Ok Scoble, but what about search feeds and starred posts?

I was watching this video of Robert Scoble discussing his feed reading system. I found it quite interesting and Scoble, as always, seems so honest and enthusiastic about what he does. You can tell he really loves it. Nice.

Of course there were snippets that undoubtedly would rile up some segment of small struggling tech bloggers, like scanning the headings and bylines for authors he knows and relegating ones he doesn't to the trash. There was also his mention of how he finds the small guys by paying attention to what the 'A-List' bloggers link to. Not exactly what "Joe Smith" was wanting to hear I imagine.

But one thing I didn't hear Robert mention was search feeds. I know that I have several Technorati and Google Blogsearch result feeds that give me posts that I would completely miss otherwise. I've found many new and wonderful blogs that way. I've got search feeds for things like 'Inkscape', 'Vim', 'wxPython' and some others. I've also used Chris Pirillo's gada.be engine (now called tagjag it seems) to good effect as well.

So why wouldn't Scoble use a Technorati feed with the term 'tablet pc'?

Sure these blog search feeds do generate a fair amount of noise, but it's fairly easy to sift through, and like I say, you can find some gems that you'd have otherwise missed. The other benefit is that they're transient. I can delete, or modify those search result feeds as my short term interests change (which they do all the time it seems).

So the questions go out to Robert and everyone else, do you use Feed searches? If so, what blog search engine do you use? And how do you use them?

ps - I'm also a huge fan of the 'starred post' feature in Google Reader. I use this as a rudimentary rating system so that I can quickly scan feeds and mark off interesting ones for later reading (I don't have all day to read these things) so it's nice to be able to keep track with something easier and far more efficient than something like say, del.icio.us .

The bigger picture - Facebook? Uh.. no.

Kent Newsome weighs in even more on the Social Networking v. blogging issue. His last statement strikes a real chord with me:

"I think the social networking closed site as online Mecca story is a myth driven by people who want to keep the content producing public behind the walls so they can make money off of the content they produce."

And while I'm not focused on making money on the content I produce (would be a nice side-benefit), I am interested in getting it out to the world - not to my fellow Facebook members or my MySpace friends. I want the meager contribution I make to be reachable by anyone wanting to read or watch it.

And the conversational aspect is no different. I want to hear from people interested in what I'm interested in, no matter where they are, no matter what their stripe.

I want to participate in the bigger picture - as Dave Winer put it the other day, "the wild wild web, the unbounded frontier". Facebook, MySpace, Virb and the like, are definitely not the bigger picture, no matter how much money they make for their
creators.

LIC - do you have it?

Penguin Pete outlines the symptoms of LIC (the Linux Insecurity Complex).

Describing one of the typical symptoms, Panic Attacks (thinking about how MS will sue Linux out of existence), Pete writes,

"You could drop nuclear bombs on every Linux user on the planet, but you'll miss at least one server housing the source code, to be found by some future archaeologist, and there it will go spreading again. Linux is creeping charlie. It is rooted too deeply to budge. Why do you think Microsoft is so afraid of it?"

So if you're a Linux user, you owe it to yourself to read his post and start showing some dignity! :)

Free commenting system? What free commenting system?

Yours truly (a.k.a. The Idiot Blogger), proudly posted about freeing up my comment system, proceeded to disable comment moderation and then forgot to hit 'Save Settings'.

Some ten hours later, idiot (me) finally gets home to realize commenters on his post are locked in moderation limbo.

Apologies to Chris and Will (btw - I'm not entirely sure that's you Will Simpson or some other Will, but I'll take the chance - I've already been an idiot once today, might as well bask in it).

Gee, you'd think I would have been automatically removed from the gene pool by now.. ;)

Freeing Up The Commenting System

Chris Brogan is someone I've enjoyed reading for quite some time now. And while lately he's been knee-deep in the 'new media' space, every now and then he gives some sound solid advice for those of us who are doing these things solely for enjoyment and nothing else.

With my recent experimentation with screencasting, inkscape, linux, twitter and other things tech, I have not spent a lot of time improving my blog (or my blogging). Chris wrote a recent post on making your blog more friendly. One of his first points was about making commenting easier, citing the fact that captchas are a hurdle that should be avoided if at all possible. He also wrote that some blogging software (like blogger.com) makes it mandatory.

