Today, WordPress released WordPress for iPhone. So I thought I'd try it out--given how little I post here, any excuse to write something is worth a shot!
Anyway, we bought this electric pump to inflate our kids' pool. I found the combination of the warning and the left-hand image somewhat at odds with each other! (In case the image isn't clear, that's the pump being used to inflate a child's swimming pool, which is not generally considered an "indoor household" item.)
Happy Fourth of July to those of you in the United States. In honor of the holiday, I thought I'd share a fireworks memory from my childhood. It's both educational (in terms of what not to do) and somewhat entertaining (in hindsight)...though as to whether it's more educational or entertaining, well, I'll leave that up to you. As this is based on really old memories, some of the details are definitely wrong, but the basic facts are 100% as presented.
I grew up in Colorado, in a small neighborhood known as Heatherwood. Our home was the brown-roofed one just up and to the right from the "A" on this Google map. As you can see, there's a relatively large park just south of our house. This was a great place to hit golf balls, toss the frisbee, and generally goof off...and on the Fourth of July, the area around the park became a great place to set off and watch fireworks.
When I was growing up--I'm not sure if this is still true or not--Colorado had banned all the interesting fireworks. You couldn't buy anything that flew or exploded, basically. So you were left with little sparkler things, various fountains, and smoke bombs--yawn! Wyoming, however, which was but 90 or so miles north, had no such laws--everything was legal there. (Somewhat ironically, I now live in a very similar situation. Oregon allows only the basic stuff, but Washington (only 30 miles north) allows everything.) So one year when I was maybe 10 or so, my dad drove up to Cheyenne and came home with the motherload--a large bag full of bottle rockets, buzz bombs, roman candles (a bunch of them tied together in one massive device), various small firecrackers, and a couple of large cherry bombs. After seeing the bag, that year's Fourth of July holiday couldn't come fast enough.
Finally the day arrived, and after the requisite picnics, we set off for the park. We always took a couple buckets of water, just in case any small fires started (but the park was much greener when I was growing up, and we never had any problems). We found a spot to set up the flying fireworks (firecrackers were lit in the street), and set up our first display of the evening. I don't recall exactly what the thing was called, but its cone-shaped casing promised something along the lines of a "huge shower of colorful sparks!" The cone was maybe 18" tall, so we set it on the ground, lit the fuse, then backed away a good distance. Soon enough, a huge shower of colorful sparks did indeed erupt from the cone.
However, as we watched the cone, we noticed something else: the angle of the shower of sparks was changing.
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It was my turn on the Macworld video blog-go-round again this week. The topic I chose is "working with multiple Macs in one home." The end result is a 10-minute clip covering a number of third-party tools that make the process easier, and a couple of general usage hints.
Due to the huge number of downloads, the size of the macworld.com video is 320x240. But if you want, you can see grab the original 640x480 version right here. Warning, it's 185MB in size (I didn't work very hard to compress it, so the quality is good, but it's huge).
I know companies need to make money to keep the web free. I know that trying things out is a great way to see if they work. With all that said, what cnn.com is trying now is potentially the stupidest revenue-generating idea I've seen on the web since...well, perhaps forever.
As of this morning, at least, when you load the US edition of cnn.com, there's a new icon on some of the stories in the Latest News section:
Click on one of those little t-shirt icons, and you're taken to a page where you can...you guessed it (or maybe you didn't!)...order a t-shirt showing simply the headline you clicked on, the date and time of the story, and a tag line that reads "I just saw it on cnn.com." In case CNN comes to their senses in the next few minutes, I made a screenshot of the preview/ordering page.
I just don't get it--someone at cnn.com really thinks there's a huge untapped revenue stream for this kind of thing? I can almost imagine the executive-level discussion that occurred over this...
'We need to make more money off our web site. Anyone got any ideas?'
"Hey, I bet there are millions of people out there that are just dying to walk around in a bland black, white, or grey t-shirt showing a headline off our site!"
'Jane, that sounds like an excellent idea! Run with it!'
I don't know about you, but I can think of about, oh, ten million things I'd buy before I got around to ordering a cnn.com headlines t-shirt...but who knows, maybe such things are indeed hip in the world of news geeks?
(AdWeek has the details on this new promo...even after reading that article, though, I still think this is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever seen on the web. Beyond stupidity, there's an entire debate about the ethics of this concept, too--headline writers are now basically tied directly to revenue generation, as CNN will be able to track which headlines generate the most revenue. What I learned in school was that revenue generating activities should always be separate from the editorial activities of a publication, including its web site. I think this holds doubly true if you happen to be a news site, where you should be held to the highest ethical standards.)
