Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/01/12/google-updater/
So, the pattern with Google projects seems to go like this: release something mediocre and not so interesting, and over time, it gets a lot better.
Case in point: Google Video. At first, I saw no utility in this disorganized beast that only supplied video within the confines of a web browser. Ah, but the times they have been a changin’! Now you can buy videos from Google video, and unless the content provider has DRM, you can download the Google video in a file, and watch it without a stinking web browser. It is my fervent hope that before long, I’ll be able to download the shows I like to watch for about $2/hour, and I won’t have to deal with the gorge-your-brain-on-crap-all-you-can-eat buffet of mediocrity that is Cable.
Well, we’ll see if things go that way. But I think the TV industry is ready to learn from the opportunities missed by the music industry. And I think that while Apple Video store has an early lead in this territory, the Google Video store shows more promise, as it is in the business of making video available to the widest audience possible, where Apple is in their 1980s business of giving people an incentive to buy their proprietary hardware.
But what really gets me excited is Google Updater. What’s this? Well, they aren’t touting Updater, they’re touting Google Pack, which is a software bundle that Google thinks you should download. The pack is mediocre–Norton Antivirus? Norton is the suck! The Pack software litters up your desktop with icons . . . grr! And since Google is making your decisions for you, Google decides that you need Firefox with Google Toolbar. Okay . . .
So, Pack is mediocre, but Google Updater . . . now this is what excites me! It is a tool to update new versions of software. Nothing so magical about that–we have been automating software update deployment in the Unix world for years now! The cool thing is that Google is releasing a tool to do this on Windows. I hope they’ll release an API, as this would be very useful for IT folks. I think this will ultimately come to pass . . . much as Google Video ultimately let you download and buy video.
But why I really want Google Updater to be unleashed as a generally useful tool, is because this sort of framework for tracking and updating installed software really ought to be a part of the OS–it is in Unix land–but Microsoft has . . . well, let us say that they have not chosen to innovate in this direction . . . and Microsoft is ever so jealous of Google, with Ballmer throwing chairs around. If Google gets into the business of improving Microsoft’s core product, man, that’s gotta scare a few in Redmond.
And nothing proves that you’re doing no evil more than sticking it to the man.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/01/09/ikea-emeryville-bah/
IKEA Flags, San Diego (Thanks,
Juan23)
Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I love shopping at IKEA . . . the drive to the mega-store, the search for parking, the endless meandering through furniture and accoutrements, only to find yourself facing the stark reality of a giant warehouse, asking yourself if the Black-Brown BILLY bookshelf, which looks so black in the warehouse, is really the same color you were looking at in the showroom, and standing in line, wondering just what kind of crap they put in a 50c hot dog. But once you pay, and you’re rolling out the door, you know you’re not far from the actual joy of wrangling your heavy flat-packed furniture up the stairs and getting busy with the allen wrench.
But yesterday . . . well, I have officially given up on the Emeryville, CA IKEA. Here is my tale, as told in the call-and-response format that passes for “customer service” via the “Internet” these days: (more…)
9 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/01/03/standby-for-maintenance/
Upgrading WordPress to 2.0, which promises mucho new features . . . let us see . . . the site may be wonky for the next few hours?
Damn, that was easy. We’ll see what bugs crop up . . .
. . . well, I still need to figure out how to reverse the posts in some categories, but that is no biggy. Please chip in comments here, just to see if the new anti-comment-spam feature is doing its thing properly. :)
Cheers,
-danny
4 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/01/01/russia-ukraine-gas-war/
So, first thing I did in 2006 was sleep in late, see of Yayoi and our houseguest Miyuki, who are going to spend the day in San Francisco riding cables cars and stuff, and make some toast and coffee and check out the Internet. And what do I see? Well, I see . . . Russia accusing Ukraine of “stealing” gas. And I ask myself “ugh . . . is this saber-rattling before a war?”
My thinking goes like this:
– Ukraine is not in NATO, it is with Russia’s CIS.
– The CIS is dominated by Moscow.
– Gazprom is effectively an arm of the Russian government.
– The “Orange Revolution” is believed to be viewed as a threat by Putin.
– War over natural resources is a popular theme. Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing oil . . . (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/29/i-am-lame/
So, I discovered yesterday, that if one goes to Google, and types i am lame, then my web site is the first hit. Don’t that make me feel special?
But I didn’t drag you here for my inverse ego thing, here’s some cool videos that I have seen recently:
Internet Musical — World of Warcraft Monsters praise the Internet, in song. Best. Video. Ever!
Climbing Russian Kids — Man, talk about making good use of a post-utopian wasteland. Hollywood should steal these kids for stuntmen.
Sushi Documentary — Everything you shouldn’t know about sushi.
Devil Dogs — Lucian Reed went to Iraq to take photographs. This video is a valuable glimpse at how our folks are doing over there.
I have decided that Google Video is mostly tolerable. It’s not standard CODECs in files . . . probably they have some decent reasons, but unlike RealVideo, or QuickTime, they don’t require you to install spyware on your computer and watch the video in a little 2″ window. So, well, okay, maybe forcing you to stream . . . why? Maybe that is somewhat evil, but it is definitely less evil than “Video on the Internet” that has come before, and easier for the masses than Bittorrent . . . though it’d be neat . . . give it time . . .
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/28/red-hat-rant/
Ahhh, so in my getting to grips with, I have a few gripes about Linux. Some day I may cultivate these into a well-formed, coherent technical explanation, but just now . . . just now, I’ll share with you a special favorite rant of mine.
