Monthly Archives: November 2011

Consumerism

Weblog

Duncan Davidson:

The harshest sign of all for me, however, was spending a day with my youngest sister last week during the Thanksgiving holiday and realizing just how much of her life is occupied with figuring out what to buy, when to buy it, and what storage to buy to store everything else that has been or will be bought. I think we talked about other things for all of about thirty minutes.

Follow the link to read the quote in context, but it mirrors experience I’ve had with others I know. It’s disarming to say the least.

Why bother with Frontier again?

Programming, Userland, Weblog, , , ,

I’ve asked myself the question “Why bother with Frontier?” many times in the last month.  I spent some time talking to people on the Frontier Kernel mailing list about getting involved with the project again.  I learned many things, including the fact that I’m not qualified to help in a meaningful way right now.  Sometimes knowing your limits is as important as knowing your strengths.  In my case, I would need to learn 10 years of C coding to catch up to the complicated environment that is the Frontier kernel.

I think instead I’ll spend my time building the software that I want instead of trying to fix the issues with the existing project.  There are many things about the Frontier coding environment that are appealing:

  1. Editing code in an outliner
  2. Scripting applications to automate tasks
  3. Building applications that work on more than one platform

That said, I think that I can build my own software while addressing my shortcomings.  I have the books and the tools to learn C, compile programs and run them under MacOS X and Windows.  I have the motivation to learn and some spare time.

So, why bother with Frontier again?  Why indeed.

Dave Winer’s open community?

Weblog

I’ve tried posting some comments on Scripting News lately but each has been moderated away by Dave. Here’s the last one, a request for him to point out to me the moderation reasons:

Dave:

You seem to moderate all of my comments but I believe I’m posting relevant content to your discussion. Can you point out a mistake I’m making and help me correct it?

Steve Kirks
http://steve.kirks.com

I’m posting this here because I think that’s Dave’s preferred method of communication: open and honest.

iTunes Match is great

iTunes, , , , ,

I enabled iTunes Match last night on our account and our home Mac dutifully uploaded 14,000+ songs overnight.  It was still working on some of the songs and the album artwork today.  I’m listening to “Blair’s List”, a custom iTunes playlist from the home machine, curated by my brother-in-law the orthodontist and music expert.  In the background, my iPhone is downloading (streaming) songs from the cloud as needed.

Way better than storing all of that on my phone.  Way, way better.  It “just works”.

“Boom” as Steve Jobs would have said…