Mike Cohen

Considering dropping IntelliTXT

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I’m thinking of dropping IntelliTXT from MacMegasite, since I find it really annoying and I’m sure most of my readers do as well. However it pays very well – about $30-$50/month, which pays for my web hosting.

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links for 2007-04-19

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The trouble with freeform tagging

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I decided to get rid of freeform tagging at MacMegasite because it was becoming too unmanageable. Since members can create their own tags by simply entering names, there were many duplicate tags with misspellings and lots of unique tags that were only assigned to a single post.

Drupal lists all taxonomy terms from different vocabularies together, so you can’t easily distinguish user-defined tags from primary topics. If a tag has the same name as a topic, a post with that tag won’t appear in the listing for that topic, which can make it more difficult to find content and can be confusing to users.

To make up for eliminating tags, I added several new topics, including iPhone and AppleTV. I’ll continue to refine the topics in the next few days to make it easier to find articles.

links for 2007-04-17

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Stallman: Game consoles are evil

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Game consoles are evil by ZDNet‘s John Carroll — Richard Stallman is the godfather of the Free Software Movement. He is also maddeningly hard core in his beliefs, to the point where I wonder if he would allow doctors to work on him if the machines they were using run anything but open source software. The following is an excerpt from an interview given […]

Sony is at it again

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Slashdot: ‘It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of ‘feature’ that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn’t appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it’s up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.’

Remember Sony’s CD copy protection that installed a rootkit? Or their constant war against homebrew PSP software? Sony’s motto is the opposite of Google: “Always do evil”.

Leopard Delayed

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Although I’m disappointed about Leopard being delayed until October, I’m not really in that much of a hurry to update to it. There aren’t any compelling features that make me want to update. I don’t use Safari or Apple Mail – I use firefox & gmail on the web, so I don’t really care about the improvements to those applications. I use Deja Vu to automatically back up my machine daily, so I probably won’t use Time Machine. The improvements in Leopard (minus the “top secret features” Steve Jobs hyped) are refinements rather than major breakthroughs.

Apple released a new developer build, 9A410, yesterday shortly before their announcement. As a developer, I downloaded and installed it on an external drive. There don’t seem to be too many major changes from the last build. I’m very disappointed that a bug I reported (which is already a known problem, rdar://4778258) is still present. It won’t calculate space correctly on my TeraStation share mounted via NFS, showing 3GB free rather than 525GB. Like the last build, I only boot it long enough to test my software and then go back to 10.4.