We’re taking the digital+hard drive plunge and getting rid of our CDs. Ulrike discovered Second Spin to buy our used CDs. One just types in the UPC code and they tell you how much they’ll pay. After you’ve entered the discs in their system and get a receipt, you pack them up and ship them off.
Category: Internet
Recent reads
William Gibson, blogging again
Tom Peters, dispatches from the new world of work
Havard Business School, working knowledge
WiMAX vs. Hi-Gain
While microwave-powered WiMAX is getting more attention these days, I was fascinated to learn on Thanksgiving of a relative’s plan to simply use a hi-gain setup instead. His plan is to go to markets that don’t already have wired broadband internet access — in his case rural Virginia — and put hi-gain antennas on the hills to reach those who don’t have access to cable or DSL. The market may not be as profitable, but the equipment and real estate costs are proportionately low. It’s a disruptive move, and there might be plenty of room at the bottom of that pyramid.
Wikipedia
If you haven’t already discovered the Wikipedia then you should, if you at all like encyclopedias. And even if you dislike wikis it’s alright, there’s proper search and navigation elements, and enough content there already to be quite useful so that one need not feel guilty for not contributing.
Surfing it reminds me of when I was young and visiting a friend who had a set of encyclopedias, lying on the floor on rainy afternoons, paging through them.
Here’s a telling excerpt from the Creative destruction page:
Most economists agree that long-term economic growth is largely the product of technological innovation. Thus, some see it as a scandal that Schumpeter is absent from many 600 page elementary economic texts’ indexes. Schumpeter’s solution would be for a new generation of textbooks to emerge, which students would choose, in partial defiance of their lecturers. Wikipedia is now one of those texts!
Lemme just email you the wiki…
It’s written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, or sent by email.
Whoa, wikis for the masses. It’s not as if they’re hard to setup (I’ve set up two personal wikis in about 10 minutes) but hosting is still a major hurder for many writers.
And it’s combined with a novel layout system:
A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it’s divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially…
Go and click a link, it’s fun!
Link courtesy Peter.
VoIP and personal SLAs
Last night my wife and I realized we both had conference calls from home at the same time. My group wanted to use Skype, so she was free to use our landline, a Vonage (VoIP) connection. This means we were using two different devices to push and pull audio down the same cable modem connection. Theoretically it’s pretty neat. In practice the poor Motorola VoIP adapter supplied by Vonage couldn’t keep up and dropped both of the connections, twice.
So far the home broadband suppliers haven’t had to provide rigorous minimum bandwidth, but when more of us start using the connection for synchronous communication we’ll want bandwidth like water: as much pressure as we need, whenever we need it, cheaply. Service level agreements for the home user could be in our future.
Build a CMS, go to heaven
Brian Alvey, speaking on a panel about CSS back at SXSW, asked, “Who’s building a CMS on these tools that spits out valid markup? Not many. A few. They’re going to heaven.”
Well, I don’t exactly believe in heaven, but to play it safe I wrote an article illustrating a few different ways you could integrate cascading style sheets with content management systems. The ideas came to me while I was working on a big Vignette-powered project, but the function is fairly easy to build in. The change is less about technology and more about organization and process: designers become empowered to improve the design through CSS as frequently and easily as authors change text.
It’s also just as useful on smaller systems, as demonstrated by Textpattern.
Hacking Congress
In this inaugural article of Paul Ford’s new column, Hacking Congress, he introduces his plan to create an RDF description of the U.S. federal government…
If you’ve been following Paul’s ideas for the semantic web, you can imagine the potential of this one.
Google! Don’t eat no babies
Paul Ford: The Banality of Google. I’d really like to excerpt the last paragraph here as he had me laughing so hard. But I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Discount for new pair.com hosting accounts
Bob has been given two keys…
What is a Digital Signature? is a fun little introduction to digital signatures by David Youd.
Unfortunately the system is generally hard to understand, which I think is the reason it hasn’t caught on more widely (who wouldn’t encrypt the occasional email if they could?). Since I’m on a mental model kick lately, I can’t help but point out that the metaphor of a key breaks down pretty quickly. I like that a key can both lock and unlock information. But one can use a key to “sign” a document? We’re used to keys moving locks into multiple positions (as with a car ignition), so this might have been better as “use the key to make a document read-only, or to encrypt it…” or something similar.
And replacing the “certificate authority” is a no-brainer: she’s the locksmith.
I point this out because the situation is only getting worse. After Paypal recently limited transfer amounts on personal accounts, I signed up for Yahoo’s PayDirect. After using my regular ID and password to sign in, it asks for a “Yahoo! Security Key” and offers a text box. What should I type here? Was I supposed to generate a key before arriving here? This is actually not a key at all, at least not in the PKI sense. It’s just a secondary password. So this is just a labeling problem, but one that makes the difference between understanding how the system operates, and not.
Update: I was considering doing something about this, approaching the PKI folks to consider how design strategy could revolutionize this market, but this article by Jay Heiser points out that the personal encryption market isn’t demanding a product, whether we think they need one or not. Still, I wonder what will happen when someone makes it so easy that a great product will create a demand, that people will start to do protect their messages because they realize they can. Or, it might be a matter of free-agent nation — freelancers who work with large companies — having to adopt it to do business with the enterprise customers whose IT departments have done the hard work of setting it up.
Interactionary
Jess has a new blog to share his big thoughts, bless his heart.
Corporate Blogging and Power
Elizabeth Albrycht on Corporate Blogging and Power: ‘I think blogging is one of those new technologies that makes the negotiations about power visible…. Power needs secrecy. Humanity needs openness. Ergo – blogging actually works on the side of humanity….’
Dynamic Text Replacement
Once the HTML is finished loading, our script will search it for specified elements (h2, span, etc.) and replace the text inside of them with an img tag. This dynamic img tag has its alt attribute set to the original text, and its src attribute set to the URL of the PHP script that we just installed. The PHP script then sends back a custom PNG image, and voila: custom headings.
That is whacked.
Textpattern auto CSS?
I’ve been thinking about ways to edit CSS from a content management system, and fascinated by Dean’s description of Automatic CSS mode in Textpattern…
Automatic CSS mode, style sheet editing is taken to a sophisticated new level, using an editing interface and organizational method intended to make CSS parameters more readable and logical. Any existing style sheet can be ‘poured’ into the editing interface and modified indefinitely.
Any Textpattern users out there? Does the Auto CSS mode UI look the same as this, or different? My email address is over there in the nav bar.