Beware of email attachments today. A new virus is on the loose.
Archive for the 'Tech' Category
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
So I was over at Wired reading this article and one of the things they talk about is Sun Microsystem’s Project Looking Glass. I watched the demo and once they got through the boring corporate speak and actually showed off the technology, it looks pretty sweet. It’s essentially a first-step towards a pseudo-3D working environment for the computer desktop. It allows you to rotate an application window in three dimensions.
This technology probably won’t actually go anywhere that the public will see it for a few years, but it’s neat to see what could come in the future.
Oooh… iPod mini. $249, five colors, one thousand songs. Not bad at all. This only serves to increase my Apple envy. (Sorry, the picture isn’t great quality, just hit Apple’s site for a better view.)
Orson Scott Card has written an article on piracy. He’s a famous author (Ender’s Game, etc.) Being a person who is affected by copyright violations, he’s got a good perspective on the issue and provides a fair analysis of the music and movie industry groups’ tactics.
Wired has an article about RSS and news aggregators.
Maniacally wired netizens who read a hundred blogs a day and just as many news sources are turning to a new breed of software, called newsreaders or aggregators, to help them manage information overload.
Many now say that their news aggregator is as indispensable as their e-mail client.
Aggregators, such as NewsGator and AmphetaDesk, allow users to subscribe to feeds from sources as diverse as the BBC, Sci-Fi Today, Slashdot and thousands of bloggers across the world. The services work by checking an Internet address at a regular interval, usually once an hour, to see if new content has been added.
I don’t read 200 blogs and 200 news sources a day. At some point, I believe our culture has an information fetish which is unhealthy. And many news sources suck. Finding a few entertaining and informative feeds is enough, and this is one way I keep up on hobbies such as web site design and development. Many prominent bloggers and designers run feeds which I keep track of to know when they have new content.
SharpReader runs on Microsoft’s .NET framework and is the aggregator I prefer to use since it’s interface is similar to that of an email program with three panes and allows you to group feeds into categories.
I have full post and excerpts RSS 2.0 feeds and a full post RSS 1.0 feed.
I hope this article and some of these links help you get started with RSS and news aggregators. Unless of course you’re not interested, but you’re simply glad to understand 2 phrases more that I utter on ocassion (pokes Cora).
Update: I’ve got my regular post feed and a comments feed (both of which redirect to Feedburner).