New install, right? By default, it wants to check the install media (who cares?) then there’s a screen that says “welcome to <version of Red Hat>” where you get the chance to say “ohhh, wrong CD …” then you move on to disk partitioning, and you have to intentionally select that yes you want to erase all data, and enter a bunch of other parameters … network … firewall, SE-Linux … altogether 10-15 minutes if you know what you are doing. Nothing onerous. Lots of “yes, a firewall, and these other things, these are all a good ideas, I’ll just mostly agree to what you suggest.” (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/23/yay-google/
“There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience “About the AOL Announcement”
Unfortunately, I don’t think you could hold them to that statement, legally.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/23/akita-sushi-buffet/
It would seem that the dinner sushi buffet is back for Walnut Creek, on weeknights, for a limited time only. When it first opened, the dinner sushi buffet was a wonder to behold! Giant servings of raw, delicious fish. It was too good to be true, and indeed when they realized how much money they were losing, they stopped it.
Well, tonight I was thinking “spicy tuna roll” and found the buffet back in action. But it is a far cry from “too good to be true” . . . more like “dude, what do you expect from a sushi buffet? Fool!” Oh well. Maybe Gourmet Sushi will actually re-open soon. The sign says he will open before Christmas, but last I seen, the windows were still covered with newspapers and there was an envelope from the IRS sticking out of the mail slot. If he skips town . . . well, restaurants come and restaurants go, but that guy has this intense aura about him that kind of reminds me of Basil Fawly, except with inscrutable Asian powers. I’m going to miss that guy.
I’m not feeling too good . . . but if I survive the indigestion I get to fly to Chicago tomorrow, and see the fam.
Happy Solstice Holidays to you!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/20/utahs-memorial-crosses/
The January 6, 2006 issue of _The Week_ reports that:
“Atheists are suing the Utah Highway Patrol to remove roadside crosses erected to honor fallen officers. At issue are 14 12-foot-high crosses, each bearing the name of an officer killed in the line of duty. All the fallen officers were Christian, and their families are unanimously opposed to the crosses’ removal.”
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/16/tellme-jazz/
As far as I know, Tellme doesn’t have a “Tellme Labs” in the manner that Google does, though I did spend some time on my own researching the intracies of LDAP and of PXE bootstrap and OS installation.
So it was nice when I was recently clued in to Tellme Jazz. This creature doesn’t explain itself much, but I find:
- You can collaborate on a shared addressbook. For example, the “Former Tellmes” group, or set one up for you family, peeps, co-workers, and everyone in the group can help add or maintain the data.
-
You can record messages, tossing in various “dazzlers” and send them along to individual friends, or groups of friends. (Think “audio Greeting Cards.”)
- Alternatively, you can send text messages . . .
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/10/blog-strategy/
So, Jakob Nielsen is the “cranky old man” of web design, but he’s mostly right. Still, when I saw the title “Weblog Usability” I scoffed . . . weblogs suck! Criticizing “weblog usability” sounds a bit like criticizing children for watching cartoons.
But, like I said, he’s usually right. How does my “weblog” . . . I call it a “web site” with an “online journal” that predates that awful awful word, “blog” but . . . I’m running WordPress, this is a . . . a . . . blog . . . well, how does dannyman.toldme.com stack up to Nielsen’s standards? (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/09/americans-cut-some-slack/
Well, so we know that Americans put in a lot more time at work than our counterparts in Europe. We get fewer benefits, but higher salaries. Of course, we tend to commute by car, and live in very hot or very cold places, so we spend a lot more cash on energy, or we would, if our government were not structured to keep energy artificially cheap. As a consequence, we convert valuable cropland into large suburban houses, and spend more time driving SUVs around the freeways.
Anyway . . . higher pay or not, I’m jealous of the five weeks of vacation that I’d get if I worked in Europe. On the other hand, Wired reports that American employers have mostly come to accept the fact that Internet access means some amount of employee slack time:
Companies are growing more accepting of the idea that workers will fritter away part of the workday shopping online, according to purveyors of employee internet-monitoring tools. Most employers engage in some sort of monitoring of workplace internet access. But rather than block all shopping sites, employers preoccupied with productivity are more apt to set time limits on access. Today . . . employers commonly permit use of non-work-related sites for around an hour a day.
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/07/starbucks-not-evil/
I am not a big fan of Starbucks. It’s not merely that I’m anti-trendy, but it just isn’t my idea of a nice coffee shop. (My idea of coffee doesn’t encompass “twenty ounces served in a paper cup with a plastic lid,” unless I’m stopping at a gas station on the Interstate.) But they give benefits to part-time employees, and as far as I have ever heard, the company conducts itself in a decent manner uncharacteristic of many greedy megacorporations. The latest evidence comes from AP / Yahoo: (more…)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/sony-is-fony/
In Sony’s defense, they are renting the walls that they are defacing:
Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers’ computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the [PSP].
dannyman says:
Corporations who think they have Street Cred are kind of lame an awkward, like White People who think they can Rap. I’ll grant you, there may be a Corporate analog to Eminem, but it aint Sony.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/gilmore-v-gonzales/
If you are free to visit San Francisco on Thursday December 8, then this may be an interesting activity. Even if you can’t go to this thing, you may be interested in your freedom anyway:
On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. He went to Oakland International Airport — ticket in hand — and was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his ‘papers’ and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn’t be allowed to read it.
He hasn’t flown in his own country since.
On December 8th 2005, oral arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzales will be heard before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel anonymously in their own country — and the exposure of ‘secret law’ for what it is: an abomination.
You may think he’s crazy, but it is good when people challenge the government–read more at http://papersplease.org/gilmore/facts.html.
Thanks, Jeff!
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