Note to Self (and Google):

When your Wii hasn't been played in a few weeks and won't turn on, don't panic. It happened to me this evening when the girls decided out of the blue that they had to use the Wii. The little red "Standby" light wasn't on, it didn't respond to any button pushes, and it looked dead.

After a bit of Googling, I tried unplugging it, left it unplugged for about 5 minutes, and then plugged it back in. The light came on, everything booted up, and the girls are now happy campers. Crisis averted. hopefully this gets indexed and saves some other father from 45 minutes of "Why isn't it working, Dad? Can't you fix it, Dad?"

Technorati Tags: wii , hardware , troubleshooting , power

In an earlier post, I mentioned that my biggest criticism of the Kindle was the inability to share content. Really, it's my only MAJOR criticism of the Kindle device and platform. but this criticism is a big one.

With the Kindle 2 release announcement, I'd hoped that Amazon would come out with software/system updates that would allow for some method of sharing books/magazines/newspapers. The Microsoft Zune, which admittedly isn't tearing up the consumer electronics bestseller chart, has a feature that allows its owners to temporarily share songs with friends. It's a cool feature and helps promote the sale of new music among Zune owners. Sadly, when I currently finish reading a purchased book on the Kindle, it ends up in the online equivalent of a banker's box in the basement. I can pull it up later and re-read it, but mostly it's buried. The cynic in me says "Eh, whatever - the publisher and seller are both happy and have no incentive to let me share an e-book."

Now I knew this going into my purchase, so it's not like I can gripe too loudly - but it seems like such an obvious area for potential improvement with Kindle 2. Had they addressed this issue, I'd already have my current Kindle on Ebay or Craigslist and an order placed for the new version. Then again, I'm not convinced that allowing for the sharing of content would require the newer hardware version.

Here's how I could see it working. as a Kindle owner, I'd have a "Friends" list (not unlike IM, the Xbox 360, etc). I could choose to transfer a title (book, magazine issue, or newspaper daily) to someone on that Friends list. While it's available to them for reading on their device, it would NOT be available for me to read on mine. At some point, that title comes back to me and is then unavailable to the Friend. Like a physical book I loan out, I can't read the book at the same time as my friend.

I could see all sorts of arguments against this from the publishers. we'd lose sales to those Friends because why would they buy it if they could borrow it from you? What would stop someone from setting up their own mini Netflix-for-Ebooks and buying once to share many times? Here are a number of ideas for ways to accommodate publishers, free for the taking by the Kindle team. I think putting one or two of these in place would alleviate many concerns:

1. Limit my list of Friends to a small number - 3, even - to discourage any sort of mass sharing.
2. Limit the number of times I can add/remove people to/from my Friends list in a given period of time.
3. Limit the number of times that a title can be shared among Friends. For example, if a title has been shared with two other people, that's it. No more sharing unless someone else buys it.
4. Limit the length of time that a title can be over on that Friends list. Maybe they only get it for a week or two? 30 days?
5. Don't allow a new title to be transferred among Friends during the first 60-90 days after its release.
6. Charge the Friend receiving the book one-third of the purchase price.
7. Charge me and my Friends a premium for access to the "Sharing Among Friends" feature.

It's worth noting that NONE of these constraints are in place for physical books. When I buy the physical version of a book, I can lend it to as many people as I want. For as long as I want. Doing so doesn't cost either of us a cent. Further, I can put it into the "used books" ecosystem and the publisher doesn't see a dime after my initial purchase.

In fact, the ability to share physical books is the ONLY incentive I currently have to buy physical books that are otherwise available in Kindle form. If it's a book I'm likely to want to share among friends or family, it makes more sense for me to buy the physical book.

For example: I'm considering reading "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The physical version of that book on Amazon is $12.60, while the Kindle version is $11.34. It's the type of book that I'm likely to read and then share with a few family members and friends. So if I buy the physical version, Amazon gets my $12.60 and the publisher gets some portion of that. Beyond that, neither sees more money from me or the people I choose to share it with for this title. Like most people, I talk with friends and family about what I'm reading. so it's unlikely that they'd all rush out to buy the physical version also if they know they can borrow it from me in a couple of weeks. Even if they have Kindles, it's more likely that we'd buy the physical book just so we could share it and avoid spending the $11 EACH to read it.

BUT - imagine that I buy the Kindle version and have three friends with Kindles that would also like to read it. Assuming they've implement suggestions #1, #2, and #6 above, I could lend it to those three people. I'd have to lend it to one after another because the "license to read" the book can only be on one Kindle at a time. but each of those three people would pay $3.75 to have the book on their device for a period of time. In total, Amazon would have collected over $22 from my circle of just THREE "reading friends". A nice premium over the $12.60 they get if I go the physical route. which is the only option now for groups of friends/colleagues who like to share books.

In my view, providing some premium-level service that includes sharing could be a nice way for Amazon and the publishers to make some aftermarket money - and it doesn't have to cannibalize new sales. In fact, I think it will spur a lot of new sales for the Kindle. many people I've shown it to say they'd love to own one but they don't want to lose the flexibility of sharing a book with a friend. The ability to share via the "Whispernet" book download service would lower that hurdle, which could only be good for publisher's sales of ebooks.

Technorati Tags: amazon kindle , kindle , amazon , ebooks , publishing

Amazon announced the Kindle 2 a couple of weeks ago and a few people have asked me if I'm tempted to upgrade my Kindle to the newer version. Short answer: not really. The rest of this post is the longer answer.

I got my Kindle last April (after a wait of about three weeks) and it's been my constant companion since. It goes everywhere I go. It charges on my nightstand (though it only needs it once a week) and is in my bag when I leave the house each day. It goes to every appointment and travels anywhere I do.

There are a number of things I love about the Kindle:

• It's small and lightweight. Fits easily in a bag and the weight is negligible.
• It's got an amazing screen. I can (and have) read on this screen for hours without any eye fatigue. It looks like black text on light gray paper - not like a screen at all.
• It's convenient. I can have a new book, paper, or magazine on it in seconds.
• It enables me to read more. It lets me carry a number of different books in a single, small form factor.
• It's expandable. I could add 2GB of space to it via an SD card, which cost something like $.14. And given that any Amazon purchases can be deleted from the device and re-downloaded later, space isn't much of an issue.

Then there are some minor quibbles:

• The buttons for turning the page are too big and easy to hit accidentally.
• While the marketing materials tell you that it's got a web browser and an MP3 player, don't kid yourself. This thing is an amazing e-book reader, but a portable wireless device or MP3 player it ain't. The browser in it is rudimentary and not up to the task for anything other than very simple pages, and the MP3 player doesn't provide any controls - seriously, it can play/pause tracks in random order and that's about it.
• The relationship between my Amazon.com wishlist(s) and the Kindle's "Save for Later" list is non-existent. I can't add to the "Save for Later" list via the web, nor can I add a book to my wishlist via the Kindle.
• Technical content is best avoided. Between issues with monospace fonts and the disparity in pricing, it's just not worth the hassle. For example. at this time, "Essential WPF" by Chris Anderson (Addison-Wesley) is available in physical form for $31.49 and in the electronic Kindle edition for $28.34. With a savings of just $3.15, no monospace font support, and the inability to share among friends/colleagues, why bother? Compare that to the NY Times Bestseller from James Patterson, "Run For Your Life" - it's $16.79 in physical form and $9.99 in e-book form.

Based on the Kindle 2 product page, it looks like the only one of these that's been addressed is the button issue. The new model (shown above) does have smaller navigation buttons and it looks like holding it without pushing a button will be easier.

Then there's the major drawback. just one really: I can't share my Kindle content. More on this in another post, but this isn't addressed in the new version either.

So does the new version have any features that interest me? Just one: Text-to-speech. Apparently, it can read your book aloud to you using either built-in speakers (which are new to this model) or the headphone jack. This feature is compelling because there are times that I'm in the middle of a really good book and don't want to put it down - but life calls and I have to head to the office, an appointment, or somewhere else. At times, it'd be pretty slick to have the option of plugging the Kindle into the car's AUX jack and letting the story continue.

But are better-designed buttons and the text-to-speech feature enough to warrant an upgrade? Not to me. Maybe there is some class of Kindle user out there that REALLY can't stand the buttons or REALLY wants text-to-speech. But that seems like a pretty small niche, so I find it hard to believe that a large percentage of current Kindle owners will be scrambling to upgrade. The new version isn't yet shipping. so I guess time will tell.

Technorati Tags: kindle , amazon kindle , amazon

I don't post to Twitter all that often, but when I'm going to be at the computer for a while I will often open the timeline for people I'm following (either via the web or Twhirl) and see what people are chatting about. I looked at it in depth a few months ago as a possibility for ad-hoc chatter among my geographically distributed team (we ultimately decided to use Campfire instead). Since then, I've had occasional exchanges with people and posted the odd update to my feed.

As of this post, Twitter's down... again... it's pretty amazing that a business with this much buzz and hype around it has allowed itself to become so unstable.

The stories of its frequent downtime, complaints about scalability, and departures of technical staff are regularly cruising through my newsreader. There's even a site that tracks the various "We're down" images that they use when the site is unavailable (the one at right is from the current outage).

I can't imagine what the behind-the-scenes issues are or what sort of challenges their tech team is dealing with... but clearly there's a problem here that they need to resolve QUICKLY. You have to assume that, at some point, people will decide they've had enough and move on to alternatives like Pownce or Jaiku. Or, as Scott Hanselman suggests in this post, maybe an open and standards-based alternative pops up to fill the void.

Lots of people are looking to Twitter as an omnipresent option for quick communication of status info, marketing messages, news delivery, and as an entry point for simple API messages. Most businesses and web properties would kill for that sort of interest and traffic... to have all that opportunity pass by because of stability issues would be such a waste.

On the other hand, imagine the case studies (for both Business and CompSci)...

Technorati Tags: twitter , stability , web architecture

When the Kindle was released late last year, I was skeptical. I like the idea of an e-book reader, but it's so expensive. Eventually, a few things occurred that convinced me to order one:

• I contemplated having instant access to major papers like the NY Times and Washington Post each morning, as well as local papers like the Denver Post.
• I took a family trip and packed a bunch of books to take with me. I typically have a few books that I'm reading at once -- some fiction, a non-fiction, and a technical book. I can't two of the same type at once, though, lest I get facts or characters mixed up.
• I saw the screen in person.

So at the end of March, I placed my order and started the backorder wait. It arrived a couple of weeks ago and, since then, it looks like Amazon's manufacturers are caught up. My total wait was almost three weeks (18 days), but at this point, the Kindle product page on Amazon.com says that it's in stock and available for shipping... they're even showing photos of an Amazon warehouse with pallets of Kindles.

Short Review

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the device. I'm not yet 100% convinced that I'll always be a paperless reader (when content's available), but if I have a choice between paper version and Kindle version, I think paper will be a rare exception rather than the norm.

Longer Review

Some other thoughts (in no particular order):

• The design's general "look" an aesthetics are not terrible, but not great either. I'll call it "functional." Some of the reviews and feedback out there have really bashed the industrial design of this thing -- calling for Amazon to hire some Apple designers and that sort of thing. I actually don't think it's quite that bad. It certainly is smaller and lighter than I expected it to be (both are good things!).
  
• The design's high points are the screen (the e-ink is AMAZING. No, seriously... AMAZING!), providing an integrated keyboard (vs on-screen "soft" keys), and the main navigation element -- the scrolling wheel/button. The wheel is a very easy way to move through your library, look things up, bookmark, etc. I don't know what the material is they're using to indicate the scroll position along the right margin, but it's pretty cool and works well even in low-light (the Kindle is NOT backlit).
  
• The design's main low point is the fact that 75-80% or so of both sides of the device are dedicated to buttons for Next/Prev page. It's WAY too easy to hit those buttons accidentally. I'd have preferred to see the top 50% of both sides dedicated to buttons so that there are more ways to hold it without accidentally hitting them. Also, the device can play MP3 and audio books - but the volume buttons and headphone jack are on the bottom. If I'm reading in bed, I'm usually holding it from the bottom or resting it on my chest as I read. Also not great - the power on/off and wireless on/off buttons are on the back of the device, which make them hard to reach when its in the cover. On the cover front -- it's not bad, but lots of people seem to have flakey covers that don't really "grip" the reader as it should. Mine seems fine... I definitely prefer reading with it in the cover as that gives me more flexibility in how I hold it. I can see getting a different cover later, though, that holds the Kindle in place at all four corners.
  
• From a software/functionality perspective, I'm very impressed. With the wireless turned on, it's very easy to search and navigate the online Kindle store. You can buy material right from the device and it shows up within a minute or so. Very slick. When looking at a book's product page on the device, you have the option to "Save for Later" (essentially bookmarking the product page) or you can download a sample chapter. When browsing the Kindle store from your PC, you can send a sample chapter to your device with just one click. In either case, the sample is on the device in less than a minute. When viewing your library on the device, you can change how things are sorted and set filters for books, periodicals, or both. Personally, I'd also like the ability to organize things into folders and show/hide downloaded samples.
  
• The "lookup" feature is slick - you can choose "lookup" on any line of text and it provides quick definitions for each of the non-trivial words in that line of text. You can further dive into each word for a more in-depth definition, or search the web and/or Wikipedia for the word.
  
• Speaking of the web, there is an experimental web browser on the device... it seems similar in capability to the Pocket IE browser I have on my Windows Mobile phone. Plain HTML pages are fine -- but sites that use any sort of Flash, JavaScript, or fancier rendering will suffer. Still, it's good enough for occasional basic use.
  
• The keyboard is usable enough for searches and quick notes, but not something I'd want to compose long email messages with. Conveniently, it's got a dedicated "Search" button that calls up a context-sensitive search bar from anywhere (i.e., if in the Kindle Store, the Search bar will search the store for your criteria). There are also shortcuts you can use in the search bar to search other contexts - @wiki searches wikipedia, @store searches the Kindle store, etc. There are a few other shortcuts, such as ALT+T, which displays the current time in the corner (humorously, it often shows it in plain English ("six minutes till four").

There are some things I'd like to see changed down the road, either through firmware or in a later hardware generation:

• It seems there's no relationship between my on-device "Save For Later" selections and an Amazon wishlist. I'd much rather have a Kindle-specific wishlist that I can add to and manage from both the device and the Amazon.com site. Even if I create another Wishlist on the site and force myself to use it just for Kindle books, I don't see a way to get at that wishlist from the device. And while I can use the "Send Sample Chapter" option from the site, I can't add something to my "Save for Later" list from the site.
  
• For subscriptions, such as the New York Times, I'd like to be able to tell it how many days I want to keep on the device by default. Currently, it stores several days of periodicals... choosing NY Times from the "Home" list displays all of the publication days so I have to make another selection. Since all of my Kindle content is backed up and available from Amazon (should I delete it from the device), I'd like an option to only keep the most recent issue of a periodical. It's rare that I'd want the Saturday paper on Sunday... so delete it when Sunday arrives and I can manually download it if the need arises.
  
• I want to see more content, particularly with magazines. The list of available magazines is pretty slim... I'd love to see Wired, Esquire, Inc, and a few others become available. I recognize that the lack of color and quality photos would be a sacrifice for magazines, particularly for something like Wired, but I'd forego that for the convenience of having the article content with me all the time.
  
• No "Chronicles of Narnia" in Kindle form?! There's also little in the way of Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and classic Stephen King (if you're into those authors).
  
• You can subscribe to blogs on the device, but most of them are $1.99/month. Not a freakin' chance, Amazon. Between Newsgator Go on my phone, FeedDemon on my PCs, and the basic web browser built into the Kindle, I can't imagine paying for content that is available for free in so many other ways.
  
• The price has GOT to come down... I thought long and hard about this purchase. Ultimately, I figured I could Ebay the device if I decide I don't like it and recoup most of my cost... so I went for it. If it were $100 cheaper, though, I think it'd be more of a no-brainer. I suspect a lot of the cost is tied up in the "Whispernet" wireless service (provided by Sprint) - which doesn't cost the customer anything after the initial purchase.

Again, I'm very happy with the purchase and haven't had any buyer's remorse at all. The Kindle has been with me constantly over the last couple of weeks and... so far, at least, the convenience of having lots of different reading material on me all the time is worth any of the drawbacks I've run into.

Technorati Tags: amazon , kindle , amazon kindle , ebook , review

Looks like Amazon is starting to shorten the delay on Kindle orders... when Jeff Bezos posted this on their front page apologizing for the long shipping delays, the typical wait was six weeks (with some reports of almost 8 weeks!).

In his open letter to customers, Bezos promised they were ramping up production and hoped that, within a "few weeks", they'd be able to announce enough stock for same-day shipping... and backorders would be a distant memory.

At the time, I hadn't yet ordered one... but I had been considering it for weeks. I have to admit to not (yet) being 100% convinced that an e-book reader will be for me. However, I typically have a few things I'm reading at once (fiction, non-fiction, a tech book, magazines, etc)... so the idea of having all of that (along with some reference material) with me all the time is very intriguing. After taking a trip last month where I brought a few fairly thick books (and wanted to bring a couple others), I figured I'd give it a shot. What's the worst that can happen -- I hate it, put it on Ebay, and possibly take a slight loss on it (though Ebay sales are currently closing for well over the Amazon retail price). So we'll see.

Anyway, I pulled the trigger and went for it. I ordered on March 31, settled in for a 6 week wait, and was surprised to get this email tonight (2 weeks to the day from my order):

We now have estimated delivery dates for the Kindle order you placed
on 3/31/08, #XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX. We are now estimating that
your Kindle will arrive between 4/22/2008 and 4/29/2008. We'll contact you
again to let you know when your order is shipped.

Based on the Kindle forums, Amazon's shipping then slightly earlier than their estimates - so with some luck I'll see it early in the week after next.

Technorati Tags: amazon , kindle , ebook

Regular readers of this blog will know that my background is primarily in the Microsoft development world, with the odd foray into Java (and more recently, experiments with Ruby and Processing). So when Microsoft announces some new tool or framework, I'll pay attention and see what's up.

Right now, there's a good deal of hype and excitement around Silverlight... which sounds great to me in theory, but in practice has been largely a disappointment.

And I saw that as a user, not a developer. I can't even think about using it for development at this point because, frankly... it simply doesn't run for me as a casual web user.

Rich Ziade nails some of the issues in his post from Friday, called "Microsoft-Centered Design":

So I'm perusing the various blog posts that have streamed out of the MIX 08 conference and some interesting talks are available online. So I head on over to the MIX 08 site to view some sessions and I run into this:  [image of the "You need Silverlight" placeholder] ..  Yep, I need to download Real Player, I mean Silverlight to watch these videos. Silverlight, for the less enlightened, is Microsoft's foray into streaming video, rich media and rich apps on the Web (aka Microsoft's Flash).

I agree with Rich's premise that Silverlight apps (or at least the demos we've seen so far) don't really provide much reason to use it over Flash -- a time-tested, well-supported platform for rich web apps.

But I find the problem with Silverlight to go even deeper:  For me, it simply doesn't work.

I use Firefox as my browser... and despite lots of examples and statements about Silverlight being not only cross-browser, but also cross-platform, I can't get it to run in Firefox. On any machine I've tried. To date, that's five machines. All of them are running similar setups:

• The most recent production version of Firefox (currently 2.0.0.12), with extensions:
• del.icio.us Bookmarks (for quick access to my bookmarks)
• Firebug (for debugging and development)
• Flashblock  (to block Flash content from loading until/unless I want to see it)
• Google Toolbar  (because... well... because it's the Google toolbar)
• Remember the Milk for Gmail   (because seeing my tasks right next to email rocks)
• Tab Mix Plus  (because I want to choose how/when/where new tabs are opened in Firefox)
• IE Tab (see below)

Note that what I'm NOT running is the NoScript extension, which reportedly causes problems for Silverlight in Firefox.

I can't tell you how many times on these machines I've gone to download the various versions of Silverlight and see if maybe... just maybe... THIS TIME will be different. So far, no joy.

The issue isn't made any easier by the various versions floating around... Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, some sort of refresh/CTP version for 1.1, and now Silverlight 2.0 as of Mix08. This thing's been around for just a year now and there are already more SKUs of Silverlight than there are of Windows XP.

Of course, things do appear to work fine in IE7. But I don't want to run IE7 as my browser. I've got Firefox and its extensions tweaked to be exactly the way I like it.

The only way I'm able to get Silverlight content to run inside of a Firefox window currently is via the "IE Tab" extension -- which loads the IE rendering engine inside of a Firefox tab. In doing that, though, I lose the integration with the rest of Firefox. And it's only cosmetically different from having two browsers open to begin with. I don't want that.

I would like this to work. I really would. So far, it seems that the newer Silverlight 2.0 will run inside of Firefox -- however, the vast majority of the Silverlight content out there (which, as Rich points out, could be provided in Flash without losing any functionality) is NOT targeting Silverlight 2.0. It seems to mostly be in 1.0 or 1.1.

So until Microsoft gets this working correctly in Firefox, I find myself having to make a decision every time I come across that drives-me-up-a-wall "Get Microsoft Silverlight" badge -- do I really care enough about this content to deal with the frustration and go outside my normal workflow to view it?

More often than not, the answer is "no," which is a shame because there are some interesting videos out there in Silverlight format (the screenshot above is from Jon Udell's Perspectives video audio interview on MS Robotics).

As a developer, the notion of using XAML to build applications that can be run via Silverlight as well as via a WPF rich client sounds really cool. But how can I get excited about a new developer platform that's completely broken for me as a user?

Update: In the comments, Jon Udell clarified that the Perspectives link above is audio and not video and I've since downloaded the MP3 version. The "Get Silverlight" badge made it look like a video to me and seeing that badge repeatedly without being able to get it working in Firefox prompted the post. Thanks, Jon!

Technorati Tags: silverlight , mix08 , firefox , microsoft , web development

Data Visualization (or "Infoporn" as I like to call it) has been a passion of mine for many years. Most of my career as both a developer and manager has been in the development of software that visualizes large sets of data. For the most part, my work has been around energy industry data but I'm often up late into the night tinkering with data sets I find online.

Over the last couple of years, the visualization of data has taken off and become much more popular than in the past. What used to be the exclusive domain of formal textbooks and students in specialized design programs has become accessible to a wider audience. As I think about it, I suspect the reason for this growth in popularity is the convergence of several factors:

• There is a TON of public data available online. Over the years, I've collected a variety interesting large public data sets, such as AOL search data, Enron email messages, and Netflix movie ratings. Peruse the "publicdata" tag on del.icio.us and you'll find more data than you can shake a chart at. In addition, the popularity of web services and public APIs for data has exploded in the last couple of years. These are ideal for fetching current, dynamic data including weather, stock prices, and other financial data. There are also web sites that catalog the wide variety of web service APIs available online. The popularity of online "mashups" (the combining of two or more web services to create something completely new) has grown very quickly, particularly with the arrival of online mapping services like Google Maps and Virtual Earth. These days, popular web sites that don't provide an API for programmatic access quickly catch heat for their omission.
  
• Data has become "social" -- though in a "Web 2.0" world, what hasn't? Seriously, there have been some great "social data" sites cropping up over the last couple of years. These sites let anyone upload, visualize, browse, and share their data. Don't like the way some data on these sites is represented? Chart it yourself. The hallmark examples here are Swivel (blog) and Many Eyes (from IBM, also with a blog), though there are other similar sites as well.
  
• Visualization tools have become more commonplace. In addition to Microsoft improving the charting tools in each new version of Excel, nearly every programming language out there has 3rd party graphics and charting libraries available for it. For many developers, adding basic charting capability to an application has become a fairly simple, plug-and-play affair. That said, it's still too easy to create charts that are ugly and do a poor job of communicating information. In the same way that the rise of desktop publishing tools in the 80's and 90's made for a lot of horrible newsletters and brochures, the increasing number of charting and visualization tools means we're seeing a lot of really bad data presentations. Go ask Edward Tufte (a "founding father" for modern data visualization) about PowerPoint or Stephen Few about BusinessObjects to see what I mean (Few refers to the charts from one Business Objects product as "data visualization Happy Meals" -- not a compliment). Still... it's an exciting time right now for this field.
  
• Development tools have improved greatly in their handling of data. Most development platforms/environments have some sort of abstraction layer or available data-access tools to easy the querying and manipulation of data. For dealing with local data, it's rare to have to write new code from scratch to ingest and parse data -- most tools have libraries for standard formats like XML or CSV, as well as straightforward APIs for working with relational databases. For remote data, there are lots of tools that quickly generate a local proxy or wrapper around standard web services.
  
• The development tools for creating and manipulating graphics have similarly improved. Writing code to create on-screen graphics used to be something that an elite few programmers could do -- it typically required very strong C++ skills, in-depth knowledge of complex graphics libraries, and a background in physics and 3D modeling. Now, most modern platforms have relatively approachable APIs for drawing points, lines, regions, and text on screen - as well as simplified APIs for 3D manipulation.
  
• Also on the graphics front, there's Processing - a development environment designed and developed specifically for visualization. It's built on top of Java, but its creators (Ben Fry and Casey Reas) and collaborators have done a great job of balancing approachability (for designers or those new to programming) and power (for those who want to create advanced, interactive visualizations). If you're interested in checking out Processing (which is free and open source and a lot of fun and so you totally should), I'd recommend Fry's book, "Visualizing Data" (published last year by O'Reilly)... Jeff Atwood calls Fry "Edward Tufte armed with a compiler" and I've found the book to be an excellent walkthrough for Processing. Additionally, it's good introduction to the thought process involved with creating an effective visualization.
  
• Computing power and storage are cheap and plentiful. It takes a lot of processor cycles to render graphics and a lot of storage space to keep all that data. Thankfully, even a "low-end" machine these days has a ridiculous amount of processing power and 250GB hard drives are a common starting point for hard drive sizes. I recently purchased a 750GB drive for my Windows Home Server machine and its cost was roughly $.20 per gigabyte. While marveling about that the other day, it occurred to me that my very first hard drive (a 10MB noisy beast given to me in the late 80s by a generous uncle) would be insufficient to hold even ONE raw photo from my new camera (a 12-megapixel Nikon D300). Insane. Thank you Mr. Moore and Mr. Kryder.

Given all of the above, it's a great time to be a data geek. Even if you're not interested in designing visualizations of your own, there are lots of blogs and sites that catalog the best infoporn from across the web. It's amazing to see so many projects coming out that are both informative and aesthetically pleasing. The thumbnail below is an example from this week - it's essentially an interactive "area chart over a timeline" showing the Box Office Receipts for movies from 1986 to 2007, designed and built by the New York Times data visualization team (they've been doing some amazing stuff recently).

In addition to checking out my del.icio.us "infoporn" links, you might want to look over some of the feeds I've subscribed to:

• http://infosthetics.com/
• http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/
• http://flowingdata.com
• http://www.neoformix.com
• http://www.visualcomplexity.com
• http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/
• http://visualmethods.blogspot.com/

In coming posts, I'll link to some of examples of visualizations that I find to be the most impressive, informative, and even humorous.

Technorati Tags: data visualization , visualization , infoporn , processing.org , ny times

A couple weeks ago, I set up Windows Home Server in the house, opting to go the DIY route rather than with an out-of-the-box solution like the HP MediaSmart. I saved a bit of money in the process, though it wasn't without some issues getting started.

For a machine, I turned to the Dell Outlet site, which I've used in the past and haven't had much trouble with. I've purchased a bunch of machines via the Outlet over the years and only one has ever had issues (blogged about last year). Odds are that it would happen at some point with a non-Outlet machine at some point, so I wasn't worried about ordering another box that way.

The machine is an Inspiron 531 desktop, with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB drive in it. It also has a DVD burner, mid-sized tower case, and the standard integrated network and video (the latter isn't needed by WHS). It was $249. Dell had sent me a coupon the week I was watching the Outlet, which basically took care of the shipping and tax. I spent another $150 or so at NewEgg to add a 750GB -- Roughly $400 total for that machine with 1TB of storage. (Note: looks like the only option now is to get a 530 rather than a 531. The difference is that the 530 uses an Intel CPU while the 531 has an AMD processor).

The setup started off fine, but I ran into issues later when I had to put drivers on the machine (after installing WHS). The Inspiron had shipped with Vista Home Premium, which I didn't need, but WHS is based on Windows Server 2003. The drivers that came with the machine (and available via Dell Support) were Vista drivers and didn't fly with WHS. Some Googling and experimentation led to trying the Windows XP drivers, which seem to be working just fine. The main holdup here was the network card's driver... with no network, I had to use sneakernet to get the drivers on to the WHS box.

So I saved money over going with an off-the-shelf Home Server... but paid a DIY tax with an hour or two of setup time and tinkering around with drivers. I'm happy with that.

Once set up, the experience has been awesome. The machine is running "headless" at this point, but the client software is on a few different machines now and works great for managing the server. In a pinch, I've used Remote Desktop a couple times to look at the server's control panel.

The features I like the most:

• Access to the file shares on the server just plain works. There's no futzing with ACLs, Windows firewall, or anything else. Each user account on the server has its own private share, there's a public share for general use, and dedicated shares for music, photos, videos, and software. An admin account can control access to those in simple fashion -- each user account gets no access, read-only, or read-write. From the client perspective, it's just \\SERVERNAME\SHARENAME and you're good to go.
• Backup is solid and runs seamlessly... it takes a while when you initially run it (go wired for that first backup!), but after that, the incremental updates aren't really noticeable.
• There's a Tivo add-in that hooks write into your music, photos, and videos. That adds access to our Tivo Series 2 (Home Media Option), along with the Xbox 360 Media access that just works out of the box with WHS. I don't need to publish photos and music from a spare desktop machine any more. As an added bonus, the machine's faster than that spare was so scrolling through images and music is way fast.
• Related note... remotely installing an add-in is dead simple. Copy an MSI into a share on the server, run the remote management client, and tell it to run the MSI for the add-in. Removing an add-in later looks just as easy.
• Remote access to the server over the internet is very cool. The WHS setup process gets you a subdomain under the homeserver.com domain and you can log into the server from any web browser to get at the files stored there. That's already proven handy when I wanted to show someone in the office a photo that we were talking about.

A few things I'd like to see improve or change:

• I still think that Microsoft needs to make WHS available via MSDN. I've got a few different ideas for add-ins I'd like to develop, but I'm not interested in doing development and debugging on the home server that's actually in "real world" use at the house. Unless they change this decision, it'll mean I need to purchase a separate WHS license if I want to get serious about add-in development. Incidentally, they've received a LOT of feedback on the issue, but currently say it's not available on MSDN due to some "valid logistical issues"... who knows?
• It doesn't seem like there's a real great solution yet for managing our music via an iTunes library. Aside from WHS add-ins, installing software on a WHS machine is discouraged... so iTunes has to be on a separate machine. But honestly, the only time iTunes gets used is for syncing our iPods (and related playlist management). Playback in the house is done via the Tivo or Xbox 360. So all the music is in two places now -- WHS and that spare desktop machine (with iTunes) that we plug the iPods into. I think (but am not certain) that I could have the iTunes library on that machine simply reference the files on the WHS box -- but haven't tried that route yet (mostly for fear of hosing up the iTunes metadata and "device awareness" for our iPods). Need to do more research here.
• Obviously a big issue that MUST get addressed soon is the widely-reported corruption problem. Thankfully, we're not editing files directly on the server shares (and won't anytime soon). The editing/manipulation tends to happen on our client machines, with the results being backed-up or simply stored for shared-access on the server.

