I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Just got home with it. 9 discs. Cost-per-disc works out cheaper than most games. Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign/GoLive/Acrobat 8 (read that
twice, free upgrade goodness!)/Dreamweaver plus two resource discs (lots of fonty goodness and some templates I’ll probably never use), a video training thing, and a partridge in a pear tree.
The box is nearly big enough to fit a partridge (whatever that is) in, too.
Steve Jobs writes some thoughts on the state of digital music which cause me to smile quite a lot. Maybe it’s time to download iTunes afterall.
Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free.  For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.  The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company.  EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
3fl run a great file mirror service for PIPE-connected ISPs in a variety of Australian states, but they still have .torrent files in their mirror. Just for kicks I tried it out… predictably (well, predictable based on my past experience of P2P) it maxed out at a bit under 200KB/s, which, uhh, sucks.
I went back to the mirror and started downloading from it directly, and all of a sudden my 1 hour long download became a six-minute special. I’m holding a shiny Ubuntu CD here in my hand that would still be downloading thanks to the brilliance that isn’t torrent-style P2P downloads.
I think I’ve had one or two lightning-fast P2P experiences in my life, but, really, they just don’t seem to be able to compete with a maxed out link on a good FTP server!
First time I’ve managed to do that and it was something really simple. I was dragging a bezier handle too far away from a keyframe and the component that was drawing the curve crashed… wasn’t even anything complicated! Goes to show that no matter how complex an app’s task is, it can still crash on (relatively) simple errands. I found it interesting. Probably you won’t :P
Going away to Orient Point again for a few days. Catching a train in about 45 minutes. Spent the morning hacking WordPress into submission without SSH or FTP access on the Matthias website. It looks ugly as anything but its butt got kicked so hard and it’s now behaving lots better. Design will come later (it should always come first, in hand with IA and usability). Still we’re working towards something useful for the not-too-distant future — it’s nothing spectacular, but it does do plenty the old site didn’t, and giving people a content management tool is a great thing in terms of culture-changing how people think about what a website is and ensuring it stays up to date.