While I sit around not buying a MacBook Pro, I’m trying to fathom why Apple decided to dump a widely known and perfectly good name, “Powerbook” for a terrible name like MacBook Pro. During the Macworld Stevenote, Jobs stated, “Today we are introducing a new notebook computer that we are calling the Macbook Pro. Its a new name because we’re kind of done with Power, and because we want Mac in the name of our products”. Huh?
The first Powerbooks did not have PowerPC chips. According to EveryMac, The Powerbook 100, 140, and 170 released on October 21, 1991 had 68HC000, and 68030 chips instead.  The PowerMacs did all have PowerPC chip, but that (PowerMac 6100) wasn’t released until 1994. So it is too long ago for me to remember, but I suspect the Power was originally part gimic and part naming scheme for designating products for Power users.

So something deeper is obviously going on with this stupid name change.  My guess is a cosolidation of the iBook and Powerbook lines into one line.  Maybe Apple doesn’t think they can create enough of a differentation to have two lines?  The Macbook is the lowend portable, and the MacBook Pro is the high end?

I guess it is another reason to sit tight and not buy.

What is incredible about Google is that they can initiate a project and make it public, before I can even make a blog post about a vague idea I have. The following blog post has been in my unpublished blogs bin for weeks now. Today, Google opened Google Base. It’s been talked about for a week or two now, but it is actually closer to what I’ve been dreaming about than the rumors led me to believe. It still has a long way to go. Most importantly the need for a public API… which I’m sure will be available soon. I most excited that Google Base will spur other similar projects. On with the dusty old blog post:

For many months now, maybe I even have a blog post about it, I’ve been wanting a web application that would basically be Filemaker for the web, combined with Wiki like collaboration and versioning. Everyone I’ve tried to explain this to looks at me funny. Either because it is just a stupid idea, or because people don’t see the brilliance of the concept. I think I’ve finally convinced Seth it is a good idea, but he has his own brilliant ideas to spend his non-existent free time on.

Somewhat encouraging is that there seem to be a couple projects circling the idea, but don’t quite get what I’m after.

What am I after? How about an example. Imagine you want to build a collaborative dictionary where anyone could add new entries, or edit existing entries. You could take the Wiktionary approach by using pure wiki software. This has the benefit of ease of collaboration and every edit is saved so you can revert vandalism etc. However, what if you wanted to have a clean xml version of the data so that you could use the dictionary from other outside applications? Each entry is just a big blog. Pulling out the distinct elements (word, definition, pronunciation, etc.) is not clean.

The alternative implementation is an Urban Dictionary route. Building a custom application from scratch. The downside to this approach is that there is a bunch of coding infrastructure that must be done. In addition, making the app have flexible access control and extensive versioning make the coding much more complicated.

My proposed solution is a web app that allows a user, through a web browser, to create a new database, define columns, types etc. (basically PHPmyAdmin). Then define access control roles (ex. anyone can add a new entry, or edit old entries) with all revisions saved. Finally they can define views/layouts. So they can provide a HTML template and a stripped down XML view.

Other possible uses?:

• Television and Radio schedules
• An open collaborative Internet Movie Database or CD database.
• Database of geo-locations
• Events calendar
• A plain old Wiki
• To-do lists

No programming required. Obviously it is a very complicated application, but all the pieces exist on their own. Just need to put the following projects in a blender:

• WikiDB
• MediaWiki
• phpMyAdmin
• base.google.com
• WikiCalc
• Ning

I’ve used populicio.us for a while. It provides an RSS feed of recent popular links posted on del.icio.us. However, most entries are just the a title and a link. Without actually clicking the link you can’t even tell what the link is about. And without any context, I’m not very likely to click the link.

To add context, it would be cool to use the link provided by populicio.us, grab the linked page and include the actual page content in a derivative RSS feed.

Playing with mplayer and streamripper a couple weeks ago, I realized it would be excellent if there was an Internet based stream converter. Perhaps one exists, or it wouldn’t be too difficult to put together.

Basically I’d like to be able to paste a Windows Media audio or Real Audio url and have an MP3 stream spit out the other end. You can basically do this with MPlayer right now, but it requires some set up and tweaking.

I want a service that I can just enter a url like this into iTunes:

http://example.com/?streamurl=http://www.wbur.org/listen/feed/wburlive_20050415.asx

And have a nice MP3 stream come out the speakers.

Earlier I was looking for a solution to having personal bookmarks available on more than one machine and more than one browser. Today I started using the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension. I haven’t extensively tested it but it seems to work alright event though it hasn’t been updated in a while. The interface isn’t great and there are some quirks with windows.

Meanwhile, Jessamyn just left a comment to check out unalog. It appears to be just what I was looking for. It is sort of a del.icio.us clone but allows marking a bookmark as private. And unlike the firefox extension, since it is web based, I can use it with any browser. I still use Safari on occasion. It is also released under the MIT license. Still pretty early in development, but seems to have all the functionality I need.

I had an idea in the shower the other day. Wikipedia has the feature where you can create a link on any article to the equivalent article in another language wikipedia. For example, check out the Wikipedia Germany page. On the left is a list of 67 links to the Germany pages on other wikipedia’s. Now rollover each link and you notice that Germany isn’t called “Germany” in different languages.

So say I want to translate the sentence, “I went to Germany for vacation.” into German. The english wikipedia page for Germany has a link to the Germany wikipedia entry for Germany and that article is Deutschland. Now go to the “Vacation” page on the english wikipedia. The German link goes to an article called, urlaub. Minor words like “I”, “went”, “to”, and “for” could be looked up on the Wiktionary.

Why is this intersting? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all. But I think it is interesting because it is a self-building translation table. Wikipedians are simply creating links, but a bi-product is a human created translation for not just words but events, ideas, etc.

I like the idea of Bloglines and delicious but I want to run these services on my own server. Haven’t even done a single freshmeat search to see if such free software exists. I’m sure it does.