I suspect that corruption issue is THE top priority for the WHS team in Redmond... once it's resolved, my next hurdle will be to figure out the best way to set up Lightroom catalog(s?) for the 7+ years of photos we have stored. Currently, I use fairly "transient" catalogs with Lightroom since all the photo files (both RAW shots, XMP sidecars, and JPG images) are being stored up on the server. But in doing that, I miss out on many features of having everything in a catalog.

All in all, I'm very happy with the WHS experience thus far. If you can live without the option to remotely edit files (to avoid the corruption problem), I'd recommend it.

Technorati Tags: windows home server , whs , msdn , dell , inspiron , tivo

Via the Infosthetics blog, I learned of the "Human Brain Cloud" - a massively multiplayer "word association game". It's pretty addictive in a "what will it do next" kind of way.

The idea is that you're shown words or short phrases on the screen and you want to quickly type in the first word that comes to mind - a typical word association. It showed "chess" and I typed "checkers". It showed "never cease" and I typed "to amaze". You get the idea... but be forewarned: once you start blazing through some words, it makes you want to keep going to see what it displays next.

The coolest part of the site is actually on the next tab: View the Cloud.

Here, you see a set of balls, each with a word on it, and as you type in a word the balls begin to disappear - revealing only the balls that match what you've typed. Having narrowed down to one or more manageable balls in the display, you can click on one of them to expand it into a network diagram. The ball you click then "explodes" into a set of balls that match words people typed in during the the word association process. The thicker the line connecting the two, the more common the association between the two balls (i.e., between the words on the connected balls).

In the image to the right, I typed "sql" - which narrowed down to just one ball - and then clicked on it to expand the associated words. The thickest lines are to "database" and "query", followed by "my" and "server". Slick. You can follow the word association visually by clicking on any associated ball to reveal its associations... and so on. To make the display manageable, balls begin to shrink and fade out over time as you drill down into other associated words.

Aside form being a bit addictive, it's also an entertaining visualization. Pure infoporn.

It comes from "2D Boy", a two-man indie game studio whose "swanky San Francisco office is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day."

Their blog has a great entry with some funny stats and insights from the word associations people have entered (at this point, about a half million words with over 6 millions connections).

They're working on a game called "World of Goo" that (from a preview video) also looks like it'll be pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: 2d boy , word games , visualization , infoporn , infosthetics

Five months it's taken to get to this point... but it looks like I can finally say that the Xbox 360 DRM issues I've complained about in the past are currently resolved. First, a brief summary.

• In August, my Xbox 360 died and needed to be sent in for repair.
• In October, I got a replacement console (different serial number), which Microsoft sent in lieu of having me wait for my original console to be repaired. Plug the hard drive in and it looked like we were good to go.
• In early November, we realized that other profiles on the console (for my wife and older daughter) couldn't play the Xbox Live Arcade games we purchased. They were stuck in trial mode... further, my profile (with which the games were originally purchased) could only play them when logged in. I called the 800 support number and was told that they needed to "re-associate" my console's serial number with the licenses for those games -- and that it would take 2 to 4 weeks. I was (and still am) stunned that it wasn't a quick, 10-minute fix but didn't have any choice. So I waited.
• Around the holidays in December, it still hadn't been fixed so I called again. This time, I was told that it would be fixed but that there was NO timeframe at all provided. "Hopefully soon" was all the support person would tell me... that is, until he hung up on me. This was the low point, as the Xbox Live service was offline a LOT over the holidays, which meant that NOBODY in the house could access those games.
• In January, I emailed Major Nelson about it (as he requested people do in a thread on the Xbox forums). No response. Oh, and to apologize for all that downtime over the holidays, Microsoft gave away a free Xbox Live Arcade game. Ironic, huh?

A few days ago, I checked back in on a MASSIVE thread over in the Xbox forums. As of this post, the thread's up to 150 pages - PAGES! There were posts that kept track of who had been hosed by this issue for the longest period of time. Lots of people were in the same boat as I am, waiting several months. But over a period of a few days, some of those people were reporting that they had suddenly been able to access their Xbox Live content. They simply had to re-download it to their console (which re-fetches the license info), after which it worked as it finally works as it should have all along. That re-download step is something I've done just about every week since August - it's what the support techs said "should" resolve the issue. Until this week, it didn't.

As of Thursday, though.... it looks like it's working as it should. And an 8-year old little girl can FINALLY get back to her quest for Marble Blast Ultra achievements. A hardworking housewife can wind down in the evening with a little Bejeweled.

Throughout this saga, it became clear that this was a big problem for a LOT of people. If the failure rate for the 360 is truly 16%, then that's nearly 3 million consoles that have failed (based on Wikipedia's figure of 17.7 consoles sold). Even if you assume that just a third of those has ever been used to purchase Xbox Live content (Arcade games, TV shows, movies, etc), then that's almost A MILLION people who could be affected by this problem. Clearly, this is a major failure on the part of Microsoft.

How SHOULD it be handled? Ideally, the content wouldn't be DRM'd at all. My opinion is that DRM punishes the people who want to do the right thing, while the IP thieves are always going to find some workaround.

But if being DRM-free isn't an option, then it should be handled the way it's handled on my iPod. I can choose to "De-Authorize" my iTunes music on my computer and my iPod. If I get a new computer or iPod, I simply Deauthorize the DRM'd content on the old device and that frees it up to be played on the new one. If a hard drive on a computer fails, or an iPod simply dies, and you don't have the ability to Deauthorize that device in advance -- well, a quick email/call to Apple resolves it IN MINUTES as they re-set the authorized playback devices for you.

Ideally, that should have been done right away when Microsoft sent me a replacement console. By the time it showed up in October, my content should already have been associated with the new ID. Worst case, it should have been handled quickly when I noticed it and called in November. Apple can do it... and they're not even a database company.

Jeff Atwood wrote about the issue earlier this month, when he realized that the DRM content he'd purchased on an Xbox 360 at his office couldn't be used on the Xbox 360 that he bought at home. To get access to the content he'd already paid for, Jeff opted to purchase it again -- to the tune of $140 worth of content. I disagree with his solution, as I think it punishes someone who's simply trying to do the right thing... but a guy with a Rock Band addiction might be forgiven for overpaying to get his fix.

The "Official Xbox Magazine" site named this issue the Number One thing for Microsoft to address in its 2008 New Years resolutions. Couldn't agree more.

Consumer advocate site "The Consumerist" posted an item on it this month as well, detailing the story of "Kevin." This guy has apparently been told by an escalation tech at Microsoft that he can "hopefully" expect it to be resolved "some time in 2008"! Unreal.

And there are no shortage of individual blogs detailing similar stories.

Understand - I'm pretty much a Microsoft guy. A fairly happy Windows user. A very happy Windows Home Server user (gotta blog that experience still). A .NET developer. A development manager using Microsoft tools (by choice). I know there are lots of horror stories out there and no shortage of anti-MS vitriol, but most of the time, I'm pretty happy with things.

It's unbelievable to me that this issue has allowed to get so big... and that the frontline support technicians aren't able to resolve the problem during a quick phone call.

Now that it's fixed, let's hope the replacement console isn't in the 1-in-6 that will fail the way my first one was. In the meantime, if you need someone to beat up on in Guitar Hero III, my gamertag is OneLeftyFoot.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360 , xbox live , drm , oxm , codinghorror , major nelson , consumerist , customer service , itunes

An item on TechCrunch this morning pointed me at the official Google blog, where David Drummond (Google Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer) commented on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. I think it's fair to say that a Google corporate officer blogging on a Google property (Blogger) constitutes their "official" response.

For an official response, it's pretty idiotic. For starters, Drummond twice refers to the letter sent to Yahoo's board by Steve Ballmer as a "hostile bid". Hmm. Is this a hostile bid? A hostile takeover? Let's look at that.

The president of one company sends an open letter to the board of another company, offering to buy that company at a significant mark-up over its current share price. Doesn't seem terribly hostile to me. But I'm no lawyer, so let's go see how others define "hostile" bids for acquisition...

Had Drummond used his own company's search engine's "Define: " syntax, he'd have found this:

Note the key element in there: without the approval of the target corporation's board. What was Ballmer's letter to Yahoo, if not a proposal for the board to consider? Had he searched Wikipedia, he'd have seen this:

A takeover which goes against the wishes of the target company's management and board of directors. opposite of friendly takeover.

... but that topic (Hostile Takeover) links to the "Takeover" topic. A key portion of that (from the Friendly and Hostile Takeovers section within the topic) is [my emphasis]:

When a bidder makes an offer for another company, it will usually inform the board of the target beforehand. If the board feels that the offer is such that the shareholders will be best served by accepting, it will recommend the offer be accepted by the shareholders. A takeover would be considered "hostile" if (1) the board rejects the offer, but the bidder continues to pursue it, or (2) if the bidder makes the offer without informing the board beforehand.

Seems to me that neither of those conditions were met. On (2), the bidder (Ballmer on behalf of Microsoft) did inform the board beforehand. And until/unless Yahoo's board rejects the offer and Microsoft continues to pursue, then condition (1) won't be met either.

Drummond's not totally alone, though... it seems that some in the media are also joining the bandwagon. ABC News has a story that refers to the bid as "hostile" several times... and quotes Kara Swisher as saying "Yahoo had been rebuffing Microsoft's overtures for the past year"... and "You don't tend to try to do a hostile takeover in the Internet space because people just leave," Swisher said. "So it's very unusual Microsoft is attacking Yahoo in this way." "Attacking"? Hyperbole much?

However, Swisher's perspective on the matter is hardly without bias. Just three weeks ago, she was writing that there was no way that Microsoft would acquire Yahoo. She called rumors of Microsoft looking at Yahoo "a tad ridiculous" and, when referring to discussions between former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel and Steve Ballmer, she has this to say [my emphasis]:

It never happened then and will not now.

So how do you get from "it never happened then and won't now" to "they've been rebuffing overtures for the past year"? Then again, I suppose telling ABC News that she frankly doesn't know and was completely off the mark just three short weeks ago isn't the shortest route to a juicy soundbite.

For their part, Yahoo makes it clear in their own official response (published late Friday) that they're reviewing the "unsolicited" bid. Not much else they can see for now, I suppose.

Earlier today, Brad Smith, Microsoft's chief counsel, posted a response to Google's statement. It's a fairly short statement, with the investment relations boilerplate being longer than the statement itself, but these numbers are worth noting:

According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.

It would be nice to know which "published reports" he refers to, but certainly Google's domination in search query share can't be argued. They're a verb at this point (and for good reason... Google's search does rock!).

So now it'll turn into a war of the words... cue the rhetoric and grab your popcorn. Should be an interesting ride.

Technorati Tags: google , microsoft , yahoo , acquisition , techcrunch

I have to be honest... When Twitter was first released and the hype was deafening, I was among the skeptics who questioned the point of the service -- why would I want to constantly update the world on 'my thoughts'? Where I am? What I'm doing, eating, thinking, saying, wondering... or worse? Who would want to read that? And why would I want to read those types of updates from others?

The fact that there was so much emphasis on using SMS/text messages for everything only added to my skepticism. I'm getting these updates on my phone? I only have 140 characters to use?

So I stayed away and chalked it up as one of those "silly web 2.0 fads" that gets announced, hyped, and then drops off the radar while still in perma-beta mode.

Recently, though, a few different things got me to take a look and (finally) create an account:

• A few services I'm using have Twitter "Bots" that I can use to communicate with the service. "Remember the Milk," for example, lets me use Twitter to add things to my task list. The "I Want Sandy" service lets me use Twitter to set reminders for some point in the future. This type of service automation has been around via IM for a while, but the user experience through Twitter seems better to me.
  
• The authors of several blogs I subscribe to have begun putting links to their Twitter streams in their blog templates and sidebars. Maybe they've been there for a while and I'm just now noticing them? In any case, I see subscribing to a blogger's Twitter stream in the same way as subscribing to their del.icio.us bookmarks. If I enjoy reading their blog posts, it stands to reason that I might enjoy their "smaller" thoughts (via Twitter) and the bookmarks they're creating (via del.icio.us). The benefits here are more passive -- I can drop in, read what I like, and then move on -- but they're benefits nonetheless.
  
• My team at work is distributed between Colorado and Tennessee. In addition, we have a fairly flexible environment that allows for telecommuting when necessary (snow days, waiting for the cable guy, and general "life happens" stuff). We use IM and email pretty heavily, but have found that those don't always work well for certain scenarios. Specifically, there are times when we'd like to have some ad hoc group communication. People thinking out loud, asking general questions of the group, or even coordinating around things like issue tracking items, builds, and more. In these cases, IM is a bit too "point to point" because those conversations often turn into "let's email the group and get some more input". Email isn't great because of the latency between arrival, reading, replying, and sending... during which people start to reply on top of one another. It's great for many things... but sometimes you just need a "chat room" for the in-between stuff that happens all day.
  
  So I thought Twitter might be useful for this and created an account... it's easy to use and that ad hoc "one-to-many" style of communicating updates and status is its strong suit. I discovered later that the downside of this is that there's a lot of other noise going on as well -- so unless I subscribe ONLY to my team members' Twitter streams, I'm sifting through other people's updates to get the ones that are work-related. For now, we're going with Campfire from 37Signals and it seems to be working well. Kinda like "private Twitter with file attachments"...

So with these thoughts in mind, I've been giving it a shot and posting occasional status updates. I'm not yet totally convinced - but neither am I as skeptical as I once was. And while the value's not there for work-related team communications (the original point of the exercise), I definitely think the "bot" services are useful and I've enjoyed seeing the updates from others whose blogs I follow...

In using it for a week or two now, I've been "following" (in Twitter's parlance) a few streams that are really worthwhile. One of those is Merlin Mann, the guy behind the 43 Folders productivity site... his Twitter stream seems to be used for stream-of-consciousness thoughts he has throughout the day. And they're usually hilarious... You know how most people have that filter that stops them from saying all the hilarious/cynical/disturbing/obscure things that come to mind throughout the day? I think Merlin just piped his filter to his Twitter stream. One example, recently posted as I type this on Super Bowl Sunday, demonstrates his ability to turn a phrase [say it in the voice of an NFL player]:

"I'm just so humbled that my freakish physique and tolerance for head trauma can be leveraged to sell lite beer. I also wanna thank 'God.'"

In addition to bloggers, I've found other types of streams to be worthwhile - including New York Times (which streams headlines throughout the day as news articles are posted), Woot (which publishes the daily Woot bargain), and TechMeme (which tracks hot topics in tech news).

There's a pretty good "fan wiki" going that provides some other ideas for using the service, including collections of Twitter mashups, "Non Human" streams, organizations, weather for various cities, and even airport status (e.g., Chicago O'Hare)!

So... for now I'm sticking it out to see how it goes. Time will tell whether the value I'm getting now lasts or if it's just short-term novelty.

Who knows... maybe in another 12-18 months, I'll look into this whole Facebook thing.

Technorati Tags: twitter , social networks , im

A few months back, probably after deleting my daily allotment of 100+ spam messages per day, I decided to look into a better way of handling email. The hosting company I use for my domain (Server Intellect) provides a web-based mail client (Smarter Mail) that I often used when out and about. On my machine at home, I used Outlook 2007 to fetch that email. And while Smarter Mail's UI was fine for a web-based mail program, the spam that made it through the filters was ridiculous.

In addition to my personal email, this affected a few other family members who also use email on the domain... and let's face it, no guy wants to hear from his Mother about "how to get rid of all that male enlargement spam."

So I went in search of a better way... as a listener to Scott Hanselman's podcast (and reader of his blog), I knew that he'd recently moved his domain's mail (and other services) over to Google Apps for Domains. His recounting of the tale in the podcast sounded pretty painless, so I went to check it out.

I was very impressed with how seamless and easy the whole thing was. Google provides excellent instructions for how to make the transition, including walkthroughs for the control panels used by many web hosting companies. The process amounts to just a few steps:

1. You prove to Google that you own the domain. The easiest way to do that is to put a file at a certain URL that contains some data they provide. You create it with a text editor, upload it to your site, and let Google know you're done. Google looks for that file and then reads the contents... if it matches what they provided, you're good to go.
2. You decide which services you want to use -- GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Start Page, and public pages -- and you can turn them on and configure them as you like. This was great because I could turn on calendar, docs, and start page right away, but figure out how I wanted to transition email later.
3. You use Google's instructions for your hosting company's control panel to make some changes in the routing of traffic in your domain. For me, this was as simple as logging into the domain, adding some A records to indicate where traffic should go (i.e., sending it to special Google URLs where the apps live), and then hit that URL in a browser to see the result.
4. With email, I was originally worried that there would be an awkward transition period... not at all. First, I created all of our accounts in the Google Apps interface so that there were mailboxes in place. Google even gives you a temporary URL you can use to check that mailbox before transitioning to the URL you want (e.g., mail.domain.com), as well as a temporary email address that goes to each mailbox. Google gives nice step-by-step instructions for handling mail transitions in particular.
5. With those in hand, I logged into SmarterMail and set up Forwarding rules on each mailbox -- so that mail sent to me (for example) would automatically be forwarded to my mailbox's special email address over on Google's system. With those rules in place, I changed the MX records with my hosting company so that mail traffic would start to go to Google's servers rather than Server Intellect's.
6. After that change is made, there's a brief transition time while records get updated and the tubes get re-routed. With the forwarding rules, though, nothing is lost or in limbo. Within hours, it seemed, everything was being processed through Google and we were good to go.

That all sounds a little more involved than it actually was... someone moderately familiar with their hosting company's control panel could get the whole thing done in a couple hours in the evening. Maybe more if you had a bunch of mailboxes to go through and set up forwarding rules on.

In addition to Scott's podcast, he also had a few posts on his blog that were helpful when I looked into this. Unlike with Scott's situation, I didn't have a bunch of email to transition UP to the Google mailboxes. I do still have a large Outlook PST file locally, but I'm not convinced I'd get a lot of value out of pushing it all up to my mailbox on the server.

For now, I'm pretty much just using GMail as intended (e.g., leave it all on the server), but I take advantage of the IMAP capability occasionally to move things into some Personal Folders that I want to archive. I do see that, over time, I'll likely start using labels and the "archive" feature of Google Mail and keep more and more info on the server... but that will be a transition that occurs naturally over time rather than jamming all of my current archives up there at once.

Others in the family are using the new setup the same way they used the old one -- use the web interface to handle mail when traveling or when using a different computer, but then let Outlook slurp it all down via POP when they're on their personal machine... but they're increasingly seeing that it's useful to leave it up on the server for convenient access.

It's been a few months since the transition... and overall, we couldn't be happier with it. The service is free, fast, and has added a lot to the way we're tracking things. My wife and I frequently share Google Docs for various things (Christmas shopping lists, chore charts, etc) and we're just starting to use the calendar to keep track of household schedules.

And that spam problem? It's pretty much licked... Google's filters are great. I think the number of spam messages I've seen in roughly three months can be counted in the single digits. I did keep an eye out on the Spam folder to watch for false positives and there were a few. But those could be counted on one hand and, more importantly, I understood why Google wanted to filter them -- mostly they were messages that mentioned poker, a pastime of mine but a frequent topic for spammers.

Bottom line:

Pros

• Virtually no spam.
• Couldn't be easier to setup.
• Uptime and stability of Google services.
• Access to Google's "search" for email.
• Other services we can grow into.
• Free (unless you have more advanced needs)

Cons

• It does require familiarity with your host's control panel... but if you have one of the many standard interfaces they support, that's an easy hurdle.
• I know people will say "use labels!" and "use search!", but I still wish Gmail had folders.
• Some of the Google Apps For Domains services get new features and capabilities slower than their "regular" Google cousins. As Scott has pointed out, it's clear they're not running the same codebase in both places... so things like IMAP support, colored labels, and lots of iGoogle add-ins don't work in Google Apps until weeks after they're generally available elsewhere (if at all).
• Those differences mentioned above also mean you need to be careful when looking at 3rd-party add-ins or tools. Some that work fine with regular Google tools may require hacks, or may not work at all, with the tools available via Google Apps.

Highly recommended!

Note:   This post is the first in a series of posts about moving more of my personal data and productivity tools on to web-based services (i.e., "the cloud"). It's a process that's largely on-going (only mail is "fully" transitioned for us), but I'm working on transitioning my tasks (which Google doesn't yet support), my calendar (both home and office), as well as personal data (important docs, photos, etc) to web-based services.

Technorati Tags: google , google apps , productivity , web services , gmail

I'm seriously contemplating a Windows Home Server solution and am pretty much at a fork in the road. On the one side is the HP Media Smart Server (which includes hardware and the OS), while the other side is the option to buy an inexpensive machine (perhaps via Dell Outlet) and then buy the OS separately.

No decision yet, but the cost difference is negligible... so it boils down to "Do I want something that works out of the box, or is this something I'd enjoy setting up as a project of my own?" Who knows... I'm also considering just going with a more basic NAS style solution.

There are many things to like about Windows Home Server, but one feature that intrigues me is that it has an SDK for writing add-ins (via .NET). I can think of a few add-in projects that would be fun to build.

Unfortunately, the MSDN Subscriptions blog announced today that WHS will not be available to subscribers. They don't comment on why they opted not to make it available... but it's a disappointing decision regardless.

First of all, I should point out that I'm wearing two hats here... The first is as a consumer who will likely be purchasing a WHS license for use in my home (unless I go the pure-NAS route). Because MSDN makes licenses available for development purposes only, I'd be buying a WHS license either way (separately or with the HP server). The second hat is as a developer with an MSDN Subscription who appreciates that the subscription gives me access to the licenses I need to build solutions on Microsoft's platform.

I've seen arguments in MSDN forums that "home" products aren't available via MSDN Subscription. However, I can have a Vista Home or Home Premium install up and running in a couple hours or so using media and/or downloads from MSDN. So there are "home" products on MSDN.

Another argument might be that that it's not technically aimed at developers... sure, but neither is Office, Exchange, or Project -- and each of those is available because developers can build tools that supplement and enrich those products. Home Server doesn't seem any different in this regard with its much publicized add-in model.

Clearly, Microsoft's success over the years is based on the popularity of its platform with 3rd-party developers. Without a rich ecosystem of 3rd party applications and tools, particularly in the business world, would Windows have become the dominant desktop OS? With many agreeing that is the first product aimed at a potentially huge and largely untapped market (small, wireless home networks), why treat Home Server differently in this regard?

In some ways, Home Server is a solution to a problem that many of its target customers don't know they have -- lots of people have small networks at home but no idea that they should be looking into automated backups, remote access to their files, and shared storage for their growing libraries of music, photos, and other data. It's certainly possible that a 3rd-party add-in to Home Server could become the "killer app" that convinces people that it's a "must have" solution.

But if developers on the Microsoft platform don't have access to WHS in the same place they get their other development, testing, and deployment tools, why would they bother?

I must be missing something... what's the downside to Microsoft including Home Server in MSDN?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft , MSDN , Windows Home Server , WHS

Eric Sink has a blog post about his experience in trying to get pricing information out of a vendor whose products he was looking into. Their prices weren't listed on the web site (strike 1), so he had to fill out a web form to request a price. The response he got back was a request for his phone number so that a salesperson could call him (strike 2). Specifically, they wanted to talk about his application and how he planned to use their product (strike 3).

I've run into this several times with development tools and components and it typically tells me one key thing about the vendor involved... you want to jack up the price based on my ability to pay. More succinctly, you want to find out my "price sensitivity" which is just a fancy way of saying, "What it's worth to you?"

That tells me the vendor isn't sure what their product is worth in the market. And that they don't think my time is worth much either (not to be an ass, but I'd like to avoid 30-minute phone calls when the topic could be covered in a 3-sentence email). Finally, it says that you (the vendor) want to dictate to me (the customer) the nature of our relationship.

"How I plan to use your product?" -- What if I'm a rich, whacked out philanthropist who buys software component licenses, reads the Quick-Start Guides to my kids at night, and wants to use your install media as the basis for my Chinese throwing star? What's the price then?

My experience with this is typically in dealing with the vendors that make UI components and other development tools. Doesn't matter if you're talking about Java, .NET, or anything else. One vendor I dealt with recently didn't have any pricing on their web site. Instead, you have to contact a salesperson via email and request a price. The response back was along the lines of this (paraphrased, but not by much):

Before I can give you a price, I really need to find out more about your product and your company. We like to look at ourselves as not just a tools vendor, but also as a partner in your business. Knowing more about the pricing of your products and services will help us craft a relationship that benefits you and ensures that you get the most out of our product.

Pretty amazing, huh? In truth, the conversation was more about him asking me questions than me asking him about licensing their product. He wanted to know how many licenses to our products are sold each year. How many end-users does that represent? What's the pricing of our product? What do our sales forecasts look like?

It's probably worth noting here that the vendor I'm referring to makes exactly one development tool -- a UI component for .NET. And I tried to explain it as simply as I could -- "Look, we already license UI tools from companies X, Y, and Z. I can go to their web site and immediately see how much I have to pay per-developer for their tools, and what the deployment licensing is for those tools (royalty-free distribution, named users, etc)."

But trying to get that information from this vendor was nearly impossible. In the end, I ended up on the phone with the president of their North American business, playing a game of 20-Questions. All so he can make an educated guess at how much I might be willing to pay for the use of his product.

By the way, when I finally got a proposed price (after multiple emails and a long phone call), it was about 8-10x what we were willing to pay to license the component. So much for the analysis of our price sensitivity... We went another direction.

Now, I don't even bother. If I go to a site and can't find any sort of pricing information, I move on.

Technorati tags: development tools, pricing, software, marketing

My last post, on whether non-geeks care about DRM (short: they will), focused on the Apple iTunes Music Store. In it, I mentioned that I've purchased plenty of music via the iTunes store. I also explained the various hoops I have to jump through to get that music into a standard format (MP3) for use elsewhere (Tivo).

What I didn't mention is that my most recent several purchases have been much easier to deal with... not because Apple's making it easier for me, though. In fact, it's Amazon.com that I've been using recently when I look for music. The Amazon experience is really very nice... and while it's not as integrated and seamless as the whole iTunes/iPod world, it's pretty easy to navigate nonetheless.

• First, you download and install the Amazon MP3 Downloader.
• Next, you shop for music. When you find something you want, you choose the "Buy" link.
• Once you confirm the purchase, the Downloader starts running and downloads your tracks in the background. As an added bonus, it will automatically add the new songs/albums to iTunes for you.

The Downloader seems to be a pretty well-behaved piece of software. It runs well and has options for iTunes integration (that auto-add feature), where to store music files that are downloaded, and more.

Ok, so it's nice... but is it better?  I actually think it is a better place to buy music for a few reasons.

• The first, most obvious reason is that you're getting MP3 format files -- they'll play anywhere.
• Second, the audio quality (bit rate) of those files is higher than with the files you get from iTunes.
• Finally, the prices are cheaper. Most songs are $.89 each and albums are typically $8.99 (some are even $7.99).

When I first looked into it, the selection on the Amazon store seemed pretty slim. There were a lot of artists that it simply couldn't carry because they hadn't yet worked out deals with the major record labels. Within the last month or so, though, Amazon has signed the remaining "Big Four" companies and the selection has grown considerably.

Now, the only challenge is to remember that I need to check Amazon first before I click "Add Album" in iTunes!

Technorati Tags: amazon , mp3 , drm , itunes , apple , digital music

The Read/Write Web blog put up a post yesterday asking if DRM-free music matters to consumers. Their point was that if most customers purchasing music on iTunes (with DRM) are using it on their computer or their iPod, then they never really "see" the DRM and don't much care. The music plays in the places where they want it. It's a good point, but I think the number of people whose music is consumed entirely on an iPod or their computer will only diminish.

That's not to say that the number of people using iPods will go down or that I predict the demise of Apple's portable music devices. To the contrary, I have had an iPod for a few years and I love it. If the new iPod Touch were available with capacities larger than 16GB (even at the expense of a few additional millimeters in size), I'd purchase one pretty quickly. I've also purchased many albums/songs through the iTunes Music Store and use it extensively for podcasts.

What I am saying is that I think the number of places and contexts in which we consume music will grow and that those places will increasingly not involve a iPod.

For example, we have a Tivo Series 2 in our family room and it's connected to our home network. The Home Media Option on the Tivo lets me point it at our library of music on a computer in the basement and play back that music through the TV or stereo. The Tivo remote and a full-screen TV are a decent way to navigate a large music collection (though there are many improvements I'd love to see) and the convenience of all our music available that way is great.

The catch is that Tivo's Home Media Option will only let me play MP3 music files. Apple's DRM-protected files aren't recognized at all. There are a variety of similar options for piping music throughout a house and their adoption is likely to rise. As prices come down and digital distribution of content is more widely adopted, it's reasonable to assume that more people (non-geeks) will want the convenience of their music anywhere, anytime.

But for music purchase via iTunes Music Store, you need to jump through several hoops to get the DRM-protected files to play back on those systems. Here are the steps I go through to make it available to our Tivo's music system:

• In iTunes, I have to make a playlist with the songs from the album I purchased.
  
• I then have to burn an Audio CD of that playlist... in terms of content, this gives me a CD similar to the disc I could go purchase in a brick-and-mortar retailer. I say "similar" because Apple's music has compression on it that means the audio on that CD is not as high-quality as on a true, shrinkwrapped CD.
  
• Note also that this disc is now also a reasonable backup to my music. If something disastrous should happen to the computer or the iTunes ecosystem, I've got a regular CD that can be played anywhere.
  
• Now I have to use another program (I like CD-EX) to "rip" that CD into MP3 files. This is the same process you'd go through with any retail CD and is something I did a lot of when initially converting our CD collection into MP3.
  
• Now that I have MP3 files, I also like to use MP3Gain to process those files and set the audio levels. This non-destructive process helps to set the volume levels in MP3 files consistently, which helps fix the problem of playlists that get very loud and then very quiet.

At the end of this, I've got my purchased music in three places and three different formats -- the iTunes DRM-protected files from Apple, the physical CD I burned, and the non-DRM-protected MP3 files that will play through the Tivo.

Clearly, a better option is to purchase my music without any DRM on it. I can burn a disc if I want to (and I do make sure to have a backup of some type either way), but I don't have to jump through all those hoops to play my music where I want, when I want. The MP3 file format is so ubiquitous that I know it will play on any portable player, through all sorts of CD/DVD players and stereos, and through playback systems like the Tivo that stream the music on demand.

So... even if a consumer doesn't care about DRM today, I'd argue that they will. I can easily see a situation where a non-techy (say, my parents) get an iPod and enjoy the convenience of purchasing music through iTunes. Down the road, though, they'll have cheaper, more prevalent, and less-geeky solutions for playing their music somewhere other than that iPod.

Only THEN will they realize what the DRM has "cost" them... and they're unlikely to be in a position to do anything about it. The whole burn-then-rip two-step described above isn't something my parents would work out or stumble across.

They'd simply be locked in and stuck. And it will matter.

Technorati Tags: drm , mp3 , digital audio , ipod , itunes , tivo

Both Leon Bambrick and Jeff Atwood have posted about LOGO recently, which reminded me to talk about Scratch. It's a FREE program from MIT that's aimed at teaching kids (or anyone else, I suppose) the basics of programming. More specifically, it gets them thinking about things like logic, flow control, and handling variables. 

