Recently, app.net has gotten a lot of attention, but I just don’t see the appeal. It’s basically a Twitter clone that you have to pay, and all of this for what? So that the API is nicer to developers and you don’t see a couple of “promoted tweets” once in a while?
It sounds like a very shallow goal for a supposedly “disruptive” communication platform. Sure it has some kind of grand plan to get us to the next level of connectedness through, err, innovative apps and mashups or something. But it doesn’t make things better on the ownership level. It’s still yet another data silo. And I’m fed up with silos.
Remember when we used to communicate through free, open, distributed and standardized protocols? You know, like emails or phone calls? Or even snail mail? My problem with Facebook or Twitter is not that I’m the product, but that I don’t own my data, and that there’s no competition or choice between service providers. They’re not only data silos, but business model silos.
Almost 4 years ago, I wrote a short article on dumb websites who have a
maxiumum password length.
Now, in 2012, there are still websites with such stupid policies. One of
the most famous is none other than Microsoft’s Live Account service, which
serves as the authentication hub for all things Microsoft. Basically, your Live
ID, or whatever it’s called, can’t have a password longer than 16 characters.
Back in the first part of this 2-part post we looked in some detail at how MacOS mounts
network shares, and how badly designed this feature is compared to its Windows
counterpart.
We’ll now look at the solution I’m using to fix the problem, which is to mount
network shares in a consistent way for a multi-user machine.
If you asked me a year ago what was the most awesome feature that Windows has and that
MacOS doesn’t, I would have probably scratched my head for a bit, mentally
sorting through all the obscure advanced things you can do with the Windows SDK
and a few lines of code, or all the little things that make organizing files so
much easier than with the horrible Mac Finder.
But if you ask me now, I’ll reply straight away this: mapped network drives.
You would think there’s not much to it, but this has been my biggest problem
as a user when I switched to a Macbook Pro as my main machine. In the first part
of this 2-part post, we’ll look at the problem. Go to part 2 for the
solution I’m using.
The 0.8.0 (and even 0.8.1!) version of PieCrust has been tagged in the stable branch.
As usual:
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I still need to write some documentation on the new and/or changed features.
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I’m really not good at keeping a single release focused around a small set of
consistent new features. I tend to pack different unrelated features mixed
with bug fixes as they come to me, and the result is a bit messy.
You can read about the changes in the CHANGELOG, or keep reading for a
detailed description of the highlights. Or you can just go and grab it from
BitBucket or Github and trust me that it’s awesome! (but wait, you
should at least read the first couple sections here below because there are a
few breaking changes).