“Yuppie bone smuggler” - Airheads

I love the movie Airheads. If you haven’t seen it, then go rent it. Whenever I think of that slick record company marketing guy being described as a “yuppie bone smuggler” I smile. That movie was filled with great lines. Rent it, buy it, check it out.

I’ve noticed a few people are starting to write that they are tired of all this Web 2.0 BS — me too — and some are vowing not to write or link to any blog entry that talks about it. Among these folks are Joel Spolsky and Dare Obasanjo who writes:

I am interested in discussions on the Web as a platform and even folksonomies (not tagging) but the marketplace of ideas has been polluted by all this “Web 2.0″ garbage. Once again, I’ve flipped the bozo bit on Web 2.0. Like Joel, you won’t see any use of the term on my blog or in items I link to from now on.

The fundamental problem here I think is that nobody likes to be sold. We like to buy, like to shop, like to try out and acquire new things, but we do not like being sold. Phony, selfish marketing speak only serves the marketers and the company/product/service being pitched. When something is hyped into being the next greatest thing it can make even the most positive person cynical.

However, it is entirely possible that good products and services can exist and evolve behind cliched, misguided marketing techniques.

It’s for that reason that I cannot completely jump aboard with never agreeing to link something simply because it uses marketing buzzwords, but rest assured Hmm is a 99.5% Web 2.0-free zone. I reserve that .05% .5% (thanks Simon) for the product/service/site that is having its dreams soiled by yuppie bone smugglers.

Hopefully those with good products/services/sites will learn that the best way to make people reach for their wallets isn’t built upon deceit or trickery, but creating something that fits a worthwhile, relevant, entertaining and/or useful purpose, itch or need.

No false illusions. Something as dynamic as the web cannot have any version numbers.

For fellow Wordpress users, yesterday Matt posted that Wordpress 1.5.2 is now available:

This set of improvements and security fixes is in line with our commitment to maintaining an extremely stable 1.5 series.

Upgraded. According to my calculations, this marks fifth official Wordpress release since 1.5 (1.5.1, 1.5.1.1, 1.5.1.2, 1.5.1.3) We switched MakeYouGoHmm to WP back in March and it’s working pretty well so far.

I’m still working with Jowl getting Webmaster Cookbook organized. We just uploaded the podcast for Webmaster Cookbook show #35. Will be upgrading that to 1.5.2 a little later as we are using WP over there too.

I just looked at the list of blogs and counted five using WP that will need upgrading. Sort of curious what other bloggers are doing to update multiple Wordpress installs across multiple dedicated servers? Anybody else reading deal with this or find a good blog post or article about dealing with this? I read Matt post some time ago that he had a little shell script he used, but I’m not sure if that was cross server or not … hmm.

Regular blogging should resume shortly. Doing lots of cobweb cleaning this morning.

The following article doesn’t mention Ruby on Rails but I keep hearing that touted by many developers as the new rage. A lot of programmers like the concept of less code.

However, EDC’s survey has found PHP, along with scripting cousins Perl and Python, is seeing drastically reduced adoption among developers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Use of PHP has dropped by a quarter in EMEA during the last 12 months to just under 28 per cent while 40 per cent of developers said they have no plans to evaluate or use PHP.

I don’t think PHP is going anywhere any time soon. Perl didn’t go away with the surge in PHP interest.

Starting with version 10.0 beta Novell wants to free SUSE, literally:

Novell is renaming SUSE Professional and releasing it as 100% open source. Novell spokesman and director of public relations Bruce Lowry says his company is “pushing” to make SUSE Linux available to anyone who wants it. According to sources close to the company, SUSE Professional is to be rebranded as OpenSUSE.

The strength of AOL once was its massive membership of dial-up users which all but shattered the nearest competition, but as low cost broadband offerings have become more widespread, AOL has had to fall back on its second strength: exclusive members content. Around the middle of this month they are finally planning on opening up this sacred content to the web. A long holdout in coming, but it might just be the much needed ticket to save their sinking ship.

The company plans to launch in mid-August a new portal that will make the services and content that were previously available only to AOL subscribers free to everyone.

Before snickering too loudly, check out some of AOL’s areas like Dan Hurley’s Amazing Instant Novelist area (keyword: novel). For the longest time we kept our subscription to AOL just for that area. eNovel made an intent to buy them at one point, but it seems that deal fell through. This is one of several gem AOL members only areas.

Alas, cancelling AOL service has been a big part of their problem, next to holding onto a slowly dying dialup model too long. They will do almost anything to keep their customers from bailing, but in being that aggressive they’ve turned more people off than on. And AOL’s pains have resulted in several job cuts over the last few years. Add that to the 92 million stolen email addresses and it all equals an iceberg in the ocean.

Although AOL might be on the canvas and drowning in a sea of their own CDs, they aren’t ready to suck the water into their lungs. Yet.

You don’t have to have SkypeOut minutes to call toll free numbers in France, Poland, UK and USA via shareskype:

You can call the toll-free numbers in many countries even if you haven’t bought SkypeOut and don’t ever plan to. You can also use this to see that SkypeOut works well for you as a sort of “try before you buy at no risk”.

It’s available now as a global beta.

The other day when I spotted a Tablet PC at Best Buy, I also spotted a Mac Mini. My wife, who once thought the Mini was cute, when actually seeing how small it was, said: “I don’t want one of those any more.” Now there are new Mac Minis with 512MB starting at $499 (yes, you still have to buy the keyboard and mouse). via Apple:

That means you can surf wirelessly with AirPort Extreme and use wireless keyboards and mice with internal Bluetooth. And for the ultimate Mac mini, choose the $699 model with a SuperDrive that lets you burn DVDs of your home movies or make a backup of the music or audiobooks you buy at the iTunes Music Store

There are also new iBooks starting at $999. More and more, it seems like Apple wants to go after the lower end PC market. This strategy could pay huge dividends if enough people will crossover. I’ve read a few stories of people making the switch.

That’s the rumour at this point anyway: Longhorn will be released as Windows Vista. Official announcement is supposed to be at 6am PST tomorrow. Guess we even have to wait for the name.

Here’s my question: does anybody outside Redmond actually care what the name of the next Windows will be? Wasn’t Microsoft building up the name Longhorn all this time, only to abandon it for the “real” name? Naming OS is becoming a fad in itself I guess. Apple’s next OS will be Leopard, so maybe it’s appropriate that we know what the next version of Windows will be … a year and a half before it’s actually released. Maybe.

Wish it was 2006 so we’d actually see this on store shelves. We can continue to hope for an Xbox 360 launch later this year. Maybe.

Update: It’s official now, watch the video here.

Yesterday we had one of our dedicated server hard drives go bad. We do have backups of most the information (all program files and custom code are backed up daily) but not every image or MySQL database has a current backup, so I’ll be in repair/reFTP/resync mode from backups today and scouring local caches trying to repair/replace some missing and potentially lost data. There was a number of domains and databases on that other server, so this isn’t a small job. MakeYouGoHmm data is undisturbed and the MySQL databases that powers this site are backed up. This might be a good call to readers who run their sites to remind them to always back up their data.

However, there area a few broken images and other small scripts on this site that were being called from that dedicated server. We’re working on fixing these issues, just FYI.

What a great early 2nd anniversary present, thank you Feedster! We will proudly display the Feedster Feed of the Day button (shown in the picture below).

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