Dell has discontinued their DJ MP3 Player. I’m not happy to see iPod competitors go, but this was just another case of a hardware vendor quickly throwing together me-too product that added nothing new to the space. Create something great and people will buy it. iRiver and Creative aren’t selling the numbers of players that Apple is, but I get the impression that they are doing pretty well. They make very nice players with unique features.
Technorati has released some statistics regarding the Blogs that they track. The most interesting to me is that 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after they have created their blog. That’s just a little better than half. That’s pretty good in my experience. Here’s a summary of the rest of the stats.
Since I haven’t been able to post for the last month-plus, here are some things I’ve wanted to get up here.
Regarding Browsers
Well, I’ve been here, but my blog has not. An OS X update nuked my blog and I haven’t had the time or will to try to fix it. The problem? A config issue in my php.ini file. Why didn’t I think of that?! Ha. Just for my own future reference (because I know I will have to do this again), I had to add /tmp/mysql.sock to the mysql.default_socket parameter.
Told you this was totally obvious. Anyway, the great thing is that it gave me an opportunity to upgrade to MySQL 5 and WordPress 2.0.1.
Sony may be coming out with a new e-book reader and I think that this may be the time for it. I have been thinking a lot about the relevancy of newspapers today and always come to the conclusion that there is no better source for information today, but that the delivery of that content is not what people want today. I have little interest in subscribing to my local newspaper (or any newspaper) and I don’t often take the time to visit their sites to read the stories. If I could subscribe to the paper and have it delivered in a way that was portable, searchable and easy to read, I would almost certainly do it. I wouldn’t even care if there were ads as long as the content was made available in a way that made it easy for me to read. I hope that Sony releases something wonderful (and Macintosh compatible).
Semi-frequent readers of my site have probably been annoyed by my constant empty “Links” posts. The problem causing this has been a script that I’ve had running every night to grab new bookmarks that I have posted to del.icio.us and list them on the site. This script creates a post whether there are new links or not. I have disabled this and will just run it manually now so that I don’t have this goofy thing posting all of the time. Sorry ‘bout those.
2005 is over and 2006 is here. I haven’t posted for a while and I have a decent excuse. My wife Amanda and I had our first child on December 15. His name is Liam and he is doing very well and we have all enjoyed our time together these past couple of weeks. I’m starting back to work on Tuesday while Amanda has the rest of the month off. Babies have a way of attracting lots of family and friends and it’s been real nice seeing everybody.
My web goals for the coming year? 1) Continue working on site construction methods using semantic-xhtml and CSS. 2) Find some time to start learning Ruby on Rails. The language itself may be a bit of a fad (I don’t know) but the concepts that have everybody excited about it will be helpful in lots of ways. 3) Finally acquire some respectable skills with Javascript. 4) Re-acquaint myself with Adobe’s software given their acquisition of Macromedia.
Mozilla hasn’t announced it yet, but it’s out there. You can get the final 1.5 for macintosh here.
Word on the net is that Firefox 1.5 final will be released today.
The photo to the right is a snapshot of the front page of the Journal Star web page (our local daily paper) today. I realize that they did $100,000 in damage and that’s pretty incredible, but really – is this front page news? DC had their beltway sniper, we have… “Get the whole story on their site”:www.journalstar.com/articles/…
This morning I worked with two students from Cambridge, Nebraska on web development topics. Here are the links and other resources that I mentioned during that time.
h3. Downloadable Files
h3. Web Sites
h3. Books
Google has a few new things out.
Today was my birthday and my wife got us tickets to see harry potter tonight. We thought that the line would be sick, so got there early and we were almost the first ones -- felt kinda dorky (but got great seats!!). Line was much worse for the movie after ours -- it reminded me of the star wars opening weekend. Anyway. If you like potter, see it. It's good. It's dark, but I think they toned parts of it down. My memories of the book are a little more evil. The movie makes assumptions that everyone pretty much knows all of the characters, so I imagine that somebody new to the series would be pretty confused. For a book that really featured more quidditch (sp?) than any of the others, this movie had not a single game -- only a short scene at the beginning of people gathering for the world cup. Even with dropping the games and glossing over parts of the book and the characters, the movie weighs in at around 2 hours and 15 minutes while focusing primarily on the events surrounding the tri-wizard tournament and Harry's, Ron's and Hermione's adolescent spats.
