The front page of CNN.com often seems to be as hilarious and absurd as the front page of The Onion. My friend Dan James point today’s particularly notable list of “top stories” (see the full screenshot):
God, Satan, on CNN
Author: Steven Garrity
Six Degrees of Zap
Our Zap Your PRAM conference is coming up next weekend and it’s really starting to come together. We’ve got a great lineup of participants, a great venue, and good eats.
I got an email this morning from Peter Rukavina, one of our Zap organizers, who is on the road to New York today. Apparently weblogger extraordinaire, Dave Winer is going to be on PEI for another conference (flash site) that week.
As it turns out Dave, who’s living in Boston, knows two of our participants, Buzz Bruggeman from Florida and Sebastien Paquet from Moncton, New Brunswick. All three will be on PEI next weekend.
It’s a small world.
Does 1.0 Matter Anymore?
More and more of the software I’ve been using lately has been open source. With this shift comes a different approach to releasing updates and to version numbering. Following the “release early, release often” mantra canonized by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, many major open source projects like Mozilla release “nightly builds” throughout the development process.
The practice isn’t unique to open source. While they don’t release them, Microsoft does nightly builds of developing versions of Windows. The developers of the closed-source RSS reader I use on Windows, NewzCrawler, have be releasing frequent “beta builds” publicly.
I remember an old article in Windows Magazine (I think it was by Fred Langa) that worried that delivery of software over the internet rather than on physical media would lead to “dribble-ware” – software that was let out the door before it was ready, only to be patched after the fact (sound familiar?).
With all of these changes, I’m beginning to wonder if major version numbers are loosing their significance. Three applications that I am relying heavily on these days are all significantly pre-1.0 (Mozilla Firebird – 0.6, Mozilla Thunderbird – 0.2, and Gaim – 0.7). Having been released frequently for months (years) already, I doubt that these applications are any less complete or stable than most “1.0” software.
Hurricane Juan Photos
Photos of Hurricane Juan from last night here in Charlottetown:
- My Own Photos
- Stephen DesRoches’ Photos
- Andrea Vail’s Photos
- Chris Wilkinson’s Photos
- Isaac Grant’s Photos
- Mike Gauthier’s Photos
I’ll update this post if I find more.
Update: The list at newrecruit.org is more up-to-date than mine.
Weblogging the P.E.I. Election
Friends of Acts of Volition and speakers at the Zap Your PRAM Conference Robert Patterson and Will Pate have been running the Election Watch weblog to blog the Prince Edward Island provincial election.
They’ve done a fine job. I was hoping to participate myself, but it didn’t pan out (too much else going on). CBC PEI has an in-depth RealVideo piece on Robert and Will’s Election (6min 44sec – RealVideo).
They even have Premier Pat Binns on camera explaining why he doesn’t post to his weblog himself. CBC did a good job of covering the convergence the weblog and politics. It’s not an easy thing for the traditional media to cover. Well done to Nancy Russell and all of CBC PEI.
Luna Blue Theme for Mozilla Thunderbird – Development Version
I’ve put together a version of Chris Cook’s Luna Blue Firebird theme for Mozilla Thunderbird, the new Mozilla email client application.
We’ve borrowed heavily from Chris’ Firebird themes, so he deserves much of the credit.
This is a rough first version of the theme. There are many elements that are either missing or broken. We have most of the icons completed, but we still haven’t done the newsgroup icons. Also, since I don’t have much experience working with Mozilla themes, there are some elements we haven’t been able to figure out yet.
Since I haven’t found a version of Thunderbird with the DOM Inspector (and I’m too incompetent to build it myself), there are some elements I could use some help on. See this diagram of what I haven’t figured out yet, and let me know if you are able to help.
Feedback, suggestions, constructive criticism, and help are all welcome.
UPDATE: A new version of this theme has been released. See
Luna Blue Theme (v0.2) for Mozilla Thunderbird Update for details.
Download/Install Luna Blue for Mozilla Thunderbird – Development Version
lunabluethunderbird.jar – 477Kb RAR File
Screenshots:
Long-time readers (if they exist) might remember me criticizing the concept of themes and skins (see these two old posts Thoughts on Winamp3 and A discussion of ‘skins’ strangly free of sexual innuendo). You can read about my partial change of heart here: XUL: How I learned to love non-native GUIs.
Update on the Zap Your PRAM Conference
Planning for our Zap Your PRAM conference is coming along well. We have a great line-up of speakers. We’ve posted a tentative schedule including most of the speakers and some of their topics. Keep an eye on the conference weblog for updates.
We still have room for more, so let us know if you are interested.
Vacation Beta 0.9
Since my day-to-day life is already quite a bit like what most people would consider a vacation, taking an actual vacation isn’t something I do very often. This year, I decided to take a week, pack up some book, and take to my parent’s cottage in Stanhope, Prince Edward Island.
My parents built this cottage with my grandparents back in the early 1970s. I spent most of my summers here as a child. As a teenager, I came to associate the cottage with boredom and a lack of television channels (ironically, now the cottage here has way more channels that I have at home). Now, it’s exactly what I need.
Only on Prince Edward Island would someone take a vacation at a cottage that is only a fifteen minute drive from their home. However, it’s not so much the location that I was looking for (as beautiful as it is), and the fact that it was somewhere else. I needed a break in routine and a change of scenery (both literally and figuratively).
I’m pleased to report that I actually feel like I’m on vacation. I was a little concerned that I’d get bored after a few hours and just go back to work. That won’t be a problem.
A few observations from living on a dial-up connection for a few days:
- It works — I can do most everything I need on a dialup.
- If something is slow, you don’t bother — I’ve dropped heavy sites from my regular visit list (News.com was going to be dropped, but they conveniently redesigned with CSS during my vacation).
- Tabbed browsing is a mixed blessing on a dialup. On one hand, it’s a bandwidth killer — I often open a group of 10 or more weblogs in tabs — that really swamps a dialup. On the other hand, you can open 10 sites in tabs, get a cup of tea, and do all of your waiting/downloading at once.
- Spam goes from being a small annoyance on a fast connection with good filtering to being a major pain in the ass on a dialup, where you have to download all the spam before filtering (on the bright side, we’ll soon be able to handle spam on the server side).
I’m only half-way through, but I’ve already got a load of vacation photos up in my gallery. The one advantage of tourists feading the foxes in the National Park is that the foxes will walk right up to your car (bad for foxes, good for photos).
Oh, and if you would like to rent my parent’s cottage next summer, let them know.
Zap Your PRAM Conference Weblog
The Zap Your PRAM Conference previously discussed now has a weblog of its own.
Come Zap Your PRAM on P.E.I.
We (we being myself, Dan James of CEOBlues.com, Daniel Burka of silverorange, and Peter Rukavina of Reinvented) are organizing the first ever Zap Your PRAM Conference in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, Canada – October 24-26, 2003.
The idea is get a small group (max of 40) of interesting people together to share ideas and talk about what interests us (weblogs, technology, design, etc.). We have some really interesting people on board so far including Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords fame.
What the hell does “Zap Your PRAM” mean? Read all about it.
Attendance is by invitation, but if you are interested, then chances are you are also interesting — so drop me a line and request an invitation (steven@actsofvolition.com).
All of the details of the conference can be found at ZapYourPRAM.org.