Category: Uncategorized

My new MacBook arrived two weeks ago, and I felt that I had spent enough time with it to actually make some useful comments on the good, the bad, and the headbangingly frustrating.

The Finder

Dear Apple: Shoot the Finder development team. Thanks.

I have switched to Path Finder as a Finder replacement. Truly the finder is one of the most debilitating pieces of software I have ever used. Nautilus on Gnome is a far superior file management system.

Software, in general

On the whole, I have found replacements for most of the Windows tools I use on a regular basis. But, as I am not made of money, I am using GIMP for Mac, and that is just clunky in the X11 environment.

Living in the browser makes my life much more tolerable than those who require the Windows environment. I haven’t got the money to buy Parallels or VMWare Fusion right now, so I am using RDC to connect to my Windows box. Slap Windows in Space #3 Fullscreen, and no one would know the difference.

Haven’t found a good Mind Map tool. And BBEdit is also muchos dineros. So Smultron is the text editor.

Usability

I rate this very high. Other than adjusting to the lack of certain keys (DEL, Pg up/dn, etc), the transition has been seamless. The trackpad is a dream and I miss being able to throw stuff around on my Dell laptops’ trackpads like I can using the one on the MacBook. I do find I leave apps hanging, as I am still adjusting to CMD-q closing the app.

Dashboard. What can I say? It’s what I need – high-level data at a glance, including the Prem Tables!

Overall

After four years waiting for a MacBook, I can say that it has been worth the wait. Solid, dependable, and slowly becoming my primary computer.
The only concern that I have is the aluminum case. I have an aluminum sensitivity, and if my hands start to peel and otherwise be in bad shape, I will have to determine a solution to that issue.

Have I mentioned that Greg House is one of my mentors?

more lol celebs!

For the last week, I have been using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on my personal laptop. I can say that the experience has been mostly transparent for me, even with the need for a complete re-build last night after an attempt to install a complex theme replacement.

I can say that it has been transparent because I have been using Linux desktops in one form or another on an intermittent basis since 1999. When business was slow in the Fall and Winter of 2001/2002, I was the Guinea Pig in my organization to see if Linux could be a corporate replacement for Windows for all desktops and laptops.

So, when I say that the process has been transparent, you will have to realize that I have been a technical user of these desktop interfaces for a number of years. But I can say that since my first positive experiences with the Red Hat Fedora and the Ximian Gnome replacement interface, things have come a very long way.

Ubuntu 8.04 is the first real interface that seems to work predictably, efficiently, and effectively with external devices and programs that are business friendly. This is especially the case if most of the tools are Web-based, as Firefox and Opera work seamlessly. OpenOffice 2.4 can open DOCX files, and media players support most of the files I want to watch/listen to.

It prints to the home network printer.

It accesses the home file server.

I can share and synchronize files among my computers using DropBox.
Some caveats to my positive experience.

• I work mainly on the Web
• I do not play games
• I have been using Linux in various forms and editions since 1999.

If you have technically savvy friend, or really want to push and expand your knowledge of computers and highly configurable operating systems, I would definitely suggest giving Ubuntu a try on the extra computer you have lying around. My laptop is at least 3.5 years old, and not anywhere near as fast as my work laptop running XP. However, with Linux, the two are comparable in speed and performance.

Go on. Try it. I know you want to.

Yesterday in the Fast Company Live Fail Whale session [mention on Scoble’s blog here], Paul Bucheit of FriendFeed jokingly said that his company’s external alerting mechanism was Louis Gray.
I cringed when I read that, as the last people who should be letting you know you have an issue are your visitors or customers. I know that FriendFeed is new and may not have the ops team that Dorion Carroll and Technorati have developed over the years, but it is still critical.
You have done a lot as a company to build a brand. Don’t let your internal and external performance sully your reputation. There are a number of low-cost and free ways to watch your performance and alert you before things break.
Louis Gray is a great guy. But he is not an objective and reliable way to alert you when something is wrong with your site.

<sarcasm>
Currently, the Newest Industry sits at #1,106,225 in the Technorati Charts. I’m looking to break into the Technorati 1,000,000 before Christmas.
If Chris Brogan can get into the Technorati 100, I know I can do this!
Help me break into this elite group!
</sarcasm>

I spent some time today pairing ideas that separate Branding from Reputation. These came from my discussion of Branding being closed-source and Reputation being open-source [here].
It’s just a start, but it’s a start.

One of the most challenging things in social media is finding the conversation leaders. Those people who drive the conversation, and create a community.
FriendFeedHolic (ffholic) has taken the base knowledge that exists in FriendFeed and added a ranking mechanism to it based on input and output. In fact, they weight the participation in the FriendFeed community more heavily than participation in other communities.
This is important. Although FriendFeedHolic is separate from FriendFeed, they have found the way to isolate and target those users who are most likely to participate and create conversations. These users, be it Scoble or Mona N, are where advertisers and marketers can target their money.
How would they do this?
Think about it. If someone that is a large commenter or conversation-creator on FriendFeed creates new content, they are assigned a higher ranking in the new conversation-driven ad-discovery model that advertisers will have to create to succeed.
This new targeted advertising logic will be forced to discover:

• The content of the conversation
• The context of the conversation
• The tone of the conversation
• The participants in the conversation

This model will be able to identify when it is an inward-facing conversation that involves mostly super-users, or if it is a conversation that engages a wide-spectrum of people.
Conversations among super-users will lead to more passive advertising being shown, as that is a spectator event, with only a few participants.
Conversations created by super-users, or that involve super-users, but have a higher participation from the general community will get more intelligent attention to ensure that the marketing messages and advertising shown fit the four criteria above.
In this new model, advertisers will have to see that they can’t simply slap a set of ads up on the popular kids web sites. They will have to understand who leads a community, who generates buzz, and who can engage the most people on a regular basis.
In this model, the leader has far less power than the community that they create. And maintain.

moar funny pictures

Full Story here.

If you can see this post, the DNS system has finally propagated my new host information out to the Web, and you have reached me at the new server, located at BlueHost.
After my LinkedIN request last night, I got two separate rcommendations for BlueHost, both from folks I highly respect.
Let me know what you think.

In the last few months, I have talked on a couple of occasions on how an outage can affect a brand, be it personal or corporate [here and here].

Yesterday my servers experienced a 11-hour network outage due to a broken upstream BGP route.

It’s sometimes scary to see how worn the cobbler’s shoes are.