After last Sunday's incident in Pennsylvania, where both students were found to have "blogs"?which didn't seem to forecast anything about what happened?schools and parents seem to be giving blogs much more attention. I hope that this provides opportunity for parents, teachers, administrators and anybody working with youth to start visiting these sites and to become familiar with them. It is futile to try blocking these sites for the purposes of keeping children away from them (I'm all for blocking when it comes to instructional management -- keeping students on task). Internet access and computer availability is simply too easy to come by to control it. Student must be taught, early, the dangers of having their lives exposed online. Schools and school district could perhaps slow some of this by providing opportunities for students to blog in a more productive, monitored and safe enviornment.
I was talking with my friend Dan this morning and he’s giving a presentation tonight regarding Internet Safety based on the government’s iSafe program. He asked what I thought about sites like Xanga and MySpace.
The real questions seem to be, “should these sites be blocked by schools and parents” and “should students be allowed to use these?”.
The broader question that gets asked is “are blogs bad?"
First of all, blogs are not bad. In fact, I believe that students should be encouraged to blog. Blogging encourages students to express themselves in passionate ways about things that they care about. Through features such as comments and trackbacks, blogs allow for an interaction and linking of thoughts, ideas and commentary that can not be matched in other ways. Students can be forced to really examine their own opinions on matters and join others in a participatory online forum.
Second, for the most part, Xanga and MySpace are NOT blogs. This is not to say that they could not be used as a blog or that they are invalid ways to share content online. If used in a monitored and guided way, they can be used as effectively as any blogging tool. The majority of posts to these sites are purely social, attention-grabbing text nuggets that equate to public instant-messaging. Users of these services are rewarded for the number of other like-sites that link to them and this encourages users to find ways to attract other people in what teens mistakingly see as a pretty anonymous and harmless world. The truth is that it would be great place for those that prey on the innocent to find a target and learn their name, what they look like, where they attend school, who their friends are and what they like along with daily habits and routines. What could be more dangerous?
Here are a number of articles that I have found that discuss this. A couple of these make the mistake (in my opinion) of saying that bad things can happen and this looks like blogging, so blogging is bad. Other articles explore the good and bad aspects of this issue. I would encourage anybody, before they say that teens shouldn’t blog, to google for K-12 blogging OR go to Will Richardson’s site (weblogg-ed) and see the great things that are being done with blogging.
Microsoft, yesterday, announced a new Web 2.0ish portal that they call live. It seems to be Microsoft's attempt to say, "Hey. We can do this stuff too." You can get a local weather forecast and aggregate numerous news feeds -- all in an interface that does not fully support Firefox yet. (Microsoft is probably still looking for some slimy way to hook Firefox into the OS since they can't seem to do anything without leveraging Windows in some way.)
Still to come, Microsoft says, is an email client and a next generation MSN messenger, along with bookmarks. If this provides a home away from home, this could be a very cool thing for Windows users.
Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. This is the first release candidate of mozilla's next generation Firefox browser, to be released later this year, and it is being made available to their developer and testing community for compatibility testing and to solicit feedback.
Some developers from the original Firefox team have gotten together and created a new browser based on Firefox called Flock. The great thing about flock is that for its core features, it ties into existing web applications. Bookmarks are all stored in your del.icio.us account. You can view flickr photos. You can post to your blog and even use Flock as a RSS reader that is much improved over Firefox. All of this with an improved interface also. Sound good? Go get it.
I didn't write near as much about my experience at MAX as I had planned, but I'm sure that what happened there is going to find it's way into what I write here for a long time. It was a super conference and I think there was a real feeling of sadness at times realizing that this would be the last time that we all came together as Macromedia. Next year Adobe will be running the show and no one knows what that will bring at this point. Will there be a conference? What will it be like? Will it include everybody from designers to coders to server admins or will they work to separate these audiences? I think that everybody who has attended MAX sees the benefit of bringing all of the parties together to mingle and I hope that Adobe continues this. It really is a thrill being around such smart and creative people for a week and -- when it's easy to become tunnel-visioned with a project or organization -- it's helpful to be allowed to step way back to see one's place in moving the internet forward. This is such an exciting time to be a developer and it's important to keep that perspective.