As a developer, I suppose it's natural to want to teach my daughters something about what I do for a living. (Note: I leave out the part about how moving into management mostly means sitting in meetings and spending more time in Outlook and Excel than in an IDE). But I do want them to grow up with strong problem-solving skills, so I've often gone out in search of good ways to teach programming concepts at a kids level. There are a number of initiatives out there, but Scratch is the one that has really taken hold for us. I've found it to be the best by far, even better than commercial products out there intended for the same purpose.

The free Scratch application is basically a workbench for creating programs using a drag-and-drop interface. You have a stage, which can be scripted to do things like clear itself, paint its background, and so on. On the stage, you drop sprites, which can be any sort of object. By default, your first object is a cartoon cat, but you can use any sort of photo, clip art, or pick from a library that is included.

For your stage and each of your objects, you have a script (or several) that can be run. This is where the genius comes in -- the script is built entirely by dragging and dropping blocks into place. No need to remember syntax or type in commands. You're essentially building a flow chart with these blocks and your "program" is executed from the first block (at the top) to the last (at the bottom). The blocks snap together as you drop them and there are good visual cues as you drag them around when and where they'll snap. If your program has multiple characters with their own script, all of those scripts run in parallel... and a single character can have multiple scripts (to support for example, moving around the stage while also waiting for some external input). The bottom screenshot gives a good example of parallel scripts.

The available blocks are grouped into categories, such as Motion, Control, Looks, Sound, Sensing, Numbers, and Pen. Each category has numerous blocks that let you control how your sprite moves, makes noise, interacts with other sprites, calculates, stores/retrieves variables, and uses its "pen". As with LOGO, the pen is the primary way of seeing what your sprite has done. You control the pen by putting it down, lifting it up, setting its color, size, and so on.

The "Control" group is where you can really do creating things as this is where flow control blocks are located. There are blocks to wait for input, "container" blocks that let you repeat other sets of blocks forever, a certain number of times, or until a condition is met. There are also If/If Else blocks and blocks to pause the script for a period of time.

The environment is very easy to work with and encourages experimentation. The left side is where the groups of blocks are stored, the middle is where you drag and drop your blocks, and the right side shows the sprites in your program and the stage where everything happens. It also has a "presentation mode" so the user can make their program run full-screen and show off to Mom and Dad.

I introduced my daughter to Scratch several weeks ago and it's now one of her favorite things to do on the computer. Given that she just received an OLPC, I'm glad to learn that there's an effort underway to build an OLPC compatible version of Scratch.

Initially, Scratch is great for use as an electronic Spirograph set. Kids can experiment by trying different things and take a "let's see what happens" approach to learning. The simple program to the right is what created the shape at the top of this post. Clicking on any of those numbers lets you change its value and it's easy to move the blocks around or add new blocks. You can see in this example that the orange flow-control blocks serve as containers for other blocks and that they can also be nested.

One of the first things kids learn, just as anyone else learning programming does, is that you have to be very explicit in your instructions. For example, without the "Clear" instruction in there, the stage would still have the previous shape and it'd be hard to see what your program is doing. Without telling the sprite where to start (0,0), the program would pick up wherever the sprite currently sites which is likely not what you want.

Scratch also comes with many sample programs that show you just how flexible it is. Games are fairly easy to program because of Scratch's support for input handling (detecting keypresses or mouse activity) and its support for collision detection. A good example is a little racing game that features a ball you have to "drive" around a race course. The arrow keys control the ball's direction and it speeds up the longer you hold them down.

However, if your ball goes off the race course and ends up in the grass (the program has an If block to see if the sprite is touching the color green), then your speed begins to slow down significantly. The program for it (visible by clicking the screenshot to the left) is surprisingly simple and it's a fun one for kids to experiment with because they can control which keys get used, how quickly the ball moves, and what the consequences are for going off-course.

I've tried out a number of different environments for kids to create things in the computer and Scratch is easily the best of the lot. It's a commercial quality piece of software that installs quickly and works very well. The folks at MIT have also created an online community of sorts where users can share their Scratch creations. The web site also has lots of videos, reference materials, and a PDF Getting Started guide that's very kid-friendly.

(Note: I just noticed that they've released a version 1.2 maintenance update in the last couple of weeks. It looks like they've added some advanced blocks, fixed a few things, and created a more detailed PDF reference guide. I'll be upgrading shortly, but the screenshots above were created with 1.1).

If there's a kid in your life that enjoys tinkering on the computer, introduce them to Scratch. Heck, introduce yourself to Scratch... I apologize in advance for the hours you're about to lose.

Technorati Tags: scratch , MIT , LOGO , kids programming , education

As I mentioned last week, we gave our oldest daughter (8 yrs next month) an OLPC XO laptop for Christmas. I've been following this project for a while and it's been interesting to see the different reactions around the web since the boxes started shipping earlier this month. Even more interesting over the last few days has been to compare some of those reactions with the reaction of our daughter.

As expected, she's been ecstatic about getting her "own" computer. The fact that it doesn't look like Mom or Dad's laptop, from either a hardware or software perspective, has only increased it's cachet in her eyes. She thinks it's pretty cool that "somebody invented a computer just for kids." When she tells people she got her own laptop for Christmas, she likes to explain that "it's a kid's laptop, but it's still a REAL computer and it even has Google!" Pretty funny that the presence of a web browser with Google makes it a "real computer" for her.

Some of the responses to this machine around the web are really interesting. It runs the gamut from "Amazing!" to "What a piece of crap..." -- but the vast majority of impressions (good and bad) are skewed because they come from an adult perspective. As an example, the review on CNET mentions an application the laptop comes with and then says "(Actually, applications are called "activities" on the XO-1. Sometimes it seems like the developers are thinking too differently.)" If you're an adult techie, I could see that these differences feel "too different." On the other hand, which word better describes the "things you can do" on a computer to a kid who's never used on -- application or activity?

On the positive side, I've read lots of adults who will use it as an e-book reader, a rugged email-on-the-go alternative, or an inexpensive way to tinker with Linux. Some of the folks over at OLPC News are as hyped about it as any Mac/Windows/Xbox/PS3 fanboy you'd ever meet.

The criticisms tend to fall into a few categories:

It's not rugged enough -- This clearly comes from someone who's not actually held or used one. This machine is very well-built and solid. It may not be a military grade Toughbook, but it will stand up to my 7 year old lugging it around just fine.

It doesn't have [Software X] -- With this one, Software X is usually something like a full-feature Firefox browser, built-in web server for development use, or a more familiar OS. Of course, each of these comes from the perspective of an adult who wants it to be more like the machine they already use. Put it in the hands of a kid, though, and these complaints go away. I've found that the OS is very intuitive and, while I wouldn't personally use it as my main machine, my daughter has had no trouble at all learning her way around and surprising me with the things she's come up with. The main complaint I'd have here is that the open-source Flash alternative (Gnash) doesn't seem to be as widely compatible as a Flash player would be. There are instructions on the OLPC wiki, though, for installing a recent build of Flash.

The keyboard is too small -- Put a kid in front of it and you'll see how perfectly-sized the keyboard is. It may be too small for an adult to use regularly, but little hands fit it just fine.

The screen is too small (and it's not a touch screen) -- The screen is small. But it provides plenty of real estate for the activities that ship with the device and it's surprisingly sharp. Hardware keys let you adjust the brightness and at the lowest setting, the backlight turns off for use outdoors. I think a touch screen would be great, especially because the panel spins around and lays down like a convertible tablet -- on the other hand, the cost of the machine right now is right around $180 or so. Adding a touch screen to it would not only increase the cost, but it would also increase the complexity of software design (to make the activities tablet-ready) and hardware design (to ensure that the device remains rugged even as the screen is regularly beat on by kids).

Personally, I've run into only two drawbacks and neither of them is insurmountable.

1. Out of the box, the device doesn't support WPA security on wireless networks (though it does support WEP). However, I did find instructions on the OLPC wiki for adding WPA support. I followed those and it connected to our access point great. It's a one-time thing, so the device has connected just fine ever since, but the instructions do require using a terminal prompt.
2. I would like to see it include better Flash support in the built-in browser. I've not yet tried installing the latest Adobe Flash player, so hopefully that improves things. Given how many kids web sites use Flash for activities, games, and even their entire UI, getting solid Flash support in the browser should be a priority.

Neither of these are that big a deal... especially now during the honeymoon period when my daughter is mostly using it as an electronic journal and just experimenting with the different activities. I'll follow-up later with some info on the various activities that ship with it, including one that doesn't but probably should (hint: typing tutor).

Technorati Tags: olpc , one laptop per child , xo , laptop

Last week, I posted a couple items on the continuing saga of trying to get our Xbox Live Arcade content working as it did before our console went out for repair. The major issue is that the defective console was exchanged for a working console, but the new one obviously has a new serial number (console ID). Content downloaded from Xbox Live Marketplace is tied to this ID, so our use is restricted on the new console. And has been for seven weeks now.

My previous rants on this focused on the fact that the profiles for my wife and daughter aren't able to play the many games that we purchased. When they go to those games, they're stuck in "trial" mode despite the fact that we've paid for them and they've got saved games, achievements, and so on.

An additional side-effect that I didn't mention is that MY profile (the one that purchased the games) can only play those games when I'm signed into Xbox Live. Normally, this wouldn't be such a problem since my profile logs into XBL automatically when I sign in.

This week, however, the Xbox Live service has had some serious stability issues. Many sites have reported the state of the service as it goes up for a while, goes back down, or is otherwise stuck in a gray area of "intermittent issues". Those issues continue even now as I write this (the screenshot above is about a minute old).

So not only can my wife and daughter not play these games via their profile, but now nobody in our house can play them at all -- using any profile.

I really don't understand how hosed up the back-end of the Xbox Live service must be that re-associating purchased content with a new console ID would take more than SEVEN WEEKS. Especially given that this is something that has to be done not only for the thousands of consoles being exchanged during repair work, but also for customers who would like to upgrade to an Xbox Elite. Retailers should have a bright orange sticker on the front of Xbox Elite boxes warning that any previously-purchased content will be unavailable for an undetermined, but non-trivial, period of time.

The whole experience has left a really bad taste in my mouth when it comes to the Xbox 360. I enjoy the console and have had a lot of fun. But at this point, turning it on just reminds me of the frustration that I don't have everything I've paid for.

I also mentioned last week that Xbox Live's public face, Major Nelson, posted in the support forums that anyone having these DRM licensing issues with an exchanged console should contact him. So I did. No response. He has put up a post acknowledging the downtime, though.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360 , xbox live , xbla , microsoft , major nelson , support , DRM

Lots of tech geeks have heard of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project founded and run by Nicholas Negroponte (MIT)... but non-techies may not be familiar with it at all.

The project began in early 2005 with the original idea being to design and build a laptop that could be used as a learning tool by kids in underdeveloped parts of the world. It wouldn't be based on Windows or Mac (due to cost and complexity), needed to be rugged (for use by kids, often in remote areas), needed to provide a self-contained collaborative learning environment (remote villages have students - but not necessarily the internet), and needed to be kid-friendly (to keep their interest and enthusiasm). The hope was that a combination of design efficiencies and large orders from governments around the world would bring the cost down to $100 (US). When first announced it was often referred to as "the $100 laptop".

They've come close... the machine cost is now under $200 (US). And while the machine wasn't originally intended to be sold to consumers in the US, it's now possible to buy one. Well, actually you have to buy TWO. For $399, you can participate in the "Give 1, Get 1" program -- one machine comes to you and another machine is sent on your behalf to another part of the world. This program started in November and continues through the end of the year. Of the $399 you spend, $200 is tax deductible and T-Mobile is throwing in a year of free HotSpot access as well... that makes it really a pretty good deal.

I've followed this initiative since it was originally announced because, like most technology people, I think getting kids familiar with the tools of technology gives them a big step up in their learning. Rather than something to be intimidated by or to see as a learning curve to ascend, a computer should be seen by today's kids as a very powerful tool to accomplish their goals and reinforce the curriculum they're already studying. With it, they can write, research, collaborate, create, publish, entertain, and communicate.

I think a kids' natural curiosity provides the desire and motivation, but lots of kids (particularly outside the US) lack access. A laptop as a learning tool is no replacement for the essentials of food, clean water, and basic healthcare -- but it is worthwhile venture.

So I placed my order on the first day of "Give 1, Get 1" and the machine arrived last week. I've spent some time playing around with it and I think my daughter (7 years) is going to love it. She'll open it tomorrow for Christmas. The "Sugar" interface is very intuitive and kid-friendly, plus there are lots of activities and things to do on the machine. She can write a journal, research via the encyclopedia, play educational games, learn LOGO (or Python if she wants to go really wild), browse the web (with some supervision and controls), read some RSS feeds, use a calculator, draw pictures, and more.

Hardware-wise, this machine is very well thought-out. There's no internal hard drive, so it can be handled in a rough and tumble way (supposedly... we'll try to discourage that). The screen is very bright and sharp, it's got a built-in handle for lugging it around, and the keyboard has a rubbery membrane over it to prevent dirt and fluids from getting inside. Opening the laptop involves flipping up two latches and then raising the lid. When up, the latches look like antennae (and, I believe, actually ARE the wireless antennae) and when they're down, they serve to protect the USB and accessory jacks.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about it. Our oldest often asks to use my laptop or my wife's and now she'll have her own -- but with a twist. In my opinion, this is a perfect machine for a curious 7 year old to tinker with. Sure, it's not going to be exactly like the machines she'll use later in her life - but I don't think it needs to be.

She'll have plenty of time to worry about Excel and PowerPoint.

Technorati Tags: olpc , give 1 get 1 , g1g1 , xo , laptop

Wow... the more I look into this Xbox Live Marketplace DRM issue, the more I find that it's a HUGE problem. There are a ton of stories out there of people who simply don't have what they paid for. It happens in two scenarios:

1. People who, like me, had to send a console in for repair and received a different console as a replacement.

2. People who have purchased a newer Xbox or Xbox Elite for either the HDMI port or the larger hard drive.

In both cases, the problem I detailed yesterday occurs -- you can't access your Xbox Live Arcade titles (or other Marketplace content) without being signed into Xbox Live. Further, other profiles on your console can't access the content as they could before the repair/replacement.

This is made worse by the fact that Xbox Live suffered a pretty big outage over the weekend... so anyone in this situation couldn't access their XBLM content at all. Even to play in offline, single-player mode.

And while there are lots of people reporting the problem, what I haven't run across yet is anyone who says the problem was correctly resolved and that they've been made whole again by Microsoft.

Some links for your reading pleasure:

• This thread in the Xbox.com forums is now at 118 pages with hundreds in the same boat... not 118 posts. PAGES.
• Ars Technica did a writeup about this issue for those considering upgrading to the Xbox Elite.
• A good analysis of the problem here by videogame blogger Matt Brett.
• Someone even created an entire blog called "The Broken Xbox Live Marketplace". It's not been updated in a while, but there's some good info here.
• Major Nelson writes earlier this month in the forum that replacement consoles SHOULD have had licenses transferred automatically... and that anyone who's licenses weren't transferred should contact him. I have... stay tuned.
• The Digital Gamer independent gaming blog has their own tale of woe.
• This guy on Windows Live Spaces has sworn off XBLM content altogether due to the issue... and points to an online petition.

I'd love to hear an honest, open explanation for why this issue is proving so difficult and time-consuming for Microsoft to resolve.

Technorati Tags: xbox live , xbox 360 , support , microsoft , xbox , major nelson , DRM

I try to be patient and understand when a company occasionally drops the ball. I really do. Especially a company like Microsoft, whose ecosystem I've worked in as a developer for much of my career. I generally support their initiatives... but problems with the Xbox 360 -- and now DRM issues with a console back from repair -- have just boiled over.

And crappy support was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

Begin Rant...

Back in September, my console died. It suffered all the same symptoms as a Red Ring of Death failure -- except the red rings. So when I sent it in, I got the privilege of paying $99 for the repair. After roughly a month, I get a console back from them and a letter explaining that, in order to expedite things, this is a different console than the one I sent in. So as of late October, I've got a new/refurbed console that's under warranty for a year. My hard drive's plugged in, so I can see all our profiles and game data. We're set.

Or so I thought.

The problem occurs when my wife or daughter sign into their profile on the console and all of our Xbox Live Arcade games are in "Trial" mode. That's about 15-16 games purchased with Microsoft Points over the last year or so. If I sign into MY profile, the games are in "Full" mode (because my profile was the one that purchased them), but nobody else in the family can play them -- or even access their existing achievements and progress.

I tinker around with deleting and re-downloading the games, but nothing works. So on 11/10, I call Xbox support and open a support ticket. The person I ended up speaking with (Ella, a supervisor) explained that because I was sent a different console, the serial number doesn't match. So the console's DRM system thinks that my wife and daughter's profiles are being used elsewhere and won't authenticate the games.

She tells me it'll take 2-4 weeks for them to "re-associate" our downloaded games/videos with the new serial number. (Why on earth this would take 2-4 weeks is left as an exercise for the reader. I can't imagine). Note that they DO already have the new serial number associated with my Xbox Live account -- she could verify it and knew the warranty dates. But once this "re-association" is done, I'll get a phone call notifying me to re-download that content and then the other profiles will get access to that content.

As of yesterday, it's been 6 weeks. SIX.

With a daughter who's out of school for the holidays now, and me taking some time off, this obviously becomes a higher priority -- we'd like to play some games together. So I call today (43 days after the first call) and spent 51 minutes on the phone. The first guy I got put me on hold three times because "his computer was booting up, but thanks for your patience". Once he could pull up my support incident, he had me verify a bunch of information, repeat the whole saga, and then put me on hold a couple more times. Eventually, he transferred me to a supervisor, Edwin.

This is when the fun started. Edwin was a complete information vacuum. All Edwin could tell me was that:

• My support incident is still open (duh)
• The problem isn't resolved (ya think? seriously... he related this to me as if it were news)
• Someone should call me when it does get resolved.

What he couldn't tell me is WHEN it would be resolved. He couldn't tell me if it would be days, weeks, or months. He said that "in special cases, it will take longer than 30 days". Given that it's been much longer than 30 days, I asked what was special about the case. His response was "I don't know. Could be a number of things."

After going round and round with me wanting to talk to someone who COULD answer my question (he couldn't connect me), wanting to know WHEN I could expect some resolution to this (he couldn't provide even a sense of scale), and wanting to know WHY this was a "special" case ("could be anything"), he hung up on me.

That's right... he told me it didn't matter if I "called a thousand times, there was no information" to be had so he went through his "thank you for calling" script and hung up on me.

This is where point out that I wasn't insulting Edwin, using foul language, or anything like that. What I was doing was asking a lot of questions because I want to understand why this is still a pending problem.

Obviously, I'm not the only person having this problem... the 360's failure rate is a joke at this point, so there must be thousands of people in the same boat. An exchanged console with more than one profile that has Xbox Live Marketplace content. In at least one case, Microsoft credited someone the MS Points required to re-purchase the games for those other profiles (this wasn't offered to me -- yes, I'd go that route if it would work). The comments for this post are also motivational reading (sarcasm)... I should point out that I am NOT "Shady515" in those comments -- sounds similar, but that poor guy is on his 11th console and has been waiting for access to his Live content since August. Travis had the problem again a few months after posting that. No shortage of similar horror stories on the web.

An Xbox team member explains the problem (but no solution) on this post... where the comments point to a petition on the issue. The petition is apparently centered around people who own an original 360 and would like to upgrade to an Elite -- but can't take their content with them because it's a new serial number.

The kicker for me to blog it... Tonight, I see a blog post from Major Nelson (Xbox Live guy about town) pimping MS Points as a holiday gift -- because I'm not getting screwed out of the Points I've already purchased?

Like the headline says... ridiculous.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360 , xbox , microsoft , major nelson , support , xbox live , fail

I like to think of myself as someone who uses Outlook's capabilities to a fairly high degree. Most people I've worked with tend to use it for email alone and then occasionally for calendar items that are shared among a group (e.g., planning meetings in a workgroup). It seems a minority of people use its Tasks capabilities, which are probably the most important thing in Outlook for me (otherwise, I'd likely just use OWA).

By using the GTD approach to capturing everything (and syncing it to my phone), I've always got a good-sized list of the things that need to be done now, later, and eventually.

Until the other day, though, I didn't realize that Outlook 2007 added a method for viewing task items alongside the calendar items. When I came across this blog post from the Outlook team, which describes the Daily Task List view, I initially thought, "sweet, I'd like to see my calendar alongside my tasks in a more complete way." The new "To-Do Bar" in Outlook 2007 gets me close (right)... and I do like having it over there all the time in the Inbox view. It lets me quickly see month calendars (handy during phone calls when you're coordinating something for a week or more out), along with the next 3 items on my calendar (where I can configure how many items are shown), and then a customized view of my Task items.

It's these tasks that are the bread and butter of my daily planning. Like most folks who use (or in my case, try to use) a GTD approach, I use categories to assign an @context to each task -- then when I'm in that context (@home, @office, @computer, etc), I simply go through the subset and tackle those tasks based on priority. This removes the need for A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 types of priorities and only occasionally will I even use the Low/Medium/High option on a task. Because I try to put everything I need to do into my Tasks (there are typically a couple/few hundred across all the context/categories), trying to prioritize all of that would take so much time that I might not actually get anything done.

The problem with the To-Do Bar is that it only shows you the next few appointments and doesn't show you the grid/schedule style view of your day. You have to read each appointment's details to know when it occurs and then the grid view that is so handy for knowing when you've got available time is left to your imagination. So while I have complete control of my Tasks in the To-Do Bar, its value for viewing the time available to those tasks is minimal.

The "Daily Task View" sounded like just the ticket as I read the post... until I looked into it further and realized the major flaw (for me). Only tasks that have a start date or due date will appear in the list. The list of daily tasks is configurable to show items for each day based on either the start date or the due date, but any task that doesn't have a date assigned to it won't appear at all.

My approach to using tasks is such that I don't use start or due dates at all.

Look at an example task -- "Record screencast to demonstrate new features added in this release." Now let's assume that this imaginary release is January 31, so I'd like the screencast wrapped up two weeks prior (January 17) to allow time for editing, proofing, etc.

I don't put a due date on this task because I don't want it filtered between now then. Instead, I want it in my @computer list every day between now and then so I can make progress on it as time and circumstances allow.

If I DO decide to assign a due date of January 17 to that task, it won't appear in my Daily Task View until that day. Today is December 9, so there are more than five weeks between now and that due date. If I wait until that day to get the screencast recorded, I have failed. I can be a procrastinator at times, but this approach to planning my tasks would spell disaster. Something more important will come up that day. We'll be approaching the release and dealing with a major quality issue. The microphone will break down. The software will crash.

And with that, my hopes for a single, unified "dashboard of my day" we dashed. Ideally, this dashboard includes:

• My inbox (I keep the message count here in the single digits).
• A schedule grid for the day (with an option for a compressed week view)
• My complete task list, grouped by context and filterable to exclude certain contexts (e.g., don't need @home in the office)
• A small calendar view that can be configured for 2-3 months.
• The nav bar on the left so that messages can be dragged and dropped into archive folders

What would really rock would be to have a collection of views like this that could be arranged by the user. Each view would have its own customizations available for sorting, filtering, grouping - just as most of the standalone views in Outlook do today.

Maybe Outlook 2011?

Technorati Tags: microsoft , outlook , gtd , organization , productivity

At nearly the same time as I was complaining about Google Browser Sync hosing up my bookmarks, Omar Shahine wrote a general post about his Firefox use (and conversation-starting Firefox t-shirt). In it he says...

Google Browser Sync allows me to sync all my cookies, saved passwords and favorites between all my computers. This is AWESOME. I cannot stand re-personalizing my web surfing experience on new computers.

Just goes to show you -- your mileage may vary. My experience with Google Browser sync was quick, but painful. In my testing so far, FoxMarks is working great for syncing bookmarks. While it'd be nice to also sync current tabs (I'm not so interested in syncing all settings, cookies, and passwords), handling bookmarks in a way that I can trust is a good start.

Technorati Tags: firefox , google extensions , bookmarks

Sara Ford (from the Visual Studio team) has been running an awesome series of daily tips for Visual Studio tweaking. The series started off as the "Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day," but many (most?) of her tips apply to VS.NET 2005 as well. Most of the tips explain tweaks that can be made via the Tools->Options dialog.

Her tip for today is about increasing the font size in the Statement Completion window... which is the little panel that opens when you invoke Intellisense in the VS.NET code editor (either by hitting "." on a reference to get its members or via CTRL+SPACE or CTRL+J -- another recent tip).

The change is made via the "Show settings for" list in the "Fonts and Colors" portion of the Options dialog. While I'd been in there before to set my Output and Command window preferences (green on black, yo), I'd never noticed Statement Completion (and probably wouldn't have recognized it as the Intellisense members list in any case).

Very slick and I can see this making it a lot easier to find things in the list... it really makes it stand out in front of the code that's being edited.

Nice tip, Sara! Now I need to go back into that portion of Tools->Options and check out some of the other UI elements that can be tweaked in that "Show settings for" list...

Technorati Tags: visual studio , intellisense , microsoft , configuration

Lesson learned -- all that comes from Mountain View is not gold. Or stable. Or safe.

While I use del.icio.us for 99.47% of my bookmarking needs on the web, there are always a couple dozen or so URLs that I leave in Firefox's local bookmarks file. Examples are for sites that I want on the browser's toolbar, private or internal URLs that aren't public, and bookmarks that have search keywords assigned.

For a while now, I've wanted to sync up my Firefox bookmarks at home with the bookmarks on my office machine. Most of these get used on either machine and it's a hassle to remember to add those bookmarks and search shortcuts in both places.

So when I came across the Google Browser Sync extension, I thought, "this is PERFECT!"  It would sync up not only bookmarks but also settings and any open tabs. That seemed great for those times when I had something open for reading in the office, but didn't get to it. Shut it down on that machine and it would open up on my home machine later.

I installed the extension on both machines, let it sync up, and then merged the bookmarks in both locations. After that, I went through a process last night of cleaning up and re-organizing those local bookmarks. I spent over an hour getting rid of the ones that were old, cleaning out the dupes, and adding more search keywords.

Today, they're gone. On both machines. A couple of folders are completely missing. Nice, huh?

Thankfully, I found a backup of the bookmarks.html file from before I installed the extension... so while I've lost the cleanup work I did last night, I haven't completely lost the original bookmarks.

Anyway, be warned... if I'd have taken the time to browse through the Google Groups discussions for this extension, I'd have probably avoided it altogether and perhaps tried FoxMarks instead. But I figured Google's stuff is pretty solid... again, lesson learned. Thank goodness I didn't have it sync passwords and all of my other browser settings.

So... back to that cleanup effort (again).

Technorati Tags: firefox , bookmarks , google browser sync , google

It started several weeks ago. When playing Madden 08, I would occasionally get weird color glitches. It reminded me of the old CRT days when your VGA cable would get loose -- it was as if I was looking at my television through green-colored glasses. "A bug in Madden," I thought, plus a reboot would always fix it. It happened rarely, so no worries.

On Friday, 9/21, a Dashboard Update went out for the 360 and this green-glasses thing happened again. "Uh oh," I thought, "it's not Madden." At the end of the update, the 360 rebooted and I got a black screen. I could hear the startup sound and playing with the controller would result in sounds as I moved around the UI. I just couldn't see anything due to the black screen.

I tried different inputs on the television. No joy. I bought a new video cable to rule that out. No joy. So if it's not the television or the cable -- gotta be the box. What seemed even more bizarre was that I wasn't getting those three red lights -- the Red Ring of Doom.

"That really sucks," I thought, "especially since Halo 3 releases next week... but at least Microsoft extended their warranty." They announced this a while back because so many boxes (especially the initial "launch day" boxes) were having problems due to overheating. Mine was not a launch-day box -- I got it about 4 months after the 360's release. So I'm covered, right?

Poor, naive me. Turns out Microsoft extended the warranty but only if you get the RRoD. In the open letter from Peter Moore (Xbox Head at Microsoft):

...we are announcing  today a three-year warranty that covers any console that displays a three flashing red lights error message.

A box with the symptoms mine was showing -- not covered. Lots of unhappy people on support forums about that issue... including many people who recommend giving the box a thump on the side (reminding me of an old television set we had when I was a kid) or wrapping the box in a towel to overheat it on purpose. I didn't want to do either of those, but I called Xbox Support to see what my options were. No amount of complaining, griping, or asking to speak with a supervisor mattered -- I'd have to pay the $99 repair fee if I wanted it fixed.

So now my Xbox is somewhere between Colorado and Texas in the supplied box that lots of people refer to as "the coffin".

A few things I've learned over the last couple of weeks:

• The $99 fee covers shipping three times. First, they get a box to me (took 7 business days). Then the console goes in the box and heads to Texas (en route now). Finally, the repaired box comes back.
• That fee also re-sets my warranty for another year. I plan on using the crap out of it to put that to the test.
• I may or may not get the same box back, which surprised me. The box I get back may be someone else's refurbished box with a different serial number. As long as it works and doesn't look like a Best Buy floor model, I don't much care either way.
• There are a TON of people who had problems on or near that fateful Friday, 9/21. Two different .NET bloggers I read (Scott Hanselman and Travis Illig) had it happen within a couple weeks. A Google search turns up a TON of problems occurring in late September. I doubt that Microsoft will ever admit that the Dashboard Update caused a problem or is even related. But checking out this thread makes it hard to claim "coincidence".

On the plus side... one of the guys at work has a 360 and hadn't used it for months (the horror!), so he brought his in for me to borrow. This added a few more things to the list of what I've learned:

• There are some very nice people in the world. It's great to have a console to use during this season when a LOT of interesting games are being released (Halo 3, PGR4, Call of Duty 4, Guitar Hero 3, FIFA 08, and more).
• Plugging your hard drive on to the side of someone else's console works like a charm. It was as if I was using my original console, except...
• His console is much, MUCH quieter than mine. When it's at the dashboard, you can barely tell it's on and even with a disc spinning, it's still much quieter than mine ever was. So much so that my wife is in favor of buying a newer one if the repaired console doesn't come back as quiet as this borrowed one. It's THAT noticeable.
• The dashboard update doesn't break every Xbox... his wanted the update as soon as it was turned on and before it could continue. Went through like a champ (though not without me sweating a bit!).

So... I'm sure it will be a couple more weeks before my repair console returns and it'll be interesting to see what's changed. Noise? Serial number? Heat dissipation? Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360 , hardware , red ring of doom , microsoft , support , repair

Back in July, I posted about the on-going problems I was having with my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop. It was just about a year old and was facing its fourth house call by a local Dell tech contractor. In the comments for that post, John B (an employee in Dell's Customer Advocacy group) contacted me to let me know that he agreed -- it was time to call it a lemon and get a system exchange.

I'm happy to update that the process was quick, painless, and couldn't have been easier. I simply emailed John with some details about the system and my contact info (service tag and my home address) so that he could find my record in their support system. Once he confirmed those details, he got in touch to let me know that a new machine would be on my doorstep in a week or two (5-15 business days).

It was just over a week when the new machine arrived. When I opened the box, I was initially thrown off because the new machine didn't look like the old one. The new make was of the newer generation -- an Inspiron 1720. I'm happy to report that the new machine has been running well for several weeks now and I've not had any problems with it.

The new machine arrives in a box with a pre-paid shipping label for the old machine. All the instructions were included for packing and shipping, including the DHL 800 number to have them come pick up the old machine at the house. Piece of cake.

