CityBlogz Design Studio / Blog

I usually go through the better part of the morning checking out my RSS subcriptions on bloglines.com. Here’s a few stories that I found interesting:

JHymn Goes Behind Atoms and Apple To Bring DRM-Free Music
by Howard Wen describes the newest successor to Hymn that allows iTunes purchased songs to be freed from their shackles of DRM.

Microsoft worker wants to be Trump’s ‘Apprentice’
describes how TV’s Apprentice contestant Verna Felton is going for the title of Trump’s apprentice. She even has her own following at Microsoft and her own website.

Besides having a Microsoft representation in the show, Apprentice contestant Stephanie Myers works at IBM. Since, I work at IBM also (as a contractor), I was interested in seeing if I could locate her in the Intranet directory. Hmmm… looks like she still works at IBM, but her telephone number is not publicly made available. For legality reasons, I blurred out her email and building location.

One Canadian’s wireless neighborhood network could someday serve us all.

Like many of us, Andrew Greig put a WiFi access point in his house so he could share his broadband Internet connection. But like hardly any of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and telephone. He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service. Then his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having a wired broadband connection of their own. They get their service from Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his attic. Now most of Andrew’s neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth. Is this the future of home communications and entertainment? It could be, five years from now, if Andrew Greig has anything to say about it.

This blog has interesting stuff about life at Google from the inside. Google employee Mark Jen never envisioned that his blog would garner much attention. That is until everyone else on the web and Google found out about it. He was forced to revise some of his posts. Ironically, his original posts were cached by search engines. It’ll be quite interesting to see how popular his site will become. I have a funny feeling that he will be closely monitored by everyone at Google. What a way to start out on a new job, eh?

Here’s a nice site to visit if you do a lot of dynamic HTML work using CSS and JavaScript.  The page is titled “CSS Properties To JavaScript Reference Conversion“.  It is quite handy as a reference sheet to print out.  

In other news from the web blogging world, Google has setup a rather interesting initiative to help prevent comment spam on blogs. They have partnered with MSN Search and Yahoo! Search to set these standards. It basically requires that the author of the blog to add a new link attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on any hyperlinks that are created in the comments section of the blog. Google and other search engines would then ignore the hyperlink when determining search rankings. I am assuming that this has been a common technique to increase page rankings in Google for quite some time. Of course, this initiative would not solve the problem of comment spam without hyperlinks, but I think it is a step in the right direction.  

A couple of interesting news about Apple. Firstly, as reported by The Register, a new highly critical security bug has been found with version 4.7 of iTunes. A patch to version 4.7.1 is available. Unfortunately, the patch also includes Hymn countermeasures that breaks this anti-DRM utility.

Other interesting news related to Apple… According to sources, The Register reports that a Powerbook G5 will be made available Q2 2005. Of course, this is just speculation.

Steve Jobs at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco announced some interesting new products at his keynote speech. Two new hardware; the iPod Shuffle, the Mac Mini. Two new software; iWork, and newly upgraded iLife ‘05. To me, the most intriguing products are the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini.

My impression of the iPod Shuffle is that it is targeted mainly for the workout crowd. I really do not think that it was meant to compete with the flash based MP3 player market that Creative and RIO have already carved out. In fact, because the iPod Shuffle’s feature set is so miniscule compared to the offerings that Creative and RIO have, those companies actually think that Apple’s announcement will help them, and not hurt them. Let’s face it, having no UI interface on the iPod Shuffle could potentially be a real problem and not a selling point. As far as the Mac Mini, it looks like it is targeted for the low-end PC consumer that has been reluctant to purchase a  Mac because of how expensive they are compared to similarly configured Dell PC. If you compare lowend PCs with the Mac Mini, it is still cheaper to get the PC. However, none of the PC makers have the unique style and compactness of the Mac Mini. If you were to get a small form factor PC from Sony or Shuttle, you’d pay a lot more for a similar hardware configuration. Take a look at the link below. They break down my analysis even further.

Mac Mini a maxi deal? Depends what you want

Despite the initial shortcomings of the two new hardware products, it would be foolish to think that Apple is nuts. They are a brand name and marketing leader and this is all part of an even bigger plan. Here’s looking forward to another year of surprises.