Valhalla Island

When I first saw Joyent being launched I didn’t understand the size or popularity of the product they offer. All I really knew was that John Gruber had been working on it full time for a while so I thought it had to be good.

Since that initial launch it has been spoken about a lot. Everywhere I look people are speaking about Joyent. This seemed unusual since something that’s not open source never normally gets this sort of attention but Joyent did. Then a few days ago I see that Joyent has purchased and taken over TextDrive, a pretty serious player when it comes to hosting for the open source community. To give you a visual idea of how big they are here’s a photo from a recent upgrade:

Now I know how serious Joyent really is and why everyone was so interested in them. Ruby on rails is my next thing to check out. An XML CMS is what I think it is. It’s funny how I can read so much about a company or product and not really know what they do.

I love the Reader’s Digest. We get it delivered every month and it’s always interesting. I opened December’s issue yesterday and the first article I read was from their ‘Right Here, Right Now, Welcome to the 21st Century’ section. It was an article about the Australian Bible Society translating the entire Bible into text message form. Here’s an extract that made me sick:

da wise men listened 2 wat da king said & den left. & da star they had seen in da east went on ahead of dem until it stopped ova da place. They were thrilled & xcited 2 see da star. When da men went in2 da house & saw da child wit Mary, his mother, they knelt down & worshipped him. They 2k out their gifts of gold. l8r they were warned in a dream not 2 return 2 Herod, & they went bak home by another road.

I’m not religious at all so I’m not sickened by it because it’s blasphemy or anything like that. They say that ‘the Bible is now more accessible to young people’. Excessive abbreviations bother me all the time and it bothers me that teenagers are being labelled illiterate. It bothers me more that this is just being accepted as the way things are and isn’t trying to be corrected. It doesn’t make sense to type everything in shorthand for one situation when there’ll always be situations where you have to type with correct spelling and punctuation. The only advantage is saving a few milliseconds per sentence while you’re in a situation where it’s ‘acceptable’ to abbreviate and that millisecond is less if you type correctly all the time anyway. Not to mention it stops you looking like an idiot.

So instead of encouraging kids to stop their bullshit abbreviating all the time, the stupid church drops to their level and insults everyone’s intelligence. ‘Too stupid to read complete words? Then read our new super-excessively abbreviated version’ says the Bible Society of Australia.

I’m back from schoolies and finally the formal photos are up. You can get to them on the sidebar or by clicking here. If you have your own photos that you’d like to add you can email them to me. It’d be nice to have a really big archive.

By this afternoon or tomorrow I’m going to have asides running so that these small updates don’t appear as large articles. I’ll make sure they’re not posted into the RSS feed either.

We’re leaving for schoolies in about five hours. I didn’t get around to putting up the formal photos, it’s been too busy. See you in a week.

John Gruber wrote an article on a similar subject earlier this year but after looking around for a new mp3 player of my own I noticed a whole lot of things. Simplicity and Consistency is what makes the iPod the world’s most popular mp3 player.

The simplicity of the iPod range is the huge difference between them and any other mp3 player maker. The main company I’ll be comparing is Creative but what’s true for Creative is true for nearly all the others.

Factoring out colour and storage variations there are 3 types of iPods, the Shuffle, the Nano and the normal iPod. Factoring out colour and storage variations for Creatives range there are 23 different types. When you factor in colour and storage variations the iPod range provides 9 possibilities, the Creative range offers an amazing 109 variations. Someone wise once said ‘every decision you force a customer to make is another chance for them to decide to just walk away’. Trying to decide on a Creative mp3 player is very difficult. Some of the smaller players come in 128, 256, 512mb and 1gb sizes. What is the possible advantage of having so many sizes? How many people would look at the 512mb shuffle and think I wish I could spend $20 less and get half the storage space?

At the moment I own a Creative MuVo, not by choice though, we got it for free with a computer. It’s very small, has a screen and holds 1gb which is great for transferring files places. Creative advertises it’s mp3 players as ‘feature packed’. Mine has an FM radio and a voice recorder, both of which I have never used. This is another way Creative are over complicating their product. Throwing on unnecessary features that are never going to be used does more harm than good. The iPod does what it was made to do very well and nothing more. Creative does what it was made to do and packs on a load of other shit.

If you took the word ‘Creative’ off the front of their entire range you’d never know that they are made by the same company. Each model is either kind of similar or just completely different. Where is the consistency or the concept of branding? Could anyone even name Creative’s Nano sized rival? iPods don’t have Apple written all over them but you can tell within a second of seeing it that it’s an iPod, made by Apple.

