I placed a couple of bids on Newton Messagepad auctions on eBay this weekend, thinking I might be able to pick one up relatively inexpensively, since they are discontinued and a decade old. Man, is there an active community of folks still lusting after these bad boys.
The auctions for the MP2100 quickly grew too rich for my blood, but I was able to win both an eMate 300 and a Messagepad 120 with a bunch of accessories.
Read MoreI’m trying to pick up a Newton Messagepad 2100 (still by far the best PDA ever created) via eBay, and was trying to find a way to track the item I’ve bid on via RSS so I can keep up to date on the auction.
But, eBay doesn’t offer an RSS feed for item auction notification? That seems like a HUGE oversight! It’s such a natural fit - I use RSS for notification from other things like Subversion, Basecamp, Tracks, etc… eBay would just fit into that. Every time something changes on an item, or on my watchlist, or my bidlist, there should be an entry in an RSS feed for me to monitor.
Read MoreI’ve been using the great CCK module on a bunch of projects (including this blog, for my bikelog). It’s really cool in that it lets you construct custom content types within the Drupal admin interface, without having to touch any PHP code. It’s like having your own personal microformat manager - it could handle things like compound content on a web page (and generate the editing form so you just fill in the blanks - abstract, body, url for more info, email contact, etc…) and I think it could even handle something like a simplified LOM for a “learning object repository”.
Read MoreGuesstimating the size of an RSS feed audience is always a huge shot in the dark, but sometimes I get curious about how many people subscribe to this silly blog. If I was willing to surrender my feeds to Feedburner, I could get some pretty detailed stats. But, I don’t want to hand over that.
So, I thought about digging into the accesslog that’s stored in Drupal’s database. I’ve set my copy to store access logs for the past 2 weeks, and it dutifully records which pages are viewed, as well as the IP address the request came from. It’s just a subset of a typical webserver log, so there isn’t any privacy issue here (if you’re really worried about being tracked online, you’re already using an anonymizing proxy…)
Read MoreI got tagged, so here goes…
I wasn’t going to tag anyone, but screw banality - it’s summer.
Read MoreI’ve been using an OmniOutliner document to track tasks and hopefully prevent things from slipping through the cracks. It works quite well, especially when combined with kGTD to help prioritize and filter tasks as they start to pile up, but it’s limited to a file on one computer. So, I can’t easily add stuff from my Powerbook at home. And I can’t access it when I’m not sitting in front of my G5. Sure, I can sync the file, and export it to the web, and print it, and sync it to my iPod, and to iCal, etc… but that’s a pain, and not bulletproof.
Read MoreKing’s in SF for WWDC2006, and just posted a quick note about the shirt/bag combo. Looks like a really sweet black T-Shirt with “veni. vidi. codi” on the front. Very cool.
King also linked to someone’s sneakypic of the banner on the second floor of Moscone West - someone must have neglected to cover it up with black fabric.
If I’m reading it properly (through a window girder), it says “Introducing Vista 2.0” with a closeup of the MacOSX 10.5 install DVD. That sounds like one hell of a warning shot. Wonder what’s going to be announced tomorrow…
Read MoreI tried to take some time yesterday to distill the patent into plain english. Michael Feldstein did a much better job than I did, which should make it really easy to find relevant and defensible bits of prior art. Of course, the fun part will be finding prior art that hasn’t been purchased by Blackboard…
Read MoreI’ve been biting my tongue on this whole Blackboard-patents-the-LMS brouhaha that’s going around. I did add my 2 cents to the Wikipedia VLE Prior Art page, with a link to one of the two LMSes I’ve been involved in building before Blackboard applied for this patent.
What follows is a largely stream-of-consciousness rant about some of the issues involved.
I find it completely unfathomable that such a basic and well established classification of software could be summarily handed to a single company. I’m planning on taking some time to actually read the patent, to see if it’s as general as everyone says, or is it really (hopefully) a vaguely worded description of their particular implementation. A cursory glance at it suggests that they’ve managed to throw in utilities ranging from online storage of user data, to storing files on a server…
Read MoreBlogBridge, my most favoritest RSS aggregator app, was bumped to version 3.0 this week. Lots and lots of small improvements, but most of the big changes are under the hood. Performance rocks (it totally doesn’t feel like a Java app - it feels like any other native application), and things like syncing feeds and preferences with the BlogBridge service (for accessing from other machines, or publishing guides as OPML, or just as backup) is nearly instantaneous.
Read MoreI’ve been thinking about the moronically shortsighted DOPA doowackie that got passed South of the Border. Basically, if I understand correctly, it attempts to protect children from online predators (which is a Good Thing To Do™). But, it wants to do this by banning minors from websites that let them contribute. They won’t be able to use MySpace. Or Blogger.com. Or Wordpress.com. Or Flickr.com. Or any other social “Web 2.0” stuff. Kids will be protected by locking them out.
Read MoreIt’s a total non-issue for me, but Dreamhost (the cool company that’s hosting my blog) is going through some rough times in their data centre at the moment. Apparently the heat wave in California is wreaking havoc on their power situation, causing a power outtage. The generators kicked in, but there was a short. And a fire. Hell broke loose. (the mention of the fire has disappeared from their Dreamhoststatus.com blog, so maybe it wasn’t that bad…) So, my blog was down for awhile. Really no big deal. If you can read this, it’s back up. I’m guessing there may be periodic outtages while it’s sorted out.
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