Information Week:
Windows XP SP3 Sows Havoc, Users Complain. Always happens with an SP release.
Why does everything suck?
I am so sick of “Social”. Oh, I agree. I agree so much I’m bashing my keyboard as I type this. As I’ve mentioned before, as a small business, I’m competing now with firms who wish to market ‘social networking’ to everyone and their unborn children ... whether it is appropriate for their audience demographic or not. Bloody waste of time for most. Apparently some feel I should be martyred for being a heretic ...
Remembering the stink
over Yahoo!’s acquisition of Flickr ... can you imagine the bloviation over a Microsoft purchase of Facebook?
Extreme Tech seems
to like the beta of DropBox for file sharing and syncing.
Dr. Dobbs Portal:
“Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion. The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection. Another language that has had its day is Perl ...”
Acquia …
commercially-supported Drupal.
Shared code snippets …
Snipplr. Some EE and other weblog stuff in here.
Coding Horror:
Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs. As the man says, if you’re using WP, consider yourself warned.
BBC:
“When Facebook came along I was one of the developers at the launch and what struck me was how there was this new form of persuasion. This mass interpersonal persuasion.”
Ars Technica:
Adobe updates the Lightroom and Camera Raw updates.
Flickr video:
Uploaded a quick 320x240 video from my Canon G5. The snow as it began to fall last evening. Flickr ‘automagically’ resized it up to their default. That should be an option, clearly.
I tend to believe that video belongs on other services. Unfortunately, every time I’ve dug in my bootheels, innovations like this take off and leave my predilections behind. We as webloggers have little influence anymore ... question is, will the cellphone-video-camera-toting-teens adopt it?
Unclutterer:
Experimenting with the GMail/Remember the Milk task-setting concept. Via Lifehacker.
NY Times Business, DealBook:
Yahoogle? Yoogle? Gahoo? Goohoo?
Why does everything suck?
The Money Losing Conundrum of Twitter and Other Communications Apps. I’ve been wondering myself when the metaphoric yachts of the big players will lose interest in purchasing such little outboard motors. They use fuel but don’t necessarily add to the major thrust of the ship. Eventually they’ll stop buying ‘em, because they’re pure drag and no revenue. How many times have we heard that ad revenue will drive these neat little apps? More and more, ad revenue seems like a house of cards waiting to collapse. It can’t support every keen idea out there.
Rob Galbraith:
Sleek, simple photo galleries offered by new fotagraft online service. For a price.
DP Review:
Adobe releases the beta of Lightroom 2. More links and info from Rob Galbraith.
Later: Some highlights noticed: 64-bit support, better integration with PS, burning and dodging, multiple monitor capabilities.
CNET:
Turning over a new leaf at Quark. “It may well have been down to some pent-up anxiety over the level of customer service we were delivering, particularly in Europe, but we are fixing this. We may also have been perceived as expensive. I mean, people probably looked at Adobe’s products and probably felt that they had to buy PageMaker and Illustrator, so they pretty much got InDesign free anyway.”
Woof. They’re still not living in the real world. I, and everyone I know who utilized Quark, purposely and intentionally moved away because InDesign was simply a better product, no matter the price ... and could export PDFs without grief, which more and more printers were requesting. Quark killed Pagemaker because of the precision of placement, thousands of an inch (Pagemaker couldn’t). You could enter measurements directly by keypad in the interface. That single feature converted more people than any other in the early days. Printers loved the precision, hated the increasing quirkiness with every update. Quark got too big for its own boots, buying Strata 3D and making other wacky business decisions. I have a feeling the inertia of existing code and interface will remain daunting, and unless they make better strides with PDF creation, they will remain at the current marketshare.
From 2.3 to 2.4:
New OpenOffice is available for download.
Rob Galbraith:
Image editing plug-ins the centrepiece of Aperture 2.1, released today. Much better, it seems. Still doesn’t read XMP sidecar files, apparently.
B&H Photo:
Transferring Old Video Tapes to DVD. Some techniques here that hadn’t occurred to me ... or just slipped my mind. Beware the tape-eating old VCR, absolutely.
ars technica:
Safari 3.1 on Windows: a true competitor arrives (seriously). “Firefox’s notorious problems with memory “leaks” are to blame, so Safari ends up using 25 to 50 percent less memory, keeping it from getting sluggish and unstable.”
Which, by the by, I overheard the funniest conversation the other day. I once had an argument with an elderly family member, who knew for a fact that Bayer, Bufferin and Anacin were all different pain relievers. [If you don’t know, all are aspirin with different or no stomach buffers]. A couple of older laptop-bearing folk were in one of our internet cafes, arguing over whether Firefox accessed “the Internets’ because it wasn’t titled “Internet Firefox”, as “Internet Explorer” was. Apparently Firefox can only access a subset of the internet? Who knew? I suppose Safari means one dons Tilley Endurables and beats through the brush of the Internet outback.
ComputerWorld:
AJAX-powered Web apps disappoint power users, Forrester says. “The local rendering of complex business screens requires serious client CPU time ...” Hmmm. I should think that time would be much shorter than making dozens of calls back to the server.
seifi.org:
Whats new in Safari 3.1 Web Inspector and Snippet Editor. If you’re using the Windows version as I am, go to Preferences > Advanced and click the Develop menu checkbox. When I opened the Web Inspector, I got nothing but blank panes ... right-click the leftmost pane, and choose “Reload”. Interesting things lurk within that Develop menu, for later perusal.
The Economist:
Online social networks: Everywhere and nowhere. “No more logging on to Facebook just to see the ‘news feed’ of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.”
Ellis Labs:
Expression Engine 2.0 Sneak Preview. Significant use of Ajax to make things more efficient. Can’t wait to see the rest.
