Kung-Log is another useful tool for Mac OS X like NetNewsWire. It allows offline creation of Weblog entries and has options for basically everything you need to support Movable Type weblogs (like this one). It actually has one extra feature, NetNewsWire is missing: you can upload files (like images) as well. That way, you don‘t have to go to the web based admin interface at all.

There is just no better introduction to Discordianism than the one given in the fifth edition of the Principia Discordia: „if organized religion is the opium of the masses then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe…“: read it.

MacOSXHints – a really, really useful site, describes another way for circumventing the iTunes 4.01 sharing limitation. This time it involves Rendezvous Beacon of Chaotic Software which is a handy small tool by itself.

Chaotic Software is the producer of quite a lot useful tools which I have been using now and then, especially MP3 Rage and Web Devil (until OSX gave me curl and wget, of course).

What the Matrix would be like if it was running on Windows XP: eat this. I guess this was done by some film students from Hamburg. Very cool.

I am using FileMaker for many years now and although I do appreciate many of its features and do not see any other contender in the area of desktop databases the tool does show first signs that it‘s time has come. Not only that there hasn‘t been any significant update to it‘s user interface and that the integration into OS X is almost non-existent. It‘s programmers seem to lack basic knowledge on security as well.

A BugTraq update today reports on FileMaker handing out complete password lists to any clients connecting via TCP/IP. There is a corresponding article at FileMaker‘s web site as well. But no update. Instead, they recommend „Reducing the scenarios in which the database is shared“ and other helpless tips.

I can only hope someone will soon come up with a cool XML database based desktop database GUI application for the Mac. It can‘t be that complicated and we are going to have it anyway sooner or later.

Does anybody know about any probable alternative to FileMaker?

If your Mac OS X computer is idle most of the time, you might want to install Fluid to get rid of your excess cpu cycles. It looks mar-ve-lous.

While iTunes version 4 was a huge step ahead in terms of publicity for Apple because everybody was talking about their new Music Store, another feature was even more important: the software provided the ability to share software via the Internet (which was a good idea).

But as the files were more or less served „as is“ it was actually more the coming of a new Napster and new tools were emerging making use of its protocol. Apple reacted with a pretty embarrassing move and limited the reachability of it‘s sharing service to the local network.

However, the cat is out of the bag. First, there is a hack called 401ok circumventing this mechanism in iTunes 4.0.1. And – even more interesting – there is free implementation of the sharing protocol used (DAAP). Let‘s see how this develops. At least this thing shows you can‘t take back anything you have put on the Web once.

Shrook is a new contender in the RSS client game. Like NetNewsWire, it sports a simple, Cocoa-based user interface.

It won‘t replace NetNewsWire for me as NNW provides other important features like the Weblog Editor, but Shrook does have some nice features that are still missing from the other program: you can define update times for each channel individually, it has a simple sort view for „new“ news, it marks „opened“ items with an small icon and it allows for more than one level of folders. Best of all: old items get archived when they get kicked off the feed. That way you can follow feeds that fill up fast and that you probably check out not fast enough.

It is so funny to see some things being named years after their birth. Weblogs have been here for so many years, but just since a three or four of them, they are known as such.

I started following the web in 1995 when I moved to Berlin to start working for ART+COM. So I was in the front row somehow as ART+COM has been one of the first ten organizations that set up a web site in Germany and the general nerdyness of the people there was rather high.

However, after the first 100 web sites came out the concept of daily blogging was starting soon. Where? In the Macintosh world. Long before the Windows world learned about editing home pages, creative writers set up nicely designed web sites with daily updates. One of the pioneers was Macintouch which is still a great resource and the format hasn‘t changed within the last five years.

I copied the concept somehow when I was taking over webmastering activity for the Chaos Computer Club. In 1997 I turned the CCC home page into a irregularly updated news portal. The concept was retained when I handed over the web site to a new web team in 2001.

The Macintosh web was really pioneering both web site design as well as the concept of Internet based publishing. Since 1990, the probably best Macintouch news source was TidBITS. First it was a mailing list only (with perfectly formatted mails!), then they extended their reach to the web. If you are into Macintouch, I can only recommend them for their style is very different to rest of the pack. Adam C. Engst won my special sympathy after speaking up in difficult times.