Thursday, April 28, 2005

Great Book for Mac Geeks



As I write this, my copy of the new Macintosh OS X operating system, code-named "Tiger" is on it's way to me via FedEx. This morning, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg said about Tiger:

Overall, Tiger is the best and most advanced personal computer operating system on the market, despite a few drawbacks. It leaves Windows XP in the dust.


The new OS includes Spotlight, a very powerful search function that will change the way people manage their documents and data files, a new iChat video conferencing application that you need to see to believe, a RSS-enabled Safari Web browser that I blogged about here way back in June 2004 and Dashboard.

Dashboard is a great idea. Unfortunately, it's not a new idea. A piece of software called Konfabulator (one of my personal favorite shareware apps) has been doing the Dashboard thing for several years. Apple decided to "borrow" the idea without compensating Arlo Rose, the Konfabulator creator. Good news for Konfabulator is that it is now available for Windows and is more than worth the $24.95 they ask for it.

So sorry for the rant. Got carried away there. This post is about a book, "Revolution in the Valley - The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made." Andy Hertzfeld, one of the major brains behind the Mac compiled this book from stories on his Web site Folklore.org about the Mac, written by the actual people who built the original Mac. It's a pretty, coffee table-like book with lots of pictures and nice design. For those who have read the stories on Folklore.org, some of the chapters will be second-time reading, but even for me it was great the second time around. And it $24.95, it's actually a good deal for a hardback book with quality paper and spot color on every page.

I'm not sure if Steve Jobs has taken this book off the shelves of the Apple stores.

More on Tiger tomorrow...

-aB

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Two Interesting Stories on Google



Via Slashdot, here are links to two interesting stories on Google and how it's impacting the Internet.

Snippet from The Globe & Mail:

Although it may seem that Google is already well-along the path toward such an information-rich Utopia, the truth is that the current state of affairs is only a first foray into the world of information retrieval. Today's smartest search algorithms still only read words as text strings, failing to make much sense (at least in the way a human would) of the ones and zeroes churning through their distributed server clusters. This lack of semantic connection is something being worked upon by the founder of the Web himself (Sir Tim Breners-Lee, at MIT) in a radical re-design of how the Web is structured and an update of the communication protocols that hold it all together.


And a snippet from Fortune:

Microsoft was already months into a massive project aimed at taking down Google when the truth began to dawn on Bill Gates. It was December 2003. He was poking around on the Google company website and came across a help-wanted page with descriptions of all the open jobs at Google. Why, he wondered, were the qualifications for so many of them identical to Microsoft job specs? Google was a web search business, yet here on the screen were postings for engineers with backgrounds that had nothing to do with search and everything to do with Microsoft's core business—people trained in things like operating-system design, compiler optimization, and distributed-systems architecture. Gates wondered whether Microsoft might be facing much more than a war in search. An e-mail he sent to a handful of execs that day said, in effect, "We have to watch these guys. It looks like they are building something to compete with us."

He sure got that right. Today Google isn't just a hugely successful search engine; it has morphed into a software company and is emerging as a major threat to Microsoft's dominance. You can use Google software with any Internet browser to search the web and your desktop for just about anything; send and store up to two gigabytes of e-mail via Gmail (Hotmail, Microsoft's rival free e-mail service, offers 250 megabytes, a fraction of that); manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google's Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there; and, through Google's Blogger, create, post online, and print formatted documents—all without applications from Microsoft.


Good stories on a company who's corporate mantra is "Don't Be Evil." It's hard to put a fence around what Google is...today as well as tomorrow. It's certainly more than a search engine.

-aB

Scratch my back and I'll, wait a minute, do I have to?

Colleague of mine added 'ole GumpRants.com to his BlogRoll. Alan's a pretty nice guy, so I will reciprocate.

By the way, you gotta love the name - DogBrainCentral.

It looks so pretty down there in the BlogRoll, between The Onion and DPReview.com. There's juxtaposition for ya.

Kumbaya, my friend, kumbaya...

-aB

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

I Want One. No, I Need One



I have a little trouble getting up in the morning. I know how to divide by nine, which is number of snooze minutes my Sony clock radio "Dream Bar" will give me. I snooze for about 40-50 minutes (or actually 45-54 minutes to be precise) every morning.

Clocky from this MIT student is the solution to my problem. An alarm clock on wheels. Here's a snippet:

Before you hit the snooze button a second time on this alarm clock, you'll have to hunt it down.

The shag carpet-covered robotic alarm clock on wheels, called Clocky, rolls away and hides.

The clock is the invention of Gauri Nanda, a graduate student -- and a person who occasionally oversleeps -- who works in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Looks kinda freaky with the shag carpeting. Make sure to keep all ferrets away from this device.

Read the entire story here.

-aB