Newsfire is now free - Does anybody care?

After NetNewsWire went free, it put pressure on all the vendors of fat-client RSS readers. David Watanabe recently announced that Newsfire was going free as well. The question I ask is... does anybody care?



Don't get me wrong, I like Newsfire... I actually paid for it way back when. It is a beautiful and highly usable application. The problem is that once Google Reader came out, any desire to use NewsFire got snuffed out. I haven't opened it up in ages. These days, it's not worth paying for an RSS reader, given that so many applications offer the functionality for free.

Randy Pausch's "Final Lecture"

Like most of you, I get a lot of 'fluff mail' from friends and family. Most of it gets deleted before it even gets read, and sometimes the stuff that does get read receives a response with a link to the urban-legends site Snopes. But on occasion, I do receive a gem. My brother sent me a video of a professor who was Oprah reprising his "final lecture". In his case, it really was his final lecture - he has a terminal case of cancer. Dr. Randy Pausch delivers a frank but heartfelt lecture on how to live your life that I think is worth seeing.



Note that the lecture on Oprah was shortened. YouTube has the full lecture if you've got over an hour to spare.



I didn't really know how to categorize this video, but since the video is about how you should lead your life, I ended up choosing Lifehacks.

CodeIgniter

I've been looking at various MVC (model-view-controller) frameworks for web programming, such as Ruby on Rails, CakePHP and CodeIgniter.



All three are very nice frameworks, designed to shorten the development life cycle for web applications. After watching the screencast for CodeIgniter, I was highly impressed by the small learning curve to getting applications up and running. CodeIgniter is a good enough framework to help a beginning PHP programmer learn solid technique and form. CakePHP is more powerful, but at the price of complexity, making it ideal for a seasoned PHP programmer. Rails is pretty awesome, but Ruby is still considered a "cutting edge" programming language.

The key to any project is to provide a framework that accelerates the development process. I really like CodeIgniter because you can have a decent prototype of a web application very quickly. The documentation is stellar (never underestimate the value of quality documentation), at least compared to CakePHP.

So far, CodeIgniter is going to be my framework of choice. It's light, it's fast, and it's easy. Oh ya, it's free too.

Telus Considering GSM?

There has been a buzz lately about the idea of Telus considering the implementation of GSM in Canada. I hope it's true -- there's not enough GSM competition. I don't think it's any guarantee that we'll see the iPhone here any time soon. The biggest hurdle to the iPhone are the data plan rates. Given that there's a pretty strong oligopoly here in the cellular business, it's unlikely you'll see a $60 AT&T-style iPhone plan here any time soon.



I'm hoping we see some new entrants with the spectrum auction this spring. Having some new blood in the cellular industry is the only way we're going to see any decent pricing plans with data. I have a $5/month data plan with Rogers, and for that, I get a piddly 5MB of data. You would think that we could do a little better than this in Canada.

Falling Hillary

I'm not taking sides on the Democratic nomination race, but I came across a Flash animation that was hilarious and hypnotic at the same time.



Check out the Falling Hillary Screensaver. If she gets stuck, you can use the mouse and free her. The physics behind the animation is quite incredible.

Opera Is My New Best Friend

Firefox has been my browser of choice for quite some time. When writing JavaScript code, I find that Firefox's debugger is an excellent tool to find issues that Internet Exploder would otherwise not reveal.



Last week, I came across an especially insidious JavaScript error. The kind that even my venerable Firefox could not identify. A product that shall remain nameless had some dynamically generated scripts that were not loading into the web page, because they were pointing to an incorrect path.

I had a strong suspicion that a remote JavaScript was performing a function like below:

document.write("<script type='text/javascript' src='wrongpath/scriptfile.js'>");

Even worse, this piece of code was being loaded dynamically. Firefox could not see or tell me that wrongpath did not exist. In a fit of desperation, I installed Safari (for Windows) and Opera. I loaded up Opera, and turned on the debugger.

Lo and behold, the debugger revealed the remote JavaScript files that couldn't be loaded. Problem solved, and I have a very happy client. Opera is definitely part of my default troubleshooting toolbox now. I've got a nice cozy spot for it right next to Filemon.

The Big Word Project

The Big Word Project could become the next Internet zeitgeist or it could just be a dud.

In any case, it's the novel concept of two Irish students.



The idea? Basically it's a dictionary with the words for sale. At a dollar a letter, to be exact. What you get in return is that the word you buy links to a website of your choice.

Geek and nerd were taken, so I had to settle for the superlatives, geekiest and nerdiest. I'll be keeping an eye on Google Analytics to see whether these novelty purchases actually translate into traffic.


It will be interesting to see where this goes.

iStockPhoto - Stock Media on the Cheap

iStockPhoto is a great resource for inexpensive but high quality photos, clip art and movies.

With prices starting as low as a dollar, it's hard to argue that the "microstock" movement hasn't transformed the landscape of stock media in the past five years. A few years ago, I paid Getty Images about a hundred bucks for a 640x480 image on my web site. To get a similar image on iStock, I would have literally paid a buck... at least at the same resolution. A print ready image would have cost me about ten bucks, still a steal.



These days, I find myself using stock images quite frequently, given that a web image can cost the same as a song on iTunes. If you find yourself in a pinch for a stock image, icon or illustration, you should definitely give iStock a looksie.