Habari DR, and some bad news,

Written in Plano, TX on March 31, 2007 and tagged with , and .

Yes I was in on the joke. Owen asked me to be the "straight man" for this little prank, and I must say it worked out quite well. Owen and Scott are both very much committed to Habari for the long hall, fear not.

Well today saw the release of the Developer Review of Habari, and the departure of two of the founders. They could have chosen a better time to leave, but to each his own I suppose. I wanted to talk about this now, before other sites like HabariWank blow it out of proportion. Read the rest »

Springtime Rituals, a Viddler episode,

Written in Plano, TX on March 25, 2007 and tagged with , , and .

So I am trying out the "Next Big Thing" in video sharing, Viddler.com

Most of you might be thinking, "Whoopty Crap, another video site." I can forgive you your lack of enthusiasm; it mirrored my own at the beginning.  But after playing around with it a bit, Viddler has some rather novel, and I tend to think, inspired features missing from other services. Read the rest »

AppleTV, some random thoughts,

Written in Plano, TX on March 21, 2007 and tagged with , and .

The Apple TV">Apple TV is now shipping, and some lucky blokes like Walt Mossberg were given demo units to play with early.  I don’t have much to say, other than as it stands now I will not be purchasing one, and here are some reasons why.

I want my DIVX!

Seriously Apple, come on.  H.264 is actually a beautiful codec; I have no complaints with the quality that you can get out of it.  What I will complain about is the footprint.  I can get the same, or better quality, from a DIVX encoded file that is sometimes half the size.  Period.

Read the rest »

Current Side Projects,

Written in Plano, TX on March 4, 2007 and tagged with , and .

Update: Do to lack of support for DVI on my ATI video card, I have had to dump Ubuntu and go back to using the MacOS. This isn’t something I am extremely happy about, but it works so I can’t complain too loudly. I will have pictures and a write up of what I needed to make everything work soon.

So I like to have side projects to occupy my time with; usually these projects are required to have nothing to do with web programming, and if I can swing it, nothing to do with Computers in general.

I like to build stuff, so I usually try to have something cooking in that arena. My current building side project is to build an altar for our home. This is a long, involved process and as such it is very much on-going.

My current short term project was/is to build a digital media center, to replace my aging EyeHome. I have an aging G4 tower lying around the house so I thought I would see how far I could push the hardware. Surprisingly I can push it pretty far.

Read the rest »

The State of the News,

Written in Plano, TX on February 14, 2007 and tagged with , and .

No, this isn”t an official communique from the wild frontier that is Habari, but it is a litle missive from yours truly about his favorite little baby.

In one word, the state of the news is vibrant.  In the weeks following my announcement on this very site, we have had hundreds of people join mailing lists, hang out in IRC and install, break and fix the product.Read the rest »