Thursday, January 19, 2006

We were able to get the outliner working with Movable Type. I have a Typepad blog to develop with. Should have something to show for it relatively soon. 

Niall and I are going over to SixApart to get wordPress.root working with Movable Type. 

I'm sitting in the Metreon food court with Niall Kennedy working on Technorati's new OPML reading lists. Just by coincidence, Steven Cohen from PubSub sent me a pointer to their directory of reading lists. Oh man.  

NewsRiver 0.40 has a podcasting client built-in. 

If you like kittens you'll probably like hate this. 

Daily Kos: How conservatives argue. 

Six month Mac report 

This is my sixth month primarily using the Mac. I still use Windows, but when I travel, the Mac is what goes with me. That goes for trips down the street to the coffee shop, or trips on BART to San Francisco, or United Airlines to Boston.

After seven years of being primarily a Windows user, I've settled into using the Mac as if it were a Windows machine. Which is odd, because for seven years I used Windows as if it were a Mac.

I refuse to use anything that locks me into Apple, much as I wouldn't use anything that locked me into Microsoft. No, I'm not perfect, there was some pain in switching to the Mac, but actually it went remarkably smoothly. If Apple should ever totally poison the air on the Mac, I am confident I could jump ship quickly. Or if Microsoft ever did something really good or compelling.

That's the resolution of Apple's scandalous misuse of RSS in their photocasting application. I don't buy that it was innocent. I have learned in over 50 years of living that when someone does something evil, it's pretty likely they know what they're doing. I've often given people the benefit of the doubt on this, and sadly, it's usually the wrong thing to do. I think they know they're screwing with RSS. When Jobs says their RSS is industry standard and that anyone could write a photocasting client, and their server actually rejects any application it doesn't know (i.e. I can't even see their RSS unless they like me), well that's like George Bush saying he fights for American freedom, but wants to wiretap every American because he's anti-terrorist. I have to lower my eyeglasses down my nose and ask if you really think I'm that stupid?

In case you doubt, Steve Jobs once said of a developer you probably know, when he was CEO of a struggling NeXT, "We can't let just anyone develop for this machine." Look, he doesn't want you to see his RSS unless you use his software or software he approves of. He's the guy who wanted to rent space to software developers on his optical disk and didn't put a floppy disk on the NeXT box. You really should read up on Steve Jobs. He's not an "open" kinda guy.

Look, the tech industry is and always will be fucked up. They still somehow manage to make a semi-usable product every once in a while. My Mac is slow as a dog, even though it has two CPUs and cost $5000, but I use it anyway because it's prettier and slightly more fun than the crap Microsoft and Dell ship. But give me a reason to switch, even a small one, and I'm outta here.

Only steal from the best 

I've been reading Ben Barren's blog for a couple of months now, and he's been reading and quoting mine for at least that long. I like his style a lot, and I thought I should mention that his style has influenced mine.

The answer to yesterday's puzzle 

Re yesterday's puzzle. Reading lists can be used to solve the problem of feed synchronization in a crude but totally "worse is better" way to make sure that my aggregator at home, the one at the office, the one on my traveling laptop and my cell phone are in synch, even if they're made by different vendors. When a developer supports reading lists, they're letting you use more than one aggregator, even ones they don't make.

I'd never use an aggregator that didn't support reading lists.

I'll bet $10 that Apple never supports reading lists, or if they do, it'll just be for their own products and products that don't compete with theirs.

Chinese cop