Hmm. I know I had captchas enabled, but never really checked if that was mandatory. Lo and behold, it isn't. A quick switch of a radio button in the commenting settings will turn it off.

I put a high value on the few comments I do get because of the opinions, ideas and discussion that can show up there. Therefore, I've turned captchas off and for that matter I've also turned off comment moderation just to see if anything changes. I'll still get email notification of comments and can go in and delete comments if they are in fact spam.

So for now I've freed up the commenting system - no moderation, no captchas. Now on to much tougher things like improving the writing and posting frequency...

Dell to sell PC's in Wal-Mart stores

I haven't seen any chatter on the very recent news that Dell is going to be selling a model or two of PC's in Wal-Mart stores starting in June. This will be in Canada as well as the US. They will be custom spec models exclusively for WalMart. I'd say that's pretty big news for a company that has so far resisted any real retail presence other than a few mall kiosks.

I'm not normally one to break any tech news but I actually knew about this a few days ago. I now have a little birdie flying around the hallways there. :)

Unfortunately you can bet your first born that the models destined for Wal-Mart stores won't be the ones running Ubuntu. But then again, stranger things have happened. ;)

Why Facebook and not blogs?

Kent Newsome asks the question:

"What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress?"

I joined Facebook a little over a month ago - and while it does have it's uses, it in no way would serve as a replacement for this blog (or blogging in general). To me it's a completely different animal.

Facebook has put me in contact with two or three old friends (an old friend with whom I'd lost touch, one French teacher from high school and a former university house-mate of mine). The rest are people I already know and interact with. But that's really the extent of it for me. It's not a place I visit to learn anything new other than whether or not Joe OldFriend has kids or not or some other personal info people are willing to share.

But that's just it. It's all personal. It's all relatively closed. It's only as open as people are willing to make it. I don't login often. Maybe because I'm not a social butterfly by nature. Maybe because it's just been a series of 'hey long time no see, what ya up to' type private messages.

Sure, there are people who cross connect, join groups and share pictures and interests. If that's what you're looking for then it serves that purpose too.

Blogging on the other hand is much more expansive. And a lot more work too. But you're opening yourself up to discovering many more new things and people (and being discovered by a much wider range of people too). It's a completely different thing. If your into learning about new things, expanding your horizons and really participating in a global conversation then Facebook is not the place to do it. Granted it's not meant to be, and frankly I get the impression that the vast majority of people there are not that lofty in their ambitions anyway - which is perfectly fine too.

Of course there are the more subjective aspects. Facebook is very constrained design-wise and not at all pretty. It's a big step up from MySpace, but my home page seems like a sea of user names, widget headings and a big fat annoying ad on the left side, all drowning in a sea of too-tiny text. I imagine you can play with it, but every Facebook page I've seen is the same. It's just too constrained for my tastes.

It's also a closed system. So there is absolutely nothing that advances the cause of the most underappreciated internet technology - RSS. I don't think Google can crawl Facebook and for some people that might be a good thing - if they even care. Maybe it's only people who understand the value of a feed aggregator that will care about that anyway.

It still reminds me of Classmates.com. It hasn't added any value to my life other than reconnecting me with a few long lost friends. But a quick google search of my name could have done it a lot quicker. But alas, not everyone has a web presence and this might be the way in for the 'great unwashed'. If only it wasn't so closed. Maybe a buyout might go some way to solving this.

What is telling for me is that for each person I reconnected with, I always ended up telling them it was better to check out my family blog or this blog if they really wanted to see what I was up to. I've been really using it as a way to climb in there and say - 'come out here and see what you're really missing'.

Make no mistake, not everyone is cut out for blogging. Not everyone wants to write more than a few misspelled lines in a comment on someone's 'wall'. Not everyone cares about well designed pages, trackbacks or RSS. Maybe Twitter/Jaiku/Tumblr addresses all that.

To me, blogging is so open-ended and has so much potential in so many ways and Facebook has none.

I think the winds of change are always blowing too. There's been Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and now maybe Virb or something else. Maybe it's good you don't put a lot of hard fought effort into your content on Facebook. You likely won't be able to move it when you transition to the 'next big thing'.

There's some food for thought Kent. :)

How not to impress anyone on a job interview..

I have not been in the job market for over a decade (and don't plan on being in it the short term either), but we're interviewing people for entry level design and drafting positions at our firm and I'm mystified by something.

