the body of a very slow loop
Do yourself a favor and check out the recently-launched Hulu service from NBC and FOX. It’s fantastic.
Hulu provides movies and TV shows in high quality with limited commercials. But the best part is, it’s totally legal. More details here.
I just subscribed to an RSS feed for new episodes of The Office. The Simpsons are next.
Google better look out. Clown Co is no joke. Pretty soon I’ll only go to YouTube when I want to see dudes getting hit in the nuts.
I use Google Notifier on my Mac. Here are a couple tweaks that make it much better:
Just noticed that Gmail was updated. It’s way faster than the old version. Nice!
I spent about 24 hours with my “fully-featured” client-side mail application and new Gmail+IMAP support before I went back to mail.google.com. The web interface is just better.
Rant 1: My Love/Hate Relationship with Exchange
The MS Exchange protocol is so much better than POP/IMAP that it makes me want to cry. I’m no MS fanboy, but I don’t know of an open alternative that comes close.
All of these questions arise because desktop mail apps are designed around the old POP model — they assume that you might want to bring mail down, locally. I don’t. I want to leave it in the cloud where it belongs. The Exchange guys apparently figured this out a long time ago.
Rant 2: Net Apps == Web Apps
Years ago I used client-side RSS readers on multiple machines. My list of feeds was always out of sync. I also read many articles twice. First Bloglines and eventually Google Reader solved this for me. The web app is ideal here. I don’t fly much so I don’t care about offline access (although Gears delivers this too).
Email is the same. 99% of the email experience is being on the net. Sure you can do some things offline, but not much. So why waste time on the sync problem? Just assume the network, move the whole application to the server side, and you are done.
The whole internet is abuzz. Google has finally added IMAP support to Gmail. Not since Google Reader got search have we seen such a v1.0 feature shipped so late.
But, to the point — every hour on the hour I check my Gmail account settings. Still no IMAP for me. Grrr.
Is this because I talk smack about adsense? Uhh, yea I was just kidding, really…
I’m sorry. Can I have IMAP now?
Update 11pm: Got it!
So, I’m reading this article by rabid athiest, Sam Harris. As I scroll South, I notice the sidebar advert:
Meet Christian Singles in Your City
That would certainly make for an interesting first date…
From the “it’s-about-frickin-time” department, Google Reader finally has a search box. Better late than never.
Just a quick rant: Why does Google still suck for finding BIOS and drivers online? A search for K8N-DL BIOS yields exactly zero first-page results from the Asus web site.
Hey Google, this is the link I want.
kthxbye
When I leave Google Reader running for a while, Firefox eventually enters some kind of crazy Javascript spin loop which eats 100% of one core until I kill the tab. This is an Intel-based OSX machine, and Firefox 2.0.0.1.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a solution?
Update: It seems like Google Toolbar might be the cuplrit. See this bug report for details. I’ll disable the toolbar and see how things go.
Update 2: Well that wasn’t it. I’m running no plugins at all now, and the problem persists. There must be some kind of bug in the Javascript interpreter.
Larry Osterman asks, “Where do you go to get answers to your technical questions?”
I know it is going to seem like I’m picking on Larry or Microsoft, but I’m not. I want to use this opportunity to point out something remarkable about Google, and about the search biz in general.
Just about every comment on Larry’s post gives the same obvious answer, to which he responds, “…for those of you proposing “Google” as the generic answer, what happens when the answer isn’t on the search engines?
Here’s my answer (prepare yourself): If Google doesn’t turn up the answer, I believe with very high probability that an answer simply does not exist.
Here’s how I Google: I enter a minimal combination of fairly specific search terms (ie, “nvidia vista rotate”) and scan the first page of results. If I don’t see what I am looking for in the first page of hits, I try different search terms. Stop and think about that for a minute. Google is so good that I readily blame myself for poor results. I think, “Google can’t be wrong — I must be using it stupidly.”
When I’m forced to make more than a few search attempts, or to look past the first couple pages of results, I have high confidence that the information I am seeking does not exist on the web*.
You can’t buy trust like that. This is the insurmountable challenge facing all competing search engines: search is a solved problem.
*Note: Sometimes this is because I am attempting to ask a very hard question. More often, it’s because I’m asking a question so stupid that the web can’t be bothered to answer it.
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