Friday, January 17, 2003

New Tascam PocketStudio This seems all the rage in the blogosphere this morning. 32Mb of Flash memory seems hardly fitting to record a 3-5 minute 4-track song, though... Put a 20Gig harddrive in there, and you've got a real winner. hey, that sounds like an iPod Studio! 10:56:46 AM

A little over seven years ago I... This one is for you TonyG A little over seven years ago I wrote a glowing review of the then-new Pointcast system. The review ran in Wired, and in huge type at Pointcast's tradeshow booth. And for the next seven years, after Pointcast's quick demise, we've been rebuilding the system, with open formats, choice, two-way-ness, and with a better scaling proposition. People who love the network that RSS forms will recognize the story. [Scripting News] 10:47:41 AM

Yole: Feedback. Yes, Feedback. Frankly speaking, I was really quite nervous about the release of Syndirella. It is not quite the first time I release anything to the public, but still - I really wanted to do everything right. I didn't sleep too well the night after the release, and uneasily approached my computer after I woke up. Congrats on your release! I'm glad to see someone create a desktop app for Windows to match to ease of use in NetNewsWire. I can see a lot of gie and take on feature sets between these two programs (or at least, I hope there is :-) 10:45:06 AM

Hibernate Tutorial Coming! I've been beavering away on a "Hibernate for the Impatient" HOW-TO doc, as a chance to give something back to the project. It doesn't cover the more advanced stuff on transactions and one-to-many mappings, but it will get people up and running on Hibernate within the hour (which always gives people a good feeling of accomplishment). It's around 50% done right now, but I'm planning to have a draft for show 'n tell by the end of the weekend. I'll post it here for feedback, th [glen] Looking forward to it! 10:29:52 AM

New news aggregator for Windows TonyG, would you try this out and let me know what you think? Any other windows users out there looking for a desktop news aggregator? Syndirella. This is the news aggregator for Windows I've been waiting for. Open source (GPL-licensed) A real application. Sorry, I've given that whole desktop web-based application thing more than its fair chance (even created my own for a client in my day job). It's just not working out. Simple 3-paned interface, ala NetNewsWire. RSS autodiscovery, and then some. It tries harder, like all news aggregators should. Support for (full HTML posts). Support for and (item-level dates). Per-feed subscription properties (including how often to check for updates). Lots of other cool little features. And most importantly, a built-in scraper, ala RSSDistiller and Cheesegrater. Allows you to configure it to read stubborn sites that don't provide RSS feeds. Note: requires the .NET framework. This will not install any evil spyware on your system or force you to sign up for Passport. It's just a bunch of APIs that sit around waiting to be called. It is 20 MB, though. [dive into mark] 10:19:07 AM

Behind the Scenes of the 1984 Mac Commercial While doing a bit of research for the upcoming book, I ran across a site that goes behind the scenes of the amazing 1984 Mac Commercial. At the bottom of the page is the script that Big Brother is reading: "My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth! We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail!" The commercial, available at apple-history.com still gives me goose bumps 19 years later. [James Duncan Davidson] If I ever get weblog searching working, I'd like to be able to refer back to this. Cool! 9:59:54 AM