I'm selling my Powerbook, a faithful compainion for the last year.  An award winning teacher and founder of HTV Magazine, Dave Davis will be it's new owner.  Dave travels more now that he's evangelizing broadcast journalism in schools.  In addition to being a full-time teacher, he does a summer camp in conjunction with the Student Television Network and attends conferences across the United States.

The replacement laptop?  A Powerbook, of course.  No, I'm not an Apple snob, but I want the best of both worlds:  Unix and Mac.  When I want to be a geek, Unix (via fink, open source) software is just a terminal app away.  I'll install X11, too.  Remote windowing for server-based apps beats the Microsoft/Citrix solution any day.  When I just want to relax, there's the easy, breezy Mac side.  Simple.  Calming.  Ahh.  Besides, my needs are basic:  web, email, NNW, Frontier, RealBASIC.

It's so simple that we all should have thought of this sooner. Think Avantgo and RSS sleeping together, or add iSync for a threesome. Doesn't Userland have an Avantgo site? I hit that site–it's Scripting News for Avantgo. Adam, is this close to what you were thinking?

Fixed some mistakes I made in my template, mainly the side elements–I had deleted some tags I shouldn't have. (Bad grammar?)

I'm reading the Zeldman epic DWWS, but to me it's more entertaining than instructional. That's because I haven't finished the “Definitve Guide to CSS” or “Eric Meyer on CSS”. I'm convinced that CSS is the way to go, I just need a bigger brain.

I wonder if Messers Zeldman and Meyer handcraft the majority of their CSS?

Robert Scoble says:

Dylan Tweney says he's noticing commenting…

Dylan Tweney says he's noticing commenting spammers. Oh, great.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

I'm seeing this too. Makes me wish that Radio could let me control comment posting. While I'm at it, I'd like RSS feeds for *all* of my comments (in one feed), trackback and comments in the same display, and full content searching from within Radio. Maybe in Radio 11. :>

The corporate office of my new employer is on the ball when it comes to technology. You would think a 100 plus year old publishing company would smell like old books. Not so. I installed a Cisco SoftPhone, part of Cisco's AVVID product line, and tested it today. I am happy to report that it works very well over a T1, Cable modem, and even 802.11b. The sound quality is just as good as a regular digital or analog phone. What is even better is that my voicemails are sent to me attached to emails, making them portable objects and freeing them of the confines of a voice only system. My laptop is now the hub for all of my communications: email, instant messaging, and voice. I will only have to use my cell phone when I can't get on a decent network connection. [X-log]

I'm going to preface this with a disclaimer: I like Russ and his comments make me think. In this case, I think he's slipped a cog. Read the excerpt, then my comments below.

Mobile Advertising

GoogleAds have made me a believer again in online advertising.

[snip]

The fact is that I first thought about mobile advertising in terms of interupting the user and taking over their display for a minute – almost like pop-ups, but actually are just interstitials that go away after a few seconds, like Salon's annoying ads. And that's just it. On a mobile phone with a shaky connection (even with the best of current networks) a small text link above or below your mobile content might actually be the best route. Simple, honest and straight forward, just like Google's text ads.

Lots to think about. I wonder if Google is thinking at all about the mobile market? They should have a Moble.com (get it?) which indexes just mobile sites (WAP and XHTML-MP) and sell mobile advertising…

[Russell Beattie Notebook]

The idea that ads would ever come up on my phone makes my skin crawl. Imagine the situation that makes the evening news. Lady getting carjacked can't make a call because her phone is being pushed ads. I realize that the situation described may be extreme, but when will we as consumers draw a line? When will someone stop and say, “Get that ad the hell out of my [insert device here]!” Why not put an LCD panel in a refrigerator, allowing the 'frig to display your family calendar most of the time, but ads for products the rest of the time. Around dinner, it starts to spew ads for steak, because the Beef Council knows your 'frig is in Amarillo and they have a bunch of extra cattle to sell.

Russell, I like the way you think, most of the time. If you have advertising revenue subsidize an essential service, then there will be a segment of the population that will trade the inconvenience ads for convenience of the product. That devalues the product and sells the ads to the lowest spending group of consumers.

Tell me why this makes sense. Where's the long term? If you say there's no long term, then why not play the market or gamble your money in Vegas?

I'm keeping my Powerbook.  I thought that a nice gentleman in California had bought it, but he didn't come up with the money.  That's good news for me–I was missing it already.  Since I already had it backed up, I decided to wipe it and start from scratch and not to install Classic.  At first, I wanted MacOS 9 dual boot capability, but I came to the (now obvious) conclusion that I don't use Classic.  My final holdout was Microsoft Office, specifically Office 98 since it runs better in Classic that Office X runs in X.

I had become used to several tweaks I had made in my install of Jaguar, specifically using Cocktail to change transparency on the dock and some unix stuff like fink and the developer tools.  I did the reintall of Jaguar last night, using the retail disks.  First thing after the reboot, it snagged the updates, so I ran through those installers.  Whew, finally done.  What was the first app I reinstalled?  NetNewsWire, of course!  Best of all, my weblog never had to suffer.

I'm trying this tomorrow…

A couple folks have posted their NetNewsWire style sheets. Ollie of ollicle.com posted one; Steven Canfield of Aquasition.Net posted another.

Update: another style sheet comes from Gummi at meettheg.com. A fourth style sheet comes from Dave Walker at freeform goodness. [inessential.com]

Mail-to-Weblog and New Aggregator for Radio

I'm trying to do a little posting today using the mail-to-weblog feature in
Radio. The web interface I setup doesn't appear to be working–probably
router settings or dynamic DNS. Worst of all, I use the Radio web interface
to read news remotely, especially at work. Ugh. Troubleshooting never
ends.

Since I'm now without a portable (the Powerbook leaves tomorrow for
California and it's new home), I'm working on a new version of the
aggregator for Radio. I've copied the aggregator's code into a new table in
the workspace table and have started to document it. My next stop is to
email Roge
rs Cadenhead and see how much of this is covered in his new book.

Anyway…

I've been reading Matt Neuburg's nearly six year old book on Frontier and
still find it useful. That's how I was able to learn enough to correctly
copy the aggregator code and create the new table. I want to rebuild the
aggregator so it has more prefs for the display. Here's my list:

–Headline only display without the content
–Headline only display of only a single weblog at a time.
–subscription grouping

Now you might ask: why do this, just run a desktop aggregator? Well, I do.
I use NetNewsWire from Brent
Simmons' Ranchero Software. I love it, but it runs on a Mac and I have a PC
at work. I don't want to buy a second copy of Radio–I don't need the
second weblog hosting, etc.–and none of the Windows products have the
simplicity, elegance or speed of NNW. This brings me to a point of
self-analysis, where I determined that since I'm learning Frontier (since I
want to customize Manila a bunch), why not apply the knowledge in a simple
fashion first? Plus, immediate gratification never hurt anyone. :>

If anyone has seen some previous Radio work with modifying the aggregator,
specificially the layout, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Jake says in this post:

Enter Firebird — Mozilla's slimmed-down browser offering. It's got
tabs. It's got auto-complete. It's standards-compliant. It's fast. And it's
got Midas. I didn't even have to change my software to get the rich text
editor to work.

I just downloaded it and did the install. He's right–I'm running it on
Windows 2000 on my computer at work. It's faster than IE, responds better
to bad HTML and works great with my install of Sun's Java. It also exposes
the programming holes in some of our intranet apps. Why not program with
standards when you have the opportunity, eh?