By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: April 12, 2007
Thursday, 12 April 2007
- Brent Simmons: ‘Relax, It’s Gonna Be Okay’ ★
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Brent’s is the best take so far on Apple’s announcement that Leopard isn’t shipping until October:
Not all the comments are as silly—but still, I have to wonder about people who proclaim, even hyperbolically, that it’s making them cry. Developers doing a Leopard-only release—I can understand their being upset, because it means they can’t ship until October. But other folks? Tears? Really? 10.4 is such a burden to use, we can barely stand it?
- Macworld Podcast: EMI, iPods, and Google Desktop ★
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Attention podcast fans: I’m on the latest Macworld Podcast, talking to MacUser’s Dan Moren about Google Desktop for 20 minutes or so.
- More on DivX ★
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Joe Bezdek, co-founder of DivX Inc., comments on Brian Tiemann’s weblog entry regarding MPEG-4 vs. DivX:
In the comments, tf writes “It is well known that DivX is a massive violation of mpeg patents.” If this is “well known,” then it’s another example of inaccurate conventional wisdom about DivX. In fact, we (DivX, Inc.) are a licensee of MPEGLA, have been for many years, and pay all MPEG-4 licensing fees in full. (This, by the way, is more than can be said for other MPEG-4 implementations such as Xvid.)
- This Is the Sound of Me Hyperventilating ★
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Gus Mueller, whose upcoming FlySketch 2 is going to be 10.5-only, reacts to the new October ship date for Leopard.
Update: Good news. Gus’s reaction has been downgraded to “Meh”.
- Apple Announces Leopard Won’t Ship Until October ★
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Apple just issued a press release reiterating that iPhone is still on schedule to ship in June, but that Mac OS X 10.5 is being pushed back to October:
However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.
This is bad news, but I, and most developers I know, have been expecting it, based on the very buggy nature of the current 10.5 seeds. Apple’s choice was to either push back the release a few months or ship a very, very buggy 10.5.0.
The big question now is whether there are actually any “secret features”, as promised at last year’s WWDC. If so, presumably, we’ll see them at this year’s WWDC keynote.
- Language Log: The Dan Brown Code ★
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Geoffrey K. Pullum:
Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives.
- Lifehacker: ‘Instant, No-Overhead Blog With Tumblr’ ★
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Gina Trapani reviews Tumblr, which looks like a great service for casual blogging.
- David Heinemeier Hansson on Twitter’s Scaling ★
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In response to Alex Payne’s comments on the scaling issues the Twitter team is running into:
Scaling is the act of removing bottlenecks. When you remove one bottleneck (like application code execution), you tend to reveal another (like database queries). That’s natural and means you’re making progress. But you have to keep your marbles straight when doing this.
- The Other Times ★
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Khoi Vinh on The Times of London’s recent web site redesign (previously mentioned here.)
- Brief Interview With Chevy Chase in Time ★
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Chevy Chase, on his favorite of the movies he’s appeared in:
It is a very difficult question, but I think the answer has to be Fletch, because it allowed me to be myself. Fletch was the first one with me really winging it. Even though there was a script, the director allowed me to just go, and in many ways, I was directing the comedy.
It really is all ball bearings nowadays.
- Update to Dan Benjamin’s Ruby/Rails/Subversion/Mongrel/MySQL Build Instructions for Mac OS X ★
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I’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth linking again because it’s such a tremendous resource for anyone using these things on Mac OS X. Even if you’re not developing with Rails, for example, Dan’s instructions are the best way I know to install Subversion and the latest version of Ruby on Mac OS X.
- 1992 Playboy Interview With Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller ★
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Kurt Vonnegut:
Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, “Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?” That’s how to pick a wife.
(Via Jim Coudal.)
- New ‘Get a Mac’ Commercials ★
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“Computer Cart” is pretty funny.
- Good Article on Music Formats in The Guardian ★
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Jack Schofield explains the differences between MP3, AAC, and WMA in The Guardian, and does a good job of it.
- 5 Question Interview With Twitter Developer Alex Payne ★
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Interesting interview by Josh Kenzer of Twitter developer Alex Payne. On scaling:
None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
On adding additional hardware:
We’re hosted at Joyent, and they make the “throw more CPUs at it” approach easy. We’ve been able to get new server containers provisioned within hours, generally.
(Via Simon Willison.)