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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

Friday, July 11, 2003

Sony's beautiful widescreen iBook-alike
Oh my. Oh my, my. My, my, my. I want one. And I want it now. Sadly, they are totally backordered, according to SonyStyle.

[ Posted at 6:10 PM | Permalink ]

Quake II .NET
Thanks Grant. This is frickin' awesome.

[ Posted at 1:53 PM | Permalink ]

Police of the future
Thanks Keith. And we all laughed at Robo-cop.

[ Posted at 1:52 PM | Permalink ]

Awesome Mac keystroke reference
This cool Dave's Picks article is a collection of the (poorly documented) key-sequences that do things on a Mac. Apple should be ashamed that this stuff is so hard (or in some cases, impossible) to track down.

[ Posted at 11:43 AM | Permalink ]

It's official. The iTunes Music Store is the New Crack
Someone needs to pull me away from my iMac and lock my credit card in a closet. Otherwise, I'm going to go broke. It is just too damn easy to buy music on Apple's iTunes Music Store. Too. Damn. Easy.

[ Posted at 11:41 AM | Permalink ]

MacWorld NY next week. No one notices
Contrary to this curious InfoWorld report, which is apparently a vain bid to gain readers, the days leading up to next week's MacWorld NY show have been curious devoid of rumor. Is it because the Apple world is still wallowing in its insane self-delusion following the WWDC? Or is it just that MacWorld NY is dead? I think it might be both.

[ Posted at 11:38 AM | Permalink ]

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Another reason to use Netscape 7.1
Though it's based on Mozilla 1.4, Netscape 7.1 includes a few unique features that make it worth considering. One is its support for the Windows Media Player ActiveX control; I was actually using this today, and didn't think much of it. It was only later I realized this was something unusual.
Update: Keith tells me the latest Firebird builds include the WMP control too.

[ Posted at 9:28 PM | Permalink ]

Install Firebird and Thunderbird the easy way
Mozilla.org makes it hard to find their next-generation Web (Firebird) and email (Thunderbird) clients, but they make it even harder to install them by forcing ZIP files with no Setup program on those lucky enough to find the downloads. Well, that's all changed, thanks to handy EXE-style installers for both Firebird and Thunderbird.

[ Posted at 11:35 AM | Permalink ]

Cool page for Netscape fans
I had run into this site a while back and downloaded one of his "Compact" versions of Netscape 7.x, which basically strips away all the AOL deadwood stuff, not a bad idea. But I noticed this morning, he's updated it all for 7.1, and he's got a bunch of other useful information. Worth visiting.

[ Posted at 9:11 AM | Permalink ]

Windows Media 9 Series for Mac OS X
Wondering when Windows Media 9 Series tech will show up on OS X? Think fall 2003. "We are definitely planning to support WMA 9 Voice in the upcoming release of Windows Media Player 9 Series for Mac OS X," Microsoft's Kevin Unangst wrote recently. "We showed the new player running with Apple's Safari browser at their WWWDC a few weeks back. We're shooting for fall release to web right now and we'll keep the list posted. Thanks for your patience."

[ Posted at 8:34 AM | Permalink ]

Netscape 7.1 reloaded
I should admit that, after reinstalling my system because of a hard drive failure, I've reloaded Netscape 7.1 and have been using that as my primary browser on Windows of late. Unlike previous Netscape 6.x/7.x versions, 7.1 has feature parity with the latest Mozilla version, the lack of which always bothered me before, and that includes pop-up ad blocking. So the new Netscape is actually pretty sweet, and I certainly like it's icons and throbber better than those of Mozilla or Firebird (though, to be fair, that's hardly a reason to switch). I was even able to download a Google toolbar, which is good, but not as good as the official Google one for IE. Some things I don't like: I can't add the Home button to the main toolbar, as I can in Mozilla, and there really aren't any themes available for this browser, as there are for Mozilla/Firebird.
UPDATE: The Mozilla hack that turns on the home button in the main toolbar does work with Netscape 7.x, but you have to switch themes and then switch back for the icon to display properly. Cool.

[ Posted at 8:28 AM | Permalink ]

