Author: rich.campoamor

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Free Hostname For Your Mac

nonstopmac has a detailed description of how you can use DynDNS to obtain a free hostname for your Mac.

Why would you ever want to do this? Well, its one way to make it easier to connect to your home computer when you are away from home. As the Internet is a wild place, you also need to take adequate precautions regarding what you expose and how. From the nonstopmac writeup:

For those who are still wondering what am I talking about, DynDNS can be used for giving your IP address a good-looking hostname. This is especially useful in situations where you are using dial-up access or ADSL connections with dynamic IP addresses. By using the DynDNS service with a combination of their software installed on your computer, you can be always available through the same host name. You can use this setup when you are hosting a web server on your local computer or when you want to use service like Virtual Network Computer (VNC) to access your desktop from a far away location. In both of these scenarios, you will need a static address, so the DynDNS service comes quite handy.

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Sun Microsystems Giving Away Software

Sun has announced that they are giving away (providing for free download and use) of all of their server side software and developer tools. I assume that they hope to make money off of services and support (like Red Hat). This also allows them to claim some karma by now having ‘free and open source software’ while making a last ditch effort to compete with Windows.

Frankly, it feels like an act of desperation, as they have seen the open source community eating their lunch in the software arena and Intel in the hardware arena. It also feels like a real opportunity for anyone with an interest in Sun software to download and have a look.

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New Tivo Applications

Tivo have announced new Online Services for Tivo series 2 owners who have broadband capability (like me!). Several of the services are tied to Yahoo! (Photos, Weather and Traffic). Others include the Live364 Radio Network, movie information and ticketing via Fandango and the ability to listen to Podcasts.

Apparently, some screenshots of these functions were leaked last week by a beta tester who claimed that they would not be available until some time next year. Tivo was a little more prepared and announced them today. I priority registered both of my units and the confirmation screen said it would take ‘a few days’ to push out the update. Very nice.

Hopefully, this is the just the beginning for Tivo services and the catalyst for more services being re-purposed from the web onto consumer electronic devices.

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New Mac Mini Rumors

Think Secret is reporting on rumored new features of the next iMac Mini. It will be Intel-based, include Front Row 2.0 and some Tivo-like functionality.

While the specific model and speed of the Intelprocessor in the new Mac mini is unknown, sources are confident thesystem will be ready for roll-out at Macworld Expo San Francisco, inline with other reports Think Secret has received that Intel-based Macs will be ready some six months sooner than originally expected.

Thenew Mac mini is also said to sport a built-in iPod dock, a feature thatwas scrapped from the Mac mini Apple first introduced one year ago.Other hardware specifics are unknown, such as whether the Mac mini willfeature video recording out of the box or whether an add-on will beoffered for those looking to employ the Mac mini not as a secondcomputer but as their living room command center.

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Amazon mturk Still Broken

I thought that I should follow up and have another look at mturk to see if Amazon has addressed the performance and functionality quirks and issues. Nope.

Granted, the home page loads quickly, but when you actually get into the meat of the app and try to do something with it, it is still crap. For example, viewing the list of ‘HITs’ available shows one with 350 available. Ok, request a HIT for that one. Buzz. Returns a screen that states:

There are no more available HITs in this group.

Great. Honest mistake. Wrong again. The same HIT group shows up on the screen again, stating that it has 350 HITs available. In fact, clicking on any HIT group other than the one that lists 30000+ HITS available (and also has the lowest per HIT payoff) gets you the same message.

It’s amazing to me that this thing has been around for weeks now and still operates like some CS101 I-just-learned-how-to-code-sort-of web app; especially with all of the resources of Amazon behind it.

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Mobile Ajax with Opera

Opera has released a beta of their Opera Platform SDK that allows developers to more easily create web applications for mobile phones. The big news here is the ability to create AJAX-style applications where the meat of the application can reside on a server rather than on the phone. I foresee this being a huge benefit as it will allow for the repurposing of existing web services for providing mobile services. Hopefully, this will translate into a flourishing of mobile apps for smartphones.

Along with this announcement, Opera has apparently synched all of the versions of its browser to make it easier to do cross application development. I updated the Opera Mobile browser on my Nokia 6620 to version 8.5 and noticed a bit of a performance increase, the welcome addition of a password manager and the ability to zoom web pages. It should be noted that the 8.5 browser release is different that the Platform described above.

I also have to wonder what Nokia’s reaction to this will be. They recently previewed some screen shots from their Apple webkit-based browser, but there was no mention of an SDK or framework to leverage AJAX-like development. Nokia’s new browser is also only compatible with their newest phones (many of which probably won’t see the light of day in the US market for upwards of a year). Perhaps this will serve as a wake up call to the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to help developers more easily create mobile apps (and leverage existing resources in the process).

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What Time Is It There?

Gchart is a nice little Google Maps mashup that allows you to input the names of countries or major cities and find out what the local time is as well as international calling codes. Right now it’s 10h45 AM (tomorrow morning!) in Wellington, New Zealand — I’d love to be there.

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Adding to Information Overload

If you are a total newsfeed and IM junkie, you can combine these to add to your own personal information overload by using immedi.at Using this site, you can be notified via MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ of things of interest in your news feeds. From their site:

Use immedi.at to be notified instantly when:

* news on a certain topic is posted
* your competitor does something of interest
* something interesting happens with a favorite sports team
* your name or company is written about
* you receive new email

The second to last bullet seems a tad on the Narcissistic side, but, hey, every one has different needs.

