EdgeCloud

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new…

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

From How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later via 37 signals

Wow. Beautifully put.

On a whim, I decided to sign up for a VOX account. The reviews have been pretty positive from around the web and for good reason. The ease of use, the sheer simplicity of the entire app is beautiful. Check it:

The signup is simple - you can see part of it here. The process actually starts by sending you an email first, which is not the usual process. It actually works pretty well and once you click to verify you get a very straightforward signup page. There are some really nice and unobtrusive details like the instruction box at the right…

…which follows from field to field giving you information about what they’d like you to put there and why you need it. A good example, on the postal code area they tell you they won’t share the information but it might be useful for the social aspect. Nice.

The library portion of VOX is slick. This has been on my wishlist for Wordpress for ages and the current set of WP plugins only get you part of the way there. The interface that Six Apart has created here is straight forward and makes excellent use of Ajax (using JSON!) to generate an interface that is responsive, allowing you to search for and add media items very quickly. In reality, this is a very part of the app, but it is very well done here. Six Apart allows you to hook into a number of other places like Flickr and photobucket and they promise more “conduits” in the near future. This is *excellent* because duplicating data is just silly - being able to grab a photostream right out of flickr to use within VOX just makes sense. I’m curious at the continued possibilities that open APIs will bring us - mashups are certainly just the beginning.

If you are already blogging you might not use VOX, but if you already haven’t jumped ship or hate myspace or blogger, then give VOX a try. It’s well worth it and you’ll notice the staggering difference in quality right away.

You’d think google would want to brand their docs and spreadsheets better, no? Either 1) text is the best design strategy ever or 2) they really didn’t give a shit. I think it was no. 2, what about you? At least it kinda sorta lines up and the color is almost complementary. Given their regular logo maybe we should be happy it’s all one color…

Microsoft Zune released today. And the O’Brian’s on CNN give Microsoft the burn…seriously, that has to hurt. It’s very true though - what really does the Zune have to offer? It looks like it tries to be pretty, but from the pics that I’ve seen, it’s not - though the interface is interesting.

Why don’t they get some decent design people over there….it’s clunky…clunky stuff

-Miles O’Brian on CNN talking about the Zune vs. the Shuffle

Finally! I’ve got my v710 synching up in iSync and working as a modem - and all the while doing so using BT! Finally found some great instructions, plus the phone I have now is newer - last one crapped out - so most likely newer firmware version. To get this to work, you’ll need the following two pages:

First, do this: 10.4: Add Motorola V710 Bluetooth support to iSync
Then this: Motorola V710 setup as Bluetooth Modem under OS X/Panther (ignore the Panther part - I’m using Tiger and it works like a champ)

It is actually quite important that you perform the instructions in the first part before you do anything else. You will need to open up a terminal and use vim to update the (text) file (or depending on how you have finder set up you can browse there and use textedit or textmate). If you had already tried to pair the phone and did so successfully you’ll want to delete what you’ve done and start from scratch (sorry) but after altering the file. I couldn’t get anything to work until I changed that file so that seems to be the key here.

Works like a champ. iSync gets all my contacts and ical events and using the phone as a modem through BT is slow but usable for surfing. Mail is no-go on VZW, probably since I use secure imap (gmail pops fine). My firmware version is 8700_02.03.00R and, of course, ymmv.

I’ve been meaning to discuss this blog post about whether entrpeneurs (geeks, in general) should talk politics on their blog. I think such a notion is a personal decision that folks need to clearly make. Certainly, there is the possibility that you might turn off some of your regular readers but that may not matter much to you. Since EdgeCloud is basically a multi-author blog we don’t usually extend ourselves into the political blogosphere. I actually get my fix for discussing all things politically through my personal blog. Honestly, this just feels right. It allows me to keep my posts focused and I know in my mind there’s a clear strategy and voice depending on which blog I’m posting to. Ultimately, you can’t separate politics completely from who you are - that’s just the way it is and if you have opinions you should share them and we should be receptive to differing opinions. We cannot give way to the clearly divisive political strategies put forth by Washington and exacerbated by the MSM. Be who you are, speak loud and proud - it’s what a healthy democracy is all about. For the EdgeCloud blog, this will remain a purely technical dialogue.

Here’s an excellent post by Christopher Fahey about why he discusses politics on his blog (graphpaper).

I generally run screaming from web applications, open source or not, that seem to refuse to spend time on simple aesthetics. I’m not even talking usability here, I just like the thing to be pretty. Webmail is one of those areas where many of the user interfaces leave much to be desired. While Gmail is passable (mostly because of the wonderful functionality) it really is quite the beast especially if you compare it to it’s calendaring cousin (which is quite nice!). Zimbra seems to have a lot of play in blogosphere but I personally find it lacking. There is open webmail as well but why use icons that look like something out of Windows 3.1 Borland C++ icon land? And, of course, the reason I’m even talking about this is because SquirrelMail got hit with the ugly stick.

As a solution to the default webmail interface that dreamhost offers, I’ve installed roundcube. After looking at some detailed set up instructions (thanks, Paul!), I was able to set it up without a problem on my shared dreamhost account as an alternative for getting at mail via the web should the need arise. There seems to be a few caveats (for some reason, moving mail to trash seems to hang), but for just reading and responding to mail it works just fine. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get it to use SSL. It’s still in development but seems stable enough…and most important of all, it’s pretty.

Give it a try!