John Turner

I upgraded my iPod Touch to 2.0 today. I am in heaven. The first app I downloaded from the App Store was Remote. I absolutely LOVE being able to control my iTunes Library over WiFi using my iPod Touch. And for FREE no less. So now I can be anywhere in my house and switch tunes whenever I want without having to be where my computer is. And I don’t need to run wires or deal with crazy hacked up smart home or X10 setups, either. So simple…LOVE it! There are a lot of Apple haters out there…that’s a shame, because Apple simply gets it. There’s no other way to say it…if you ask me, they are the only true IT company around. They do the whole thing, soup to nuts, they do it well, and they make it seamless. It took me all of 10 seconds to get Remote working and playing anything in my Library. There’s no way that would have happened on Windows, from any vendor, and certainly wouldn’t happen with Linux.

Recently, Microsoft has signed agreements with Xandros, Novell, and Linspire aimed at protecting users of those Linux distributions from damages related to unspecified patents. Microsoft claims that Linux infringes on 235 of their patents but RedHat and Canonical (the commercial backer of Ubuntu) are not buying it.

RedHat stated that their position remains unchanged, according to ZDNet Australia. Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical, posted a comprehensive explanation of his position and opinion of these agreements. In short, Shuttleworth believes that Microsoft is no friend to Linux or free software and takes the time to explain why. He sums up the recent agreements with Microsoft as “trinkets in exchange for air kisses”. Ouch!!

I’ve been crazy busy at work. This is good, I’d rather be busy than bored, but it has kept me from thinking about posting. A few things I’ve been working on: trying to figure out which would be better for some sites I’m building, Cake (PHP framework) or Django (python framework). I have security and (potential) scaling issues with PHP, but I have administration and learning curve issues with Django, so I’m not sure what to do. Another major problem for me is the apparent dearth of Django-friendly webhosts. At least with PHP, you can pretty much use it anywhere.

I checked out Ron Paul’s website the other day. Very, very interesting. I loved his track record, especially the part about never having voted to raise taxes, never voted for an unbalanced budget, and having voted against the Patriot Act. All big pluses in my book! Maybe I’ll vote for him…I’m definitely not voting Democrat or Republican no matter who gets nominated.

My buddy Peter pointed me to IMified today, so I set it up and I’m checking it out. This is a test. Hmmm…I had to edit this post in the WP admin tool. It seems IMified can’t handle HTML or URLs in posts sent via GTalk. If I have time this week I’ll check out the IMified forums and see if anyone else has seen this problem.

Coolest site I’ve seen in a long time: ClickShirt. It’s cool on multiple levels. First, the site design is clever and intuitive, making it easy to use. Second, it was done with OpenLaszlo which looks like the rich web application environment I’ve been trying to find for years. Third, it’s a front end to CafePress, which means the author is making money off of every shirt without having to actually deal with the hassles of running a t-shirt business. Very smart all around. The guy behind it (Bret Victor) also designed two synths I like very much, the Ion and Micron from Alesis. Nice work!

I tried setting up WP’s “blogging by mail” feature, where WP reads an email account via POP3 and converts the email messages into blog posts. Doesn’t work, and I’ve tried it with both GMail and an email account hosted on a regular domain.

The GMail way doesn’t work, apparently, because GMail is not POP3, it is POPS or POP3S or whatever it is called. Basically “secure POP3″, which means it runs on port 995, not port 110 like plain old friendly insecure POP3. But the other, non-free-email account way should work. This needs more investigation…I’d love to be able to blog by sending email from my crackberry.

Engadget is propagating rumors from one of the sites that specializes in Apple rumors. The prediction is that Apple will release a 15.4-inch MacBook in 2Q. I’ve been Mac-only at home for almost a year (hallelujah!) and have been thinking lately about getting one of the current MacBooks. I’m not vain enough to pay $400 extra for black instead of white, but I’m visually-challenged enough to pay $400-$500 or so extra for a bigger screen. If I could get a 15.4-inch MacBook with Leopard for somewhere south of $1500, I’d buy it.

Engadget has a post about the recent vulnerability in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. I didn’t get into all the details, but apparently all it took was someone watching the memory registers on their computer for changes…eventually one of the keys was shown in the clear, and that’s all she wrote. Big media companies will never get it…DRM will ALWAYS fail as long as it involves having to distribute keys to customers. As one commenter notes, you can’t have encryption if you need to distribute the keys for decryption. That’s a recipe for a crack. Instead of spending money on increasing value and making content better, big media companies are wasting millions, perhaps billions, fighting a battle they can never win. They’d be better off (as Steve Jobs also suggests) simply releasing their content in a way that encourages customer loyalty, instead of presuming all of their customers are thieving pirates.