Jonathan Zittrain:
If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.
So if you’re a programmer, get ready for a prolific source of randomness to be put at your fingertips. And even if you don’t want to part with a pseudorandom-number generator you’ve grown to love—whether for cryptography, scientific computing, even gaming—you’ll now have Bull Mountain to produce the seeds for it.
A captivating story of computer randomness.
The fact that I complained about not having a good task manager didn’t mean I stopped looking for one. After taking a quick look at the plain text TaskBadges, I’ve moved to try out OmniFocus. I don’t have a license, so I’m trying to make the best use of the 14 13 days trial.
One of the first things I’ve noticed when playing with OmniFocus was the weak support for the GMail web interface. OmniFocus Clippings works well for normal web pages, but not with the GMail web interface. Nor does the Send-to-Omnifocus emailing system (nb: the link in the reply is unusable in Google Chrome).
The OmniGroup people suggested that I should try the OmniFocus bookmarklet. Unfortunately I’ve found this bookmarklet to be very basic.
Long story short, after digging a bit through the GMail HTML and the OmniFocus custom URI scheme, I’m presenting you the improved, GMail aware, bookmarklet:
For GMail, the bookmarklet creates a new task with the email title as the task title and a note with the current selection (if any), plus a from line in the form: From: email subject:(email subject) email_thread_url.
For normal web pages, the bookmarklet creates a new task with the document title as the task title and a note with the current selection (if any), plus a from line in the form: From: page_url.
You can drag & drop the bookmarklet to your toolbar from the button below:
I’ve tested the bookmarklet in Safari 5.1 and Google Chrome.
Update: The bookmarklet Javascript got trimmed in the publishing process. Now I’ve updated it.
Quite a few brilliant ideas. Actually, I like most of his proposals.
Lee Mathews:
One side effect of a rapid release schedule is skyrocketing version numbers, something both Google and Mozilla want users to ignore. But that’s a tricky proposition when users have been raised on slowly-climbing digits trailing the names of their favorite apps. Rather than cling to traditional versioning ideas, companies are now pushing channels — constantly updated snapshots of the different development stages of a program. Both Chrome and Firefox now offer stable, beta, and bleeding-edge versions to suit a user’s wants.
This went online a couple of hours after my Firefox X post on Firefox, versions, and frequent releases.
Earlier today I’ve asked on Twitter:
What are you using to organize your PDFs? Preferably online and with search & tagging available
I’ve only got a couple of answers, so I’m reposting my question here hoping to get more recommendations. A blog post format also allows me to detail my requirements:
After some short investigation I’ve ended up with the following services, but I haven’t validated against my requirements:
Benjamin Darfler suggested a combination of Dropbox and Evernote. Dropbox fails quite a few of my requirements so it’s not really an option. I don’t know much about Evernote, but it seems like a tool that can be used for this scenario, but it was not meant for it.
Martin Grotzke suggested FinalFolder, but the documentation on their site is so scarce that I couldn’t figure out if it is or not a solution I could consider.
So, what other solutions are you aware of or would you recommend?
Seth Godin about breaking news:
If it’s important today, it will be important tomorrow.
I think the only way to agree with the above is to use Seth Godin’s definition of breaking news: “whatever is new to you“. But it is not the definition in wide use: events that are currently developing, or “breaking.”.
The difference is not in the interest, but in timeliness.
I don’t get the new Firefox versioning strategy[1]. For a long time I was taught that major version releases are important. Now Firefox moved from version 4 to version 6 in just a couple of months. Is Firefox version still relevant?
When speaking about major versions a web developer is used to get worried: yet another version that his application must be tested against and supported for years. This usually equates to stress[4].
I’m sure this is not the message Mozilla wants to send out. But I think it is in the wrong format.
The other application that i know it has been from version to version is Google Chrome. But there’re some important differences between the two strategies:
What should Mozilla do?
I know I’m not the first feeling this or writing about it. ↩
I briefly checked my stats and I’ve found 3 Chrome versions (12, 13, 14) and 4 versions of Firefox (3.6, 4, 5, 6) which is not bad. ↩
I’ve read that latest versions of Firefox have a similar transparent upgrade mechanism. ↩
While major versions usually bring in a lot of improvements over previous versions, web developers cannot decide immediately to drop support for older ones. ↩
I think I remember reading that Mozilla already did this. But the fact that Firefox 3.6 and 4 still account for 20+% of the Firefox users (nb: this stat is for my blog) means that a web developer cannot stop worrying about them. ↩
Devin Coldewey:
The web […] has been neither expected nor pressured to meet the journalistic standards of a national newspaper or the layout standards of a print magazine.
Let’s set things straight: the web is a different medium, that doesn’t need to conform to the beauty of newspapers or print magazines. Most of the ugliness and issues we are seeing out on the web comes from those trying to push the traditional media standards to this new medium. We have the chance to define what beauty means on the web so let’s not take the easy path and totally ruin it.
Now that consumers want to buy it, creators want to make it, and technology wants to accommodate it, beautifully-designed content will begin to actually bubble its way to the top. The more nicely-designed site may win in a rivalry these days — despite the fact that services these days are so simple that practically every menu and button is superfluous — but there aren’t many sites I would say are an actual pleasure to read, as I find many printed magazines are, or a pleasure to use, as a well-turned device is.
None of those things will make a difference if we’ll continue to paint it in a newspaperish or magazine style.
Marco Arment:
It’s interesting that so much online publishing is moving into a small handful of massive, closed, proprietary networks after being so distributed and diverse during the big boom of blogs and RSS almost a decade ago.
But all of these proprietary networks that want to own and hold in your content are reversing much of the web’s progress in some other areas, such as the durability and quality of online identity.
I’m wondering where would be today if 20 years ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee would have designed the walled wide web.
Fred Wilson:
A central issue with the Internet, no matter what device and presentation layer you use to access it, is that there is an unlimited amount of content available.[…] Restricting access to content doesn’t work. Someone else’s content will get filtered and curated instead of yours. Scarcity is not a viable business model on the Internet.
Nothing to add, except maybe that at this moment there doesn’t seem to be any viable solution for the future of filtering and curation.
