kerneljack's diary

A superb blogging app written in Java, and it also allows you to save your state so you can pick up where you left off on a computer other than your regular one. Just try it using the supplied Webstart link; you don’t need to create an account the default list of supplied feeds is excellent.

Some cool stuff on the Ars Technica Holiday Gift Buying Guide. Mmm.. iPaq

Superb commentary and speculation from Russ on the iPhone This sounds plausible, but a lot of the comments against it also make sense. Apple will have to compete in the market that is already swamped really badly, and they will also have to deal with the mobile phone operators. In short, a lot of work in a lot of new territory for them, if they take up the challenge.

Finally, music artists have come up with a way to earn money and circumvent the music industry through weedshare, and online service that allows artists to put up their own songs and charge as much as they want for them, but usually up to a dollar for a song. I think it’s a great idea, if it takes off that is. At least artists now seem to be starting to move towards a model where they make their own rules and earn their own keep on their own terms. Also, the more you share and other people share the better. This is better explained in this section in the FAQ:

The concept is pretty basic: Weed rewards people who share files and respect artists’ rights.

You can play a Weed file three times for free on any PC. After three free plays, you’re asked to pay for the file. You can use any current Windows Media-compatible player software to play the file. The Weed software, which keeps track of your account information, is used to purchase files.

Once you purchase a Weed file, you’re free to play it all you want on up to three PCs. You also can burn the file to CD and play it on your stereo system, or transfer it to a portable device like the Creative Labs Nomad, the Rio S10, or any current Windows CE PDA.

Best of all, you can share Weed files with anyone you like, as long as the files remain in their original form as Windows Media files. And if someone you share a file with purchases that file, you’ll earn a payment for helping to distribute it.

Specifically, the artist always receives 50% of each sale, and the rest goes to those who helped distribute the file. You get 20%, the person who shared the file with you gets 10%, and the person who shared the file with that person gets 5% of the sale price. Weed receives the final 15% for service and software maintenance costs.

All purchases and distributor payments are made into your Weed account through PayPal. Deposits and withdrawals from your Weed account cost 50 cents, but all other transactions are free. You must have a PayPal account to make deposits to your Weed account.

Some friends were over and I took some pictures of their baby daugher which they loved. My Olympus camera is over 3 years old right now and this got me thinking about what new stuff is available. I bought my 3 megapixel Olympus camera for about 300 pounds and now the superb Canon IXUS 5 Megapixel is only 239 pounds! It’s quite an amazing camera, more than good enough for a lot of things. A great recommendation.

I finally upgraded to MoveableType 3.212. I really wanted to upgrade, if just to get the Comment Moderation feature as comment spammers are bombarding my site pretty badly right now. Everyday I get about 20 pieces of new comment spam. This feature allows me to approve comments from unregistered users before they appear on the site. That doesn’t cut down the work for me, but at least it defeats the spammers’ purpose: free web advertising through search engines like Google.

I haven’t been reading blogs regularly these days and I just found out that Russell has started working for Yahoo!. Wow! Way to go! I have always enjoyed reading Russ’ posts (sometimes not completing them as they tend to be really long and I’m looking forward to any changes at Yahoo! that he will influence. Good luck, Russ. On another note, this image he has put together of the phones available in the US this Christmas is awesome.

Hmm.. Russell just received his Star Wars trilogy set, I feel like I should get it too, it was just 29.99 at WHSmith’s on the day of the release and is only 26.99 on Amazon right now. I was seriously expecting it to be much much more expensive than that, though I am glad it isn’t. I never managed to watch any of the movies as a kid, they were never to be found anywhere. It was only about 7 or 8 years ago when I was in Cyprus that I watched them properly. I do believe the new movies suck though Episode II was definitely better than I.

I almost completely missed the rumour that Google is thinking about creating it’s own browser, namely gbrowser. That should be interesting, though I still haven’t managed to get a gmail.com account. Google has hired away a few people from Microsoft who used to work on IE. Jason Kottke has more on it, and apparrently Anil Dash thought it was a good idea last year Good call.