Besides Creative’s range being unrecognisable and way too large, the UI is crap. iPod’s use anti-aliased myriad for their typeface on a cream background which is very pleasing to your eyes. Creative’s larger screen versions mainly use neon blue on a black background with an even brighter blue for highlighting. Their type choice looks like something I’d see using command prompt in Windows 95 on a 286.

The only thing I like about non-Apple mp3 players is the ability to just drop music onto them. iPod’s do some wierd thing to hide it’s music when you try to navigate directly to it. I don’t like iTunes and I don’t like that you have to install it just to be able to transfer music.

Our formal was last night and it was a lot of fun. The after-party went on until daylight and some people didn’t sleep at all before coming to school again.

The formal means a million photos. At Kris’s house we must have had around 1000 photos taken of us all. For each pose there were 15 parents with 20 cameras and they each took about 5 photos each. Then when we actually arrived the professional photographers took a photo of nearly every possible combination of people. So to account for all theses photos I am going to set up some awesome permanent page with everyones photos on it. Because I made a really cool thumbnail maker it’ll be nicely thumbnailed too. I’ll try to keep them fairly high resolution.

It’ll start with my very small amount and hopefully everyone will get theirs to me soon.

It was only a matter of time before advertising came about in podcasts. Fruitcast is the first company I’ve seen taking the first big steps.

Although I don’t like advertising I accept that it is a part of life. Although my main problem with advertising is when it’s in things I have paid for. I can’t believe that pay TV companies can justify showing ads at all or that pay TV subscribibers put up with it. When you are paying $50+ a month for something it shouldn’t come with embedded ads. I have less of a problem with ads that are bundled with things that are free, where their only source of revenue is advertising.

I have even less of a problem with ads when they are heavily targeted and may actually be of interest. I have even less of a problem when the ads look very nice. An example of ads I have little or no problem with are those of sites like 9rules and A List Apart. There’s been many occasions when I have actually clicked on ads at both sites. They were things I was very interested in and were pleasing to look at. This is what has made Google so successful, although thier ads aren’t quite as targeted since a computer chooses them. Also, Google works on them being less bad looking rather than much better looking.

Anyway, back to Fruitcast. I really like their philosophy. With podcasts it is possible to be extremly targeted with ads and they are controlling it strictly. There is a set of guidelines.

If we don’t think it’ll fly, we’ll reject it. We’ll let the advertiser know, and try to give them some feedback on how they can improve it. Lame ads hurt everyone.

That’s at the end of the guidelines. It’s true, good, high quality ads are good for everyone. The podcaster receives revenue without their material losing credibility, the advertiser reaches their targeted audience and the listener gets a short, non-intrusive ad that they may actually be interested in.

By complete accident I came accross photomatt with the default kubrick theme and I quickly saw how his smaller entries are separated from larger articles. The small ones are all put in a category named Asides. Then I imagine I’d just throw an if statement into the loop that picks out the posts with ‘Asides’ as their category and styles them differently.

I thought it’d be more difficult, separate tables or something, I don’t know why I was thinking like that though.

I spent so long today stuck on these tiny little problems. I know I said that I didn’t like RSS and this design was special because I dropped the sidebar but, I lied and they are both here now.

For around three hours I was stuck on the problem of the search form submit button not being included in the list element. That was right after I started and I’m suprised that I didn’t abandon the whole thing right there. I ended up compromising which I don’t like to do but the text field and button are on the same line now and it kind of looks better anyway. The sidebar is back because I thought it looked funny with just the search box and the RSS links on their own.

So now I’ve publically announced the availibility of my RSS feeds I might tell you how to use them. You download some sort of feed reader like RSS Bandit, Outlook and Thunderbird are also feed readers so you might already have one. Then you go to the section where you add a feed and copy in the link that those little buttons on the right take you to. Then you’re done. You can read my stuff without actually coming here! Technology’s great.

I made those little buttons myself too, I didn’t like any of the ones I found. I think that the RSS type is a pixel or 2 lower than the ATOM. I could check, but I won’t.

I’ve recently discovered that because this site is primarily run on Wordpress I also have my very own RSS feeds. I don’t just have them either. According to my stats people are using them. I couldn’t tell you what feed reader they’re using or anything like that but by the stats I’d say around 30-40 are using it. Here’s what I offer:

• RSS 2.0
• RSS 0.92
• ATOM 0.3
• Comments RSS 2.0

Pretty entensive list considering I had never even thought about it before. So in the next few days or maybe next few minutes I might throw up the famous orange XML button.

