A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.

MSFT History

26 January 2004

Download details: Key Events in Microsoft History – they missed my hire date, but they have this surreal item that I was involved with – “4/18/1994 Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 has become the world’s best-selling retail operating system, edging Windows 3.1 into the No. 2 spot”

Bose Companion 3

26 January 2004

Bose? Home Entertainment - Companion? 3 multimedia speaker system – I tried these out recently and was really impressed. Great sound and the little desktop controller for volume/muting is very very nice. I’m probably going to get some more for an additional machine, though they are out of stock everywhere. (I am also fascinated by how Bose keeps their MSRP up – you see no discounting of Bose products, no gray market stuff, even Ebay prices stay high. They have some distribution magic).

iTunes hackery

24 January 2004

Tong Family Blog: What is MyTues, QTFairUse and Audio Hijack? – Rich has a good summary of all the iTunes hackery that is going on. Kind of humorous to read articles over the last month that file-sharing is declining – sure seems alive and well.

Rich, I wonder how long til someone writes a CD drive emulator that just lays down the written tracks as MP3s on the hard disk. There are CD emulators today that read/write to hard disk; seems like no reason you couldn’t recode the data as MP3 along the way.

Basic, PERL on phones

23 January 2004

From Mobilewhack, news that Basic and PERL are coming to phones. I’d love to replace my stupid default phone screen with a little script that succinctly displayed the weather forecast, the most recent scores and next scheduled game for my favorite teams.

Where I've Been

22 January 2004

John Battelle’s Searchblog: I Know I Saw It Somewhere… … hmm, don’t I just want to use my blog as my history of interesting and relevant sites? At least for me, the blog is the best repository of sites I need to remember – I get to add commentary to the link, I can search the links, the links are available every place I need them.

Trying out Blogjet

22 January 2004

Trying out blogjet on Marc’s reco – Marc’s Outlook on Productivity: More on Blogjet – it is nice. But it doesn’t really work for me because it assumes you want your post content in a separate paragraph than your title, which is not how i format my entries – for short entries like mine, this creates far too much whitespace for my eye. The lack of underlying code access means I can’t easily fix this. So I have to pass on blogjet.

Grocery Slotting Fees

22 January 2004

Oligopoly Watch – interesting insight on grocery slotting fees. And interesting that Wal-Mart doesn’t take them. There is no Wal-Mart conveniently nearby, if there was I would give them a try.

Blackberry and Outlook2003

22 January 2004

Struggling with a blackberry problem right now – won’t sync correctly with Outlook 2003 – a search on error #4198 at the BlackBerry support forums reveals that I am not alone. How long has Outlook 2003 been out now? Surprising to me that the bberry dudes have no fix for.