WIRED has a really entertaining story about the creators of Delicious Library. Their “office” is the local coffee house. I’m très jealous…
A few other good stories about software development have been making the rounds lately . Namely the Audion story and the Graphing Calculator story. If you are interested in something in book form, I recommend Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
Don’t forget: CocoaTextile supports Markdown. Currently, I’m implementing a Toolbar and CSS support.
There has been a bit of a stir (most likely because it’s free and anything free is Good News) lately regarding the release of the classic Bungie trilogy, Marathon.
Free download? Bah! I still have my originals! I remeber the days when the computers on my home network were named Durandal, Tycho, and Leela…
To really enjoy Marathon, you’ll need this Required Marathon Resource.
Jeremy comments on the Silicon Beat article, but poses the question, “where will you store your data”? Data is the easy part, what about my session? That’s what I want to know. Unless I’m using a web app (or other server-side app), I have no good way to transport my session or my state. I want to have the same five Firefox tabs open with the same history wherever I am. I want the same editing buffers open, etc. Heck, for now, I’d just settle for having the RSS posts I’ve read, marked Read in whatever reader I’m using at the moment! (Ed. I think attention.xml might help with that)
Imagine this like hibernating your desktop, then awakening someplace else. Wasn’t this the promise of the Internet? Or at least, Java. Ha ha.
The very helpful Technorati Mozilla/Firefox search plugin does not seem to be in the mycroft database, so here it is!
There is a perfectly awful article at Salon about the Mac Mini. In fact, it was so bad, I felt compelled to email the author, Farhad Manjoo:
I usually enjoy your articles, but your article about the “Mac Mini” seemed uncharacteristically stereotypical. Complaining about the one button mouse? Read: http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/input.html Assuming that a Mac that costs ”$1,300 [is] essentially the same desktop Dell’s giving away for $500”? Check out: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4895 Worst of all, assuming that Mac users are (to reverse your logic) putting their “emotions” ahead of other, more rational (e.g. their wallets) considerations. I think you would find that many Mac users are highly competent, technology-focused professionals. I also hope that you would not be surprised to find that many early-adopters are Mac users. So much for the Mac “languishing in obscurity”. This is all classic stereotyping and, frankly, misinformed. I’d expect more from Salon’s Technology writers.
I blame the MacWorld Expo buzz… I’m not usually a zealot.
Chuck Toporek has a great article about the possibilities for the Mac Mini. The two that interest me are Mac Mini as “small” server and Mac Mini in a cluster.
I think a headless, quiet Mac Mini would make a great home server. However, anything beyond that I think is going to run up against that 256MB RAM limit. I’m certainly considering replacing my noisy Gentoo box that is prone to over-heating. I already run mysql, Apache, tinyproxy and Wordpress (to name a few) on my G5. The Mac Mini seems like it was destined for this duty (or as part of a home theatre).
With regards to clustering the Mac Mini, I think that this is a fantasy, albeit an appealing one… Heck, those little boxes scream out to be stacked! However, building a cluster is as much about power and heat management as it is about software. Plus, without RAID or (as it appears) easily swappable parts, the Mac Mini just wouldn’t survive very long. In most large clusters, the server is a commodity… the Mac Mini is too sexy to be a commodity!
A post on the Decemberists site announces the new tour, dubbed “The Advance of the Picaroons Tour 2005”, confirms the release date of “Picaresque” and provides a track listing. “The Infanta” and “The Sporting Life”, I’ve heard on a “High Dive” bootleg—both were great (surpise, surpise). I, for one, am certainly excited. Verily.
I’m working on adding a projects page for my sundry software projects. Once I’m happy with the layout, I’ll add a real link from the main page. Comments on layout/organization/content welcome.