Why do people show up half an hour late dressed in casual clothes for a job interview? Has society changed so much in the last 10 years that you no longer need to dress appropriately and show up on time for an interview?

About 11 years ago I remember sitting in my car, dressed in my suit, half an hour early for my interview, nervously waiting for the appointment time. I remember even taking a drive a few days earlier on the weekend to scope out the place so I'd know where it was, where I could park etc. I didn't want to get lost or have to walk 5 miles and be late for that interview.

Overprepared? Maybe. But the last few people I've seen come by here for interviews have been late and are dressed pretty shoddy. We work in a casual dress environment (think golf shirts and khakis), but this is a job interview - aren't you trying to make a good impression?

I'm not the one doing the hiring so I can't really speak to their experience or skills, but man, these people don't look like they're trying to impress anyone. At least they're achieving that.

Nothing like a bit of humour to send you into a long weekend...

Thank you to DanteDefiance, who's digg comment got me chuckling at the end of a long Friday afternoon:

"How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if the woodchuck was Chuck Norris?

...all of it."

Here We (lo)Go Again!

Here's another logo contest for those interested in exercising their creative muscles and learning Inkscape at the same time. This one sounds especially interesting and fun too:

From debianArt.org :

Debian Jr. is a Custom Debian Distribution (CDD) project.
Their goal is to make Debian an OS that children of all ages will want to use. Their initial focus will be on producing something for children up to age 8. Once they have accomplished this, their next target age range is 7 to 12. By the time children reach their teens, they should be comfortable with using Debian without any special modifications.

The Debian Jr. needs a logo and all designers are welcome!

Check out the contest's About Page for all rules and deadline (July 16th).

Update: If you want to incorporate the standard Debian 'swirl' in some way, I found a scalable SVG version of it on the debianart.org site right here.

How to get me to stop watching TV in one easy step...

So it sounds like CBS is cancelling Jericho. I quite enjoy it. In fact, it's the only TV series I've watched with any amount of loyalty in the last 5 years.

Of course they've got to make sure everyone gets their fill of frickin' CSI-whatever shows, that's for sure.

Bahh. I'm angry.

Anybody know where else a guy can get his fill of post-apocalyptic entertainment?

Photos + Music = Much more

One thing I lament is the lack of an equivalent to MS-Photostory for linux. The awesome effect music can have on a series of photos has always amazed me and Photostory is a simple way of achieving that. (Photoshop Elements (and likely iPhoto) can do the same sorts of things).

If you've ever wondered how much music can influence imagery, check out this wonderful (but of course flash-heavy) site that I found via digg.

A couple of years ago I made a nice slideshow using the 'Ken Burns' pan and zoom effect and a series of pictures of my wife and our daughter from the first 4 years of her life. I had a lot of pictures to choose from after all.. ;) With the beautiful song 'Promise' by Tracy Chapman as the audio backdrop, it still elicits tears from family (including myself, and I was the one who made it!).

So put your headphones on and check out that site. Once you're clicking through the photos, turn the music off (speaker icon at upper right) and try and tell me it doesn't make a huge difference.

Come to mention it, wouldn't it be nice for Flickr to offer a similar service? Maybe they could build a library of creativecommons music to build an online flash generated slideshow with music. Or maybe someone else already offers this? It would be a great way to build this stuff and promote cc music at the same time.

Ever seen one of these in a store?

I can now bid goodbye to burning CD-RW's for podcast listening in the car. For some strange reason I thought the USB input on my new car's stereo was for some special connection to a dedicated mp3 player (a la iPod). Turns out you can plug any USB key into it and play the mp3 files that it contains! Kia supplies a short black cord for this connection. I've tried it and it works flawlessly with the 1GB key I keep in my briefcase.

The stereo's face has a female 'mini' usb jack on it, and the supplied cord has a male mini-usb on one end and a female usb type-A connector on the other end. The type-A connector is the 'normal' thin and wide jack type that is used on virtually all usb keys and devices. So you can plug the usb key right into the female end of the cable.

And while the cable is not too unsightly, the geek in me is now in search of a direct 'female type A to male mini-usb' adapter to eliminate the cord completely. Effectively I want to plug the USB key right into the face of the stereo, eliminating the cord.

I've done some online searches at BestBuy and TheSource (aka RadioShack up here), but the best I can seem to find is a female to female version.

This is exactly what I want. Anybody seen it available in good old brick and mortar electronic shops?

