Gadgetopia

Six Apart Japan: Huh. Cool.

Q&A: Microsoft Accelerator Boosts Six Sigma Practices: Microsoft is pushing a set of add-ons for Office and Project that make the software play nice within a Six Sigma methodology framework. For instance: A lot of Six Sigma teams spend an inordinate amount of time creating Microsoft PowerPoint reports, such as ...

Six Apart does their customers right: An amazing response from Six Apart to some systems problems they had last month. Click through for a screencap that will probably blow your mind, considering the service people usually get from vendors. Via Kottke.

Six Apart to buy Live Journal: This is all over the Net this morning, so I'll jump on the "Holy Cow!" bandwagon. I have learnt exclusively that Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad, and Moveable Type is about to acquire Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount.

Brad Choate joins Six Apart: Six Apart has picked up Brad Choate, writer of two of the best MT plugins: MTSQL and MTKeyValue. While I can't write a post about all our new hires, I wanted to take an opportunity to write about the newest addition to our engineering team, ...

F1 Nutter - The Story of Six Wheel Formula One Cars 6: Speaking of odd Formula One experiments, here's another good one: the six-wheeled car. The idea behind this was to hide the front tires behind the front fairing, since tires an aerodynamic pain to deal with -- as far ...

Comment Spam: Six Apart is looking at the problem of comment spam on Movable Type blogs, and they offer some solutions. In particular, I'm encouraged by the new MT-BlackList plugin.

Jobs at Six Apart: They need a Software Engineer and an Executive Assistant. Given my MT hacking of late, I'm a shoo-in. Does it matter that I don't know Perl?

Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam: Could this be the be-all and end-all guide to comment spam? A lot of good research, opinions, and information here. This document describes how malicious or unwanted comments ('comment spam') affect weblogs, the techniques spammers use to abuse weblogs, and the tactics that ...

Publisher goof lets porn ad slip into video game: This is about Rainbox Six 3. Kind of funny, kind of not, depending on how you look at it. About two-thirds of the way through the game, there's a level set in a garage with posters adorning the wall. The URL ...

Bacon turns 'Six Degrees' into a game of giving: A old meme turns into a really nice idea. A year ago, [Bacon] bought the domain name SixDegrees.org. And on Friday, the actor will be at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to launch SixDegrees.org, an online charitable-giving site ...

Submitting TrackBack as an Internet Standard: Six Apart is forming a "Trackback Working Group" to try and make trackbacks an Internet standard. Six Apart has engaged many companies wishing to extend the TrackBack protocol in some way, a proposition that Six Apart is excited about and encourages. However, no one ...

Remember this? A rechargeable battery that can be fully charged in just 6 minutes... Well, now you don't even have to wait that long: Impatient people may find Toshiba's latest invention something that would fit their lifestyle. The company announced Tuesday that it had discovered a way to recharge a ...

A rechargeable battery that can be fully charged in just 6 minutes, lasts 10 times as long as today's rechargeables and can provide bursts of electricity up to three times more powerful is showing promise in a Nevada lab. Altair Technologies of Reno has created a new type of ...

Six Apart Professional Network Overview: This looks like a bribe to get you on a mailing list. The Six Apart Professional Network consists of a number of benefits designed to help you get the most out of Six Apart's Movable Type, TypePad, and TypeKey platforms. Whether you're a consultant, designer, ...

David Raynes: SubCategories 1.2: There was much complaining when Movable Type 3.0 came out that there wasn't anything new in it. To a large extent, the complainers were right there was very little new functionality...on the surface. The real gem of MT3, it turns out, is the new plug-in ...

Movable Type's Spam Hole: Six Apart is getting a little heat for not being more aggressive in notifying people about the recent MT spam vulnerability. The question does arise though, with literally tens of thousands of MT users affected by this vulnerability, why didn't anyone at Six Apart think that ...

How long before someone issues a Movable Type "distribution," and how would Six Apart react? Movable Type is so customizable, that a lot of users have custom preferences, myself included. Whenever I do a new MT install, I find myself loading the same plug-ins, building the same templates, changing the ...

EZ-D: The 48-Hour, No Need To Return DVD!: We've talked about disposable DVDs before, but I saw them for the first time in truck stops on my way to Colorado last week. They were $5.99 each, and could be watched for 48 hours before a chemical coating on the surface ...

Casual computer games go upscale: An interesting look at the evolution of "casual" games. This is an interesting market niche -- it's vaguely defined as simple, cheap, lightweight, downloadable games that appeal to people not normally into the hardcore gaming experience. But, as the article states, they're getting more and ...

