Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Moshe Bar at Byte.com has performed a careful and thorough side-by-side benchmarking of OS X as a pure server (not desktop) environment by installing both OS X and the SuSE PowerPC Linux distribution on an XServe. Short story: OS X lost to Linux on every measurable count, but Moshe is still impressed, since OS X is so new while Linux has had a decade to tune its subsystems. To my knowledge, this is the first such test done with this degree of care.
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Music: Fugazi :: Waiting Room
Anonymous reader “George” sent me a point-by-point rebuttal to “Why HTML in EMail is a Bad Idea.” While I disagree with most of George’s assertions, his response is nevertheless the most cogent defense of HTML in email that I’ve seen. In the interest of fairness, I have posted George’s notes without editing or commentary from me.
As if to prove I’m not a lone crazy man howling in the woods, Low-End Mac has published The Dying Art of Plain Text Email.
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Music: Bill Laswell :: A Screaming Comes Across The Sky
Great quote on the commoditization of words, courtesy the J-School’s not-yet-unveiled weblog on intellectual property (stay tuned):
Clay Shirky on the mass amateurization of publishing and why weblogs are as good as gold:
“Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing. ”
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Music: Sonic Youth :: My Friend Goo
Photographer Eric Meyer invites you to reassemble his photographs on the fly (not to be confused with on-the-fly eyeball distortion).
Coincidentally, I’m in the middle of reading O’Reilly’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, by a different Eric Meyer. The book is very thorough, but I can’t help but think it would actually be more useful in a more terse format. I want to hear everything he has to say, but I want him to do it with fewer words. But I know well how much harder it is to write something short than long.
“I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
– Blaise Pascal
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Music: Aimee Mann :: Momentum
You’ve probably seen Janis Ian’s testimonial in USA Today, Music industry spins falsehood. What we need are about 1,000 big-name stars to do similar experiments themselves, and make similar testimonials that they actually made more money by giving away their music, rather than the other way around.
Meanwhile, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer now testifies for Apple.
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Music: Godley & Creme :: Cry
News floating around this morning that the entire Blogger system has been badly hacked. Because it relies on FTP for site publishing and because most people have the same password for FTP as for the rest of their account, tens of thousands of people now have compromised internet accounts. As always, this is the achilles heel of big, centralized systems. This can’t happen to MovableType because there is no centralized server on which the system is based.
Ask and ye shall … I asked the author of Kung-Log about the possibility of integrating Kung-Tunes‘ ability to detect iTunes’ current track (have been missing that little twist of LiveJournal hijinx), and he added it in v 1.5.4. Complete with full output format templating (I like simple). Hats off to Adriaan Tijsseling!
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Music: King Floyd :: Groove Me
Amy took Miles outside today – the shades aren’t just to make him look like a bad-ass — gen-u-ine UV protection!
If you’re outputting RSS feeds, you can now have them validated – one small step toward a more XML-interoperable web. Even if you’ve upgraded to MovableType 2.5, you’ll need to update your RSS templates manually to get them to validate properly.
Just spent half an hour with Transmit 2 for OS X — possibly the best FTP client I’ve ever used. Slick, bug free, full featured, and integrated support for SFTP, which more and more sites are requiring. Fetch’s days are over. Snooze you lose…
