Whirlycott / Philip Jacob

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Google Analytics Blog: Raising your profile

Filed under: Technology — Philip Jacob @ 4:45 pm

We’ll continue to add benefits like this for existing users - and there are more and more of you every day.

How about you people over at Google Analytics stop adding new features and start fixing the multi-hour long periods in which your product appears to simply lose data?

Here’s a screenshot of traffic on La Tartine Gourmande, Bea’s blog. Flip your stats into an hourly view and you’ll see the same drop off.

google-data-dropped.jpg

So, Google, how about fixing this? It’s not the first time it’s happened.


Sunday, September 17, 2006

An unintended consequence of Apple DRM

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 8:05 pm

I use iTunes to manage my music collection which is stored on a Debian Linux file server and accessed via Samba.  My entire collection is MP3 files because (a) I don’t like encumbered music and (b) Apple’s DRM files don’t play on my Squeezebox.

When I buy stuff from iTunes, I have to burn the songs to a blank CD and then re-import them to iTunes as MP3 files.  I used to use JHymn to do this automatically without having to waste a blank CD, but Apple did something with iTunes, so this solution doesn’t work anymore.

What do I do with the CD after I’ve imported it?  I give it to someone, usually a friend if they’re over for dinner or something.

Tell me who this DRM stuff is helping, eh?  Because right now it seems like it’s causing me to waste time burning these stupid CDs and guaranteeing that one of my friends get a copy of my latest music.


Friday, September 15, 2006

Ten major news stories the media is ignoring - MarketWatch

Filed under: Pointers — Philip Jacob @ 8:30 pm

Ten major news stories the media is ignoring - MarketWatch

Yeah, that’s worth reading.  Via Jim Moore.


Overheard…

Filed under: Quotes — Philip Jacob @ 9:41 am

“I have a long family history of… disaster” - Aaron Weber


Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise

Filed under: Technology — Philip Jacob @ 8:04 pm

Via John Palfrey:

Microsoft has just unveiled a new commitment not to assert certain rights against people who develop code based on specifications that Microsoft has developed. It’s called the Open Specification Promise.

Interesting to observe that Microsoft did not include their RSS extensions (called SSE) in this list of specifications covered by their promise, a problem that I highlighted almost a year ago.

There is a difference between (a) putting a certain type of liberal copyright on a specification of a protocol or file format and (b) allowing unencumbered implementations of such specification. Microsoft has acknowledged as much with their new Open Specification Promise.

An analogy might be if I publish a recipe for baking a cake under a Creative Commons license, you might still not be able to actually bake the cake because I have some kind of an patent, pending or otherwise, on implementations of the cake.