Derek asks: Have you ever used OSX?
I have. I like it a lot. The folks over at apple are really good at inovative user interface design. I'm going to start sounding like a broken record because I keep talking about iPod - but its just the ultimate example of super simple effective user interface design.
I don't know a single person who hasn't picked up an iPod and figured out how to use it in less than 2 minutes. And invariably after the 2 minute learning period everyone exclaims "this is so cool".
The learning curve for OSX is a little bit longer than 2 minutes - but the reaction is also the same for a lot of people - "so cool".
Why? Its easy, intuative, and does what you expect it to do.
My only two wish list items for Macs would be 'right click' context sensitive menus - and keyboard shortcuts for text editing (Shift-Home, CTRL-Home, CRTL-Arrow, Shift-Arrow and the like) . But, right click is certainly one of UI design features I will thank Redmond for for many years to come.
Andyway. it occurs to me that it is the last day of the year (well at least us North Americans have agreed on this day to be the day that will be the last of the current year). I resolved a long time ago not to make resolutions for new years - so I will stick to that tradition. I also decided many years ago not to make a big deal over New Year's Eve celebrations. My plans have always been decided by the first person to make me an offer for something to do that I thought might be fun.
Past years have included:
Going to a non winterized cottage - only to have the termperature drop to minus 25 overnight... Which made trips to the outhouse that much more fun.
Getting together with friends from university for a swanky dress up house party.
Winning tickets to a club's new years celebration.
Just going to a club for a new year's celebration (incidently its what I did last year - and was thus far my favorite new years).
And - several years of staying in - not because there were no offers to do something - just no offers to do something that I thought might be fun.
This year, my first best offer was to stay in. And that's what I will be doing. A nice dinner, a drink or two and the company of my beautiful girlfriend.
Andyway - on a personal level, this has been a good year - I have been blessed with much happiness and good fortune. Many others in this world have not been so lucky. In fact, my year could have been 100x worse and still been better than over 90% of the world's population. Its all relative I suppose.
Here's to hoping that everyone has as good a year or better next year as I had this year.
Happy New Year Everyone.
andre
Well, it seems that a few comment spam bots have been doing their best to tart up my site with their links. Somehow they have gotten past the human input validation tool I have placed on my comments. The are possibly using some OCR - and since the font and the background pattern don't really change, I'm not surprised that some software manages to do OCR. I am surpirsed that someone has gone through the trouble though.
You may not have noticed the spam because I am able to get rid of all of it with a click of the mouse. Still, its a pain in my rump to have to lift a finger to rid the site of this plague. So - in an attempt to discourage these evil crawlers that waste my bandwidth and ugly my site - I have disabled comments on all but the front page posts. We will see if this action is enough for them to give up on my site altogether - I would think that the author of the spambot would have placed a routine that checks the success rate of the automated comments... if most attempts fail - stop trying - because its a waste of their resources to continue to attempt to place comments where none can be placed. Here's hoping anyway.
andre
I've talked before about being one of those people that never went to IE as a browser - always sticking to Netscape through the good times and the bad (remember the wonktastic 6.0)... and in turn the other mozilla products - most recently firefox (browser) and thunderbird (which is a beefed up more feature filled version of 'netscape' mail available since 6x).
Now there is a new tool to add to the box. Mozilla Sunbird! Only in version 0.2 right now - this calendar/scheduling app is already looking good. Really, it has a good foundation, because its the next generation of the existing mozilla Calendar.
I've never been a calendar application user.... A white board or post it notes used to be my low tech way of keeping track of appointments. While this sort of 'organization' would drive a person with a Gold personality nuts - My brain is wired differently and my own system worked for me....
But, recently santa brought me an iPod. Besides being a wicked cool music storage tool it also doubles as a uber-simple PDA - with calendar and notes tools. So why not make use of this feature. The calendar application accepts industry standard .ics (iCal) files. Just fill up your calendar on your machine - and export the file to your iPod and all your appointments are a clickwheel away.