Open Source and Commercial Software Will Always Coexist Peacefully.

Everywhere I look people are talking about the Open Source bubble bursting or Microsoft facing a greater Linux threat. I don’t believe that either will ever bring the other down.

They are both for computer users but these days everyone is a computer user so it’s fair to say that open source is for one type of person and commercial, lisenced software is for the other. It’s almost as extreme to say that the mens clothing industry will never compete againsts the womens clothing industry.

Everything my Mum does on her computer she could easily do on an open source system, that she wouldn’t have to pay for. My Mum hates being on the phone to tech support but the point is that she needs it there. That’s the fundamental difference. People pay for people not software. Linux is free because it doesn’t come with a building full of people attached to phones and the majority of home PC users need this.

We were talking at TAFE last night about commericial servers versus open source servers. One guy there works for the council and they spend $100,000+ a year on Microsoft servers that he says won’t go a week without going down. That price is partly for hardware but mainly for yearly lisencing. Now compare that to a server running a Linux distribution and you get all the hardware, software and 3 people to sit there and watch it for the same price per year. The Linux system also calls itself ‘Super Ultra Stable’, there are open source servers out there that have had continuous up-time of 5 years or more. This seems as though it would be the far superior option for any business, the same hardware running free software that out of the box is guaranteed to work more efficiently and you get some people dedicated to keeping it working for the same price.

Still, a product without corporate backing is an unrealistic option for major business or government operations. It’s just too risky, even though in reality open source is a far more technically reliable option.

Webhosts most commonly use open source servers but this just proves that different people need different systems. Although both are operating systems they are extremely different, for very different people. There would be no advantage to Linux if tomorrow everyone threw their PCs in the bin and started running Red Hat or Debian. It would be disasterous to the community, there’s just no people to deal with support. It’s this difference that will keep people buying Windows and Mac OS. This shouldn’t bother Linux, they make very good software for the people that are comfortable fixing problems themseleves or turning to a helpful community forum.

This morning I had an economics exam and it was my last one. It hasn’t sunk in yet that I will never have to perform a group oral, study for a maths test or go to home group again. It hasn’t even sunk in that I don’t have to go to school for the rest of this week or that my formal and graduation are next week.

Now I just have to wait for my OP to arrive. It’s never crossed my mind that I won’t get what I am hoping for but now it feels a little more scary. It doesn’t bother me much though, I would love to get into any of my top five preferences. Even my 6th I wouldn’t be too disapointed about. I can’t wait until university. I can’t wait to be surrounded by people with my interests. I’m proud of myself for working hard right until the end and not giving up with a term to go like a lot of people at school.

December is my favourite month, there’s a few things this year that are going to stop it being as good as usual but there’s a few other things that are going to counter that. Things like turning 18 and finally seeing Less Than Jake.

I just caught the end of this last night on TV but just now I’ve seen the full extended version. It’s an ad for a Sony LCD screen with 250,000 bouncy balls bouncing down a Californian street. When I saw it I didn’t know if it was real or not but aparently it is.

You can see it on Sony’s website. It’s definately worth the loading time to see the larger, extended version.

-Update-

I just found an even longer, widescreen version. This version goes for 180 seconds and you never want it to stop.

I never used to have an email spam problem but I always had Norton Antispam installed just because it came with the other Norton tools. Everyday I mark about 20 emails as spam using Norton and everyday it seems I get the same spam again. So I wonder if it actually does anything.

Thunderbird, Firefox’s email girlfriend, is supposed to be very good at blocking spam straight out of the box but I have had many problems trying to configure it in the past. It won’t connect to any of my various mail servers.

Does anyone know of any free and effective spam blocking tools I can plug-into Outlook? Or even a completely new email client you know to be good?

9 rules is featuring this article from Cognitive Daily. It’s about an experiement with young kids and how they understand cause and effect. Very interesting.

Whenever Messenger starts telling me to update I always put it off until Messenger Plus tells me to update too. I can’t stand using a desktop application with ads. But from the time I first click the remind me again in one week box Messenger starts playing up, crashing at random times and signing me out over and over. I always thought this was some sort of built-in bully tactic to make people update.

After about the 7th time I had told it to back off for another week, Messenger Plus alerted me of it’s own update and I finally got 7.5. At first I didn’t see any obvious differences. Then I saw they have used a different icon and name for the old webcam function. It’s now video. I also saw a link in the bottom right hand corner telling me to ‘Get a Webcam’. This link takes you to a store selling webcams. I didn’t like that at all.

