I have been experiencing some odd behavior with my network performance. Mostly issues associated with HTTP requests hanging. I have not solved the issue yet, but I do have a few tools that come in handy for figuring out if your ISP is up to no good.
The first is Glasnost from the Max Planck Institute. The java applet will check for packet shaping antics as well as throttling from your ISP.
Today I found myself in need of a lightweight ERD tool. I was planning a small relational database and I was on a windows machine. I didn't want a heavy-handed tool like Visio or DBArtisan so I did some Google-foo and found WWW SQL Designer. It's a javascript based web app for making small ERD's. Check out this awesome live demo. It's easy and the results look nice enough. You can also save the entire design as XML and take it with you.
I'm sure most Netflix subscribers have now received the email from Netflix announcing their name change. Well, they are actually keeping "Netflix" for their streaming service and naming their DVD service "Qwikster". These kind of moves always strike me as a bit strange. I'm not sure the name is ever the root problem. In this case, I think the name change adds to the confusion. The average Netflix user that I know (meaning non-tech nerd) see streaming as an extension of the DVD service.
Amazon recently sent me an email describing some new features of their S3 service. They include:
Folder Upload Find Objects by Quick Search Broader Access (use the Amazon S3 Console on platforms that don’t support Adobe Flash) Amazon S3 is still a bit too geeky for most people but these new features sure seem to target mainstream users. I honestly do not think Apple's iCloud will replace Dropbox. Neither, do I think it is designed to function like Dropbox.
Sometimes the Internet feels like a bunch of self-righteous babies full of nothing but opinnions. But "we" shouldn't forget that it's also a bunch of awesome people that make interesting things. Wonderful, meticulous, powerful things. So when you're burnt-out with the firehouse of tech blogging and hyperbole find some time to clean-up your RSS feeds. I just swapped a whole lot of junk "news" for some content from people that actually make things.
I don’t want to add to the echo chamber of Apple blogs so just go read Horace Dediu at Asymco. That’s one smart man:
Consider how HP and Apple faced the changes in the PC market almost exactly a decade ago. On September 3, 2001, HP announced that they would acquire Compaq. On October 23, 2001, Apple announced the iPod. The rest, as they say, is history.
I love me some NVAlt and Simplenote. However, I’m stuck in Windows at work and do not have the pleasure of using Dropbox on Windows. There is a decent enough Simplenote client for windows but development seems to have ceased and it is not feature complete.
So I recently started using the Simplenote webapp for my notes on Windows and it is a great experience. It’s closer to an NVAlt experience on Windows than any other native application I have tried.
If you have not made the rounds over at StackExchange then you are going to kick yourself when you finally do. It’s so crammed full of gems that it’s hard to walk away without learning something new.
Here’s a list of people’s favorite gestures for Lion. Or how about auto-mounting volumes at login? Here are general questions about keyboard shortcuts on Mac OS X and some info about Mission Control usage.
Big THANK-YOU to David Sparks over at MacSparky for taking an interest in my home screen. I've been following the Home Screen series on MacSparky since it first began and it's kind of baffling that somehow I ended up as part of it. It's a great series through and through and David is a super nice guy.
Here are two contrasting posts from the "In the Pipeline" site. One epitomizes what's wrong with a little knowledge and taking the easy path to a conclusion. The other demonstrates the extraordinary accomplishments possible to those that take the difficult path.