So what are .ics files? Like i said - a standard calendar file format. i.e. NOT OUTLOOK - which happens to be a good thing in my opinion, because along with never swithcing to Internet Explorer - I never switched to Outlook for my mail.
Outlook will export to .ics - so outlook users can make use of the iPods calendar too - they just have an extra step.
So back to Sunbird. Sunbird uses the iCal standard. SO - Syching with the iPod is as simple as drag and drop of the calendar file into the iPod calendar folder. You don't need a mac, you don't need special synching tools, you don't need an expensive calendar application. All you need is an iPod and freeware in the form of Sunbird.
Having said all that - Sunbird is still in early development. Its still got a bunch of known bugs (with printing and other features). But, its still quite stable - and all the calendar functionality you would expect is there and working. Sunbird may not yet be ready for enterprise use, but if you just want to keep track of personal appointments and tasks you can't beat the price. And in time (say version 1.0), I'm sure it will be ready for enterprise use.
So there it is - The mozilla power combo. Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird - who needs Microsoft for anything other than maybe an operating system.
andre
Just wanting to wish the world a merry Christmas.
Santa comes early for many European Canadians - i.e. gift are opened on Christmas eve vs Christmas morning (that's for sleeping in ;-). In recent years I've been speding Christmas eve with my family and then Christmas day with my girlfriend's family. This means that sleeping in is no longer an option - but on the up side, I get two visits from santa. One on the eve and one in the morning.
Euro Santa got me an ipod. Santa Canuck got me a Puffy Ama Umi CD!!! - Ahhh musical bliss.
andre
ipodder, is perhaps the neatest thing I've heard about in ages.
Reading the history of ipodder - and podcasting. I encountered an interesting story of how an insanely good idea and open source can turn into an insanely good product and toy. Of course it helps if you have Dave Winer on your side to begin with...
If you've got some money making ideas based on this - now's the time to act. Currently there are 'thousands' of users - but that number is sure to grow into the 10's and 100's of thousands soon.
Or if you want to be your own DJ - or want to listen to other home spun deejays... download it now.
andre
The lure of easy money has made me sell out. Adwords are a new fixture at andremolnar.com.
Ad words are an interesting feature - not only because they are a potential revenue source - but because they tell you what a computer thinks you and your readers are interested in. Apparently google's machines think that you are all interested in the Iraqi war - and Blogging. *shrug* Sure - why not.
Still, I haven't written anything about the Iraqi war - and I don't exactly write about blogging. But, whatever - if google thinks that is what you are interested in - Great.
andre
I've gone ahead and started building my word radar screen based on data found at 10x10.
I have developed the back end of the application which grabs data evey hour and updates my database with some information about the words. I have come up with a way to store each hour's data in a file as well which will ultimately be used to create the front end of the application. So version 0.1 of the application is nearly complete.
The next step will be to build a prototype for the front end - first in basic html/php and then in flash. With each new release I will update some features and improve in areas that I see lacking.
After gathering a month's worth of data (since the launch of the 10x10 site), I've discovered the following:
Only @1500 words have ever been on the top 100 list
There have been over 700 different top 100 lists.
So far the top 10 most frequent words are:
| Word | Total # of times on the list |
|---|---|
| president | 665 |
| security | 661 |
| officials | 652 |
| un | 642 |
| minister | 638 |
| iraq | 637 |
| killed | 635 |
| iraqi | 624 |
| prime | 614 |
| military | 611 |
The word 'president' has been on the list for the past 355 consecutive hours
I will post my thoughts on what I think this all means - but for now I thought I would share some preliminary factoids.
I look forward to sharing the first beta version of the radar tool with the world soon. Stay tuned.
andre
p.s. Zen learning rest stops on this journey -> re-familiarizing myself with trig. -> hex math -> colour theory -> flash 7 ->markov chains again.