Blog posts I didn’t make

“The best weblogs are the ones in everyone’s ‘drafts’ folder.” Here’s the blog posts I never finished or posted:

OS X on Intel

I wrote about what was then news, and pointed out the fact that I had previously written:

Apple is definitely in the hardware game, they’re not going to port to Intel. Do you see that dot after the word “Intel”? It’s a period, the argument is over. But because there are idiots out there who like to point to the x86 port of Darwin as evidence, let me add that if by some cosmic collision Apple decided to throw out all software that had been written for OS X/PPC and put OS X on x86 you’d be no more able to run it on your home-built system than you are able to run OS X/PPC on a non-Apple PPC.

Whoops. I guess my mea culpa is better late than never. I then go on to reiterate that I didn’t think that OS X would be available for non-Apple hardware, but that I was so knocked back by the fact that Apple was switching to Intel that I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

What makes Greasemonkey different

A quick how-to on Greasemonkey, followed by the start of a post explaining how Greasemonkey changes everything. Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind) does a much better job than my half-entry at taking an abstract look at what makes Greasemonkey so cool.

Looking for a Grand Unified Theory of the Internet

I was looking to tie together the ideas in Smart Mobs, Unmediated, The Wisdom of Crowds, the Semantic Web, The Long Tail, The Omidyar Network (the philanthropical organization and the social networking tool), P2P, VOIP and Web Services. I didn’t get very far. I think I was trying to figure out the ideas that Tim O’Reilly made clear in What is Web 2.0? Unfortunately I was working on this a couple months before his essay, otherwise I would have just delicioused his work and been done with it.

Semantic Web on Rails

I start wondering about something like an Object-Relational pattern for the Semantic Web. The idea would be that RDF schemas would define the object’s properties, so you could do something like

class FOAF << SemanticRecord::Base
has_namespace "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
end

and my object would then be able to do do things like

foo = FOAF.find_by_mbox_sha1sum('202876b395c6df49b2ca06c41f773ed07da6d366')
foo.name = "George Hotelling"

through the magic of metaprogramming. Semantic Web, meet Ruby on Rails explores this idea in more depth.

Domain name clichés

This started off as a joke on IM with Ben Tesch. The list included myanything, e-anything, iAnything, anythingster, anythingr (i.e. Flickr) and anythingnet.com.

Giving good “headism”

I was going to respond to Chris Anderson’s post More evil “Headism” but didn’t get much further than a witty title. I think I was looking at some Amazon list as a counter-example to his post; I suspect it was some sort of personalized hit list. I’m adding it to this post half for the title and half for completeness.

Development checklist

I mention a (currently backburnered) personal project that uses the following Web 2.0 patterns:

• Web services mashup
• Web services provider
• AJAX
• Social software
• Microformats
• Tagging / Folksonomy
• Long Tail compliant
• Provides RSS and iCal feeds
• Built on Ruby on Rails

I think I avoided posting it out of shame, even though it is tongue in cheek.

OMG, big companies might not be fighting for my rights!

I got all self-rightous and responded to DRM Crippled CD: A bizarre tale in 4 parts by saying that of course DRM and the DMCA isn’t about copyright infringement, it’s about market control. I’m glad I didn’t post this one, it was really condescending even if the core facts are true (about DRM and the DMCA).

The one thing that I do like from the post is my reminder that 400 jobs were lost when the MPAA sued 321 Studios out of existence. Let’s not forget that the DMCA is costing real people real jobs.

Plus Ça Change

This was intended to be a short entry just pointing out how sites like Riffs are recommending specific browsers (try going there in Safari), just like the bad old days. Web 2.0 is starting to look a lot like Web 1.0b. Web standards advocates are screwed because XMLHttpRequest isn’t standards-compliant and something that useful is going to get used, standards be damned.

The future of comedy

You know how some people’s sole idea of humor is reciting quotes from The Simpsons or the collected works of Monty Python? I started imagining a world where all humor was expressed in terms of Simpsons quotes; sort of like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok. “Bart, his shorts eaten.” Sadly, the Darmok dictionary has been taken offline, but a copy resides in the Wayback Machine.