barnskiblog: 03/01/2003

Thursday, March 27, 2003

For the all the lucky techies like me that get to look after Windows environments, this year's most useful website discovery so far is eventid.net.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Project Blinkenlights: Arcade Home.

Loads of Mac Fonts from tyworld (more here).

HTTP 404 Porn Not Found :)

Apelogic - geekily vent your geeky frustration.

Microsoft walk out on the W3C.
"What, us, Microsoft, join in with setting open, common communication standards to improve the internet for everyone? Surely that would mean that people could compete with us on a slightly more level playing field. We don't think that's a good idea.......".

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Operation Badger: the American Military Operation Name Generating Device.
From the interestingly wordy Ftrain.com.

Monday, March 24, 2003

I know at least one other person who will find this useful; there's a freeware conduit available that allows a palm device to sync e-mail from the Apple Mail application on your Mac. You can download it here :)

Friday, March 21, 2003

machinatus - more grade-A flash wizadry.

Community Wireless - the next step for pervasive networking?

Thursday, March 20, 2003

The universal currency converter - very useful.

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Glenn McDonald is a nice guy from Massachusetts. He writes the online music column The War Against Silence. He has also written this superb monologue about switching from PC to Mac. It's possibly the best pro-Apple diatribe against MS ever written (imho), because it's so human. I've already switched to the way of the Apple, and it made me want to discover Apple again. I can't believe Apple themselves aren't using it for their switch campaign.
If you can't be arsed to read the whole thing (and you should), here's an extract:
"Executives in the PC business use the word "sexy", in such a way that I'm always surprised to discover that their children aren't adopted, and the Mac interface is not "sexy" or sexy, and it would be grotesque to want it to be. It is, in fact, playful, often well over the line into frivolity. It is not businesslike, in precisely the way that nothing should be "businesslike". The bouncing icons (and the puffs of smoke and the pipe-organ speech synthesizer and the way dialogs tidily resize and the drop-shadows on the windows and the jellybean buttons and the eject key on the keyboard) are not individually rationalizable on utilitarian grounds, and they do not pretend they mean to be. They are there to, in aggregate, change the nature of your relationship with the device. They are joyful, and they hope their joy is infectious. The more you use a Mac, and the more of its secrets you learn (and the bizarre truth is that although simple tasks are designed to be much simpler on the Mac than on a PC, the Mac is also much more deeply and pervasively capable of being tweaked and customized and automated and shortcutted), the more you will like it. This is exactly, radically, totally the opposite of what happens in Windows, where every damn thing you learn after the first ten minutes will make you hate it more and more violently."
Link and exctract were both blagged from John V. Keogh at wibbly - respect.

You Crazy - another blog worthy of respect.

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

So, there's been a lot of chat about the fake Puma advert(s). You can see one here at gawker.
I don't really understand what the fuss is about. the girl has clearly dribbled foamy toothpaste spit on herself in a rush to leave the house, and nobody has had the heart to tell her. Why would that make me want to buy sportswear? ;)

Friday, March 14, 2003

Lightning Photo Album from the NOAA.

Thursday, March 13, 2003

Froogle. Another belter from the boys at Google.

Just got an error trying to access Blogger:
Background:
The request cannot be processed at this time. The amount of traffic exceeds the Web site's configured capacity.
This blog is running on Apache on Linux (good), but Blogger itself still runs on IIS on Windows 2000? (info from netcraft) - roll on Google, who will hopefully stick it all on Linux, give it more bandwidth and make it solid :)

Clutter for MacOS X.
via Dan Hon's Extenuating Circumstances

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Now, I like to think of myself as a decent sort of bloke, who doesn't generally tend to subscribe to gender-biased views of the world. However, this rant had me howling :)
(...in fact, the whole site is entertaining.... ).

Monday, March 10, 2003

/usr/bin/girl - another quality blog.

Also, hello and thanks to Wastrel for the link :)

So, Domo-kun is a small brown open-mouthed monster hatched from an egg who lives with a wise old rabbit underground.
For the movie Donnie Darko (which I really want to see), a bloke called Gary Jules did an amazing cover of the old Tears for Fears song, Mad World. That in itself is great, and made me dig out my Tears for Fears greatest hits CD. It's dated a bit, but some of the songs are still quality.
Anyway, Gary Jules' cover of Mad World is that ever so rare occurence these days; a cover that actually rivals the original. Also, the video features Domo-Kun, and the result is the absolutely superb music video experience, Domo Darko.
the link above is a realplayer stream; there's also an avi here, but the sound is dodgy.

Sunday, March 09, 2003

Got a question about toasting bread? Why not ask Dr. Toast.

Saturday, March 08, 2003

Dan Hon's blog. I don't know him, but he links to interesting stuff.

Friday, March 07, 2003

paintings from Phil Ashton.

Monday, March 03, 2003

Xiao Xiao - fighting stick man insanity.....

Google Viewer - view your Google results as a slide show. Those boys have some ideas, don't they?!

Touch of class - computer peripherals made of wood. Check out the mahogany keyboard....

Sunday, March 02, 2003

BTW, experts-exchange is a great tech support site for everything IT, and it's free!

After that last blog, I think maybe I need something like this!

So, Apple's Server OS is different from standard MacOS X. What's even more interesting though is that it looks like there's some fairly decent Active Directory integration available via LDAP 3 authentication support in Open Directory.
Why would you want to do that? - because we can start displacing ms with Apple, and not just for servers. If I can authenticate from my mac to the AD, that's one less barrier to being able to use a mac instead of a PC at work... and I know which I'd prefer.
I suspect it's not as seamless as we might be led to believe (I bet proxy authentication is still a bugbear, for example), but good news nonetheless.
Let me be clear - I'm not anti-microsoft per-se; I use their products at work, and in the corporate space they are excellent. I just believe that there should be a choice.
As I've said before; as an IT user, I don't believe it's in my best interests to be served by a monopoly: Competition will promote the development of products and channels to best meet my requirements, rather than to satisfy the financial forecasts of some mega-corporation.
At home, I do have a choice, and that's why I use Macintosh and Linux :) - rant over.

Saturday, March 01, 2003

The good news is that the Mac OS X port of Open Office is at final beta for X11. The not so good news is that there still seems to be some way to go before the Quartz / Aqua version will be available. The Open Office team need help, even if it's just testing and feedback, so if you're a bit of a UNIX geek with an Apple.....
Also, good work by the X-Box Linux Project who have managed to not only get Linux running on the X-Box, but also have it running Open Office :)

The Darwin Streaming Server from Apple: an Open Source streaming media server for Linux, Solaris and Windows.
More on Darwin here.

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