News.com: Yahoo's Semel steps down, Yang takes over.

Jerry Yang blogs about the Yahoo!

A 1999 picture of Scoble 2.0 at age 5.

Jeremy Toeman: USPTO launching P2P patent review.

My first software review was in the NY Times, in 1983.

Marc Canter enjoys the relaxed lifestyle of Trieste.

Kottke reviews Ratatouille. Sounds like a good movie!

Dvorak: "Wake me when Matlock comes on."

After all the michegas about AT&T last week, I decided to order a second Internet connection. I was pretty happy with their high speed DSL, but if they're going to gang up on customers with the record industry, I want to be sure I have an exit planned out.

So I ordered a Comcast network interface. It should arrive in a few days.

The question is can I have both network interfaces running on the same LAN?

I was thinking if I plug the Comcast box into a G4 desktop that has two Ethernet jacks, while the other is plugged into the big switch I bought a few weeks ago (and it's working great, btw) that's connected into the DSL line, that somehow all my computers would be on both nets at the same time?

I figured some of the network gods tuned into this station may have some ideas.

Is there any way to make use of two net connections on one LAN? Or does it necessarily mean two separate local nets?

Comment here, please.

And sorry for destroying our culture, Andrew.

I have to take a written driving test tomorrow. They have example tests, which is useful. I've never failed one of these tests, but I'm getting a fair number of the practice questions wrong.

One thing that's really cool about the DMV site is they tell you what the current wait time is at the local office, and other nearby offices. It's been a long time since I've been to a California DMV.

BTW, according to Andrew Keen, posts like this are ruining our culture. Sorry for that.

I sat in the same seat for 14 hours, arriving just past 5:00 in the morning. And it wasn't even the best spot!

But it was pretty good, and my notes are here.

It will be good to get back and see my family.

This is the one post I won't just refer to The Sand Trap. I didn't write anything Saturday there.

I met my cousin at about 7:15 by the second green, and we watched 19 golfers go through the second hole. Masters champ Zach Johnson triple bogeyed after putting in a bunker to get to a better lie, then leaving his ball there with his next shot.

We wandered around, and my cousin admonished me for not telling him that the "hot chick ratio" at golf tournaments was so high. So, for any other single guys out there, consider yourself warned: you should dress well when you attend golf tournaments if golf and comfort aren't first on your list of priorities.

I spent Friday at the U.S. Open (as I will every day this week except Wednesday) and my observations are here. Executive summary: Steve and I watched seven hours of golf at the first and ninth holes and we saw one birdie. One.

Oh, and Phil Mickelson is a silly, whiny man.

Today Steve and I took the day off from hiking around the golf course to play one of my favorite courses in the general area: Oak Tree Country Club near Sharon, PA. The course was reviewed rather positively on The Sand Trap and it's always a joy to play.

Despite not playing particularly great, I shot 33 on the front nine. I nailed four birdies and mixed in a double bogey from a bad sand wedge. The back didn't go quite as well, primarily due to more horrible sand wedges, but it's one of my better rounds of late, particularly with the putter. I worked with a yardstick on the practice green prior to play. It must have helped.

Play was halted up the sixth hole due to a hailstorm that dumped an inch of water and pebble-sized hail on the area. The practice green was nearly solid white at one point.

Ken Case:

OmniFocus uses compressed XML transaction files to store its data, with a SQL cache for efficient access. (Each time you update the application, we rebuild the SQL cache to ensure that it’s consistent with the latest schema.)

This clever design lets OmniFocus store its data in a text-based format while also providing good performance and mitigating the rigidity of SQL storage for an evolving application. I’m currently trying out OmniFocus as a replacement for OmniOutliner Pro for managing my software projects. Despite the fact that I’m not into GTD, OmniFocus seems to be a good fit. It automates much of the work that I did manually in OmniOutliner, moving items around to view them in different ways. It supports multiple windows and hoisting, and the filtering options are much better suited to my purposes than OmniOutliner’s. Most importantly, OmniFocus doesn’t do too much. It’s nothing like OmniPlan, which goes way behind my needs. It’s more like a version of OmniOutliner that’s optimized for tasks.

