I missed it last month when MySQL AB signed an agreeement with SCO. But it’s hard to miss the backlash now. SCO peed in the pool and it’s just not cool to hang out with them anymore. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos defends the deal in a Computer Business Review article from yesterday:

…Mickos maintained that MySQL’s track record in promoting open source and opposing the European technology patent directive should retain the community’s trust. “That’s a hundred times more influential than any deal with SCO could have been,” he said.

As seen recently on the Generator Blog (watch out for annoying popup ads) and Metafilter: ungreek.toolbot.com.

For years, designers have been using fake Latin gibberish known as greeking (or sometimes lorem ipsum, after the customary initial words) as a text placekeeper. It conveys the shape and “color” of text without the distraction of actual content.

Source options include the Esperantists’ Manifesto, Jane Eyre, the Tao Te Ching, the GNU Public License (in Swedish), Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” Internet RFC 1630 by Tim Berners-Lee, and good old Lorem Ipsum.

For anyone who was ever enthusiastic about the Palm platform, the last few years have been challenging. In an article also commented on at Engadget and Slashdot, ZDNet columnist Michael Singer lays out his Five reasons for Palm’s slide. They are:

• Palm executives were slow to see the convergence of cellular phones and personal digital assistants
• Palm has had a hard time making its corporate customers happy
• The separation of Palm’s hardware and software units failed to boost Palm’s prospects
• Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky took their knack for innovation with them when they left in 1998 to start Handspring
• Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales

The loss of Hawkins and Dubinsky is the biggest in my view. It was the most diluting of many events that have diluted Palm and its image over the years, from the early naming gaffes (Pilot, PalmPilot, Palm Connected Organizer…) to the proliferation of too-similar models (III, IIIx, IIIe, IIIxe…) to the PalmOne/PalmSource split.

I learned this today from an anonymous comment over at FA:OSX. If you want to download RealPlayer but would rather skip the registration and the attempts to distract you into buying the payware version, just go here:

http://www.real.com/freeplayer/?rppr=rnwk

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jima commented on Sat Oct 8 14:16:27 2005:

There’s also another version that the BBC had made exclusively for its radio listeners that doesn’t have all the spyware stuff that you get in the regular RealPlayer version. BoingBoing wrote it up last year, and it looks like the links are still good.

When I was starting this site and designing the software that powers it I decided that I didn’t want to use raw HTML for writing posts. After 10 years of authoring HTML I still find it visually obtrusive, and somewhat distracting when trying to focus on writing. I considered both Textile and RST but ultimately settled on Markdown. The implementation I use is Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown, which has worked flawlessly.

I find that, as advertised, Markdown is great for writing text (and hypertext). The source is very readable – which makes the writing process a lot easier, especially for longer posts – and I almost never need to write straight HTML.

Some recent news is giving me flashbacks to 1995, when Unisys sprung their GIF patent surprise on the young World Wide Web. We got quite angry and some enterprising people even built a replacement for the beloved GIF.

Are we going there again? Forgent, a Texas company that “develops and licenses intellectual property and makes scheduling software” (it makes me feel dirty just to type that) is suing 40 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo, for infringing on JPEG-related patent No. 4,698,672.

The innovative online music label Magnatune (which I mentioned once before) does things differently. They offer unrestricted streams of all their music (not just snippets), have a voluntary sliding price scale, and offer DRM-free downloads in multiple formats including patent-free Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. It’s easy to love this as a consumer, but to many business analysts it sounds untenable. Today I came across an academic paper that validates the Magnatune model:

The paper analyzes the behavior of customers of the online music label Magnatune… We develop a model that is based on reciprocal theories of social preferences pioneered by Rabin (1993) and extended by Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger (2004)… The predictions of our model are empirically tested with the field data we obtained.