Blue Sky On Mars

• 15:06 @837 beats: still hatin’ on timezones. #

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• 09:06 New MacUpdate software bundle that will likely include Parallels! www.mupromo.com/?ref=4759 #
• 09:34 Me on candidates that lose ground: "They get bitter, they cling to lies or secondary figures or word definitions to deal with frustrations" #
• 14:13 I don’t like Twitterific popups, and Twhirl keeps appending %00 to URLs. So, now I’m trying Spaz. #
• 14:13 when there are so many choices, it’s easier to try a different program than file a bug report. Sad, isn’t it? #
• 14:15 i hate time zones. Swatch Beats were not such a bad idea. #
• 14:33 Spaz and Twhirl are both AIR-based clients. It looks like AIR adds the %00 to URLs that safari opens because they both have the problem. #

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Apparently, it’s Mac software bundle time again. MacHeist has “retail bundle” deal going that is entirely uninteresting to me. I first read about it a few days ago, and it’s since only sold 980 bundles… far less than has been typical for one of their deals.

MacUpdate has just released a new bundle that is far more interesting. The Parallels Bundle. They’re being a bit sneaky calling it that, because Parallels is the last app that will be unlocked. They don’t even tell you how many they have to sell before Parallels is unlocked. The bundle costs $65. For people that don’t own Parallels, this could be a steal because Parallels itself retails for $80.

Even so, the collection of apps that you know you will get is pretty decent as it is. I’ve always thought Leap looked interesting, and that’s $59 regularly. Typinator is a useful sort of tool once you get using it. I don’t have time to write a novel right now, but if I did StoryMill looks like a fun way to do it. Art Text looks useful for presentations and such. The other apps I could do without, personally. DVDRemaster might be nice, but is it really better than Handbrake?

I buy my fair share (at least!) of indie Mac software, and bundles like this are a good way to try out and really get into a bunch of new tools. (And, yes, that is an affiliate link up there. I wouldn’t be posting this if it wasn’t interesting, though. After all, the MacHeist bundle has been up for days and I wouldn’t have even mentioned that one if it weren’t for the more interesting MacUpdate bundle appearing.)

Software Business

• SitePen Blog » Unit Testing Custom Code with the Dojo Objective Harness
  Dustin talks about using DOH to test code, even code that doesn’t use Dojo.
  (tags: javascript test)

Linkage

• 10:28 Why does Twhirl (an AIR app) use Control-Arrow to move between words rather than Option-Arrow on a Mac? That’s just wrong. #
• 10:28 For anyone considering making AppDrop more viable: take a look at the ZODB. Seriously. It’s a much closer fit for datastore than an RDBMS. #
• 11:18 isn’t it a bit late to have an HR Block commercial ok the radio? #

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• Random Defense - the game @ itch.com
  neat little game where you set up towers to defend some area from weird little random graphics.
  (tags: entertainment games)
• Photo Matt » SecurityFocus SQL Injection Bogus
  A bunch of great tips for running WordPress securely. (Main tip: stay up to date.) Spotted via daringfireball.net
  (tags: security wordpress)
• Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files
  (tags: video youtube howto)
• Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon’s EC2 - Waxy.org
  Not surprising. I noted a few days ago that you could make the datastore API work with ZODB pretty readily.
  (tags: appengine google)

Linkage

• 10:59 "refactoring" sounds entirely too serious. I’m doing some rejiggering of code right now. #
• 15:03 @crazybob Yes, Obama could do as he pleased, but the evidence at the time did not support the "rash" war tinyurl.com/2go7wz’s_Ira … #
• 15:05 @crazybob sorry, bad link… tinyurl.com/ywvtcv #

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eWeek has just posted an article about SitePen: SitePen: Passing the Open-Source Torch

Open-source participation helps SitePen amass an all-star team of Web developers.

SitePen is full of fantastic people, really. It’s a great example of a business built on the success of open source project leadership and contribution.

Software Business sitepen

Alex Russell picked out a few great highlights from the new Dojo 1.1 release and has a nice little essay on open source to boot:

I could go on for a long, long time about what’s great in Dojo 1.1…but I’ll spare you most of that. James, Pete, Dylan, and the release notes can give you a strong sense of why Dojo 1.1 is the most polished, fastest, and easiest-to-use release of Dojo we’ve ever done. For the impatient, you can already start using it from the CDN without downloading anything.
[From Continuing Intermittent Incoherency » Dojo 1.1: Some Awesome For You App]

Dojo is reaping the rewards of having spent a lot of time getting their infrastructure together. 1.1 really improves so many parts of the package.

(ObDisclaimer: I’m not directly involved in the Dojo project myself, but I work directly with core Dojo folks at SitePen.)

JavaScript, Software Development dojo

I don’t know if this preannouncement comes as a result of all of the Google App Engine publicity, but here it is: Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier. In a nutshell: AWS now lets you create a storage volume of 1GB to 1TB that can be mounted in one EC2 instance and will persist beyond the lifetime of an EC2 instance. As an added bonus, you can have automatic snapshots of your volume plunked into S3.

They say that this storage is a low-latency, high-throughput block device. So, you can run all kinds of traditional software on top of it.

This will change the competitive outlook a bit between AWS and GAE a bit, because it makes it easier for people to use all of the software pieces that they’re used to when they use AWS to manage the hardware infrastructure. This means that it’s easier to take your existing apps and skills and get them up on AWS. GAE has a fight ahead in terms of getting people to write their apps differently… but the benefit to doing so is that you no longer think of hardware infrastructure at all.

Python, Software Development aws