August 2003

Killer Apps

August 6, 2003

A few killer apps I've been thinking about.... Some are partially built.

Online bookshelf. Safari at oreilly.com has the concept but it's missing the feature that would get me to subscribe. I have about 50 O'Reilly press books sitting on the shelf. If I could use ISBN or even answer a randomly selected question from the text and register the print copy for online access I'd subscribe in a minute. The savings in the weight of my backpack and the ability to access the books from anywhere I'm online would be well worth it.

Good and Bad of the upgrade

August 3, 2003

I completed most of the Drupal upgrade last night. The bad that has to be fixed.... permalinks are broken as a result of the change in the architecture. For the moment I've made this change in node.module to get the # to appear again (lines 526-529 which were 526-528). However older permalinks are broken for the moment.

   // if ($main == 1 && $node->teaser && $node->teaser != $node->body)  # Comment out to Put Permalinks on all nodes
   {
      $links[] = l(t("#"), "node/view/$node->nid", array("title" => t("Permalink to this posting.")));
    }

Next I'll look at either mod-rewrite or a php script to allow the addressing of nodes without the argument based form of '?" since search engines don't follow those links as well.

Upgrade to Drupal 4.2.0

August 2, 2003

The upgrade to Drupal 4.2.0 went smoothly. Some nice new features I'll investigate in the morning.

Telco vs. RIAA

August 1, 2003

SBC today filed suit in an attempt to stop "a flood of recording-industry court orders that seek to track down Internet users who might be illegally copying music."

Meanwhile Senator Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate's committee on investigations, called for an investigation of RIAA's tactics.

Another reason to unplug the cable

August 1, 2003

Somewhere recently I read an article talking about the fear that satellite and cable companies will start using provisions in their contracts to prevent people from hooking up devices that may diminish advertisers revenue.

Today while waiting for the car to be re-repaired I was reading an article in this month's 2600 about the provision stating that servers can't be connected to cable companies' broadband internet. This presents some real challenges to the future of the desktop computer. A very powerful view of the future would suggest that all computers are nodes, both client and server, to others. There are applications such as Userland's Radio, and Apple's iTunes that include servers.

There are some geeks that use many servers. For example e-mail is much easier for me to handle with qmail running on each laptop with the ability to connect to various networks. This doesn't even touch the file sharing servers (NFS, SAMBA etc.) that are used to share files between the machines. And then there are database, contact etc. servers....

To truly experience the benefits that will come from personal computing in the next years it's time to unplug the cable until the cable companies get the message and begin to work a more reasonable user-agreement for everyone involved.

C7 and 22

August 1, 2003

We have a couple of vending machines at work that are chronically ill. The first, a Pepsi bottle dispenser has a constant full row of bottles. The remainder of the machine can be empty but C7 will remain full. At some point one might believe the vending machine operator might get the wiser and figure out the machine errantly says the row is sold out. Several months have passed and the problem persists.

On the other end there is another machine with slot 22. Slot 22 is consistently filled with the last tantalizing bag of Cheetos. The rest of the machine is largely full and only the Cheetos are so low. The bag remains stuck, as it has been for several weeks. When do people stop looking at such things.

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