I proceeded to get rid of all the advertisments I could using Plus and Stuffplug. I couldn’t get rid of the webcam link though.

I looked around for more new features without finding any and then these alerts start popping up in the corner with a strange icon in the top left corner. These were telling me of people that had opened a conversation with me. Most of them, a few seconds later, would throw another alert on top telling me they were talking to me. I like this feature. It’s funny seeing the screen fill with people opening conversations when you first sign-in and then seeing how many people actually start conversations once they’ve seen who you are.

This feature might not be very reliable though. I once had a Plus plug-in installed that told me when people closed a conversation window. But often people would tell me they didn’t close the conversation and people with the plug-in would tell me that I had closed the window when I hadn’t.

There is a voice message feature which everyone has been talking about. I don’t have a microphone plugged in on this computer so I havn’t tested it yet. The way it seems to work looks very nice though.

The only other major interface update I could see was the new start-up/login screen. No longer is there a useless screen with a single button sending you to a dialog that you sign in with. The start up screen is now the login screen and it looks very, very nice. That was an update that was long overdue.

I havn’t asked anyone else if they are having the same problem but in my options menu I can’t get to any options other than the set that are first displayed. Pressing the buttons in the sidebar don’t do anything at all. Maybe it’s just my computer, maybe it’s another bully tactic because I have Plus installed and am hiding their ads?

“You want to hide our ads, fine, but you don’t get to change any options” says bully Messenger.

Most of the people I’ve met through my website or through other websites use AOL Instant Messenger. So I downloaded it yesterday afternoon. It’s always hard to be fair when criticising a different brand of a program you’ve always used because you’re just so used to the old one and it’s a matter of adapting to the new one. I’ve been playing with AIM for about half an hour now and compared to MSN Messenger, AIM is a piece of shit.

It’s ugly and unusable (or is it inusable?). I would put a picture of the interface but it’s so awkward that there’s no way I could see it fitting in with this article. The conversation window’s aren’t much better, actually, they’re worse, much worse. It feels like I’m in some horrible IRC private chat window. It doesn’t feel like a stand-alone, job specific program at all. Using it makes me feel dirty. Maybe you can customise the look of it somehow, or get some sort of themes or skins. I’ll have to look into it.

There was a very interesting article linked from Slashdot this morning. The article compares Windows and Linux user interfaces and suggests how Linux may compete with Windows. It also lists some serious Windows flaws that have often annoyed me but have never really thought about.

Today was the last day of classes. I have an exam tomorrow, two the next day and another next week and then it’s over. It hasn’t sunk in yet that I’ll never have to go to another high school class. It’s exciting and frightening. I really like school and I am going to miss almost everything about it.

I can’t wait until university. I would be very happy to get into any one of my top five preferences. It makes me very happy to think that for four years I will be learning, full-time about exactly what I want to learn about. Surrounded by people that share the same interests. At the moment there’s absolutely no one I could talk to at school about three column liquid CSS layouts, for example. It’s exciting thinking about picking specialised, elective courses. I can’t imagine how great it would be to work in a specific XML class or listen to a professor speak about usabilty in user interfaces.

On the day that classes finish I’ve also had my best night at TAFE. I am so happy with the work I am doing in that class. I’m doing so much on my own now. My teacher thinks I could get my own $60,000 teaching job how I am straight out of school. I am no teacher though.

The Joy of Tech is a very funny cartoon mainly based around Apple, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. It’s just been added to my daily reading list.

Two sites that I have recently come accross and really like are Binary Bonsai and Shadows. Both are very well designed although Binary Bonsai is only half finished and doesn’t support IE at all. I noticed how in depth it was and wanted to check how it looked in IE but it serves a style-less page instead asking you to browse happy. My new little comment word hider is completly stolen from him too. He also, like a lot of other websites I’ve been reading lately, uses a system of separating small updates from larger articles. I’m trying to decide if I’d like to implement that here.

Shadows is a beautiful looking site. It has a pretty flash header, I like the icons just underneath and the colours on the sidebar are great. There’s a recent article on Shadows that I liked about education.

I downloaded iTunes again. I don’t like how it automattically imports all the music it can find. I also don’t like how it remembers my old podcast information. When I uninstall a program I want it to delete everything. I also dislike iTunes for it’s obnoxious .m4a file format. Why create create your own Apple/iTunes only file format when there is a high quality, widely used open format available. I only got it so I could listen to the higher quality version of Mark Hoppus’s podcast which is only available in stupid .m4a.