- Apple’s iPhone Wrecking the Cell Industry — bleat bleat. Andy Oram’s comment hits the mark: The music companies and AT&T were like travelers who refused to believe they were taking a long trip. They didn’t pack warm clothing, and therefore had to buy it at disadvantageous terms when they came to need it. Apple was more sophisticated about where all companies are going technologically, so they had what others needed.
- Fruux — a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs. (via Daniel Raffel)
- Redflax — notable not just for art, but for the Maori quote: He toi whakaaro, he mana tangata – roughly translates: where there is creativity/artistic expression, there is human dignity/prowess.
- Google’s Chiller-less Data Center — Belgium has only 7 days (on average) when the ambient air temperature isn’t enough to cool the data center. Finally, a business model for unpleasantly-cold climates.
"sync" entries
Four short links: 20 July 2009
Four short links: 13 Jan 2009
Apologies for the delay. Just remember Douglas Adams’s great line: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
- Misconceptions and Objections to Gaza Mapping – Mikel Maron deals to objections about the OpenStreetMap call for help to build an accurate free streetmap of Gaza. This is fantastic work from OSM.
- Twenty Most Practical and Creative Uses of jQuery – I am generally loathe to link to linkbait (“X most Y Zs!”) even though I’m guilty of it myself. This just pushes my jQuery love button, and the jQuery love button loves to be pushed.
- http://rocketstrikes.iamnear.net – as you cruise around London, find out where the bombs struck in WW II. There are huge opportunities for locative services to open up historical geodata like this, in the same way that Pepys Diary Blog and Dear Miss Griffis have brought old diaries to life.
- Differential Synchronization – the solution to the problem of “two people are editing the same document at the same time, and you need to make sure they’re each seeing the same thing”.
Palm's webOS Represents Major Shift for Syncing and Data
In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their models of data storage and access: Users just make changes to their data (contacts, calendar, mail, etc.), and Palm's webOS handles committing those changes to whatever canonical data source it…