B. Mann Consulting

I've been listening to music before going to bed (and using music as an alarm clock). Last night I used iTunesShut, which lets you set a number of songs or a number of minutes for iTunes to play before it slowly fades out the music over time and stops. See the Macworld review for a longer explanation.

The songs? I just bought Feist's "The Reminder" and Mathew Good's "Hospital Music".

I installed an iTune's Alarm Clock last night, and was woken this morning by some electronica: Rising High Trance Injection: Perry and Rhodan - The Beat Just Goes Straight On & On.

Have a good day, all.

Still my favourite text editor, and not only for it's advanced multi-user collaborative editing: it's a great editor for everything from simple text to HTML with built in live preview and syntax colouring for lots of languages.

Roland already did the podcast for Bryght Radio with Dan, but I owe him a post talking about some of the ideas we discussed regarding outliners, OPML, the universe, and everything.

Dan is aiming high. He's here in Vancouver doing heads down work on Focus, the best outliner for Windows. Basically, he says he wants to build the Omni Outliner for the Windows outliner market. I asked him all sorts of devil's advocate questions, like what about web-based outliners, or cross platform ones, or Dave Winer's OPML Editor. Well, for starters, he's got a wiki filled with all the outliner apps he can find, so he's definitely surveying the competition. The next part is that he's got some definite market segments in mind. He's going to build his outliner so it meets the needs of Getting Things Done disciples. And he's building it on Windows because he a) wants to make money and b) thinks there's room for a great desktop outliner on Windows (maybe cross promote with Omni?).

I bugged him a bit about open source, but there are very few examples of great desktop apps in that category. As well, Dan plans on a plug-in architecture -- actually, embedding Python via the .NET framework to make the whole thing scriptable. Sounds pretty cool, and pretty much the equivalent of AppleScript on the Windows platform.

I think he's got some other plans with regards to "instant outlining" and connecting with Dave's OPML editor, but I'll let him make the big splash about that.

So, welcome to Vancouver, Dan. I'm sure we'll see you at some more Vancouver Web 2.0 User Group meetings, and of course, if you're a supporter of the Innovation Commons concept, go add your name to the list.

Check out Photon -- a plugin for iPhoto that uses the blog APIs to connect to your blog system and export photos directly.

And yes, it works with Drupal. I wrote up the settings on drupal.org.

I'm using Flock, a new Firefox-based open source browser. Why? Well, it's to be the world's first "social browser", but mainly because lots of friends work there.

And, I'm already responsible for sending one person to the mothership (note to Bart and Jeffrey: you owe me at least an iPod, especially if I hook you up with someone from the original OE One team)

Sorry if this is cryptic to some. My main point in posting (other than to publicize my request for an iPod) was to start listing some feedback to the Flockers. Roland did a good post on why Flock is important with some more meat to it.

The first item of feedback being...

Sorry, Alex, I don't use Quicksilver. Lots of people do (by my count, maybe 50% or more of power users, as modeled by my colleagues). I'm sticking with Tiger's built in Spotlight capability. It's slower than Quicksilver, but it's built right into everything.

The uber-launcher turned master-controller that has Mac users raving. But can it act as my de facto universal tagging app? Do real people find it useful? Does Boris?
del.icio.us/for/borismann: [from awsamuel] quicksilver: find not. do. or do not

And yes, not being able to add items/tasks/people to more than one category in OD4Contact *is* frustrating. I'm using project-based organization, since it is supposed to be mainly for task tracking, and this seems to work OK.

Richard wrote about securing his email with SSHKeyChain in the context of pointing to Kees Cook's discovery of 45 clear auth POP accounts at OSCON.

I actually ran SSHKeyChain before my upgrade to Mac OS X Tiger, but never re-installed. It worked most of the time, but not all the time. To be honest, the whole process is somewhat hard. Richard (or anyone), I'm making a Request for Tutorial (RFT): please document both the requirements (what do I need in a mail server to support this?) and the steps involved in secure email.

I've got the Mac version, now available from the download page at support.opml.org.

Turns out I hate the way that opml blogs work -- the anchor-based perma-links, the no separate entries, the weirdo "adding a link to a whole entry". I think the OPML editor should stick to what it does best -- working with OPML outlines. Actually, talking to Colin and others, we really just want to have Omni Outliner speak instant outlining.

But this begs the question, what are we building here? I think this could be done with Jabber, the Publish/Subscribe JEP, and passing back and forth OPML document fragments. With identity and presence built in, of course. Would Dave be open to swapping out the communications protocol with something more standards based?

It's the same reason I'd like to see SubEthaEdit's protocol opened -- there are many more things we could build if these were standards.

In any case, thanks Dave for giving us a new old thing to experiment with.Try subscribing to my Instant Outline. Not sure if this works yet.

What Is This?

I love Delicious Library. But I want more.

Delicious Library works with your iSight or a dedicated barcode scanner to scan the UPC codes of your books, music, movies, and games, and create a library on your computer. It also connects to Amazon and looks up all the information directly from the UPC code, including a picture of the cover and all sorts of other good stuff.

The other day, we were drinking some red wine and really enjoying it, and I was looking at the bottle and noticed the UPC code. So I walked over to the computer, held it in front of the camera, and... *beep*.

Except the beep doesn't do anything. It does get entered into the library, but Amazon certainly doesn't know anything about wine, so it doesn't have any information to grab. And the library is restricted to books, movies, music, and games...so where does the wine go?

This would seem the perfect application of a Content Construction Kit -- give developers (and users) the power to create new libraries and library items out of a list of fields and value types. Heck, I might even pay a monthly fee to get access to an updated database of wine info.

So, here's hoping that the Monsters (Delicious Monster, that is, the development team) decide to give us the Delicious Construction Kit. Everyone from wine enthusiasts to comic book collectors will take care of the rest. Just like the CD database began with hand entering content, that's how wine or comic book directories could grow as well.

Hey, this milk carton has a UPC code on it...Delicious Refrigerator anyone?