English

I cut this from the previous Macbook related post:

I now have a new Macbook from which I am blogging this.

The guys from Dojo are going at it relentlessly. The current release is so very much improved from when I last seriously looked at it half a year ago, it’s impressive.

Mirroring Mark Pilgrim’s move to Linux, I have six months ago moved from Linux to OS X and have never looked back until now. Last week I sold my iBook and while waiting for my Macbook, I am typing this on my Debian GNU/Linux Etch box.

I’m going to The Next Web Conference next week Friday. This conference, organized by the Fleck guys is a good chance to get up to date on the Web 2.0 right here in the Netherlands. Great initiative.

I am currently calling customers to get their feedback, and more often than not I receive out of office, out to lunch or in meeting statuses.

I am quite turned off of the whole CSS Zen table-less design ethic. It is most unpractical. The most basic layout primitives have a less than straight forward translation to CSS.

I have been invitated to present at TOPdesk to our consultants the relative merits of using a wiki to organize our knowledge as opposed to the facilities we used to have.

From the R Language Definition:

I sympathize with Mark Hammond’s decision. Apple is the lesser evil of non-free software. In the light of Apple’s stubbornness and lack of transparency my bough creaks from time to time but it is holding strong for now.

Tom Armitage - Telling Stories: what Homer, Dickens and Marvel Comics can teach your (social) software

Maya Lotan - Urbanseeder: Technology Mediated Flirting

Alexander Kjerulf - Let’s Reboot Democracy

I got a hold of Felix of Plazes here at Reboot and showed him the new incarnation of my Dashboard Widget. The new version performs a different (arguable) more useful function and should suck a bit less.

T.L. Taylor - Play

Adam Arvidsson - Sociology ABC

Emil gives Joel’s list of stuff you couldn’t do so far in web applications and this list is rapidly decreasing. We will probably get very decently usable web applications by the end of this year. Expect to see the arena explode.

Revision 0.4 of Firebug was just released and this revision also sports an impressive number of added features mostly focused on JavaScript debugging right within the Firebug console.

I have been trying to run a mediawiki based wiki on my main site for a while now (alper.nl/wiki) and the general results have been pretty awesome.

I just threw away 2 Gigabytes worth of podcasts waiting to be listened to. Who knew podcasts were such a storage hog. This batch can wait some more. I also unsubscribed from five or six podcasts.

An interesting article in the New York Times about the increasing popularity of Media Immersion Pods.

Ok, after three days of session after session, bad WiFi following bad WiFi, XTECH has finally come to an end. My general thoughts are positive but with some reservations.

I got a mail this week that I had won a FON router.

Not much happening on this blog. I might have to reconsider its future.

Yesterday I saw the talk Treating Digital Broadcast as just another API and other such ruminations (Suw Charman transcript) by Tom Loosemore from the BBC here on XTECH. He showed us some interesting trends and advances in digital broadcasting but he also shattered my perception that the BBC is very ahead in these matters.

WiFi connectivity at the XTECH conference here in Krasnapolsky is very poor. They have bought a conference wide login for everyone on the commercial network already in place and it is not cutting it.

I was thinking along the line of calendars and events and such, among others after the talk of Frank Mantek about the Google Data API on XTECH and I had the idea:

XTECH

XTECH

XTECH

XTECH

XTECH

Here at XTECH I see lots of other people taking notes (probably very similar to mine). Why aren’t any of these people using SubEthaEdit? Let’s work together and not waste effort.

XTECH

Paul Graham - Is it possible to create a Sillicon Valley outside of the US?

Very cool ideas for some nice technology (Wired: MIT Fashion Design Takes Cue From Virus) and the thing they did for a prototype is a great illustration. Now if only they could get the per unit price down (Zauruses don’t come cheap).

Elias has an important post on something very necessary: enabling client side Javascript developers to consume any kind of RESTific data without going through the pains of cross-platform XML parsing.

Love the domain name “escape from cubicle nation”, love the piece and love the goals: Open letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs across the corporate world (via).

It’s about time and way too late to see Sun making Java more Linux-friendly after both:

I think most Mac fans read Cult of Mac but I especially liked the ominous comment at the bottom of this post:

Catching the widget fever in a bad way last night’s Colbert Report episode inspired Reinier and me to create a widget based on the Backwards Bush counter.

I love TextMate!

Podshaala from Barcamp Bangalore: When will every course be podcast right after the fact?

After mucking around with Dashboard some more, I gave up last night. My widget worked fine in Safari but every time I installed my widget in Dashboard the widget would disappear. The fact that Dashboard does not give you any feedback does not really help in solving this problem.

After I had seen the innards of the Tigergotchi widget, it certainly didn’t seem too difficult anymore to build a widget of my own.

Yesterday after work on a very sunny flip-floppy afternoon caught the train to Amsterdam with Yun and Redmar.

Interesting piece by Anthony Townsend on municipal wireless touching on some issues which are too important to ignore. For us here in the Netherlands the whole debate is pretty much moot seeing as we do not have any worthwhile wireless initiatives anywhere.

Just handed in my registrations for both XTECH and Reboot to Marleen here at TOPdesk. Both should come through fine and send me happily off for some conference fun in May and June.

The Origami PC story is just too funny. I guess that happens when Steve Jobs makes doing demos look so very easy.