As you might guess, I get a lot of email from readers of Macworld and macosxhints.com. For the most part, I love hearing from readers -- even if it's negative feedback, believe it or not. In the case of negative feedback, however, it's nice if the writer provides enough detail so I know (a) what they're upset about, and (b) what I might be able to do about it. I've actually had many useful and productive exchanges with folks who wrote to flame me for one reason or another.
However, on the opposite side of the fence, as an example of the kind of useless feedback I hate receiving, I offer up this email that arrived this morning:
Do you proof read these articles before you publish them?
That was the entire email. I have no idea which typos the author may be referring to, nor for that matter, which one of the 20 to 30 things I wrote last week that those typos may be in. It's also somewhat ironic to note that proofread is one word, not two -- if you're going to chastise me for typos, it's best not to make any of your own!
I really do enjoy hearing from and corresponding with readers. But if you're going to take the time and effort to write to me, at least include enough information for me to understand what it is that's gotten your attention, so that I have some context for your comments and can respond in a meaningful manner.
As you may know by now, a company known as Psystar has announced they're selling Mac "clones" for $549, complete with Leopard pre-installed. From a legal perspective, these machines clearly violate Apple's OS X 10.5 end user license agreement (EULA). If you're so inclined, you can find a full copy of all of Apple's EULAs on this page--the 10.5 EULA is a 2.1MB download. The relevant portion of the EULA is section two, part A:
This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.
Seems pretty black and white, doesn't it? Use OS X in this manner, and you're violating the EULA. So how can a company like Psystar hope to stay in business, given this legal transgression that's key to their business model? Wired offers up some legal opinions on how they may be able to survive--basically, violating an EULA isn't in nearly the same class of legal violation as is violating copyright or patent law. A breach of contract suit won't prevent Psystar from selling their clones, and probably wouldn't even serve as a financial deterrent: as one attorney notes in the Wired article, "the maximum damage Apple would be able to claim is the price of Leopard -- actually, the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) price of Leopard, which might be a few dollars." Another attorney comments that EULAs are problematic in court, as they've vague by nature. He says, "Companies make them as broad as possible but there's no way to basically enforce them. It's a scare tactic, a way to say, hey, we're reserving all these rights."
The Wired article is a good read, and notes that Apple's best defense may be in technology, not the courts--future system updates may render cloned systems unusable, which will certainly cut down on Psystar's ability to attract and retain customers. So that's what the experts think. From where I sit, over in the "just barely passed the required business law class" section of the room, here's my take on why I don't think it'd be wise of Apple to bring their EULA into the court system.
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In general, I wouldn't change a thing about the way OS X Hints has worked out over the years -- I've learned a ton, had a ton of fun, and even managed to completely change my career. One of the first things I did right (through sheer luck, more than anything else) was to choose a content management system (Geeklog) that allowed for public story submissions. With the whole community participating, the hints collection has grown at a tremendous rate.
Lately, though, the downside of public submission queue has become apparent: spam submissions. As an example, here's a bit of what I saw in the queue this morning:
There were well over 100 such entries, all of which were added between Friday morning and early Monday morning. Ugh. (Geeklog presently lacks any sort of captcha on story submissions, though I think there's one in the works for the next minor update.)
So instead of spending time reviewing, editing, and posting hints, I spent the first 10 or so minutes of the morning identifying all the spam entries and deleting them from the system. Clearly these are automated scripts at work, hoping to hit sites that use unmoderated submissions. They care not if a site is moderated, obviously, though it certainly puts me in a foul mood as I clean up their detritus. Sigh.
I've been spending a lot of time using Firefox 3.0b5, and I'm generally thrilled with the browser (think Camino's look and feel (mostly), plus full support for Firefox extensions and Safari's speed). It works so well most of the time that I forget it's a beta.
Then there are times like this morning, when I saw this screen:
That came up when I tried to report a non-functional site--one that loaded fine in Safari, but wouldn't load at all in Firefox. It's things like this that make me remember I'm using beta software :). (Even worse than the blank privacy policy, though, was the fact that checking the box and clicking the "Done" button didn't then let me report the site.)
Today, while trying to register on a web site to download a public beta of some software package, I received the following very helpful error message:
Hmm...I'll get right on that, whatever it might have been. (The eventual solution was to use a different page on the vendor's site to complete what seemed to be an identical form. For whatever reason, it worked there, but not where I was trying to do it.)
I recently ordered a couple of new services from Verizon (distinctive ring and caller ID). In their confirmation letter, I found this reassuring paragraph (red underlines are mine):
Versizon uses a definition of "any time" that I am not familiar with!