I was seriously offered $15,000 for the gadgetopia.com domain name today. I mention this because it's the first time anyone has ever offered to buy the name, which I find odd because I think it's an awesome name. Maybe I'm just deluded. I turned the offer down, incidentally. That might ...

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers: Good for Yahoo -- instead of building their own blogging software, they just partnered with Six Apart to offer Movable Type to all their hosting clients who want to blog. Pre-installed, even. Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for ...

MovableType Madness: Dean over at blogs4God presents a really good wrap-up of the furor over the new Movable Type release. Unbeknowst to me, Six Apart made a change over the weekend to say that mutiple Weblogs in MT used to create one site (for instance, if you have another blog ...

e-t-a-o-n-r-i Spy and the F.B.I.: This is a pretty funny story about a kid, a secret code, and the FBI. About six weeks later, when I happened to be off on another escapade, my mother was visited by a man who identified himself as an investigator from the F.B.I. [ ] ...

TypePad News: Some Frequently Asked Questions: Six Apart has released a list of TypePad features. Still no word on pricing.

Schlotzsky's Offers Free Wi-Fi in Restaurants in Six States; Free Use of In-Store Computers Adds to Wi-Fi Appeal: Free wi-fi is working well for Schlotsky's, apparently. No sign of Wi-Fi at the lone Schlotsky's in Sioux Falls, sadly. More than 40 percent of customers say that free Wi-Fi or the ...

Six Apart ProNet - Plugin Directory - Built for 3.2: If you're on the latest version of Movable Type, take a browse of the plugins built to take advantage of the new API hooks in that version. There's some really great stuff here: Ajaxify Ajaxify is a set of plugins ...

CNet remarks on a study that pokes a little fun at the numerous MS-funded studies that suggest that Windows has a lower TCO, while Linux silently but surely gives you cancer. The study suggests that Windows also has a lower T0t4l c05t 0f 0wnz0rship, the cost a cracker has to ...

When Blobjects Rule the Earth: This is a really interesting concept, buried under a long-winded, rambling speech. This speech was delivered by Bruce Sterling at a conference in late 2004. In it, he reveals the concepts of a "Spime," which is a thing that carries a history with it. You ...

Netflix adds online movie viewing to DVD rental service: It was kin dof obvious that they had to get to this point someday. This is a fairly radical change for them, but I commend them for making the change. Online movie rental service Netflix introduced a new feature Tuesday to ...

Love all...for instant replay at U.S. Open: The animated instant replay system has been a hit at the U.S. Open so far. If the player chooses to consult the replay (each player is allowed two challenges per set), an animated image of the ball hitting the court zooms into focus ...

Everything TypePad!: TypePad has its own blog. Lots of good information on the service here. Six Apart is hitting all the right notes with this one.

A Whole Lotta Features: This is a good tutorial on how to run an entire site from MT, but it runs into a problem that I've written about before. "...and you'll have to limit any site to six different types of information, but it should be clear that for a ...

The Segway is climbing to new heights. "It took six sets of batteries and three drivers, but a Segway scooter made it to the top of New England's tallest peak." Recharge my batteries, I'm going to the top!!

My normal routine these days involves checking the various employment sites looking for future employment. Today I stumbled upon a job that at least in description fits what I'm looking for -- PROGRAMMING/WEB DESIGN/SYSTEMS DEVELOPER. Once I started reading it I couldn't help but think it was a scam. For ...

SnowCraft: It's in the spirit of the season that we revisit this the snowball fight Flash game. Based on my memories of playing it, this has been on the Web for at least six years, which makes it ancient. Call it nostalgic fun.

My TypePad Beta site managed to get a #5 ranking for "Gadgetopia" on Google. Funny. I'll change the name of it now so it stops climbing the ranks, but kudos to Six Apart for getting TypePad blogs so far into the Google index.

Michelin tells teams not to race U.S. Grand Prix: Michelin, who supplied tires for 14 Forumla One teams in this weekend's U.S. Grand Prix, announced after qualifying that their tires were not safe on the final turn at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Problem: In Formula One, you're not allowed to change ...

Download details: Windows AntiSpyware (Beta): Microsoft has a new version of their AntiSpyware tool out. It has some bug fixes, but more importantly it pushes the expiration date of the free version out to December 31, from June 30. That's six more free months for a tool that ...

Reading USAToday.com over a bowl of cereal this morning, I clicked on story about the Columbia shuttle disaster only to get an error about a non-existent domain. I checked the link: http:// cms-preview-site2-t.usatin.usatoday.com/ tech/ news/ 2003-06-04-colu mbia-foam-test_x.htm Looks like a "CMS preview" link accidently made it's way into production. I ...