Windows guy describes switching to Linux, gets it wrong
I love this sort of article, because they always gloss over the fine points, and make Linux seem like a far more obvious choice (this time, mostly regarding the desktop, which is odd) than it is. Take the following comment, for example: "Let me take a moment to have a heart-to-heart with anyone who thinks he cannot live without a particular application. Applications only aid tasks. Before Windows Notepad there was the physical notepad. Before the word processor, there was the typewriter, before the typwriter a pencil. The key for one looking to get out of the neverending cycle of paying for upgrades to proprietary software is to distinguish between the application and the tasks the application assists with. When you approach things from this angle, finding applications to fulfill tasks in Linux becomes tons easier." Sure. But when you "approach things from this angle," you also obfuscate the real issue, which is that companies have employees, customers, processes, and other inconvenient items that they rely on evey single day to get work done. For these businesses, "switching to Linux" isn't some random, quasi-religious goal. If OpenOffice.org Writer is just 1 percent different from Word, for example (and it's much worse than that), that represents downtime and support calls and expenses for the company that switches. Everytime they get a Word doc in from outside the company that doesn't display properly in OOo Writer, that's another expense. And so on. But that's just a simple example. Some of the other advice in this column is even more ludicrous (my favorite: The Linux equivalent of XP's Fast User Switching is "Ctrl+Alt+F1, login as new user at command-line interface, start GUI by entering command startx -- :1. Switch between screens using Ctrl+Alt+F7 or F8 depending on user." LOL), but it all makes my point: Linux just isn't a viable replacement for Windows in many situations because you can't simply swap out Windows for Linux. These articles are a waste of time. The way you get Linux into a company is through single-use servers, by demonstrating that users won't see a difference, the company will save money, and, if it's true, the resulting server will actually run better and stay up longer. No one is replacing perfectly serviceable Windows desktops with Red Hat 9 desktops, sorry.

[ Posted at 8:19 AM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

QuarkXPress 6.0 conspiracy
O'Grady's PowerPage makes a compelling argument that Apple basically paid off Quark so that the company would make its QuarkXPress 6.0 product OS X-only. It's a bet the company's going to lose, too: According to the article, 6.0 is too little, too late, and inferior to Adobe InDesign. I had a chance to check out InDesign recently, but I haven't used Quark in a long time, so I have no opinion on that. But it's pretty obvious Quark has made a devil. And I'm pretty sure he wears turtlenecks and jeans.

[ Posted at 7:17 PM | Permalink ]

iTunes originators shut their doors
After 19 years as a Mac developer, Cassidy & Greene shut their doors last week. Why is this important? C&G was the company that developed SoundJam, which became iTunes. In other words, Apple enters a tiny submarket of the tiny Mac market and ... poof. Another one bites the dust. Not cool.

[ Posted at 7:14 PM | Permalink ]

The sound of silence
I travel alot, and I've gone through a series of noise-cancelling headphones, but back in February, I bit the bullet and got a pair of $300 Bose QuietComfort headpones. They work very well, but they're big, bulky, don't fold, and include a weird box on the end of the microphone cord where you control the level of sound-deadening. In short, I wouldn't fly without them, but they're a hassle. Needless to say, Bose just released an update, the QuietComfort 2, and it answers all my problems with the original: They fold up, they eliminate the box, and they even get rid of the residual dead noise you can sometimes hear in all other noise-cancelling headphones. Sigh. Time to fork over another $300?

[ Posted at 6:48 PM | Permalink ]

With iChat, Who Needs a Phone?
Well, for starters, everyone in the world does, because no uses iChat. This Business Week Online article, sadly written by a guy I actually respect, simply propagates a common myth, that Apple innovates and invents markets, like audio and video instant messaging, despite the fact that it's actually quite late to the game. But the bigger problem is market size: To use iChat AV for video, you need Mac OS X 10.2+ with a 600 MHz or faster G3, or any G4, processor. That means the market is pretty damn small. And video chat will set you back $150 for the iSight camera (which is admittedly nice) plus $129 for Mac OS X 10.3 (Jaguar) or $30 for iChat AV. That is, the base price is $180 and it goes up from there. So iChat is a luxury item, like many Apple products, whereas Microsoft's MSN Messenger 6.0 is free and available to the 99 percent of the world. I think a better title for this article would have been, "With Windows, Who Needs a Phone?" It's sad to see Salkever turn into such a tool.

[ Posted at 12:11 PM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, July 08, 2003

Halo PC
I'm told Halo is awesome on the Xbox, but I can't get into hand controllers for first person shooters, and though I gave it a shot, I gave up quickly. However, now that Halo is coming to the PC--with major improvements, no less--I'll be first in line to try it again. In this interview with the folks doing the port, we discover that Halo PC will look much better than the Xbox version, thanks to rewritten pixel shaders and DirectX 9 support. There's a lot more, but it looks great, and I can't wait. The expected release? Late summer.

[ Posted at 10:59 PM | Permalink ]

How language stunts creativity
A fascinating article in Canada's National Post explores why certain people with brain damage are capable of great art, be it music, painting, or drawing. Very interesting, and something to look forward to when dementia sets in.

[ Posted at 10:53 PM | Permalink ]

Adobe Reader
In this excellent article, we learn that "Adobe Reader has run on an estimated 500 million personal computers and other devices. Yet, the software program does not make a cent for Bruce Chizen, chief executive of Adobe Systems Inc., which owns the program." BTW, PDF was 10 years old, if you can believe it, last month.

[ Posted at 9:00 AM | Permalink ]

Monday, July 07, 2003

Google toolbar
If there is a single reason on God's green earth to use Internet Explorer, it just might be the Google Toolbar and its Blog This! functionality. Maybe.

[ Posted at 4:45 PM | Permalink ]