Category Archives: Technology

Movable Feast

dollarshort.orgBlogger is great, but it has its limitations. So I’ve been seriously considering switching over to Ben and Mena Trott’sMovable Type. The more I look at it, the more impressed I am by this grass-roots content management system, especially by the fact that it’s run entirely by a husband-wife team. The wife, Mena, also happens to be a terrific designer, as evidenced by her beautiful personal site, dollarshort.org. All this has me thinking: it’s about time for Subtraction.com to move up to version 6.0.

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Chill Factor

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics have joined forces to produce Chilling Effects, a Web site devoted to educating the public on their rights within the First Amendment and copyright laws. ?[It] offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.? Have a look at the database of cease and desist letters sent by megacorporations to perceived violators of their copyrights to get an idea why the site has that name.

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Computer Imaging

Computers: An Illustrated HistoryGerman art book publisher Taschen has released what I sheepishly admit is probably the perfect book for me: “Computers, An Illustrated History.” The book is a somewhat perfunctory historical account of the evolution of big iron mainframes and unexpectedly powerful ‘micro-computers’ and PCs, but probably no one should consider it authoritative. Rather, its true value is as a quietly lavish compendium of 50+ years of computer photographs, mostly marketing shots of hardware. Nostalgiac kitsch aside, this is a remarkable compilation of coolly alluring imagery, some of which is beautiful, and some of which is frightening — but most all of which seems to promise a kind of precision-controlled, modernistic utopia, if only humans would give themselves over to the digital world.

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Spam-Be-Gone

Cloudmark has the best idea I’ve seen yet for eliminating spam. Their SpamNet product is basically a kind of distributed computing application. It plugs into Outlook XP and helps users identify incoming spam using a set of rules — the system communicates back to a central server about which messages have been marked as junk. As more users contribute, the rules get refined, the system gets smarter and a kind of global understanding of what is and isn’t spam develops. Brilliant. Hope it works.

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Blogging Heads

More Lessig:“Right now we have a culture where the most creative and important builders of freedom in the 21st century have zero political savvy and (so far) zero political effect.” This is from his recent blog posting, one communiqué from a very interesting online squabble between Lessig and well-known Userland impresario and knee-jerk blogging evangelist Dave Winer. The debate’s heating up, and this is a good thing.

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Mo’ Memory

Mo’ MemoryFor so long I’ve been plodding along with just 256MB of RAM in my Titanium PowerBook G4, but last night I popped in a new 512MB chip, for a grand total of 768MB. Aaaaaahhhhhh. The picture above shows all the apps I’m running at once, and there’s still 483MB available.Memory’s not as cheap as it was a year ago, but I got a fair deal for it at Crucial.com.

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Playing with Fire, and Other Toys

FireThe new Mac platform seems more viable than ever — and I’m enjoying using it more and more and playing around with all the new software toys, too. It’s such a charming experience that I pre-ordered a copy of the next revision of the OS (technically 10.2, but colloquially known as ‘Jaguar’) from MacConnection, which has it for US$25 below list. It’s pretty remarkable how elegantly constructed most of the software is for Mac OS X, from 800 pound gorillas like Office v.X, which is running beautifully on my machine, to intrepid shareware/freeware endeavours like Fire, which makes one of the best instant messaging clients out there, and certainly the most elegant cross-IM platform application I’ve ever seen. Even the Java-based ports like LimeWire are way more elegant than their Mac OS Classic or Windows counterparts.

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Free Culture Has a Price

Lawrence LessigNoted cyber-age legal authority Lawrence Lessig has a wake-up call for anyone frustrated with the way media companies are trying to dominate copyright controls. He laid it down in his powerful presentation at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention: it’s in the old guard’s interest to try and control creativity and innovation; they have the power to do so and they are excercising it, and it’s our responsibility to fight it.

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New Hack Swing

MacHack CDFrom TidBITS: “The centerpiece of the annual MacHack conference is the MacHax Group’s Best Hack Contest, in which the world’s best programmers compete (preferably during the preceding 48 hours) to come up with software that displays the ultimate in programming creativity, knowledge, or arcana, ideally presented with tongue firmly planted in cheek.”For hardcore Mac geeks who couldn’t attend this past spring’s MacHack, the The MacHax Best Hack Contest CD is now for sale.

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