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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

Saturday, July 05, 2003

New Quake III maps
Id animator Fred Nilsson this week provided Quake III Arena fans with two new maps which are, apparently, favorites at the Id offices, pro-q3tourney7 and mpteam9 (the latter of which requires the Team Arena add-on. Both are excellent, high-quality maps, worth downloading.

[ Posted at 12:10 PM | Permalink ]

Thursday, July 03, 2003

When good hard drives go bad
Thanks to a freak electrical problem which also rendered my fax machine useless, the C: drive in my newish Dell system is fried. This took 3 hours with Dell Support to figure out, however, so I guess I'm just happy it wasn't the motherboard. After installing a new hard drive and reinstalling Windows, I decided to reinsert the old drive to see if I could recover any data. No dice. On the good news side, Dell sent me a new hard drive that arrived the next morning at 9:30 am.

[ Posted at 12:44 PM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Toshiba goes widescreen
Joining Apple, Sony, eMachines, vpr Matrix, and probably others I'm not aware of, Toshiba this week is introducing a widescreen notebook, the Satellite P25-S507. However, Toshiba's box is actually one of only two 17" notebooks, the other being Apple's PowerBook G4 17-inch, which was "introduced" in January, but actually went on sale, in volume, in April, just two months ago (contrary to this article). Toshiba's monster notebook features a 1,400 x 900 screen (same as the PowerBook G4 17-inch and, not coincidentally, the iMac G4 17-inch) with GeForce FX5200 graphics, CD and DVD burning capabilities, 802.11b and 802.11a wireless networking, a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, and a 60 GB hard drive. Unlike the Apple unit, however, Toshiba's machine is priced to sell at $2100, compared to a base price of $3300 for the PowerBook G4 17-inch.

[ Posted at 1:54 PM | Permalink ]

Open source as bad/good as proprietary code
A new study comparing the relative quality of open source software with its proprietary equivalents finds the two to be of the same quality. The study found 0.53 defects per thousand lines of code for Apache compared to 0.51 for the commercial software, on average. I'm curious how they were able to make this comparison, since proprietary software code is, by nature, ... um ... proprietary. But this study doesn't really provide an accurate view of the problem, which isn't theoretical, but rather a battle between market leader Microsoft and the Linux/OSS movement. Methinks a much more detailed study--perhaps with the cooperation of Microsoft--needs to be done.

[ Posted at 11:14 AM | Permalink ]

Apple's fans continue to rewrite history
So now that Apple has added audio and video chatting to iChat (AV), Business 2.0 has apparently come to the conclusion that Apple was the first company to get this technology deployed to users. I first used video chat with NetMeeting on Windows several years ago, and I've tested various Web cams on Windows ever since, using a Logitech add-on for Windows Messenger and the new MSN Messenger 6 most recently. But hey, now that Apple's finally caught on to the possibilities, the ~7 million people using OS X are going to do what the ~700 million people using Windows could never do: put the phone companies out of business. Yawn. Think, people.

[ Posted at 11:03 AM | Permalink ]

Dan Gillmore sugarcoats Apple's lies
Apple fan and San Jose Mercury News columnist is apparently concerned that his run of evaluation hardware out of Cupertino will dry up, as he really dances around the key issues in Apple's controversial G5 benchmarks. In what is purportedly a Q & A column (one gets the feeling that Dan is writing both the questions and the answers in order to avoid answering the really hard questions), Dan mentions the "dispute" over Apple's benchmarks, but adds, "there's no doubt that these are fast machines." Regarding the debate over Apple's bogus benchmark claims, he writes, "I'm not sufficiently expert on this. But one of Apple's people made a strong defense on Slashdot the other day." Uh-huh. Actually, they didn't. But good news, Dan, your G5 eval unit is on the way, as you passed the test.

[ Posted at 10:55 AM | Permalink ]

Monday, June 30, 2003

Mozilla 1.4 goes gold
Mozilla.org has released the final version of Mozilla 1.4.

[ Posted at 5:13 PM | Permalink ]

Mitch Kapor on switching to Mozilla
Mr. Kapor notes that he's finally replaced Internet Explorer with one of the alternatives, and he's chosen Mozilla. Not a bad choice, Mitch, but if you can swing OS X, I highly recommend Safari instead. Interestingly, Kapor found the transition somewhat painful, mostly because of fit and finish issues, bookmark importing, site password rebuilding, and other obvious issues. And in a somewhat related note, I'm experimenting today too, posting this with Netscape 7.1, which was just released. It's OK.

[ Posted at 3:08 PM | Permalink ]

New Blogger version
Blogger has updated its blog management software, and it's looking pretty good. I purchased Blogger Pro a while back, and I'm glad I did, but this new version really puts it over the top. In a good news/bad news kind of thing, it also works with Safari, finally, though the experience on Safari isn't as good as it is in IE or Mozilla, because the posting page and post management stuff are on different pages in Safari, whereas you get a single screen view in other browsers. I hope they fix it, but it's better than the alternative (having to use Mac IE to post from the Mac).

[ Posted at 10:49 AM | Permalink ]

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Breaking Apple's DRM
Thanks Keith. It was only a matter of time, but people are starting to publicly discuss how Apple's DRM scheme for the iTunes Music Store works. And not coincidentally, this article points out yet another example of an Apple executive (in this case, Phil Schiller) lying to the company's customers.

[ Posted at 11:19 AM | Permalink ]