Dear MBW: I just want things to be like they used to

I used to love MacBreak Weekly. But I finally gave up and unsubscribed. Why? Here's an example. And keep in mind, this is not an isolated incident. This is a representative sample:

Episode #117. They've got Wil Shipley. Great guest. Should be a great show. Wil is (trying to) talk about scanning barcodes with a cellphone camera. Andy Ihnatko interrupts with a digression about how he takes pictures of books in the store and later buys them online. Leo LaPorte interrupts Andy with a digression about how buying books online is just so much more convenient. Andy interrupts Leo with a digression about how he's finding more and more books scanned into Google. Alex jumps in to defend the value of the printed book. The whole thing devolves into a discussion about which books are worth owning in physical form. (Answer: books with lots of pictures.) Total time before Wil even speaks again: six minutes. And he never did return to exactly the point he was trying to make before he was interrupted. It was just lost.

So okay, six minutes out of a 90 minute show, no big deal, right? Couple points. One, the thread of the meaningful conversation was destroyed by the interruption. Two, it happened again. Wil started to talk about using your mobile device for comparing prices, and the group launched into another digression about some camera store down the street that overcharges for everything. Elapsed time between the end of the first interruption and the start of the second: Forty-five seconds.

The conversations used to be more coherent. The digressions were fewer, and more interesting when they did happen. Remember the Rat Hole music? They don't even bother to play it anymore, because if they did, it would run non-stop.

It's not too late to right the ship, MBW. I miss the show you used to be.

In case you missed it in the 80s, here comes the sequel

App Store: I'm out (Fraser Speirs)

Apple Extends NDA to Rejection Letters (Arnold Kim)

Beneath Apple (Brent Simmons)

"[Microsoft] is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself."
   - Neal Stephenson in 1999

Slicehost: The Awesome Continues

Is it possible to restore a single file or directory from a backup?

I was recently in the same situation, it actually happened a little bit before Sep 4 and so I didn't have the benefit of looking at this thread. But I tried it anyway, just to see how Slicehost would handle it. I allocated a new slice sourced from the previous night's backup of my production slice. I scp'd my lost files back over to the production slice and then told Slicehost to delete the new slice. It took about 20 minutes to wait for the new slice to allocate, 10 minutes to retrieve my files, and 10 seconds to deallocate the new slice. Cost to me: 66 cents.

I don't know what these guys are thinking. With customer-friendly policies like these, how will they ever have a successful IPO?

I Guess I Should Fear For My Soul

Google Chrome

Google Chrome

John Gruber is on target when he says it sounds more like an application runtime than a browser. But the key point is that it is an application runtime optimized for the kinds of web applications that already exist. They're not trying to make a "next generation" browser like Ubiquity or push some new kind of embedded applet ("Rublets - now you can make RIAs with Ruby!") Based on this one comic book-style presentation, Chrome is monomaniacally focused on making the existing crop of HTML+Javascript+AJAX based web applications run like lightning. And by extension, expand the viability of that platform into the near-term future. Which makes sense, considering how much Google has invested into that platform. Reading between the lines, it seems like the Google Gears developers said "here's what we could do with Gears, but the existing browsers are too slow/too crude/etc." So someone at Google said "fine, let's make our own browser so that the Gears guys can go nuts."