Linked List: June 20, 2006

Tuesday, 20 June 2006

Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 

InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister says it’s better than Ubuntu. It installed easily on his notebook, including easy Wi-Fi support, but power management remains a sore spot. (Via Ramanan Sivaranjan.)

BombSquad 3.0 

Freeware minesweeper game for Mac OS X.

Project DReaM: Open Standard DRM Proposal From Sun 

Sun:

DReaM is a Sun Labs initiative to develop a Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution based on open standards that will also integrate with proprietary DRM solutions, thus providing both openness and interoperability for specific customer requirements.

I’m in no position to judge whether this is feasible, but the problem with an idea like this is that Sun is in no position to drive adoption of it. And the only companies that are in a position to drive adoption of an “open” DRM scheme don’t want to.

MonoCalendar 

Regarding my “Where’s the open source calendar app that’s as simple and uncluttered as iCal?” question on Monday, John C. Welch emailed to point out MonoCalendar, an open source iCal knock-off written for Mono and .Net.

Spotlaser 1.3 

Alternative search interface for Spotlight data. Spotlaser only provides a UI for specifying queries; results are shown by way of Finder search results windows. Donationware.

Blogging From TextMate 

Screencast by Allan Odgaard demoing Brad Choate’s “Blogging” bundle for TextMate. The basic posting and editing stuff I’ve had working in BBEdit for years, but the niftiest trick in this demo comes at the end, when he drags a PNG into the editor window.

Interarchy 8.1 

Sweet update to my favorite file transfer app. The best new feature is support for Amazon S3 (Interarchy is the first Mac file transfer app to support S3, as far as I’m aware). It works just like you’d expect: you enter your credentials and get a file listing window where you can drop files and folders to upload them to your Amazon S3 account. My other favorite new feature is a small one, but I requested it: the “Mirror Dry Run” feature is now available from the contextual menu in the Bookmarks window; previously it was hidden away in the Preferences window.

Surviving I/O Errors 

Wolf Rentzsch on how he recovered from a FireWire I/O error that left 4 KB of a 114 MB disk image unreadable.

See also: Dave Nanian on why SuperDuper gives up and reports an error when it encounters such an error, rather than skipping it and moving on.

Zen and the Art of Classified Advertising 

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, in an interview with Brian M. Carney in The Wall Street Journal: “If it’s not something that users are asking for, we don’t consider it.”