The machine itself wasn't quite a one-for-one swap, but overall I'm quite happy with the way it worked out. Some of the things that vary from this 1720 to the older 9400 I had are:

• The 1720 doesn't have a DVI output. As I never really use the machine with an external display, it's not a big deal to me. If I did need an external panel, this might be a concern.
  
• They (John?) did upgrade the machine to a Core 2 Duo T7300 processor (from plain ol' Core Duo), as well as a drive upgrade to 160GB 7200rpm (the original was an 80GB at 7200rpm). Very nice
  
• It's got five USB ports on it, while the older machine had 6. I rarely use more than two at a time, so this wasn't a big deal to me at all.
  
• The new machine has a bigger keyboard and a full numeric keypad to the right of the main keyboard. As a result, it's got less empty space on the left/right sides of the keyboard than the old machine. The layout of navigation and editing keys is still taking some getting used to (e.g., PgUp, PgDn, Home, End), but overall it's handy to have the numeric keypad. The biggest adjustment has been that the main keyboard isn't centered on the machine... so I offset my hands a bit while I'm using it.
  
• The new machine has an NVidia GeForce 8600M GT video adapter in it. So far, I'm very pleased with the video performance. The older one had an NVidia in it as well, but it was the GeForce GO. I expected the newer machine to have a higher Windows Experience Rating than the old one, but it actually dropped a small amount (due to the graphics card). Then again, I'm using the default driver that Windows Vista put on the machine and haven't checked Dell's support site to see if there's something new and improved available for the 8600. I don't do any gaming or hardcore DirectX/OpenGL stuff on this machine, so the video performance hasn't been an issue.

Getting up and running was mostly straightforward... I did have a bit of a panic when I went to re-pave it, though. As Rick Strahl mentioned on his post about a new Inspiron 1520, the larger capacity SATA drives on these laptops require a special driver. Without it, Vista initially installs just fine but then blue-screens after the final reboot. The first time it did that, I got well and truly panicked!

A quick search on Dell's support forums, though, turned up a couple possible solutions... you could do as Rick did and disable the AHCI mode in the BIOS (putting the drive in plain old ATA mode). It sounds like there's no performance or stability hit either way. The other route, which is the one I took because I was doing the pave anyway, was to download the AHCI driver from Dell and expand it on to a USB thumb drive. Insert that in the machine during the Vista install and then point to it during the step where it asks about third-party SCSI or RAID drivers. Once I did that, all was well.

Interestingly, it sounds like some of the problems Rick had with his NVidia card are similar to the issues I had... while his issues led to instability during WPF development and the inability to use an external panel, mine led to black screens and what seemed like the eventual burnout of the built-in panel.

After searching around quite a bit, there are also reports of issues with those machines being susceptible to static discharge problems. I definitely felt that "tingle" from time to time with the older machine and was using the standard 2-prong AC adapter that Dell ships. Apparently, it's now possible to order a 3-prong adapter if you want it but Dell sounds fairly confident that the 2-prong shouldn't be a problem.

In any case, the newer machine has been ROCK SOLID for the last several weeks of regular use. No instability, the temperature seems to be well within the normal ranges, and it runs very very fast.

Thanks again to John and the rest of the Dell Customer Advocate folks for taking care of me on this.

Doh - that reminds me... I need to make sure the extended warranty I paid for was transferred to this newer machine! Off to that support site again... :)

Technorati Tags: dell , hardware , support , customer support , solution

Via a post the other day from Lifehacker, I've been checking out a new site called XTimeline at http://www.xtimeline.com. The site allows you to create web-based timelines based on data you provide, using a couple of different file formats (CSV or RSS), or by entering events on the timeline by hand. The coolest option is to provide an RSS feed and it creates a timeline with points along the line for each item in your feed. Once you create an account and log in, you can create your own timelines, share them with others (or make them private), embed them into your own site, and so on.

The image above is based on the data from a Yahoo Pipes RSS feed I created a while back. It's a feed that pulls together items from this blog, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and other online accounts I have. It's not very interesting or voluminous, but it did highlight how easy it is to create a timeline. The only thing that wasn't immediately intuitive was that there was an extra steps to "add events from RSS", wherein it takes the published date for each item out of the feed.

In addition to creating timelines from RSS feeds, you can upload data in CSV format, browse through a ton of public timeliness others have created, identify favorite timelines, rate them, tag timelines with keywords, and so on. Some cool examples include a history of the internet, the history of video games, and a timeline of music in the United States (embedded as an iframe below).

Creating an account is free and requires only an email address. I don't see options around "premium" services, so aside from some subtle ads on the site, there doesn't appear to be an obvious monetization plan -- not that wikipedia has one either, right? Either way, it's a really cool site for data and infoporn geeks. They've also got a blog where the founders/developers update on site improvements and changes. In their initial announcement, they answer the "Why Timelines?" question:

Why make a site just for timelines?
Making a dynamic timeline widget isn't enough -- you need to have a place to create, store, and share them with other people.  We like to think of xtimeline as a cross between wikipedia and youtube.  Like all user-generated content sites, you can upload your own thoughts, media, and opinions.  Eventually, we think some timelines will become well-known enough to be online references.

I really dig seeing cool visualization tools like this, especially when (just like Swivel and Many Eyes before) they make it so easy to explore and create new views of data. Well done!

Technorati tags: xtimeline, data visualization, infoporn, timelines

Greg Reinacker (Founder/CTO of NewsGator, a local company) and Brad Feld (of the Foundry Group and a Boulder-based VS/startup blogger) both posted recently about their first computers.

For me, the "computer geek" bug bit pretty early. When I was 12 or so (early 80s), I had a friend whose father bought him a TRS-80 Color Computer. He'd have sleepovers at his house and we'd stay up very late hacking out "games" (loosely defined) that were of the Choose Your Own Adventure variety. They were completely text-based and offered multiple choices at each turn. We learned quickly to map out the story's flow on graph paper.

It didn't take long to decide that I needed a computer of my own, so I started saving. Eventually, I got a paper route for the San Jose Mercury News and that helped me reach the savings goal pretty fast... I was pretty excited to purchase a Commodore 64 with my own money. My parents helped out by buying me the cassette tape drive (so I could [painfully and slowly] save my work) and a dot matrix printer. The following Christmas, my grandparents bought me the 300 baud modem for it (funny story: I learned years later that my grandparents argued over whether to get this because they'd just seen the film War Games). A year or so later, I bought the disk drive for it... which was both more expensive and physically larger than the computer itself!

I spent a whole lot of time hacking on that thing, including punching in program after program from "Compute Magazine". You'd punch things in by hand and try to run it later... but it was guaranteed not to run, so you'd have to go back through and try to find the typo.

In high school, I got in trouble once in a History class and was given some "extra" homework -- I had to write "I will not cause a disruption in Mr. Whatever's class in the future" a hundred times. I asked the teacher if it would be alright if I typed it a hundred times because A) I had a lot of homework and B) I needed the practice typing. Not having any idea what he was agreeing to, he said it was alright.

I went home and wrote something like this:

10 FOR I = 1 TO 100 
20     PRINT "I will not cause a disruption in Mr. Whatever's class in the future." 
30 NEXT I 

Fire up the printer, run it, and I was done... I remember this because it was the first time I realized that I could make a computer work hard so I wouldn't have to. Thus, a career was born.

That computer was also my first experience with the online world. I had to borrow my parents credit card to make it happen, but I got my first Compuserve account with that C64. Between cruising forums and writing code to peek/poke sprites on screen, I spent hundreds of hours on that machines.

Later (shortly after high school), I got an IBM PC XT 8088 clone that had two 5.25" floppy drives in it. One was the system (the OS and whatever app you ran) and the other was for data (to save your documents or whatever). Later, my uncle hooked me up with a 10MB hard drive... it was a beast and sounded like a jet taking off. I still remember messing around with jumpers to get it all working.

That 8088, with an amberchrome monitor, was the computer with which I first combined my other hobby -- music. I bought a serial port MIDI adapter and the original release of Cakewalk for DOS. Connecting a synthesizer to a computer opened up an amazing new world to me. I've been a Cakewalk (now SONAR) user ever since, despite dabbling with other products. It just "feels right" to me.

From there, it's been a series of 286, 386, and so on... I've never owned an Apple computer (though the MacBook Pro is sure tempting these days) and have been a PC junkie for over 20 years now.

Technorati tags: commodore 64, first computer, cakewalk, trs-80

If getting a tattoo of a product logo (MS Zune, in this case) isn't "out there" enough, how about getting an operating system error message tattooed all the way up your arm (Windows Blue Screen of Death)??

I wonder how you explain those to your grandkids in a few decades...

Technorati tags: windows, bsod, tattoo, zune

I've subscribed to Frans Bouma's blog for quite some time. He wrote a post earlier this week that echoed a meme floating around various development blogs and, at the end, he "tagged" anyone who was reading the post.

Let me just pass on the torch to every dear reader of this blog. So if you read this item, you are up next.

Not having been "tagged" before (it doesn't happen much when you have two readers -- and they're both just different browsers on your own machine ), I started to give it some thought.

What are the things in my life that I've just "gotta have"? The must-have gadgets and tools that I wouldn't want to do without.

I should make two very important distinctions... first is that the most important thing I have in my life is obviously my family, but they're not "things". The stuff below is a list of simple, material possessions. Secondly, let's ignore for the moment that all any of us really needs is sustenance, shelter, and safety. The point of the meme is simply to point out the gadgets, tools, or prized possessions you enjoy... so here's what I came up with.

Gadgets and Toys

Xbox 360 - While it was originally just mine, it's become something the whole family uses now. From the media center capabilities to family-friendly games on Xbox Live Arcade, there's plenty here for the non-hardcore gamer.

Nikon D70 - I wish I were better at taking photographs than I am... I do alright, but I try to avoid the Auto modes and my best pictures usually still require some trial-and-error.

Roland V-Drums - Rupturing my Achilles earlier this year was a big setback in my drumming. I'm able to do it for short periods now and it's very relaxing to put  my iPod on the 'Drums' playlist and work up a sweat.

Tivo - Once you've time-shifted television, there's no going back. And don't tell me about your Comcast or Dish Network DVR... it's not the same.

iPod - It's not my first MP3 player, but it's by far the best I've had. I just wish iTunes weren't such a P.O.S. under Windows. Mine is a 60gb iPod Photo... but I wouldn't mind moving to an 80gb 5G iPod at some point.

Software Tools

CodeRush and Refactor Pro - These tools are like crack for me. I get twitchy if I have to use a machine that doesn't have them installed. I think my team is tired of hearing me preach about how much I love using these.

SlickRun - Probably the first thing I install after Windows... there are so many ways of using it and many of the shortcuts I've defined are etched into my muscle memory.

FeedDemon - Sure, Google Reader's good... but for my money, you can't beat a well-written, fast desktop application. Plus, with the automatic syncing to NewsGator Online, I get the best of both worlds.

Reflector - I can't imagine any .NET developer not installing this on their machine right away.

SnagIt - I generate a LOT of screenshots. From graphics for our dev wiki to quick examples I attach to email messages, a picture is usually the quickest way to get a point across.

I think that's it... I could come up with a lot more (and may do a list like this one at some point -- if only as a Google-indexed reminder of the things to install), but this my current Top Ten.

(Sorry, Frans, that LLBLGen Pro isn't on that tools list yet. I've been meaning to try it out, honest!

Technorati tags: gadgets, top ten, slickrun, coderush, feeddemon, snagit, llblgen, tivo, ipod, xbox 360

Every developer, or at least those who really love what they do, has a few side projects to work on. They're the palate-cleansers you turn to when you want to sink your coding teeth into a different problem for a while... they're your sorbet projects. 

Well, one of the side projects I've worked on this year has been iTunesExport - a .NET app that can export playlists from your iTunes library. It exports them in a variety of formats (M3U, EXT, WPL), can copy tracks to a new location, and has both GUI and command-line interfaces. I got involved earlier this year when I wanted to export playlists in a file format that it didn't yet support. I contacted Eric Daugherty, who owns and hosts the project's site, and jumped in to add the additional export type. Since then, I've added additional features and tweaks and it's been a pretty fun project to work on.

Yesterday, productivity blog LifeHacker did (another) post on it with some examples for using it. It was a cool surprise as LifeHacker is one of the feeds I subscribe to, so I came across their post randomly in my feed reading.

I added a comment to that post, but since it was my first comment to LifeHacker my registration is sitting in an approval queue somewhere and the comment's not yet visible. The other comments on that post had a number of questions about iTunesExport and I wanted to answer those and/or clarify what the tool does.

First, iTunesExport does NOT modify your tracks in any way, shape, or form. It won't convert to or from any file format and it won't strip DRM from purchased tracks. The only time it does anything with actual song bits is when you choose to copy tracks to a new location for your exported playlist(s)... and in that case, it's just doing a straight, bit-for-bit file copy.

Second, the purpose of iTunesExport is simply to let you export playlists OUT of iTunes and into a file format that can be read by another player (WinAmp, Windows Media Player, etc). In my case, I use it to make my iTunes Smart Playlists available through the Tivo Home Media interface on our television. With this in mind, we're very careful to NOT modify the iTunes library XML file. We're simply reading the playlists/songs out of it and then writing another file in the format you want. So the exporter doesn't do anything to play count, last played, or any other data in the iTunes library.

Finally, Eric and I are always interested in hearing suggestions and feedback for the app. Some of the recent changes/fixes, especially around internationalization and Unicode,  have come via testing and feedback from others.  Those are always the things that are most fun to work on because you know someone can use it right away. So while I've got a few ideas for things I'd like to add (including saving/restoring your settings, improved documentation, and some better reporting/feedback on what was exported), we'd love to hear other ideas for things the tool might do... so please send those along via the project's site or through SourceForge.

Technorati tags: itunes, itunesexport, lifehacker, playlists

One of the side-effects of having surgery earlier this week is that I've had time on my hands to get some reading done. I can't lift anything heavy yet and I'm having to take some pain meds... so my options are pretty much limited to reading, watching television, playing some Xbox, and using the computer. Even that last one can be dicey as I don't want to be anywhere near important code while taking these prescriptions. 

On the reading front, I started reading "Managing Humans" by Michael Lopp (also known via his nom de blog, Rands) the other day and am nearly done with it now. The subtitle of the book is "Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager", which I think provides a good idea of the book's overall "vibe".

I know I've mentioned his site, Rands in Repose, a few times in previous posts and it's one of the top feeds in my subscriptions. He writes from plenty of real-world experience on managing developers, development projects, and most importantly, managing organizations on behalf of those developers and development projects.

His is one of those sites that you go to as soon as you see a new post has arrived. The writing and insights are just that good... so when I learned he was publishing a book, I knew that it'd be a must-read.

A lot of the material in the book comes from his blog, though it's been re-worked to some degree to flow better in book form. The humor, edginess, and "bite," however, all remain intact. This is NOT your typical management advice book -- it's focused squarely at people who manage development teams that are building software products.

The book is broken into three sections --

• The Management Quiver, where each chapter discusses tools (or "arrows in your quiver") for surviving the manager-employee relationship (from either direction). Detecting agendas, handling someone in the middle of a freak-out, and saying "no".
  
• The Process is the Product, where processes and approaches for getting a product out are discussed. Status reports to monitor progress, capturing the context for work being done, and the all-important version 1.0.
  
• Versions of You, which contains chapters that discuss the various personality types that are common in a software team. The Organics, the Incrementalists, and the Free Electrons. If you've been a developer (or managed developers) for any period of time, you can't read through these chapters without laughing out loud at the way he describes these familiar personalities.

The chapter on saying "no" is particularly hilarious, as it describes the process by which a manager becomes a manager -- essentially, pixies arrive and provide you with an elegant top hat that has the words "I'm The Boss" emblazoned on the front. Of course, the key thing that you don't immediately recognize as a new manager is that the back of the hat reads, "For Now." And so begins the lesson about a manager NOT being infallible and truly needing a team to push back for the improvement of the process/product/company. Team members forget the "For Now" part and let the title and position of "The Boss" get in the way of fighting for good ideas.

Saying no forces an idea to defend itself with facts. It forces a manager under the influence of his top hat to stop and think. Yes, I know that top hat can be intimidating, and yeah, I know he's the guy who signs the checks, but each time you allow your manager to charge forward with unchecked blind enthusiasm, you only reinforce his perception that he's never wrong. That's a ticket straight to Crazy Town.

As the subtitle suggests, the book is aimed squarely at software engineering managers. But one of the things I really like about his style is the dual angles for the advice he provides. While he's suggesting an approach for handling a problematic situation with your manager (the President, CEO, CTO, whatever), he's also providing advice on how to not be that problematic manager as you manage your own team.

The book does so well with this multi-angle approach, that I'd also recommend it for people other than engineering managers, including developers of all levels and non-technical folks who regularly work with a development team.

Technorati tags: book review, managing humans, rands in repose, rands, michael lopp

One of the cool features of FeedDemon, the news reader I use, is called "News Bins" -- it's essentially a place you can drag and drop items that come through your feeds to save or organize them for later. I used to use them essentially as "bookmark folders" for items I wanted to come back to.

In the latest version, News Bins can now be sync'd with NewsGator Online in the same was as all the rest of my feeds and folders can be. Even cooler, Nick Bradbury (the primary FeedDemon developer) set it up to create an RSS feed for any synchronized News Bin. So anything I drop in there is exposed via a syndicated feed to anyone who's interested in seeing the things I've come across.

With that, I've created a "Link Blog" and the feed for it is in the navigation items on the left. Right now, I've created only one and will use it for development-related items, plus the occasional 'general tech' tidbit.

I can see how this feature would be useful in a few ways, though... creating a link blog for "family", another one for "work", and so on. FeedDemon has keyboard shortcuts for dropping items into the feed easily so I can quickly share items that people in my family or at the office might find interesting.

Nick has a post from just after the 2.5 release that also discusses this feature and there's also a screencast with a walkthrough.

Technorati tags: newsgator, feeddemon, link blog

Here's today's blogosphere bummer... word is that print magazine Business 2.0 is on its last legs and could be publishing their last issue later this summer.

I've been a subscriber for just a couple of years, but in that time it made the cut when I did a serious "print subscription purge" a while back. It filled the gap nicely between two other magazines I subscribe to - Wired (for tech coverage with little "business" angle) and Business Week (for the decidedly non-tech business-y stuff). The closest thing I've found to Business 2.0 has been "Inc" magazine, which doesn't have as strong a tech angle and isn't usually one I read from cover to cover.

Most telling, it's one of the few magazines I've had where people who see it on my desk want to read the issue when I'm done with it... guess I should have told them to buy their own.

It sounds like Business 2.0 has actually been on the upswing (no small feat for a print magazine in these "content wants to be online... oh, and free to access" days), but its publishers (those AOL-acquiring, 3.2-billion-wasting, internet-music-hosing geniuses at Time Warner) decided that B2.0's new numbers may be coming at the expense of Fortune. Can't have that, so the smaller tech rag gets the thumbscrews.

The coverage today doesn't make it clear whether this deal is 100% done and there was an effort to get a "show your support" FaceBook group going. If it is a done deal, I guess I'll have to look at the silver lining here -- a shorter to-read stack on my nightstand.

Technorati tags: business 2.0, fortune, magazines, time warner, print, media

After posting over the weekend about my recent Dell woes, I received a comment from "John @ Dell" who works in their Customer Advocate group. John looked up the system I'm having issues with and agreed that it's overdue to be replaced.

After confirming the service tag and my shipping information, he commented again to let me know that an exchange machine is on its way. That's GREAT news... I look forward to posting again once it arrives and I can confirm that all's well and I'm back on track.

I gotta hand it to Dell... between the Customer Advocate program and the Direct2Dell blog program, they look to be pretty serious about being proactive with customer issues that arise. It's a bummer that it took blogging about it publicly before it was dealt with, and I'd have liked to have seen more responsiveness using the "traditional" support channel... but the end result is what's most important to me in this case as the machine's pretty much unusable as it is. Thanks again, John, for picking up on the post and taking some steps to get this resolved.

PS... ironically, I finally got a response to an email I'd sent in middle of last week wherein I wondered about the replacement panel that didn't appear to have been shipped. The response was a very short and generic message, stating simply that it "looks like the part should ship on 7/20".

Technorati tags: dell, hardware, customer support

The last DasBlog release under ASP.NET 1.1 went out a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to give that a run. It all seemed to go well when running it locally, which was a good sign... and seems to be the standard for the last few updates I've done. Once I have it running locally, it's just a few config changes to get it going on the server. This one was just slightly different because there were some script files moved around and I initially had it running under ASP.NET 2 on my local machine. In any case, the site's using it now and no hassles.

I've been lurking on the DasBlog developer mailing list for a couple months now and there's a good deal of activity. Currently, the project's dev team is working on the initial ASP.NET 2.0 release, including support for Medium Trust. As I mentioned previously, there's also a theme contest going which should yield some cool new looks for folks to use.

I keep meaning to check out some of the "open source template" sites out there, but then I get sidetracked with other things... with this update, I'm settling for a few new navigation links and an updated blogroll.

Technorati tags: dasblog, blogging, asp.net

I've been a Dell guy for the last ten years. Over that time, I've had just one non-Dell machine and that's because it was purchased for me prior to starting a new job and the company was then standardized on IBM machines. That machine was a Thinkpad T series and it wasn't too bad a machine.

Otherwise, machines for home and business have been Dell boxes (one every couple of years at home and who knows how many business machines) and I've always suggested to friends and family that they go with Dell also. You get a machine that's ready to go out of the box and their prices usually compare well with other options-- assuming you don't want to go the build-your-own route. When it comes to my personal machine, I prefer a laptop so the DIY thing isn't really an option.

That allegiance is beginning to wane. About a year ago, I bought an Inspiron E1705 for my home/personal machine and it is pretty much loaded (at to the extent that an Inspiron configuration could be). Lots of RAM, fast disk, 1920x1200 17" display, DVD burner, NVidia graphics, and so on. Not a lower-end machine and not inexpensive either. It ran fine for the first few months but then the issues began.

It started at the end of last year when I noticed that it was running really hot. Areas on the bottom were nearly too hot to touch. Then early this year, it started randomly giving me the BSOD with a general hardware failure.

I had next-day warranty coverage, so I gave them a call... they decided it was the CPU burning out and sent another one out. This is when I learned that Dell's "next day" service really isn't "next day". What they mean is that they'll ship the part(s) out to some local contractor in your area and then the contractor should be out to fix it the "next day" after they get the part. So it's more like 3 days... whatever, I could get by with that and the CPU was replaced.

So far so good for a couple months... but then suddenly the screen would go black (as if the display shut off) when the machine was on AC power. On battery, it was fine. The machine was continuing to run and I could use Remote Desktop from another box to get into it even when it was on AC power. So another phone call... this time, they said they'd ship out a new "main system board". Three days later, a tech's out to replace it - but the problem isn't fixed.

So he calls Dell that day and they ship a new LCD panel out... another week goes by and then the screen gets replaced. Seems OK for a few days, but then...

The left edge of the screen begins to fade (see image to the left)... it's gotten more pronounced since that picture was taken, to the point that the fading now comes all the way into the middle of the screen. It also seems to get darker the longer the machine is on and, after 30 minutes or so, the left half of the screen is unusable. Another phone call... this time, they'll replace the LCD panel and the NVidia adapter ("just in case," says the tech).

All of this was frustrating, but now it's worse... because there's been no progress. After a few days, I don't hear from anyone. So I call to see what's up and am told the part is on backorder for a day or two and I'll get an email with a tracking number once it ships. Nothing for a couple days... so I email the tech, who emails a tracking number back to me and says the part(s) are on their way. However, Fedex doesn't recognize that number at all.

I emailed the tech again last week, along with the tech supervisor for the incident and the Dell Customer Advocate email alias... still no response.

I've got surgery scheduled for this week, but my wife will end up having to call them and nag again about getting this fixed.

I also have to wonder -- at what point does Dell declare this thing a lemon and replace it? This will be the FOURTH time in a few months that a tech has had to come out to replace parts on this machine. All these support calls, replacement parts, shipping, and paying contractors to come to the house -- that's gotta add up. I've got nearly the same machine at the office for business use, as do several of my colleagues,  and nobody has had any problems. Clearly this box has some problems.

In any case, their handling of this support problem may just be what changes me over to Lenovo... or HP. Or Toshiba. It's kinda ridiculous to think that, over the last few months,  my machine has been out of commission for weeks.

Technorati tags: dell, hardware, support, customer support, problems

Christopher Hawkins has a post from last Friday wherein he describes his "dream" software projects. The funny thing is that he refers to them as "silly", but they seem like pretty real and useful projects to me. The film production system, in particular, sounds like a fun project to work on.

While I wouldn't say that mine are quite "dream" projects, there are a couple of systems I've always thought would be a lot of fun to work on.

Poker Machines for Casinos -- Partially because I enjoy playing some poker myself and partly because I think there would be some interesting problems to solve. There have been a number of products announced that bring the "automated" world of online poker into casinos, bars, or other hangouts.

Note that this is NOT video poker of the "Jacks or better" variety. In some cases, the game is still "regular" poker, but everyone around the table plays the hand via a touchscreen and there's no dealer. In other cases, it might be a small table where two people can play heads-up while they wait for a seat at a regular table or while hanging out at a bar and watching a game. There are enough differences between these "electronic tables" and regular online poker software to make it pretty interesting.

Elevator Control Systems (for high-rises) -- This is the one that usually gets a laugh when I tell people about it. But if you imagine a tall building with multiple tenant types (retail, offices, or residential apartments, etc), then there are some intriguing things to consider. How do you optimize the flow and availability of a car at any given time? If an car's at rest, do you send it to a certain floor to wait for a call? During the morning, you have one type of flow (from the ground floors up to the offices) and in the late afternoon it's the opposite. What about lunch hours? How do you handle things like redundancy or failover if a car has to be taken out of service for repair? What can you provide facilities and security with in the way of monitoring and management?

Both of these seem interesting to me as intellectual projects... but I think what intrigues me is that they both offer a lot of opportunity for data visualization and some infoporn. In both cases, you can imagine administrative/monitoring interfaces that provide all sorts of interesting views of data (historic poker hands) and state (elevator state).

I'm interested in reading what sort of "dream" projects others write about.

  Technorati: software, development, projects, dream

Ben Scheirman is running a themes design contest to get some new looks in the themes list for DasBlog. To encourage designers to submit their original designs, he and Scott Hanselman are putting up a $100 gift certificate for Amazon.com.

While I "know what I like" when it comes to design, I've got virtually no talent for creating a web theme from scratch... This could be a good opportunity for someone with talent, though, and a hundred bucks at Amazon.com? As I've said since we signed for Amazon Prime, "If I can't get it at Amazon using Prime, it's probably not worth buying..."

Speaking of DasBlog, the last ASP.NET 1.1 update went up a couple weeks ago. I'm running it on my local machine and it seems to be fine... so I'll update the server soon. On the other hand, an ASP.NET 2.0 version that supports Medium Trust is in the works. Maybe it's worth waiting... either way, I'm stoked to see all the renewed activity on the dev mailing list (where I've just lurked for a few months now).

  Technorati: dasblog, web design, themes, contest

My wife's computer (a Dell Latitude laptop) has been acting a little wonky and was overdue to be re-paved and re-configured. It was a hand-me-down from me to her over a year ago and it's been nearly three years since it was rebuilt. I usually like to pave once every 12-18 months.

Thankfully, I always divide a laptop drive into at least two partitions -- C: (for the OS and apps) and D: (for everything you might want to keep). Once you get some of the system folders like "My Documents" pointed to a location on D: (using the awesome TweakUI), it's very convenient. It also makes doing this re-pave pretty simple because I won't have to restore all the files she cares about later. I back that stuff up semi-regularly (probably not regularly enough), but the D: stuff doesn't get touched during this process. I'm just nuking the C: partition and doing a re-install.

So I'm installing XP (not enough horsepower for Vista) from a disc that has SP2 already applied... but even at that, the first Windows Update process has taken even longer than the actual install of the Operating System. There are 80 important/critical updates in this first pass (and more likely after the first 80 finish and it reboots).

It's good to be up to date and all, but man... that's a lot of updates.

One other thing that has the potential to really irritate people is that one of those 80 updates (number 65, to be exact) is the Windows Genuine Advantage update. This installs some utility on your machine that verifies that you're using a legit, licensed install of Windows. Fair enough... but this update opens a wizard that requires you to step through it.

That's right -- the 65th update in a list of 80 that need to be downloaded and installed stops the entire update so that you can click Next a few times. Worse, there's no need here for a Wizard as there are no options or configuration settings to be set!

Luckily, I've opted to let this run through the afternoon and I just go over and check it out every once in a while to move things along. So I saw it fairly quickly. But how many people doing this have seen those 80 updates in a list and decided to start the process and go to bed... only to find a wizard wants their attention in the morning?

That stinks.

  Technorati: windowsxp, annoyances, windowsupdate

I can't make it due to scheduling conflicts, but the Startup Weekend in Boulder begins tonight. The idea is for a group (a few dozen) to start with an idea this evening and work like mad until Sunday evening to turn that idea into a "thing".

I'd bet on some red and bleary eyes come Sunday night and Monday, but it should be a lot of fun and a great experience regardless of the business/product outcome.

Good luck, gang!

Technorati tags: startup weekend, boulder, colorado

As I mentioned earlier, I find all the breathlessness around the iPhone to be entertaining. It's a sexy-looking device, to be sure, but it's a phone. And a $500-600 phone at that! Multi-touch sounds interesting, but it's not as though there's much else here's that innovative -- email, messaging, web-browsing. With no developer platform -- but wait, "there's the web" (and the Apple fans fall all over themselves to declare it some sort of ground-breaking genius move -- "bold"? "forward-thinking"? Yeah, you're objective).

In any case, it's obviously been a very successful launch for Apple, even with the too-many-to-be-a-fluke activation problems. Wildly successful. Down the road, I may even stand in line (for 5 minutes) pick one up for myself. You know, once it has decent download speeds and there are some compelling applications (I kid, I kid!).  In the meantime, it is nice to see mobile devices getting a lot of attention like this and spurring on the competition for features is a good thing.

What had me chucking this morning was a TechCrunch post that declares $200 million in profit for Apple in their opening weekend. How did they get at this number? First, the quote:

"Based on the cost of manufacturing an iPhone..., Apple would have made a profit of between $200million and $266 million in 3 days (not including marketing costs), on sales somewhere between $350million and $420million, significantly more than earlier estimates of Apple having a $300million weekend."

The original quote referenced a BusinessWeek article from Monday that estimates the parts cost for an iPhone to be $200-$220US. This is from a non-Apple estimate by a firm that took apart a production iPhone and came up with an estimated cost for the individual components. The $20 difference is based on the 4GB versus 8GB unit.

So using the most basic possible math, TechCrunch clearly took this route:

Voila, between $200 and $266 million. The TechCrunch article does point out that Apple "would have" made this profit by "not including marketing costs".

I'm not sure why marketing would be the only cost called out separately here because the true figure for expenses on the iPhone are clearly much higher. So while Apple will never tell us what that number really is, the most basic analysis would also have to include:

• R&D -- A team at Apple worked hard to decide what to build, which features to include, how it might be engineered, what the tradeoffs were for cost, features, battery life, and size. Multi-touch doesn't grow on trees, right? Nor do screens that don't scratch easily.
  
• Design -- A team worked to come up with that cool look and all that sex appeal.
  
• Development -- Somebody wrote that software, right? Sure, I know it's "based on" OSX, but it's certainly not a matter of OSX developers choosing "File -> Save As iPhone" in their development environment.
  
