Archive for December, 2006
Save The Farmers
Thursday, December 21st, 2006
I’m from the Federal Government, and I’m here to save your small family farm.
The very policies touted by Congress as a way to save small family farms are instead helping to accelerate their demise, economists, analysts and farmers say.
The size of a few of the checks we send will blow your socks off. I though technology was a good space to be in. The real money is in free government handouts to the farming community.
Firefox’s Busted Parent Chain
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Why are dialogs created by sub elements in the main Firefox window not children of the main window? You can see this behavior by creating a window using createDialog, and not specify ‘modal’ in the options. Close Firefox and the dialog will hang around. Using ‘dependent’ in the options has no effect either. This is completely busted, dialogs should be children of the parent. This breaks standard UI conventions and forces you to jump through hoops to make sure your dialogs get closed when firfox exits. Another good example of where this shows up is in the debug console. Why does this window stay open when the main window is closed? Because it’s not a child of the window that created it. Doesn’t make any sense to me as to why they would engineer it this way.
Love That Line
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
The leading DRM digital download service, Apple’s iTunes, has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst company Forrester Research.
Not the sales collapse part, the “DRM digital download service” part. If your buying DRM’d music, your getting sucked into a situation where you don’t control your own music. You also can’t control what devices that music will play on. Big mistake in my book.
“The comparatively modest iTunes numbers suggest that consumers are still spending the bulk of their music budget $14-at-a-time on shiny discs,” he writes.
“iTunes sales are not cutting into CD sales,” he elaborated to us, “they’re an incremental purchase at best.
“There’s a problem here. CD sales have fallen 20 per cent over five years. The message here is not that CD sales are coming back, the ability to obtain pirated music is now so widespread the DRM looks to consumers more like a problem than a benefit.”
Apparently consumers aren’t as stupid as some would think they are, or as honest.
Cool OSX App
Friday, December 8th, 2006
“Tangerine! lets you easily create playlists of upbeat music, or playlists for relaxing. It works by analyzing the BPM and the beat intensity of your music. Spend your time listening to music, not making playlists.”
I wonder how they handle the the iTunes integration? Is it all open format file manipulation or does iTunes on OSX have an extensibility API?
The Little Console That Could
Friday, December 8th, 2006
Two options:
a) Build a console that tries to go head-to-head with the big boys, or
b) Build a fun, inexpensive and innovative little console people will buy regardless
Nintendo went with option B, and it looks to be working out quite well.
Wages
Friday, December 8th, 2006
Here’s an interesting New York Times article (surprisingly unbiased on a subject as hotly contested as the this) on the dwindling “middle class squeeze.” Dems are of course, defensive, claiming it’s temporary. Honestly there’s no way of knowing as the economy seems to be at a tipping point right now with the housing market slump. But all in all, this is good news. I wonder what effects a big boost in the federal minimum wage will have over the next year?
For now, however, paychecks are growing fatter in nearly every corner of the economy. Average hourly earnings for workers outside management grew faster than inflation in every major sector but manufacturing from October 2005 to October 2006, according to Moody’s Economy.com. For workers in leisure and hospitality, financial services and natural resources, for example, wages grew more than 4 percent, after accounting for inflation.
WPF/E Hello World App
Friday, December 8th, 2006
Hello World in WPF/E developed using.. notepad. Lets see Flash do that. Unlike Flash, WPF/E is based on markup and scripting, now where have I heard of that before? 
WPF/E reminds me of an old project I worked on with an old friend of mine called Yindo, which was a web applications environment very similar in features to WPF/E. Granted the underlying technologies of the two were quite different but they both provided the same ability - to develop apps that could run both in a web page and on the desktop without the use of expensive development environments. That was and still is a powerful idea.
Note, Lee’s also updated his header on his WPF blog, it’s now written in WPF/E. I’m going to have to check this stuff out. The install only took a second and the integration is flawless.
Also note, the WPF/E installers are still technology previews, so this tech is not officially released yet. Microsoft has stated that the tech will gain an new name when they go to release as well.
(..and yes, it works in Firefox, and on the Mac.)
Online Music Sales Decline
Friday, December 8th, 2006
Paul Therrott found an interesting WSJ article detailing a 3 quarter decline in online music sales. This can’t be a good sign for Apple. Personally I’m still not buying in on online music. I like my music tracks DRM free, thank you very much.
Pearl Harbor
Friday, December 8th, 2006
Came across this amazing shot taken by a Navy photographer of the USS Shaw exploding during the attack. The resolution of the full image is amazing. More can be found on the National Archives.
Similar Ideology
Friday, December 8th, 2006
Howard Dean, chairman of the national committee of the U.S. Democratic Party, is attending the two-day conference together with the leaders of leftist governments of several countries and party leaders from across Europe.
“We are not anti-American, we want the real America, your America,” former Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, president of the European Socialist Party, said in remarks directed at Dean.
Now why doesn’t that surprise me? 
European Socialists eager to work with U.S. Democrats
