I purchased the MacHeist NanoBundle this morning. I haven’t gotten much of a chance to look at the apps included yet, but a big draw was MacJournal, which appears to be compatible with independent wordpress installs (this is my test). Also Tracks looks like it could have some serious potential. It’s a little menu bar icon that allows you to search your itunes library and find/play a specific song super quickly. It also scrobbles to last.fm for you if you want (I do want). I’ll put up some more info as I have a chance to play with the applications more, but until then you’re probably best of going to macheist.com to look at the list of programs yourself because I believe there’s only one more day left to purchase.

Cal Tech and MIT have had a fun rivalry going for a few years now (or rather the practice of hacking between the two schools increased during my undergrad years). Knowing that I wasn’t too surprised when I received a link to mitrejects.com and saw the end result.

It’s a relatively harmless and humorous little joke, but I wonder how the Cal Tech administration will respond. More interestingly, I wonder the Cal Tech administration can do. I doubt there is any law on the books anywhere that mentions “defamation via domain name.” My guess is that Cal Tech will look of the owner of the domain name and ask them nicely to stop redirecting it to caltech.edu. The joke may end there, but if the owner of the domain name politely declines the request, I expect that Cal Tech will look into legal options before ultimately realizing that the mostly likely option for resolving the issue will be to issue a request or “take-down notice” of some sort to the domain registrar for the domain mitrejects.com. At that point it would not at all surprise me if the domain redirect was killed by the registrar, trumping the wishes of the actual owner of the domain name.

It’s a realistic possibility, and it begs a couple questions:

1. Should there be laws preventing this sort of internet bullying/pranking?
2. Should your domain registrar really be able to force you to accept terms of use that cede your control of the domain to them?

Note: this is all entirely speculative, and potentially completely wrong and inaccurate. I however, don’t think it’s a bad guess.

While walking home this evening from the light rail stop I heard the most interesting criticism of the iPad anyone has mentioned yet:

It doesn’t even have a DVD player.

Listening to the concerns of people who don’t make their living around software or technology can sometimes be quite enlightening.

Sometimes you see Windows running (and failing) in places you might never have suspected.

Today Google has announced they’re running a domain name server free and open to the public.  The Google blog post talks about how Google feels compelled to improve the speed and quality of domain name servers because it will help make the internet a speedier and happier place for everyone.  That very well may be true, but I would assume there’s also another side to this not mentioned in the blog post.  While Google may offer a great DNS for you to route your visits ESPN.com, Amazon, or Facebook through, they’ll probably also now have a guaranteed way to know every single site and page you visit.  Google probably has lots of good ways to get most of this information from you already (through their existing services you probably use), but as a domain name server maps the name of every URL you type to the actual server hosting that site, this should guarantee they get all the information they want about your browsing habits. I can’t imagine that Google is not using this information to their advantage in some other way as well.

I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will immediately begin using the Google Public DNS immediately thinking it’s the greatest thing since slice bread, just like there is always a group of people that line up to buy the newest Apple gadget.  This may be the best domain name server created, but you may want to stop and think about what other benefits Google may be reaping by providing this service.

Privacy is not dead on the internet, it is however very easy to unknowingly sacrifice.

Random thought, would it at some point be good for the Google homepage graphic to be Google with the two Os replaced by binoculars?  Maybe that wouldn’t portray the right image .

So I know this setup is a stretch for most people, but it’s something I’m pretty happy about.  I’ve previously written about the fact that I think Windows Live Writer is awesome, and I still do.  In fact my recent revival on the site is largely due to the fact that I recently installed a fresh build of Writer at work to post and revise, as well as test and help weed out any bugs/failures.

Previously I’d said that if I could run Writer on my Mac to do my blogging, I would.  Well now I’ve made that statement a reality.  I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate virtualized under VMWare Fusion 2.  On my virtual machine I installed Windows Live Writer (Wave 3) and when I run the application in Unity mode it works almost exactly like a native Mac application.

It looks something like this:

[update] I happened to forget the disclosure I had intended to include.  As I am currently employed by Microsoft, it’s likely that my opinion on anything involving software will be interpreted as biased.  While I do work on the same team as the people that make Writer and I know plenty of them, this site has absolutely nothing to do with my job or employer.  I’m under no obligation whatsoever to talk about software, I just happen to like Writer.  It’s a simple application with a well defined purpose which I believe it accomplishes quite well.

Since I’ve entered the new (to me) world of client development, I’ve had to re-learn a lot of very basic things, such as what some commands are.  At times it leads to unintended geek humor…

campo [11:19 AM]: is the command k in ntsd a stack trace?

tesh [11:19 AM]: yup                                                                            

campo [11:19 AM]: k

tesh [11:19 AM]: lol                                                                              

I just logged into twitter and was greeted with this graphic informing me that I’m part of the Beta group for a new retweeting experience.

It looks like Twitter is trying to clean up how retweets are displayed by linking to the original tweet, and simply placing the original tweet in the stream of your followers.

This seems cool because it might help with nested retweets by allocating all retweets to the original user, and when you find something that has been retweeted interesting you’ll be able to link back to the user that originally made the tweet without any hassle. Then you’ll be able to check out their page/bio and decide if you want to follow them. Another cool thing about this is that I don’t believe Twitter created the notion of retweeting (I’m not sure) but it’s cool to see the service embrace a standard originated from within the community.

The biggest downside to this (aside from the fact that I don’t retweet very often) is that this graphic tells me nothing about how to use this new retweet feature. Do I still just copy and paste the tweet prefaced by RT? Can I just type RT @mager to just retweet @mager’s most recent tweet? (That would be an awesome feature by the way).

I think Twitter just made it even easier for tweets to become viral, but I wonder how many people might not even notice this feature because they consume their tweets using third party clients rather than the Twitter web interface.

[updated]

I found the first retweet to show up in my timeline. Rather than showing up as a tweet from a user I follow it shows up as the tweet from the original user with their user name and icon with a little note telling me which user I follow retweeted it. This is pretty much what I expected, and it will be nice because rather than having tweets from 5 different users retweeting the same thing, I will just see the original tweet with a message saying it was retweeted by those 5 people I follow. This means Twitter has a great way to tell exactly how popular a specific tweet is, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that ability involved in a future business/revenue move in the near future.

Another downside I’ve realized is that you can’t add your own thoughts or a comment about a retweet.  It looks like you have to follow up with another tweet if you want to comment about what you just retweeted.  Now I’m envisioning tweet pages with hundreds of comments about 140 character messages that spark huge debates…

I managed to put my iPhone onto some weird states yesterday on the walk home. Below are a few screenshots I was able to get.

The first is a keyboard stuck over the home screen. I assume something went awry between the home screen and spotlight search. The phone was stuck like this for a couple minutes.

Next is a screenshot of the white flash that is displayed on screen when you take a screenshot. I was aware you would somehow be able to take a screenshot of the screenshot taking process but my phone didn’t explode so I guess it’s OK.  [update: this just looks like blank space, but I swear there's an image there.]

The third image is my iTunes library completely blank. This was strange because it seemed like all the spacing was correct (as of my music was still listed) but all the names were just blank.

I also was on the Now Playing screen showing the album cover of the Arctic Monkeys album I was listening to and when I hit the back button I was shown the track listing for the Kings of Leon album I had been listening to in the morning. That was also weird but you can’t really take a screenshot of that.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen your iPhone do? Is anybody else’s home button just not really working anymore? I have an iPhone 3G I bought on release day and I pretty much have to hit the home button three times to get it to work.