30 Sep

http://project.ioni.st/post/2808#video_2808

25 Sep

http://happymundane.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-street-view.html

15 Sep

Things to do when the wife is out of town

  • Hulu
  • Work
  • Eat leftovers
  • Watch the new Jay Leno show (same as the old)
  • Ride the bike
  • Work
  • Watch TED videos
  • Sit on the couch
  • Work
11 Sep

Yojimbo 2

Rating: 4.0

I love Yojimbo, but the new icon - worst. ever.

Yojimbo Icon

10 Sep

I've looked at MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, Couch, and many other database applications over the past few months.

I like Couch the best.

However, I have decided that Mongo DB is the best database to use for a web CMS. And this is for one reason: a query language.

Content is based on documents or content objects and this just cannot be modelled correctly in a traditional RDBMS like MySQL. Couch is great, but you gotta know what your content looks like up front (or write tons of code to create / drop indexes depending on content changes).

If I ever build the CMS that I would want to build - to allow users to create structured and unstructured content anywhere in the system - it would only work with Mongo.

9 Sep

iTunes 9

Genre Browser

OK, so they moved the genre browser to the left. Luckily you can change it back to top with View > Column Browser > Top.

UI

The new interface is very white. All the progress bars look better than before, but I can't get over just how bright it is. The Movies section still won't do folders or anything, but I suppose that's what search is for.

Store

The new store is easier to navigate and it's much easier to preview songs. It's actually a lot like the iPhone iTunes store.

LP and Extras

I have been saying for a long time that there needs to be a file format that allows menus like a dvd with all the extra features, but still contained in one file. Finally, Apple has delivered this.

It will be interesting to look inside these files to see if something like Handbrake could ever be used to generate them from existing DVDs (the holy grail) and if open source players could ever support anything like this. This is the most exciting thing to me as now I can actually think about buying movies in iTunes. Why pay the same price as DVD and not get any special features?

A better description of the special features when browsing the store would be nice, but hey they're just getting started.

Final words

Finally someone chose to try to solve the problem of include special features with movies - all in one file.

Iron Man is for sale this way. I might have to try it out.

8 Sep

Not Nathan

iPhoto has facial recognition now, but it still needs a tiny bit of improvement. Below are some of the real mistakes it made trying to recognize me:

Not Nathan

Not Nathan

Not Nathan

6 Sep

Daily Chores

Let's see if I can stick to this.

3 Sep

What would the world look like if people lived locally, yet were interconnected with the rest of the world?

Comment by Matt Parks:

What do you mean by living locally? Local to what? Not sure if I understand the question.

My reply:

Living locally, to me, means to live near where you work, buy things made near where you live, and form close relationships with those who are geographically similar. Sure, we all travel a bit, but planting ourselves into out community and working together to benefit it should be our long term goal.

2 Sep

A great iTunes Smart Playlist

Songs you have listened to greater than five times, but not within the last 6 months.