Summersault Weblog

The Associated Press has reported recently on an interesting trend in browser usage that was originally revealed last week by WebSideStory, an independent Web analytics company. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which had enjoyed a market share upwards of 95 percent as recently as June of 2004, has now slipped below the 90 percent mark in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not usually one to rush into upgrading an operating system, but Apple has made the act of upgrading it’s OS X OS more of a pleasurable experience than most any other software upgrade process I know of in my experience with Windows, Unix, and Macs combined. It’s the difference between going to hospital to have a major organ extracted, dropped on the floor, dusted off, and replaced (all Windows upgrades, FreeBSD upgrades that involve kernel recompiles, etc.) and going through an outpatient procedure where you eat cheese and sip wine while they work on you, and you leave you with a fresh set of eyes, an extra arm with a cutting edge accessory attachment, and about ten years added to your life (Mac OS X upgrades since my switch in 2002). So I didn’t mind putting a central tool in my life - a PowerBook G4 Titanium - on the line for a little bit of surgery when Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger arrived yesterday.
Read the rest of this entry »

I love simplicity, and I found it today in shfs, a tool that allows me to
browse any server I can ssh into as a local file system.

Consider this common case: I’m working on some content for my website at home, and I’m ready to upload to my website. I can only access with SSH-based tools, to prevent my password from being sent in the clear, as FTP would do. That means my choices are basically ssh, scp, and sftp.
Read the rest of this entry »

Linux as a desktop operating system is finally at place where it can be
comfortable alternative to Windows or Mac OS X for a lot of people.

Linux has outgrown the perception that it’s necessary to use the command line
or have to compile your own software.

Yet, the hacker culture it has evolved from is ripe with opportunities for
additional efficiency and power for those users that do dare to visit the
command line.
Read the rest of this entry »

Even in a small office with only 6 people, there are still lots of opportunities for schedule conflicts and confusion. Even when it was just Mark and I, we often longed for the ability to share our personal and work calendars in a way that would make scheduling meetings more efficient. For a long time, it seemed that the options available to us involved either spending thousands of dollars on enterprise-level commercial software, or sacrificing ease-of-use by jumping through a mile of hoops for the most basic features.

With the emergence of some open industry standards for the storing and publishing of calendar information, however, we’ve come a long way toward making multi-platform calendar sharing a reality. This entry describes our setup in the hopes that someone else might find it useful.
Read the rest of this entry »