Currently at Ephox we use MSN Messenger for a lot of communication but the servers are somewhat unreliable and it would be nice in some cases to be able to tie conversations into various internal systems (for instance, when talking about a bug it would be nice to “invite” the bugzilla bug into the conversation so that the conversation is logged).  There’s a bunch of other things I’d like to play with but don’t know where to start.  For the following, please ignore privacy issues, this is for company related conversations only and I’m aware of the privacy issues and will deal with them in time – I just want to play with the idea and see how far it can go first.  Something like archives could potentially be written so that only the participants of the conversation can access the archive.

Scoble just doesn’t get it sometimes. Here’s a tip – there’s a difference between using Windows and liking Windows.  Most people hate computers in general – they don’t like Microsoft, they don’t give two hoots about Apple (though they love iPods). Most people these days are forced to use computers.  Most people aren’t qualified to evaluate which computing platform is better for them and can’t be bothered learning how to do so (when was the last time you met an average Joe who could accurately identify even a couple of key differences between OS’s).

I got my first SpamKarma report on comment spam for symphonious.net in over a week today.  It reports no attempted spam whatsoever.  Previously I’d been getting almost a hundred attempted spam comments a day and now suddenly it’s stopped.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t change anything and I don’t think my comments are broken (though I had to relax the spam protection a while back as it was blocking comments with more than one link which caused problems for a couple of people).  Course if my comments are broken, let me know below….

Great to see Ugo Cei joining the side of good, er, those with full text feeds.  Shame to hear about the cause of it but I’ll definitely be reading a lot more of Ugo’s writings in the future – the barrier to entry is now much lower.  There’s no need for me to decide if I’m interested in the post based on a short summary, I start reading and don’t stop until I get to the end or get bored.  Essentially the impetus is now on my to decide I don’t want to read the entry instead of on deciding that I do.

Somehow I got the song Your Feets Too Big stuck in my head and since I don’t have a copy, I went searching the iTunes music store.  I found the original Fats Waller version but decided I liked the version from the new cast of Ain’t Misbehaving, The Fats Waller Musical more and added it to my cart.  Then of course iTunes recommended I buy the entire album (all Fats Waller hits) and after a sampling the various songs I succumbed and bought the lot.  It’s very good.

I just downloaded Eclipse 3.1 M7 and tried it out.  This is the first eclipse build I’ve tried on OS X 10.4 (on Java 1.4.2_07 and Java 1.5.0_02) and for the first time it actually appears usable on my powerbook.  Previous builds (on previous OS’s with previous versions of Java) were always frustratingly slow to use and I’d rapidly give up and go back to a Linux or Windows box (or vi).  With this release it appears to keep up with my typing, editor windows open and close quickly and startup is really fast.

I may have commented on how great NetNewsWire is a couple of times before (1, 2) but I have to do it again.  If you have the full version of NetNewsWire (as opposed to NetNewsWire Lite), you can easily create and subscribe Feedster searches using File->New Special Subscription->Search Engine.  There’s a range of search engines you can choose from and a bunch of other options in the New Special Subscription that may be useful as well.

Various people seem to be having problems with Mac OS X 10.4, particularly in the installation process.  Perhaps it’s just my innate desire to rub it in but I feel compelled to point out that my upgrade has been pretty much seamless.  The only problems I’ve had are with Mail.app – GPG caused it to crash which is to be expected since Apple explicitly said not to use those APIs as they are likely to change.  I’m also having a weird problem where Mail.app is no longer synchronizing mailboxes properly.  When you choose ‘Synchronize “adrian@intencha.com”’ from the Mailbox menu, it doesn’t do anything – nothing shows up in the activity viewer and new messages aren’t found.

I’ve been watching the Harmony development list since just after it’s inception and it’s been very interesting reading when you look at the big picture.  I’ve skipped over most of the technical discussions and focussed more on the interpersonal and inter-organizational topics as well as legal issues etc.

What is clear from watching the posts flow through is that there are a whole lot of people from outside of of Apache getting involved.  There’s also a bunch of people that appear to be completely new to open source as well.  Most of these people will rapidly drop off when they realize they can’t keep up with the amount of email passing through the list, let alone the actual work involved when that really gets started.

Useful little tool for seeing what people are searching for: Keyword Selector Tool

Just dumping it here so I can find it later.

Tim O’Reilly makes some interesting remarks about how to make advertising more useful.  I have to wonder though how much damage has been done by the constant attempts to grab people’s attention with advertising using cheap gimmicks and generally annoying people (popups, flashing images, distracting animations etc).  A huge number of people have become accustomed to just totally ignoring advertising.  I know that I don’t care how good an offer an ad puts in front of me anymore or what the ad does to get my attention I ignore it.  The only message I get out of web advertising these days is that I hate web advertising.

I wanted to be able to have all my RSS feeds combined in the cool (looking but totally impractical) RSS screen saver but sadly it only allows you to select one source feed.

I tried two approaches to solve this:

1. Set up a personal planet planet instance that aggregates all my feeds and point the screen saver at that.
2. Create a combined RSS feed using AppleScript.

Item one I got working but didn’t like the fact that I was then downloading all my RSS feeds twice, so I scrapped the idea.  If however you ever want to create a planet instance that stays in sync with your RSS feeds, use something along the lines of the AppleScript below and execute it periodically.  I’ve snipped most of the paths involved to try to avoid making the lines too long.  A bunch of lines have also been wrapped – the compiler should find them.  It reads the configuration file from config.ini.tmpl, adds the RSS feeds to the end and writes it out to config.ini