Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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Apple, where are the rentals?

Apple, where are the rentals?:

Over the past few weeks, the studio bosses have been reversing course and praising apple again.  Warner Chief, Edgar Bronfman recently got caught praising Apple’s iPhone and iPod lines.  Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball reports on  Doug Morris‘ admission that the Entertainment industry had/has no idea what they are doing technology-wise.  In fact they were so stupid that they couldn’t even know who was smart enough to hire to figure it out.  That is Calculus Integral stupid – and it seems about right. Quote:

"There’s no one in the record industry that’s a technologist," Morris explains. "That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. "We didn’t know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me."

[It’s amazing that these folks can’t even get to let’s try a whole bunch of things and see what works and what doesn’t — including Apple’s solutions. Shameful…]
Source: 9 to 5 Mac – Apple Intelligence

Google hopes to undercut coal with cheap, renewable energy

Google hopes to undercut coal with cheap, renewable energy: The company itself is also trying hard to reduce its drain on the environment. Google is working to reduce the energy expenditure of its data centers across the world, all of which need power and cooling for the servers, and plans to be carbon neutral by the end of the current year. It has also been developing an array of solar cells to power its California headquarters, the Googleplex, and is involved in an initiative to arrive at more energy-efficient computers.

Presumably, the idea behind this move is as follows: if you can’t persuade people that burning coal is a bad idea ecologically, providing them with a cheaper, cleaner alternative makes it more expensive to pollute than not, and even if shareholders don’t care about the trees, they’ll care about the bottom line. At a time when report after report highlights the growing damage done to the planet through the use of fossil fuels, this move by Google to spur renewable energy uptake ought to be applauded.

[Excellent. Git’er done! The flip side of evil.]

GDrive: Three Ways it Could be a Game Changer

GDrive: Three Ways it Could be a Game Changer: The difference between local and online storage in this case will not just be the absence of space limitations, the data will also be accessible to the nearly infinite computing power of Google. Though it’s a nontraditional use of the world, I think Henry Blodget is on to something important when he writes this morning about GDrive that “‘cloud computing’ represents a paradigm shift similar in magnitude to the one that ushered in the PC age.” Both for individual users and in anonymous aggregate, there’s magic that’s possible when our data is so accessible to unlimited processing power.[Everyone ready to Google with all of this? That’s what I thought…]
Source: Read/WriteWeb

Inject Ruby into any running OS X application

Inject Ruby into any running OS X application:

RubyInject is an intriguing new tool that can “inject” a Ruby interpreter into any running OS X application. Why? Well, along with RubyCocoa it allows you to interact with an application “from the inside.” If you’re a RubyCocoa aficionado you can probably think of a few cute tricks to use this for already. If not, then just think about AppleScript on acid. All of this fun and games does require OS X 10.5 (Leopard), however.

[Hmmm.]
Source: Ruby Inside

US A-List bloggers start to line up against Facebook?

US A-List bloggers start to line up against Facebook?: The thing about this is that these sort of guys are pretty influential – of these things are tipping points made.

Last year we predicted that 2007 would be the year that Privacy really hit the headlines, though we never believed Facebook would be the catalyst – my money was on Google or some small rapacious startup. Facebook was then a very benign player.

How things change….now, on the one hand, we have a desperate-to-monetize-at-$15bn company with (observably) less humble management, on the other a mounting storm in the blogosphere, increasing legal/regulatory interest, and early reports from customers about being caught by their friends with their wallets open being less than happy! [Hmmm.]

The next step in Digg clones

The next step in Digg clones: Imagine Digg in the old days, when there were just 25 people using it. Maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe it didn’t really get interesting until there were 100 users or 250 or 1000. It was good, the articles were gems, things we weren’t finding on our own, there were huge numbers of them, but they were prioritized, and the community had a heart of gold, people were doing it for love. The maturity level was high.
[A friend and I were discussing a very similar idea, so I’d toss the following into the fire. Create an API for the blog readers that “marks” a story as highly rated by your community. The point it to avoid having a feed of highly rated stuff, but maintain whatever org system you want and just see that this story is recommended.]

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Blasting the Myth of the Fold – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design: Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Advertisers currently want their ads above the fold, and it will be a while before that tide turns. But it’s very clear that the rest of the page can be just as valuable – perhaps more valuable – to contextual advertising. Personally, I’d want my ad to be right at the bottom of the TMZ page, forget the top.

The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it. The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page because they were so engaged with your content. Now what? Is a footer really all we can offer them? If we know we’ve got them there, why not give them something to do next? Something contextual, a natural next step in your site, or something with which to interact (such as a poll) would be welcome and, most importantly, used. [Nice report.]
Source:

Useful products for parents…

For those of us of the tech world a couple of useful items that I can’t find. Maybe there out there, in which case I hope you folks can point me to them…

1) A decent sized screen (7 – 9 inches) with a couple of speakers that I can attach to an iPod (preferably wirelessly), to play video. Please no fancy switches on the front, or other enticements for little fingers or feet. The screen should be able to display behind the front seat headrest, preferably from a nice strong bracket rather than straps of some sort. It should cost something reasonable rather than twice the cost of an iPod. Alternate uses, a portable system for displaying presentations, or catching up on various bits of, ahem, culture.

2) A small something that I can insert/stick on/into his favorite toy or whatever that sounds an alarm when that small item gets more than a few feet away from the unit in my pocket, with a distance setting. A couple of common scenarios… Kid in stroller, falling asleep, grip loosening on favorite toy. Toy falls out of stroller quietly so parents don’t notice who then frantically have to search for it later… Or on a sneaker which someone’s child loves to remove… etc. Should work on bottles and other stuff, although I understand the range issues here may prove difficult. Let’s see though, OK? Alternate uses for this include not forgetting or losing keys, wallets, phones. etc.

Lemme know?

Thanks.