http://thebogles.com/blog Things I care about Thu, 15 May 2008 19:06:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I am enjoying OSX and the Macbook Pro, but I was initially finding it difficult to train myself out of familiar Windows keyboard shortcuts like Control-X to cut the clipboard and Alt-D for the location bar in Firefox. Here I'll describe the steps I took to add Windows/Linux compatible ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/05/easier-osx-migration-windows-compatible-keyboard-shortcuts/ Many users have noted difficulties with GPS in Beyond411. I've investigated and discovered that the web service I am using for reverse geocoding is incorrectly returning empty results in many cases. I have notified the providers of the web service; I will post an update as available. I believe ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/04/gps-issues-in-beyond411-diagnosed/ I am getting really sick of watching this rerun for umpteenth time. Once again, one party is offering tax cuts as an effective strategy to win elections, while the other party argues that those tax cuts will only benefit the wealthy. If we can talk about race like adults, why can't ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/04/unfunded-tax-cuts/ I found these comments by John Doerr on Green Tech interesting. The notion that we need "reindustrialize" the planet matches my sense that the first industrial revolution was a hack that has no chance of continuing to scale or endure. Our next president must rearchitect markets so that "the ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/04/john-doerr-on-green-tech/ From an interview of the Post's Editor-in-Chief by MediaBistro: We've really fallen behind the times here. We are in the process of designing a Web 3.0 generation website that we hope will leapfrog where the current news industry is, ideally, and create a reader news experience that has not been imitated ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/04/the-washington-post-says-its-going-web-30/ The Subversion Merge Fairy and associated documentation is now hosted as a Google Code project at http://code.google.com/p/svn-merge-fairy/. Please contact me if you are interested in write permissions to contribute changes. (The Merge Fairy is a Python script that automates the process of merging changes from one Subversion branch to another, based ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/04/subversion-merge-fairy-now-hosted-on-google-code/ http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/04/penguins/ I have my Facebook privacy settings to only show my friends to "My Network and Friends". But my public Facebook page republishes a sampling of my friends, without my permission.  It also reveals my Facebook user ID in the query string. Facebook ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/04/the-erosion-of-privacy-on-facebook/ For too long, rather than engaging in constructive debate, Democrats and Republicans have mocked one another. This has worked out badly for all of us. It has undermining our sense of common purpose. It has lead us to rash, unbalanced decisions from both sides of the aisle, rammed ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/03/obama-speech-on-markets/ CIO magazine has published a video on how to Install and Use Six Free Killer BlackBerry Apps. Included in the list is Beyond411, along with Viigo, Worldmate Live, Google Maps, Facebook for Blackberry, and TwitterBerry. http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/03/how-to-video-install-and-use-six-free-killer-blackberry-apps/ Is Facebook just clueless about what OpenSocial means or are they being disingenious? Today Yahoo, Google, and MySpace formed a non-profit OpenSocial foundation to help promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites. Here was Facebook's response: "As the largest contributor to the memecached [sic] system, Facebook has long been a ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/03/open-source-vs-open-data-facebook-doesnt-get-it/ Good critique of the Google Contacts API over on Snellspace: ... as is typical of GData, all of the application specific data is contained in extension elements. While this is technically not a bad thing, it does mean that Google has effectively invented Yet Another Way of representing contact information. We ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/03/snellspace-critique-of-the-google-contacts-atom-format/ Libxml-Ruby is a blindingly fast way to parse XML in Ruby. However, many have complained that the interface is verbose and not especially Rubyish, and that the documentation lacks details and examples. Thanks to the flexibility of Ruby, it's easy to remedy this situation. libxml_helper.rb, described here, opens up the XML::Node ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/03/678/ A brave and thoughtful speech, worth reading and considering regardless of your political affiliation: A More Perfect Union http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/03/this-is-not-politics-as-usual/ People used the web in radically different ways after a critical mass of people shifted to unlimited plans. The same could be true of cell phones-- unlimited voice plans could enable valuable new voice services that were previously infeasible. For example, imagine being able to use your car speakerphone to ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2008/03/on-demand-audiobooks-and-other-applications-of-unlimited-cell-plans/