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Monthly Archive for July, 2007

Pownce

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 27, 2007
in www
. 2 Comments

Pownce is a new web application/service/business started by Kevin Rose of Tech TV, Digg, Revision3, etc, etc. It seems to be a combination of Twitter-type micro-blogging, Instant Messaging, and File transfer. (I don’t know if Twitter and related services are being called “micro-blogging,” but it seems like as good a name as any to me.)

Pownce is getting a lot of coverage, overwhelmingly positive. TechCrunch’s Crunchbase says:

Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. Users can send music, photos, messages, links, events, and more via the Pownce web site or through lightweight desktop software (available for Windows and Mac environments; Linux coming soon.) Only the people you choose get to see what you sent.

Pownce won over the skeptics at Mashable. It has Scoble, Matt Mullenweg, and a plethora of other bloggers chatting up a storm about it (okay, all Matt says is that he’s “really enjoying” it; I’m a lazy blogger. I’m sorry). There’s even a Wordpress plugin for it.

Did I mention it’s still in beta?

So, what’s the story? Scoble suggests that Pownce is gaining traction because of a better UI. Um, of course, having the magic Kevin-Rose-Web-2.0-Aura doesn’t hurt any.

Like any competition in the same space, it’s a little pointless to use two things. You don’t buy a Coke and a Pepsi and mix them together and drink them both at the same time. When Ma.gnolia appeared, amidst much hype and hullabaloo, it got quite a bit of attention too; but ultimately, I think it’s safe to say that del.icio.us stood out as the winner in that particular competition. In that case, I think that del.icio.us won because it had a huge amount of lead into the market-space. You could argue that the ability to move your entire database of bookmarks over to ma.gnolia in an instant negated that lead, but I think the fondness that del.icio.us users had for the service won out; we weren’t about to switch over just because it had a pretty interface designed by Jeffrey Zeldman, though a very nice design it was.

The point, if there is one, being that Twitter may not have been around long enough to have earned this sort of traction. In my case, I’ve only just started using Twitter, and I’m certainly not going to use both at once… who has time for that? So, um, I guess I’ll probably look back and forth at them, and eventually I’ll wind up using one or the other. Or maybe neither; that’s always a possibility, too.

Twitter

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 23, 2007
in Asides
. 5 Comments

I guess I first saw Twitter about… 2 months ago? I will freely admit, my first thought was, Why?

Finally overcome by curiosity, I decided the best way to answer that question was to start using it.

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s something like a micro-blog, or personal, ongoing, state-diagram. You write, in 140 characters or less, what you’re doing right now. This is then saved, along with a time-stamp of sorts, in a long list of “what I was doing right now” web-bites. Naturally these are available in an RSS feed.

Of course, the minute you put anything in an RSS feed, it instantly becomes useful. If not useful, at least, usable: you can subscribe to it, aggregate it… um, well, you can do at least those two things. Depending on your perspective, they might be the same thing. You can follow other people’s twitter feeds, and other people can follow yours. You can throw the feed up on your web page (I just stuck mine in the sidebar).

So, you may be asking, why?

I don’t know; why not?

Pyro: Firefox as a Desktop Environment

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 20, 2007
in Linux
. 1 Comment


Pyro is a new kind of desktop environment for Linux built on Mozilla Firefox. Its goal is to enable true integration between the Web and modern desktop computing.

This is closer to my idea of what the “Web OS” will be. Projects like EyeOS and related efforts are neat, and all; but being as they require a traditional OS, running at least enough of a Window manager to render a browser, they seem a bit unnecessary. Pyro, as an add-on for Firefox, and taking on the role of Window Manager for itself, seems like a cool bridge between the traditional OS and the so-calledweb-based/browser-based OS. Pyro doesn’t try to call itself an OS — it’s a Window Manager.

Very beta, from what they say on the site; I’ll have to test it out at some point. It’s an interesting idea; could be a fun project to keep an eye on.

Blogging in Public

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 20, 2007
in Asides
.

Astute observers will have noticed inconspicuous buttons in the left-hand column, pointing to my profiles on LinkedIn & Facebook. Feel free to add me as a contact or friend on either, if you happen to use them.

A lot of folks approach the co mingling of blogging and “work” with some trepidation. There is a small history of bloggers being fired based on what they write when not at work. For some, the approach has been to either throw caution to the wind, or to simply blog anonymously.

Myself, I just figured this blog was so low traffic, it really didn’t matter. Plus, I don’t write anything about work. However, at the same time, I was reluctant to put links to this site onto my other social networking profiles… as if anyone googling my name wouldn’t find this blog anyways.

I finally decided there’s nothing I could possibly write that is going to get me fired, or that would really bother me if someone at work, somehow, stumbled across it. That’s the internet, plain and simple; it’s all out there. Short of ending this blog and re-emerging elsewhere with an assumed name, that’s just the way it is. That being said, I don’t plan to change the way I do things, though I would like to start posting more regularly (and something more thoughtful than links to random ephemera).

Hence, the addition of the social networking links on the left, and the addition of links back to this site from those sites. There is no myspace link (although I do have one), as I like to pretend that myspace does not exist.