Regarding my comments on MSN Music and the lame comments by some people, Daring Fireball has made some interesting observations on the help site for MSN Music. Microsoft claim that Apple’s store uses a proprietary format and it is difficult to use the store with the 70 other standard music players on the market. Interesting spin, though as is pointed out in the post, those 70 or so other players also work only with WMA or MP3. In the case of Apple, the iPod only works with AAC and MP3. So both are DRM-encumbered, but, Microsoft makes a really big spin on it and makes the iPod look like the beacon of incompatibility.

The only format of music you can buy on the MSN Music store will be DRM-enabled WMA. Most players that support Windows will play only this format plus maybe MP3. The MSN Music store only works in IE and uses ActiveX. So who’s being incomptible with everyone else here? Apple makes iTunes available for both Mac and Windows and people have even been able to play the stuff in Linux as AAC is a standard format, unlike WMA which requires you to get the Windows DLLs from somewhere to play in Linux. Anyways, enough of this rivalry. They both have their limitations and lock-ins. Let the best man win. I have a feeling Microsoft might eventually take the lead again somehow because they have deeper pockets and most people who get Windows with their PCs will not know any better to go out of their way to buy music from Apple. Yes I know Apple is the leader in online music sales right now, but for how long?

I uploaded a bunch of older entries from my weblog yesterday and it is really striking to me how much more funny and free-spirited I used to be back in 1999 Staying awake everyday until 3:00 am, reading a lot of technical books, documentation, eating a lot, watching a lot of movies. All my older entries have a much funnier streak. I hope I don’t lose what I have left as I get older.

Larry Osterman has written a brilliant post about his 20 years at Microsoft. He’s been through so many changes and reorganizations at Microsoft, he’s basically witnessed the whole of the personal computer revolution and it’s repercussions. I suppose a lot of others have as well, but in any case his write-up is superb:

I still have the letter that Microsoft sent me confirming my job offer. It’s dated January 16th, 1984. It’s formatted in Courier, and the salary and stock option information is written in ink. It’s signed (in ink) by Steve Ballmer. The offer letter also specifies the other benefits; it’s not important what they are. I also have Steve’s business card his job title? VP, Corporate Staffs. Yup, he was head of HR back then (he did lots of other things, but thats what his title was). I also have the employee list they gave out for the new hires, as I said before; there are only about 600 people on it. Of those 600 people, 48 of them are still with Microsoft. Their job titles range from Executive Assistant, to UK Project Troubleshooter, to Architect, to Director

Discovered Metroblogs today, and I quite like the London one, despite all the criticisms levelled at it in the comments. I’m sure it’ll improve in time. It’s made me think about going to the London Wetlands and the Thames Barrier Park.

Middle of summer and so much rain around it’s not funny. I was caught in a thunderstorm a week ago with an umbrella in one hand and a kitchen trolley in another Oh and a knapsack which I shouldn’t have brought along. Nevertheless running in the rain and hoping and praying that the lightning flashes you are seeing don’t find a reason to come your way is something I won’t (and won’t want to) experience again soon. I should have had the damn trolley delivered

That was a while ago but recently even more torrential downpours have hit the northern areas of Scotland and England. Lots of flooding and devastation and rescues. Charlie is causing much havoc stateside as well. We have mostly managed to avoid the rain here is london so far but we hear it is approaching ….

Had a really nice time a few nights ago with my friends Phil and Julia and Carlos and Jenny. They were hosts at our first tea party at the new flat. Muchos fun was had by all.

Apple Tablet coming up? new G5 iMacs being released end of August, which should be very interesting. I can’t wait to see their new design for the iMacs as I’m sure everyone else is. Phil Schiller is doing the keynote speech this time though as Jobs just underwent cancer surgery. I wish him a speedy recovery.

