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About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Coming soon: Everything Must Go

The next edition of "Everything Must Go" will be appearing here soon. --Paul

Friday, September 13, 2002

It's ... alive!
So I just installed Red Hat "Null" (which is the third beta release of what will eventually be called Red Hat 8) and... my god. This release is simply beautiful, with an artfully designed GNOME desktop and setup application that rival Windows XP, and a bunch of user interface refinements that make this a major improvement. Pop in an audio CD and the GNOME CD Player starts up (heck, the fact that audio works at all is amazing). Plug in a digital camera and... well, nothing happens. But if you run the Digital Camera Tool (gtkam) and tell it what kind of camera you have, it works! It actually freaking works. Amazing. One minus on the Fujitsu laptop I'm currently testing is that going into whatever power management is on there causes the screen to be garbled when you come out, but that's probably my fault, I'll test it on other machines. And though the system fonts are simply gorgeous, they look crappy where you really need them, in Evolution (email), Mozilla (Web browsing) and OpenOffice.org (word processing). My, my, my though. This thing is looking good.

[ Posted at 12:54 PM | Permalink ]

Thursday, September 12, 2002

Calendar interop is good stuff
So you can subscribe to calendars created with iCal using Mozilla Calendar, and vice versa (apparently, I haven't tested this yet). Unbelievable good stuff.

[ Posted at 11:21 AM | Permalink ]

Mozilla 1.2 alpha
The new version features Emacs-style type ahead find, the ability to add multiple attachments to the Attach File dialog (Windows), better keyboard accessibility, faster IMAP downloading (Mac OS X), and the usual stability and performance improvements. A beta is due in October and the final version in November.

[ Posted at 1:18 AM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

iCal - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
iCal rocks. iCal sucks. OK, it's a typical 1.0 iApp in the sense that Apple got a lot right, but muffed a lot of the details. What's good: The UI, which is gorgeous; the subscribe/publish features, which are sweet; and Apple's unbelievable Calendar Library, which I've used to subscribe to such things as US holidays, and the Boston Celtics and New England Patriots game schedules. Good stuff. But the features Apple really dropped the ball on are glaring. When a reminder window pops up for an event, there's no way, from that window, to "snooze" the alarm and have it remind you again at a later time; I use this feature all the time in Outlook and Palm Desktop. The ICS version it uses is incompatible with Outlook, which blows (and I don't care that it's Microsoft's fault; Outlook is the standard: Make it work). And here's a real basic problem: When you change your Time Zone, all your iCal appointment times change!!! Nuts. No doubt iCal 1.1 will fix a lot of these problems, but my God, what were they thinking? It's sooooo close.

[ Posted at 12:34 PM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

MPEG-4 vs. Windows Media Video 9 "Corona"
MPEG-4 sucks. Apple fans don't like to hear that. It's true.

[ Posted at 10:35 AM | Permalink ]

Chimera 0.5 official release
So the new release includes better Mac OS 10.2 compatibility, more reliable downloading, tabbed UI performance improvements, better drag and drop support for links and bookmarks, and many other changes. Chimera is still the best browser on any platform, and it's barely out of alpha.

[ Posted at 10:35 AM | Permalink ]

Apple releases iCal
I'm downloading iCal now, but I already have the feeling that this thing is going to rock. What I really need, however, is interoperability with Windows somehow, either through Mozilla Calendar or Outlook, and I suspect iCal is going to bite me in the butt in the same way that email interoperability did.

[ Posted at 10:33 AM | Permalink ]