As a result of this drastic step, I expect everything will continue on pretty much as it was before. Enjoy your weekend!

Hide-a-pod

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 16, 2007
in Apple and Humor
.

Hide-a-podBilled as the The ultimate iPod* (and iPhone*)
Anti-Theft Device, the folks at Hide-a-pod have come up with an ingenious solution to preventing your iPod from being stolen: “Hide it in a Zune*!”

From their “testimonials”:

I had been losing 3 to 4 iPods a day due to theft or just leaving them laying around. My friends were starting to say that I had more money than brains with all these iPod purchases.

Well, I picked up a Hide-a-Pod the other day and I haven’t lost an iPod since. If I leave it somewhere and go back later it’s always right there were I left it. I guess I have both money and brains now.

Even better, from the FAQ:

How can you do this so cheap?

There were a lot of disappointed kids last Christmas who wanted an iPod but were given a Zune by some well-meaning friend or relative. Consequently, there is a glut of Zunes available on eBay every day. We buy ‘em cheap and throw away the guts to make our product at a great price.

If I had been drinking something when I first saw the page, I think it might, possibly, have come out of my nose. Just saying.

Linux Mint vs. Sabayon Linux

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 13, 2007
in Linux
.

…and I have to go with Linux Mint.

Sabayon looks very impressive, but much like Gentoo, it seems you still need to be willing to roll up your sleeves and spend some time neck deep in bash and config files to get it running at full capacity.

I don’t mind that… in fact, even on Ubuntu I usually wind up editing xorg.conf by hand at least once. But in my old age, I’ve found that I really want things to “just work,” and that I don’t really want to stay up until 3 in the morning tweaking nVidia drivers so I can get xorg working again.

So, Linux Mint tops the charts right now, in my opinion. It is basically the latest greatest version of Ubuntu, plus (in the full “imagine there’s no software patents” version) added drivers and codecs that make your first boot a real treat… everything just works. Even Beryl, right out of the box (if it came in a box).

Sabayon Linux

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 9, 2007
in Linux
.

I just stumbled, recently, across Daniel Robbin’s website — that would be drobbins, creator of Gentoo Linux, among several other things.

Sabayon Linux BadgeWhile there, I clicked on a link to Sabayon Linux, which is billing itself as “the most bleeding edge Linux around.”

Um… good! Downloading now, thank you.

Children 18:3’s video blog

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 6, 2007
in Music
.

Among my favorite bands for the last year or so has been a local Minnesota band called Children 18:3. I happened to look at their myspace page recently, and they have a “video blog” up… Pretty amusing:

I love the shots of the people in the crowd staring at the stage with no expression whatsoever. Priceless.

In one of the band’s I played in, we played in a coffee shop one time… I guess the coffee shop didn’t realize that hardcore bands are, well… loud? It was interesting; people were leaving, giving us dirty looks, the attendant was freaking out because we were above the decibel limit for their establishment (they had a meter!)… good times. It was the worst show ever. So, in some ways, I can identify.

Further Thought’s on Blue Like Jazz

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 5, 2007
in Asides and Books
.

I was thinking about the introduction to Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz the other day. It’s a great book, and it’s well worth reading the whole thing, but the more I think about it, the more I think that the book is just a much longer explanation of a thought Miller puts on the very first page:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.

His point, I think, is that most of the world never really sees Christians loving Christ, loving God. (As glaringly obvious as that probably is, I just thought I’d state it anyways.) They see the church doing a lot of other things; loving ourselves, asking for money, building nice buildings (it’s okay to have a building, I’m just saying…), defending our politics… and so forth.

But none of that is likely to make people interested in God, interested in Jesus, or interested in Church. That would be like giving a speech of the complexity of Jazz, the relationship between notes, the interplay between instruments, notes, scales, and chords, and expecting the listeners to go away loving Jazz.

Just a random musing; again, a very good book. You will enjoy it.

The Case Against Rails

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on July 5, 2007
in Code
. 2 Comments

Man… In an article whose headline begins with the word “Blasphemy,” AlterThought’s Un.Rust blog dares to state the case against Ruby on Rails… and makes some excellent (though painful to read) observations.

The author states it several ways, but the main thread of the observations seems to be that since Rails is capable of doing so much construction automatically, it enables amateur coders to pass themselves off as developers, and wind up costing their clients extra money because the application they wind up with needs to be rewritten, revised, doesn’t scale, etc, etc. I’d hate to think that’s happening, but at the same time, I’m sure it is.

That’s actually one reason I’m unwilling to answer ads for Rails developers or to pass myself off as a Rails consultant — I’m painfully aware that I don’t (yet) know enough about either Rails, or full-scale web application development, to do that in good conscience. That’s actually one reason that I’m working on my Microlinks application in my spare time; yes, if it is actually successful (or even semi-successful), I’ll be very pleased. More than that, it provides an opportunity to really learn the framework, “gotchas” and all.

In the back of my mind, I’m hoping I can also write a small application in Django at some point… just because the experience of comparing Rails to Django would be valuable. Also, Python is as excellent a language as Ruby, and I’d just like to try it.

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