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The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: October 2007

Microsoft to Release .NET Framework Source Code

Microsoft .NET FrameworkI’ve covered a few stories on this blog [1], [2], [3] where Microsoft is making some positive strides toward opening up to the concept of open source, particularly in relation to it’s software development arm.

On October 3rd Scott Guthrie, manager of the teams who build the development and platform tools at Microsoft, announced that the source code for the .NET Framework would be released with the next release of Visual Studio (VS 2008).  This announcement is the latest in a series of moves by Microsoft over the past couple of years.

Though the source code will be available for download and reference by software developers, it will be licensed under the Microsoft Reference License, meaning that the source will not be freely distributable.

Still, this is a major step forward for the software giant, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next step will be on the journey toward peaceful coexistence with the open source community.

Bacn – SPAM: The Next Generation

A new term has started to emerge over the last several months to describe the SPAM you get that’s your own doing. The Term is BACN (note the Web 2.0-esque missing “o”). All of those mailing lists, Facebook notifications, Friendster blog-update alerts and Microsoft VS Developer notices were things that you thought you wanted to get in your inbox, but every time one comes in you just decide to turf it.

Bacn
Image: jted on Flickr

This image really does illustrate the point nicely (though the Spam cut is probably a bit too small…). I have to admit, that despite the amount of junk email I get, and lots of it is Bacn, I still continue to sign up for notifications of things. I think it’s just the innate fear of missing something. This way I get all the information I might want to read someday, but most likely I’ll just ignore it.

According to the Wikipedia article, and a couple of other sources, the term Bacn was coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in August 2007. Apparently this is what you get when you cross over-zealous twiterers with Canadian bacon and a boring stint at the registration table.

I’ve noticed that I take a similar approach to some of the podcasts and other feeds I have subscribed. Even though I never actually read that feed from TechCrunch, I’m reticent to delete it because someday there might be a good story in there for a blog entry or some other purpose.

At the end of the day Bacn is self-inflicted, so I guess I’d better shut up and start fryin’.

iTunes – Restore Deleted Podcast Episodes

I just had a devil of a time trying to restore a deleted podcast in iTunes (this week’s episode of the GGP actually).  The episode in question had failed to download in its entirety and so I decided to delete it, and add in a manually downloaded copy.  Yea, no such luck.

Once the episode was deleted, iTunes refused to allow me to force the correct file back into the right place.  It’s just this sort of “I know better than you” attitude that drives us Windows & Linux geeks CRAZY about some of the OS X applications.

There is (thankfully) a feature of iTunes that will allow me to re-download the episode from the feed. Here it is in three simple steps:

  1. Collapse the feed in iTunes
  2. Hold down the Option (Alt) key and re-expand it
  3. All the available episodes will re-appear, simply “Get” the one(s) you want

I don’t know if anyone else has had this problem, but here’s the workaround just in case.

Thanks to Dennia on My Mac Blog for her nearly 2-year old post which saved the day.

Mac Lab Rat #10 – Global Geek Podcast

Well here we are, the 10th edition of the Mac Lab Update for Global Geek Podcast #65!

This week’s first tool is a Dashboard Widget called Delivery Status that will allow you to track packages from over a dozen different companies. This quick and dirty widget allows you to quickly hunt down that pesky new Wii, iPhone or eBay package that you’ve been waiting for without having to remember which website you need to find to look it up.

Some of the packages it can track are:
- US Postal Service & CanadaPost
- Posten in Sweeden & Norway
- FEDEX
- Apple
- Nintendo
and several others…

Not all services are are available in all countries, but it’s a really good start. There’s even compatibility with Growl to notify you when a package’s status changes.

Download Delivery Status from Mike Piontek‘s website.

Second on the block this week is a set of scripts for Apple’s Mail and Address Book apps. The scripts were written by Andreas Amann and are a collection of AppleScripts that are used in conjuntion with the standard OS X mail application to add many new features, and enhance some existing ones.

The API available to AppleScript and Cocoa developers for most of the built-in apple applications provides a myriad opportunities for elements of the applications to be scripted, or to combine them together.

Some of the scripts provided by “Mail Scripts” are:

- Add addresses: Not just the sender, but any email address contained in the header of the message (to, from, cc etc…) (Integrates with Address Book to store contact information)

- Create new Mail rules based on the selected message. this saves lots of tedious data-entry

- Schedule Mail Delivery for a later time/date. This allows you to write and pre-send a message, and then let the Mail application deliver it to its target at the appointed time. (integrates with iCal for scheduling)

There are several other scripts as well. If you’re a regular Apple Mail user, and find it lacking any of these capabilities, download Mail Scripts.

Third up this week is SketchBox, developed by Germany’s OMZ:Software. Sketchbox is a desktop-sticky application for the Mac which allows you to either draw or type notes to yourself. The sticky notes have two separate layers, a drawing canvas and a text input box.

The stickies can be deployed on your desktop, and will each occupy a space like a separate window, and can be managed while the main window is closed. The application will also allow the stickies to have alarms set on them, but they’re set in a timer format. You set the number of days, hours & minutes until the alarm goes off, instead of setting a specific time. At the appointed time, a cell-phone like ring will remind you of the task at hand.

Finally, Sketchbox provides support for tablet devices, allowing you to sketch to your heart’s content without even reaching for a keyboard. It’s in this context that the pull-slider interface for the alarms makes the most sense.

I’ve never really been a fan of Stickies type applications, and in some ways there’s quite a bit of polish missing from SketchBox. I’d love to see this type of functionality implemented as a dashboard widget instead. Still, the freehand drawing ability is pretty cool and I recommend at least taking a look at Sketchbox.

Last up this week is some tips for making use of a great built-in OS X feature called Aliases. This is a blog post from MyFirstMac.com which outlines some “killer-app” possibilities for what most consider at first blush to be a pretty innocuous feature of an OS.

The tips range from simple productivity gains for automatically reconnecting Network Drives, to workarounds for FrontRow’s limitation of not finding content outside of your Movies folder.

There’s a discussion started after this post with a few bonus tips as well, definitely worth a look for any Mac-Switcher’s out there, or those who just want to learn all they can about their mac.

Go and check this post out!