almost effortless

Instant Domain Search — what a great little app — this thing saved me a bit of time, and I think it's a great idea. The basic concept is that it applies AJAX to searching for domain names, which speeds up the process quite a bit. Then, the person who created it can make a buck (or whatever) if you buy your domain through clicking on one of his referral links.

This site is designed to help you find the right domain name. We don't offer computer-generated suggestions because we think people can outperform machines when using good tools.

Nice. Try it out »

Also, I noticed that GoDaddy has something faster than their normal search, if you look closely. Click the Quick Domain Search bar right above the login form, and you'll see what I mean. It's not as snappy as the Instant Domain Search site, but it's better than the alternative on Godaddy's site.

I remember searching all over the place for some reasonable "activity indicators", which I could use in a web-application I was building. It was too late for that when I stumbled across this very nice collection, but I'm sure it'll come in handy later. As an aside, I packaged the images up into this zip file... just in case.

I must say that, although very happy working on an Apple computer for about 2 years now, the closed and proprietary nature of Apple products continues to irk me. I think the system (the hardware/software combo) is solid, but it bugs me that you've got to buy into the system the whole way. It's an all-or-nothing type of situation, and the lock-in is pretty obvious. If you feel the same way, Juggling oranges (written by a longtime Apple advocate turned hater, who was prompted by this article) is going to tickle your fancy:

...you can begin to see why I chose to switch away from Apple and onto a Free Software platform. Mac OS X is only available from Apple, and it only runs on Apple hardware. Running a Free Software operating system removes both of these risk factors at once. Furthermore, Apple has made it very clear that they will do everything in their power to protect this lock-in. Despite the fact that their Intel-based operating system could run on commodity hardware, Apple has intentionally crippled Mac OS X with code that checks the hardware to ensure that it came from Apple. They're intentionally introducing friction between the layers, bolting their operating system onto their hardware. Some day there will be no hardware that can run Mac OS X, and because of Apple's DRM it will be illegal to emulate it in software.

As of late, I've been doing my best to avoid falling into (what I call) the good-guy-bad-guy logical fallacy - where one feels the need to pick sides between two things, such as competing technology companies. This is an easy thing to slip into, and can be evidenced in many "switchers" that have a bad experience with, say, Microsoft, and decide to say, switch to Apple products.

The temptation is to buy into the whole marketing image of the products that you drop your hard-earned money on, while eschewing what you had used formerly. In this case, one might be tempted to adopt an almost religious fanaticism to, say, Apple, while droning on and on about the inferiorities of Apple's competitors. This is commonly referred to as becoming a fan-boy.

The best attitude to have in this sort of situation, in my opinion, is a healthy skepticism toward organizations that are interested in selling things to you. If you can keep your emotional bonds to electronic goods and the people that peddle them, I think it's for the best.

In Praise of the Hyperlink is a really excellent and well deserved ode to the fundamental building block that serves as the foundation for the Internet — a:

...Remember the realisation that you were interacting with something that was potentially neverending; a borderless labyrinth of information, all interconnected through the beautiful simplicity of the hyperlink. We may have grown accustomed to this miracle but that doesn't make it any less wondrous.

We are storytellers, no longer huddled around separate campfires, we now sit around a virtual hearth where we are warmed by the interweaving tales told by our brothers and sisters. Everyone is connected to everyone else by just six degrees of separation. Thanks to the hyperlink, we can find those connections and make them tangible.

The dream of hypertext has become a reality.

You can't complain about free stock icons. Silk from famfamfam.com:

Silk is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format. Containing a large variety of icons, you're sure to find something that tickles your fancy. And all for a low low price of $0.00. You can't say fairer than that.

After the Google Spreadhseet app hype, I'm pretty much behind this article:

Google-love is getting out of hand... After I wrote about the launch of Google Spreadsheets this morning, one commenter said “Its very nice and sleak. Will be very useful for keeping track of money etc, as if this was the first spreadsheet he'd ever seen... [Now] that Picasa, which Google acquired in mid-2004, will soon be adding albums... Picasa is Google's desktop photo management software something like Yahoo's Flickr, except it's not on the web. Yeah, it's just like Flickr, except without tagging, sharing, commenting and, of course, it isn't a web service.

While I appreciate Google giving their employees 20% of their time (or whatever it is) to work on pet projects, I get annoyed when everything they put out immediately gets heralded as the end of Microsoft or the greatest thing since sliced bread.

That being said, this article makes a good point:

Even if Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't have designs on toppling Microsoft Office, they do have a vested interest in toppling proprietary file formats (well, save maybe Google's own DRM). After all, what makes Google's Search possible? It's the fact that the Internet is comprised almost entirely of "open" HTML documents. The budding Google empire is built on top of an open file "format" with wide accessibility.

I'm not 100% on board that Google has a "vested interest" in open formats, and I'm pretty sure google can search Word DOCs as-is, but I do like Google's tendency toward using "open" standards. For example, their Chat service uses the Jabber protocol, which aims to make sending instant messages between services providers as easy as email. Imagine if you couldn't send email to an @aol.com from your @yahoo.com account... That's the state of things in instant messaging, and I appreciate Google coming down on the right side of that one.

Another place that Google seems to be taking a stand is on the net neutrality business that's going on with our fair government as of late:

The debate over "net neutrality" is coming to a boil in the next week as the House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that could determine the future of the Internet. The big phone and cable TV companies want Congress's permission to create a new, unprecedented regulatory bureaucracy on the Internet – a private bureaucracy of broadband monopolists with the power to determine what content gets to you first and fastest. Google believes that forcing people and companies to get permission from, and pay special fees to, the phone and cable companies to connect with one another online is fundamentally counter to the freedom and innovation that have defined the Internet... Our CEO Eric Schmidt believes this situation is so important that he has written an open letter to Google users asking them to speak out on this issue...

Here are some pretty amazing pictures of Dubai. It's almost unbelievable... and I thought there was a lot of construction in Chicago. Apparently, Dubai is the spot:

In many areas, it is not easy to see Dubai's sky without at least one crane in your view; Industry experts cautiously estimate that 15 to 25 per cent of the world's cranes are in Dubai. Some US$ 90 BILLION are on-going in Dubai alone.

I love k2 (the Wordpress theme, but I think some of the images are overkill. Luckily, there is an easy way to hide them using CSS. It's easy:

.commentslink, .chronodata, .tagdata,
.comments .commentlist .commentmetadata {
	background: none;
	margin-left: -20px;
}

Great tip for skipping over voicemail greetings on mobile phones (Via):

• T-Mobile = #
• Cingular = #
• Sprint = 1
• Verizon = 1

This tour of Windows Vista Beta 2 is quite exciting, even for a fairly-new Mac fanboy like myself. Worthy of note are the improvements to "alt-tab" (now known as Windows-Flip), which seems to be on the right track *cough*. My biggest gripe in using Windows nowadays is the lack of mouse support on alt-tab, which I hope will be included here.

Also of interest are Windows Media Center's new support of image/photo handling. However, the thing I'm most excited about is the new Windows Calendar, featuring apparent use of the iCalendar format. Microsoft's support of an open and non-propritary format is a very good thing, indeed. Not to be overlooked is the new UAC (User Account Controls) feature, which ought to provide some much-needed relief from malware, viruses, and other security woes.

But perhaps you're looking to hate? Look no further: 20 Things to hate about Vista.