Rui CarmoThe kid has been hogging the “CPU”:Wikipedia:CPU of late with irregular moods, feeding times and all sorts of cruel little behavioral experiments on us puny humans, so there has been little opportunity to fire up my MacBook and type away at stuff to see if it goes away or gets filed properly. Here’s a stab at it, bearing in mind that I haven’t really had that much sleep lately.
Wild Wild Web
So Microsoft gave up on Yahoo, which raises the question of how long either of them will last in a bunch of sub-markets (what with neither of them being able to dodge the Google juggernaut in advertising, search, etc.). Should be interesting, especially since I don’t quite know if either of them will be in second place a couple of years from now.
Other stuff that hit my radar was Twitter moving away from Ruby on Rails, which was perplexing for one reason, and one reason alone: Who the, er… fricassee cares? It’s not as if it was a religious thing or something. Oh, wait…
Books
Thanks to the kid, I’ve been reading books the way people watch “View-Master”:Wikipedia:View-Master reels – I keep squinting bleary-eyed at the same scenes time and again to see if they move of their own accord. Still, there are a few reviews forthcoming, at the rate of a paragraph a day or something,
The Cloud
After fooling around with Evernote the other day, I started wondering about the kinds of notes I take and where I need them. As it turns out, there is a quite large amount of inconsequential information that does not require much in terms of security or privacy (such as links, which I commit to del.icio.us) and that I don’t really want to have to sync from one machine to another.
Besides, it all left me with a sense of deja vu. So I wasn’t at all surprised to find myself clicking on Google Notebook and finding a bunch of stale notes from last year which I had entirely forgotten about. Mucking about with it quickly yielded a number of conclusions, namely:
- It works fine in Firefox (but says Safari is unsupported)
- It is hopelessly outdated as far as Google web apps are concerned (browser support is flaky, SSL support is broken, and it seems to be using an older version of their libraries)
- It would only require a few minor tweaks to do everything I needed (and I could always add a bookmarklet for some JavaScript encryption script)
Furthermore, it has a lackluster API that provides read-only access to public notebooks (so extending it with a desktop client is not in the cards). Still, if someone at Google picked it up as a 20% project and made it at least as good as Google Docs (which I’m now using to keep track of shopping lists and whatnot), I think it would be killer.
Oh, that reminds me – if someone at Google lands here, please pester whomever is in charge of Reader to add at least basic filtering based on RSS category fields – Bayesian classification would be better, but its blatant disregard for feed metadata is almost insulting considering that you bothered to implement tags – which, incidentally, are not propagated on shared items. But I digress.
Movies
Going to the cinema is now tantamount to mounting a Mars expedition (i.e., it will happen in ten years or so and would end in tears if I tried it now), so movies are now a completely alien art form that I have no access to until the DVD release cycle turns. Still, I’ll be adding “Iron Man”:IMDB:tt0371746 to my wishlist, if only because pfig hasn’t called it crap yet1.
Also, given that Apple shows no tendency to use their considerable clout to try to rationalize access to iTunes content worldwide (and I’m one of those people who finds it ridiculous to play around with vouchers and falsified Beverly Hills addresses2 to buy movies and TV series), I’m patiently waiting to see what Sony will do with their “PS3”:Wikipedia:PS3 store3.
Of course, that would require me to have a TV set. And a renovated flat. Hmmm.
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1 And if he does, that’s likely to be an even better endorsement.
2 Could it be that Apple never really checks all those “Beverly Hills 90210”:IMDB:tt0098749 addresses in iTunes accounts?
3 Hint to the guys in Shinagawa – the aggregate market of European countries except the UK, France and Germany is under-addressed and very big – here, this report is only about 40.000 Yen, as much as a cup of decent coffee near your office.