I've been selected to beta TypePad the new service from Six Apart. I don't know how many were selected (maybe everyone who applied?), but you have to agree to a non-disclosure agreement, so I can tell you all about it, but then I'd have to kill you. (Long, pregnant ...

XSNsports.com: All those hours in front of the X-Box are about to pay off. Take your skills online, and compete in a feeder tournament in one of the six XSN Sports games. If you come out on top, you could be on your way to Los Angeles to compete for ...

The Good Book(s): Six Apart has a roundup of all the Movable Type books out on the market right now. There's a quite of a few of them, it turns out. This one is 432 pages. (What are you going to say about MT for 432 pages? They must dig ...

Striking fear into the heart of the spotted owl since 1991: The walking machine adapts automatically to the forest floor. Moving on six articulated legs, the harvester advances forward and backward, sideways and diagonally. It can also turn in place and step over obstacles. Depending on the irregularity of ...

Vaporware: Nuke 'Em if Ya Got 'Em: Wired has named the best in vaporware. They even gave a Lifetime Achievement Award. "After all," [a reader] wrote, "what could possibly compete against a game that is six years in the making, is called by the own company's president 'turtleware,' and has ...

Microsoft Small Business Software: Microsoft has released a six-month free trial of Small Business Server 2003. The rumors were true: there is a Standard Version without SQL Server, and a Premium Version with it. Still no word on pricing, and I can't find it for sale in retail outlets, so ...

BW Online | Business Software Needs a Revolution: Commentary on installed software vs. ASP software: "Talk to a typical software buyer, and you hear the same complaints: It's too complex, with installation projects that can take years to finish. It's too expensive, with starting prices in the six figures and ...

Joe and I were wondering something today: why do so many ecommerce sites ask you for your "Card Type" (Visa, MasterCard, whatever) during the checkout process? Isn't the card type always derivable from the number? (e.g. MasterCard starts with five, Visa with four, Discover with six, Amex with three, ...

The Most Powerful Diesel Engine in the World: A simple page on the largest engines in the world: six to fourteen cylinder inline diesels used to power container ships. You think the 8-liter in your Dodge Viper is big? This baby tops out at 25,000-liters. They're almost 100 feet long ...

waffle: under the iron: Anil Dash of Six Apart and LinkedIn has some comments over at Waffle about the future of The Semantic Web: "The most productive next steps are going to happen in a few phases, I suspect. The first will be new generations of blogging tools that natively ...

Google Groups must have gotten much faster at some point. In the past, when you posted a message, you got all kinds of text afterwards telling you it was going to be, like, six hours until your message got posted. But today, I got this: And, sure enough, my post ...

Meet the Disintegrator: 24 barrels of rubber band minigun madness: Truly, without question, the greatest rubber band gun ever made in the history of the world. Unlike your dinky little six-shooter, this model boasts a 288-band capacity and 40-round-per-second firing capability, making it one of the most dangerous weapons to ...

Top Five Comfort Games: I like the idea of a "comfort game." For years, it was Total Annihilation for me. For the past six months, it's been Funky Truck 4WD over at Tea Games. Red is good for this too. Like food, games can provide comfort in a time of ...

One of the things that drives me nuts about Microsoft is the licensing. The other day, I found myself wishing for a book or a class on Microsoft licensing so I could understand it...then I realized how utterly absurd that was. Understanding licensing should not be a core competency of ...

We took a cue from our arch-rivals over at Electric Pulp and finally created a Flickr account (give us six years or so, and we re bound to pick up on a new trend or two). Our first activity is a photoset of the Blend Offices. So, take a tour and ...

There's a new worm that's ramping up quick. It's an email that appears to be from Microsoft with a subject line something like "newest net critical pack" or "Network Patch" or another one of about six variants. It has an executable attached. I'm getting about one of these every five ...

Trigger: Joe covered Trigger in a Friday diversion a few months ago. I got hooked on it and played it until my fingers bled. The only drawback to the game was that the same old maps got boring. Well, version 5 has been released, and there are scads of new ...

An experiment based on existing theories that most people are connected via a small number of people, has been proven using email. It showed that messages only have to be forwarded on average six times to reach almost any other e-mail user. "The idea was tested by asking participants to ...

Six Apart ProNet - Plugin Directory: The Movable Type plugins directory has really grown up. If you haven't been there for a while, it's worth stopping by and browsing. Lots of new stuff. I maintain that the quality of plugins for MT is far and away its strongest asset and ...

Life! Give My PC Life!: Fortune Magazine (of all people) identifies the parts to build a stunning machine. I didn't grab the calculator, but as near as I can tell, they're built something in the six or seven thousand dollar range, and that's before the $4,500 monitor. They don't even ...