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Sun Java Studio Creator Now Free

If you have been even remotely interested in trying out JavaServer Faces, you might want to pick up a (now) free copy of Sun’s Java Creator IDE (was $99USD). Versions available for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows.

If that version of Creator floats your boat, you may want to sign up for the Early Access program for the Creator 2 over at java.sun.com to see what the next generation of tool might be able to do for you.

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Yahoo and TiVo

Not sure what the big hubbub is over the the Tivo/Yahoo announcement. Apparently, you can now schedule TiVo recording from the tv.yahoo.com site. When TiVo introduced the Home Media Option a few years back, online scheduling was always something you could do directly from the tivo.com web site. Having to traverse the flash advert laden Yahoo gauntlet for anything is torturous at best (and for me, simply to be avoided).

I was curious to see if there was more to this, so I followed the registration link. I stopped cold at the prompt that wanted me to enter my TiVo credentials into a field that read:

This one-time step links your TiVo® box(es) to your Yahoo! ID, so you can schedule recordings from Yahoo! TV any time.

So, if I proceed, then it would appear that Yahoo would now have access to my Tivo viewing habits (and giving nothing of value in return). Of course, I am making an assumption here about what the nature of this ‘linking’ is.

Additionally, Yahoo continues to show it’s disdain for Mac users by creating a registration page that causes Safari to crash unnecessarily.

No thanks, Yahoo.

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Tim Bray Goes Off on WS-Interop

I tend to agree with Mr Bray’s WS-Interop posting. Much of what is being created under the guise of standards feels like it is just making real interoperability more and more elusive. From a pure interoperability standpoint, introducing SOAP into an interaction just tags on non-value-added bloat with the ‘benefit’ of having the interaction be more toolable (and you more dependent on the tools).

WS-* isnÂ’t about standards. ItÂ’s about what Microsoft (there are partners, but itÂ’s mostly Microsoft) chooses to implement while waving the WS-banner and retroactively shaking Standards Fairy Dust over the process. Which is OK, as far as it goes; I get the impression that Indigo WCF is actually some pretty neat software that will be useful to a lot of Microsoft customers, and Sun has a stake in the ground saying weÂ’re going to interoperate with the Microsoft WS-stack. Do I think this stuff is going to Change The World? No. Do I think that this is the real future of Web Services? No.

Standards have their place and certainly serve large corporations to help cut through the sometimes dense forests of (ad hoc) internally adopted technologies. However, on the wild, wild Internet, simple is better. This is not to say that standards have no place; afterall, there wouldn’t be a Internet without TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, HTML, etc. In the end, the simplest, most open solution tends to win.

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Effective Information Management

steptwo has an excellent article enumerating the 10 Principles of Effective Information Management.

I have to agree with lifehack that principle five ‘take a journey of a thousand steps’ is one of the real keys here. Too often I have seen important strategic changes not put into place because they would never be implemented as their own project. However, they could be just as easily broken down into manageable chunks and implemented along with other projects.

via lifehack.org

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Google Maps Go Mobile

Earlier today Google released a version of Google Maps called local for mobile that runs on most Java-enabled mobile phones . I was able to easily download the app onto my Nokia 6620 and start making use of it. The experience was much more seamless when I finally found the setting in Nokia’s AppManager to not prompt me every time the app wanted to connect to the web (which was a lot).

One downside that I found is that there is no apparent way to ‘bookmark’ locations (say, your home, or place of business) to make it easier to zoom to places where you commonly find yourself. For that matter, bookmarking would make it easier to get directions though the service because you would commonly want directions to/from your home or place of work. Bookmarking would be a great addition, as I find that anything that keeps keying and mousing to a minimum on a mobile device makes that app/service all the more valuable.

I found the Google offering much snappier (speed-wise) than the previous app that I was using on my 6620 called MGMaps. MGMaps basically served the same function in delivering Google Maps to mobile devices. It may be that MGMaps may go away altogether now that Google has introduced its own mobile application.

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Mac Browsers

Use a Mac and tired of your current browser? (or maybe just have too much time on your hands)? Apparently there are 83 or so browsers to choose from. Some of these are a bit of a stretch calling them browsers (realplayer, netNewsWire) just because they have some rudimentary HTML display capability.

Of course, all of the usual suspects are represented in the form of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, and Opera. There are also some interesting variants like the ‘Eric Shore Baur’ browser that in instrumented to measure page load times and allows for playback of web actions.

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World Usability Day

Visit the World Usability Day site and take in the world-wide activities that are happening today. This one sounded entertaining (in Auckland, New Zealand)

A hiliarious remote control shootout! Eight attendees vied for the title of “Owner of the most unusable remote control”.

The winner wasn’t actually the most number of buttons, or the least amount of buttons actually used – but the one that managed to switch off all the electrical equipment in the room through the accidental push of a random button!

Another good resource is Jakob Nielson’s site useit that focuses primarily on web usability. The remarkable thing about this site is that inspite of the fact that web development has been going on for around 10 years, the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again.

If today’s activities inspire you, you might consider joining the Usability Professionals Association.