ExpanDrive

Robin Harris made a great post last week over on Storage Mojo outlining 5 zombie storage concepts that should die. His last item on the list really hit home:

Cloud. Yep, the word du jour is, because of its popularity, rapidly being drained of meaning. Public? Private? Compute? Storage? Cheap? Secure? Software? Infrastructure? What??? Sure, talk about cloud, but for goodness sake don’t put the word cloud in a product name. You’ll regret it within 2 years if you do. If you simply must then follow EMC’s oblique approach with Atmos.

I appreciate the need for a simple buzz word with a real-world analog to help people understand and get excited about new technology, but meaning is being drained from “cloud” at a break-neck pace. This blog is a great place monitor the insanity.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre (六四屠殺). Consider reading the Wikipedia page, and also the page on Tank Man. The New York Times published a great retrospective with the photographers who took pictures of Tank Man, as well as a previously unpublished photo from the street.

BBC has a story about reporters being blocked from entering the square today. It includes some humorous video of un-uniformed agents blocking the cameras with umbrellas. Also, a website claims that an unusual number or Chinese social networking websites are “down for maintenance” today.

Where can I apply for this job?

ExpanDrive v2.0.2 is out with a few major bug fixes. We strongly recommend the upgrade.

David Appleyard at Mac Appstorm posted a glowing ExpanDrive 2 review on Monday and has followed it up with an awesome giveaway – AppStorm is handing out free 10 licenses of ExpanDrive! Feeling lucky?

(RT @cottonduck)

James Iry posted a really amusing “history” of programming languages over on his blog, One Div Zero. I laughed till I cried. He bills it as “mostly wrong,” but he’s not far from the truth.

Just for a taste, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the History

Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem”

Good times

Braid, the breathtakingly beautiful indy game by Jonathan Blow has finally been released for the Mac. I have had a troubled and unhealthy relationship with video games, and so for the most part I bind myself to the mast, but I think I’m going to make an exception today. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that looked like it had a better ratio of fun to not-fun.

You can buy it on Greenhouse for $15.

We thought we were pretty tough when we coerced FTP into working like a filesystem for ExpanDrive, but someone on GetACoder.com thinks they can get FTP to do a lot more.

Budget: $ 300-1000
Description
Hello, I need a FTP Client which can view all the directories and files on a specific server WITHOUT logging in with the FTP details. It must be able to show me the server IP and all other details given below. It must be able to get all the MySQL Databases connected to the pages. It must collect the user name, password and host name and give it to me. It must also allow me to connect with the MySQL User Name, Password and host name to any database in the world and have a SQL editor to take actions. It must be able to download the file stored on the server (not the client-side preview but the real code on the server!). Regards, Akshit Soota

This is an upside down version of a freshman year physics problem I had from K&K (problem 3.17, search for “hydrant” on Amazon ‘inside the book’). Another video on YouTube has more information on the jet pack.