• Production -- The BusinessWeek article referenced above states that the $200/220 cost for the iPhone is just the parts. Those parts have to be assembled. By people. And big machines. In factories.
  
• Testing -- Use the phone internally. Find a problem. Fix it. Use the new phone internally. Request a feature. Add it. Repeat.
  
• Fulfillment -- Those phones have to be packaged (something Apple clearly spends a lot of time and money on -- they single-handedly created "gadget porn") and shipped out to stores.
  
• Marketing -- This is the one that TechCrunch opted to include and it's obviously a huge cost. There were iPhone commercials all over prime time in the weeks leading up to its launch. Posters, brochures, billboards, t-shirts, television spots, magazine ads, and so on.

Finally, there are other costs not specific to the iPhone that must be carried. All those jobs above people to sell it (sales and retail labor). Those jobs also include people who need places to work (facilities), recruitment and benefits (HR), paychecks and expenses (finance), and tools with which to communicate (IT). Overhead.

We'll never know exactly what those other costs do to the iPhone's bottom line. But we can safely say that they add up to some fairly non-trivial numbers.

Do I think Apple LOST money on the iPhone's opening weekend? I doubt it. But it's certainly not accurate to say they made anywhere near $200 million in profit. iPhone #1 was very expensive for Apple to put into a customer's hands... it's iPhone #5,000,000 and beyond that will let us know what sort of long-term value has been created for Apple's business.

And I don't mean to pick on TechCrunch here... lots of sites were calling the iPhone a massive hit before the first device had been sold over the counter. There's no shortage of this sort of speculation.

In fact, TechCrunch themselves poked fun at all the hype a few weeks ago by calling it the second coming. Hilarious.

  Technorati: iphone, business, apple, techcrunch, cellular

Earlier this week, I turned on XM Radio in the car and was greeted with a "No Signal" warning -- and dead air. This had happened once or twice before in the last four years and fixing it involved a call to XM's Customer Support line, waiting on hold for far too long, and then dealing with some of the worst support staff I've ever experienced.

Both times, they "sent a signal to reset" the radio and it was fine within 10 minutes or so. But it took phone calls of 20-30 minutes to get there.

So I was dreading making that phone call once I got to work and decided I'd use Google to see if it's possible to request this "reset" online. No dice, but in searching I found that the entire XM system was down. That saved me a phone call, I suppose.

A day or two later, I got an email explaining that they had "resumed normal levels of service" and apologizing for the inconvenience. Apparently, some software update in a satellite went bad and it took hours to get the problem resolved. "Sorry, our bad."

The truth is, I didn't really miss it. Sure, I enjoy the programming when I have it... but the truth is that I find myself listening to my iPod far more often than I listen to XM. Many of the channels I listen to on XM are NOT commercial free (news/talk channels from other organizations) and the channels that are (XM's own music channels) increasingly have too much DJ chatter and advertisements for programming on other channels. And their exclusive content (such as Major League Baseball, Oprah, and until recently, the Opie and Anthony show) has never interested me much at all.

On the other hand, I still dig listening to podcasts on the iPod and there's no shortage of new ones coming out all the time. I've also been using the "Smart Playlists" feature of iTunes more often, which helps get me playlists that are very focused on the things I most enjoy listening to. Plus, I can use the iPod in places that my XM SkyFi currently doesn't work, such as while exercising, in planes, and so on.

Their handling of this outage is further making me re-think my subscription to the service. Not only was their never a notice on their web site (the logical place for many people to turn when they have problems with their radio -- if only to get the support phone number), but they're apparently offering a pittance of a refund. Engadget reports that they'll refund about $.87 to customers due to the system outage -- but only if you call in and request it.

Yeah... my experience with XM wait times is such that sitting on hold to ask for $.87 is a money-losing proposition. On an hourly basis, I'd make more money sewing clothes for Kathy Lee Gifford. To say nothing of the incompetent staff on the other end of the phone. The right thing to do here is to just automatically deduct the $.87 from next month's charge for anyone who was affected by the outage (XM implies it wasn't everyone by saying it affected an "undisclosed number of customers").

I like (not love... not need... just like) XM Radio... but their competition extends far beyond potential-merger-mate Sirius Radio. Their competition is with iPods and every other MP3 player. It's with PSPs, laptops, home media centers, Tivo, game consoles, and every other way in which media can be delivered to me.

At $12.95 a month, it may just be losing that competition for my money. I'll definitely be paying attention to how much XM-specific content I listen to over the next few weeks.

  Technorati: xm radio, satellite radio, customer service, podcasting, portable audio

I've used Firefox for a couple of years now... but with its rich support for extensions and themes, it's the browser that never stops evolving.

This weekend, I happened upon a very cool bit of functionality that's actually built right into the browser's search bar - no extension required. To check it out, click in the default search box (or use CTRL+K to put your cursor there) and make sure that Google is your current search engine (CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN will cycle through your installed search engines).

Now try typing some of these, without hitting enter:

• 54^3
• 100 cm in inches
• sqrt 4096

Because of the auto-fill capability in that search box (which suggests searches as you type), these expressions and conversions get calculated and returned on the fly. Given that most people have a web browser window open all the time, you can't get much more convenient than this.

Here's a blog post that provides some other Google tips that you may not be aware of. I've used most of these for a while, and not all work on the fly like the expressions above, but checking time in foreign cities and getting quick movie showtimes were cool new ones for me.

On a related note, here are some of the must-have extensions that I install with any new Firefox setup:

del.icio.us Extension -- The new 1.5 version replaces the built-in Firefox bookmark capability by adding a sidebar with dynamic tags and swapping the built-in bookmark keyboard shortcuts. Note that your standard bookmarks aren't touched and are always available.

Flashblock -- Blocks Flash objects from appearing in any web page. Instead, you get a little Flash logo that you can click if you decide you want to see the Flash app. Makes the web a LOT less "blinky."

Google Toolbar for Firefox -- Provides one-click access to all sorts of Google searches and properties. Turn on the Suggest feature and you get the same "suggest" functionality described above.

IE Tab -- Some sites just don't behave well in Firefox. This extension lets you open a site in a new tab that hosts Internet Explorer right inside the tab. No need for a separate IE window!

Send Tab URLs -- When I'm researching something, I will sometimes have a LOT of tabs open. This extension creates an email message with the title and URL for all current open tabs. Very useful when you want to send some research to others or when you want to send some links to the office or home.

Tab Mix Plus -- Lets you control all sorts of settings around tabbed browsing and managing tab sessions.

Tabs Menu -- Couldn't be simpler. Adds a "Tabs" menu to the menu bar, with a dynamic list of current tabs under the menu. Very useful when you're trying to navigate a ton of tabs.

  Technorati: firefox, search, web search, extensions

I'm testing the latest FeedDemon 2.5 beta build and ran across a problem where an empty <STRONG> block in the middle of a post caused the Newspaper view to get out of whack. This post will have a similar empty block, so I'm hoping that the issue (which is described here) will re-appear.

This post from Phil Haack points to Charles Petzold's concern that "prose is dead" in technical books. The concern was based on Jeff Atwood's comparison of two different WPF development books. Wow, how's that for name dropping? Three names in two sentences. I ought to point out that I have a great deal of respect for Charles, Jeff, and Phil and all three write blogs that are in my must-read list.

As shown in Jeff's comparison, one book (Petzold's) has large blocks of uninterrupted text and appears to be entirely monochrome, while the other book (by Adam Nathan) has smaller blocks of text and makes liberal use of color and visuals.

I agree with Phil's commentary about "visual learning," and his pointer to the excellent "Head First" books is spot-on, but I actually think there's an even more important thing to consider here. That's the subject matter... in this case, the topic of both books is the new Windows Presentation Foundation API that's a part of the .NET 3.0 release. I find Petzold's statements that "Powerpoint has won" and the "battle for the future of written communication is over" to be a bit unfair. It implies that readers are looking for visuals alone or that well-written communication is no longer important.

Anyone who has seen a WPF sample application knows that this is not the same ol' Win32 GUI toolset. In the hands of a talented designer, it's shiny. It's pretty. It glows. It makes you want to look at it... is it unreasonable to prefer a book that conveys the same feeling?

It's also worth noting that the bar for information presentation has been raised over the past few years. As computer users become more familiar with different types of data visualization, and as flashy UIs like Vista's Aero take hold, expectations for UI are higher. Even in a typical "line of business" application, it may not be enough any more to use the same old Windows UI toolkit. You could certainly argue that it's possible to build an efficient, intuitive, and fast application using the same Windows UI tools we've used for nearly 15 years. No question. But few applications compete only in their specific market or product area. Most are competing for attention with other applications on the user's machine. Or with a massive web designed, in many cases, by some very talented designers. If you want customers to enjoy using your application, as opposed to feeling like it's drudgery, spending some time (and money) on its appearance and visualization is critical.

Now replace "using your application" with "reading your book". 

I've not read either book yet (though I plan to do so shortly, thanks to the O'Reilly Safari Library subscription -- highly recommended), but I don't think it's unreasonable that Jeff (or anyone else) prefers the book that has more visuals. A book whose purpose is to introduce a "Presentation" framework probably ought to have the presentation of its content made a higher priority than would a book discussing some "under the hood" technology (say, the Windows Communication Foundation, or WCF). In a book that covers UI controls, gradients, and different layout options, I'd probably like to see... UI controls, gradients, and different layout options.

That's NOT to say that the communication of ideas and information aren't the highest priority. No amount of visual flash will makes up for poorly-written, poorly-edited, or poorly-communicated content (and that's the true evil of Powerpoint). And few are as well-regarded as Petzold when it comes to communicating difficult technical content in a way that's easy to understand and put into practice. An entire generation of Windows programmers, including myself, was "raised" on his Programming Windows titles. I'm certain that I'll find his book well-written and that it'll provide useful information on WPF.

But it's not hard to see why some would prefer a book that presents a presentation framework in a presentable way... is it?

  Technorati: infoporn, data visualization, wpf, user interface, technical books, publishing

Last night, I mentioned that I was mostly happy with the Vista upgrade. One thing, however, that is standing out for me as a major annoyance is its insistence on treating ZIP files as folders in Window Explorer.

In the left pane where folders appear, ZIP files are treated as if they were subfolders of the folder in which they appear. I can see why some people might prefer this behavior -- you can, after all, just click on the ZIP file as if it were a folder and the right pane will display the files within the ZIP archive.

The problem for me is that I have some folders that contain a hundred or more ZIP files. When I navigate to those folders in Explorer, the folders pane on the left suddenly becomes very long and unwieldy. When there are just a few ZIP files in a folder (as in the screenshot above), then it's not a problem... but when the entire folder pane gets taken over by ZIP files, it sucks. Navigation becomes very inefficient.

Under XP, this could be taken care of by unregistering a DLL at the command line:

regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll

Under Vista, you'll get barked at if you try this:

The module "zipfldr.dll" was loaded but the entry-point DllUnregisterServer was not found. Make sure that "zipfldr.dll" is a valid DLL or OCX file and then try again.

I've Googled around quite a bit and perused the Vista-related newsgroups, but have yet to come across an answer... though there appears to be no shortage of people asking the same question. I've got both WinRAR and WinZIP 11 on the machine (yes, both are licensed and paid for) and associating either of those with ZIP files doesn't make the view-as-folders thing go away. It just changes which app opens them when you double-click a ZIP and which icon is used to identify them (WinZIP in the above screenshot.

Note: It does seem that there are lots of people who have broken Vista's built-in handling of ZIP files and need to get those files re-associated with the Vista handler. This appears to be resolved by opening a command window as an administrator and running this command:

assoc .zip=CompressedFolder

Any advice on getting this resolved?

  Technorati: Windows Vista, ZIP, Explorer

I've been meaning to re-pave my home machine for a couple of months now. It had a ton of stuff installed, uninstalled, updated, and so on... plus, as I mentioned previously, I'd been toying with the idea of pushing it up to Vista Ultimate. Well, after getting those hardware problems taken care of, I went for it.

It's actually been a pretty smooth process, though it seems like a re-pave takes longer each time I do it. And it's not just getting all those apps installed... it's also all the little settings, utilities, checkboxes, and customizations. It really does take a while to get a new rebuild to feel "comfortable".

One thing I've done for the last few years that does make this process a LOT easier is to organize my hard drives into multiple partitions. I've typically done this with Partition Magic, though there are are other alternatives that seem to get high praise. I keep all the stuff that I don't want lost in a rebuild on that second partition (seen as a D: drive). Under WinXP, I'd move the "My Documents" location with TweakUI (Vista has this capability built-in), I make sure to put SQL Server's data location over there, and obviously any development projects. It makes it a lot easier knowing that C: can be wiped clean and rebuilt without losing the stuff I care about.

I just wish there was a way to also back up all those little settings and customizations that get made over time (e.g., my preferred layout/view for file Explorer, various registry hacks, and customized views in Outlook).

Anyway, I had this drive partitioned already from the initial XP setup... so moving to Vista was pretty easy. I'd actually like to make my C: partition a little larger (D: has lots of free space) and I was excited to learn that Vista has partition resizing/moving built-in. It's under the Computer Management MMC plugin through Control Panel->Admin Tools. It turns out, though, that Vista doesn't let you extend a bootable partition (e.g., my C: drive) -- only shrink it. I'm sure there's legacy some reason for this, but given that it's a basic capability in 3rd party tools like Partition Magic and others, it seems silly that Vista won't let me. To make matters worse, I hear stories of people using Partition Magic to create NTFS partitions and then Vista can't read them. Not cool... but space isn't that big an issue, so I'm looking at those other options.

All in all, the process went smoothly and nearly all of my hardware had drivers installed automatically. The one exception was the built-in SD card reader on this laptop. The cool thing, though, was that Vista saw the problem and notified me of a solution -- updated drivers were available through Dell's site. Everything else installed and has been working well and performance is great -- the machine definitely feels snappier than it did under WinXP.

As a reference for the scores above, the machine is a dual core Inspiron (T2500 processor at 2GHz) with 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 (using Microsoft's WDDM driver at 1920x1200), and a 7200rpm Seagate Momentus drive. The display performance, in particular, has been great and Aero looks gorgeous with the bright TrueLife (glossy) widescreen display.

Vista's got a ton of UI tweaks, so maneuvering around has taken a little getting used to... and I have to admit to turning off UAC. Maybe I'll turn it back on now that most everything is installed and settled, but how many "Yes, I'm sure" buttons does a guy need to click? I'm still trying to get used to the newer Explorer UI and I wish I could get the Sidebar and its gadgets to Auto-Hide (the way the Task bar can)... but I really dig the ability to quickly search the Start menu.

Overall, I still feel like I'm settling in... but all my apps and tools are installed and things seem well. Now I'm going to go watch some fancy window animations for a while.

  Technorati: Windows Vista, Microsoft, Setup, Installation, Dell, Inspiron

So my home/personal machine decided to take a nose dive a few weeks ago and I'm just now getting to the point that it feels "whole" again.

It's a Dell Inspiron E1705 (same as the 9400) and I'd been running WinXP Pro on it since I bought it last summer. I'd been meaning to update it to Vista at some point, so I started making some backups and taking notes on various app/driver compatibilities. All seemed well, but during that process it began to spontaneously reboot. No warning, no nothing -- just a sudden, blank screen and then the Dell boot-up sequence.

The first time it happened, I figured it was a fluke-ish thing. Then it happened again a few days later and then twice in one day. Finally, it got to the point that booting into Safe Mode only worked intermittently and I began to get a BSOD that talked about hardware malfunctions. Not good.

So I call Dell and they decide that it's a CPU problem. According to the tech, it seemed that the CPU was overheating and after doing it once or twice it would just get flakier and less stable. The machine does run hot, but I'm always careful to run it with the vents and fan outlets unblocked.

Anyway, he says they'll ship one out and have a technician come over to replace it. I bought the machine with "Next Day, On-Site" service. Turns out that they mean "the next day after the part you need arrives in the hands of your local technician." Pretty lame, but I could live without the machine for a day or three.

Once the tech came out and installed the new CPU, I burned the machine in for quite a while to see how it would behave. All seemed well, so I went for it... popped in the Vista install disc and went to town.

Two weeks of heavy use since then and still no real problems. Do I trust it? Still not sure... but that warranty coverage is in place for a few more years so even the worst case scenario doesn't have to be all bad.

One nice upside is that the Dell support tech that I got (late on a Sunday night, no less) was great. He was based in Salt Lake City and didn't go through the usual "First, let's reboot" script once he realized that I'd spent some time troubleshooting. He even gave me direct contact info later "so if you need to call back, you don't get routed through India." Nice!

  Technorati: Dell, Inspiron, BSOD, Tech Support

Just over a week ago, I came across this posting on the 37Signals blog that discusses some of the resources they used to populate testing databases for their new product, Highrise. Given that this product is a contact manager, they wanted contact names with details... and lots of 'em. In the comments to that post, "Jes" mentioned yet another resource -- the "Fake Name Generator" web site. He mentioned that you get full contact details for a fake identity and that you could get up to 20,000 for free. Hmm.

This interested me because I always like getting hold of useful data to tinker with on side projects. One of my passions in development is for data visualization, or "infoporn," so the more data to look at, the better. I've downloaded data that includes the Netflix Prize data set, the Enron internal emails released by FERC, and geo-coded zipcode lists. You never know what might be useful, right?

But now you're thinking... "if those contacts are fake, then why would they be interesting?"

The reason is that the person/people behind the Fake Name Generator have gone out of their way to make it credible-looking fake data. For example,

• The cities match the states.
• The zip codes match the cities.
• The area codes (mostly) match the zip codes (I found a Bakersfield area code with an LA zip code).
• The names are more than just random letters and resemble names you'd find in any US-based list of contacts.

Having a set of data like this greatly improves the testing of code that works with contact details. Who among us developers hasn't created fake records for "Donald Duck", "John Smith", and "Joe Blow"?

My understanding is that the data is created from various legitimate sources, but the values across columns are randomized -- so that someone's real first name is used with someone else's last name, someone else's address, someone else's city, and so on. A few searches turn up other discussions of this data, including a set of contacts uploaded to Swivel.

The data is provided free for up to 20,000 fake identities, provided that you're willing to wait up to a week to download your data. If you need it sooner, you pay $10US to expedite the process.

A few other cool things about this service:

• You can specify which columns you'd like in your data, including credit card numbers (fake - but numerically valid), SSN/National ID numbers (also fake - but numerically valid), and gender.
• Email addresses use domains from various temporary email services (mailinator.com, mytrashmail.com, etc). Again, they validate but aren't useful as anything other than test data.
• You can get the data in various formats, including HTML, Excel XLS, SQL script, or delimited text files.
• You can specify the countries and name types for your data... so if you need some data that includes Swiss addresses and Hispanic name sets, you could request it.

I also found the data to be reasonably well distributed, at least in the US-centric set of data I received. For example, across 20,000 contacts, I found:

• The bulk of addresses were in California, Texas, and New York. The fewest were in Wyoming, Delaware, and New Hampshire. I had one record whose state was 'NN' -- ??
• Most surnames started with the letters M, S, and B. The letters with fewest surnames were X, Q, and U.
• The zipcode with the largest set of contacts was 90017 (Los Angeles), but the Area Code with the most contacts was 703 (Virginia). As I dug in further, it seemed somewhat logical because the LA area has numerous area codes spread across it.
• Social security numbers had starting numbers that were evenly distributed from 0 to 6 (2500-3500 each), with just 700 of them beginning with the number 7. There were none that started with the number 8 or 9. I learned on this CodeProject article that SSNs beginning with 9 are reserved for special government use (Witness Protection, I'm sure... hah!), but I'm not sure why there were none starting with an 8.

Anyway, I've been impressed. It's an interesting service and seems worth bookmarking/tagging the site for later... you never know when you'll need a bunch of bogus (but real looking!) data.

Note: I've got no affiliation with this site whatsoever, aside from requesting a set of 20K fake identities and getting an email with download details a week later.

Technorati tags: data, identity, development, infoporn

Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror, is on a blogging tear lately... I don't know how he manages to knock out such frequent posts on such consistently interesting topics. Today, I read his post on building your own hardware (with an interesting intro on how Google's servers have always been custom machines).

I've modified my machines in the past, adding RAM or drives here and there, but I've never built a machine from the basic components. For the last several years, I've purchased Dell machines (often from their Outlet, with great results) and I've never had a problem with their quality (and have yet to need to customer support, knock wood). Prior to that, I'd purchased Toshibas, Microns, and beige-box generic machines from local vendors.

That said, I'm not opposed to building my own machine. I can certainly connect the parts and troubleshoot various issues. So why don't I? Because I'm scared. That's right... I'm afraid.

My primary concern with building a machine from scratch is all the fine print I see in hardware compatibility. Whenever I read detailed specs or reviews for hardware components, I get the impression that it's VERY easy to build a door-stop. Front-side bus speeds here, parity errors there, chipset compatibility back here, and so on. And tracking down those types of problems scares the bejeebus out of me. I know how to debug software. I can find and fix memory leaks. But random reboots or POST errors? Cripes, where do I begin?

Reading Jeff's post earlier today, it struck me that there ought to be a way for a guy like him, who really follows the hardware world and enjoys spec'ing out machines, to make a little cash at it. Not enough to retire to the beach and I doubt Michael Dell will lose any sleep -- but if it's easy to set up, doesn't require any support, and it's something you're already interested in... why not?

On a whim, I checked NewEgg to see if they have an affiliate program... and sure enough, they do. I think it'd be awesome for Jeff (or similar hardware guru) to spec out a few machines on his site.

My primary machines for the last couple of years have been laptops. Currently, my work machine and personal machine are both fully-loaded Dell Inspiron 9400s -- a back-breaking desktop replacement that's very fast. The two are only physically distinguishable by a little fish sticker I let my daughter put on my personal machine. And I'm generally happy with these machines...   but who has just one or two machines? Our house also has the aging "Wife Laptop" (due to be replaced with a Tablet, I think), an old file-server, and my music-and-video production machine (not to mention a couple of Linux boxes Tivos).

But... show me the list of parts to build a "Little Bang" machine, a Media Center PC, a Windows Home Server box, the end-result of the Hanselman Developer Machine, etc. I've purchased and assembled electronics kits in the past and it's great fun... mostly because the parts-list and compatibility issues are taken care of for me and I can focus on the actual building part.

You'd want to make it clear that you're NOT supporting these parts or the resulting machine. It's strictly "do it yourself" and "at your own risk"... but if it's a parts list from someone who actually groks this stuff, I'd be happy to add those parts to my NewEgg shopping cart using your affiliate links.

There's lots of precedent and you have a decent audience of gear-heads... so what do ya say, Jeff?

Please? 

Technorati tags: hardware, codinghorror, diy, custom pc

While I've been going through this adventure with my Achilles rupture, there are a few apps/utilities that have been especially useful. I thought it'd be worth expressing some gratitude to these folks...

The first is NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile... As I've mentioned here before, I'm primarily a FeedDemon user, but I really like the entire NewsGator Online service for keeping my feed subscriptions in sync across FeedDemon instances at home and in the office. I added NewsGator Go! to my phone (Samsung i730) shortly after it was released, but have used it sparingly... mostly because it takes time to sync 300+ feeds over EVDO and I don't often find myself with that THAT much "sitting and waiting" time.  

I've worked with Kevin Cawley (primary developer of Go!) in the past and he's a top-notch mobile developer. His work really shows in the Go! product, as it's got a number of nice touches that I've come to appreciate this week. With all the time I've spent in various emergency rooms, waiting rooms, and exam rooms, there's been plenty of "down time". Reading my feed subscriptions on the phone is a much nicer way of spending that time than going through months-old issues of Newsweek or People magazine. Putting Go! through its paces over the last week or so has made me appreciate that common sync platform all the more... and has also brought to mind a few enhancement requests I need to send off to Kevin and the NG folks. :)

The other product/service I've come to appreciate over the last week is Xbox Live Arcade. I'd played Marble Blast Ultra with my daughter in the past and it became a regular favorite for us. I also picked up the Texas Hold'Em game when they offered it for free during its initial release (though playing for funny money is a far cry from "real" poker). Beyond that, though, I didn't play many of the Arcade games... I just found the elaborate retail games to be more enjoyable.

This week, though, I've obviously had lots of time on my hands so I downloaded some demos for other Arcade titles. Some of the games I've purchased and been playing more regularly now are Uno, Backgammon, and Bankshot Billiards. Uno was an inexpensive no-brainer and is an easy one to play when on pain meds... Backgammon requires a bit more thought (and I had long forgotten how to play), but is a lot of fun. And Bankshot Billiards is a little steep at 1200 Microsoft Points, but it's got enough variety in it that it's been worthwhile.

I also got Crackdown this week, which is a lot of fun. And while I'm enjoying that game a TON, it's not something I can play all the time (violence)... the Arcade titles fit the bill nicely for a change of pace that I can play with the two little ones around. And in a few cases, can enjoy playing along with my older daughter (7 yrs). She had a blast playing billiards for a while earlier today and was starting to get the hang of the angles and consequences for hitting the cue ball too hard.

I've got a bunch of options for passing time while I'm off my feet -- napping due to meds, a laptop and wireless broadband, lots of books/magazines, the Xbox 360, and regular games with the family. But I still find myself battling restlessness and boredom. I just want to be able to walk outside!

Heaven help us if our power should go out for some reason...

Technorati tags: xbox, xbox live, crackdown, arcade, newsgator, feeddemon, mobile apps

The concepts behind the new Yahoo Pipes application really impress me as a "mashups" engine (to say nothing of it generally being an amazing web-based application). I've not played with this sort of app before (are there others that do something similar?), but found it to be very intuitive and easy to work with. I did wish for a few other sources (more geo feeds) and tools (manipulating item text/descriptions on the fly).

This article on Lifehacker is a great example of a basic use for Pipes -- create a single, aggregate feed of all the feeds in your life (Flickr, blog, del.icio.us, etc). Following the directions in that article is a good way to see a basic aggregation in action. Nick Bradbury (of FeedDemon fame) built another cool example, mixing the iTunes Top 10 Songs feed with a YouTube search to find videos for those songs.

I'm hoping to spend more time with this app over the next couple of weeks. I think it's got a lot of potential for creating custom news sources... and I'm sure the coolest uses are yet to come.

Technorati tags: mashups, yahoo, yahoo pipes, pipes, feeds, aggregators

The problems with running iTunes on Windows Vista are pretty well documented at this point. From purchased music/videos not playing to outright corruption of the iPod's contents in some circumstances. Apple has even taken the unusual step of recommending that iPod users not upgrade to Windows Vista.

Om Malik's site, GigaOm, has a brief post about it that includes a poll asking "Who's to blame?." What I find amazing is that, as of early this morning, with 487 responses, nearly a third of respondents (30%) are blaming Microsoft. Another 29% think both parties are to blame.

I really don't understand that... Given that Apple controls both the hardware (the iPod device) and the software that interacts with it (the iTunes application), how is Microsoft to blame here? Did Apple not have access to the Vista betas and release candidates that the rest of the world did?

And while I make my living developing on Microsoft's platform, I'm not anti-Apple in any way. My wife and I both have iPods (and love them) and I've spent a good chunk of change at the iTunes Music Store. I think they make great products and I could easily see a Mac in our home down the road.

Apple has made a "repair tool" available that is supposed to help with the major issues... and their knowledgebase clearly indicates that the ball for fixing this is in their court (e.g. with the next update to iTunes for Windows). Yet a full 59% of respondents in the survey hold Microsoft at least partially to blame? I just don't get that.

Technorati tags: ipod, itunes, apple, vista, rants

I finally got around to registering with "Share Your OPML" this weekend. I like the idea of being able to compare my subscriptions with others and thought it might be a cool way to learn about some new feeds. I didn't realize it before, but it turns out I currently have 354 feeds... which is nowhere near the list of "most prolific subscribers" (rick pogg -- 8,210 feeds?!?).

To me, the coolest feature on the site is the "Subscriptions Like Mine" option -- it essentially compares my subscriptions to the subscriptions of others on the site. The more shared feeds there are, the greater the "strength" number for ranking similarity... which is nice because I can see a highly-ranked user's feeds and pick up some additional subscriptions that are likely to be of interest. This feature and the "Who Subscribes To..." feature had me clicking around and exploring feeds for quite some time.

I did run into a couple of issues with the site, but nothing too worrisome. First, there are two options for providing your OPML subscriptions to the site -- upload an .OPML file to the site or provide the URL for a file elsewhere. I tried to go the URL route, but that didn't work -- just a blank page after submitting the URL. Not a big deal, though I do think pointing to an URL makes it easier to keep my list of subscriptions up to date.

The second thing I ran into was a blank page when trying to view the subscriptions for some of the top names on the "prolific subscribers" list. I'm sure it has to do with the volume of feeds, though I was able to get at pages for subscribers with over 3000 feeds (yikes!).

Some other features I'd like to see are a sense of activity (how many people use the site? how many total feeds?), timeliness (how often are new users joining the site? when was a user's feed list last updated?), and some UI niceties like sorting (based on feed/subscriber counts, etc). Based on the "Community Weblog" and developer-oriented mailing list, it's hard to tell how much new activity there is around the site.

Getting an OPML file for my subscriptions was pretty easy with FeedDemon. Simply choose the "Export Feeds" option under the File menu and select which feed folders to include. I then hand-edited the file to remove a few feeds that are personal/internal feeds and would just clutter up the public subscriptions.

In doing this, it occurred to me that a cool feature for FeedDemon would be to auto-export and upload an OPML file from time to time. I probably add/remove 5-10 feeds each week (and suspect that my total subscription list stays in the 350 range). If FeedDemon could be told to export an OPML with a certain name and upload it to a certain location on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, that'd work very well with the SYO site (assuming the "enter an URL" option were to work correctly). Many bloggers provide an OPML file for their subscriptions directly on their blog, so this would have value beyond just the people using SYO.

On the other hand, with NewsGator Online, maybe the ideal solution is for NGOS users to have a unique URL that would provide a dynamic OPML and per-feed options for being included/excluded from the public OPML. Looks like the NGOS "Locations" option may get me close... I'll have to research that some more soon.

In the meantime, give Share Your OPML a shot... you're likely to come up with a few new feeds for your aggregator.

Technorati tags: shareyouropml, opml, blogging, feeddemon, newsgator

(posting from Windows Live Writer now)

So my last post was a test for the Telligent BlogMailr service... looks like using it for most posts won't work out so well on dasBlog. I can see how it might work for "quick update" style posts... but I don't post frequently enough for that to be of much use.

So just in case someone comes across this wondering about using it with dasBlog, here's what I found (clicking the image to the right shows the original message sent from Outlook 2007):

• Inline styles didn't come through (some of the words in the post were italicized and bolded).
• Inline graphics didn't come through (there was a small, right-aligned logo in the email I sent).
• Binary attachments get munged (rather than the attachment I sent, it posted with an attachment to a winmail.dat file). I removed that in the post below.
• I didn't receive an email telling me that anything had been posted.
• Links get posted showing the URL in the body of the post, rather than an anchor tag on the selected text.
• It also just occurred to me that there's no good way to use blog categories via email posts.

Overall, I think it's a very cool idea... and I can see keeping the free account open for the odd "quick and dirty" post. I'm sure bloggers who post frequently with "here's what's happening right now" style posts will find it very convenient. It's probably not something I'll use a whole lot, though. 

