phatness.com - still kickin

Wow, that last month or so is such an up hill battle. We have finally launched Flowzit, our first product. Check it out:

http://flowzit.com

If you haven't received an invite code for the Family & Friends account, shoot me an email.

So Green Day is running around masquerading as this band called Foxboro Hot Tubs. Good for them. Blink 182 did it, why can't they? (Interesting... Foxboro... Box Car... whatever)

As a pleasant surprise, you can download their CD off their website and it is even in DRM-Free MP3 format. It's encoded at 320k bit rate no less! I applaud their decision and figured I would put my money where my mouth is and reward them with my support.

That's where the nightmare begins. Apparently, they partnered with this service called Neurotic Media. Clicking on "buy cd" takes you to a second website, foxborohottubsdownload.com, which I assume is pointed at NM's servers. The checkout process feels like something from 1998 and asks for information not required for checkout like my date of birth. Well, what the heck, I love Green Day, like the songs I've heard so far, let's do it.

However, I would not ever do this again and I wouldn't recommend anyone else either.

Did you know that you have to agree to a terms of service to purchase the CD? The terms of service talk about recurring billing fees and I must cancel the service to prevent this. What the heck? I thought I was just downloading a CD. Why do I need to agree to a terms of service to buy songs?! Ridiculous.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, who I have mucho respect for, linked to an article about how the Java support in the lastest version of Mac OS X is terrible. He then makes a very irresponsible statement:
"I fail to see why anyone (other than Java developers themselves) would care."

The problem with this statement is that you should care. Why? Well, because you are a Mac user. It will take a bit to explain. Humor me.

There are many upon many businesses out there that support the Mac platform ONLY because their Java applications will run on a Mac. But this isn't the complete reason. Hear me out.

Now, these businesses aren't Google, Microsoft, or IBM. You probably haven't heard the names of these businesses, let alone the names of the software they provide. They certainly aren't household names, and your mom and dad aren't using their applications. But they do represent a significant base of development energy. These are the guys that make it possible for the little guys and the medium guys to do business.

For the longest time, I have offered my friends phatness.com email addresses. Everyone wanted one. No one kept one. The problem is that every webmail application offered by hosting providers don't have the ease-of-use and presentation needed for normal users.

Now, we have our answer. Round Cube is a webmail system that even in its pre-release, blows the doors off of everyone else.

As with any programmer, I have a set of tools I use on a frequent basis. Coming from a Windows background, you need a powerful text editor for basic tasks. It needs the ability to read files coming in from Unix as well as Windows, hopefully has the capability to run external programs, an easy interface for working with large file sets, and maybe syntax highlighting.

If I'm on a *nix machine and coming in over a terminal, I will be using Vim. When I'm on Windows, I used to use EditPlus. Now, I'm finding myself more and more on different operating systems but working with the same set of files. So I decided to see what was available that was cross platform and didn't run in a terminal window.