By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: December 29, 2006
Friday, 29 December 2006
- Things Seen Today at the Camden ‘Adventure’ Aquarium and the Completely Unscientific Names I Made Up for Them ★
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I like the ones of the frogs best.
- Society of Professional Journalists: Code of Ethics ★
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Not every blogger consider themself a “journalist”, but these guidelines certainly seem applicable. With regard the Microsoft/AMD/Acer/Ferrari notebook furor:
Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
(Thanks to reader Remco Greve.)
- John Siracusa: ‘Game Over, Man’ ★
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John Siracusa on .Mac and Sync Services:
Why is .Mac slow? Apple.com always loads quickly for me. I can download 5GB disk images from Apple’s developer connection web site at over 900KB/second, which is about as fast as my cable modem can go. Why is .Mac unreliable? The iTunes store gets a tremendous amount of traffic—surely much more than .Mac — and yet it remains available and responsive nearly all the time.
At this point, I’ve given up hope of discovering the answers to these questions. I no longer care why .Mac doesn’t work like it should. I’m not going to continue to plead with Apple to make .Mac better. .Mac has been around for four and a half years now. It’s enough already. I just want my applications back.
Siracusa calls for third-party developers to stop relying on Sync Services. My experience has been that the problems with Sync Services are two-fold: (1) the general performance problems of .Mac; and (2) bugs in Mac OS X’s Sync Services implementation. One of my little birdie friends tells me that Mac OS X 10.4.9 should go a long way toward fixing #2. Like Siracusa, though, I’ve pretty much given up hope on .Mac ever being a reliable high-performance network resource on par with, say, the iTunes Store.
- Apple Says Options Probe Exonerates Steve Jobs ★
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John Markoff, reporting for The New York Times:
The special committee Apple commissioned to investigate its options awards issued a statement today that was signed by two Apple board members: former vice president Al Gore, who chaired the special committee, and Jerome York, who heads the board’s Audit and Finance Committee. “The board of directors is confident that the company has corrected the problems that led to the restatement, and it has complete confidence in Steve Jobs and the senior management team,” the statement said.
Apple recorded $84 million dollars in expenses related to these option grants, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t that much money. That, plus the news regarding Jobs’s apparent lack of involvement, sent Apple stock up 5 points.
- What’s Noka Worth? ★
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Exquisitely detailed 10-part exposé on Noka Chocolate, a Texas chocolatier that sells its chocolate at an outlandish markup. (Via Andy Baio.)
- Joel on Software, an Ad-Free Site? ★
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Joel Spolsky, writing about the free Ferrari laptop saga:
For a couple of years, I accepted a donation of colocation space and facilities from Peer 1 Network, but only because they were the best colocation facility and backbone provider I could find, and only because Joel on Software is really a non-profit, advertising-free site and I was happy to accept the sponsorship.
Ad-free and non-profit, eh? I count 99 current job listings on jobs.joelonsoftware.com, which, at the listed price of $350, amounts to $35,650 in revenue in the last 21 days.
- Joey deVilla: ‘Blogger Don’t Preach (I’m Keeping the Laptop)’ ★
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Joey deVilla:
While I’ve had Vista installed on my office PC for the past couple of months, it’s been second banana to my PowerBook. For the most part, the Vista-PC combo at work has been relegated to web browsing on another screen while I’ve been using the Mac to do all the real work.
By sending me a laptop with Vista pre-installed, Microsoft has actually managed to get me interested in Vista and giving it a thorough look-see to see if “there’s really a there there.”
I’m not sure why this has erupted into such a little blog publishing world scandal. It’s certainly wrong for someone to accept one of these machines and then write about it without disclosing that it was a gift (or a review unit, or whatever you want to call it), but I don’t get why some people are so up in arms about Microsoft giving them out in the first place.
- Buggy Saints Row: The Musical ★
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Cabel Sasser takes footage of a bunch of glaring, silly-looking bugs in Saints Row (a Grand Theft Auto rip-off) and, hilariously, sets it to music.
- Scott Beale Auctioning His ‘Free’ Vista Notebook, Proceeds to EFF ★
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Winning bidder gets a Laughing Squid t-shirt and stickers, too. Most of the bloggers who received them are keeping them, unsurprisingly.