ZenVilla Blog

Apps of the Year 2005 - Where Are You?

Kevin — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 05:16:11 +0000

I’ve just finished re-reading a nice article on Daring Fireball titled “Apps of the Year, 2004″ and it occurred to me that we never got similar treatment from DF regarding John’s favourite apps of 2005. That’s an article I would really like to see. Sure, we have the MacMinute Showtime Awards, the MacWorld Eddys, the Apple Design Awards and probably more but what separates DF from the pack here is the detail and attention given to his analysis. In short, we get a list of apps we should check out and we get some ideas as to why they might be worthy of our time. I know 2006 is not exactly the new year anymore but what do you say John? Please… pretty please?

Late to the Party

Kevin — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:58:36 +0000

I’ve just now finished upgrading my WordPress install from 1.2.1 to 1.5.2 in the hopes that the new feature set would help with the comment spamming. I’ve been slowly turning off comments for all my posts because the spam just keeps on increasing, even with comment moderation turned on. The spam may not be making it to the site but it’s filling my InBox non the less. As it turns out, there is batch comment deletion in the new version and I’m very impressed. I still need to play with it more but all those queued up spam comments are gone! And good riddance!

One side effect of the update is that I’m now using the default Kubrick theme. It’s not a bad theme but I’d like to put aside some time to find something different at some point. A job for another day though.

PS: I have turned off justified text. I can’t stand that!

Nathan’s Annual Hot Dog Eating Contest

Kevin — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 07:43:34 +0000

Tomorrow is the day of the big event. I imagine the untouchable Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi will be competing again and if he does, I’m curious to see if he’ll be able to beat his current World Record holding performance of 53.5 hot dogs in 12 minutes.

To read more about the contest and the Tsunami’s utter dominance of it check out this entry in Wikipedia.

Groovy Time Rave in Kyoto

Kevin — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 12:22:22 +0000

The Quzco group is putting on their 1st outdoor party of the year (as far as I know) and it’s coming up this weekend. It starts at 3 PM on Saturday and runs until it’s done on Sunday. It’s in Miyama-cho, Kyoto and the line-up is all local from either Kyoto or Osaka. The forecast for the weekend includes the possibility of a little rain and maybe even some thunderstorms Saturday night so bring a tent and tarps if you have them. Chances are if we get the thunder on Saturday night the Sunday morning sunrise will be beautiful.

I’m probably posting about it much too late to be of any real help to anybody and for that I apologize. I’ll try to be a little more punctual in the future so that Google has more time to find me.

Oh yes, for entrance fees, contact info and a map, check out their site. They have photos from previous parties online too.

Bloglines Does the Weather

Kevin — Tue, 24 May 2005 17:06:36 +0000

This is pretty cool. You can now setup your Bloglines account to display weather for various cities on top of bringing you your daily dose of news feeds. Good stuff.

As much as I like desktop aggregators there’s just nothing like the always on service of Bloglines. Even when my iBook is sleeping or in transit I know my news is just a click away.

No Accountability at The New York Times

Kevin — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 04:02:59 +0000

Ha! What a joke this is. From the New York Times on April 22nd. An article by one James Brooke discussing the ban on U.S. beef currently imposed by the Japanese government.

This comes only a few days after an editorial piece by Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the Times regular columnists, about how people are losing respect for the press. Yeah right, the computer misspelled those names. Maybe Mr Kristof should forward his piece to Mr Brooke and his editor.

Unfortunately, due to their system requiring payment for older articles, I can’t provide links to either of them. The Kristof piece was titled “A Slap In The Face” and it ran on April 12th. A list of his columns can be found here.

XBit 1.0.2 Released

Kevin — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 17:40:20 +0000

The new year is upon us and with it, a special gift for XBit, a brand new bug! It seems the code that handles downloading new issues from the TidBITS FTP server had a slight oversight in it. The result, no new issues for you! That such a simple bug could so impair the functionality! Anyway, the application has been updated and downloading should work once again.

On the topic of XBit, I’ve been playing with a handful of ideas for the next major release. Nothing has been hammered out yet but it will probably be Panther only.

Some Testing Required

Kevin — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 09:32:24 +0000

I thought the recent move to my new host had gone smoothly. Everything looked good and I was happy how quickly it all came together. The end of year holiday season is rather hectic after all. Not as much face time with the iBook as I usually have. So I was rather surprised today to discover that my RSS feed and archive pages were missing in action. How lame is that!? I had neglected to bring across my htaccess file. Argh!

Everything should be working now…

A Small Orange

Kevin — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:12:55 +0000

We’ll I think I’ve made a decision regarding my forced move away from Bloghosts. I’ve opened an account with A Small Orange and I’ve been playing with the account over the last few weeks. Things seem to be in order and their response times are good so over the next few weeks I’ll be moving this blog and all my other sites over to them. Hopefully all will go smoothly. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a new web host, they have recently stopped accepting new customers. Something about reorganizing to handle future growth. They may still be accepting new customers via email though so if you’re really interested it’s worth a shot. Leave my name as your referrer and I’ll get a month of free hosting.

Robots Are Cool

Kevin — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 16:13:34 +0000

This is just too funky not to love. It’s good to know that gadget geeks in Japan are keeping that childhood dream of an amazing and fantastic future alive.