• flat files are almost impossible to hack
• Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high

• blogofile build seems to copy or regenerate every single file
• it's not totally happy being on S3 - it doesn't make index.html files for the archive and category directories.
• there's no easy way to post-via-email or send a link to start a post

What was really appalling to me was getting burned by this screen:

Twitter, like Facebook, lets you use other sites by handling authorization. I’d been having serious problems with Twitter not accepting my password (as were thousands of others, apparently) and it just got fixed last week. So even though I was logged in and active on twitter.com, I wasn’t surprised to be prompted to login. And I didn’t look closely enough at the URL.

Of course I wasn’t surprised to see this:

Takeaways? Twitter has becoming more and more reliable. They are fixing bugs. And we all need to watch where we’re going - sometimes we think we’re someplace we’re not.

images courtesy of Sophos I copied them so they won’t take their bandwidth or disappear if they change their links.

Problem is, there’s no standard way to show how far you’ve read in a newsfeed. Articles are updated, the online services fetch them at different times - Google and Bloglines are online all the time but your RSS reader probably is not. So I can’t easily keep offline readers in sync unless they’re hooked up to something to like FeedDemon. That costs money, which would be OK, except that they have Mac and Windows (and BlackBerry) but no Linux. Plus I don’t - or want to know - what their licensing scheme is. If I have it on my laptop and my desktop, is that one instance? It’s probably two.

So I made the decision to stick with Google reader which also works on my Blackberry, though not in a great fashion.

I’ve really not been happy with the way that they did “email an article”. But they’ve introduced a new way of doing that and I’m much happier with their implementation. Hmmm. I’d show you a screenshot except that I don’t know how to do that in Linux. I will figure it out.
Official Google Reader Blog: There are people who don’t use feed readers?

Today I ran across an Apple ad mocking Vista.   Unfortunately, they pretty much got it right.

I’m hoping for an update that fixes this.  Please, Microsoft?

I’ve had it happen when I want to change the smallest system setting.  I’ve had it happen while downloading files.  C’mon, get out of my way.

I’m having trouble doing backups with Quicken.  Intuit probably had to do something so that they could force writes of data every time you changed something so that it wouldn’t be lost.  But wow, this was coming for a while.  

I wanted to look at Vista before thinking about Mac OS.  It’s tough, though, because you can get a 17″ HP or Dell laptop for $1000 less than a 17″ MacBook Pro.  Granted that it might take another $250-$300 to bring the laptops up to apples-to-Apples (heh) specs but that’s still a lot of money to spend on an OS.   Guess I could be one of the elite then, though.

Makes me wish for FreeBSD or Linux.  But I don’t really want to deal with an ugly, clunky windowing system as well having to reboot to run the few Windows programs I need.

I enjoy reading Joel Spolsky’s articles.  In Choices = Headaches - Joel on Software he talks about the problems with Vista:

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between
nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items.

He thinks that’s too many.  So do I. 

Human-oriented social contexts should allow users to control scale: how many people can access what aspects of my on-line persona, what sorts of communication are available based on what degree of connection, and so on. If I want to limit my profile on Facebook to only current students of my university, I should be able to do so. If I want to rectrict access to my music playing habits to only those people that I know, then Last.fm should allow me to.

Good stuff.