Inspirational Technology

This is a pretty interesting collection of 5 Apple Prototype products that never made it to market. What’s really intersting about it, is two of the products, the phone and the tablet Mac, are still active rumors to this day. The latest rumors now seem to expect both to show up sometime in 2007. I suspect that may be true for the phone, but I’m not so sure about a tablet Mac. I’d love to see one, but Microsoft’s Tablet PC has hardly taken the world by storm. I actually own one of the stupid things and bolting tablet functions to a desktop OS is just clunky. I haven’t touched the thing in over a year. Of course if it ran an OS truly designed for the tablet experience, with software also truly designed for the tablet experience I might find it more useful. Apple does have an OS designed for that usage, of course, it needs a fair bit of modernization.

Following up on my post yesterday about converting VMWare virtual appliances to Parallels, I added a post today with 6 ready to run appliances for Parallels. The appliances include vTiger, SugarCRM, Gallery, LAMP, OpenFiler and MediaWiki. Through JumpBox we’ll also be putting out a number of new appliances for Parallels in the future.

From Virtualization Daily, Converting a VMWare virtual appliance to work with Parallels. It’s my goal to bring as many virtual appliances to Mac OS X users as possible. With JumpBox, everything we release will run under Parallels as well as VMWare.

The next edition of Agile web development with Rails is now available in PDF form and is expected in book stores around the same time that Rails 1.2 is released. I’ve been reading the beta PDFs and am looking forward to getting the paper book when it ships. The REST features of Rails 1.2 are a great enhancement that brings Rails one step closer to being a true next generation web framework.

Tim Bray is pushing an effort to choose Relax NG for XML schemas. I simply say yes, if you have to have a schema, at least use a schema language that makes sense. W3C XML Schema is an abomination that has done more harm to XML based systems than anything else. Every time I’ve seen a team try to make use of W3C XML Schemas, it results in nothing but headaches. I just look on with frustration over my knowledge that it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s really quite sad to see how bad the W3C screwed up with that technology and how widely it penetrated other specifications without much thought being given to it’s real quality.

According to Marketwatch the F-117 Nighthawk “stealth fighter” is set for early mothballing. I find this to be kind of sad. It’s such a fascinating aircraft. When I lived in Tucson you would see these flying around every once in a while, now they’ll probably end up there permanently for storage.

Are we real?, an interesting look at whether we’re real or just part of some kind of simulation. Always something to wonder about, especially when you look at some of the things we’re beginning to do.

And there will be people who will see the simulation argument as a way to prove the existence of God. Though it does suggest a omniscient and omnipotent creator it doesn’t say anything about such a creator. Besides, would a creator create a whole universe of simulated organisms to worship him?

Yes, that is the question.

I’ve been a big fan of the Rhapsody music service for quite a while. I’m a Mac user, but I used to keep a PC around just so that I could run the Windows client. A while back they launched a web interface for the service that allowed you to access the Rhapsody library from Mac OS X and Linux. At the time that was exciting to see … until I used it and realized how abysmal the user interface is. You can’t even queue an album through the interface, it always starts playing immediately, replacing what was already playing. I have never understood why they used that behavior. The benefit of the service is to be able to browse around and queue up various albums for playing from a mass library. With the web interface that ability just doesn’t exist which is really odd. That plus the fact their music player leaks memory forced me to switch back to running Rhapsody on Windows, only now I use a Virtual machine on my Intel based Mac. That’s a pain of course due to the memory consumption of the VM.

Anyway, boring history aside, there’s a new service called YottaMusic which puts a completely new web interface on top of the Rhapsody service. If you’re already a subscriber to Rhapsody you already have an account that will work with YottaMusic. To say that this interface blows the Real designed interface away would … well it would be the understatement of the year. YottaMusic is a modern AJAX based interface that’s simpler, more powerful and most importantly has the ability to queue an album for playing without replacing what’s already playing. It’s currently an alpha release, but looks very promising. Now, of course comes the question about how they’re going to make money? The service is free for now and there’s no advertising (unlike the Real designed web interface that pushes really annoying ads even if you’re a paid subscriber). The existence of YottaMusic just proves that Rhapsody is a great service at a fundamental level, while Real’s complete inability to put the user first is blatantly on display in the current Rhapsody web interface.

I’ve been out of the SOAP vs. REST debate for a while, but Pete Lacey’s “The S stands for Simple” post just has to be mentioned. For XML geeks who’ve been constantly been annoyed with the abomination that is SOAP/WSDL/UDDI it’s quite amusing. I’ll be so happy the day that SOAP is finally dead. Of course coming along right behind it will be another bloated, horribly complex and completely unnecessary vendor designed technology to do the exact same thing. After all, if it’s actually simple enough for average developers to understand then there’s no market for tools and that’s something we just can have now can we.

Through Grid7 we just released the audio of the sessions from the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference. All the recordings are now online and are taking the place of Grid7 Venturecast #9.

It was a hectic day at the conference, we launched JumpBox, did some interviews with the press, talked with a whole bunch of people and on top of all that ran around trying to capture audio from all the sessions.

The conference was a great event though. The turnout was surprising with a sell out at I believe 450 people. The sessions were interesting, though the session “What does it take to make a company succeed in Arizona?” had a refrain I’m getting really tired of hearing. At the end of the day, the story is always the same, startup companies in Arizona have an extremely hard time getting funded. There’s a ton of money in Arizona, but it pretty much all goes into real estate. We just started working on a round of funding for JumpBox and trying to do that in Arizona is not something I look forward to.