Network Solutions – Squat for the Win
This is a whole lot of crap. There are allegations, and proof, that Network Solutions reserves domains that people perform whois look-ups for on their site. WTF? If their excessive prices weren’t enough, now they are stealing from people in a second way.
Due to my minimal interaction with web programmers and technology people from birth till now, even though I’ve been doing development for 5 years, I am just learning about incredibly cool Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (http://aws.amazon.com/s3). You can store unlimited amounts of data for $.15 a GB. Ridonculous. You pay $1.80 for 1 year of storing 1 GB of your files in their storage system. The cool thing is all the great apps you could build on top of this. Imagine being able to hook up to this via DAV or Samba… You could easily have a plugin to store all of your My Documents into this thing and never have to worry about your computer dying and you losing all your data. Though you could always setup a RAID and have 2 x 320GB drives with an effective one-time-cost of about $.53 a GB. But thats only if you have 300GB of music, but most everyone just has 3GB of files and photos.
It looks like this has been out for nearly a year now, but I’m interested to see if they adapt this and promote other easy ways of storing and accessing your data. Like I said in one of my recent posts, the easier something is for a person to do, the more likely it is they will do it.
This great photographer at Jet (Michael at MLA Photonix) on New Years Eve took almost 50 pics of me djing and with Stephanie. And I am damn appreciative… You can find the link here from my imagery page.
Everyday is a new music day… I love this track. Its off Daft Punk Musique Vol 1, which is a couple years old, but hard to keep up with everything… I refixed the track a little to remove an annoying dude with a German accent. It’s more club friendly now.
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Look what those crazy innovators in Japan have created. Unfortunately it is totally sold out, and no more are being made, but hopefully they’ll be back based on popular demand. A man can only wish…
So I signed up for Twitter today because I saw my that my new boss (Alex King) had his Twitter status on his blog (http://alexking.org). So I decided to try it out. Twitter is basically a tool you can use to share what you are doing or thinking at any given instant with your friends. You are limited to 140 characters, so its great because you have to be concise.
Now, Alex has this whole list of Twitter updates on his site which is really cool, because he can effectively share things very easily via his blog without ever touching a computer. All you have to do is send an SMS to 40404. Then it got me to thinking how this could be turned into an application for a cell phone where you can post directly to twitter via a net connection, not via an intermediary like a SMS message that takes a few hops to get to Twitter.
I easily take tangents, hence the short paragraphs that each break into new directions, but these thoughts lead me to think about how you might be able to write a cell phone app to perform this simple task. But you can’t really, because how the hell are you going to make it compatible with all these hundreds of mobile operating systems? Thats when I got really excited about Android.
Android is Google’s open source mobile phone operating system that they have going as a new initiative. The exciting thing is that anyone can contribute either code or ideas to help develop what is likely going to be one of the most useful things since the cotton mill, with arguably as much controversy.
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I have an idea that should be an entirely different blog post, and really is something that is commonly understood, but often disregarded: More people will do something if it is easy. Applicable in any variety of places, but in this context the perfect example: Ruby on Rails. Its so much easier to develop in Ruby on Rails, so people can still be lazy, but build quality applications that they wouldn’t otherwise pursue due it typically being much more time consuming and complicated in other frameworks or languages. As well, ROR is extremely well thought out / strategized, and forces users to follow (and subsequently learn) important and good coding conventions to successfully build their applications. Furthermore, you can easily integrate (with one command at the console and a few lines of code) a lot of plug-ins that have a lot of easily reusable functionality (like GeoKit for incredibly easy Geocoding, or File Column for file and image handling). The outcome has been really great applications that people that are a little or very lazy would not have otherwise built.
So, imagine that if Android is that easy too, a large number developers will put effort into building solid applications.
The more thought there is that goes into designing a solid framework, the easier it will be to develop applications that are inherently good quality, and as it would be easy to develop applications, a greater number of people will build interesting applications.
This follows through to another idea: the more accessible a powerful tool is, the more innovation there is. Ruby on Rails is definitely powerful, but an even better example is what Apple has done with things like Final Cut & Logic. It lets people like my friend Greg Hydle develop amazing “studio” quality movies out of their own garage. And Logic lets any enthusiast or professional create amazing music on their home $2000 laptop. Its $1300 for Final Cut Studio and $500 for Logic. Both are what major movie houses use to create $100 million movies. I will have a separate blog post for this bad boy too.
I have steered far away from what my original point was: imagine all the cool and useful stuff that you could create for your mobile phone if Android is developed intuitively…
We’ll see what Apple has to show come February when they are supposed to release their SDK for the iPhone. I love how the iPhone has pushed everyone to develop much cooler products, so lets see if Google’s response is as well conceptualized as the iPhone is.
Yeah momma! It’s sloppy joe night at the Khadiwala residence. That is, the Armen and Jameela Khadiwala residence, and I have me a ticket. I love me some sloppy joe!
Here are some useful pieces of sloppy joe info:
Thats about all the interesting stuff I could find…
This track has probably been out for a while, but I dig it, so I share it:
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Anti Gym was on Fox National News this past week, and I made my national debut in djing. Had to get up at 5:30am on New Year’s Eve to get down to the gym and setup for djing. Damn early, but it was a good time. And had a shot of pomegranate vodka at the end of it to start my day… Do work son!
Click here to see the video, and click on the “Can You Handle It?” link.
