By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: January 9, 2008
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
- Idle Hands ★
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Clever idea from Paul Kim:
I recently submitted a patch for Sparkle+ to deal with a similar situation. It can be annoying to get an alert about a new version when you are working. A new version is not a “drop everything and deal with this now” type of alert. With this patch, when a new update is found, it will check the user’s idle time and hold off showing the panel until a certain amount of time has elapsed. This minimizes the chance of the user being in the middle of something when the alert comes up.
- Apple to Lower Prices of U.K. iTunes Tracks ★
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Apple:
Apple today announced that within six months it will lower the prices it charges for music on its UK iTunes Store to match the already standardized pricing on iTunes across Europe […]. Apple currently must pay some record labels more to distribute their music in the UK than it pays them to distribute the same music elsewhere in Europe. Apple will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months.
This is about compliance with European regulations.
- Paramount’s Commitment to HD DVD ★
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Bloomberg:
Paramount Pictures denied a newspaper report that the studio is poised to follow Time Warner Inc. in abandoning Toshiba Corp.’s HD DVD technology.
“Paramount’s current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format,” Brenda Ciccone, a spokeswoman for Paramount, said in an email today.
Where by “current”, I suspect she means “however long it takes to sell our current stock of HD DVD titles and shift production to Blu-ray”.
- Network Solutions Squats on Available Domains Looked Up Via Their Whois Server ★
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Yet another chapter in the ever-popular saga, Network Solutions: Shitbags Extraordinaire.
- Voodoo ★
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MacJournals on MacFixIt:
No one, except maybe [Artie MacStrawman], argued that you should never repair disk permissions. If you’re having trouble, especially if you suspect it’s permissions related, you should by all means repair permissions and see if that fixes the problem. You just shouldn’t imagine that performing this task at other times is doing you any good, because it’s not.
- David Watanabe on Inquisitor’s Affiliate Ads ★
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I’ve gotten a slew of emails asking for my thoughts on this report (which got picked up at TUAW) regarding the way David Watanabe’s freeware Inquisitor input manager hack for Safari inserts Amazon and Apple Store affiliate ads in its search results for certain terms. Watanabe has responded on his weblog, and I largely agree with him. It’d be better if Inquisitor’s affiliate link results were visually tagged as such in the result list, but I don’t think there’s anything scandalous about it.
- The Vanishing Numeric Keypad ★
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David Pogue reports that new MacBooks are shipping with keyboards without the embedded number pad:
I asked my PR contact at Apple, and she confirmed that it’s true: the embedded number pad was eliminated to make the MacBook more closely resemble the aluminum Apple keyboards, even though the MacBooks manufactured up until now had one.
- Sure, Everyone Loves IE ★
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Michael Calore speculating on the possibility of browsers other than MobileSafari once the iPhone SDK ships:
Safari is a great browser and all, but many are itching to see other browsers like Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer (don’t scoff, there are plenty of reasons) running on their Apple gadgets.
Firefox (or at least something Gecko-based)? Sure. Opera? Maybe. But IE? “Many”? I’d say the number of iPhone users who wish there were a version of IE for it is zero.
Update: A couple of emails from readers who say they’d want this, as they need to access web sites that only work in IE. Back when Mac IE was the default and dominant Mac web browser, most IE-only web sites only worked in Windows IE, because they depended on Windows-only Active X stuff. So, sure, if by “iPhone version of IE” you mean “iPhone version of IE that somehow works with web sites that depend on Windows-only components”, sure some people want that. Isn’t going to happen, though.
- Brand New: ‘Xerox, The Very, Very, Very Shiny Company’ ★
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Armin Vit: “Why is that marble not rotating? Or exploding? Or building out of thin air?”
- Rails : Shared Hosting :: Oil : Water ★
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Dallas at Dreamhost:
The feeling I get from the Rails community is that Rails is being pushed as some sort of high-end application system and that makes it OK to ignore the vast majority of user web environments. You simply cannot ignore the shared hosting users. In my opinion, the one thing the PHP people did that got them to where they are today is to embrace shared hosting and work hard to make their software work well within it.
It’s certainly the case that Ruby on Rails simply is not suited for use in a shared hosting environment. The basic gist of Rails is that it’s easy and convenient from a programming perspective, but very difficult from a hosting perspective. It’s easy to say “The Rails team should make it easier to host”, but it’s sort of the nature of the beast, and I’ve never seen a good recommendation for specifically how they could do so.
- ClearType Rendering Forthcoming for Safari on Windows? ★
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Good news for Windows users who don’t like that Safari for Windows uses Mac OS X-style anti-aliasing. (Via Grant Hutchinson.)
- Three Students Stabbed, Pa. School Evacuated ★
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Surreal; this was my high school, and a bunch of people in my family work there now.
- Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire 3.1’s Release as Freeware ★
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NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons:
But I will say that, for me personally, this is a dream come true. Every developer wants to be able to work on the software they love, make a living at it, and give it to the world for free.
Usually you get to pick two out of three — if you’re lucky. Me, I get all three.
- NewsGator Releases NetNewsWire and FeedDemon as Freeware ★
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Wow:
NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services.