Month: October 2003

thunderbird rocks

IMAP has received a huge performance boost and is several times faster than 0.2

confirmed. this is HUGE news for me. i have 10Ks of emails on my IMAP, and the speedup over flaky wifi will be a very welcome change. i felt the speedup on the landline, even. thunderbird is quickly becoming the best email program.

hard to ignore

Weblogs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those of us who spend much time reading the Web. Also known by the inscrutable nickname “blogs”, weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that a great deal of weblog content today is about weblogs and weblog technology. What are weblogs? What’s the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows.

very cogent analysis of the blogosphere.

invisible applications

Microsoft executives demonstrated applications installing seamlessly, without any prompts or dialog boxes. Gone were the prompt boxes asking the demonstrator if he really wanted to install the application. Click once, and the application installed and launched without any user intervention.

i appreciate the vision behind this. tools should be usable just by picking them up, like in the real world. i do not buy the line that “computer users ought to know about x”. without code signing and a body that rapidly revokes certificates for spyware and the like, this will sink faster than a grindstone. though, your spyware / adware is my revenue stream..

Survival of the unfit

Remember accidents? We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes. We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.

Will we become feeble before we become bionic?

Elegance

tuned into the elegant universe by chance. great, great show, not just for finally hearing the smartest man alive speak.

Although he is definitely a physicist (as his list of publications clearly shows) his command of mathematics is rivaled by few mathematicians, and his ability to interpret physical ideas in mathematical form is quite unique. Time and again he has surprised the mathematical community by his brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical theorems.