Treo 600 Review

My review of the PalmOne Treo 600 smartphone has just been published at JiWire. Check it out if you're interested in a pretty cool device. Because the Treo's also got a camera, you will, of course, find a picture of our cat on the Cool Tips page of the review.

Software from the future

Apple names their security updates after the day they're released, which is why I was just startled to see Apple - Support - Downloads - Security Update 2004-05-24. It's software from the future!

OTOH, it's a useful patch for a known security vulnerability (although one that, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't actually been found to have a genuine exploit in the wild), so go grab it.

Curve ball

I joined the local Curves fitness center a couple of months ago, and since then a couple of people have forwarded on to me various articles about the less-than-woman-friendly beliefs of the founder. The new Salon article, Curve ball, finds that there those stories were a mix of truths, half-truths, and exaggerations. It's worth checking out (get the day pass to read it) to see what's actually going on. The most useful part: the pointer to Curvers for Choice, a group I'll definitely be looking into further.

On the road again

You'd love to come meet us, but don't really want to travel hundreds of miles? You're in luck; we may be coming to you! Tomorrow night, come hear us speak at MacChUG, the Mac Chico Users Group. We'll be talking about our latest book, Mac OS X Unwired. And even better, they're going to be giving away over $10,000 in raffle prizes... and I think that you have to be present to win.

So if you're anywhere near Chico on Thursday night, c'mon by!

Barack Obama blog

Barack Obama has a weblog. Go check it out, particularly if you don't know who he is, 'cause you should.

DFA Gear

Value Judgment pointed towards the DFA (aka Democracy For America) CafePress Store. Lotsa good things here, and I'd like a bunch of them. Somehow, I can imagine Tom wearing a Kumbaya, Dammit! shirt. I really wish these folks would offer some 88x31 web buttons.

Singing Science Records

Because Sean sometimes reads this blog, here's a link to Singing Science Records. They're from 6 old LP's:

• Space Songs
• Energy & Motion Songs
• Experiment Songs
• Weather Songs
• Nature Songs
• More Nature Songs

Check 'em out.

SubEthaEdit 2.0

Speaking of cool text editors (as I was a couple of posts down), via Dan Wood, SubEthaEdit 2.0 has been released. The bad news: it isn't compatible with 1.x versions, so everyone's got to be on one or the other (no mixing). The good news: lotsa nice new features. I'm always amazed at conferences when I realize that there's still no Windows or *nix compatible equivalent.

Sending Live Television Via iChat

Via Jason Kottke, Simon Thornton blogs about sending live television via iChat. Tom, you gotta check this out—it sounds very useful for someone who, say, runs a cable TV station but doesn't live in an area where that station is available.

Frontier news

A few days ago, Seth Dillingham wrote a short article called I Want an Outliner for Code Writing:

Spent a couple of days in Frontier on an update to Conversant. Then, a couple days in BBEdit with XUL (RDF, XUL, JavaScript, and CSS).

My hand keeps double-clicking to the left of function names in the JavaScript, to collapse them. I still want to see the declaration, but I want the body of the function out of the way while I work on another part of the code.

Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe your hands still remember the action, like mine do.

Somebody find me a real, mac-friendly, syntax-coloring outliner for programmers. Please!

Today, Dave announced that the Frontier kernel is going to be open sourced in the next few months. So I gotta wonder: any chance that Seth knew this was in the works?

My personal take: I worked with Frontier from 1996-1998, and whatever the differences I had with Dave and UserLand, I always thought that the Frontier IDE rocked for writing code. I second what Seth said!

Panel on women entering computer science

Via the Interesting-People list, Google's holding a panel on women entering computer science on June 2. I'm laughing my butt off, for a variety of reasons. First, because they say:

One of the many myths about the computer industry is that you must be young to enter the field. To the contrary, many highly successful women and men study Computer Science when well past traditional college age.

It's not a myth, folks. It's true. And backing it up is the second reason I'm laughing: there's not a single person on the panel who's a currently employed, non-academic, actual in-the-trenches programmer.

Sigh. Get out of the ivory tower, folks, and take a look around. You're not doing anyone any favors by increasing the pool of unemployed tech workers, except maybe the employers who can now offer $9/hour instead of $10/hour, assuming that they don't just take the jobs offshore.

Okay, one more random jab: this panel is being put on by the Anita Borg Institute, best known by my spam filters as the folks who said, "Anita's dead! Let's ruin her reputation by sending out tons of unsolicited commercial bulk email! And we'll make sure that there's no way on any of it to unsubscribe or get off our lists!" Sheesh.

Cardiovascular risk and sleep apnea

Al says:

From Progress in Cardiovascular Nursing, the importance of diagnosing and treating sleep apnea in cardiovascular patients. Learn how and why. Or just go ask Tom.

Don't ask Tom; he'll only say that it was just a little heart attack. Talk to me, and I'll rant for half an hour about the number of doctors and nurses that should have figured out that maybe this guy snoring up a storm might have something they should look into. And then I'll rant for another half-hour about how Al ought to be sainted, because his blog was the first place we ever heard about sleep apnea, and that directly led to Tom being diagnosed. The best guess is that it's probably added 10-20 years to Tom's life expectancy.

On second thought, maybe Al's right and you should just talk to Tom—it's a whole lot faster.

Continuing the MT conversation

Continuing the discussion about MT licenses, Movable Type clarified and changed some of their terms.

Having looked at some of the feedback on other blogs, the feeling I get is similar to the one I had when Apple started charging for .Mac accounts. To the people screaming about how they had 30 free .Mac accounts, and how dare Apple try to charge them $100 each for them, my answer is, well, if you hadn't gone and scarfed up 30 accounts, Apple wouldn't have needed to start charging that kind of money. (Yes, I know it's not an exact analogy; Six Apart isn't getting a hit per weblog or per user, but the impression's the same).

In our particular case, though, it still rubs me the wrong way. If Tom and I split this blog in two, with one instance on dori.com and one instance on negrino.com, it'd be free. If we then added four more blogs (two on each domain), it'd still be free. But because we have one shared blog, we have to pay if we want to upgrade.

This isn't just me being a cheapskate. Tom and I have been in this biz long enough to know that if you want successful small developers to exist, you've got to give them cash; that's why we gave SA a $50 voluntary donation two years ago when we switched from Blogger to MT. It's the fact that we could have six blogs for free if we blogged as two individuals, but have to pay for a single joint blog that just doesn't sit right.