Say, it, ain’t, so
During all this Telus stuff, he seemed to be so calm, so level-headed, so sensible… But Derek has gone irretrievably to the dark side with his endorsement of the serial comma:
30 Jul 2005
29 Jul 2005
Blog remora
blog remora, n., blahg reh-MOH-rah: One who attempts to increase the popularity of her or his own blog, or avoid the labour of blogging, by quoting the comments of more established bloggers.
28 Jul 2005
Supreme Court says yes to MP3 players (and the 21st century)
From the Canadian Press, Top court refuses to hear appeal on MP3 players
The fight over a levy on iPods and other digital music players ended today when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear any further arguments on the matter.
That means there will be no levy applied to digital audio recorders such as Apple’s popular iPod and iPod Shuffle as well as other MP3 players like iRiver.
“Obviously we’re disappointed. We felt it was self-evident that those products are sold for the purpose of copying music,” said David Basskin, of the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), the non-profit agency which collects tariffs on behalf of musicians and record companies.
This was a pretty questionable approach even back in 1999, when the Private Copying Tariff (a levy on recordable media like audio cassettes, recordable CDs and MiniDiscs) was first introduced. It casts a very wide net, tacitly assuming that if you’re buying recordable media, you intend to use it to copy music that you don’t own. (Or, technically, music you don’t own a license to. Welcome to the fun world of intellectual property law.)
The fine art of asking for help
Alex King, one of the premier plug-in developers for WordPress (the blogging software that runs this here corner of the Web), is getting pretty frustrated.
Every time he releases a piece of software, all of it free of charge, he’s deluged by support requests — often questions that could be answered if the users had just read the documentation that goes along with his code (a phenomenon addressed by some with a terse “RTFM”).
Talking back to Telus
Continuing the saga of the blocked web sites, Telus wrote to Derek Miller, and he has in turn replied, asking four superb and pointed questions:
27 Jul 2005
The latest tool in consumer vengeance: the blog
Since we’re on a revenge theme today, let’s take a quick look at consumers who are using blogs to take a swipe at companies what done them wrong.
The Hobson and Holtz Report has spent the past week discussing two bloggers who are taking on companies that have sold them lemons: one a computer, the other a car.
Disgruntled Land Rover customer Adrian Melrose has taken on the posh car manufacturer. (He’s also triggered more than one “cry me a river, luxury-SUV-boy” comment, but that’s another discussion.) Well-known blogger Jeff Jarvis has documented his hellish experience with Dell.
And now A-list Canadian blogger (yes, we have an A-list up here in the frozen north; it’s just that we only go down to about “E” or so) Tod Maffin is posting reviews in a separate blog — some positive, but most not. His review blog’s slogan, “Because payback’s a bitch,” gives you an idea of its mission and tone. His targets range from two local contractors to a major VoIP vendor, Vonage.
(Focus) tested in battle
BBC News: New name for ‘war on terror’
Confidential focus group report
To: Karl Rove
Re.: Rebranding exercise
Note to Karl: This thing actually is confidential, okay? It’s not like the identity of a CIA operative; this is serious business here.
Focus group conducted
Tuesday, 26 July, 2005
Anytown U.S.A.
7:00 p.m. – Group assembles. Moderator distributes little sandwiches. Some grumbling from group, moderator explains “We eat the little sandwiches we have, not the little sandwiches we wish we had.”
7:05 p.m. – Backup moderator arrives. (Previous moderator reported in stable but guarded condition.)
Konfabulator’s revenge: tweaking the Tiger
They say living well is the best revenge. Others say the hell with that: revenge is the best revenge. A little software company may be about to prove both points of view right.
A lot of Mac users have a warm place in their hearts for Konfabulator, a program that allows you to run much smaller programs called widgets.
Widgets can do handy things like display a live weather forecast, give you a pop-up medication reference and tell you whether you’ve won the lottery. (That’s a piece of code even I could write: open a window and display the word “Nope”. It would work at least 99.99% of the time.)
Then Apple announced that an upcoming revision of its operating system would have something very much like Konfabulator built into it. One of the biggest selling points of OS X 10.4, dubbed “Tiger”, is Dashboard, which offers, yes, widgets that can do things like display the weather, pop up reference windows and… you get the picture.
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