When you sign up for a Google account these days, they evaluate your password strength as you type it. The area marked "Weak" above said "Too Short" until I had six characters, then it said "Weak," until I added a few numbers and punctuation symbols to the end, and it ...

Wii Sports Experiment, Results!: Good for this guy. Six weeks ago, I began what has become a huge obsession of mine. It is called the “Wii Sports Experiment” (Read my original announcement of this from Early December ‘06). I outlined a 6 week game plan for myself, the idea being ...

EA: The Human Story: Here's a riveting essay on the apparently hideous work practices at Electronic Arts, the game manufacturer. [...] they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came ...

A Standard for Site Organization: This is just a first-rate idea. This was actually written six years ago, and many sites still haven't pulled it off. A selection of well-chosen and well-named root-level directories, implemented across as many sites as possible, would go a long way toward easing the complexities ...

movabletype.org: News: Six Apart clarifies Movable Type licensing: "...for personal, non-commercial users, Movable Type is free to download and use. We don't consider an Amazon wishlist link or a PayPal donation link to be a commercial use of your site, so you're free to update your weblog and maintain your ...

Calif. judge nixes online processing of Microsoft claims: Lindows put up the site, Microsoft sued, Lindows refused to remove it, and, well, here we are. Lindows.com's site, MSfreePC.com, promised to simplify the process and provide instant gratification. Users, after answering a few questions, were given Lindows' Linux operating system or ...

Start-up launches Linux legal protection Open Source Risk Management plans on Monday to begin selling Linux users protection against copyright infringement claims such as those levied by the SCO Group. The New York-based company is launching the insurance-like offering after a six-month study that compared Linux with several versions of ...

Asian Pirates Sell Microsoft's Next Windows System: Longhorn is in the wild in Asia already. Underscoring the scale of U.S. companies' copyright problems in Asia, CDs containing software Microsoft has code named "Longhorn" are on sale for six ringgit ($1.58) in southern Malaysia. Microsoft's current version of Windows, XP, sells ...

TypePad to have 10,000 users by December, expects positive cash flow by end of 2003: You have to subscribe to Business 2.0 to read this, so I'll quote by proxy to Roland's site. "By December, the company says, it will have 10,000 users of its latest product, TypePad, each paying ...

More on Perplex City: This sounds really, really fun. Great name, too. [...] the gist of Perplex City is that you buy packs of six cards for $5 a pack and enter a world of puzzle solving, interactive fiction, and real-world/fantasy crossover. Each Perplex City card has a puzzle on ...

Six Apart - Project Comet: It's vague like an Amway presentation, but the folks over there aren't dumb, so I'm sure it'll be huge. Project Comet will launch in early 2006 and will combine the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered ...

I've moved into a fair amount of houses by this point in my long life, and I've determined something: plans made when the house is empty will change drastically as the house starts to fill up with stuff. You see, when a house is sitting empty, you look around and ...

Low-tech valet parking gets high-tech treatment: Parking cars ain't what it used to be. While paparazzi save their flashbulbs for celebrities, every car that's valet parked at the Pechanga Resort & Casino on the edge of Southern California's urban sprawl is automatically photographed from six angles. The name of the ...

Wanted: Master Lego Model Builder "Applicants will be given 2,000 Legos and 45 minutes to impress a panel of judges. Those chosen for the second round will be notified within 24 hours and asked to come to San Diego in late January. [...] Patrick DeMaria, a LegoLand master model builder, ...

The case against Sitecore: If you re going to quote the industry standard CMS evaluation report in support of your product, you better quote all of it, apparently. CMS vendor SiteCore cites a previous version of our Web CMS Report to list some of the strengths we identified in their tool. ...

Boy, 4, dies after riding Epcot attraction: This ride is apparently pretty intense. From the CNN article: In 2003, Disney began placing motion sickness bags in the ride. During an eight-month period in 2003-04, six people over age 55 were taken to the hospital for chest pain and nausea after ...

Spam Cube: A spam filtering appliance for the home. It's $150, and sits between your modem and your router. Presumably it intercepts POP and IMAP requests and cleans them before returning the results. Is there a point to this? Why a hardware solution? Just to protect more than one computer? ...

300 Images From 1800 Sites: This guy went icon shopping at major sites. If you want to know what people are using for a "printer friendly" icon, here's your site. I roughly estimate that for every six web sites I scoured, I was able to acquire one graphic image. I ...

WiFi Speed Spray: I've been waiting for this. "The patented formula in WiFi Speed Spray is the result of years of scientific research and testing. Simply spray the area around your computer. Usually five or six sprays is all it takes. As your computer sends data, each bit also carries ...

