Dave Mancuso dot Com

From David Weinberger:
“The importance of the weblog phenomenon isn’t so much that it enables people to publish their breakfast menus or even their genuine insights. It’s that we now know what our “avatars” on the Net are going to be: not graphical cartoon representations but our body of writing. You are what you write. On the Web we are writing ourselves into existence. This introduces into the self the same issues of control, inspiration, invention, deception and play as have always been present in the relationship of authors to what they write.” That about sums it up for me.

Testing the Radio XML coffee mug…..this is only a test….

Sources: AOL not bidding for Red Hat. AOL Time Warner apparently is not making a bid to buy Linux manufacturer Red Hat, said sources familiar with the matter. [CNET News.com]

No big surprise here. How do these things get started? We may never know the true story, merger or no merger.

GNUStep aims to place OpenStep (and MacOS X in a way) on Linux. Check out the link at OSNews.

Amazon posts a profit! Awesome! Catch the story at MacCentral.

Just why AOL is in negotiations to purchase Linux “packager” Red Hat?
AOL should bundle a productivity product like “Radio” with their existing hosting business and sell ‘default’ “rss” xml feeds to their installed base of advertisers. Now that would be an interesting platform!
[Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]

I think this hits it right on the nose. Linux is (to me) a server technology. Radio is a communications technology. AOL is a communications company. This Linux-AOL story makes no sense whatsoever. I bet the Linux installed base hates it, too. If AOL wants to use Linux servers, why don’t they just buy a distribution instead of buying the distributor?

I’ve been using iPhoto. The features really strike a chord with how people use computers. I have a few ideas for version 2 already.

One of the most impressive features is the slide show. Watching an audio slide show with soft dissolves of some nice family portraits really tugs at the heart. I heard that a number of people at the keynote were visibly affected by the audio slide show demo that Steve Jobs did.

I want to export a set of iPhoto pictures as a Quicktime movie complete with the audio and dissolves. I can export the movie from iPhoto, but I lose the dissolves and audio. I tried the “Make Audio Slideshow” iPhoto AppleScript, but I lose the dissolves and wide pictures are squashed (I do get the audio). I can take the exported Quicktime, open it in Quicktime Player, and save it as a DV stream file, import it into iMovie, import the audio as well, and save it back out as a QT movie, BUT–I lose quality, I lose the dissolves, and the frame pacing seems to speed up.

I think that most of the issues are pretty easy except for the dissolves. You’d have to give iPhoto the ability to render the dissolves as it exports the pictures. It would be nice if the iMovie team could lift some code from iMovie and work it into iPhoto for this, but I think it just wouldn’t be that easy.

Still, it’s a great product.

From Go2Mac:An enterprising Mac user has begun to archive Apple marketing materials. The first entry is the 10 page (12 if you count the covers) brochure for the new iMac given out at MacWorld. The text is hard to make out, but it’s great reading, especially pages 9 and 10: “A special message to Windows users: Welcome.”

I was working on my other blogger site, Analog Reflection, and had to use the “Submit” button in Manila. Funny. This button would have a completely different meaning to me in a Microsoft product. Heh.

Hmmmm. I love the “heh” punctuation at the end of a blog entry, but it occurs to me that I lifted it from Dave Winer. Would his established use of prior art enable him to bring legal action against me? How far can you stretch this kind of litigation before it becomes ludicrous? I hope we never find out.