RSS in rewind?

Maybe it's just me, but I find it funny that the person I consider to be the 'father of RSS' seems to upchuck a bunch of posts from a couple of years ago every once in a while. You'd think he'd be the last person with publishing bugs. I guess it's the price you pay for doing development work.

In any case Dave, I almost thought New Orleans was flooding all over again.

:)

That new car smell baby!

Well, it finally arrived today! No more ass numbness from the blatting exhaust of my 95 Integra. I got my new Rio5 today! It's 'copper graphite' ... dark-metallic-grey for us non-marketing types. And I love it. It's a fully loaded Ex-Sport model. For a feature list, check out my post of about a month ago where I first pondered the decision.

Nuff said, here's a couple of pics:

Jericho -mmm mmm good, and mushy link love to boot.

I just finished watching the latest episode of Jericho I had recorded from Wednesday night. Awesome awesome awesome!

I've watched the series from the beginning (based on an initial critique from Kent Newsome by the way - a testament to the power of 'word of mouth'), and it's just kept me always coming back for more. I don't watch much tv otherwise, so I've tried to figure out what it is about the series thats so compelling to me.

I think it comes down to two things:

1. The way they are able to intermix the personal and global storylines so well. They manage to give proper attention to each, without diluting either; and,

2. The show manages to provide satisfactory and substantial milestones in each episodes and also supplies unexpected plot twists and great setup for the next episodes to keep me coming back for more.

Kudos to the people who create Jericho. There is still something to be said for damn good television.

Following on from David's good practice and at the risk of copycatting Kent and now Earl, a couple of 'Thank You Links'(tm) go out to my inkscape screencasting compadre heathenx, and nate who commented on my recent post about mp3 splitting.

I really appreciate all you guys.

You have got to be kidding.. right? No?

How's this for a twist?

1. Man diagnosed with pancreatic cancer - given one year to live.

2. Man stops paying mortgage, quits job, spends all his savings, family trips, lives life to the fullest - even makes funeral arrangements.

3. Man notices symptoms going away.

4. Man told he was misdiagnosed - it's inflammation of the pancreas, not cancer.

5. Man left bankrupt, in dire straits, but alive.


Talk about a rollercoaster. A great wave of relief followed by dawning realization and terror.

He's asking for compensation, and failing that will sell his house and/or sue the hospital. I don't think he'll win, but you gotta have some sympathy for the guy.

Good audio book - but I'd like to chop it up. Any Suggestions?

While perusing the comments on a Digg post about Richard Dawkins, a link was posted to a freely downloadable mp3 file containing the audiobook version of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. I started listening to it this morning and have done enough driving as of lunchtime to reach the two hour mark.  So far it's a really interesting and thought provoking narration of science and society. The whole thing is listed as 13hrs and 19min long (!). It's a 137MB download no less.

Therein lies the problem. I am appealing to anyone out there who might know of an automated way to split any given mp3 file into a number of chunks. I could do this in Audacity manually, but for something this size an automated splitter app would do wonders.

As I've mentioned in the past, I burn my podcast mp3 files onto an mp3 CD-RW which I then listen to in the car. The  fast-forward and rewind capabilities of the car deck are fully capable for a 4 minute music file, but they become clunky and extremely inefficient when you're talking about 30 minutes let alone 13 hours. ;)

I like the audiobook, but it would be nice to be able to stop and listen to some music files or something else for a while and then come back at least close to where I left off. So I'm thinking of splitting it into half-hour or 15 minute chunks. Anybody know of a free and effective tool for the job?

If I found an effective solution I'd probably run the splitter on any podcast longer than an hour since it's been more than once that I've inadvertently forwarded to the next track when trying to skip ahead a minute or two.. doh!

Do cars have feelings too?

I think my car knows it's the end of days. The new car (a silver, fuel-miserly, and decent looking Kia Rio5 - Ex Sport) is hopefully available in the next day or two and my current car - a '95 Acura Integra 4-door - is flailing in panic.

Since putting down the deposit on the Korean car at the end of last week, my Integra's automatic tranny has started hunting for gears at odd times, and what was once a slightly louder than normal exhaust note has developed into a bellow on full acceleration. It's almost as if it's now given up and is beckoning me for one final expensive repair job.

