Ohhhhh boy. I knew this would happen sooner or later:

GmailFS: The Gmail Filesystem

For the less-techie crowd, this is basically a way to use your free, one gigabyte Gmail account as though it were a disk inside your own computer. But only on Linux at this point, as far as I can tell.

We’ll see how long it takes before Google tries to shut this guy down.

The combination of a broken FireWire port, potentially expensive repairs, “old” age (over 2.5 years), diminished storage capacity, and a limited time 0% APR offer on our credit card helped us to decide that it was time to purchase a new Apple iPod.

ppp|
Apple 20GB 4th Gen iPod|ppp

We bought it at the Rockingham Park Apple Store in beautiful, tax-free New Hampshire. It’s all synced up with the latest tunes, as well as calendar and contact information via iSync.

iPodResQ buys used iPods in any condition, so hopefully we can get a few bucks out of the old one.

Here’s to many more years of on-the-go music!

Full photo gallery can be found here.

I have five Gmail invitations to give out. Let me know if you want one!

I forgot to mention this last week, but prwdot.org has just passed its second anniversary of hosting at Site5.com. I originally signed up on August 15, 2002, after many bad experiences with my previous web host. My experiences with Site5 have been nothing but terrific. Their prices are great, their service is great, their support is great. I couldn’t be happier. Site5 has a very professional and personable staff, which is a rarity in this industry. I ask a lot out of their support personnel, as evidenced by my Site5 support mailbox, which contains 339 messages. These aren’t just common support questions, these are arcane issues that most people would never even encounter, such as setting up procmail in a shared hosting environment, setting up DAV support, custom Perl module installations, etc. They have had no problem responding to and taking care of each and every one of my requests.

You can get their basic account (which is quite a bit beefier than most places’ basic accounts, I must say) for just $6.95/month if you sign an annual contract. It’s $9.95/month if you prefer to go with a month-to-month contract. I currently have their Site4 account, which is just $25.95 for a month-to-month contract that provides 2 gigs of storage space, 60 gigs of bandwidth per month (with bandwidth rollover!), unlimited subdomains, MySQL databases, email accounts, FTP accounts, and more. Check out their site to see what plan is right for you.

Several other users are also happy with Site5, by proxy, since I am hosting them for free under my account:

Will Farnham
Amy Walton
Corey Lowe
Nathan Clark (though I’m not sure if he’s actually using his account any more)

I would also like to congratulate two other fellows whose blogs I follow:

***Chad Everett|http://jayseae.cxliv.org/*** (who also wrote the ***Bloglines Toolkit|http://jayseae.cxliv.org/2004/07/08/bloglines_toolkit_v1r4.html*** Mozilla/Firefox plugin) for winning third place in the MovableType contest for his ***Notifier|http://jayseae.cxliv.org/movable_type/notifier/index.html*** MovableType plugin.

***John Gruber|http://daringfireball.net/***, author of the ***Markdown|http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/*** MovableType plugin, who tied with Chad for third place in the same contest.

Kudos and congrats to everyone involved! As much crap as I’ve given SixApart for their changes to the licensing schemes, I think this contest was a great way to reward people for doing great work in the area of plugins.

Of course, since the contest was to write plugins for MovableType 3.0, I won’t be able to use the newest versions of these plugins… but I guess I can stick with the old versions for now.

Congratulations to ***Jay Allen|http://www.jayallen.org/***, ***winner of|http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/07/plug_in_to_mova.shtml#more*** ***MovableType|http://www.movabletype.org/***’s ***Plug-In Contest|http://www.movabletype.org/contest.shtml***. Jay is the creator of the excellent ***MT-Blacklist|http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/*** plugin. I use MT-Blacklist here at prwdot.org to help reduce and control comment spam.

Update: Jay chose the PowerMac G5 system as his prize! Woo-hoo!

Read the relevant entries on Jay’s ***personal blog|http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2004/07/plugin_contest_winners_announced_tonight*** and on his ***MT-Blacklist blog|http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/2004/07/mtblacklist_mt_plugin_developers_contest_grand_prize***.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited for someone I’ve never met!