Eric Blair:

The MBA folks I’ve met who are interested in the tech sector tend to fit into two groups — those that think feature checklists are the be-all and end-all and those that think you need to truly understand what the customers want. Furthermore, party membership doesn’t seem particularly driven by level of technical skill. Some tech-savvy MBAs want solutions with every bell and whistle while others believe that their level of tech-savviness takes them outside of the main market segment.

They're here. I'm going with Tiger… big surprise.

May 31, 2007 at D5:

Walt Mossberg: So the two of you have certainly–you’re involved every day with the Internet, you have Internet products, you have a whole slew of stuff on the Internet, you have iTunes and “.Mac” and all of that, but on another level, you’re the guys who represent the rich client, the personal computer, the, you know, big operating system and all that. And there is a certain school of thought–and I’m sure it’s shared by some people in the room–that this is all migrating to the cloud and you’ll need a fairly light piece of hardware that won’t have to have all that investment, all the kind of stuff you guys have done throughout your careers.

Steve Jobs: I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

June 11, 2007 at WWDC:

I do have one last thing.…What about developers? [applause]…We've come up with a very sweet solution.…We've got an innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices. Really innovative.…The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. It gives us tremendous capability.…You can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.

Path Finder 4.7 includes nice, minimalist Subversion support.

August 2006:

In Leopard, take this a giant leap forward with 64-bit Carbon and Cocoa, all the way to your applications. You can have fully native 64-bit UI Carbon or Cocoa applications.

November 2006:

First implemented at the UNIX level in Tiger, Leopard brings complete 64-bit support to all of Mac OS X’s application frameworks. Using either the Carbon or Cocoa frameworks, you can create applications that can address extremely large data sets, up to 128TB using the current Intel-based CPUs.

June 2007:

In addition to the POSIX and math libraries supported in Tiger, Leopard enables developers to build complete 64-bit applications using the Cocoa, Quartz, OpenGL, and X11 GUI frameworks. You can even use 64-bit Java on capable Intel processors.

The omission is not an accident. All of my applications are Cocoa, but they use bits of Carbon to do things that aren’t possible with pure Cocoa.

Observations from Tuesday are here.

Played at Cranberry Highlands this evening. Pace of play was absolutely dreadful. Over five hours for twosomes. Played a scramble on the back nine and, largely on my ball, was -1 until we quit in the middle of 18 because we were sick of waiting and it was getting dark.

Joel Spolsky:

The advantage of Microsoft’s method is that it works better for on-screen reading. Microsoft pragmatically decided that the design of the typeface is not so holy, and that sharp on-screen text that’s comfortable to read is more important than the typeface designer’s idea of how light or dark an entire block of text should feel. Indeed Microsoft actually designed font faces for on-screen reading, like Georgia and Verdana, around the pixel boundaries; these are beautiful on screen but don’t have much character in print.

Observations can be found here.

Unfortunately, I played a golf course called "Alcoma" before going to the U.S. Open. Ugh is all I can say about that.

The transparent menu bar is insane. If you had asked me a couple years ago whether this or the gratuitous Dock reflections were Leopard or Vista features, I would have guessed Vista.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Cover Flow (though I won’t use it myself), but it’s not what the Finder needed. The Finder isn’t fixed; it looks to me like a minor update, though opinions differ. That said, the new Finder’s appearance is much better than brushed metal, and Quick Look (the framework more than its use in the Finder) is a great enhancement that’s long overdue.

I’m not at all surprised that there’s no iPhone SDK. I think that Apple has always planned to eventually open up development of real iPhone applications, but it was unrealistic to expect this right away. And it’s in everyone’s interest for them to take their time and get it right. It’s unfortunate, however, that Steve Jobs has been so deceptive on this point. The Apple Product Cycle is familiar enough by now that I don’t think anyone really believes what Jobs says. And, more importantly, it’s insulting to portray some browser hooks as an SDK for writing true iPhone applications. The iPhone Web applications aren’t even at the level of Dashboard widgets, and Apple certainly isn’t using them to write the iPhone’s Finder. I’d have been happier if Jobs had simply said that having a real Web browser means access to real Web applications.