Six Log: Why We Need Echo: Ben Trott's reasons why we need to re-write RSS: "...can't we just make these improvements to RSS? And that's the problem: we really can't. Setting aside any of the political issues because, for this initiative to be accepted, it needs to be done ...

Blogging Solutions for Business - Movable Type Enterprise: I guess the only big differences I'm seeing from the standard version are LDAP integration and Oracle as a possible data backend. Of course, these are both huge for a lot of companies. The most popular platform for business blogging now offers ...

Microsoft blunder leaks information about Vista: Microsoft accidentally published a page on its site that leaked details of the upcoming Vista. (This is why you need good content management, people.) Apparently there are going to be six primary versions of Vista. Included in those listed offerings was Windows Starter 2007, ...

AOL reveals top 10 spam subject lines of 2003: Here's a shocker. Viagra. Lowest mortgage rates. Hot XXX action. As seen on Oprah. [...] Those four phrases and six more topped the list of the most commonly-used subject lines for junk, or "spam" e-mail in 2003, Internet service provider AOL ...

I've seen Ford Explorer limousines, Hummer H2 limousines, and Ford Mustang limousines, but this is a new one on me. Vaca Meter Limousines has converted an old Boeing 727-100 and converted it into a 50-seat luxury limousine. [...] It's powered by a six-cylinder, turbocharged diesel engine in the back and ...

Yahoo Submits DomainKeys to IETF: Six months after first announcing their plans, Yahoo! has submitted a spec for "DomainKeys" to the Internet Engineering Task Force for approval as a standard. Good for them. DomainKeys is a way of authenticating email senders, using public and private key pairs and the domain ...

Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot: Here s a five-minute video of a full auto shoot somewhere in Oklahoma where folks take their machine guns and just go nuts. Included is the heart-warming footage capped above, where a girl no more than six-years-old spits hot death downrange with her daddy s machine gun. You ll ...

Blake Ross, one of the folks who started FireFox, posted a funny story about his grandfather's browser evangelism: So when I returned from the airport bathroom two weeks ago, I was hardly surprised to find him [...] engaging the head Rabbi of Israel in a delightful conversation about Firefox. We ...

Computer artist doodles oodles of 'Google's: Here's an interview with the guy that draws all Google's little logos. (Incidentally, I'm guessing Google is six today?) Herald: Which letters are your favorite targets for manipulation? Hwang: Understandably, the "O" and the "L" are the easiest to deal with. The "O" has ...

Flash steps out of the browser: We talked about this six months ago when it was first announced. Good to hear it's come to fruition. "Software maker Macromedia on Wednesday released a test version of Central, a new add-on for its widespread Flash animation format that's intended to make Internet ...

Waiting For the Big One: People are talking about Google IPO as if it's the Second Coming. "It's difficult to precisely estimate the offering's potential size. The whispering in the Valley is that Google's revenues this year could be in the range of $700 million to $1 billion, with profits ...

I'm of the opinion that tales of Wikipedia's inaccuracy are widely overblown, but if you ever read any Encyclopedia Brown books as a kid, Adam Cadre's Wikipedia Brown is hilarious. "Wow, [the zoo's koala population] tripled in six months?", Officer Clancy asked, whistling. "Yes, it's true", said the zookeeper, "We ...

Cracking Down on Cyberspace Land Grabs: Great article on the New Thing stealing IP blocks. "Network operators were galvanized by a particularly brazen case in April, when a trail of spam led to the discovery that no-less than six /16s nearly 400,000 addresses had been misappropriated from ...

Here's a CSS technique that I didn't know about, and perhaps you didn't either. To center an element on the page like the image above just set the margins to "auto." This only works on block elements, so you'll need to modify the "display" value for images. ...

Why use Stripe Snoop?: This is from a SourceForge project for Stripe Snoop, a mag stripe reader that shows you what information is on the magnetic area of the ubiquitous cards in your wallet. A little scary. Open your wallet. How many cards in there have magstripes on them? Three? ...

Wired News: Signs of Life in Silicon Valley: Jobs are suddenly popping up again in The Valley. "'I wouldn't tell anyone to pop the bottle of champagne because the recession in the Valley is over, but it's definitely better than it was six or seven months ago,' said Alan Hattman, ...

From Moveable Type: I can't wait... "A small sampling of some of the features that will be in Movable Type Pro: Improved author management, Remote publishing, Custom entry fields, Integrated spellchecker, Registration for comments and posting." Here's some more information from the official Six Apart press release: "Along with its ...

Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk?: There appears to be trouble in Sealand with the founders arguing about whether it's still...afloat (sorry, sorry). "A widely publicized project to transform a man-made platform in the English Channel into a 'safe haven' for controversial Web businesses has failed due to political, technical ...

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type - Staggernation.com: Very interesting plugin for Movable Type. This would let you extend MT with arbitrary data stored as XML somewhere. It might be a hassle for every entry, but I'm running into a problem with this site whereby I'd like to store about six ...

Stanford rejects hacker applicants: As near as I can tell, these people didn't do any "hacking," per se. They just put their ID numbers into a querystring argument. You'd have to be pretty loose with the term to call that "hacking." Admissions sites of at least six schools were accessed ...

The Surprising Legacy of Y2K: It turns out there were some very surprising secondary effects of the Y2K panic. I will admit to having never considered any of these in my mind, Y2K was a huge hole into which companies poured money to no benefit other than the acute ...

Wired News: Every Sims Picture Tells a Story: Players of The Sims online are using the "family albums" to create graphic novels of sorts: "[Nicole] Service, known in the Sims community as nsknight, has created several albums that are highly ranked by her peers. Among them is her six-part Vanderbilt ...

This weekend Apple opened six new 'mini' stores around the country. They are much smaller than a normal Apple Store and they allow Apple to enter more markets without the high initial start up costs associated with larger stores. Once again the design is impeccable. The stores have clear white ...

Mena's Corner: Support System: These three women were the source of a stunning number of posts on the MT support forums (one of them had upwards of 10,000). I worked with two of them (I don't remember which two, sadly) on the MT Wiki when it was first getting off ...

NewsGator Case Study: Triple Point Technology: This is a great case study by the guys over at NewsGator about integrating blogs and RSS into the enterprise. "Internal weblogs were created using Six Apart's Movable Type. Internal authors are accustomed to sending email, but now post certain information to their new ...

Does anyone want to weigh in on how much longevity plays into search engine positioning? Take two sites: both are really equal in terms of search engine optimization, and both have an equal number of inbound links. But one has been on the Web six months (long enough to get ...

The bloated, dysfunctional world of Enterprise Solutions: This is just a great rant, and one that I can so relate too. I've been neck-deep in a "Enterprise Solution" type of project (which I pushed for, I'll admit), and got nowhere in a full year except six-figures in the hole. I've ...

Microsoft and Harrah s unveil high-tech interactive bar table : The Microsoft Surface video that came out last year was the butt of many jokes ( the future of computing will be a big-ass table ), but lookie here Microsoft and Harrah s Entertainment introduced a high-tech interactive bar table Wednesday that lets patrons ...

Thirty years ago today, Evel Knievel attempted to jump the Snake River in Idaho. I have vague memories of going to the pay-per-view to watch this historic event and I still have the tickets to the show to prove I was a pack rat even at the age of six. ...

Vacuum leader Dyson sets sights on hand dryer market: I have a Dyson vacuum, and it s been one of the most amazing gadgets I own. The first time someone sees one of these hand dryers in the States, comment here. I will drive a fair distance to use it once. ...

Every night, five mysterious thuds wake up neighborhood: On the heels of Joe's post about ghosts in the machines in Sciliy, I found this over at Boing Boing. It's been six months since the residents of Manor Green Road in London have had an uninterrupted night's sleep. "[T]hey have been ...

SC072 | Products | SiCortex: You think your desktop hardware is fast, buddy? Look what sits inside this little desktop tower, just in case I have to accurately model a hurricane season or something. Note the processor count and RAM numbers. The SiCortex SC072 “Catapult” is the personal version of ...

Office hunts for new niches: This is an interesting trend for Microsoft, and one we ve written about before. It involves add-ons that customize a product for a certain vertical. The first seven products from the Accelerator Program will focus on specific business segments and tasks: sales proposals, personnel recruiting, quality-management ...

Branson car sets amphibious record: I'll admit that when we wrote about the Aquada before, I figured the car was just a toy. However, you can't really argue with this. Entrepreneur Richard Branson has set a new world record by driving across the English Channel in an amphibious sports car ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...

GroupOrg - Features: Yesterday I mentioned that the PHPCollab project had forked. Today, I find out that my very own open source project, InfoCentral, which I handed off to someone else two years ago, has forked. There has been quite a bit of drama surrounding InfoCentral lately, with the guy ...

Why Microsoft won't beat Six Apart: A good article on how and why software gets adopted by the masses. Interesting information on what happened with Quark. "I wouldn't worry too much yet, because no team has asked me the important question yet. What's that? 'How do you get the A-list ...

