Dreamhost down again
Yesterday all tubes were full
Please don’t bust my balls

Microsoft doesn’t always produce crap. Entourage is actually a pretty good email application and I’ve been using it for years now.
But I’ve decided to revisit Mail.app and it’s also a great e-mail application, but one of the reasons I’ve never used it was because I could never figure out how to tell the application to use my IMAP folders (on Dreamhost) for specific functions like using my IMAP “Trash” as the real Trash, etc.
Thanks to my buddy dalematic, I’ve found the solution:

note: this problem was previously solved using this method.

Hey, after almost 5 months, Nokia MOSH is finally live to the public (we initially had the Alpha version open to a small group of testers). You can upload your own content, or collect other peoples’ and have it immediately available for your phone via the mobile version of the site (you don’t need a Nokia phone).
This site is the result of a lot of hard work by both Nokia and Schematic New York. For as much art direction and design I did, it wouldn’t be worth anything if it weren’t for all the hard backend and client-side development from my Nokia team at Schematic. We also had great project management (thanks Eoin).
Big ups to Ian, Vinny, Wes, Maggie, Emily, Andrew, Jason, Brian, Eoin, David, JP, Del, Chris, Ben, Kevin, Karolina, Pablo and everyone else who contributed!

Shots from this weekend – About Town 8.5.2007.

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity

• Occam’s razor, by William of Ockham

So I downloaded my first DRM-free album from iTunes – The Beastie Boys, The Mix-Up. The album is entirely instrumental jams – the kind of tracks you’d be familiar with if you have Ill Communication, The In Sound From Way Out!, or Hello Nasty. The album is great and it shows that The Beastie Boys are talented musicians off the mic.
Once I got the album, I decided to check out their website. On their website I discovered that they have a Flickr album:

I’m been using Dreamhost for my site hosting, as well as my clients, for over 5 years now. The problem is, in the last year or so, our relationship has been getting strained. Dreamhost doesn’t give me the kind of attention and uptime I need. My sites are down or slow all the time.
In the afternoon today, if you went to this site, you would get a message saying “bad_httpd_conf”.
So I Googled bad_httpd_conf.
The first 4 entries were from Dreamhost.
That’s not a good sign.
I know I need a dedicated box for my sites. Now I just need to get the budget to afford one. If anyone has any recommendations, let me know at michael [at] thecombustionchamber [dot] com

Microformats: Social Network Portability (via Zeldman)

Why does every single social network community site make you:

• re-enter all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)?
• re-add all your friends?

In addition, why do you have to:

• re-turn off notifications?
• re-specify privacy preferences?
• re-block people you don’t want to interact with?

These are great questions. It makes me this of this great parody site, Useless Account.

Bubble 2.0 Coming Soon, By John C. Dvorak (I kinda think of him like the Bill O’Reilly of tech) (via Slashdot.org)

The current bubble, already called Bubble 2.0 to mock the Web 2.0 moniker, is harder to pin down insofar as a primary destructive theme is concerned. A number of unique initiatives, however, are in play here. Let’s look at a few of the top ideas floating the new bubble.

Even kookie people you can learn from, and Dvorak is no exception. What he talks about has some bits of truth to it. Ever since around September of 2006, I’ve been thinking, “Damn, there’s a hell of a lot of start-ups launching.” This could be result of reading sites like TechCrunch and Mashable, but I still had this sense, and I still do. There’s been a lot of venture capital money floating around this last few years, and when I say a lot I mean billions.
I’m not sure that there’s a Bubble 2.0 so much as there’s a lot a lot of little farts in the bathtub we call the Internet. I’ve seen a lot of services that all piggy-back on YouTube. If they go under, no one will give a shit because they don’t employ many people. API’s have effectly made it easy for anyone to provide a service without too much heavy lifting. Yelp.com is a perfect example of a great mashup service that I love, but relies on the Google Maps API to make their site effective.
I think what we are seeing already isn’t so much a Bubble popping as much as we’re seeing air being redistributing from bubble to bubble. Social networking won’t be going away anytime soon, but users are fickle, and if they find out that their friends think MySpace is no good, and that Facebook is the place to be, then they will not hesitate to move.
If something happens to Google, that will be a Hydrogen-filled Zeppelin the size of California crashing to the ground. Other than that happening, there’s no bubbles that will be popping.
The old video and music industries are dying which is one of the reasons why we’re seeing so many efforts to reinvent these media online. A lot of these video start-ups HAVE to fail. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, everyone wants to make an online music store, everyone wants a video sharing site. They can’t all survive.
The key thing to understand is old music and tv media are going to keep plugging away at New Media until they get something that makes them money (read: That people like to use).

The New Web War – “Inside Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun’s fight to power the next wave of rich Internet applications.”
I acknowledge the Robert Scoble is a prominent (albeit annoying), technology blogger. He seems enthusiastic about his field and he writes consistently and thoroughly on his site, Scobleizer.
But what the hell is he talking about in his new article for Fast Company?
He says there is a Web War between the rich internet applications of Adobe, Microsoft and IBM. That’s like saying there’s an digital music player “war” between the iPod (100 million sold, April 2007), the Zune (1 million sold, July 2007) and the Samsung YH-925GS (the what?).
Let’s get this straight. There is no RIA war right now. Let’s please drop the the hyperbole. Of three technologies mentioned in the article, there is one leading RIA contender right now and that is Adobe Flash. I’m not going to even acknowledge Microsoft Silverlight or IBM JavaFX because, number one – there’s no usage/penetration statistics on either Silverlight or JavaFX. Number two – once Silverlight and JavaFX start getting implemented and picked up by users, then we can call it a competition, not a war.

The Real Issue

What people should really be thinking about is how companies like Google and Adobe are changing the paradigm of software deployment and usage by making them web-based RIA’s and how entrenched leaders like Microsoft are going to respond when it won’t matter whether you’re on a Mac, PC or Linux computer.

Let’s get something straight people. You can be religious OR you can be superstitious. You cannot be both. They are mutually exclusive of each other.
*This also applies to people who claim to be religious that also follow their horoscope, uh, religiously. Pick one.

If you’re a nerd like me, tell me if something similar has ever happened to you:
My wife was just having problems connecting to the internet on her Apple Powerbook. I asked her if I could see the laptop. She gave it to me. I quit out of Firefox, restarted Firefox and got onto CNN.com fine.
“I did exactly what you did but it didn’t work. I don’t get it – why is it when you do something on my computer it works?”

Microsoft patent application reveals plans for paid Zune sharing

Microsoft. Please give it a rest. This whole Zune thing is dead in the water.

I was reading an article over at TechCrunch, Could Microsoft Knock Off Yahoo To Become Google’s Biggest Competitor?, and it wasn’t the main story that caught my attention, but something in the second paragraph:

Despite a $100 million Crispin, Porter + Bogusky advertising campaign, Ask saw its share of the search market decrease from 3.5% to 3.3%, although to be fair to Ask, Compete recorded a 2.6% rise in traffic.

This just proves that advertising will only get you so far – you still have to have a product that works well. There’s thousands of sites and applications on the web that are hugely successful that don’t have advertising budgets. $100 million is a lot of money if your marketshare went up 3% and is depressing if your marketshare actually went down.