techno.blog("Dion")

If you are in a rush in the morning, just grab the iToast Shuffle and run!

I guess if you have to live with SPAM, we may as well make some fun with it :/

Cameron turned me on to this movie.

The old annoyance of seeing 4 friends walking down the road on their phones, is getting matched by the white earplugs.

Resistence is futile.

And then Rob of Tangosol made it a double

After Apple released the special edition “U2 iPod,” someone bought one, added some songs from Negativeland, and tried to sell it on eBay as the “Special-Edition Negativeland vs. U2 iPod.” This got some attention at the time, but the auction disappeared, after Apple asked eBay to take it down — saying it violated their intellectual property rights. Wired News now says the same guy, Francis Hwang, is selling the iPod on his own website, while wondering what possible claim Apple could have over him selling stuff that he had purchased. This is an issue that’s only going to get more attention over the next few years as the rights of buyers gets increasingly confused thanks to things like EULAs and copy protection. Apple shouldn’t have any claim over it whatsoever, but in an age where everyone seems especially jumpy about intellectual property rights — just by claiming it was a violation, Hwang couldn’t sell a perfectly legal offering on eBay.

– Techdirt

This is a sad trend. In the past Apple stopped trying to go after their base, just because of the PR effects. Now, are they reverting back to cease and desist tactics? and law suits?

Is it worth wrecking your community?

I would understand if someone was actually doing a Bad Thing, but geez.

After Apple released the special edition “U2 iPod,” someone bought one, added some songs from Negativeland, and tried to sell it on eBay as the “Special-Edition Negativeland vs. U2 iPod.” This got some attention at the time, but the auction disappeared, after Apple asked eBay to take it down — saying it violated their intellectual property rights. Wired News now says the same guy, Francis Hwang, is selling the iPod on his own website, while wondering what possible claim Apple could have over him selling stuff that he had purchased. This is an issue that’s only going to get more attention over the next few years as the rights of buyers gets increasingly confused thanks to things like EULAs and copy protection. Apple shouldn’t have any claim over it whatsoever, but in an age where everyone seems especially jumpy about intellectual property rights — just by claiming it was a violation, Hwang couldn’t sell a perfectly legal offering on eBay.

– Techdirt

This is a sad trend. In the past Apple stopped trying to go after their base, just because of the PR effects. Now, are they reverting back to cease and desist tactics? and law suits?

Is it worth wrecking your community?

I would understand if someone was actually doing a Bad Thing, but geez.

All the love is for Cocoa. Why does Carbon get such a bad rap? I never looked into it much, but just last week a friend talked about how he thought Carbon was a poor mans solution, until he actually spent some time on it too. And, he found that it was actually not a bad solution, especially with the Java bindings.

James Duncun Davidson has also just written that Sometimes Carbon isn’t so Bad.

Jef Raskin, Mac pioneer, dies at 61.

Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.

Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin’s Pacifica, Calif., home.

Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite fruit, joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31. The Macintosh was launched in 1984, but Raskin left Apple in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs.

Reskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when he first visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). (Apple is often accused of copying Xerox’s graphical user interface–GUI–into the Macintosh operating system).

Check out this demo of zoomable interfaces. We see some of this with F9 and company.

We still have so much to do wrt human-computer interfaces. Don’t you feel like a primate who can only poke and prod at things?

RIP.

Apple pioneered the mouse (via Xerox ;) ). They love it. I didn’t quite understand how much until I was listening to an audio book on my last 5 hour drive from Madison to Minneapolis. I was listening to The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which is a very frank account of Steve, and details his travels from NeXT back until he is in charge of Apple once more. It shows that he got VERY lucky with Pixar ;)

But, anyway, back to the mouse. When Steve was speaking to a group at Stanford (when he was at NeXT), he took one of the current Mac keyboards from a student who wanted him to sign it. He then went on to pick out all of the keys that he hated. He hated the function keys. He hated the arrow keys, as he felt that we should all be using the mouse.

I understand what a great innovation the mouse was. I would hate to use Photoshop with arrow keys :) However, I actually try to use the mouse as little as possible. This may be because I am from the vi/emacs frame of mind, and I have some weird twisted thought that it will stop me getting carpel tunnel :)

Although, I can setup nice key bindings on my PowerBook, there are STILL areas which drive me nuts.

Tab To Damn Drop Downs!

One of the primary irritants, is how I can’t tab from text boxes to drop downs and select them with the keyboard. This is even the case within apps such as Firefox. I am sorry, but when I fill out a form I want to be able to just use my keyboard and tab between all fields. It drives me nuts that I have to stop and get the mouse out to make the drop down selections.

God knows how people with accessibility problems think!

Apple pioneered the mouse (via Xerox ;) ). They love it. I didn’t quite understand how much until I was listening to an audio book on my last 5 hour drive from Madison to Minneapolis. I was listening to The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which is a very frank account of Steve, and details his travels from NeXT back until he is in charge of Apple once more. It shows that he got VERY lucky with Pixar ;)

But, anyway, back to the mouse. When Steve was speaking to a group at Stanford (when he was at NeXT), he took one of the current Mac keyboards from a student who wanted him to sign it. He then went on to pick out all of the keys that he hated. He hated the function keys. He hated the arrow keys, as he felt that we should all be using the mouse.

I understand what a great innovation the mouse was. I would hate to use Photoshop with arrow keys :) However, I actually try to use the mouse as little as possible. This may be because I am from the vi/emacs frame of mind, and I have some weird twisted thought that it will stop me getting carpel tunnel :)

Although, I can setup nice key bindings on my PowerBook, there are STILL areas which drive me nuts.

Tab To Damn Drop Downs!

One of the primary irritants, is how I can’t tab from text boxes to drop downs and select them with the keyboard. This is even the case within apps such as Firefox. I am sorry, but when I fill out a form I want to be able to just use my keyboard and tab between all fields. It drives me nuts that I have to stop and get the mouse out to make the drop down selections.

God knows how people with accessibility problems think!

TiVo’s stock jumped >17% based on rumours that Apple would buy TiVo.

I wonder what Apple would do with the company? What would an iTiVo look like? Lots of classic curves…. Mac OS X instead of Linux? iPhoto, iMovie, … builtin?

Both companies DO have a similar cult following, but I am not sure if it makes sense for the merger. TiVo has a tough time fighting against the cable / satalite companies which have control :(

My wife wants to have a daughter. I would love a son.

However it has been proclaimed that you can predict the sex of your child based on computer usage:

Men who use Apple iBooks/Powerbooks with wireless cards have a very high probability [>85%] of having female offspring that is far greater than the statistical average.

I am trying to do the math based on the fact that I only use Perl a little now, and use both PC and Mac.

(Really, we would be happy with anything)