The man behind Fake Steve Jobs has bid adieu…to himself. Newsweek’s Dan Lyons will cease posting to his “Real Dan Lyons” blog after he made some comments that were taken as less than favorable by their subjects. In a recent post on the departure of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang (archived at Valleywag), Lyons wrote of Yahoo’s PR team, who had told him that Yang wasn’t going anywhere:
I’d never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators—they’re really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of s* put one of Yahoo’s attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true “inside story” of what was going on with the Google deal, which was, he informed me, that the deal with Google was a sure thing, definitely going to happen, no way in hell is the deal not going to happen, there are no real objections from the regulators, they’re fine with it, the objections from advertisers are not an issue, blah blah blah.
That deal, you may remember, fell apart like a wet newspaper in the mouth of a pitbull. Anyway, apparently Yahoo’s PR team objected to their characterization (we presume it was the word sacks that really got them riled), a complaint which made its way to Lyons’s employers at Newsweek, prompting him to pull the blog entry. Or, as Lyons himself described it to the AP:
“The bottom line is I don’t want to jeopardize a job I like (and which feeds my hungry 3-year-old twins) over some blog that’s just a funny little thing I’m doing in my spare time,” Lyons wrote. “Or, to translate this into Fake Steve speak: I’m a coward and a whore who has totally sold out to The Man.”
We understand Lyons’s reluctance to upset his corporate overlords, but we also kind of wish he stood by his remarks, if not for himself then for everybody who’s been forced to deal with…shall we say, circumlocutious PR reps.
As the old saying goes, you learn something new everyday. But sometimes you learn something and forget something. Yesterday was one of those days. While writing up VoodooPad 4, I thought I’d open up some of my VoodooPad files to check out the new features.
I mostly use VP files to keep track of notes and ideas for fiction writing that I do in my spare time; it’s great for building connections between different concepts and characters. And as I used to maintain multiple computers, I’d gotten into the habit of using my iDisk for file storage so I could access said files no matter where I was. As an added benefit, I figured that would give me multiple synchronized copies of files in different locations to help safeguard against data loss.
I’d also assumed that Apple itself backed up the iDisk files, as most large server installations do. This wasn’t blind assumption either; back in 2005, Apple recovered files that had disappeared from my iDisk:
We isolated an issue with your iDisk, which is now fixed and we recovered the missing items for your iDisk Documents folder. To access the recovered data, please connect to your iDisk and navigate to the Recovered Items folder that is now present in your iDisk Documents folder. Please note there may be duplicate copies of some of the files.
Fast-forward to yesterday. I open up the VoodooPad files on my iDisk only to find they won’t open. And when I check them out in the Finder, I discover that’s because they register as 0KB in size.
Continue reading "The perfect storm of data loss: a cautionary tale"
There are a surfeit of browsers on OS X, everything from the likes of Safari and Firefox to newer entries like Cruz and Stainless. Maybe you stick to a single browser all the time or maybe you, like me, find yourself switching back and forth a bit. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easier way?
That’s where Choosy comes in. Install this little preference pane and set it as your default browser. Then, when you click a hyperlink in your mail client or other application, Choosy will let you choose from a pop-up list of your installed browsers. Using Choosy’s preferences, you can have tweak a number of options, such as only showing you currently running browsers, or picking and choosing which browsers you want to appear in the list.
For those that often switch back and forth between multiple browsers (such as web developers), Choosy can be a godsend. Right now the program’s still in beta, so you’ll need to send in your email address to get a copy. The final version will be shareware, but if you grab a beta copy now, you’ll also snag a discount code.
[via Daring Fireball]
Guys, I’ve got some bad news. You might want to sit down. Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo, well, he’s resigning. I know this is going to be hard on all of us, but—wait, what? You knew? But, how? Oh. Right. There was that whole begging Microsoft to take them back after they shot Redmond down like Jenny Slater when I asked her to the senior prom. Yeah. And the failed deal with Google. And the fact that Yahoo’s stock closed at under $11 yesterday.
Yeah—it hasn’t been a great year for you, Jerry, has it?
Anyway, Yang, who also co-founded the company back in, oh, 1845 or so, will step down as CEO, but will remain on the board under his old title of Chief Yahoo (chief Yahoo? We’ll see what Mr. Serious has to say about that). No news on who might replace Yang as CEO, but a little Googling suggests that we may have found just the person to, erm, take the opposite direction from Yang.
