July 2003 Archives

PHP Complete points to Colours on the web which looks like another good resource for understanding design choices and choosing complementary colors for web sites. PHP Complete also has an RSS feed. Subscribed. [Found via Scott Johnson] Update 2003-09-01: Another useful tool is Color Blender by Eric Meyer [Via Phil Gyford]... (more)

Joel on Software is a valuable site for software developers. A former developer at Microsoft who now runs his own software company (Fog Creek Software), Joel Spolsky writes about software development in a common-sense manner. Periodically, I'll peruse the archive to read some of the older articles, even those I've read before. Today I'm reading (again) his series on Painless... (more)

Recently I discovered goodthatway, a tech news site whose tagline is "better living through better technology". I suggested that the site offer an RSS feed to help people keep up with the latest links and stories. Scott from goodthatway was interested in the details, so I've put together this article with some details. Article: Getting Started with RSS (an example... (more)

Just subscribed to the PVRBlog (PVR = Personal Video Recorder like TiVo or ReplayTV). This new blog was created by Matt Haughey who runs (among other things) MetaFilter and A Whole Lotta Nothing. Good stuff.... (more)

Over the Fourth of July holiday, the kids had a lot of fun playing games on a couple of Palm handhelds that I brought. Back in the office on Monday, I found this set of pictures that Cathy Jo had taken. Kind of artistic, eh? These were taken on my Zire 71 with its build-in camera. (more)

Having a spell checker in Outlook is pretty useful, but sometimes the suggestions it gives are hilarious. Is there a name for these things? I've got to start keeping a list. Today I sent an e-mail with the word "DevStudio" (referring to Microsoft Visual Studio) and got this suggestion: Devastation! (more)

The latest issue of Crypto-Gram just came out today. If you're interested at all in computer security, this is a great resource that comes out once a month. His archives are also worth browsing through. Good site to learn from. Crypto-Gram is a free monthly e-mail newsletter on computer security and cryptography from Bruce Schneier (author of Secrets and Lies... (more)

Vertigo Software -- Quake II .NET is a version of the popular Quake II game, ported to native and managed C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. Don't mind me, I'm just playing....er, studying .NET programming... [Via Chris Sells]... (more)

The July issue of First Monday has appeared with a couple of interesting articles: The grey digital divide -- Perception, exclusion and barriers of access to the Internet for older people (by Peter Millward) The impact of digital games in education (by Begoña Gros)... (more)

Feedster (a search engine for RSS feeds) recently added the ability to index your entire site. Normally, it will read your RSS feed to add entries to its index. But, if you've set up your RSS feed to only provide a recent number of entires (like 10), you might want to ask Feedster to get caught up with all of... (more)

Our ReplayTV box is really old and has very little capacity. But, I do like their "MyReplayTV" service which lets you program your box remotely from a web interface. Here I am on vacation in Tahoe and I just set my box to record the Nascar race on Saturday. Life is good! Update 2003-07-06: Well, MyReplayTV is reallly cool if... (more)

Or...things to check out after vacation. Rasterweb shows how to hack AmphetaDesk to use <guid> elements, if they exist Textile-2 coming soon (Brad Choate working with Dean Allan) -- I've been using MT-Textile and have found it extremely useful -- no more writing HTML tags for my post to ensure it's formatted correctly Bill Kearney has a list of sidebars... (more)

Morbus Iff comments on the Subscriptions Harmonizer and brings up good points about using OPML as the transfer formats. This just focuses on the aggregator possibilities, and doesn't consider OPML sniffers that could create blog "six-degree" communities (based on XML, as opposed to scraping blogroll HTML). Is there a standard convention for linking to your site's blogroll and/or subscriptions list?... (more)

Zempt 0.3 was just released yesterday and includes a whole bunch of changes including offline operation, spell checking, and better account management. It also includes plugins for Winamp and Windows Media player which will insert your current song in your web post. Currently, I'm not listening to anything :(, so it doesn't matter. But it's still cool.... (more)

Dave Winer is sketching out a concept for a Subscriptions Harmonizer web service. The idea is to keep your aggregators in sync with each other when run from multiple locations (home, office, laptop, etc.). I commented that my old FTPStore hack for AmphetaDesk is quite similar. Cool, Dave linked to my comment. If anyone arriving here from Dave's site wants... (more)

Back in May, I caught wind of the Sony-Ericsson T608 Bluetooth phone being available soon to Sprint PCS customers. This looked like the perfect phone upgrade for me (and my Palm Tungsten T), but alas I read today that it's being cancelled. Back to the drawing board for picking a new phone. [Via MobileTracker, via Gizmodo]... (more)