Why Flock Rocks

Okay, I must say, wow. The 'favorites' in Flock kick ass. They are COMPLETELY integrated with del.icio.us, and there is NO WAIT TIME. It must sync up from time to time or something, I don't know. You can go in, look at your bookmarks, and it shows their tags next to them.

Also, you can search by tag. All the tags are listed alphabetically and you just click one to see the bookmarks listed. All this happens instantly.

Note on the above, it seems to me that command clicking should do something, but currently it doesn't. Question is, though, should it be an AND or an OR operation.... I want AND somehow, but intuitively selecting multiple tags could make sense either way...

Here's the feature that blew me away, though. Searching for something in the google/yahoo/amazon/wikipedia/etc. search field does a live search -- as you type -- of matching bookmarks FROM DEL.ICIO.US! It's so sweet. I'm in love. This should make for a very slick browser. Good job!!!

Test post from Flock!

That's right, you heard it here first, flock is out and available for trial use. You have to be on the mailing list to get it it seems, but for those who are, you can download flock, the new web2.0 web-services enabled, firefox based, open-source, cross-platform browser.

Although I've just started using it, I must say that it seems nice. It doesn't want to work with multiple blogger accounts, unfortunately, but aside from that I'm liking it. If I have multiple blogs in one account they all work, but different accounts can't be used. This is probably a beta issue.

The design is slick, and I could see this being popular. It will dependon how customizable it is, though, I think. I don't use Flickr, I use smugmug. Will I get handy-dandy integration? Time will tell...

Inkscape for Mac!

I'm happy to see that there is finally an official Mac binary of Inkscape, the awesomest Vector editor ever (seriously), now that they're up to version 0.42. After briefly playing with it I can report that it is much faster than the prior, unofficial binary. If you don't have it, get it. It's a quick 22-odd MB file, and it's a dream to use. Use the tutorial and after that you'll be drawing faster than you ever thought possible. Good-bye Illustrator!

social bookmarking update

So, there's a 'related URL' field in dashblog. I was curious to see where it posted the link. Turns out it doesn't, or at least not to blogger, so here's the link.
link

social bookmarking resource

Found this cool place which is working on a comparison of social bookmarking tools. I still haven't figured out which one is my favorite, but watch this page for some good comparison. If nothing else this showed me a bunch of cool sites of which I wasn't previously aware. Enjoy!

My new brain?

I must say, I knew it would happen eventually, but is this it? Is this going to be the site that replaces google as my fist-stop shop for searching?

Once I discoved google for the first time years back it was awesome. It grew in awesomeness for awhile, but recently it's been lagging behind. Wikipedia would be my first source for some topics. I'd use google only if I wanted to trudge through lots of stuff to find that place. We all know what I mean. When you're searching, you finally reach that thread which takes you to the network of information you were looking for. Maybe it gives you the term you need to search for, maybe it gives you a site, with links to all the good sites. Who knows. Google has become 'the hard way' and I groan at having to use it, knowing that although it's great at some things, there's others where I know I'm in for a good chunk of trudgerous searching.

Gataga is a social bookmark tag meta search engine. It is designed to look like google and it searches all the big tagging places. At first glance it seems great. Haven't used it much yet, but I'll be putting it through its paces. I expect very good things. Goodbye google, hello tags.

Anyone been Outfoxed?

I've seen the new Outfoxed thing and I want in. Anyone out there have it and willing to invite me? Either that or I'll get the invite from Stan, but it's supposed to be a better experience if you start out networking with someone you know...

More on why apple is switching...

This is nothing new, but it shows how popular laptops are to the computer industry, and we all know they've been even more important to apple in the last few years. Apple can't afford to let laptops slip. The inability to get a G5 the "mother of all thermal challenges" into a laptop is likely a big impetus for this change...

The woes of being a power user

I'm a self-confessed power user. Mild inefficiencies irritate the hell out of me. All I see when using any technology is how it could be done faster, better organized, with less steps, or what it could be combined with to make it killer. I rarely see what's there. I see what COULD be there, what's not there, and the like.

I can't stand the idea of paying for software, because I know I'll barely use it before I switch to something else. If I paid for every piece of shareware or donation ware that nagged me for money I'd be in debt up to my ears. But I haven't used ANY of those programs with any regularity. I find them all mostly lacking. Sure, some of them still ROCK, but for how long, and will it really be worth it to pay for it when some better one will come out in a matter of months? Will I use it that much? I can tolerate a nag for that long. I can't tolerate the cost of perpetual upgrades.