Man, Taoist humor gets me every time.
When it comes to software development, bugs are the enemy. They can make your software behave in unpredictable ways, creeping and crawling through your code. But bugs aren’t always the fault of the third-party developer—sometimes they have their root in things out of their control—like, say, Apple’s own software.
Apple’s long maintained a system for tracking bugs called Radar, which allows developers to submit problems that they’ve discovered. Unfortunately, Radar doesn’t allow for searching bugs other than ones you submitted, so if you’re looking to see who else might be having similar problems, or whether a particular bug has already been noted, you’re out of luck.
That’s why developer Tim Burks took it upon himself to create an open-source system that allows for those capabilities, based on Google’s App Engine. Since Apple’s own database often contains protected information, Burks took a simple but clever solution: create a duplicate database into which developers could file the same bugs they’re reporting to Apple, but which allows for searching and other features that Radar doesn’t. The system, dubbed Open Radar, has already attracted a lot of attention from devs, who have quickly begun populating it with issues they’ve discovered.
So why should non-devs care? Well, the simple answer is that the more access to information that developers have, the faster they can corroborate and identify bugs, thus the more solid and reliable your software gets. And if Apple happens to take this as a message about changing the way they do business, even better.
One of the most oft-requested, but inexplicably absent, features for Google Talk has been the ability to have an audio/video conference with other users. And although Google Talk still remains the only mainstream IM client on Windows which lacks the ability to have an audio/video conference, Google has now added this feature to Gmail itself.
Using a proprietary browser plugin (a 2.4MB download), that's compatible with Safari 3.x and Firefox 2.x and above on the Mac, the web-based chat client in Gmail now offers users the additional capabilities of having a two-way audio and video chat with other people on their contact list (as long as they have a Gmail account and have the plugin installed).
Although it offers some neat features like the ability to "pop-out" the chat widget and fullscreen support, there are some limitations too. For one thing, it only supports two-way chats, so you can't hold a conference with more than a single person at the same time. For another, you can't record these chats, although that's only a minor quibble.
On the plus side, though, these features are free of charge and cross-platform by their very nature (though it's not available on Linux yet). If they haven't yet appeared in your Gmail account, just give it a day or two. Read on to see how well it works in the real world.
Continue reading "Google adds sights, sounds to Gmail chat"
Ever wondered what that “IMAP” business in your email client was all about? Well, lucky for you, Apple’s using its public mouthpiece at the MobileMe blog to let you know all the gory details:
There aren’t many industry acronyms it helps to know about, but IMAP is one of them. The words the letters stand for, Internet Message Access Protocol, don’t exactly cause the heart to leap, but the protocol itself defines a promise that matters a lot to anyone who handles their mail from more than one location.
Is it just me or is the MobileMe blog is getting increasingly odd? Posts pop up at seemingly random, as though some engineer somewhere is slapping his head and saying “Oh, crap. I forgot to write a post for that blog?”, then digs through Wikipedia to find something to write about. This from one of the few places on the Web where Apple actually communicates directly with its customers—customers who pay $99 a year, no less. Nothing about the service having issues on Monday? Or other issues? You mean to tell me that MobileMe is working perfectly smoothly right now? In the immortal words of Messrs. Campbell and Algar: “cha, right.”
Anyway, this is just my way of saying: gee, thanks, Apple. I can’t wait to see your rendition of how a bill becomes a law.
Apple may be a lot more forthcoming about what they’re doing in the background to fix MobileMe these days, but that doesn’t mean they’ve sorted out all issues with the perpetually sketchy service. According to a post on Royal Pingdom, visitors to the MobileMe homepage yesterday were greeted with a very unfriendly error message: “Not Found: Resource does not exist.” Not the most amusing way to greet your customers, I can tell you that.
Apparently, it was some issue with the domain name and not the service itself. Typing ‘http://me.com/mail’ in the address bar would take you to your MobileMe inbox as you’d expect it to, but both ‘http://me.com’ and ‘http://www.me.com’ were inaccessible. The outage lasted almost seven hours, from 2:29 AM EST to 9:25 AM EST.
As should be evident from the nature of the problem, none of MobileMe services were hampered and anyone who didn’t visit the web version of MobileMe yesterday, like me, shouldn’t have noticed any glitches at all. Apple hasn’t posted any information about this latest hiccup with MobileMe anywhere. We’re expecting some mention of it on a support page six months from now. Or not.
[Via TUAW]