Flail away buddy boy. You've been a decent car under indecent conditions, but your time has come. I've managed to go from around 200,000km when I got it to just over 340,000km in about 2.5 years. Not too much of that is city driving, but a fair amount of it is dirt and rough road travelling - so I don't feel I was jipped.

But nonetheless, it is a little embarassing these last couple of days driving around in something that sounds like the truck from Sanford & Son.

But maybe if I tilt the seat way back, people will assume I'm just another two-bit punk driving an Integra with a big soup-can muffler. I better get me some hip-hop goin' in the car too for authenticity.

Yo yo yo. Word.
:)

What's in a name...

Todd Cochrane blogs about a recent WSJ article on the importance of how well your name Googles. It's been a while since I Googled my own name, but back in the day, I was the 2nd or third entry. There are relatively few benefits to having a last name like mine. But in the age of Google, it definitely ain't hurtin' my page rank. ;)

Currently when I type my first and last name into Google I get 30,600 hits. The first result that is not 'me' is at the very bottom of the third page!  - I pwn Google biatch! :)

But with great power comes great responsibility... I have been at the same engineering firm for over 10 years now. If I ever went looking for a new job, I'd better be proud (or at least not embarassed) about what pops up in those first three pages of results.

Scanning those 29 hits, my only concern might be that you'd think I was a programmer/graphic artist/photographer - there is nothing about structural engineering anywhere in those first three pages. While I enjoy what I do, it's not something I blog about or participate in online.

Besides, I'm happy where I am, but if I did end up switching jobs, I'd probably be keen for something in programming/graphic arts/photography. :)

What's your Googability?

ps. I've also got Meandering Passage riding my coattails at the bottom of the first page of results. You're welcome Earl! ;)

One Reader at a Time

Ron K. Jeffries mulls over his blog stats today. In his post he quotes a New Yorker article which states:

"Of the blogs that review products, Engadget, now owned by AOL, has the biggest audience; it gets about eight million unique visitors per month. …"

Ron will be glad to know that I don't subscribe to Engadget. But I do subscribe to him. :)

Number generates big numbers...

Geez, I never thought anything would ever beat the 22,000 diggs that the iPhone announcement received... nevermind by a 13,000 digg margin.

Steven's Old School Linux experiment begins...

Steven Rosenberg is truly going old school.

He's starting an experiment where he's going to the command line for a month. No Gnome, no KDE, no XFCE, nada, zip, zero. Here is his Day 1 Post.

I look forward to seeing how he makes out.

Under Feisty, I do a fair amount of things at the command line (or more accurately the pseudo-command line - I'm talking about  terminal window within Gnome). I still love and use MOC for playing music, I do a lot of my file management from the command line, Vim is my editor of choice most of the time, and ImageMagick has proved useful and efficient at times - if only I bothered creating a list of the various tools.

Good luck Steven - hopefully you post some progress reports.

SCTV Genius - courtesy of YouTube

I'm not sure if there are any SCTV fans who read this blog, but back in the day it was one of my favourite shows.

Thanks to YouTube, you can watch the classic Gerry Todd show. It gave me a good chuckle on so many levels (the DJ voice, the video effects, the commercials, it goes on and on - video bloggers take note!).

Part 1 has the start of the show and classic Gerry Todd - bring up the super.

Part 2 has a hilarious Doobie brothers carpet warehouse commercial and a Christopher Cross / Michael Mcdonald video at the end that is pure genius.

I forgot how awesome SCTV was. Thank you YouTube!

We're not paying you to use Facebook...

I've written about the seemingly ubiquitous Facebook a couple of times. While I have a Facebook account, I've hardly every used it. A couple of friends and relatives have beckoned me to post some things there (on their "walls"?) but to this point I haven't really complied.

A couple of newsworthy things about Facebook:

1. It was recently reported that Toronto is the 'facebook capital' meaning that this area has the largest facebook contingent (NYC supposedly has around 250,000). Is this a good thing? Dunno.

2. I spotted a CBC story today where the Premier of Ontario (Dalton McGuinty) has stated that he doesn't see how Facebook adds any value to the workplace. As of yesterday, provincial government employees were banned from accessing Facebook. (and YouTube) through their workplace computers.


The article also mentions that more than a few provincial and federal politicians have Facebook pages, so it's not only the 'grunts' that might be pissed off about it.


With records showing these sites being checked more than 20 times an hour in some cased, I have to say I'm glad to hear it. We (Ontarians) are paying the salaries of these people are we not?

