Category: internet

“For all the rhetorical flourish on display, many of the presidential candidates still don’t have a grip on the King’s English. That great American personal pronoun, the first person singular, which adorns nearly every sentence of candidate discourse, is still too slippery for many of this year’s White House aspirants.” – from the WSJ.

I’m quite happy to see Gmail providing IMAP access now. It hasn’t shown up on my account yet, but it sounds like they should have it rolled out to everybody pretty soon.

Since I talked about the NY Times site going 100% free yesterday, I thought I’d post a bit on the possibility of the WSJ going free. This article indicates that Murdoch is interested in making the site free, rather than sticking with the current $99/year fee-based model. If nothing else, this possibility will probably keep me from renewing my WSJ subscription early! (With my luck, if they do make the site free, they’ll do it two days after I renew.)

The NY Times has stopped charging for access to select articles on their web site. The whole thing, from 1987 to the present, should be free now. Yay! I never saw much point to their TimesSelect service; from my perspective, it seemed like they were charging for the stuff I was least interested in anyway.

Meanwhile, The WSJ still costs a bunch. I’m not sure if I’ll renew my print & online subscription next year. Maybe I’ll drop it and try and catch up with some alternative reading material instead.

For some reason, I was thinking today about an article I read some time ago, about a series of pocasts on some area of history. After a bunch of searching, I think this was the article. It’s about a podcast on the history of the Byzantine Empire. This series has been mentioned in a few different places, so the Times article may or may not be where I heard of it. Either way, it’s something different to listen to, whenever I get tired of tech and comic book podcasts.

I was looking around a bit today at the stuff on iTunesU, and some of that might be interesting too. I listened to parts of a few random lectures; most of them sound like… college lectures. I suppose that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not compelling “daily commute” listening. I’m tempted to listen to this Data Structures course from Berkeley, just to refresh my memory on this stuff. Maybe I can find a class on design patterns. I’m too old to have learned that stuff in college; design patterns didn’t really take off until about five years after I graduated. (Gotta keep learnin’!)

I like Pat Oliphant’s reaction to the idea of Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal. Scary.

I think my brother Pat would have loved the absurdity of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Attack in Boston. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here.) He was a big ATHF fan.

It’s been a while since I posted anything about online bookmark managers. I’d pretty much settled on posting bookmarks to Spurl, then letting Spurl post them to del.icio.us. This was working great for a while, but the del.icio.us integration in Spurl stopped working a week or two ago. A few people have posted about it in the forums, but nobody from Spurl has said anything about fixing it.
To get around having to either post everything twice, or give up either Spurl or del.icio.us, I’ve been looking for another way to post to them both at the same time. I found a site called OnlyWire. It looked legit, but I was initially wary of giving them the passwords to my Spurl and del.icio.us accounts. I gave it a shot, and it works OK. However, it turns out that their terms of service allow them to post sponsor links under your IDs. They say that they’ll only do that once, but that’s enough to make me want to avoid doing business with them. If you look at the “Hot Spurls” and “Just In” lists on the Spurl homepage, it looks like this service (and possibly others like it) have already polluted the bookmark pool, so to speak, to the extent that useful bookmarks are being pushed down the list in favor of sponsored links.
I’m starting to think now that maybe I can do something with Greasemonkey. I haven’t really looked into creating Greasemonkey scripts, though, so I’ll need to do some research first.

I’ve been hosting this blog on a free “preview” account from 1&1. The deal was for a free account for three years, and those three years are just about up. I just switched over to a $4 per month paid account with the same feature set as the free account. They have a bunch of other options for paid accounts, but, strangely, they don’t match up with the preview account in a logical way. Both their cheaper and more expensive accounts allow more disk space and have a higher monthly transfer allowance, but only the most expensive option allows cron jobs, for instance. Kind of weird, but I haven’t blown the limits on the preview account, so I guess I should be good just continuing it.