CodeWeavers has released a beta of CrossOver Mac. This is CodeWeavers specific version Wine, which allows you to run Windows applications under unix like systems. Engadget has screenshots from trying to install Internet Explorer and FileZilla.
CrossOver Mac is still in beta so expectations should be set appropriately. Having said that, this is a very exciting development.
Makes me wish I had an MacIntel system.
Do you remember the Web 2.0 Color Palette page that was popular recently? I decided to whip up a new WordPress theme for my blog based on the colors in the Web 2.0 palette. How many can you find?
In the process I’m also tweaking the layout and pages included on the site. If you run into something that is broke or missing wait for a few minutes and see if I’m in the middle of fixing it. If after a few minutes it is still broken, drop me a note describing the problem.
And my tag cloud is back, for, you know, folks who are into that kind of thing.
Changes in version 0.3.3:
I’ve tried to keep the size of EditInPlace reasonable, but as more bug fixes and features get added there is only so much you can do. So starting with version 0.3.3 I’m including a minified (via JSMin) version of EditInPlace.js. This brings the JavaScript source from 10,304 bytes to 6,751 bytes.
The new ajax_data option allows you to provided additional data. I’ve had a few requests for this feature, thanks to Joe Lion for reminding me about it. The example page has been updated to show to use this new feature. It’s simple enough:
EditInPlace.makeEditable({
id: 'edit_this_thing',
ajax_data: {
database_id: 12345,
other_data: 'Some Other String Data'
}
});
As always, you can browse the Edit In Place files, play with the example page or download the version 0.3.3 release.
I’m starting to wonder if someone over at Amazon really does have a master plan to take over the world. Today they announced the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). EC2 allows you to have a “virtual computer” hosted at Amazon which is roughly equivalent to a “1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth”. Pricing $0.10/hour, $0.20/GB of Internet traffic and $0.15/GB/month of S3 storage used. Running a system 24×7 would set you back $72/month plus S3 storage costs.
The folks who thought S3 wouldn’t change things, may start changing mind now. Amazon has a ton of information up on this new service: Developer Tools, WDSL, Forum, FAQ and a Getting started guide.
Right now they only support Linux based systems, but hopefully we’ll see that expand. I’m voting for FreeBSD support! Amazon is using XEN to virtualize these systems, so hoping for FreeBSD support seems reasonable.
I’m on the waiting list for next beta round, I look forward to trying this out. Expect to hear more about this.
Big news in planetary circles, Pluto is no longer considered a planet:
… the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930.
Much-maligned Pluto doesn’t make the grade under the new rules for a planet: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”
Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s. Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of “dwarf planets,” similar to what long have been termed “minor planets.” The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun — “small solar system bodies,” a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.
Now we are down to 8: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto will have to start eating with a different lunch crowd, hanging out with the likes of Ceres (an asteroid that was also demoted from planet status) and 2003 UB313 (who really wants to be accepted by the cool planets).
Guy Kawasaki brings out some interesting points about business. Ten Things to Learn This School Year picks on the general theme that what you learn in school is often completely opposite what is useful in business. Some of these points are brought up in his Art of the Start presentation.
I’ve been working on slides for a presentation at work and I’m trying to take Guy’s 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint to heart. These are also covered in the Art of the Start talk as well. I like the 30 point font rule. As part of this I’ve been using Gliffy for some of the diagrams in the presentation. I’m not a heavy diagram user so I don’t have a detailed comparison of Gliffy versus Visio, but I will say that so far Gliffy has been a pleasure to use.
Yesterday Pawel Jakub Dawidek (PJD) announced his ZFS on FreeBSD project. He has done a tremendous amount of work for only 10 days. If you or your company has the resources to help/sponsor PJD on this project that would enable him to spend more time on ZFS on FreeBSD.
It looks like the folks from Sun are open to patches from Pawel’s efforts. While having ZFS on FreeBSD would be awesome, keeping efforts in sync will be a big deal going forward.
As a side note, the ZFS on FUSE/Linux is still moving ahead.
Business 2.0 – Blogging for Dollars. There are certainly a few folks out there making some money. I find it odd though that the only links in the article were for publicly traded companies. Even those links weren’t to the company websites, they were for stock quotes and graphs. I guess Business 2.0 has to keep CNN‘s bottom line in mind.
Looks like Weird Al is back with a new album, Straight Outta Lynwood. The new single is Don’t Download This Song, which you can of course download in MP3 format. The video is going up Yahoo! Music tomorrow (23 August). Additional info is available on Al’s MySpace site.
I’ve been a Weird Al fan since I first heard Eat It in 1983/84. Just the other night I was watching the DVD of UHF with the commentary track on. Did you know that Trinidad Silva (Raul Hernandez, Raul’s Wild Kingdom) died during the filming of UHF?
At any rate, I look forward to seeing what Al’s got on the new album. Oh yeah, it better be available via iTunes so that I can download it 
Over the weekend Adam Kalsey announced his new service, Feed Crier. Feed Crier pushes RSS/ATOM feeds though AIM (other IM networks are reported to be supported later). Subscribing to a feed is as simple as IM’ing feedcrier with ‘subscribe ‘ on AIM.
Feed Crier accounts come in two flavors, free and the $4 per month Pro account. The free account allows you to subscribe up to 3 feeds. The Pro account allows for unlimited feeds, no advertising (?), feed summaries and the ability to manage your feeds via the web. I’m not sure if the no advertising feature of the Pro account means that that Feed Crier won’t display their own ads or if they’ll strip ads from feeds you subscribe to.
I was able to subscribe to my own feed for this blog and got a quick response asking me to click on a URL to verify my subscription. Once I verified Feed Crier sent me messages containing a linked title to recent entries. Unsubscribing was just as easy, I sent ‘unsubscribe ‘ to Feed Crier and quickly got a response back.
I’m not a big user of IM so I don’t know that I’ll make much use of this. As a concept though I think this is a neat idea. With the popularity of feeds this allows you to glue pretty much any data to your IM client. I could see this being really useful for those who want to keep very close tabs on a feed. And if you are using this on Mac OS X then Growl makes it even more awesome.
I’m curious how Adam is tracking updates to feeds. When you subscribe to a feed does Feed Crier start polling that feed? Perhaps he’ll be looking at adding a ping server to get notifications of feed updates.