Safari 3 is very nice, but unfortunately the beta requires an installer, completely replaces Safari 2, and even requires a reboot. For shame!

Safari for Windows, apparently the highlight of the keynote, is interesting in that it doesn’t use Windows controls. It even renders fonts the OS X way. Lots of low-level Mac frameworks are built-in, and even the RSS support was completely rewritten to be portable. I don’t expect Safari on Windows to win many converts, but it should help make more Web sites compatible with Safari on Macs and iPhones.

As expected, Apple isn’t competing with Parallels and VMware, but they are making Boot Camp switching a little less painful. Keeping in mind the Apple Product Cycle, I expect this to change in 10.6 or 10.7.

Overall, it was a disappointing keynote. I didn’t expect the top secret features to materialize, but it’s still a let-down after Job’s hype last year and all of Apple’s Microsoft bashing since then. And there was no new hardware. (So much for Apple moving that from the summer Macworld to WWDC.) I hope no one took Fake Steve’s advice to buy AAPL, because right now it’s down since that time, closing down 3.45% for the day while Creative was up 3.91% (though it’s still way down from its pre-iPod heyday).

Like the keynote, I think Leopard looks underwhelming for end users. However, as a developer I’m very excited about it. There are numerous under-the-hood changes that will make for better applications that run faster and that can be developed more quickly. Developers will get hammered with this message throughout the conference, but thanks to the keynote it isn’t what most people will be discussing.

Third-party opportunity: write a little utility that changes the top of an image file so that when it’s used as a desktop picture in Leopard the menu bar doesn’t look transparent.

I've come to realize that the most screwed up thing about stupidity is that you simply cannot defeat it.

What are your WWDC predictions? I haven't got many, but I do suspect we'll see some of those "secret" features in 10.5 - including a new look.

I think the iPhone will be underplayed at WWDC because I think Apple will (wisely) hold off on releasing an SDK until they're sure they have the APIs down pat. To people clamoring for an SDK, I am reminded of a common consulting joke: you can have it on time, on budget, and fully featured - choose any two. I'd rather have a solid, stable, wonderful iPhone SDK/API in a year or two than a crappy one now.

P.S. I highly doubt that even when November rolls around and my last cell phone contract ends (Carey's parents' line) that I'll be able to get an iPhone. There's simply no AT&T or Cingular in Erie, PA. Grrrr…

I’ve been working on an app that has a few NSComboBoxes. I wanted the NSComboBoxes to work as expected, allowing the user to choose an item from the drop down list or enter a new item directly into the text field. I ran into a few problems using bindings in this situation and found that just setting the bindings up in interface builder was not enough as it didn’t seem to automatically add any new items typed in to the associated NSArrayController.

(more…)

I bought a Zelda walkthrough book the other week at EB. It’s for the Wii version of Twilight Princess so I figured it would be interesting to read. I had played up to the third dungeon in Twilight Princess, but found out from the book that I had missed a LOT of stuff. Not just a small thing here and there, but large sections and new moves and stuff. I thought I was progressing pretty well, but I guess not.

Traditionally I’ve always thought of walkthrough guides as cheating, but I guess it comes down to how exactly you use the book / guide. I decided to delete my current game and start over again, but this time before leaving a particular level / zone, I’ll check the book to make sure I haven’t missed anything. I figure this isn’t really cheating because I’m playing the game myself, but just making sure I don’t waste time having to come back for bits I miss. In the long run I think it’s going to save me some time.

My Wii hasn’t seen much play time recently. Melanie logs on to the ‘Wii Vote’ channel every few days and does the votes and enters a question. We haven’t yet had one of our submitted questions used, but I figure there must be thousands and thousands of questions submitted.

I started Playing Ultimate Alliance again, this time actually doing the proper moves and not just swinging the controls around and hoping for the best. It actually makes the game a lot better.

There hasn’t really been any new releases for the Wii that have taken my fancy. Mortal Kombat Armageddon looks interesting, but I’ll wait and see. I’ve been tempted to get a mod chip for my Wii, but I’m really not game enough to pull my Wii apart and solder it in.