I miss out on the supposed joy or satisfaction of building very much on any platform/system/whatever. LJ, orkut, friendster, all passed by the wayside for the most part, as were countless other services before them. I actually PAID for a service the other day in smugmug. (What? Not Flickr?! you ask. No, not flickr, thank you very much. Yes, I can put little notes on the pics. And I can add keywords. Well, keywords can be added on smugmug (although only by members, and that irks me) but more importantly it's half the cost with no limits to the number of pictures/size and only a generous bandwidth quota per month. Plus it has drop-dead gorgeous galleries, and you can view pictures in 3 sizes PLUS the original size. Flickr is overpriced due to buzz factor but it isn't worth the extra bones.)

I can barely start adding to my personal wiki before upgrading. Thankfully we have some emerging standards there (textile) which should help with the whole upgrade conundrum.

But my point is, if I have one, that although I'm one who can explain exactly how such and such works, often what it was inspired by, the pros and cons of its language/structure/paradigm, point out good things for them to add later (which they or someone else usually does add later), and so on and so forth, I barely ever USE them. It makes me wonder... why?

What stuff do I really USE? I use my web-browsers extensively. EXTENSIVELY. I do use bookmarks, not just google. Google isn't that good. I must admit that I have been using del.icio.us quite a bit. It'll take awhile to determine whether I'll continue to do so, but it allows me to view my bookmarks from any browser on any computer anywhere. AND it helps me find them faster. That's a good thing. (I wish, though, that I could do a keyword search on del.icio.us and see the top results from KEYWORDS of links people have bookmarked. I can click on 'popular' keywords, and click on keywords when they show up, but I can't just do a search for an arbitrary keyword. At least as far as I can tell. I can only search through MY keywords, which is useful, but the other would be SO COOL. Like a dynamically generated, bottom-up sort of dmoz.)

Okay, I'm done with this rant. Smarter posts to resume.

T-Mobile Backstory

In my last post I mentioned prior trouble with T-Mobile but didn't elaborate. It all started about 2 months ago when I received a phone bill that was 6 times higher than normal. Surprised, I delved into the details. Turns out there were now 4 additional phones attached to MY plan. I hadn't ordered a single one, and their area code was several states away.

I called T-Mobile and after answering a lot of questions, and asking a lot of questions, I was told that everything would be corrected, my account had been locked, that their fraud department would call me, and they'd take care of it. Impressively, their fraud department called the next morning (I'd been told not to expect the call for a couple days as it was a friday) and cleared the corrections on the spot. I was pleased.

That is... until the next bill arrives. This one was twice as big as the last (roughly 12x my normal bill) and the same phones were still attached, and had been ever so active. Also, the charges from the previous month, although not billed to me the previous month, were rolled over to the current month. Pissed, I called back again. Their reply was basically a "Whoops, I guess we forgot to actually remove those. Heh, sorry". That made me mad and I turned of easypay (which automatically charges your card every month so you don't have to worry about missing a bill. At this point I was more worried about "accidentally" having a gigantic, unexpected withdrawal leading to overdraft charges. That's the last thing I need.

Thankfully this problem seems to have been resolved as my latest bill is devoid of such errors.

At this point I am seriously considering switching providers even though many of my most frequent contacts are on T-Mobile and I can get free mobile-to-mobile with them, AND T-Mobile has competitive rates. I am seriously concerned about their obvious security problems. I want all my information removed from their databases as I don't trust them. What am I to do? Buy pre-paid? Yeah, right, that costs a fortune (for no good reason as far as I can tell...).

T-Mobile bug, possible exploit?

Entirely by accident I have, with the help of a friend, learned of a fairly large and not-all-that obscure security hole in T-Mobile's voice-help system. This is the system reached by dialing 611 if you're a T-Mobile subscriber, and there's probably an 800 number, too, but I'm not sure.

When you call in you can get info on your available minutes, used minutes, and whether or not you have mobile-to-mobile, weekend, or nights minutes. There may be more info. You can also get quite a bit more info if you type in your last 4.

Now, if you're on a shared plan (like a family plan) you are also asked if you want to check the usage on other handsets, so you can see if your little sister is hogging all the minutes I guess. Well, here's the funny part. You can type in the number of ANY T-MOBILE SUBSCRIBER and receive all of the aforementioned information about their account. There is probably more that can be gathered, also, but as I am not personally on a shared minute plan I cannot test it for myself. All you with shared minutes should test this and see just how large a hole this is.

What's better is that when I told the punk on the phone about it he told me the ONLY WAY to get this information to those who might be interested was to send an email through the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the T-Mobile homepage.

I've found T-Mobile to be incompetant before, and this just adds to my dissatisfaction. Come on T-Mobile, get your act together!!!

LOL @ Work

So, I overhear this conversation from the Dev department.

One dev is being chased by the linux crowd around the office. She's trying to figure out which new machine to buy: Mac or Windows (It didn't sound like she was even interested in linux).
"Okay, okay," she says, arriving in a different section of the dev department, "windows people, windows people, what should I buy, a Mac or a Windows?" (She's foreign)
(Undistinguishable chatter)
"What? The windows people are telling me to buy a Mac???"