Solipsism Gradient

Some days ago, as I noted below, Sanford Selznick published an excellent article for would-be shareware authors.

Well, the second part is now out. Enough said.

I’m at the Macmania office in São Paulo, here for a 3-day visit. The #100 issue of the magazine is just coming out, and they’re throwing a party next Thursday. Even though it supposedly will be one of those badly-lit-with-loud-music affairs, it’ll be a chance to meet most of the gang in the flesh – and, of course, some of the cover models will be there… 😛

Speaking of covers, #100 has two covers for the price of one! See them here and here.

I’m also here to finish my chapters of a book about Mac OS X. I wrote most of those months ago, but now, with Jaguar out, everything must be revised.

However, before diving into that I found a must-read link to Richard Thieme’s article Real Hacking Rules!. Simply marvelous. Here are some quotes:

…hacking [is] practice for transplanetary life in the 21st century.

In essence, hacking is a way of thinking about complex systems.

Hacking is knowing how to discern or retrieve information beyond that which is designed for official consumption.

This is off Chuq von Rospach’s site.

Chuq has worked for Apple for a long time, as list mom for several of their developer mailing lists, among other things. Chuq’s also starting a weblog which should be worth watching.

SIGNS YOU LIVE IN THE YEAR 2002…………..

1. You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.

2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

3. You call your son’s beeper to let him know it’s time to eat. He e-mails you back from his bedroom, “What’s for dinner?”

4. Your daughter sells Girl Scout Cookies via her web site.

5. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven’t spoken with your next door neighbor yet this year.

6. You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains Echinacea.

7. Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.

8. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.

9. Every commercial on television has a website address at the bottom of the screen.

10. You buy a computer and 6 months later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.

11. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 years of your life, is cause for panic and turning around to go get it.

12. Using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase would be a hassle and take planning.

13. Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.

14. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not have e-mail addresses.

15. You consider second-day air delivery painfully slow.

16. Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.

17. Your idea of being organized is multiple-colored Post-it notes.

18. You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.

19. You get an extra phone line so you can get phone calls.

20. You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.

21. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.

22. You wake up at 2 am to go to the bathroom and check your e-mail on your way back to bed.

23. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : -)

24. You’re reading this.

25. Even worse; you’re going to forward it to someone else.

All I can say is: if I had a cellphone, which I thankfully don’t, this would be 90% accurate…

…in no particular order:

Jeremy Zawodny.

Umami Tsunami.

Joi Ito.

James Lilek’s Bleat. Be sure to look at Lileks‘ whole site… amazing. I wish I had time and resources to do something like that.

Forwarding Address: OS X

Ken Bereskin.

Lee Felsenstein.

Matt Croydon’s postneo.

Glenn Fleishman’s 802.11b/Wi-Fi News pointed me at an interesting item about Wi-Fi in Brazil:

Alan Reiter tells how he spent a couple of weeks in Brazil talking about wireless at “Mobile Corporate” conferences. Be sure to read his later entries too.

One of his articles links to Eduardo Prado’s Smart Convergence blog, which I’ll read in more detail later. It seems there are good business opportunities for wireless in Brazil, but with the recent devaluations of the Real, investing in imported technology is tough.

Here in Belo Horizonte, a 2.5 megapeople city, Wi-Fi seems virtually unknown. My favorite networking shop, Deltatronic, has just an access point and a couple of wireless PCMCIA cards from H-Net, and the salesman didn’t know how many they had sold (if any).

I did some wardriving last weekend, using MacStumbler, and couldn’t find a single network. Of course, buildings here are concrete and brick, so there is less chance of leakage… I couldn’t see my own network from the street, even though my access point is mounted on an outside wall.

A company called Pointer (couldn’t find the URL) makes wireless connections available in several Brazilian airports. I tried it out in June at the São Paulo/Guarulhos international airport. Any access is first diverted to a log-in page where you have to give a credit card number. I can’t recall if they mentioned a price, but I didn’t go further

I’ve updated phpBB to version 2.0.3, which just came out. It fixed some security vulnerabilities.

I’ve also done incremental fixes to page formatting inconsistencies, changed to grey smilies (the default yellow ones were rather obtrusive), added a link to the site map to the 404 page, and did some minor things I can’t remember right now .

Most people call them “blogs”, I know, but “weblog” somehow sounds better to me…

Here are some I read quite often – not in any particular order:

Glenn Fleishman’s GlennLogs. Glenn and his wife sat at my table at this year’s MacMania Geek Cruise. He also maintains 802.11b/Wi-Fi News, an incredibly useful resource for all users of AirPort and other 802.11b wireless technologies.

Dave Winer’s Scripting News and his DaveNet. Dave was a Mac pioneer with outlining softwares ThinkTank and MORE. He’s also co-author of several important protocols such as SOAP and XML-RPC. Often controversial, always worth reading.

Doc Searls’ weblog. Doc also was on that cruise. Among other things, he’s one of the authors of The ClueTrain Manifesto and senior editor at the Linux Journal.

Check out all the weblogs at the O’Reilly Networks. A great resource!

Cory Doctorow’s boingboing. Cory’s a noted columnist and science fiction writer.

Mario AV’s blog (em Português). Mario AV is the pixel artist for Macmania, Brazil’s leading Mac magazine, and incidentally, the author of the “RB” logo you see at the top of this page. Even if you don’t read Portuguese, click on some of his links at the left to dig the cool graphics and photos.

More later…

Here’s a great article for shareware developers by Sanford Selznick:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/09/30/dev_osx.html

Sanford also writes some nifty shareware himself. Check it out!

I’ll edit this post later to include some more resources for shareware developers…