Fifty years to the day. Canada wins gold in men's olympic hockey beating the U.S.A. 5-3. Just for the record the goals were Paul Kariya (Chris Pronger, Mario Lemieux), Jarome Iginla (Joe Sakic, Simon Gagne), Joe Sakic (Ed Jovanovski, Rob Blake), Jarome Iginla (Steve Yzerman, Joe Sakic), Joe Sakic (Jarome Iginla).
There are thousands of Canadians partying on the street tonight. Car horns are still going outside my window with Canadian flags flying proudly.
Well it's my birthday today. A little self promotion never hurts. :-) 27 years old. My father was the first to start in the "approaching 30" jokes.
It's been a while since I've posted, but this is news! Belarus beat Sweden 4-3 in the quarter final in the last few minutes with a bizarre goal scored after Vladimir Kopat popped a shot from between the red and blue line off Tommy Salo's mask. The puck bounced over Salo's head and trickled into the goal. Belarus battled in the last two minutes to keep Sweden from evening it up and that was all she wrote. Sweden's out of the tournament and we wait for Canada to face off against Finland tonight.
Evan pointed out that 3G appears to be something that 3G proponents want and not consumers. "For what? Not video conferencing, but to watch stuff that his "creative people" would be creating. That's just what "consumers" want, right? To watch a movie on their 3" phone screen with its bitchin' sound system."
I can't even get a decent video conference going with NetMeeting through a NAT at either end without playing with various gateway settings at either end. I thought H.323 was supposed to make this stuff an easy to use standard? We still have a long way to go.
Evan made another good point that I've been pondering as well. By the time 3G actually does arrive, we may have enough 802.11 coverage to make it obsolete. The problem as I see it is that 802.11 doesn't operate like a cell. If I were to move from one transmitter to another the connection would have to be reset as my IP and routing information would all change. So 3G has some advantages still.
Joel spends a lot of explaining why you should never do a complete re-write of your code. In his latest posting Joel gives an example of code cleaning as the viable alternative.
This gets me motivated to clean some code of my own!
I found this new program demoed at Web Review called Mix-FX. It's great for creating simple off the shelf Flash animations.
Apple does it again. Steve Job's Macworld 2002 Keynote shows off Apple's new suite of iTools and the new iMac. For the first time I perked up at an Apple computer and might seriously consider it for at least friends, and perhaps myself in the future. Rare. Apple has a great marketing machine. They make you really feel good about buying their products. Many of my associates scoff at Macs like I do, but the iMac is really geared for real people, doing real things. Something for people looking to improve on computing. Linux developers listening?
Joel Spolsky's article Fire and Motion lets me know that I'm normal. Well, normal for a programmer anyway. Joel lets us in on a little secrect that we all hide. In a normal day most programmers don't program that much. Oddly enough, this article was motivating.
Google comes up with a great report at the end of the year called the Year-End Google Zeitgeist. It's a great collection of top queries and query declines on Google's search engine over the past year. There's also a timeline with notable events.
New Spider-Man trailer. Lots of CGI in this movie. Looks great.
Several bloggers have been referencing Microsoft's new Digital rights management operating system patent. This patent describe digital rights management baked into the operating system allowing only trusted apps to control media. This means that in future versions of Windows only "trusted apps" or applications certified by Microsoft can handle rights-managed data.
I really need to make a push towards using Linux in a desktop environment unless I'm going to follow the rest of the crowd and simply use whatever MS throws in front of me. I still use Windows as the following applications have me tethered to Windows; Photoshop, Illustrator, SoundForge. There are a few others but I can live without them. I hate having to make choices based on principal rather than technical merrit but hey, I don't always like to follow the crowd.
Dan Gillmour put it best recently. Most people are sheep, it turns out. They take what's put in front of them. Amen brother!
Linux is still not a viable alternative for the Windows consumer. Lots of work must be done before Linux is even remotely usable as Windows. That's an entire rant of it's own - stay tuned.
Well, thanks to Drea at Eyespy Graphics, the North 49 Design site looks much better and has a more focused set of services listed. I'll have to find some time to flush out the marketing mumbo gumbo soon. As well, I'll be putting up a demo section soon to show off some new technologies I've been working on for the past few months.
I just added my web page to Blogdex. More and more, I'm seeing specialized search engines and indexes appearing online. When Google results are too much, seek out something more specialized.
I feel better about building SonicBoomerang as I notice this more and more.
Once again, Dave Winer has provided me with an awesome link. Google has just released their 20 Year Usenet Archive. For those who love Internet history, they have highlighted some great moments from the first posting about AIDs to Linus Torvald's announcement of Linux. Enjoy!
Wired has an article on Google's groups as well. Another fun thing to try if you ever posted is to perform a search on your name. I've found multiple posts regarding questions on databases, viruses, server side programming, photoshop and weightlifting that I posed, comments on HTML copywright, answers to HTML formatting, CGI scripts, Windows 3.1 Winsock (ouch!) and falling victim to a chain thread in the early days. The list goes on and on! I had no idea I posted to USENET so much. By searching for "Michael Glenn" uwo , I found 252 hits. All so far, appear to be mine. Now I know why I receive so much spam.
The Danger HipTop puts the functionality of a RIM Blacberry, Palm, and cellular phone into a single device. This is the type of device I've been looking for. Now I wonder which networks this can work on?
Version 0.9.6 of Mozilla is now released. Get it while it's hot.
The new Star Wars trailer is out. Much more revealing this time. Just like the last one, Apple's Quicktime site is faster than StarWars.com.
Via Ryan Price from Abstract Design. It seems IIS is still a big security threat. We could use more audit software with operating systems. I've used one from Microsoft to test Windows 2000 for general security threats. Very helpful.