After the sweltering heat of the past month, some rain today. Walked to the office in a very light drizzle. Felt good 
.
Monthly Archives: May 2002
Blogger Announcement Forthcoming
Ev:
We’re going to be announcing a new partnership and feature to the site this week that’s going to make a lot of Blogger users happy and drastically increase the quality of the Blogger service. Stay tuned.
Great! After all the press Userland has been getting, it’s nice to see Pyra is alive and kicking, too!
The Pillars of Creation Fading
BBC: Hubble’s ‘Pillars of Creation’ are fading. And most people don’t know that the Pillars of Creation look that good only after extensive image processing. Here’s a picture of the same region of space in infrared, taken by the Paranal Observatory at Chile. Doesn’t look quite as exciting now, does it?
Sun Announces StarOffice Pricing
CNet: Sun prices StarOffice at $76. Good. Sun’s position as a Microsoft basher was seriously compromised by a refusal to give alternatives — and Swing doesn’t count. This, on the other hand, is a good start. Microsoft ought to be celebrating — some good old fashioned (read: non-Free) competition they can finally hit back at One quote from the article though:
Gartner puts the price of switching a Microsoft Office user to StarOffice a $1,200 — costs that include factors such as retraining, lost productivity and the difficulties of translating StarOffice files to and from Microsoft formats. Sun’s Chin acknowledges there are retraining costs, but argues “it could be lower than $1,200″ and that Microsoft isn’t exempt. “Anyone on Office 95 or 97 switching to Office XP is going to have the same retraining cost,” Chin said. “Macros are different, file formats are different, the user interface is slightly different.”
Macros are different? Wow. Never realized that. File Formats? Been largely stable ever since the Office team created the Future Record Type (or whatever they call it). User Interface? Changed less than the change from StarOffice 5.2 to 6 . FUD, Chin!
Almost Ham
From the creative marketing department, this email in my inbox:
I saw your mention of the Spider-man movie in your blog (hyperlink mine, not theirs). I thought you might be interested in this story from the Seattle Times newspaper on Saturday about a Spider-man game that launched last week. There are some cool photos of the Spider-man and Hulk figurine. (URL) If you’re interested in the game, you can learn more at this site: (URL)
This would be a classic, by the book piece of responsible, well-fashioned, one-to-one direct mail that would have risen above the common herd of spam if it was not for one reason: it was not addressed to me. It was bcc’d to me. That one act destroyed any chance this mail had of making me sit up and take notice; instead, I imagined a direct marketing droid sitting up fishing for Spider-Man links in Daypop or Google, and bcc’ing them his marketing message at the end of the day. For a letter that went to such lengths to connect with the addressee, this was a very curious lapse.
$20 Commemoration of 9/11?
$20 Bill Commemoration of 9/11. Farfetched.
Exercises in Frustration
I kept typing start "E:/Apps/Editplus 2/editplus.exe" into a Windows 2000 console today and was frustrated as to why the darned thing would open up another empty console instead. Then I had the bright idea of looking at the help: START ["title"] ...blah... [command/program]. The stupid thing assumed anything in quotes would be a window title. Someone gift the author a copy of Joel’s Book, this breaks my model of how command line programs work completely. I can’t imagine what harm a command like START [command/program] [/TITLE="title"] ...blah... would have done.
Microsoft Shared Source in Asia
Microsoft Shared Source Availability by Country. Except for Japan and South Korea, the rest of Asia is conspicuous by its absence.
Linux and the Home User
Don McArthur points to Brendan O’Neill‘s Linux rant, and says that the Linux phenomenon has no real clothes. Actually, Linux was never intended to be an instrument of world domination — it was a kernel created by one person, unaffiliated to any cause, for fun. My two bits on the subject is: Linux will never become more than a power user’s tool until its fanboys shake off the `users are sheep‘ mentality so commonly seen on message boards. Like Ogilvy said, the consumer is not a moron. No one ever gained mindshare by insulting their potential userbase.
US to Monitor Overseas Students?
ZDNet: US to monitor overseas students via the Net. Rights, Schmights.