[removed]

I'm glad to see that an increasing number of blogs I subscribe to are starting to turn OFF the Snap.com previews. These began showing up a couple/few months ago and drive me up a wall.

When I'm reading someone's post and come across a link, I'll often hover my mouse pointer over it so I can see the target URL... is it on the same domain, do I want to follow it, etc? What I DON'T need is a small thumbnail of the page I'm going to.

What's the point of the thumbnail?

It's not as if I can actually read the target site via thumbnail and do I really care about their color scheme and columnar layout in advance? For me, it falls into the same category as those sliding DHTML panels that ask me to fill out a survey (ahem, HP.com) or "support" the site's sponsor.

I haven't looked into it much, so it's not clear to me what the benefit is to the site/blog operator... I can only assume that they get some metrics on which links are being followed or "hovered". Whatever... get that another way. One less irritating alternative is the MyBlogLog service that Brad Feld uses on links in his posts (right)... a small popup tells me how popular an outgoing link is and, more importantly, doesn't replace a decent portion of screen space with visual noise.

And yes, I know that you can click the "Options" link in the Snap preview popup and turn them off for all sites. I've done that... a few times... it doesn't "stick" for me for very long (and no, I don't regularly clear cache, cookies, or that sort of thing). Also, while this Lifehacker article suggests that site visitors should go to Snap's web site and "download a cookie", what site operator wants to force visitors to do that? The comments on that Lifehacker article suggest an even better approach for Firefox users -- Adblock to stop them once and for all.

Anyway, here's hoping the recent backlash continues and more sites remove the preview popups.

Technorati tags: rants, blogging, web design, snap

The "Tempest in a Teapot" issue got me thinking about the "are all blogs really 'blogs'?" debate... it's a question that comes up from time to time as various people try to define what "blog" means. Some think it's only those that allow comments or provide syndicated feeds. And, of course, some feel it has to do with linking to others in the "blogosphere" (can't stand that term). Then there's the whole "A-List" topic, which I think is the adult geek's equivalent of high school's "in" crowd. How to be an A-List blogger... it's always funny to come across those posts and find yourself asking "Who is this person again? And who's on that list, exactly?"

Ultimately, who cares?

Does it matter whether something is a "blog" or a "news feed"? Is a site like Engadget, written by a team of contributors, a blog? They also include some tips/tricks and contests... so is it a news site? What difference does it make... if it provides value to readers/subscribers? And if you're providing value, doesn't that make you "A-List"? And doesn't the definition of an "A-List" change for pretty much every person with a news aggregator?

For me, blogs fall into various categories... and this tends to be how I classify them:

• First, there are those who generate new and interesting content of their own -- and are not typically technical (a category unto itself for me). They have done interesting things. They have interesting things to say. Their observations are insightful or provide perspectives that I might not otherwise get. My list of examples include Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Brad Feld, Mark Cuban, Levitt and Dubner (the Steves), Chris Anderson, and Rands. When non-technical colleagues and contacts want to know who to check out, these are the writers I point them toward.
  
• Next up is the geek elite... the bloggers who provide interesting content that is technical. Given my area of expertise and interest, these are of special interest to me. Again, this is content that I wouldn't otherwise get hold of. It's a code snippet that does something elegant. It's the review of a ThinkGeek gadget that I didn't know about. It's a utility or some buried software feature that can improve my day. These include Scott Hanselman, Jeff Atwood, Martin Fowler, Phil Haack, Omar Shahine, and Nick Bradbury (note the bias toward the .NET/Microsoft ecosystem?). I would also include the "hacks and tips" sites here, most of which tend to be geek-oriented: Lifehacker, Web Worker Daily, or Parent Hacks.
  
• Third is the sites that are niche-oriented news and link sites, though most these have tips and tricks in there alongside their focused news updates. Engadget, Kotaku, Colorado Startups, Valleywag, and Information Aesthetics. These are the sites that provide me news and links to the far corners of the web that I wouldn't otherwise see coming though in FeedDemon.
  
• There are also those (and I put myself in this category) who I think blog mostly to get things we find interesting out into a Google index somewhere. I'm probably the person who traffics my blog the most and that's usually after thinking "what the heck was that link...??" and searching Google with my domain name as a filter. We throw things out there that may or may not be of value to anyone else... but what the heck, it's out there and it could be interesting to someone. There are thousands of people out there like this... blogging about their programming language, their Lego creations, their rec hockey team, or their New Year's resolutions. Lots of gold nuggets to found out there, with no shortage of interesting content (and Technorati tags have recently become my favorite way of exploring new topics).
  
• Finally, there are those who most identify themselves as "bloggers" -- I don't need to provide links here, do I? If your posts are typically about blogging, blog traffic, and blogging etiquette, you may be on this list. And while there's no question that blogging is a phenomenon worth discussing and exploring, these sites often have an echo-chamber feel. Blogging conferences... blogger dinners... blogs about blogging... it all makes me wonder: when the postal service first started, were there "letter-writer meet-ups"? Will mainstream, non-techy types eventually have a blog, just as sure as they have a mailing address?

I guess my point here is that "A-List" is such an exclusionary concept -- it leaves people wondering "who's on it?", "Am I?", "How I can get on it?". Every blog/feed/site mentioned above is my A-List. Those are the sites I recommend to others. Those are the sites I'll stop to read first when I see a new post come through. They're important to me because they provide value... and if the value I receive exceeds the opportunity cost of the time I spend reading, then it belongs on my personal A-List.

YMMV.

Technorati tags: blogging, rants, netiquette, community

So this is what it looks like when the blogging "A-List" melts down. Pretty sweet view from down here on the "Z-List."

Really? A weekend spent like this because you didn't get linked to?

Technorati tags: blogging, blogging etiquette

A few Microsoft folks have blogged about their first ever Amazon.com orders and that got me curious about my first order. I had no idea that the "My Account" page had an archive of orders going back that far, so I went to check it out. On the "My Account" page, simply change the "View by Order" dropdown list to "Complete order history sorted by year" and click the Go button. The resulting page has the most recent orders on it, but another dropdown list will contain an item for each year going back to your first.

Turns out that I've been an Amazon.com customer for nearly 10 years! On February 24, 1997, I ordered the first volume of "Pattern Languages of Program Design", by Coplien and Schmidt (act now, only 2 in stock!). I later purchased other volumes, though not all five that are listed for sale on the site.

Looks like my largest order was in early 2001, when I often used Amazon.com to purchase software tools and books for the team I was managing at the time. An order containing multiple JBuilder 5.0 upgrades was $4,225 (!). For a time in 2000 and 2001, I was purchasing a lot of things for the office through Amazon.com. They had great prices, quick shipping, and it was more convenient than the PO-based system we had previously used for many things.

It also surprised me how many books (mostly Java and process related) were purchased for the team around that time. It looks like we got just about every Java book published for a while there... I still think well-written development books are a cost-effective learning tool -- provided that you're able to learn from a book format. Many people aren't... and need a lecture or "show me" approach to learning.

It's been a while since I purchased a tech book, though, as I think O'Reilly's Safari service is a great value for us book-learner types. Their new "Library" offering gives you nearly unrestricted, electronic access to a ton of books. They also include a lot of books from non O'Reilly publishers, including Addison-Wesley which publishes some great .NET books. If you absolutely need paper from time to time, the service includes "download tokens" that let you get chapters in PDF format for printing and offline viewing.

That hasn't completely curtailed our use of Amazon.com, though. We became members of their "Prime" program late last year, which gives you free 2-day shipping and cheap overnight shipping for about $80/year. If you have lots of family/friends that live in other parts of the country and use Amazon.com a lot, it's a great value. It paid for itself pretty quickly over the holidays. And with free 2-day shipping, it means that Amazon is the first place we go now for many household things we need. No shipping fees, no tax, decent prices.

The only downside I've found with Amazon Prime is that not every item is "eligible" for Prime. Many of the items on the site are actually sold and shipped by 3rd-party vendors... but only items where Amazon.com is the seller are eligible. And while each product page tells you whether or not the item is eligible, it'd be great if they provided an option to search only eligible products. Maybe it's there and I just haven't found it... but overall, we're still happy with the service.

Technorati tags: amazon.com, books, oreilly, safari

I was surprised this morning to see that the new "Watch Now" service from Netflix was enabled for my account. The "Watch Now" page had previously shown just a "coming soon" graphic... but this morning it had a "Get Started" link and the main UI tabs at the top of the screen included a "Watch Now" tab. While I know the service has been met with skepticism, I've been looking forward to it for a few reasons:

• Our movie tastes are widely varied at home. From action movies to chick flicks to kid flicks... with Watch Now, I'm thinking we can worry a little less about the variety of our three at-home discs.
• I often watch discs late at night once I've gone to bed... depending on how tired I am, it sometimes takes a few nights to get through a movie. With this service, I can send a movie back if I know there's only 10-15 minutes left and just catch the end of it over the wire.
• We've had a few cracked/scratched discs that had to be sent. In over four years with Netflix, we went for three years without a problem... but have had several in the last few months. It's bound to happen, but this service means that we might be able to save the day if that kids movie is scratched and there's (yet another) snow storm going on outside. These last few months have also been the only time I've been tempted by Blockbuster's rent-by-mail service. Being able to take a bad disc to a local store and swap it for a good one is pretty appealing.
• I like the idea of previewing some movies in advance to see if they're worth adding to the queue.
• It's a free addition to what we're already getting. Free's good.

Netflix provides one hour of "Watch Now" viewing for every dollar spent on monthly fees. Since we're on the standard "3 movies at a time" plan, that's about 18 hours of viewing over the wire -- more than enough for us. Watching movies on the computer isn't likely to replace the television experience anytime soon, but as a free addition to our service, it's certainly a welcome feature.

So far, it looks like the list of movies is fairly basic... there aren't many of the newest movies available on the list, but there are enough to give it a shot. The "Watch Now" section has a "Top 25" list and the top five movies on that list (as of this morning) are:

1. Sherrybaby
2. Born into Brothels -- A good documentary, but depressing.
3. Super Size Me -- If your kids can't pass the golden arches without convulsing for a Happy Meal, have them watch this with you. It'll cure them.
4. The World's Fastest Indian -- A cute movie that was better than we expected. Also decent a decent one to watch with kids.
5. The Motorcycle Diaries

Going to the movie page for a title that's "Watch Now" enabled will display two buttons -- both the "Add" button you're used to seeing for adding it to your queue and a "Play" button to start playback in the downloadable player. Looks like it works only with Windows XP and Internet Explorer.

While I've not yet gone through the full playback experience, I did notice that the main "Watch Now" page provides feedback on your current expected video quality... I was several rooms away from our 802.11g router, but had a decent signal and was showing "Good".

More to come once we've downloaded the player and watched a few titles.

Note: Looks like Netflix has also lowered their most basic "1-out" plan to just $4.99 a month.

Technorati tags: netflix, watch now, streaming, movies

I've got an open position on my team for an experienced ASP.NET/C# developer in Boulder, Colorado... if you've got experience building production-quality, commercial web applications, get in touch with us. Even better if you share our interest in data visualization and analysis. So on the off chance someone sees this in an aggregated feed or via Technorati, here's the ad:
--------------------------

Title: Software Engineer
Business Unit: Global Energy Intelligence
Reports To: Vice President, Engineering
Location: Boulder, CO

Global Energy Intelligence, a leading provider of energy information solutions, is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to join our commercial development team and be a part of our aggressive growth.

The ideal candidate:

• is a C#/.NET developer with proven experience building production, commercial-quality applications.
• is comfortable with advanced SQL syntax and SQL Server.
• has a thorough understanding of OOA/OOD concepts.
• is flexible and open to new ideas or change.
• has some passion and drive to excel in their career.
• has strong development experience building dynamic, data-driven ASP.NET web applications (though Winforms experience is a plus).
• is self-directed, organized, and extremely attentive to details.
• recognizes the value in agile, iterative development processes.
• communicates well with technical and non-technical peers alike.

Global Energy Intelligence is made up of experienced professionals whose sole focus is making a positive impact in the energy intelligence and information solutions industry. We pride ourselves on getting the job done for our customers and using the latest technology to do it. We strive to build software in a way that's delivered quickly, highly-reusable, and low-maintenance. We have a generous benefits package, including company-subsidized medical/dental coverage, flexible spending accounts, and a 401k plan. We also offer a casual work environment and a flexible paid-time-off structure.

If you're an experienced developer looking for new challenges and the above qualifications align with your skills, we want to hear from you. If you know the difference between a 'programmer' and a 'software developer', we want to hear from you. If you're in the top 20% of your current team and you're tired of carrying the other 80%, we want to hear from you. If you learn new things, build new software, write quality code, and constantly refactor for improvement, all because you HAVE to -- because you can't NOT spend time on those things -- then we want to hear from you.

We're building an all-star team. Lazy, uninspired, dead-weight developers need not apply.

This is a full-time employment position. Local candidates are preferred. No relocation is provided. No contractors. No agencies. No recruiters. No phone calls. No lightweights. No exceptions.

To apply for this position, please send your resume via email to jobs@globalenergy.com with "Boulder SW Engineer" in the subject.

Technorati tags: jobs, helpwanted, boulder, colorado

Four successful Colorado entrepreneurs launched the TechStars program this week in Boulder. This initiative will take ten new startup teams (of up to 3 people) and provide a "summer camp" environment to help get their ideas and businesses off the ground -- that is, if summer camp includes some initial funding, access to a variety of experienced mentors, hosting and legal services, and a summer full of educational sessions.

While TechStars doesn't require that the teams be from the Denver/Boulder area, they do expect the teams to spend the bulk of the summer here (based on the FAQ). With its "college town" status and mountain scenery making it hard to leave, Boulder has long been a thriving place for entrepreneurs and small businesses... and this program looks like a great way to jump-start some new additions to the startup community. I also like that the application process is informal and accessible. No need for a formal business plan or pitch session -- just a strong idea and willingness to make a run at it this summer.

Anyway, it sounds a great opportunity for some enterprising folks with creative product ideas. I look forward to watching the TechStars blog for updates as the program gets started.

Technorati tags: boulder, colorado, techstars, entrepreneurs

As I mentioned over the weekend, I've transitioned over to Office 2007 and am mostly pretty happy with it. I like the Outlook To-Do Bar more and more each day.

However, I ran into a problem yesterday that I couldn't find any resolution for online and I figured it'd be worth archiving here so the Google tubes can find it later.

Basically, I opened up VS.NET 2003 yesterday and got errors from two of my add-ins. These were CodeRush (the DXCore, to be specific) and the VSWindowManager PowerToy. Both of the error messages indicated that there was a FileNotFoundException being thrown while they tried to add items to the Visual Studio menus. Only the CodeRush exception told me which file was missing and it simply said 'Office'.

Now, I had used VS.NET 2003 last Friday (our desktop product is in 1.1 for now, but our newer web product is in 2.0) and it worked fine. The file name in the exception reminded me of pretty much the only thing that had changed on the machine since then -- the Office 2007 install.

I thought it was odd that VS.NET, which doesn't require Office to be installed, would be freaked out by an Office upgrade. In any case, I fired up the VS.NET 2003 installer and chose the Repair option. It's worth noting here that the Visual Studio 2003 installer is quite possibly the slowest-running install in the history of computing. Go get lunch while it runs... when you're back, grab a book, take a walk, or paint your house. Choosing the Repair option in the installer doesn't appear to be any faster than a first-time install.

Once that was done, I reinstalled CodeRush/Refactor and the VS Window Manager just to be safe... and all is well. Since then, I heard back from the DevExpress support folks (who rock) that they've seen this issue before. The problem occurs when the Office.dll and Extensibility.dll files are removed from the machine's Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Those files are needed by Visual Studio add-ins that want to hook into the IDE.

My best guess is that the uninstall of Office 2003 removes those files from the GAC (though they may still be around somewhere else on the machine) and they're not re-registered by the Office 2007 installer. The Office 2007 install does give you the option to uninstall 2003, or you can leave it there... and I did opt to have it uninstall.

Hopefully, anyone who suddenly finds that their VS.NET 2003 install isn't loading add-ins will Google for "Visual Studio 2003 add-ins loading exceptions Office" and come across this post at some point.

In my previous post, about the process of upgrading to Office 2007, I mentioned that Outlook had asked at startup if I wanted my RSS feeds sync'd with the Windows Common Feed List. Given that I rely primarily on FeedDemon and NewsGator's products for RSS, I chose 'no' and moved on.

Later, I went looking around to experiment with the Common Feed List in Outlook 2007 and IE7... but couldn't find the option anywhere in Outlook to change my mind about that initial selection.

This evening, I finally came across the option and figured a follow-up would be a good idea here.

In Outlook, go to Tools->Options and select the Other tab. On the Other tab, click the "Advanced Options" button and you'll find a checkbox on the resulting window -- Sync RSS feeds to the Common Feed List.

I went through the upgrade to Office 2007 yesterday... while I'd followed its development through Microsoft blogs and preview articles, I hadn't ever installed any of the pre-RTM versions. The upgrade itself was pretty painless, though, I did have a bit of a scare at the last minute when I fetched it off MSDN.

On the MSDN Office Pro 2007 (English) page, Outlook isn't listed as one of the included applications. However, this page says that Office Pro includes Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager (not sure what BCM is, but I doubt I need it). There have been a few blog/newsgroup posts from folks who have downloaded it and didn't get the BCM option. Thankfully, I burned the ISO image to a disc and Outlook 2007 is included -- it just doesn't have BCM.

There are also a number of posts about a mix-up with product keys on MSDN. Apparently, the product keys for Visio and Project are the same, as are the keys for InfoPath and OneNote. While the key will work for multiple activations, once it's used for a certain application it can only be used for THAT application going forward. So if you use it to install Visio, you can't use it when you install Project. According to a Microsoft blog post, that should be fixed this week. I didn't need Project or InfoPath right away, but I did want OneNote and Visio... so I went for it.

From there, the upgrade was smooth. I removed Visio and OneNote in advance, but let the installer for Office 2007 upgrade my 2003 installation. This picked up all my Outlook account settings and data files and worked like a champ. The Office install asked me to reboot, though, the OneNote and Visio installers didn't need it.

Since then, I've found/discovered just a few things and made some mental notes:

• While it takes some getting used to, I really like the ribbon bar UI. I keep looking up there for a menu to traverse, but once I think about the task I want to accomplish it works great -- Insert something into a document, Format a portion of the document, etc.
  
• I use the heck out of Outlook, both at home and in the office, and I'm kinda bummed that Outlook only got half of the new UI. The main Outlook client window doesn't have the ribbon bar, but the various child item windows do have it -- new message, new task, new appointment, etc. I'd prefer it to be all or nothing, I think... that said, I do like a few of the new things in Outlook: The To-Do bar is handy (ALT+F2 to toggle), the ability to subscribe to internet calendars (via .ICS) is great for viewing Google Calendars, and the color-coded categories on tasks is useful.
  
• Some things about the new Outlook aren't real exciting for me -- During the initial running of it, I was asked if I wanted Outlook to use the Windows common feed location for RSS subscriptions. I said 'no' at the time, but now I'd like it to use that... I just can't find a place to tell it so. I can see where I add new RSS feeds, but not where I tell it to use the Windows location. It's not a big deal as I much prefer FeedDemon and the whole NewsGator experience, but it does seem odd that I can't find it. Another little nit is that the keyboard shortcuts I got used to don't always work. For example, I use Categories in new Task items as a way of assigning context to my GTD 'next action' tasks. In the past, I could ALT+G to bring up the Category list when creating a new task and then start typing the first few letters of the category I wanted to assign. Now, I have to use ALT+H to get the Task ribbon, then 'G' for the Category list, and then I have to arrow-down to the one I want. Typing the first few characters doesn't work.
  
• I could be wrong, but it seems that Outlook 2007 uses Word as its email editor -- and that's that. In past versions, there was an option to use the regular message editor. I don't see that option now and the message editor has a Word-like feel to it. As long as performance doesn't suffer (the main problem with Word as the email editor in the past), I don't mind either way.
  
• Looks like I need to install the Windows Desktop Search if I want a better/faster search experience from within Office. In the past, I used Lookout (which Microsoft bought) to search across all Outlook items. It was small, fast, and stable. I'll give WDS a try, but it seems like overkill when 90% of my searching is in Outlook and not across the file system.
  
• I had to disable a part of the MindManager add-in for Outlook, as it would crash Outlook every time I closed it. Exporting from Outlook to MindManager isn't something I do a lot, so it's not great loss... but I was surprised that the MindManager site doesn't have any news on how they're addressing this. Their support forums have a few older mentions of it from pre-release and others have blogged about it, but now that Office has gone RTM I'd have thought that MindJet would jump on a fix for this.
  
• I dig the Data Bars feature in Excel, along with some of the other conditional formatting additions.
  
• The Office apps now have their own color schemes, with three to choose from -- black, silver, and blue. The blue seems much too light to blend with the standard XP Luna blue theme. The silver blends well with the XP Luna silver theme, though. That said, I've been using the Royale Noir (now Zune) theme, which is XP Luna in black. I like it a lot... the Office 2007 black theme 'mostly' blends well with the Zune theme, but Outlook in particular looks kinda bad. The black toolbar area with silver/gray toolbars seems a bit too high-contrast (below). The apps that use the ribbon UI, however, look very good when Office uses black and XP is on the Zune theme (Word, Excel, Powerpoint).
  
• Haven't spent much time yet with Visio, OneNote, Powerpoint, or Word...

In any case, the whole experience has been reasonably solid and very stable (aside from the one issue with the MindManager addin... which was easily fixed and isn't the fault of Office at all).

I just finished upgrading to the latest release of DasBlog and all seems well. The upgrade process itself could hardly be smoother. There were just a few steps involved...

1. Downloaded the Content, SiteConfig, and Logs folders and placed them into the local web directories.
2. Ran the DasBlog Updater utility to cleanup the Content folder.
3. Ran a diff on the new and old config files... moved the stuff I cared about.
4. Pushed the new web directories up to the server.

Done in under a half hour. It went very smooth and my hats off to Scott, Omar, and the rest of the DasBlog team.

So then I went cruising around to check out some of the new stuff Scott mentioned in his release announcement. One of the things I really like is the ability to disable comments on a post older than a specified number of days. I don't get many comments and most of what does come in is comment-spam on older posts. Hopefully that setting improves things.

There are also a few more themes available than in previous versions. One of these, called Project84Grass, was designed by Jacob Hodges. I liked the general style, but opted to darken it up a bit and add my own header image. It was the first time I've gone into the DasBlog template mechanism and it was much easier than I expected. Swapped out a few images, changed up the stylesheet, and modified a manifest -- and DasBlog picked it up on refresh.

Thanks!

Robert Scoble mentions that he’s nearing email bankruptcy with more than 1500 messages to go through. According to Lawrence Lessig in Wired and mentioned by Merlin at 43 Folders, that’s the point at which you throw your hands up in the air and reply back to everyone who sent you anything saying “Sorry, but I deleted your message. If it’s important, please get back to me.” Voila, your debt is wiped.

If he’s not already looked at it, he REALLY needs to give ClearContext a go. In fact, he can use promo code CC15-15190 if he’d like to get $15 off.

Shameless pimping aside, ClearContext will do so much more than just the “triage” he mentions (organizing or grouping into folders). If you let it analyze your email history and contacts, it will prioritize those messages based on who sent it, whether it’s part of a thread you’re involved in, and a variety of other factors.

Chances are pretty good that a guy like Robert gets a lot of unsolicited, “cold call” messages from people hoping for a mention in his blog. Let those get pushed down the stack and watch the messages from his boss, his family, and important colleagues rise to the top. My guess is that a small fraction of that 1500+ messages really NEEDS some action. So once the important stuff is highlighted, use the ‘action’ buttons on each message to create Outlook tasks, appointments, new contacts, or defer it to some later date (my favorite procrastinator-friendly feature).

And aside from the promo code above and being a happy customer, I’ve got no affiliation with ClearContext.

A while back, I read (actually listened to) the Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. It was a great book with a lot of intriguing ideas. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that a large group of people, most of whom are NOT experts in a field, are more accurate or correct than individual experts when the crowd’s predictions are taken in aggregate. If you enjoyed Tipping Point or Freakonomics, you’ll probably enjoy the book.

Recently, there have been a few articles about companies that are using “prediction markets” to help predict successful products, financial results, and so on. The idea is that if a large cross-section of a company is asked to predict quarterly sales, that group is often more accurate than asking the small handful of people at the top of the sales organization. Similarly, a large group of people responsible for designing, building, marketing and shipping a product will often better predict the market adoption of the product than the product’s management team.

One example of a prediction market is the Iowa Electronic Markets (profiled in the book), which over the last several years has been very successful at predicting election outcomes. It’s used as a teaching tool at the University of Iowa, but is open to anyone who wishes to participate. A “trading account” can be opened for as little as $5 (and up to $500) and my understanding is that the presence of “real money” forces participants to evaluate their decisions more carefully than if their accounts just contained “points.”

And just within the last few days, I’ve learned of a couple of new sites that are taking this effect out to the consumer. One of them is Inkling, whose business is to “host” private prediction markets for companies, as well as public culture/sports/politics markets that appeal to the geeks and wonks crowd. Some example public markets include “Who will win the NL Wild Card race?” (the high stock here is currently for the Dodgers), “Will Apple’s stock price be above $85 on 1/15/2007?” (61% likely), and “When will Microsoft ship Windows Vista?” (Jan 2007 remains the favorite). You can get a free account and buy/sell these “stocks” on your own.

Another example is PicksPal, which does roughly the same thing but focuses exclusively on sports. They watch the various Vegas/online sportsbooks to see where the odds are and then you (with a free account) can buy/sell shares in the results (in points). The cool thing here is that it goes beyond the typical win/loss and over/under predictions. You can buy stock in “prop” bets such as “When Virginia plays Georgia Tech, will any defensive player have 2 or more interceptions in the game?” If you think it’ll happen, you buy stock and get paid back stock as a result. With that prop bet, you’d get paid 8 points for every 1 point bet.

Neither PicksPal or Inkling costs anything to join and neither provides gambling of any real money. You’re simply predicting an outcome and comparing your individual result to that of the overall community’s “group prediction”.

As I started this post, I found several other examples that may be worth checking out, including CrowdIQ, Owise, and Smarkets.

Oh, and Go Newcastle (25/4 over Liverpool on PicksPal)!

Just a test to verify the configuration for Windows Live Writer. So far, the auto-formatting and styles appears to work fine. Just need to test uploading and formatting of an image.

And a map:

“Rands in Repose” is a blog on life as a software development manager and one of my all-around favorite blogs. He writes a handful of articles a month and they’re invariably insightful and well-written. Managing a development team can be a tricky thing, given that developers sometimes have quirks that are “outside the mainstream” — such as being night-owls, extreme introverts, very focused, or logic-driven at the expense of diplomacy.

He just started a new series called “Deconstructing Managers” that I’m really enjoying. In it, he’s breaking down some of the stereotypes of engineering managers and trying to serve as a translator between “the manager” and “the engineer”. It’s great stuff and takes a balanced, humorous view of this relationship.

So if you’re new to managing a development team, or if you’re on a team and have a new/challenging manager, it’s definitely worth subscribing and following along.

Assuming this goes through and shows up without a hitch, the server migration is done. The Server Intellect folks were great when I had questions about control panel issues or moving mailboxes during DNS propagation.

The kind folks at Server Intellect (my hosting provider) are adding some newer, beefed-up servers to their data center… so it’s time to migrate everything over. I always feel like I’m missing something when I’ve done this in the past, but this time I’m feeling good. They have a really good setup and migration plan in place, so as the DNS updates there should be little, if any, downtime.

Crossing fingers…

Google announced a number of new products/tools yesterday, but the one I find the most interesting is “Google Trends” (also found under the “Labs” section).

It basically lets you see the history of a search term’s use over time… and if the search term appears in Google News as well, you see that along with regular web searches. Just as with Google Finance, there are links along the chart to news items that occurred at that point in time. A search for ‘tivo’ yields:

You can also view the popularity of a search term by city, region, and language.

Even cooler is that you can supply multiple search terms and compare them all on the same chart. This lets you do things similar to what the “Google Fight” site has done for a while (by running both searches and scraping the count of items found). Here’s a comparison between the phrases “playstation 3” and “xbox 360”:

I’m not sure how current these search results are, but with E3 happening this week and a bunch of PS3 announcements, I’d expect to see a spike there pretty quick (for both, though probably with PS3 searches surpassing 360 searches for a time).

Also interesting with this search is how Seattle appears in the searches-by-city result… among the lowest in searches for “Playstation 3” and the highest of all with searches for “xbox 360”. Wonder why.

I just tried this little sneak/workaround from LifeHacker to see if it would convert my Yahoo Mail account over to the new beta… sure enough, it worked!

I like the look and functionality, but it definitely “feels” slower. Thankfully, I use the Yahoo account primarily for minor registrations (forums, news sites, etc), so it’s not something I have to spend a great deal of time with. Still, if they can get it sped up a bit, it’s a great UI.

The New York Times had an article yesterday entitled “Software Out There,” which discussed the whole “programmable web” movement that’s sprung up over the last couple of years. The author says that the internet is entering its “Lego” era.

It was actually a semi-interesting article, but I wish I could read an article in a major paper just once without cringing at the leaps of faith and hyperbole made by the author. Is it so hard to get an expert to look over an article before publication? The key example from this NYT article is this section (mid-way through Page 2):

Mr. Ozzie, who used the Firefox browser (an open-source rival to Internet Explorer) during his demonstration, said, "I'm pretty pumped up with the potential for R.S.S. to be the DNA for wiring the Web."

He was referring to Really Simple Syndication, an increasingly popular, free standard used for Internet publishing. Mr. Ozzie's statement was remarkable for a chief technical officer whose company has just spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars investing in a proprietary alternative referred to as .Net.

At what point did .NET become a “proprietary alternative” to RSS or any other “standard for internet publishing”? Or vice versa?

But hey, why pass up the opportunity to put out something that seems semi-scandalous (“Imagine, a CTO for Microsoft using Firefox! Suggesting RSS as an alternative to .NET!”).

This has been reported on and blogged about in numerous places today, but when it shows up in your Inbox, it’s just too good to pass up.

An email message with the subject “[placeholder for winning team] Wins the NCAA Tournament!” arrived this morning. The [placeholder] goof is repeated in the body, but the best part is that they actually included a “UCLA Wins!” graphic. A mistake made even funnier by tonight’s result.

Someone at Amazon.com has some ‘splaining to do.

The NewsGator world is really evolving quickly. I’ve followed the company since it was just Greg Reinacker writing the NewsGator Outlook add-in… reading feeds in Outlook wasn’t my preferred style of working and I ended up going with FeedDemon very early in its life. Still, Greg’s company is here in the Denver area and they’re a .NET shop so it’s always been interesting to follow. Things got pretty exciting when Brad Feld’s Mobius Venture (also local) invested and then NewsGator acquired FeedDemon and brought in its author, Nick Bradbury.

Over the weekend, Nick announced that they’ve hit the 2.0 milestone with FeedDemon. It’s a major update and congratulations to Nick on getting through it… I’ve been testing the FD pre-releases on a secondary home machine since the original 1.6 process started and it’s improved substantially over time. It’s been a long process, but I think the results are worth it. The new treeview for feeds is great, but the most welcome feature will definitely be synchronization with NewsGator Online. I was skeptical at first whether or not this would be something I’d use, especially early on when it was “subscription service or nothing”. But I said then that “I’ll give this stuff a try” and I have. Now, after working with it for a while and “finally seeing the light”, I’m happy to say that I’m hooked. With this feature, I’ll have full synchronization between my home/weekend machine and my machine in the office. When I’m not at either machine, I’ve got the NewsGator web-based reader as well (which, btw, has improved quite a bit since that skeptical blog post last year).

