I am saddened by the death of Joe Strummer. The Clash were influential to me in many ways, and I still listen to them on a regular basis. Goodbye Joe, thanks for all the great words and music. Now we’re all lost in the supermarket…

I got myself a cordless drill for Christmas. It makes holes in things. I’ve already taught the girls how to use it. Every 6 year old, and almost 4 year old, should know how to use a cordless drill, right?

Lots of work has been happening in the Drupal world lately, and the admin section is getting better by the day. Hopefully everyone working on it will keep up the current level of improvements, and we’ll soon have a nice little system to deploy.

I’ve not yet deployed Drupal here because it still doesn’t work the way I do. I think if you’re considering a new publishing system to replace your current system you’ll find two things:

1. Systems that conform to the way you work
2. Systems that force you to conform to the way they work

Right now Movable Type is the first one, while Drupal is the second one. In my mind all systems should probably be able to conform to the way you work, while being able to suggest that the way they work might be a better alternative. (This reminds me of the Mac OS X dock controversy.) Drupal’s taxonomy is probably a lot more powerful than Movable Type’s category system right now, of course things change quickly on the internet…

About a month or so ago I shot an email to Mark Pilgrim about using the <cite> tag, and if I was using it right, and lo and behold that tag is back in a big way. My question was about what tag I should use when mentioning a book or movie title, but I guess a person is another valid thingy to cite. I also need to start using the cite attribute in my blockquotes…

Well, I’m enjoying the time off. I didn’t quite get done everything I wanted to get done, but I’ve still got a few days.

Ahhh, the holidays are here! Jeremy says:

And I just know I’m gonna waste time screwing with Windows.

I hear ya, Jeremy. as I’m sure you know, you are a computer guy, and not only that, you are a smart computer guy, so it’s not surprising that people would expect you to know how to fix a computer.

I help my Dad with Windows issues as well, and I’ve never purchased a Windows PC in my life. I’ve used Windows, but only when forced too, not by my own choice, but when we get down to it, I know enough about computers to poke around Windows and attempt to figure things out. Well, at a high level anyway, I won’t be messing with the registry or anything…

Oh, and before you all head off to the relative’s for the holidays, burn a few CD’s containing the latest versions of Firebird and Thunderbird for those unfortunate Windows using people. You might also provide information on the vulnerabilities of IE and Outlook, and suggest that stopping popups and spam are great holiday gift from programmers around the world…

(If that last bit tended to ramble a little, I’ve probably had too much egg nog…)

Gee, how was my timing yesterday in mentioning Atom feeds… See this:

Since yesterday there’s more than a million active Atom 0.3 feeds at
http://www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/atom

Wow…

As mentioned previously, Bloglines now supports Atom feeds. Right. So what does that mean? Well, today it means that any site out there publishing an Atom feed can be viewed using the Bloglines aggregator. Of course, you’ll have to find a list of sites with Atom feeds. There are probably two kinds of feeds. The ones that people created (probably by hand) to test Atom at the time, and the ones that are created by software people wrote at the time. Hopefully people who went the software route have kept up-to-date with the changes to Atom. (I’ve tried to…)

Now most, if not all, of these sites probably also offer some flavor of RSS feed as well. So the real question is, what do you gain from using the Atom feed? Well, today I don’t know if you gain much, besides flashing your geek cred and showing the aggregator makers that supporting Atom is something people want.

Ok, that’s not completely true. So far from what I’ve seen it depends upon what’s in the feeds. For instance, Mark Pilgrim has minimal data in his RSS 2.0 feed, but more extensive data in his Atom feed. My RSS 2.0 feed and Atom feed are nearly identical, both using pretty much everything I could get out of my current publishing system, which admittedly is not a lot…

So where does that lead us to in the future? Heck if I know… My hope is that aggregators that support Atom do something interesting with it. In reality it shouldn’t be a big deal to support Atom, but I think it could be a big deal to showcase Atom. Are there things we can get from Atom that we can’t get with RSS? If so, let’s see it!

Either way, it sure is interesting to watch…

I’ve been testing out Bloglines a bit. it’s a well done application. They now suppport Atom, which is nice. I hope other aggregators do this as well.

I’ve seen this become a common occurance. Someone on a mailing list asks a question:

"I’m looking for a good foo written in bar than runs on fee…"

And without a doubt, some helpful soul will post a reponse like:

"Did you search Google for foo bar fee?"

In some cases they even provide a link!

http://www.google.com/search?q=foo+bar+fee

Now I’m sure some people are actually trying to be helpful (and some are just being smart-asses!) But honestly, I figure if people are smart enough to subscribe to a mailing list, they are smart enough to know that search engines exist. (True, some people aren’t actually smart enough to unsubscribe from a mailing list, but we’ll tackle that another day.)

So in the old days, some know-it-all who didn’t want to share their knowledge, or had no knowledge to share, would suggest RTFM, today it’s “Google for an answer” as the response.

My guess is when someone asks about “a good foo written in bar than runs on fee” what they really want are opinions from people about “a good foo written in bar than runs on fee” or perhaps real-world experience about “a good foo written in bar than runs on fee” right?

And if that doesn’t work you can always try Google Groups…

Open-source projects are often criticized for their silly or odd names… The GIMP, LAME, and even Mozilla are often met with confused looks. I mean, Word and Internet Explorer are very boring names, but they do plainly reveal what the application is about.

Well, just try telling your boss that you want to try Booby…

Welcome to the Booby project

I am VERY interested in your experiences with Booby.

To be fair:

Booby is a multiuser, multilanguage, fully themeable web-based desktop application which provides online management for bookmarks/favorites, contacts, todo’s, notes and news feeds.

So you know, it might actually be useful…

And yes, there are screenshots of Booby.

(Sigh… I can’t even imaging what sort of traffic I’m gonna get from this post…)

Via Gizmodo comes word of a Java based wrist watch.

How does it run?

Well, it’s a little slow…

(Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

I’ve been thinking about a few of the features you see on some web sites, mainly the ’send to a friend’ type thing that lets you fill out a form to send someone a link. I almost never use this, but is it because:

• The function is built into my browser
• I fear the use of my name/email for evil purposes
• I have no friends

I wonder what kind of stats are kept on such a feature and if there is added value to the user in it.

The other feature I question is the ‘print this page’ feature, which (usually) allows you to print a page without the navigation doodads and silly banner ads. I’ve worked on sites that have implemented this, and four years ago it made sense, but now that we have browsers that properly handle print style sheets, is this really needed anymore? Do you ever use it to print a page?

I’m contemplating the importance of such extra features in relation to taking a page and stripping it down, providing to the user only that which adds value. Less is more, right?

I welcome any comments on this….

Those folks at Slim Devices have done it again, this time with the Squeezebox, a wifi enabled network music player. (See review.)

I like these guys, even though the SLIMP3 and Squeezebox don’t really have a place in my lifestyle (lack of budget and lack of listening to music in the home) I’m happy to see them make great products. And to top it all off, they’re a great example of a company that benefits from open-source software, while also giving back to the community. The server software is written in perl and you can download it and use it even without their device. they are also open to the hacker community, and welcome their work.

It’s good to see Slim Devices make cool hardware that people like, and cool software that people can use as they wish. Good Luck guys!

File under: D.I.Y.: Using a Linux box as a sign…