July 2006 Archives
Alton Brown is my favorite television chef and his new show premiered last night. In Feasting on Asphalt, Alton rides his motorcycle across the country in search of authentic road side eateries and gives viewers an excellent history lesson along the way. Alton's personality shines in this show and I find it to be a bit more raw than his other series, Good Eats, and that's a good thing in this show. Everything just shines spontaneously written and produced. This is going to be a great series.
OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
Slashdot is reporting that eBay has banned Google Payments. There are a lot of people hollering about how unfair this is, but I really want to call attention to this comment that points out:
eBay specifically states that any "new" service without a track record of privacy protection and customer service will be scrutinized and most likely prohibited until it has some history.
I find that point important enough to call a little bit of extra attention to it.
Yesterday I wrote about Adium 1.0.b1. A few hours later 1.0b2 was released, and today we have 1.0b3. The folks at Adium do a great job of documenting changes on their beta page, and I really think that's worthy of mention. So frequently we don't know what changes unless we're following the svn commit notes or the trac rss feed, but now anyone can know.
This is definitely exciting news, and I'll be looking forward to the official release.
The first beta of Adium is now available. I think it's exciting to see that they have made enough progress to mark something beta, though I remain concerned about a few bugs I've seen in the svn version. We'll see how this goes.
Burlington launches their fireworks on the third of July instead of the fourth and I had the opportunity last night to get out and take some photos of them. I have to say that I am very proud of this set. I hope it's enjoyed by others as much as I enjoy it.
I gave in. I ordered TiVo today. The TiVo software is so vastly superior to Adelphia's DVR that there was little question about whether or not I wanted it, but since Comcast is moving to Vermont and has a deal with TiVo I wanted to hold out. I've even heard rumors that they'll be beta testing soon. But I gave in. Perhaps it's my patience, and perhaps it's the ability to use it to contact my file server upstairs to listen to music, but it struck me as a good idea.
A couple of months ago I started to talk about requiring people to sign in to comment on my blog. I'm not about to require you to register on my site, but there is typekey. The ability to log into typekey is a common feature among blogs, so it's not a huge stretch to require it and it will hopefully put either slow down or stop the comment spam I've been getting. Maintaining the spam lookups list is just too time consuming for me. As I mentioned, I may set up open id logins so livejournal and open id users can comment as well.
A nice side effect is that permalinks are loading a little faster now. Handy.
Last week I wrote about Guy's Big Bite. I talked about my hope that Guy would fall into a groove and get a little better in front of the camera, as well as my getting used to him. The second episode aired today and I think at least one of those hopes has come true. Either I'm more used to him or he's gotten better, but something about this episode was a little bit more inviting than the first. I think Guy Fieri's got some real potential and I think I'll keep watching this one.
I follow Camino's nightly builds on a semi-regular basis. I've always enjoyed having the bleeding edge software, and Camino is a great thing to follow. Nightly builds include a lot of new features, some of which I've written about before. Adding to the plethora of features that Camino's user base has asked for and received, developers have added spell checking as you type in text fields. This may not mean much to a lot of people, but it does help me. I am a member of a few forums, but more importantly I like to blog and I like having spell checking as I type. Now I can use my MovableType bookmarklet to write entries and still get my spell checking. This will definitely change the way I blog - at least a little bit.
Let's all get over the shock that I'm paying any attention to sports at all, let alone the staggering unlikelihood of my actually reading articles about it. Hell has frozen over, because both of these things have happened. Not only that, but I'm blogging about it. Now who saw that coming?
Here's something else not too many people seemed to see coming - the Boston Red Sox set a record last night with their streak of seventeen straight errorless games. The previous record was sixteen set by the Cardinals in 1992. Read more here.