To improve things even more, NewsGator recently acquired the SmartRead application and brought in its developer, Kevin Cawley. Kevin and I have actually worked together in the past and he’s an all-star mobile developer. He really “gets” the mobile/handheld form factor and I’m certain he’ll do great things under the NewsGator banner. I’m pretty amped about having that “full synchronization” extend right out to my phone, so he’d better do great things!

Anyway, congrats to everyone at NewsGator for the exciting steps they’re taking.

Like many other developers, I’ve fallen into (and occasionally out of) David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) way of working over the last 18 months or so. It started with the book, and then later the e-book, but more than either of those, I’ve found that quick and handy shortcuts keep me on track.

One of the key elements of GTD is that you put your trust in some external system to keep track of all the “stuff” you need to do. This gets it out of your head, where it’s nagging at you and consuming bandwidth. Obviously, having some effective shortcuts for putting tasks into your system quickly is very useful. Most of the shortcuts revolve around dealing with Outlook, which I use to organize everything in my work life and a whole lot of things outside of work.

For example, I use the heck out of Bayden SlickRun on my machine. As quick-launch utilities go, it’s by far my favorite. It’s lightweight, takes very little system resources, and can be configured to perform a variety of creative tasks. Some of the GTD-related shortcuts I use include:

• nm – To create a new message. This shortcut simply calls outlook.exe with “/c ipm.note” as a command line parameter. Even with Outlook minimized, this will open a new message window.
• nt – Probably the most used shortcut, this creates a new task by passing “/c ipm.task” to the command line.
• na – Creates a new appointment with “/c ipm.appointment”.
• nc – Creates a new contact with “/c ipm.contact”.
• nn – Creates a new note with “/c ipm.stickynote”.

These get more use when I’m out of the office with my laptop. When I’m in the office, I use a Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000, which has several shortcut keys across the top (above the function keys). Once you install the Intellitype software for the keyboard, you can set those keys to do whatever you want. In my case, they create new messages, appointments, tasks, notes, and launch Visual Studio — all one touch away.

One of the key elements of GTD is the idea of context — that certain types of tasks can best (or only) be accomplished in certain situations. Various GTD discussions groups frequently have on-going discussions for right/wrong/best context, but it just boils down to how each person works. One example frequently given is @errands or @phone, where you might categorize tasks that can be done while you’re out running errands or while planning to make phone calls. Neither of these work well for me, as I don’t spend a lot of time running errands or on the phone.

On the other hand, I have @computer which has tasks that can be performed whenever I’m at a computer (home or office) — web sites to look at and that sort of thing. I also have @development, which has tasks that are specific to development. That is, I have Visual Studio, SQL Enterprise Mgr, Vault, and my other tools open… so now I can start digging into those tasks. I also like @Home, which is handy for storing the things I want to do around the house (or more commonly, the things I don’t want to do but need to get done anyway).

The e-book mentioned above also has the suggestion that you create categories for people you regularly work with. I’ve found this to be helpful for our management meetings at work. Because many of the people I work with travel regularly, I add reminders of things I want to mention/ask the next time they’re in town and we meet. For many topics, that approach works better than sending out email messages that will just be a part of the flood when they plug into their hotel room.

Once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts for asks, you can add items to your list as soon as they come up — thereby freeing you up to stay focused on the task at hand. When editing a task, type the task title, hit ALT+G to open the categories list, type the first couple of characters of the category you want, SPACE to select it, ENTER to close the window, and ALT+S to save the task — after a while, it becomes second nature and takes seconds to add a new task.

More recently, I’ve added ClearContext to the mix. This is an addin for Outlook that makes organizing your Inbox very easy and efficient. It analyzes your email patterns and can move/highlight the messages you receive based on sender, topic, priority, etc. There are a number of other productivity boosters that, as you learn them and make them habits, can quickly add up. I really like the ‘task’, ‘delegate’ and ‘defer’ options, which let you turn a message into a task for yourself, delegate it as a task for someone else, or simply hide it away until a later date. When you first install it, you don’t notice much beyond a few new toolbars here and there. But as you read through the guide and get a handle on its features, you realize there’s a lot under the hood. They just released their latest version with these features and their ‘basic’ version can now be used for free. If you spend much of your day organizing or managing projects in Outlook, give their demo a try.

I had bookmarked this a while back and came across it recently when clearing things out that are now on del.icio.us.

It’s a hilarious send-up of the many management and market consultants that swarm around charging ungodly rates to put together quadrant charts and product positioning diagrams.

My favorite line has to be “When one of our new-age marketing gurus or design experts or consultants has an idea, the rest of us look at him or her with serious expressions and write stuff down on paper”.

Huh Corp

PS: A few things struck me really funny during this post. First is that when I did the Google Image searches on “quadrant charts” and “product positioning”, some of the images that came up were from real-world Huh Corps… Also, many of the images that came up when searching on “product positioning” were in fact quadrant charts. Second is that the Huh Corp site has Google Adsense on it which, due to their satirical use of buzzwords, ends up showing ads for more real-world Huh Corps. Awesome.

I love my Xbox 360. I loved the original Xbox. In fact, I was so amped over the Xbox that I sold off my PS2 and all the PS2 games. I’ll likely do the same eventually with the original Xbox in favor of just the 360 (especially since the backward compatibility list pretty well covers the games I’d want to keep).

But there is one area that the whole Xbox community falls well short of Sony… childrens’ and family games.

Now, before you point to the Xbox Live Arcade and say “those are all kid-safe”, hear me out. 

First, just because a game isn’t gory or violent doesn’t mean that’s a good game for kids. It may be “kid-safe”, but it’s not kid-centric. Is there redeeming value in letting a kid play Joust or Geometry Wars?

Second, consider what happens if you go to Amazon.com, choose Video Games, Xbox 360, and then select the “Kids and Family” category. You get three games — two sports games from EA Sports and Ridge Racer 6. While they may be “kid-safe”, they’re certainly not kid-centric.

One of the things I really liked about the Playstation world was that there were actually some good educational games for kids to play. When she was 3, my daughter used to love playing Elmo’ Numbers and Elmo’s Letters. The graphics weren’t going to win any awards from the Joystiq crowd, but there were a lot of upsides. She got to play a game “just like daddy does”, it was a fun activity for us to do together, and she learned as she played.

And I don’t think a game has to be strictly educational to provide some learning opportunities. The various Sim- and Tycoon games offer the opportunity for creativity and problem-solving. Adventure games that require puzzles to be completed along the way, and so on.

I know the 360 hasn’t been out very long, but this is still a problem for original Xbox titles as well. Go to the “Kids and Family” section on Amazon for the original Xbox and the list is dominated by EA Sports titles and various racers. The two relatively kid-centric games on that list are Lego Star Wars and Madagascar (both seem to have little redeeming value beyond mindless entertainment).

Finally, I know that the market for these types of games is pretty small. This seems like an area where the Xbox Live Arcade and Marketplace could come through. No need for packaging or media distribution and a couple of decent titles would market themselves. I’d have a reason to go get some Microsoft Points.

In the meantime, thank goodness for the V-Smile…

Jeff Atwood had a good post this past week, entitled “Fear of Writing.” As I read, it really resonated with me and my desire to blog more often.

I’ve got a bunch of notes/URLs set aside as potential blog topics and have been saving these for well over a year. (At some point, I’ll have to clean them up because I’m sure many are now well past their “sell by” date.)

So if I have all these things that I think are noteworthy, why can’t I bring myself to blog more often? I think the reasons boil down to two things:

1. Making it a habit. To get good, you need practice. Practice is repetition. Repetition forms habits. Right now, I’m simply not in the habit of writing up a few posts a week. I have to set reminders to myself. I know it’s something I want to do, so I think the reason it’s not yet a habit brings me to reason #2:
2. That fear thing. The issue here is the fear of writing something that’s simply not worth reading. I think writing up a good post requires some up front work — to organize the thoughts, the research and links, the writing, and the editing. And anything less has the potential to pollute the bandwidth.

I’ve written a fair amount before, including many magazine articles and a monthly “Best Practices” column. I know it’s something I enjoy… but writing for a blog is different than writing for a magazine or a full online article. It’s a smaller scale. It’s typically much shorter. It should be more frequent. It’s far more casual and it’s supposed to be a conversation — a single voice in a larger community.

With magazine articles, it was a larger task  (thus requiring more preparation) and a looking deadline made the commitment easy. But once it was done, it’s over. Only occasionally would I hear from someone who’d read the article… and when I did, it was months after I’d written it (most magazines have a 3–4 month lead time).

A blog post is a smaller task, but the feedback (good or bad) is more immediate. Someone can comment or send email within minutes of me clicking the “Post” button. This tight feedback loop is the part of blogging that I think is so cool, but it also instills the fear — what if it sucks? What if I got it wrong? What if I hit “Post” too soon?

I suppose admitting the fear is the first step to overcoming it… so, my name is Jeff and I have a fear of blog posts.

I had occasion to use Scott Willeke’s “Less MSIerables” tool this morning. I had download some code samples to check out and they’d been posted as an MSI package. While I like that format for installing apps and utilities I will keep around, it’s overkill for things like code samples or sample projects — things I don’t need cluttering up the Add/Remove Programs dialog and am likely to look at quickly and then delete.

It worked like a champ when pointed to an MSI file and made it easy to choose which files I extract. The registry key option (Allowing you to right-click an MSI and choose “Extract”) didn’t always work for me, but running the app itself and selecting an MSI isn’t too big a deal.

Well done… thanks, Scott!

Nick Bradbury (creator of FeedDemon) explains the way that synchronization works between FeedDemon 2.0 beta and the NewsGator online service. I’ve been using various builds of FeedDemon since the 1.6 beta began and synchronization has been a bit of an issue. At various times it hasn’t worked well, but I think mostly the issue has been a lack of understanding on how the sync should work. Nick’s post goes a long way toward helping clear some things up and it’s good to hear that they’re looking at better ways of handling read/unread state of items between NGO and FD.

It’s also worth noting that when a folder is marked for synchronization, FeedDemon no longer goes directly to your subscribed feed URLs for updates. Rather, it goes to the NGO servers to ask for updated items. On the one hand, this makes sense because it’s the easiest/fastest way for NGO and FD to stay in sync… but it also means you’re at the mercy of the NGO servers’ uptime. When they’re unavailable for any reason, and it’s happened on occasion during the beta, you’re not going to be able to update your synchronized feeds.

I’ve used FD since its original beta and been a customer since it was released… and I don’t think there’s a better news aggregator out there for people who prefer a Windows desktop application. Currently, there are just a few things I’d like to see out of 2.0 to make it ideal:

1. Allow for nested sub-folders in the new folder tree. This has been requested a few times already and Nick has mentioned that, while it won’t appear in the 2.0 release, it’s on the list for a later version. I think for those who don’t like folders, having the ability to organize using the 1.5/1.6 style UI would also be good.
2. Improve performance to where it was during 1.5… I tend to scan item headlines and use the “spacebar for next unread item” style of navigation. When cruising through a bunch of items at once (basically holding the space bar down), FD 2.0 doesn’t keep up the way it does under 1.5.
3. Make the synchronization as seamless and “behind the scenes” as possible, but I do think it’s important to give users a lot of control over how it works. This is a challenge because flexibility adds complexity… making documentation like Nick’s post available within FeedDemon would probably help with that. Having an option to force a sync and tell FD “make my local feeds reflect NGO” (and vice versa) would be nice. If the NGO servers are down and FD could be told to go directly to feed URLS instead of NGO, having this explicit “force update” option would be great when the NGO system comes back online.

That said, it’s clear that Nick and the NG team are committed to raising the bar for news aggregation… the transparency and honest desire for feedback from customers is great.

I got to be an early alpha tester on Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon 2.0 update. Nick has now made it available for wider testing via his blog (and previously the NewsGator support forum, though it wasn’t bloggable then) and it’s worth checking out.

The key things that I really dig about this update are:

• A hierarchical treeview for subscriptions. I find this much easier to navigate than the “one group/folder at a time” approach of earlier versions. It’s also easier to manage subscriptions in different groups.
• The “attention” stuff that lets you see what you’re spending the most time reading. I have far too many feeds in FeedDemon currently and it’s rare that I can keep up with all of them on a regular basis. Using some of these tools, it’ll be much easier to trim down my subscriptions to a manageable level. The reporting tools from the 1.6 beta (especially the dinosaur report) is good for this also, but there’s a distinction between “feed that updates infrequently” and “feed that has high value for me”. Some blogs update very infrequently, but when the do I want to pay attention to them.

Anyway, with the cat out of the bag, go forth and give it a shot. Nick has always been very receptive to feedback, so now’s the time to put it through its paces and report what you find. I’m still using 1.5 on my “main” machine, but I’m finding that the machine that’s been running the various 2.0 alpha builds has been getting more and more use.

Due to being in the “right place at the right time” last week at a local Circuit City, I was able to score an Xbox 360 Premium bundle. To start the games collection, I also got Project Gotham Racing 3.

Wow. This is an impressive device… not just from the gaming perspective (though the graphics for PGR3 are stunning), but also from the UI and “media” angle. It was easy to get up and running and converting my old Xbox Live account to run under the 360 took just a few minutes. The Xbox 360 can also talk to Windows XP machines on our home network to stream music and photos, so we’re considering it in place of the Tivo Home Media Option (which we like, but it has its limitations). If you’ve got a Media Center PC on your network, you can even stream video and use the 360 as an “extender” device.

Once I had it up, I spent nearly an hour and a half tinkering in the “Dashboard” before I ever put the game disc in. The Dashboard has a ton of things to explore:

• Lots of settings for customization and themes. I didn’t see a way to create custom themes, but there were lots available in the Xbox Live “Marketplace”.
• Set up your “gamer card” to include an avatar, which type of gamer you are (recreational, family, “underground”, etc), and other identity info. Again, I didn’t see a way to add your own avatar/icon, but there seemed to be plenty available through Marketplace.
• The hard drive came preloaded with one Xbox Arcade game (Hexic), a bunch of music files (most of which were from artists I’d never heard of… no surprise), and a handful of video files as well. Plenty to browse while you figure things out and it’s easy enought to delete them if/when you want to reclaim the space.
• You can rip your own music to the hard drive for listening (including listening during games, like the original Xbox), but even cooler was plugging in my Ipod and having the media page on the Dashboard instantly recognize it and provide a UI for playback — including playlists, genres, artists, etc. With that capability, I probably won’t see much need to rip discs directly to the drive. The console has 2 USB ports on the front and I get the impression pretty much any sort of USB device is fair game for media photos and music.
• Also in the Xbox Live Marketplace, you can download demos, trailers, and other things. Some for free and some require “Microsoft Points” (which you can buy through the console or apparently get preloaded cards at some retailers)… more below.
• Tinker with the music and photos using the Windows Media Connect application on an XP machine. Once it’s set up, the 360 recognizes song files, playlists, and photos and, like the Ipod, has a metadata-driven approach to navigation (artists, genres, albums, etc). This is in contrast to the Tivo’s “file system” approach to navigating music and photos on a network.

So then I put in the PGR3 disc and was blown away by the graphics and gameplay. I played PGR2 a lot on the first Xbox, but was never particularly great at it. The UI is fairly different with the new version, but there’s no question it’s a huge step forward in terms of visuals. You can pause the game and go into “Photo Mode”, which lets you fly around the track and take pictures with control over color, exposure, shutter speed, aperture, focal distance, and so on. The only downside I saw with PGR3 over the previous version was when trying to find a game on Xbox Live. With the previous version, I could tell it to search based on similar skill, range of cars, cities, tracks, type of race, and several other parameters. With this version, it seemed that I only had two criteria to choose from — type of race and the city. I’d have preferred to specify the car class (so I could use the car I’d practiced with offline) and skill range. My impression is that that the new Xbox Live system is more “skill” aware than in the past, so maybe that’s being factored in behind the scenes (didn’t help me from getting skunked, though).

Anyway, there have been just two things that I’ve come across that I don’t really care for.

Xbox Live Marketplace “Microsoft Points” for themes/icons: The idea here is that you prepay for points and can use them for things like themes, avatar, “arcade” games, and even to change your gamertag (the conversion factor for points to USD makes this change cost about $10… good enough to discourage constant changes to gamertags, but cheap enough to consider once if you hate the one you picked a couple years ago). Anyway, I was surprised to have to use points for things like themes and avatar icons. For the arcade games or things like music videos, having a micro-payments system makes perfect sense (a la Itunes). But do I really want to pay money to use an EA Sports-branded FIFA 2006 theme on my 360? A DOA4 theme? On the themes front, I also didn’t see a way to preview themes in advance of purchasing, but since I was going to shell out points to get a theme, it didn’t matter. Maybe down the road for an Arcade game or two, but not for themes and icons.

Xbox as Media Hub on multiple computers: After installing Windows Media Connect on a couple of machines in the house, I just had to choose which folder(s) on each machine were available on the network and which devices (the 360 in this case) could have access to those folders. Then in the “media” portion of the Dashboard, you connect to a machine to view the photos or listen to the music. This all looked great and definitely has the potential to replace Tivo’s Home Media Option for us (and we use the heck out of that Tivo feature)… except that the Xbox 360 UI won’t let you connect to more than one machine at a time. In our case, we have one computer that has all of our music on it (roughly 35GB)… it’s the one we run Itunes on and sync the Ipods with. However, we store all of our digital photos on a separate machine (maybe 8–10GB here). But in the 360’s Dashboard UI, you choose either “Music” or “Photos” and then you see a computer. That’s right, one. Singular. Uno. If you want to connect to another one, you have to first go to the Dashboard “System” UI and disconnect the first one, and then you go back to Photos or Music to connect to the new one. I did some Googling around to see if I was missing something somewhere, but couldn’t find any resolution. For now, that makes it enough of a pain to impact the Wife Acceptance Factor. I tried mapping a drive from the “music” computer to the “photos” computer and then making that drive available to Windows Media Connect on the “music” machine. This works, in that the 360 could then fetch photos and music from the same connection, but fetching photos in this way wasn’t very speedy (at ~4MB each). I really hope the Xbox team is working on a way to let the 360 “see” more than one machine running Media Connector on the network.

On a related note, I also found the UI for browsing photos to be inefficient. In that UI, it actually shows all directories that contain photos, even if those directories are subdirectories elsewhere. In this case, the “file system” approach to UI seems the best way to go… we organize our photos by year, then month, and then a descriptive folder name (e.g. “\2005\06\Elizabeth’s Birth”… on the 360, you’d see a browsable folder for “2005”, another folder for “06”, and a third for “Elizabeth’s Birth”. This makes it unwieldy when you have several folders named “Soccer Games” under different year\month combinations — you just see multiple folders named “Soccer Games” in the UI and can’t tell which year/month each belongs to.

Thankfully, both of these issues are software/service related… if Microsoft opts to, it can roll out updates to address these (and more). Even as it is, though, the 360 has really impressed me.

Within the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to use the del.icio.us service more and more. It’s called a “social bookmarking” service… and while brief, it’s not the best way to describe it. A (wordier) description would be “an online service that lets you bookmark sites and assign descriptive tags to those sites.” The “social” angle comes up in that your bookmarks are shared by other users of the service (they also provide some “antisocial” settings).

A tag is essentially a keyword that you define and you can use multiple tags for a single bookmark. If you’re familiar with Flickr for photos, it’s a similar service for bookmarks. Not coincidentally, both Flickr and del.icio.us have been purchased by Yahoo — Yahoo’s loving tags these days.

When I first checked it out last year, I thought it was a cool idea but I’ve got over a thousand bookmarks in Firefox. I’m fairly anal about categorizing them into folders and the thought of going through all of that to assign tags and descriptions wasn’t appealing. On the other hand, synchronizing those between machines and different browsers can be a hassle… and they’re not accessible from other machines. Enter the “del.icio.us Loader for Firefox” by Julian Bez. With this tool, you upload your Firefox bookmarks.html file, assign some tags, and run it. It will show you all the bookmarks it found in the file and let you visit each, add/remove tags, etc. I found that splitting my bookmarks.html file into multiple .html files made this process easier. It took some tweaking, but it was worth it when it came time to assign tags.

So now I can go to my del.icio.us page from anywhere (as can anyone else) and get at my bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/jdonnici

If I want to quickly get at all items that I tagged with a certain word, I just use this format: del.icio.us/jdonnici/[tag_name]. Like this or this.

If I want to see everyone’s bookmarks for a certain tag, I use this format: del.icio.us/tag/[tag_name]. Like this or this.

Tags can be concatenated together with the “+” plus sign like this: http://del.icio.us/jdonnici/dotnet+sqlserver 

Finally, I can subscribe to various del.icio.us feeds in my aggregator, including a specific tag or a specific user. This makes it easy to see the things that other people are finding interesting. There are lots of other tools that I’ve yet to tinker with, including an “Inbox” for tags and the ability to tag something as being “for” another user (presumably making it show up in their inbox). I can also go to the main site page and see both “recent” and “popular” bookmarks.

For Firefox, I’m also finding the del.icio.us Firefox toolbar extension to be invaluable. It puts a shortcut on your toolbar to your tags, as well as a shortcut that opens a tagging window for the current page you’re on. Clicking that lets you tag the page and even shows you suggested tags based on what others have used for that same page.

As I said, I’m just getting started but I do see how this could be a MUCH better way of managing bookmarks and coming back to useful content than the old bookmarks file and/or Favorites directory. It takes some work up front if you have a lot of bookmarks… and I can see how keeping your tags clean and consistent is pretty important (the site provides some tools for removing and renaming tags). But it’s free and seems very much worth the effort.

A week or so ago, we added ourselves to Tivo’s priority list for their new online applications and Yahoo partnership. The software update arrived within the last couple of days and I spent some time yesterday tinkering with it.

Most of the new stuff is found under the “Home Media Option” section of the menu (called “Music, Photos, and More” now) and it falls into a couple of categories:

1. Yahoo Services
2. Games
3. Online Media

Yahoo Services — In this category were things like Yahoo’s Traffic, Weather, and Photos. Basically, you just use Tivo to log into your “My Yahoo” account. After you supply a zip code (or even multiple zip codes), you get a weather forecast and current traffic reports. I don’t have any pictures in the Yahoo Photos services, so I didn’t test that but the weather and traffic seem to work fine. It’s not quite as fast it would be through a browser, but it’s workable.

Games — There are three games on the menu now, all of which are single player games and can be played with just the remote. One of them is a “Connect 4” clone, one is a “Jawbreaker” clone, and the third is sort of like a one-person Scrabble game where you make words to earn points. High scores are recorded for each game. It’s kind of a novel idea, but I don’t see anyone playing a whole lot of games with just a Tivo remote. It also suffers from speed issues.

Online Media — Under this category are a Podcast retriever/player and a client to listen to Live365 Internet Radio.

First, the podcasting interface… it works, but is just barely useable. Up front, there are a few categories (Entertainment, Technology, News, etc) and each category has several podcasts already in it. You can also enter your own URL, which is horribly slow and painful with just a Tivo remote. Try entering http://www.itconversations.com/rss/recentWithEnclosures.php by navigating one letter and symbol at a time. Tivo really needs to provide a better way to subscribe to podcasts via URL — maybe using the Tivo Central Online service or the Tivo Desktop client that runs on PCs.

Once you’ve subscribed, you see a list of the shows/episodes for the feed, along with a little graphic (if the podcaster provides it in their feed) and brief description of the show. You can then hit Play to listen. Unfortunately, your controls for playback amount to “Play” and “Stop”. You can’t fast-forward or rewind and there’s no way to stop something at a certain point and then pick up at that point later. I suppose if you really want to hear a certain podcast show, it’s passable but I don’t see this getting adopted very widely until its much easier to subscribe to feeds and control playback.

On the Live365 Internet Radio front… it’s not bad. You see a list of genres and then a list of the internet radio streams under each genre. The streaming was a little choppy at first, but it seemed to settle down and stay consistent once it was running for a minute or two. I didn’t find a lot of great stuff on there, but I’m not much of a broadcast radio listener.

Overal Impressions

It’s an interesting first step and I really like that Tivo is planning to take advantage of the broadband connections that many people have in their homes. I hope we’ll see more experiments like this. The main issues with this first release that I see fall into two categories:

Interface Speed – It was noticeably slower to navigate through the online options and menus. I couldn’t see whether it improved over time through caching, but even navigating around an on-screen keyboard to enter a URL was pretty slow. It’s frustrating when your button pushes aren’t registered right away, so you push it again, only to have the cursor then jump twice at once.

Remote Control – I’m hoping that they soon make it possible to set up options or subscribe to podcasts via either the Tivo Central Online web interface or via the Tivo Desktop client that runs on PCs (for the Home Media and TivoToGo capabilities). Otherwise, these new features will get very limited use, at least in our house. It’s just too much of a pain to do things character by character using a standard remote control.

Last weekend, our Tivo Series2 box started making a very high pitched ringing/squealing sound. It didn’t seem to bother Michelle much, but was quick to give me a headache. Even worse, it was that “your hard drive is on its last leg” type of sound.

I got behind it and verified that it wasn’t the fan making the sound, so then I was faced with a decision. Do I wait it out and see if it passes? I tried this for a day or two, but it was driving me up a wall. Do I go buy a new hard drive and swap it out? I could, but all the directions I found online make it look like more of a project than I wanted to get into. When it involves opening another computer and swapping drives on an IDE channel, booting to Linux floppies, and command-line partitioning… well, I could work my way through it but I’d rather not.

I head over to www.tivocommunity.com, where the hardcore Tivo folks hang out, and came across a site called www.weaknees.com. They seemed to have a good reputation there as a busines and were also pretty active on those forums helping people out.

On their site, I found a 160GB replacement drive for our model Tivo… for $159. Sure, I could get a bigger drive at CompUSA for this much, but their offer was great because:

• The drive was already set up to be plug and play with Tivo — including the latest Tivo OS already installed.
• They included instructions (PDF) for swapping out the drive, complete with lots of pictures.
• They included the two Torx wrenches I’d need to open the case and swap the drive.
• They took PayPal, had it in stock, and their shipping was reasonable.

I emailed them some initial questions I had about what to back up and how current the OS was on the drive I’d get… I had a response in an hour or so telling me just what I needed to know.

So I went for it and WOW am I ever glad! It arrived yesterday and took all of 20 minutes to swap the drive, including the 5 minutes I waited for the power supply to discharge (recommended in their instructions).

Once the drive was swapped, it fires right up and goes through the guided setup. Best of all, it was whisper quiet.

The only potential downside with going this route is that you lose Season Passes, Wishlists, and obviously any recordings. But Season Passes are easy to write down and re-create, we don’t have that many wishlists, and there weren’t many recordings on there that we were too worried about (mostly some kids’ shows that can be replaced in an hour on Noggin). If there had been important recordings, we could have always used TivoToGo and burned a disc.

Your box’s Tivo service is unaffected because its tied to an account number that’s stored directly in the box’s hardware and not on the drive.

In any case, it was a great experience all around and I’d highly recommend using www.weaknees.com if you find yourself needing to replace/add parts for your Tivo.

As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, it's time to make a change to the blog. It’s running on an older .Text build, but starting to show some age… mostly in being able to prevent comment spam.

Part of the reason I want to blog regularly (and am still trying to “make it a habit”) is for the comment feedback. Many of the entries I’ve made have lead to people contacting me directly to respond or give feedback and advice. It’s great to get that feedback, but not if I have to delete a bunch of spam links each day.

So now I have to decide if I want to go with Community Server or DasBlog. Community Server has the advantage of including a photo gallery and seeming to be more flexible. I also like that it stores all content and settings in SQL Server. On the other hand, DasBlog seems to be faster to get up and running and has some cool features of its own. That simplicity extends to its storage mechansim, which is XML files for content and .config for settings and security.

I’ve read up on both, but it’s time to get hands on. I’m gonna just get both up and running locally, convert my existing .Text entries, and see what I think of each. I’m happy to hear from anyone who’s made the switch from .Text to either CS or DasBlog. Since I’ve turned off comments, you can just use the Contact page.

Just in time… my current keyboard in the office (an MS Natural Keyboard Pro ergonomic ) is just starting to get flakey. I think it’s time to move up to the new Natural Ergonomic 4000. I really like the idea of a zoom slider, especially if it works well with Photoshop.

What I can’t tell is if it’s possible to reconfigure that slider to be used for scrolling in certain applications. That would be a killer feature… I sent a suggestion in to the old “mswish@microsoft.com” alias years ago when mouse wheels first started appearing… the empty space between the two keyboard halves on the Natural series is ideal for a scroll wheel/slider. I saw it appear on the side of a Logitech keyboard a couple years ago, but couldn’t bring myself to switch. Anyway, for apps like Visual Studio and Word, scrolling functionality would be great.

I first tried the Natural keyboard (the one prior to the Elite with its goofy layout) in 1995 and, after a week of use, I was hooked. I also use the Trackball Explorer and (knock wood) have never had any type of wrist pain or discomfort. Using both products deters the casual office visitor from driving your machine, but it also makes it frustrating to use someone else’s machine with a standard keyboard/mouse.

I got this phone just about a month ago on my Verizon account and have been using it pretty heavily… in brief, I am in love with this phone. Slide-away keyboard, a decent amount of memory, nice bright screen, built-in Wifi, built-in Bluetooth, built-in EV-DO, and SD card expandability.

Some thoughts:

1. Samsung includes an extra “extended life” battery, which is good… if you use it a lot, you’ll see the battery drop off fairly quickly. I park it in the charger each night, though, and have yet to have a day where the standard battery (slightly smaller) didn’t make it through just fine. Then again, I’m not someone who’s on the cell phone for more than an hour or so a day. In addition to the extra battery, there’s the cradle, cables, belt holster, a CD-ROM with the Windows Mobile OS, and stereo earbuds that double as a microphone headset.

2. One irritant I’ve found is that the charging cradle has two cables — one for AC and the other for sync’ing via USB. The phone itself, however, will only take the AC cable directly. So you have to have it in the cradle if you want to sync. Not a big deal, you say, but I prefer to have the cradle on my nightstand and let it charge over night… during the day, the phone should be syncing with my machine in the office. To get around this, I picked up one of these for my desk at work and one of these for my laptop bag. Both work great for syncing, but they also charge the phone via USB power — makes battery life pretty much a non-issue for me.

3. It’s running Windows Mobile 2003 SE and I’m hopeful that a Windows Mobile 5 upgrade will be available at some point. No word yet that I know of.

4. I haven’t yet built any apps for it, but I have started to read more articles on the .NET CF… now I just need to come up with some cool ideas to build on. I’m thinking of a “Soccer Coach Assistant” to keep track of players, rosters, track goals/assists during games, etc. If the UI is done well (meaning minimal taps for in-game tracking), it could be a great way to keep statistics for a season (something young players love to hear at the year-end party). Plus, it would get me some exposure to SQL CE, which I know nothing about. Or maybe I’ll build something poker-related, I don’t know… any ideas?

