Wanna Remember Steve Jobs? Go Read Folklore!

Posted on by Josh Peters

We all know that Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. Some folks take it more personally than others. My opinion of Steve Jobs is that he is Tron. In the original movie, Tron is described as someone who fights for the Users. That’s the idea in my head of Steve Jobs. I’ve read accounts of how in tune he was with what consumers cared about. He really was an embodiment of what you hope Capitalism produces: a specialist who understands his market better than anyone else and profits off of that.

But who wants to be thought of as a consumer? Truth be told, I never really liked Apple or Steve Jobs very much until I started reading stories collected on Folklore.org, a collection of stories maintained by Andy Hertzfeld. These stories really won me over. As a software developer, my emotions are mixed that I haven’t tried my hand at a startup. Folklore’s stories both relieve me and inspire me to want to try. The original Macintosh really was a great story to tell. I hope it takes less time for the equivalent story of the iPod and iPhone to come out, I’d be interested in hearing it.

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What To Do About Fraudulent SSL Certificates?

Posted on by Josh Peters

In case you’ve missed it, Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar issued a wildcard SSL certificate to someone who is not Google for *.google.com. The risk to most folks is that a third party can pretend to be Google for most intents and purposes. Very bad news.

As I listen to this week’s Security Now! podcast, I thought of a potential useful addition to the SSL trust model we employ today.

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Better Version Enforcement In Maven

Posted on by Josh Peters

This post is inspired by episode 341 of the Java Posse.

One criticism of Maven (esp. when compared to Apache Ivy) is a lack of enforcement of hard version numbers in dependencies. Maven allows you to specify inclusive and exclusive ranges for dependencies. The problem is, by default Maven doesn’t enforce those ranges.

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Total 180

Posted on by Josh Peters

Just a quick note, I have achieved my weight loss goal! I now weigh 180, down from my personal maximum of 235. I have been using the LoseIt app on my iPod touch, logging each meal and exercise since November.

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News from Google Chrome’s future

Posted on by Josh Peters

Future announcement from the Google Chromium team:

Now that YouTube, Gmail, and all of the rest of Google’s flagship assets are now accessible through the SPDY protocol, we are pleased to announce that a future version of Chromium (as well as Google Chrome and all versions of Chrome for Android) will remove support for HTTP.

Progress is not easy, and we know this move may adversely affect some of our customers (namely the ones who use the web for non-Google approved uses), but the future is now. SPDY offers many attractive new features that HTTP does not, so HTTP has got to go. Consumers will get used to the reality that nearly all of their favorite sites no longer work with our browser and can look forward to the day Chrome automatically updates itself to remove support for A technology not controlled by Google.

We know that our customers expect Chrome to be the fastest browser out there, which is why we ruthlessly cut out de facto standards in wide use after helping to get the public excited about those very standards in the first place. Just as we did away with animated GIF support (YouTube always was a better choice anyway) and non-Unicode character set support (up yours “Windows-1252″), HTTP can now be considered a museum piece next to Gopher.

What are you going to do, switch to Firefox?

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Calendar Invitations with Google and iPhone (or iPod Touch)

Posted on by Josh Peters

I have been using my iPod Touch for several weeks now, and have learned a great tip for making the calendar that much more useful if you use Google for your mail and calendar.

The issue with iOS and its Gmail integration is that there is no way out of the box to invite folks to a calendar event. If you choose the Exchange setup path instead of the Gmail setup path, you can get that killer feature back on your handheld device (I assume this would also work in Outlook, but I don’t use that for personal mail).

Another benefit of using Google as an Exchange server is that your contacts will be synched up too. The key setting is the server name, which is m.google.com. Using that setting enables you to have a calendar that you can add attendees to.

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Soundgarden reunited?!?

Posted on by Josh Peters

Welcome back to one of my favorite bands of the 90s! My wife can have her “Pumpkins” (as can you, future father of twins, Frank Kerous); give me the complex chord progressions of Chris Cornell any day of the week.

If you wanna buy the album, use the link below and I get a teeny, tiny sum of money.

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