Jeremy Zawodny's blog

Nikon Coolpix 5700 -- Cool Camera

I'm not really in the market for a new digital camera. My existing Kodak DC-290 is doing quite well. It replaced my Kodak DC-210 about 2.5 years ago. However, if I was looking around, I'd have to give the Coolpix 5700 a serious look. Here's a review of a pre-release model at Digital Photography Review.

blogdex ranking

blogdex:

is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses. at current, blogdex is focused on the referential information provided by personal content, namely using the timeliness of weblogs to find important and interesting content on the web

Interesting. As of right now my blog is listed as #9 on their site. Wonder how long that will last. The only link listed in the detail for my site is Tony Bowden's in sanity, one of the blogs I check daily.

More Palladium Info

Adam Goodman points me at this TCPA / Palladium FAQ and an article over at The Register.

Here's a bit of the FAQ that struck me:

12. Scary stuff. But can't you just turn it off?

Sure - one feature of TCPA is that the user can always turn it off. But then your TCPA-enabled applications won't work, or won't work as well. It will be like switching from Windows to Linux nowadays; you may have more freedom, but end up having less choice. If the applications that use TCPA / Palladium are more attractive to the majority of people, you may end up simply having to use them - just as many people have to use Microsoft Word because all their friends and colleagues send them documents in Microsoft Word.

Yuck. Microsoft and the media industry are saying "you don't have to play the game, but if you do play you're gonna play by our rules."

MovableType 2.21 is available

And check it out, it comes with MySQL support now. Guess what I'll have to play with soon. Maybe the Google API stuff works right too. I still haven't managed to get it working right. Hmm.

I still don't quite grok the new TrackBack feature. Can someone show me the power?

Broken Trust

Dylan Tweney (the brother of a guy I went to high school with--both are geniuses) wrote an article called Broken Trust about Microsoft's Palladium in which he concludes:

But the rest of us should be very wary of putting so much faith in Microsoft. The real question is, for whom does Palladium make computing safer? It will surely make the digital world safer for Microsoft and Disney. But who will defend us from Bill Gates?

I couldn't agree more. When I first read about Microsoft's plans a few days ago, I couldn't believe what I was reading. The guys in Redmond really have balls. It's pretty scary.

Tim Mentioned Me

That's right. Tim O'Reilly, in his article The Strange Case of the Disappearing Open Source Vendors mentions:

Jeremy Zawodney [sic] of Yahoo talks about MySQL Optimization not because Yahoo sells MySQL but because it uses it to deliver its service. And of course, it's not just the speakers but the attendees at the conference who are using open source to improve productivity, cut costs, and drive innovation in the products and services that they do sell.

Well, it's good to see that he's getting the message out. I was just wondering what I'd write about in the blog when I read Tim's article. Unlike in past years, I wasn't very surprised by anything he said. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a just different. If nothing else, he's pimping my talk. Maybe I' should beef up the slides a bit.

Oh, if you look at the URL for my talk, you'll notice that it's apparently session 2600. I'm not sure what to make of that.