EBay pulls CNET staff auction, due to a technicality, reports The Register. Hmmmm, who'd do such a thing? How about anybody who's just been laid off?
Come to think of it, there are a lot of unemployed tech journalists I know who'd auction themselves off en masse to the highest bidder for any kind of work right now.
Futzing with CSS, as Dave Winer said today on Scripting News, can be a black hole, from which no useful work escapes. Let's see if it's fixed now…
A little tweaking of XML, and presto. Okay, we've determined that generating CSS from a print design tool, InDesign, is somewhat restrictive, because it's for PAPER, DAMNIT, and paper (unlike a lot of websites) has FIXED WIDTH AND LENGTH. So, CSS layers that come out of InDesign have a hardcoded set of positions. This is fine if you're spitting out static pages, but if you're planning on modifying them…
Well, duh. Anyway, my copy of Dreamweaver should be here any day now. I'm hoping to do a comparison between Dreamweaver and GoLive at some point ( but considering I just got GoLive 5.0 to install properly for the first time, and 6 has been out for several months…)
I've been playing around with the latest beta of Lifli's iBlog, the .Mac-centric blogging tool for Mac OS X.
If you haven't heard of it yet, iBlog is designed primarily to provide a blogging tool for Apple .Mac users, posting weblogs to a .Mac homepage through WebDAV and a connection to the user's iDisk. It also has a feature that allows you to read RSS feeds, and you can alternatively post to an FTP site (a Blogger interface is coming soon).
Thus far, it's an interesting tool. It did take me a while to figure out that I needed to click the “lightswitch” button to switch to RSS reader mode (I had to break down and look at the online docs). But there are a few lingering things that are bugging me.
Because of some bugs in the .Mac posting feature in the current beta, I'm using the FTP option right now, and I'd like to be a little more explicit about where to put things, but it still appends an iBlog directory onto the end of whatever FTP location I give it to publish to.
I'm starting to do some things with Adobe's InDesign for a couple of projects I'm working on. One immediately cool feature I've found–it can save documents as W3C compliant CSS. Another–it can import and export XML content like RSS. So, in theory, with some scripting, you could suck in some RSS feeds, process them with InDesign, and output print, PDF and web content from it. Ta daaa: A print 'zine from RSS channels
Theoretically. I still have to dig a little deeper.
The joys of monthly journalism: my column on Sun and Linux finally got posted online today (I wrote it over a month ago). As it posts, LinuxWorld is winding down, and Sun is down again to $3.46 a share.
My boss, the mad genius, still is taking entries from the staff for the Sun-goes-out-of-business and the Sun-gets-bought-by-IBM pools (closest guess to date of transaction wins). I'm not ante-ing up yet, though–I don't think Sun is history yet, no matter how stupid they've been about the software side of their business. And I don't think IBM has enough spare cash left to buy them outright.
If I had been tracking the financial performance of Handspring a bit more closely, I might have been more in tune with why the company had been pissing me off so much.
I have a Handspring Visor (the Prism, their color model), which they now only sell reconditioned. My wife bought it for my for Christmas 2001, along with an eyeModule2–a spiffy little digital camera attachment for Handspring's proprietary but cool Springboard interface. Then, I found out after upgrading to Mac OS X, that Handspring had bought the eyeModule operation and ceased all development work–so there would be no upgrade of the software to work with OS X.
This adds an extra piece of complexity into my life. Now, when I want to download the pictures I've snapped with my digital pinhole camera (that's basically what it is–entirely dependent on available light, fixed focal length, and occasionally surprising results), I have to reboot in OS 9 and reconfigure HotSync, suck off the photos and then reboot to OS X.
Now, Handspring is refocused on its phone/handheld Treo devices (and it's downsized considerably over the last year as it's bled money), so it's doubtful that there will ever be further support for the eyeModule. It's become yet another piece of legacy technology for me to fiddle with.
I'm gradually digging into the backlog of new software that Apple has been shoving across the Internet onto my hard drive, and finally got around to configuring iSync, a feature of the .Mac service. I never thought something so simple could be such a big deal–that is, until I suddenly found all the addresses and calendar entries on my laptop, desktop and Handspring synchronized.
Now, mind you, the results require a bit of a merge-purge, since I've had seperate versions of all this data in my e-mail, on the Handspring, and so on. But by pushing the button on the Handspring's cradle, I now sync the desktop and the handheld with the data from my laptop.
The Handspring's synchronization was somewhat temperamental (it crapped out on address book synchronizaton the first time through), but that's been my experience with the Handspring in general with OS X).
For Christmas, I bought my kids a PC–a Compaq 1.2 GHz machine from Sam's Club. They needed a PC to play their favorite games (Roller Coaster Tycoon isn't available for the Mac) and to do school work on–both are now doing school projects in PowerPoint. We set the shiny new system up in our finished basement, which acts primarily as the kids' playroom.
My oldest son (just turned 12) also wanted to be able to instant message classmates about homework (yeah, right). So I set him up with an AIM account. Soon, we discovered an interesting side benefit to this arrangement:AIM has become our own little intercom system. Now, I don't have to strain my vocal cords shouting through two floors to get him to take the trash out anymore.
According to the folx at WaggEd, Microsoft shipped its CRM package to manufacturing yesterday, for anyone who cares. The package will be sold through Great Plains' solution providers and consultants who've signed up as resellers only. One CRM described it to me as “definitely a first version release” and compared it to Excel 1.0 — not exactly a great product, but we all know how that story turned out for Lotus.
I haven't been blogging much lately–and frankly, it's because a lot that's been going on in my world isn't the sort of stuff you blog about. They're things for self-blogging: diaries, journals, and maybe letters to a select few. Maybe a secure blog with paid membership. ( 
) In any case, the long litany of things I can't blog about has had me reflecting on the role of the inner editor in all of us.
Most people have an inner editor–that part of our concious mind that formats our public thoughts before release, and tries to make them acceptable to the audience. The editor isn't there from the start–we learn slowly what's acceptable to say in public, or what to say to certain people, mostly from trial and error as we grow up.
Sometimes, the editor is off getting coffee, and we don't think about what we're saying before it comes out…the results are often embarrassing, or hurtful, or come back to haunt us later, or all of the above in some combination.
I've met some people who don't have an internal editor (or who've bound and gagged their internal editors and thrown them in closets within their minds, at least); they have a non-stop express from thought to mouth, and not even their foot can stop them from bursting something out. These people are alternatingly entertaining, frustrating, and frightening to watch, depending on what topic they happen to drift off to.
(Once upon a time, I thought Scoble had no inner editor, but now I know that he was only on an extended sabbatical. Right, Robert? )
Turning on the inner editor when you're blogging is a different process. When you're writing, it's just you and a keyboard; unless you conciously think, “This is going up in a public place, and there will be consequences,” you may not stop yourself from making comments about work, or family, or other things that might, once cast in electrons, have unintended consequences.
Of course, the advantage of blogging is that you can always go back and change the words. The disadvantage, of course, is that your original words are probably cached for all eternity someplace else already.