Looks like XP SP2 is definitely better but proving quite troublesome for many people to install. I’ve read quite a few reports of installations failures and total system screw-ups on different mailing-lists and newsgroups, and this eweek article gives a nice summary of the problems so far:

In Weblog postings and interviews with eWEEK.com, users have reported everything from unproblematic installs to complete system failures. In between, difficulties varied from confusing user interface changes to broken applications to performance slowdowns. Many said SP2′s features improved their confidence in the platform’s security; others said they continue to be surprised by minor issues

The thing that surprised me most was the ability of other firewall vendors such as McAfee and ZoneAlarm to turn off the XP firewall when they are installed. I understand why they would need to do this, as running 2 potentially conflicting firewalls at the same time is probably not a good idea, I do hope these third-party products provide suitable notification and warning of their actions.

I myself am actually a bit glad that these kinks will be worked out or at least solutions will have been posted for most problems by the time Microsoft releases the non-OEM home user version of SP2.

On another random note, though and totally unrelated to SP2, Pizza Hut in London sucks! And I really mean it, I almost lost it today trying to order a simple delivery from them. The person on the other end couldn’t understand my address, had problems with my postcode, the final price was wrong …. I’ll just end it there, I hope they get better

Found a great entry on Tom’s site today where he comments on Paul Graham’s excellent Great Hackers essay. I haven’t managed to find time to read the essay but Tom’s post about office space makes a good point. I also strongly believe in having a nice quiet space when one wants to concentrate on ‘hard problems’ or even when trying to follow a train of thought to conclusion. Being interrupted at times like these leads to a huge loss in productivity as you have to context switch for however long is necessary to do something else and when you return to the task at hand you might find it difficult to continue where you were interrupted. It’s not like you can simply change the Instruction Pointer in the brain like you can in computer memory to simply resume execution where it left off

If you read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines you’ll see that he is right when he states that brain neurons basically waste a lot of processing power not calculating, but sustaining body functions. So when a positronic brain is eventually constructed with equal computing capacity to the brain it will function much more effectively at computation as electronic circuits are a million times faster than neurons. Remember though that this “being” or whatever it may be will also have to devote a portion of it’s processing power to maintaining itself. Still, in the end it would be a lot more efficient.

Big kerfuffle happening since MT decided to impose some charges upon its users. Mark Pilgrim has a very well-written piece called Freedom 0 which has been linked to death by many people; he ended up writing a follow-up to it. There is a nice breakdown of most blogging software and their features here

I’m still using MT as I installed it last year. Since I’m the only one publishing to this blog at the moment, I don’t see any reason to change over to anything else. Nevertheless I will keep a close eye on WordPress and may switch to it sometime in the future as Tom and many others have done. It’s not that I’m against what MT have done in any way; it’s just something I need to think about.

Been doing a lot of linux work lately at home and am quite pleased with its progress on the desktop Kernel 2.6, Gnome 2.6, gdesklets, etc all make for a really nice desktop and OpenOffice is getting better everyday. The GNOME developers are quite busy these days as can be witnessed by reading the PlanetGnome blogs.

Some amazing things happening these days. I’ve been using my Sony Clie heavily for quite a while now and have found it to be so convenient while travelling to/from work. I’ve got several ebooks on it (including Cryptonomicon , some music and some technical audio talks, some movies, a few pictures I took in the office, and every morning I sync up all my RSS feeds to it and read them on the way to work It’s got quite a good battery life, requiring recharging every few days or so, depending on how heavily I use it.

The only downsides to using a clie on the Mac is that some things like Memory Sticks don’t show up on the desktop as mountable drives. This can be fixed by downloading the excellent missingsync for macs, which allows you to use the full functionality of the clie, along with iTunes, iPhoto, etc. Memory sticks are one of the things I don’t like about Sony machines though. They are expensive for the amount of memory you get (about 50 pounds for 128MB – official sony store prices are about 70 pounds!). Yes, ebay is your friend

In other interesting news, someone’s written a Mac emulator for the PC that runs OSX! I’ve only just found out that PC fans are falling all over themselves to try this thing. There’s even a website called www.emaculation.com!

One other thing to check out: musicplasma. It’s really cool.

Hourly doses of coffee beat a cup? I better figure this out and change my daily dose, this might be quite helpful.