It’s still a fun device though and I’m not really bored of the games I have yet.

I’ve always had a small interest in radio controlled cars. Last one I had was a Tandy one that got broken one day and we could never find parts to fix it. I started reading up on them again recently and was quite amazed at how advanced they are now. You can get nitro fuel based cars, with small little fuel motors in them, 2wd or 4wd, disc brakes and more. I went and checked out a local hobby shop here in Rocky (Ultra Hobbies), and found that they actually sell them with quite a good range of ready to run (RTR) cars and numerous spare parts.

I asked the guy behind the counter when the local RC club meets and he gave me the dates for the next meeting. I remember going to watch both the off-road and on-road cars before but somewhere along the line I forgot about it. Anyway, I might go check it out the next time they meet.

There seems to be 3 main classes of cars. On-Road, which is pretty self explanatory, Off-Road “buggies” and Off-Road “Truggies”. The main difference between “buggies” and “truggies” seems to be the look of the car. “Buggies” tend to have smaller wheels at the front, and are lower to the ground. “Truggies” seem to be a mutation of the old style “Monster Trucks” + “Buggy”, being lower to the ground then a monster truck but higher then a buggy.

The “truggy” seems to be a lot more fun as it can pretty much go anywhere due to the extra height and it also has the speed of a traditional “buggy”.

Most of the guys run Jammin’ X1CRT trucks and I’ve done a bit of reading about them. A base ready to run system costs around $850 AUD, which seems to include everything you need to get up and racing. This model car seems to have a pretty big following so there are a wide selection of spare parts and also upgrade pieces.

A quick youtube search brings up some good results and shows how well the little cars run on all sorts of surfaces.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll end up getting one or not. I’ll probably go to a few race meetings and see if my interest remains. I think it might be something fun to do that is out of the house and away from the computer.

Brent Simmons:

I’m a Cocoa programmer, so I use Xcode all the time. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t really like it, or if it’s just like that I don’t like IDEs. Programmers are intelligent people and sophisticated computers users, so you’d think that they would be more productive and happier with a literate interface instead of all this heavyweight point-and-click madness. You’d think they would demand it.

I don’t like working in Xcode, either, and yet there’s no doubt that Xcode 2.4 is much better than previous versions of Xcode, Project Builder, and ProjectBuilder. And, from what I can remember, I mostly like it better than CodeWarrior, Visual Studio, Symantec, and THINK C.

I don’t really know what to “demand” to make Xcode better. It just doesn’t feel right, and I think Brent is correct that the problem is that it isn’t linguistic enough. So I’ve opted out of it. Rather than use Xcode as an IDE, I use it as a build engine, controlled via make from either BBEdit or Terminal. When I need a debugger, I tend to just fire up gdb by itself. What I’d like from Xcode is more hooks so that external editors can leverage its symbol index and display build errors.

NetNewsWire 3 is out! I’m really looking forward to the performance enhancements. I like the feed cover art and the ability to hide read items.

Update: I was skeptical about the new tabs, but it turns out that I really like them. I miss the old toolbar buttons, though.

I’ve spoken about Adium in the past (1,2), both times I have both praised and also bagged it due to an annoying bug involving multiple group chat conversations. Basically, If you had multiple group chat conversations going, all the text would get displayed in the first conversations window. This of course made it almost impossible to have multiple group conversations.

Thankfully, via a comment I left on the main adium blog, one of the lead developers - Evan Schoenberg took a quick look at the bug and whacked together a quick fix. Apparently it was rather basic and was caused by group conversations all using the same group chat ID and not unique ID’s. Anyway, as of Adium 1.04, the multiple group chat bug is fixed!

The seemingly simple fix actually motivated me to download the source code and take a look at it. I wouldn’t mind trying to fix some other bugs or maybe make some features better.

Evan’s quote in the comments of the bug say it all really:

Sigh. We really need someone interested in Adium development who actually uses MSN. This took about 30 minutes to create what I believe is a fix, and it has been a major flaw in our MSN implementation for 2 years.

