Blog Reading

Reading blogs takes much less time using Google Reader. Why? The way things are organized/viewed is faster and I have learned the magic keystrokes (Shift-n, Shift-p, Shift-o to switch activate a feed and my old friends j and k for moving up and down inside a feed).

One other thing that has been interesting is the Trends chart:


Based on the trends, I was able to see that the Drudge Report was the most frequent poster (many repeats). After a little thought, Drudge got the axe. I can go to the web page a few times a day faster than looking at the headlines inside Reader. Next on the list is probably Hot Links.

Wireless Mouse (Keyboard) Batteries

I have a love/hate relationship with my wireless mouse (and keyboard). The mouse seems to eat batteries. It seems like the mouse needs 2 AA batteries at the most inopportune moments....

Mouse:
September 27, 2007
August 25, 2007
July 28, 2007

Update August 25: The mouse needed to be fed again.
Update September 27: Fed mouse again, keyboard has shown an alert. Looks like the mouse needs to be fed once a month.

Facebook Bankruptcy

There's been a lot of buzz about Facebook since they opened it up to non-students recently. There have also been a number of posts about the difference between it and the other online diary applications. It's supposed to be a more mature version of MySpace.

Recently a high-profile Facebook user, Jason Calcanis, declared Facebook bankruptcy and comment bankruptcy. He has a great quote midway through his post:

You spend so much time checking off what you'll do that you never do anything.

Robert Scoble wrote: Calacanis can’t keep up with Facebook This post reeks of geek superiority, when there shouldn't be any. Scoble posts some interesting things and some interesting videos, but his job is different than a lot of other people. He fails to realize this in this post. Facebook, etc. are just tools for non-disruptive communication. The moment that their usage becomes disruptive, they lose their usefulness.

I fail to see how people can spend all day updating their every move on any of these applications and still get any real work done. Not to mention the fact that most people really don't care when/where you are eating, going, etc. These posts are a great reminder to focus on things that really need to be done.

Book: Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby

The Pragmatic Programmers have released another little PDF book, Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby. It looks pretty good!

The bad news: It is written for Qt3. Hopefully they will update it for Qt4 in the near future.

An OLPC Option?

Slashdot reports a $150 Linux Laptop for the Masses. At first glance, this looks like another option for an OLPC---The laptop is a 1.5 GHz Celeron M 370 with 14 inch screen, wireless network and it comes with Fedora Red Hat pre-installed. According to the update, the Swedish company offering the machine may not be entirely legitimate.

Regardless, the future is clear. Low-cost machines are going to become more readily available.

Web 2.0?

The debate over the use of Web 2.0 continues. O'Reilly's Conference News points to an article in the Miami Herald, What is Web 2.0?

The short story:
The definition of Web 2.0 differs depending on whom you ask.

The defining issue seems to be whether or not a user can edit something on a site, i.e., Wikipedia. One could argue that this is old technology, given that WikiWikiWeb started back in 1995 (if not a bit earlier), it's just easier for user's to modify (post) content.

So, I still don't think much of the use of the term Web 2.0. It's just marketing buzz words for the evolving state of the web.

Real meaning of OLPC?

New Acronym: OnLine Porn for Children
Old Acronym: One Laptop Per Child

OLPC Used to Browse Porn, was posted on Slashdot last week. I was a little surprised to see this, then again not.

One Laptop Per Child machines for sale this Xmas?, on BoingBoing, suggests that more children may be able to view porn. It has a pretty good close-up of the machine, for those that haven't seen it.

Blog Reading: Bloglines -> Reader

I've been using Google Reader the last few days, first for the Mac-related blogs, now for everything! I tried Reader several times before, but it didn't seem to do handle news the way I like to read them. Somewhere along the way, this has changed. I like the way it keeps a history of previously read items (I have over 3200 items marked in Bloglines). This was part of the catlyst for change---keeping items seems to slow Bloglines down, as it reloads any images. While waiting for one of the blogs to load the other day, I thought "I should try Reader again."

This is my second newsreader switch since I've been reading news/blog feeds. I switched to Bloglines from NetNewsWire about a year ago when I decided that I was rereading (mostly headlines) the same stories at home/office during the day. I still like NetNewsWire, but I don't always have access to it, the way I do to web-based readers.

This cartoon sums things up pretty well:

Some Coding Tips

Awhile back, a couple of fairly well known Mac developers posted some thoughts on how to manage code a little more effectively. Each one of these has some good practical ideas to help manage the process.

• Thoughts about large Cocoa projects
  
• Uncle Jens’s Coding Tips
  
• Code Expiration (Suicidal Code)
  

Contrasting Hands

Mari holding my index finger. Quite a contrast in size!