One Man Against Secrecy: Interesting story about what one guy can do with a Web site. Armed with a pocket-size copy of the Constitution, the Freedom of Information Act and an investigator's patience for source-building, Aftergood is out to slay what he sees as the arbitrariness of the U.S. system ...

Gateway feels lure of consumer electronics: Here s more on the Gateway transformation I wrote about a few weeks ago. Moving toward a business model it calls branded integrator, Gateway is preparing to unveil a wide range of consumer-electronics products that work together and share content. It is also designing services ...

Well, it's been about six months since we last posted a Friday Diversion, which makes it less of a weekly feature and more of a biannual one. We've got two here that won't keep you busy all weekend (I hope not, anyway), but should get you frustrated enough to build ...

Six Apart released a Developer Edition of Movable Type 3.0 today. While I haven't been able to find a detailed feature list of what's new in 3.0 it looks like they've made significant changes to their licensing scheme. Apparently one of the big improvements over previous versions is an improved ...

Dusting Off the Archive for the Web: Sports Illustrated is following the lead of the New York TImes and putting everything they ever wrote all 53 year s worth on the Web for free. Their old content is a huge asset in terms of their abilityt to capture eyeballs ...

Mint has reminded me of the some of the weird terms in which I get "stuck" in Google. I don't know why this is -- for some reason, Google just fixates on certain posts. (On a related note, my five-day-old post on SpamStopsHere is now number three on Google for ...

Last year, Verisign unleashed upon the world the universally despised 'Site Finder' service, which changed the way DNS works so that any time you typed a domain name that didn't exist, the DNS system would send your browser to a web page where Verisign would (mostly) try to sell you ...

Internet agency considers freeing up single-letter domains: Here's some interesting information about single letter domain names. I didn't know that they weren't all in circulation. Single-letter names under ".com," ".net" and ".org" were set aside in 1993 as engineers grew concerned about their ability to meet the expected explosion in ...

Fusebox Web Application Standard: I read a book on Fusebox a number of years ago, and I found a site using it today which jogged my memory. It's an MVC implementation which was originally written for ColdFusion, but which they've expanded into a language-neutral "methodology": To build a Fusebox application, ...

Last week, I posted about installing SpamAssassin for Exchange. It was a simple install, and it worked pretty well. I was getting a 50% filter rate right out of the box, and I was confident I could get it up to 70% or so by cranking down the threshold. In ...

I m more than a bit behind on my reports from the GM Blogger Junket, but I m going to try and catch up here. I ve already written about the Milford Proving Grounds in general, and about the Advanced Driving Techniques course we went through in the morning. Next up: lunch. ...

Airbus bets on building largest commercial plane: The Airbus A380 is set to be unveiled next month. It will be the largest passenger plane in history. Its wings stretch nearly the length of a football field, about 50 feet longer than any plane in the air today. Nose to tail, ...

Joel Spolksy has a reputation for hiring great people. He made a movie about his intern program, in fact, which cultivates the best of the best. He s distilled all of this hard-won knowledge in a new book, which is titled for his theory of good programmers: Smart and Gets Things ...

I needed to find out the public IP for my workplace just now, so went to my old standby whatismyip.com. When you hit that page your IP address is at the top very handy and no monkey business but today there was a notice down below that the ...

Seven flights of fancy that fizzled: My generation was totally lied to. In all the children's books we would read about "the future," they said we would all have flying cars. Growing up, I didn't care about anything else just tell me when my flying car will be ready. ...

DATABASE DEBUNKINGS - HOME: My dreams have come true -- I am Fabian Pascal's "Quote of the Week." He took this quote from the rip roarin' argument we had a few weeks ago. I said: What I need in a database is place where I can persist and retrieve data. ...

Plugin Contest Entry 1: Tiny Orwell 1.0" href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/archives/000357.html">Plugin Contest Entry 1: Tiny Orwell 1.0: Password-protect your Movable Type blog using this plugin. Tiny Orwell is a simple TypeKey-like authentication system written in the spirit of the Trackback reference implementation and blosxom. This script provides an alternate to TypeKey for ...

Tricks of the Trade: Mother: I read this early this morning. If you are repairing something which will need to take a lot of pressure (e.g. a rucksack or leather shoe), use dental floss,. It threads onto a needle easily and is virtually unbreakable. You can also make it black ...

Blogs in the Workplace: A good article with a dozen or so examples of how blogs could fit into corporations: "Mr. Tang has also used blogs to coordinate group projects, like the recent process of interviewing job candidates for a programming position. The various people at the company who spoke ...