After reading ***Will’s post|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/001875.html*** and then following up and reading ***this|http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator*** and ***this|http://daringfireball.net/2004/07/konfab_confab*** on ***John Gruber’s blog|http://daringfireball.net***, I’ve decided to rethink my position on Konfabulator vs Dashboard. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

I think ***Dashboard|http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html*** is a cool looking feature. Being a web developer, I am intrigued by the possibility of being able to build a Dashboard “gadget” by using JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML. For the moment, that is where my happiness ends.

Gruber encourages us to “look under the hood” to see the real differences between Konfab and Dash. Yep, ok, they’re both different under the hood. Konfab uses its own proprietary XML parser and JavaScript engine, while Apple uses its own WebCore technology. But I didn’t need to be convinced that they were different under the hood.

Gruber puts on a pretty good razzle-dazzle show, pointing us to these under-the-hood differences, as well as showing how Dashboard is similar in scope to Apple’s own Desk Accessories functionality of many years ago. But he doesn’t give adequate treatment to my primary concern. By way of analogy:

Say I want to design my own car. I come up with some really great ideas for new components that will produce tremendous horsepower, amazingly efficient fuel consumption, and a silky-smooth ride. I build these components, and put them all together in a frame that could withstand a drop off of the Grand Canyon (while protecting the passengers). Then, I need to design a body. I look at the Audi TT, and think that it looks really sweet. I have had some trouble coming up with my own design for the exterior, so I “borrow” a lot of elements from the TT, and whip up a “new” body for my car, calling it the PT. When the PT is released, the public is going to think that my car looks a heck of a lot like the TT, and they’d be right. But when they got in and took it for a test drive, they’d realize that it was infinitely superior – especially after they drove it into the Grand Canyon. So, the public would eventually discover that it really was a different machine – under the hood. But does that excuse me from borrowing the TT’s body design to use in my PT? I don’t think so.

Neither should Apple be excused for borrowing the look, feel, and functionality of Konfabulator for use in their Dashboard technology. Look at this now. I don’t really have any thoughts on what would have been the “right thing” for Apple to do with respect to Konfabulator, but I am pretty sure that whatever the “right thing” is, it has not been done yet.

One last point – I do understand the comparison between Dashboard and Desk Accessories, at least in terms of scope. They were both designed to be small, lightweight mini-apps that could be run on screen alongside other applications. But I feel that Gruber is trying to read this comparison into Apple’s actual design philosophy, on their behalf. I haven’t seen any proof as of yet that Apple really did use this as a basis for developing Dashboard. I’d love to see a statement or article on Apple’s website that says something to the effect of “Our idea for Dashboard started way back in the 80’s, when we designed Desk Accessories…” If Desk Accessories was truly an Apple innovation, and if it truly is an ancestor to Dashboard, then why hasn’t Apple made that public knowledge? I’m sure that most modern consumers wouldn’t have any clue what a Desk Accessory was, so I can understand not putting the information on an Apple marketing website. But how about tossing it into a developer note? Or maybe, when Dashboard is finally released, there could be a note in the ‘About’ menu that says “Inspired by Desk Accessories”. I’m waiting.

I’m a paid registered user of the Mac program ***Watson|http://www.karelia.com/watson/***. Watson is a web services application, similar to Apple’s ***Sherlock|http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/sherlock/*** tool. The idea behind web services tools such as this is that rather than navigate to dozens of different websites to get stock quotes, weather, news, movie tickets, flight information, package tracking, etc…. you use one application that has hooks into these websites. The application does the searching and browsing for you, and puts all of the handy tools in one easy to access location.

Well, the latest news is that Watson’s technology has been licensed by ***Sun Microsystems|http://www.sun.com/***. Dan Wood discusses it in a recent ***blog entry|http://weblog.karelia.com/Watson/Now_I_can_talk_a_bi.html***. Watson will reach its end-of-life on October 5, 2004. In the meantime, Sun has created a new, cross-platform, Java-based version of Watson named ***Project Alameda|http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/KitchenSink***.

Watson is a great time-saving tool, and I’m sure Alameda will continue to be just as excellent. Keep up the good work, folks!