it twice this holiday season, and saved myself about 30 bucks in shipping. Not too shabby. Organic Online is laying off 270 people for the holidays. Meet the new economy, same as the old economy. Seriously though, I remember when Organic was this funky Web development firm in San Francisco. The article doesn’t say how many employees they have, but if they’re laying off 270 of them, then they must be huge. (I see from their website that they have 9 offices now including one in Sao Paulo.) ...

Is anybody out there using Flash as a replacement for Powerpoint? I’ve been thinking for quite some time that Flash movies are superior to Powerpoint presentations in just about every way. They’re ready for streaming over the Internet, they’re much smaller, and the effects are much cooler than those available in Powerpoint. If someone repackaged the Flash authoring environment so that it worked more like Powerpoint, it seems to me that Microsoft might have a good fight on their hands. Flash is misused a lot, but many people seem to think that Flash isn’t useful – that’s certainly not the case. ...

“The Street” : a Fox show about stock traders has been cancelled. Po Bronson had some role in creating the show, but I couldn’t detect any of his genius in the finished product. Good riddance. The current release of Mozilla is 0.60, which is Mozilla code branched from Netscape 6 (according to the roadmap). I’m not exactly sure how it relates to the core Mozilla work that is continuing along the main branch. ...

Phil Agre continues his jeremiad against the Republicans and their handling of the Florida recount situation. I think that Agre makes some cogent points, but I don’t agree with everything he says. Still, his comments are a nice counterpoint to the stuff we read in the mass media all the time, I particularly like his in depth analysis of the way various spinmeisters use the certain words to make things sound more nefarious than they are. ...

Looks like Emacs is going to be getting a much needed update at some point in the future. Who knows when the newest version will be released though? And more importantly for me, how long it will be until it’s ported to Windows? I was glad to find this link because just yesterday I was wondering what those Emacs guys were up to. I’ve really been enjoying the stories on NPR’s Morning Edition about the NPR 100, a list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. Not only are the songs great, but the stories behind them are generally fascinating as well. It’s especially interesting to learn why the songs were so important or influential, since almost all of them just seem like classics to me, and I can’t place them in the context of their contemporaries. ...

So, I’ve been using Opera 5.0 all day in honor of their releasing their latest version for free, and I must say that I’m very impressed. The browser renders nearly all pages correctly (DIG pages being the notable exception), even those with complex markup and style sheets. I can only assume that pages that render incorrectly contain hacked markup to compensate for deficiencies in IE or Netscape. Opera 5.0 also has excellent cookie management, the only problem is that it’s a bit too complex. For what it’s worth, the Mozilla daily builds and IE for the Mac have perfect cookie management. ...

A bipartisan group of Senators is ramming through legislation that would make it tougher for consumers to have their debts dissolved by filing for bankruptcy. This is legislation bought and paid for through millions of dollars in campaign contributions by credit card companies and banks, and I find it disgusting. Over the past 10 years or so, the availability of credit has increased to a ridiculous degree. Those credit cards were handed out under the current bankruptcy statutes, and now that the irresponsibility of the lenders has come back to bite them in the ass, they want to make things tougher on consumers. Give me a break. Banks seem to be developing a pattern of getting themselves into trouble and asking the government to bail them out – let’s not forget the S&L; bailout from the eighties that wound up costing us over 150 billion dollars. ...

A reader sent along this excellent link to a detailed article on Ruby. From Tara “ResearchBuzz” Calishain, a link to another article critiquing UCITA. As long as states keep considering this stupid law, I’m going to keep linking to articles explaining just why it’s so stupid. Here’s a truly cool project: a group is working on porting Nethack to the Palm. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like a terribly active project. Joel on tools you can trust. ...

Anyone using Ruby? It’s an object oriented scripting language with Perlish syntax … I guess for some people that’s about as close as you can get to Hell, but it sounds pretty interesting to me. Three years after the initial signing of the treaty to ban land mines, the United States and other Cold War great powers still refuse to join in. Our excuse is that we still need land mines to use in the DMZ between North and South Korea. In the meantime, land mines buried all over the (third) world kill and maim people every day, long after the reasons they were planted in the first place were forgotten. ...

Wow, last month’s Wired contained a great article by David Corn on the reasons why more government documents aren’t published on the Web. I had forgotten about all those promises Newt Gingrich made in 1994 about Congress putting everything on the Web. The article is comprehensive and incredibly useful. The government is nowhere near where it need to be on this. One of the coolest ideas that’s taking root is publicly available wireless LANs. People with high speed connections are allowing anyone with a wireless ethernet card to access their LAN and connect to the Internet, making it possible for people to get access to the Internet for free from wherever they are. Obviously lots more people have to participate to make this useful, but it could be really, really cool if it catches on. ...