The adium source code is huge, way bigger then any other source / project I’ve ever been involved in. I have a feeling it’s going to take some time to figure out how it all works.

So yeah, I now use Adium for my MSN messaging needs. It beats the pants off the clunky default MSN messenger app.

So yeah, the only way I could have already seen the Heroes season final here in Australia is from watching a downloaded copy. The current episode being aired in Australia is somewhere around episode 16 / 17 which is pretty decent compared to other TV shows, but still pretty bad.

I remember reading some kind of survey done by someone, that I could probably find if I googled but don’t feel like it at the moment… anyway… the survey basically showed that Australian people downloaded the most TV shows. This doesn’t really surprise me considering the crappy TV programming that happens here in Australia.

For starters, we get TV shows weeks after they air in the US. Heck, sometimes we are seasons behind what is showing in the US. Add to that the fact that the TV channels over here have a great habit of shuffling up the episodes, showing part of a season then part of an older season then the rest of the new season or just generally screwing up the flow of the program by not even showing it one week. It really makes it hard to watch a TV show and follow the season through.

Also, forget about discussing the TV show on many of the Internet forums. Chances are the people in the US are heaps ahead of us so they will be talking about stuff we have no idea about and end up ruining the ending anyway.

So yeah, I download TV shows, and I’ll probably continue to do so until the Australian TV channels start doing things right.

This movie caught my eye in the dvd shop and after reading the back of it I decided it might be an interesting watch. Turns out it was. It’s basically a movie about the word ‘FUCK’. A word that has been around for centuries, used in many different ways.

The movie looks at the word from many different angles and provides a pretty decent history of the word while also debunking a lot of urban myths about it.

I find it interesting that a word, made up of 4 separate letters, can have such an effect on people ranging from extreme excitement through to insane violence. It’s funny how we, as human begins, associate certain feelings and emotions to words and phrases.

Personally, I don’t really find particular words offensive. Sure, when used to verbalise a certain emotion, the word may take a certain meaning depending on what I associate with that word. However, it’s more about what the person is trying to express, not the way they express it that I may find offensive.

I found the movie really interesting. Certainly made me think about how humans express themselves and how we associate emotions with words.

I’ve got a new domain and have shifted my blog. Should you have a subscription to my RSS feed you will need to update that also.

It is now located at http://www.tduggan.com

Please enjoy.

I’ve had a .mac account now for some time. I basically only use it for the iChat account (which you can get without continuing to pay) and the email address.

I never use the webspace, and occasionally use backup, which I guess justifies the cost for me in some way.

It seems that these days, you can get comparable free services which in some cases are much better. I kind of hope Apple are working on some kind of updates for .mac to make it seem a bit more worthy of the yearly subscription fee.

I’ve read a lot of comments about how bad and anti-climatic the Heroes season finale was. Personally I thought it was great. I think a lot of people were expecting some kind of uber fight between Peter and Syler, with both of them going at each other using their powers and one of them being defeated in some kind of huge season 1 climax. In reality, Hiro teleports in and stabs Syler, which may seem a but lack-lustre, but really that was all that was needed.

I think a major theme of the show from the start was Hiro’s journey and discovering his ‘destiny’. There was a point when he thought the sword was the key to his powers but in the end he discovers that he is the one who controls them and the sword is just a tool.

I liked how they actually tied up some loose ends. They could of quiet easily taken us to the start of the last fight scene and then thrown up a ‘To Be Continued…’ message, which would of annoyed me to no end. Instead, they followed it through and gave us an ending. I think the major problem were the expectations people had, and they didn’t just watch it to see what happened.

Who knows where the story will go now. It looks like Syler managed to drag himself away and get into the sewers, even though he had that strange eye thing happened and supposedly died. Did Peter really die? or can the healing power he absorbed from Claire actually help him survive, meaning that maybe only Nathan is really dead? What is up with Hiro getting tele-ported back to the future in the middle of some kind of battle between Japanese forces, is he really the hero that he read stories about as a kid?

So many questions left to be answered. Im glad the series ended like it did and I’m looking forward to it returning next year.