On Kiddie Records Weekly you can download mp3 audio files of famous (and not so famous) kids story records from days gone by. Only one set of files is available for download on any given week, but links for BitTorrent feeds are available for all preceding weeks. With titles like ...

A while back I posed a question about cryptography that no one could answer. "How does a cryptologist know that he has decoded something? If he's trying to brute force an encrypted message, he has to try umpteen different keys. So how does he know when he's got the right ...

Well, this will probably be the last entry of 2004. This year we posted 1,530 entries and you posted 2,962 (!) comments. As the comment count should verify, Gadgetopia went buckwild this year. According to Google Adsense, we push about 100,000 page views a month to the HTML version (and ...

Super-speed broadband could arrive as early as '06: This would be nice. This would drop a full-length movie down to...five or six minutes, provided the upload was fast enough. Broadband Internet access via TV cables will be able to hit 100 megabits per second as early as next year, 50 ...

He, For One, Does Not Welcome Our New Wii Overlords: Interesting commentary about how the apparently massive success of the Wii will affect harder-core games. If Nintendo has its way, young males will no longer be the dominant segment of the console audience and this transition appears to be ...

Movable Type 3.1 Launched: We mentioned some of the big changes in MT 3.1 a few weeks ago. It's now in the wild. The most prominent new feature in Movable Type 3.1 is the dynamic page functionality, allowing you to choose between static page generation or dynamic pages on a ...

Style Master Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Editor: Western Civilisation has released Style Master 3. We've talked about this software before. About a year ago, we said. "...I don't see a need for it, really. It's a GUI for building CSS sheets with controls for just about every possible directive and ...

CNN.com: CNN released their re-design today. Lots of rounded corners, and very Web 2.0-ish. They designed for a minimum width of about 1,000 pixels. Very CSS-compliant. I shut off stylesheets and it turned into clean, readable HTML. They re finally building Web sites like the rest of us. In the end, ...

Well Macworld San Francisco 2005 is underway and as expected, Steve had some exciting announcements during his keynote. Some expected and some surprising. iLife '05 - A nice upgrade to an alreday great product. I'm excited because now iPhoto can handle any RAW photos I may take. $79 and ships ...

Dick Henry, a Professor at Johns Hopkins University, has a problem with the Gregorian Calendar System. His beef with the 365 day year is that it horks up the class schedules he prints up for his students, what with the dates ending up on different days of the week from ...

the business value of web standards: This is a good article about how to write good, solid HTML, and the author hits on something I discovered as well when re-assessing how to teach HTML for The Joshua Project. "For years, the standards community has been extolling the virtues of keeping ...

[Note: For updated information about this problem, and details of (1) a hardware migration to a new server, and (2) a same-time upgrade from SBS 2000 to 2003, check out this post from July 23, 2005.] Well, I was in the office until 4 a.m., but I think I actually ...

Simplicity: This is a good essay that's a huge counterpoint to the "embrace limitations" philosophy that 37 Signals started pushing a few years ago when Basecamp came out. I think what Joel is saying is that you need features, but they need to appear simple to the end users. And ...

A Windows user spends a week with a Mac: This is from last year, but it's a good essay about transitioning from Windows to Mac. It seems balanced, and it reinforces my overall feeling: six of one, half dozen of the other. I think Macs are pretty, but I doubt ...

Brave New Web by Charles C. Mann: This article is admittedly seven years old, but it details what happened to Randal Schwartz, Perl Legend, and author of thee books on Perl. He was contracted as a sysadmin for Intel at the time: "Hearing of a security incident at another computer ...

Sony ships 1 million PS3s in Japan, expected to miss target: This doesn't surprise me much, I guess -- $600 is a tough pill to swallow. Sony said on Tuesday it has shipped 1 million PlayStation 3 game consoles in Japan, but speculation is rising that the company would fall ...

Are the Browser Wars Back? - How Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer: This is a good article from Slate that rings true Mozilla and Firefox are surging in the market right now. More and more, people are switching. You've probably been told to dump Internet Explorer for a Mozilla ...

I Spot ACCESS is an Iowa company that is currently working with the state of Iowa to set up free wireless hotspots at all of the states highway rest areas. An article in today's Des Moines Register points to increased tourism and spending in local communities as a benefit of ...

The Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2: Movable Type 3.2 is due pretty soon, and they're adding some great features to it. Here's a welcome addition: a comment (and trackback) rating system. [...] the system isn't just for fighting spam: Any feedback item can be have a positive score ...

Well, I went ahead and upgraded to Movable Type 3.1 with the free version I got from joining the MT Professionals Network (still trying to find a catch...). Note that if you're considering a 3.1 upgrade, wait there are errors in the upgrade scripts that Six Apart is working ...