October 19, 2003 
TypePad
This blog (and the rest of the trevor.smith.name site) is in the process of moving over to TypePad. Eventually I'll point the trevor.smith.name domain over there, but in the mean time you should check over there for new posts.
I'm shifting over to a combination of TypePad, eApps, a home server, and my .Mac account to handle my mélange of online needs.
Panther
I don't think I'm breaking NDA when I mention that I'm running Panther and it's a big relief that they've updated Quicktime for Java to work on J2SE 1.4.1. This really helps my current project, as I need to use QT renderers and 1.4.1 APIs for full screen apps and preferences.
I'm also happy to see that DBG's journaling file system is the default in a clean installation. Now if only Tim, Pavel, Sakoman, and DBG (all ex-Be'ers now at Apple) would get it together and bring metadata to the file system and Finder, we would be living in the fricking future.
October 14, 2003
If you could just do that... that would be great.
Someone working on Mail.app should completely disable the popup dialogs which interrupt whatever I'm doing every time a mail server is unreachable. The app already disables the mailbox widgets, so why the bouncing icon and the modal dialog?
Laptops go on and off the net constantly. Please stop alerting me to an event which is in no way alarming.
October 13, 2003
Café computing
I'm in a Manhattan café, Cosí, working on a short story exploration of some ideas that I think I might work on for NaNoWriMo. While I'm sure that there are free wireless cafés around these parts, it was worth a few bucks to find and use a Surf and Sip location rather than to hunt around. My friends here aren't big computer users, or I would ask them. Suggestions are welcome.
October 10, 2003
Reactionary
While watching Udell's BloggerCon aggregators session he mentions that he doesn't use NewsGator because within the email context he's responsible for responding to incoming information and he doesn't want to feel that way when browsing RSS feeds.
This relates to my previously mentioned post slowdown due to my very focused daily feeding sessions, during which I'm also not very responsive.
I wonder if a tool working over a large dynamic aggregation of RSS feeds could tease out actions communities would support. Could aggregators sort sets of action oriented assertions by frequency aor reference. For example, could Technorati have deduced that the most popular blogs suggest voting against the recent California recall?
October 07, 2003
Now I've done it
I woke up yesterday with a sore lower back, so I've been walking around like "Old Man Smitty", bent over with my hand on my back and leaning on things. I hope that I'm better in time for our trip to NY.
October 06, 2003
October 05, 2003
What's in my dock
Finder, Safari, Mail, iChat AV, iTunes, CodeGuide, AddressBook, TextEdit, Elements, Terminal, Snak, Preview
Behind the dock is a portion of a satellite image of my neighborhood, courtesy of the USGS.
October 01, 2003
Mailbucket
Mailbucket is the opposite of TopFeeder. Instead of taking RSS and turning it into email, it takes email and turns it into RSS. Very nice.
Browsing and feeding
My rate of posting to this blog has decreased since I started receiving my RSS feeds in a TopFeeder daily email. My theory is that this is a result of treating my news gathering as a single daily task instead of a series of gap filling browsing sessions. While I used to pack 15 minute browse/post sessions between tasks like walking the dog and starting my commute, now I read all of the posts in my TopFeeder daily update in an (action-packed) 30 minutes and I rarely break that flow to feed information back into the noosphere.
Switching from browsing to feeding has made my news gathering more time efficient, but it has increased the startup costs of individual blog posts because it requires interruption of the larger session or some other task.
An alternative theory is that I'm cowed by the realization that there are so many active blogs out there. This realization has come to me partly through the act of building a massive RSS aggregator (10k+ feeds) and search engine, from which I find a deluge of commentary about most of the topics on which I would post.