Archives

Spam-Be-Gone

Cloudmark has the best idea I’ve seen yet for eliminating spam. Their SpamNet product is basically a kind of distributed computing application. It plugs into Outlook XP and helps users identify incoming spam using a set of rules — the system communicates back to a central server about which messages have been marked as junk. As more users contribute, the rules get refined, the system gets smarter and a kind of global understanding of what is and isn’t spam develops. Brilliant. Hope it works.

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Blogging Heads

More Lessig:“Right now we have a culture where the most creative and important builders of freedom in the 21st century have zero political savvy and (so far) zero political effect.” This is from his recent blog posting, one communiqué from a very interesting online squabble between Lessig and well-known Userland impresario and knee-jerk blogging evangelist Dave Winer. The debate’s heating up, and this is a good thing.

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Death of a Party

24 Hour Party PeopleOh yeah, so two days ago I saw “24 Hour Party People,” Michael Winterbottom’s chronicle of Manchester impressario Tony Wilson and his Factory Records empire.The trailer was half wildly promising and half very worrisome, but I’m happy to say that the former part won out, thankfully. “24 Hour Party People” is consistently hilarious and restlessly inventive, engagingly manic and deeply comic. I had a great time watching it. And if director Michael Winterbottom fawns a little too much over the Ian Curtis character, the movie is still loaded with far fewer pretensions than the average pop history movie.

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Old Media in a New Media World

This Is a MagazineThis Is a Magazineis a curiosity; an old media concept in a new media context. It’s a Web magazine, but not like Salon.com or even Newsweek, as it’s very literally a magazine that just happens to be on the Web. Your mouse-clicks ‘turn’ itspages, and it lacks true interactivity in a way that suggests a committed principle (though its designers can’t resist the occasional, spartan suggestion of acknowledging its online milieu). It’s a strange idea, but the abundance of evident visual talent behind the whole thing is ultimately winning. Worth a look.

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Mo’ Memory

Mo’ MemoryFor so long I’ve been plodding along with just 256MB of RAM in my Titanium PowerBook G4, but last night I popped in a new 512MB chip, for a grand total of 768MB. Aaaaaahhhhhh. The picture above shows all the apps I’m running at once, and there’s still 483MB available.Memory’s not as cheap as it was a year ago, but I got a fair deal for it at Crucial.com.

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Playing with Fire, and Other Toys

FireThe new Mac platform seems more viable than ever — and I’m enjoying using it more and more and playing around with all the new software toys, too. It’s such a charming experience that I pre-ordered a copy of the next revision of the OS (technically 10.2, but colloquially known as ‘Jaguar’) from MacConnection, which has it for US$25 below list. It’s pretty remarkable how elegantly constructed most of the software is for Mac OS X, from 800 pound gorillas like Office v.X, which is running beautifully on my machine, to intrepid shareware/freeware endeavours like Fire, which makes one of the best instant messaging clients out there, and certainly the most elegant cross-IM platform application I’ve ever seen. Even the Java-based ports like LimeWire are way more elegant than their Mac OS Classic or Windows counterparts.

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Free Culture Has a Price

Lawrence LessigNoted cyber-age legal authority Lawrence Lessig has a wake-up call for anyone frustrated with the way media companies are trying to dominate copyright controls. He laid it down in his powerful presentation at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention: it’s in the old guard’s interest to try and control creativity and innovation; they have the power to do so and they are excercising it, and it’s our responsibility to fight it.

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