My Most Narcissistic Post Ever.. so far anyway

Like many avid photographers, I've got thousands of photos on my hard drive, of which, I'm in maybe 5 or 10.

I just wasted 30 minutes trying to find a decent photo of myself to use for my Twitter badge. I quickly remembered that I generally hate photos of myself. It is very rare that I like any of them and that's why the photo in my blog profile has never really changed.

I did manage to find a couple passable ones. The first one I chose I happen to like quite a bit, but it looks far more serious and contemplative than I actually am. I would feel like I was pretending if I used that one. It was actually taken with my 50mm F1.8 lens at arm's length while I was looking out a nearby window.


I finally found one a little more in character for me. Of course it was taken when I'm at my absolute happiest - when I'm cuddling my daughter.


So until I go get the glamour shots done at the mall, that's the one I have to settle on for my Twitter badge. ;)

Of course the backup plan is to do some very very minor touchups to my blog profile photo using Inkscape... can you tell which one's the original?

The Real Landscape of the Web

If you were looking for a Map of Online Communities (and related points of interest), look no further. Beautiful. I love how the 'Mountains of Web 1.0" separate the Icy North (Yahoo and MS) from just about everything else. ;)

Kevin Rose between the proverbial rock and hard place

There has been a lot of unrest on Digg lately after they started pulling posts that contained HD-DVD crack codes as part of a cease and desist order. Users were adamant that this was wrong and started digging posts up to the front page, effectively spamming the system.

Kevin Rose, in what is either a cool move - or dumb move - depending on your perspective, wrote yesterday:

We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Errr. You just might. Either way too. Piss off enough users and you lose credibility and page views, get sued up the ying-yang and you lose too.

No wonder I heard Kevin mention that he's working on a new web app (the first really separate thing from Digg) during a recent Diggnation episode.

It's a tough call.

Ubuntu To Jump Shark - free admission

Given the impending news of Dell shipping systems preloaded with Ubuntu, I guess there is no doubt now that Ubuntu has jumped the shark. What's next? Trying to get Linux slapped on the side of an IRL race car? At this rate, there will be people using Linux who've never even compiled a kernel before!

Oh the humanity!

Honestly, I don't see the march towards free and open source salvation (or disaster depending on your point of view) stopping any time soon either. I'm not going to join the geeky hordes in calling this the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' - even though this year it seems somewhat more realistic than the last ten, but looking at the surroundings, it does give you pause for thought.

Some interesting things from my perspective:

1. Free and open source development is not slowing - people not getting directly paid for developing things hasn't been a major stumbling block to this point.

2. The general public is getting more tech saavy. It doesn't matter if they are switching to Macintosh. At least they are beginning to realize that there are completely viable non-Microsoft alternatives. While awareness is growing at what seems like a snail's pace, it is growing - inexorably.

3. If Vista hasn't been a failure, it sure hasn't been the runaway success that it needed to be to maintain utter long term dominance.

4. Virtualization may make the choice obsolete. If I can run XP in VMWare, or XP in Parallels on a Mac, then the sacrifice of moving from one platform to another will vanish.

5. The pace is relentless. Who can move faster? Microsoft, Apple or FOSS developers? Doesn't releasing an OS every 5 years leave you a little hog-tied when technologies rise and fall so quickly? Apple sounds like it is trying to make some big steps with Leopard. It has to. I haven't heard of one thing in Vista that could be considered a big step ahead. Linux will undoubtedly scramble, catch up and likely surpass Apple's best efforts within a year anyway. Such is the tenacity of riled up developers when the gauntlet is thrown.

6. Free and open-source software is empowering the people who make and do interesting things. Open vs. closed models is becoming the big debate more and more often. Witness Silverlight v. Adobe.

7. If you can succeed as wildly as Ubuntu has, with a default brown theme, you can do just about anything! ;)


So the shark-jumping is not the end. It's hopefully only the beginning.

XMMS2 logo entry winner announced!

To quote Shaggy... 'It wasn't me..'

Congratulations to Arnaud Didry's entry 'Bluenote' which won the XMMS2 logo contest . It is a very attractive and striking graphic. Good job, and very deserving of the win.

I wonder how Arnaud plans to spend the $400 Amazon gift certificate prize?  If you had 400 bucks to spend on Amazon what would you buy?