I’ve been searching for the perfect keyboard for years. What I seek is generally known as a slim keyboard. But it is easier to express by stating what I don’t want: a wide honking keyboard with number pad, function keys, internet buttons, and wrist support.
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Actually, I want my OGG, but that didn’t evoke the nostalgia of MTV’s catch-phrase from the 80’s. What I definitely don’t want is Fairplay or WMA with all its nasty DRM. But when you look around at the legit online music services, you’re gonna get DRM. Here’s my problem with the online services:
I’ve found some answers to these problems, so click the link below to read my full thoughts.
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Indie band Longfellow out of Athens, Ohio just released a new album, “Jangling Tea Trolley”, which is their best effort yet. To complement the CD release, I designed a new website for them at www.longfellowfan.com. It’s definitely still a work in progress, but it has essentials like show listings, message forums, and online orders through PayPal. Props to PayPal for their developer-friendly integration. I literally threw the ordering together in one night. I plan to write my own shopping cart for better integration soon.
These guys are music geeks, and enjoy the technical aspects of music. There’s a nice writeup on them at The Post Online. Their sound is hard to describe, but it’s something like atypical acoustic pop with similarities to Jack Johnson, Ben Folds, and Dave Mathews. (Of course, there are sample tracks of their CD on the website if you want to check them out.) Full disclosure: the band’s primary vocalist, Nick Long, is a cousin of mine!
I heard about Google bombs from reading Dean’s blog entry. A Google bomb is an attempt to influence the ranking of a site in Google’s search results. While Google’s algorithm for ranking is secret, people have figured out that a website is ranked higher if the sites that link to a page use consistent text.
One of the most famous Google bombs was a campaign by Adam Mathes to get the search results of “talentless hack” to list the website of his friend Andy Pressman. Adam got enough webloggers to link Andy’s site with the text “talentless hack” that Pressman’s site became the number result in a Google search.
The interesting thing about Google bombs is that once they become popular, people talk about them, and the bomb is knocked out of the top spot. Some people think there’s no reason to counter Google bombs because of this natural effect.
If you went and read the comments on Dean’s blog, then you know we tried a Google bomb of our own. We both linked to Gayle’s website using the text of “fishies for president“. And sure enough, as of right now, it’s the number one website listed for that search on Google.
It’s getting hard to ignore the popularity of Firefox. With the release of Firefox 1.0 and 11 million downloads since November, the Spread Firefox team decided to broaden the campaign further by placing a two-page ad in the New York Times. Look closely at the background: there are 10,000 names of people listed from the community who contributed funds for the ad.
Of course I support Firefox because it is open-source, but I also think Firefox is a faster and more usable browser. I’ve been talking to friends at work, and I didn’t realize how badly people are afflicted with spyware and viruses. Firefox is better suited to security because it is written carefully and supported responsively by the community.
The statistics speak for themselves. Firefox has had 4 advisories in 2004, rated as moderate or low in criticality. That other browser has had 34 advisories in 2004, with over half of them rated as moderate to extremely critical. Even worse, half of the vulnerabilities for that other browser have no patches, some of which are highly critical. So, what are you waiting for?
This is one of the most creative résumés I’ve seen. Alexandre Guéniot presents his Curriculum Vitae using Flash. Never has such bad singing made such a good impression on me.
I ran into the problem of needing to load a BufferedImage on the serverside of a Java web application. I’m manipulating images dynamically in code that are then served to the web browser. Java loads images asynchronously by default, and you can track progress using the ImageObserver interface, but it might not be as easy as you think.
This article quotes Steve Ballmer as saying:
There are two people who probably are the number one spam recipients in the world. Bill Gates [is number one] because he is Bill Gates. Bill literally receives four million pieces of email per day, most of it spam. Literally, there’s a whole department, almost, that takes care of it.
Four million e-mail messages per day? For once, the spammers have done some good for the world. But that’s 46 emails per second! Can MS Exchange even handle that kind of load? Or maybe they are running Postfix.
A whole department to handle spam? Does that mean they pay interns to filter through it, or do they have software do it? Why not release this wonderful spam filtering software to the world? Oh… a whole department, “almost”. By that, maybe he means they are running Spam Assassin. If not, he could save some money by getting a Gmail account.
According to Flamesplash on Slashdot, internal Microsoft employees can e-mail Bill directly without going through filtering. Flamespash was an intern at Microsoft, and his journal has some interesting stories where he’s come across Bill at work.
By the way, you can e-mail Bill at billg@microsoft.com.
Rob Sable has a great post called Button Madness where he demystifies those cute little buttons everyone seems to have on their web pages. Of course I immediately used Button Maker to create my own “eBlog” button. 
The buttons use a short, skinny font called Silkscreen that was created by Jason Kottke and given away as a free TrueType font. It turns out this font is used everywhere, which I realized only after I saw it and started noticing it. As I type this into Moveable Type, I can see the font is used on the menu buttons.
People are bidding on Ebay for a grilled cheese sandwich that has the Virgin Mary toasted onto one side. The seller claims to have noticed the resemblance after taking a bite, and the sandwich hasn’t molded 10 years since. They claim to have won money gambling during the ownership of this sandwhich, and now they wish to sell it.
It looks a little like Marilyn Monroe to me. At this point, the bidding looks to be around $70,000. Boy, I need to start paying more attention to my food before I eat it.
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