5. The included apps are great… VoiceSignal is a voice-command application that seems to work very well. “Call Home” and it does “Open Excel” and it does, etc. There’s “Launcher” which is a configurable app for one-handed launching of various apps. I also like Picsel Browser, which is a web and document browser that’s very slick… it zooms in and out, pans around, and allows for lots of cool navigation options. It reads Excel docs, Word docs, PDF, images, etc, but I also prefer it over Pocket IE for general surfing. There is also a There’s all the usual Pocket PC apps, including light versions of Word, Excel, Outlook messaging, etc.

6. Combined with Verizon’s EV-DO high-speed service, it’s amazing for on-the-go connectivity. I’m regularly getting 600kpbs or better for downloads. The EV-DO isn’t available everywhere, but the Denver/Boulder area was turned up a few weeks ago and I’ve been lovin’ it. I can stream video into the mobile Windows Media Player and get great, fluid video images. If you’re gonna go with a device like this, I think you pretty much have to get the “Unlimited Data” plan… I did and don’t regret it a bit.

7. The form factor is perfect for me. It may be on the large-ish side for some, but it compares well with the Palm Treo. I like that I get a nice, large (for a phone) screen and then can slide the keyboard open/shut as needed. The keyboard keys take some getting use to because of their size and proximity, but they stick up nicely from the device and have a solid “click” to them.

8. The built-in wifi has been great, though I’m thinking of adding a 3rd party app to manage the wifi. The built in handling for scanning, connecting, and authenticating is just a little unwieldy. Handango has a number of apps that seem to manage wifi connectivity for PPC devices, so I’ll give those a try.

9. No chance to use the built-in Bluetooth yet, though I may have to grab a wireless headset one of these days.

10. I stuck a 1GB SD card in the side and have been installing apps to that (to save space in the built-in RAM)… I’ve also downloaded some WMV video files to watch when I’ve got dead time. There are some “DVD to PocketPC” apps out there that can apparently fit a feature film into 128MB of space, which could be pretty cool. For now, it’s been things like some Channel9 videos and some of the .NET 2.0 GrokTalks.

Finally, Verizon’s service has been awesome. I’ve been with them for about five years now… back in 2002, I got screwed when I moved my account from a company name into my personal name. Nothing changed but the account name, but the way they did it made it appear as a new account — meaning I lost all my existing customer benefits like cheap phone upgrades, etc. Try as I might, nobody could fix it for me. Given that and their previously-crappy selection of PDA style phones, I was pretty sure I’d be jumping ship and heading to T-Mobile or Cingular.

So I checked out this phone when it first came out and really was impressed… I called Verizon customer service a number of times beforehand, with questions about upgrade pricing, various data plans, EV-DO capabilities, family-share minutes (for my wife’s phone), and so on. Without exception, the people I spoke with were friendly, knowledgeable, and very helpful. Obviously, something’s changed over there… so their improved customer service and improved selection of higher-end phones did it for me.

I love this thing.

Marcus Vorwaller, who maintains the “Best Tool for the Job” blog (a great blog, btw) wrote a post earlier today in which he describes why he feels independent podcasting will die. While I do think there’s a ton of (overblown) hype surrounding podcasting lately, I respectfully disagree that it’s going to go away any time soon. He feels that podcasting will ultimately dwindle down to 20 or 30 podcasts that “anyone cares about or will listen to”. I think that’s awfully low and, once the “me too” hype of podcasting goes away, I expect that number to still be measured in the hundreds.

I also think it’s worth noting that his post (and this one) relate to independent podcasting. Not the well-funded, corporate-driven, marketing podcasts that are pushing a product, nor the podcasts that are published from radio stations that already have an investment in equipment and talent.

Here are the reasons he gives for podcasting to die off, along with my disagreements.

1. Pocasts are time-consuming to create. This is certainly true… but you could argue that many of the better (re: interesting and readable) blogs also require an investment in time on the part of the author/content provider — I’m sure Marcus spends a great deal of his personal time on “Best Tool for the Job”. If someone is passionate about what they want to say and getting their message out, they’ll find the time. For most people, blogging is a hobby that they spend some of that precious spare time on… I don’t see any reason that podcasting doesn’t fall into the same category.

2. Podcasts don’t make money. Also true in most cases. While there are some examples of independent shows that are bringing in some money (via donations), they’re certainly not the provider’s sole source of income. But if we agree that podcasts are often put together by hobbyists who are passionate about a topic, then the fact that they’re not generating income isn’t usually a factor.

3. Podcasts are expensive to produce. I suppose this depends on the definition of expensive. $100? $500? I listen to some great podcasts that are recorded on iRiver MP3 players. Another that’s recorded with a USB microphone on a laptop. There are open source audio editors that make cleanup and editing a snap and don’t cost a dime. Nearly anyone who wants to put out a podcast will have a computer and a vast majority of those will have some sort of audio input capability. Is it ideal? No… but it can work quite well and stepping up to the next level of sound quality doesn’t have to be much more expensive than a nice DVD burner or a new monitor.

4. Podcasts are boring. There’s plenty of evidence to support this, given some of the bad stuff out there. On the other hand, there are a lot of shows that are interesting — using my personal definition of “interesting”, which is the point here. One of the podcasts I listen to centers on the world of poker. If you’re not into poker, you’d be bored stiff to listen to it. If you are into poker, you might enjoy it. I also listen to a couple of .NET development-related shows that would bore to tears anyone who’s not spending their days building software with .NET. Based on Marcus’s blog, I’m sure there are a few podcasts that align with his interests. Whether or not those also have decent quality and content he finds compelling is another matter.

5. Podcasts sound bad. I lump this in with the “expensive to produce” argument. Typically, a podcast sounds bad because the provider recorded it with the built-in mic on their laptop, while they sat next to the microwave in their kitchen and and ate potato chips out of a plastic bag. Any halfway decent studio microphone (not anywhere near as expensive as you’d think) does a fine job, as do plenty of USB-based microphones. One nice thing about the explosion around Skype and other VoIP services is that mic manufacturers are flooding the market with inexpensive, USB-based mics. I also don’t think it’s important to have a “radio voice”… like most blogs, independent podcasts are put out there by regular people. They should sound like regular people when we listen and I don’t think one needs the booming monster-truck-rally-announcer style of voice (which are usually treated with audio effects anyway) to be interesting. If your content is interesting, I’ll tolerate a bit of a nasal voice.

6. Podcasts are too long. Are there some that are too long? Probably, but it’s like any other content or form of entertainment. If you’re interested in it, you don’t want it to end. If you’re not interested in it, then you’ve got another option that’s missing from radio broadcasts — the fast-forward. There are times that some of the podcasts I listen to lose me. The topic for a given show might not appeal to me or maybe they’re doing a segment that I find boring. I fast-forward until I’m past it… and if that occurs too often with that particular podcast, I unsubscribe.

7. Podcasts are light on content. It’s the same argument as with “boring”, “sounds bad”, and “too long”. If it doesn’t hold your interest, move on. The upside to this hype is that there’s plenty to choose from. I’ve downloaded some that I thought were just horrible. I really don’t need to hear about your day, what you’re having for dinner, how your dog’s vet appointment went, or that you and your wife are vacationing in the Poconos. If your content isn’t relevant to me, I’m gone.

In any case, I’m curious what others think. Will we eventually see podcasting just plain “go away”, or as Marcus suggests, will it become the exclusive domain of existing broadcasters like NPR and radio stations?

I blogged about Podcasts last year and came to the conclusion then that there was a lot of hype around podcasting, much of it overblown, but that we’d eventually see it settle down and some real value emerge.

Since then, I think I’ve been both right and wrong.

I’ve been right in that I’ve seen some real value emerge from podcasting. I now regularly listen to a number of podcasts while I commute. There is some very compelling audio content out there.

I’ve been wrong in that the hype has yet to settle down… and yesterday’s release of iTunes 4.9 with podcasting support won’t do anything to help quell the noise.

With this release, you can now browse through various podcasts in the iTunes Music Store (all free, for now) and subscribe to those that interest you. You can tell iTunes to automatically download the subscribed podcasts into the iTunes library, where they will be synced with your iPod. The iPod also has an available software update, which provides bookmarking support for the podcasts you download (meaning you can switch to something else and later pick up where you left off).

I’ve downloaded both the 4.9 iTunes update, as well as the iPod update and here are a few thoughts. First, the good:

• First, the interface for browsing podcasts in the iTunes store is very nice. Subscribing is easy and it wasn’t difficult at all to set things up to automatically fetch podcast files.
• Second, I really like that downloaded podcasts will be bookmarkable in the iPod.
• I also think that this will be a great way to get those who are new to podcasting introduced to all the great content. Since it’s so easy to browse, subscribe, download, and sync, (oh and it’s free), the barrier to entry is much lower than in the past.
• By having podcast support in iTunes, I may not have to explain “podcast” to friends and family as much.
• The installs for both the iTunes update and the iPod software update both went without a hitch.

Now the not so good… and to be fair, my main gripe with iTunes as a podcasting client is the same as with every other client I’ve tried — an incomplete set of features.

My ideal podcast client would le me subscribe to feeds and configure them on an individual basis. I want to configure the genre, artist, and album tags in the downloaded files — per feed. I want to specify exactly where downloaded audio goes and the naming convention used for those files — per feed. I want BitTorrent support built in for feeds that provide that option. I want to be able to specify the update/download schedule the client uses to check for new files and download them when they’re available — per feed. I want to be able to specify the iTunes playlist(s) that downloaded files appear in — per feed.

So while I think iTunes is a decent client, especially for those new to podcasting, it’s far from perfect. The biggest one is being able to specify the genre, artist, and album tags. Podcast providers are all over the map with how they fill out metadata tags in the audio files… if they fill it out at all, it often varies from one show to thenext. And because the iPod’s navigation centers around this metadata, I have to update things myself if I want them to be organized correctly.

The other issue I’ve run into is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to take podcast files that are already in your library and tell iTunes to treat them as podcasts. I’ve got a bunch of old episodes from some of my subscribed feeds and I work my way through them when I’m doing yard work, errands around town, etc. And while I’m OK with subscribing to all of my podcasts in iTunes going forward, I’d really like to NOT have to re-download all of those files just so that iTunes/iPod recognize them as podcasts.

In typical fashion when a major announcement is made around an RSS-enabled product, there’s some drama and much discussion. This time, it’s centered around the tweaks they’re using inside of RSS to support the appearance of a podcast in iTunes, the “chapters” feature in enhanced podcasts, etc. But that’s to be expected and hopefully Apple does the right thing and evolves those extensions to something more straightforward down the road. In the meantime, it sounds like podcasters may have to jump through some hoops to get their content to appear correctly in the iTunes directory.

So overall, it’s not a bad release. If you have an iPod and have never checked out podcasts before, you’re set. If you’re already using a podcast client and have your own process for fetching/syncing, you may want to keep doing what you’re doing.

Currently, I listen to a number of podcasts (to be listed at some later point) and getting them on to my iPod isn’t as straightforward as I’d like. I figured I’d mention the steps I use here on the chance that someone else finds them useful or has some suggestions for improving the process.

My steps are…

1. Throughout the week, I use FeedDemon to fetch the podcast audio files from my subscribed feeds.

2. On the weekend, I copy all of those to the correct folders on our “media server” — essentially the photos/music box we use with the Tivo Home Media Option and with which I sync the iPod.

3. I run MP3Gain on all of the .MP3 format files so that their volume metadata is consistent with the rest of our audio.

4. I drag and drop all of the new files into iTunes.

5. I use a “new files” Smart Playlist in iTunes to view only the files I just added. With them displayed, I clean up the tags:

• Set genre to Podcast and year to 2005.
• Make Artist and Album consistent across each feed’s files, both new files and files previously downloaded from the feed.
• Verify the Track Number tag so that the files are listed chronologically on the iPod.

6. I sort them based on the file type column and select those that are MP3 files. I then right-click those and choose “Convert to AAC”. This can take quite a while for lots of files (or longer programs).

7. When it’s done, I remove all the MP3/new-AAC files from iTunes’ Library.

8. I then go the folder that has all those files and do two things:

• Delete the MP3 files (don’t need ‘em any longer).
• Change the .M4A extension on the newly-converted files to .M4B. This lets iTunes treat them as audiobook files — so that they’re bookmarkable and can be sped up. The iPod lets you set the playback speed to “Faster” so that files play about 25% faster, but without the higher pitch that would make the speaker sound like a chipmunk.

9. Delete older shows that I’ve already listened to, both from the iTunes library and from the drive.

10. Plug in the iPod and sync it all up.

So there you have it… all podcast files are bookmarkable, can be sped up for quicker listening, and are easily found by Genre and Artist on the iPod. Any suggestions?

With the purchase of Keyhole (URL is now redirected) a year or so ago, Google picked up an application that lets you literally “fly” from one place to the next. You can zoom and pan, like with most mapping applications, but you could then enter a “destination” address and the software would zoom back, slide over, and then zoom in to your destination — giving the sense of flying.

Today, they released Google Earth, which raises the bar even further. For starters, the base version is free (Keyhole used to be about $30 for the personal version). They have a “Plus” version, which adds GPS support, basic importing, and some drawing tools, all for $20. For $400 (and up), they have Pro and Enterprise options aimed at business uses.

This version has the ability to view layers, such as restaurants, ATM machines, lodging, and so on. They even give you layers for crime statistics, census data, and congressional districts. You can turn on off roads, political boundaries, and terrain. As you’re viewing the imagery, roads and highways are overlayed on top of the images, which makes it easy to get your bearings (much easier than Google Maps’ satellite view).

Street names overlayed on the aerial imagery make it easier to navigate	Where the hell am I?

The interface is very polished (more so than Keyhole was) and all navigation is smoothly animated (via DirectX). You can rotate, zoom, place pushpins (like bookmarks), print, email, and so on. Perhaps most impressive is that you can tilt the perspective so that the view appears to spread out in front of you (and you see the horizon). I also like how the UI tells you the current altitude of the “eye” — that is, the zoom level you’re currently at is translated into ft about the earth’s surface (see below).

Well, well worth a download. Just plan on a productivity hit while you explore.

For some reason, I find various online "personality" tests interesting, mostly because I'm curious about how the code works under the hood. There are so many subtleties involved, including the test-takers self-perception, their ability to be honest with themselves, and the difficulty of measuring complex traits with "Agree/Disagree" types of questions.

Anyway, there's no shortage of these types of things online and I came across this one via Peter Provost. The results below are probably more accurate than not for me… again, if I’m being honest with myself. :P

This blog was getting peppered with comment spam a while back and it became too much of a pain to deal with. So I turned off the comments feature and resolved to take care of it “one of these days”.

Today was that day.

I finally checked out a variety of options that are out there for dealing with comment spam on .Text sites. The one that seemed to have the biggest “bang for the buck” (where bang is the solution’s effectiveness and buck is the time spent implementing/managing it) was the Clearscreen HIP-CAPTCHA control from Miguel Jimenez. The part that took the longest was probably FTP’ing the changed files to the server. It doesn’t require a rebuild of the .Text source and seems to be working well in my brief testing.

I still have a bunch of stuff I want to do with my .Text install, starting with building it from source and continuing through a new skin design. But for now, this’ll do.

So now you have to enter some random code before you can post a comment. One thing I’ve noticed is that it sometimes has too much distortion in the display… in those cases, just hit Refresh on your browser and it’ll generate a new code. Shoot me an email if you run into any problems with it.

The Google Maps service was unleashed yesterday… holy crap, that rocks. Some notes:

1. Watch how rarely the full page refreshes. I haven’t looked under the hood to see how they do it, but I’m assuming some iframe tags and a lot of Javascript. One thing’s for sure — between this, Google Suggest, and Gmail, Google is pushing the envelope for what can be done in a web UI.

2. When it shows a pushpin on an address, clicking the pushpin opens a little callout box with a detailed map for the surrounding area. They even draw a shadow behind that callout box on the underlying layer. That’s slick.

3. You can search on all sorts of stuff. In the Search box at the top of the window, I had luck with addresses, partial addresses, city names, airport codes, zip codes, company names, and so on.

4. You can get at directions from just about anywhere. The little pushpin callouts, the main search results, and so on. Clicking the directions “From here” link in the callout box changes the box to a sort of “sub-search” that lets you provide the “To” address.

5. The searches are context-aware or location-aware. For example, start from the top (new browser window/tab) and search for “Sacramento”. The result is the city in California. Now search for “Kinkos” and you see pushpins for all of their locations in the Sacramento area. Close the tab/window and start fresh… this time, search for “Denver” first and then “Kinkos”. Now you have Kinkos in that area… so each search is aware of the one before it and/or the boundaries you’re currently looking at.

6. I combined it with SlickRun (which I’m addicted to) for a very fast mapping reference. For those that use SlickRun, just use the /?q= querystring, but provide the SlickRun word-replacement macro ($W$). http://maps.google.com/maps?q=$W$ is the command. Assuming your MagicWord is “map”, you can then enter “map boulder”, “map 123 main street, denver, co”, or “map sfo”. Way cool.

So the long-awaited OS update came to our Series2 Tivo a week or so ago. Aside from supporting the new TivoToGo service, I’ve noticed only two things with the new version.

1. The UI feels slower.
2. While listening to music with the Home Media Option, the current song’s info banner moves around every few seconds (presumably to avoid burn-in).

I’m sure there are others, but that’s what I noticed. On to TivoToGo…

This update also added a web server and small web app to the Tivo box. This can be reached using https://[tivoipaddress]/nowplaying/index.html (note the “s” for secure http). You’re prompted to log in with “tivo” as the username and the password is your Media Access Key (you can find this in your Tivo’s System Information page).

Once logged in, you can see your current recordings and even download the .TiVo files to your machine. This approach for getting at video files isn’t officially supported, but it’s kinda cool to see the actual file sizes for all those shows you’re hanging on to.

Alternatively, you can use the new Tivo Desktop software (version 2.0), which provides a nice little UI for viewing your recordings, copying a bunch of them at once, and launching a media player to view the local files. Note that you MUST install the Tivo Desktop app, even if you plan to use the web interface to download them. This is because installing the desktop app forces you to provide your Media Access Key and a “playback password” (which you’re prompted for each time you watch a show on your PC).

Tivo says that viewing that watching the .TiVo files on your machine requires Windows Media Player 10 and and a codec. I’ve had good luck with the Intervideo codec that comes with WinDVD, but it seems there are lots of free/cheap codecs out there to choose from. I also found a program called The Core Media Player, which seems to play them all by itself just fine. Tinkering with codecs is a pain, but the ones listed on the official Tivo page seem to work well enough.

Once the desktop app is installed, the files are transferred, and you have WMP set up with a compatible codec, you’re set.

Top 10 Things To Know

1. As you can imagine, the files themselves can be quite large. A half-hour show I tested was about 680MB and a 2–hour movie is a few gigs of data.

2. These files naturally take a while to transfer to your local machine. Not only are they large to transfer, but the Tivo does some type of on-the-fly encoding/conversion of the files with your media access key. This is to ensure that someone can’t just post a file to the file-sharing networks and have it be viewable everywhere. I also understand that it takes even longer if your Tivo is otherwise busy (ie. recording a show), which makes sense given that the CPU is occupied.

3. To make the long transfer times liveable, I switched our Tivo from being wireless to being wired (using the Linksys USB200M). I was getting about 750kb/sec, which made a 680MB file transfer in about 15–18 minutes. It should have been faster for a file that size, but again the Tivo itself is “processing” the file as it copies it to your local machine — so that’s the bottleneck. Another thing you can do is use the Tivo Desktop software to queue the files up for copying… click some checkboxes, push a button, and go to bed.

4. Apparently, the 7.x version of the Tivo OS adds 802.11g and USB 2.0, which might make wireless transfers liveable (though still not as fast as wired).

5. Closed-captioning information isn’t retained in the files that end up on your machine.

6. You can learn all sorts of geeky things about the service from the hardcore Tivo fans at http://www.tivocommunity.com.

7. I think Tivo really needs to do something about the codec issue. Unless you have a machine that already has a DVD player package, you may not have a codec that lets you play back the mpeg2 files in Windows Media Player (or elsewhere). And using one of their recommended codecs means you pay $15 for the service that is otherwise marketed as free. Not a big hit to the wallet, but I do see the whole “download and install a codec, configure WMP, wait for long file transfers” thing deterring the non-geeks out there. It certainly wouldn’t meet the Wife-Acceptance test.

8. Some codecs and configurations make seeking forward/backward impossible, leaving you with just the WMP slider bar to navigate within a show. That’s a pain, but the Core Media Player did allow moving forward/backward easily with the right/left arrows. The size of the jump is configurable, so you could make the right-arrow jump exactly 30 seconds to skip commercials.

9. To burn a show on to a DVD, Tivo says you need the Sonic MyDVD software (not worth the link). The http://www.tivocommunity.com gang can point you to other options that supposedly work (haven’t tried them myself)… but the MyDVD software does apparently use the PACE Interlok copy-protection mechanism. I’m somewhat familiar with this “solution” because it’s used by several vendors in the electronic music world (particularly with soft synths and fx plugins)… lots of problems have been reported with this over the last few years, mostly because it replaces kernel-level drivers on your machine. Even if you uninstall MyDVD, those are left behind… nasty stuff and lots of electronic musicians (myself included) simply won’t purchase software that uses it.

10. Bottom line… in a pinch, it’s a useful option to have. I don’t see its release as a huge win for Tivo in the market (getting it to work still feels too “techy”), nor do I see it as something that even tech-geek Tivo owners will use a great deal. On the other hand, if you are the geeky type and you regularly travel, it’s a handy way to have something to watch during layovers or long flights.

So Tivo finally announced their TivoToGo service… with it, you can transfer recorded shows to your laptop to watch “on the go”. Later this month, they’re supposed to have an app available that lets you burn those shows to DVD as well. It’s a slick service that’s been in the works for a while.

In order for it to work, Tivo has to roll out a software upgrade to all their Series 2 boxes. And their web site says that this can take several weeks! I understand that rolling out an upgrade to that many boxes is a big deal, but that still seems like a really long time. There are some reports of people getting it already, but no such luck here. Tivo put up a “get on the priority list” page, but who knows what effect that has.

I just know I want it now. Patience is not one of my virtues.

Ok... so is this a typo, or is CompUSA cashing in on all the breathless Halo2 hype? I happened to be surfing http://www.compusa.com tonight and saw that price. I did a double-take before realizing that it was a data entry error (11/09/04 was the Halo2 release date). Oops

Speaking of Halo2 -- well, I can't speak of it because I don't yet have it. I'm hot-and-cold when it comes to video games. Sometimes I'm into it, other times I go weeks or months without playing much.

I did get two-thirds of the way through the first Halo before I got sidetracked by work, the soccer season, Madden and FIFA 2005, and so on.

So I made a decision to NOT buy Halo2 until I finished the campaign in the first Halo. I did that this afternoon and wished I'd done it sooner... that final challenge in the final chapter (destroying the core and the Warthog "joyride") were so intense! It was a lot of fun (and it took me a while before I could make it through).

So now I can go get Halo2, get my butt kicked online, and enjoy all the cool multiplayer/online stuff they've added.

As an amateur musician and recording geek, I've been following the recent "podcasting" discussions with some interest. I think it's interesting for two reasons -- one reason is the application of an existing technology (RSS or syndicated news feeds) for a new purpose (binary enclosures, usually some form of audio). While this is merely evolutionary (nowhere near revolutionary), it has the potential to be one of those watershed points when the average schmoe gains the ability "to be heard". It happened in the 80's with desktop publishing programs. It happened in the 90's with inexpensive digital recording gear and the proliferation of MP3 as a "universal audio format". More recently, it's happening with blogs.

But with podcasting, how much is really new? What barrier to entry has been lowered? What long, cumbersome process has been overhauled? The ability to record audio? Nope... if you're on the go, you can get a handheld digital recorder dirt cheap these days and many PDAs have the ability to record audio and put it in your computer for upload. For the less mobile, a cheapo microphone plugged into your soundcard and a free audio program does the trick.

Is it the ability to get your audio out to a wide audience? Nah, anyone can put up a web page for free these days and make audio files available for download (some even get sued for it when the files they post don't belong to them). You could argue that it's hard for would-be consumers of that content to find the producers that interest them -- but that hasn't changed here. I still have to go out and find the podcaster or audio-blogger I'm interested in. And we can look back to the late 90's incarnation of mp3.com as a better example of bringing producers together and making it easier for consumers to find what interests them.

So what is new? From my perspective, the "new" part is combining RSS (a pull mechanism wherein I subscribe to what interests me) with portable audio players that continue to drop in price while features and capacity rise. With podcasting, I can get the audio content I want when it becomes available. No more reminders to check a web site. No more subscribing to email newsletters and then surfing to a download site. It just gets to where I want it, as soon as it's available.

For me, Rory Blyth describes it well when he says that it's just a way to syndicate binary content -- a description I completely agree with. And in that sense, I think the name "podcasting" does this "next step for content" a disservice because it focuses on audio. The enclosure tag that makes binary content possible could just as well contain pictures (piccasting? gifcasting?), video content (vidcasting? porncasting?), or chapters of an e-book (novelcasting? fictcasting?). In each case, I can think of an example that excites me more than "the audio blog":

PicCasting - There are some great photographers and amazing digital artists out there. I'd love to subscribe to a few "image feeds" that highlights their latest work on a regular basis. Even if your intent is to sell them, put up a feed with smaller images or subtle watermarks.

VidCasting - Please, Mr. Scoble, let me subscribe to a Channel 9 video-only feed. As the Channel 9 crew puts out a new video, my aggregator pulls down the WMV and jams it into a local directory. As prevalent as high-speed access is, sometimes the streaming video just isn't practical. Later: Woo hoo, looks like the feed on the Videos page does have <enclosure> tags!

BookCasting - Again, there are a lot of great writers out there who do some amazing short stories and/or in-depth technical articles. Turn your novel into a series of PDF chapters and let me subscribe... if it's good, I'll watch my aggregator anxiously for the next chapter.

Ok, so the "casting" suffix has run its course.

Finally... back at the top of this post I mentioned that the podcasting "phenomenon" interests me for two reasons and, no, I didn't forget the second reason -- it's the hype. It's the breathless regurgitation of how THIS is the next big thing! THIS is going to change the playing field! THIS is going to start a revolution! Ugh... just when the bubble-hangover was subsiding.

Here's where my interest really starts to wane. Scott Hanselman, prior to being called a Luddite, puts it well when he says "you can't speak as fast as I read." I think the blogs (or other content) that DO work well as audio are few and far-between.

Understand that I've been downloading .NET Rocks and listening during my commute since its infancy. That show works and I plan to listen to the new one as well -- for the content. I tried a couple of episodes of Adam Curry's "Daily Source Code" recently -- that show doesn't. As Greg Hughes said in this post, a medium that talks about itself feels a lot like MLM (multi-level marketing). For whatever media reputation Adam Curry brings to the plate, the Daily Source Code comes across as a guy sitting in his basement talking to, and about, his own personal ecosystem. Well, except for when his wife walks in to tell him dinner's ready. Or the dog barks because it has to go out and piss. In between, we're treated to an echo chamber wherein the media's podcasting darling talks about... well, podcasting.

So yeah, I think podcasting syndicating binary content has a lot of value... for now, it's largely unrealized value.

It's been a couple/few weeks now since the version 1.0 Preview Release of Firefox was released. This weekend, I decided to look into it and see whether the various extensions I'm using had been updated.

Flashblock (blocks Flash/Shockwave media from loading/playing until I want it to)

Googlebar (the Google Toolbar for Firefox)

IEView (because not every site works outside of IE -- though there are ways to improve that!)

ChromEdit (Easy access to the customization files for Firefox)

Web Developer (A ton of developer-oriented tools)

Tabbrowser Extensions (customize the way those tabs look/behave)

All are installed and seem to be working fine on my laptop now... time to update my main dev machine, I guess. This blog entry will be my handy bookmark when I need to download/update these things. :)

Darrell Norton posted this snippet for Firefox on his blog and it works like a champ. MSDN pages that list code used to look like this in Firefox:

After adding the snippet below to userContent.css, it looks like this:

Here's the snippet to add to userContent.css. As Darrell mentions, using ChromeEdit is by far the best way to customize the Firefox customization files. Even finding them can be a trick at first...

/* Microsoft MSDN code stylesheet */
pre
{
   white-space: pre !important;
}

Sweet tip... thanks, Darrell!

I've been subscribed to some Netflix RSS feeds for about a week now. Overall, it's not bad but I had to scale back what I was pulling into FeedDemon. I started with my queue, my recommendations, the Top 100, and the New Releases. The latter two are public feeds for everyone, while the two former feeds are specific to my account. My feelings on them have been:

Queue -- I've found this to be pointless and removed it from FD. RSS is great when I want to be notified that some content somewhere has changed. But when Michelle and I are the only ones changing that content (the queue itself), I don't see much point. Ditto for the "Recent Rental Activity" feed.

Recommendations -- This one is useful in that it puts some titles in front of me that I might no otherwise find. Overall, I find Netflix's recommendations engine to not be as accurate for me as Amazon's or the Suggestions engine in Tivo. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems that Netflix often recommends films that simply have the same actors/actresses as movies I've recently rated. If I'm a DeNiro or Coppola fan, chances are pretty good I already know about their movies...

Top 100 -- This one isn't bad either. It hasn't changed much and I'm not sure how often they recalculate their Top 100, but it's interesting to know what's getting a lot of requests.

New Releases -- I had to unsubscribe from this feed. Amazon's "New Releases" for DVDs (and Music, for that matter) highlights the new stuff that's likely to be of interest to many people. You can then drill down further to see the more obscure releases. The problem with this feed is that it's just a firehose of new releases. Bizarre documentaries, how-to and self-improvement titles, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like independent movies and some of the non-mainstream stuff... but when I'm reading my news in FD, I don't want to sift through 50-60 new titles every day on the off chance that I'll find one or two that seem interesting.

I've had XM Radio for nearly a year and a half... and have been hooked since Day 1. Rarely do I hear a commercial and there's always something interesting. They've announced a bunch of changes recently, one of which is a new online music service. They're going to charge $8/mo for the service, or $4/mo if you already have an XM subscription for a hardware radio. It's a cool idea, but the press releases makes it sound like you're only going to get a subset of the full channel lineup. I suppose if you've got XM in your car already, this is a good way to pay just a few dollars more and get it at home/work. I went with the Delphi radio, though, which I like because I use it in the car, at home, and in the office.

They also added XPR - XM Public Radio. I listened briefly to it earlier and can't quite tell what (if any) relationship it has to NPR (aside from a few familiar names).

Now if they'd add a weather/traffic channel for Denver/Boulder, I'd be shouting from the rooftops.

All the troops must be set... I posted some invites to http://gmailforthetroops.com/ and never heard back. C'est la vie... first five to send a request to jdonnici -at- gmail dot com get them. I'll still put a request coming from a .mil address to the top first.

So I started using Mozilla Firefox about a month ago and I think it's official now -- it's my primary browser. It's got so many cool things that IE doesn't have (at least not yet). Things like tabbed browsing, quick searches for links in a page, a much nicer bookmarks/favorites manager, and built-in popup blocking.

The tabbed browsing thing alone is worth the switch, given that I very rarely have only one browser instance open at a time. More often, it's a handful of different articles, google search results, or news stories. I also like that you can save an entire set of tabs as one bookmark and return to them all via that single bookmark.

Another very cool feature is the ability to block images based on the domain in the IMG "src" element. I never see images now that come from the common banner ad servers. 

And the extensions/plugins being built are amazing. I use the GoogleBar (essentially the Google toolbar), a Flash blocker (it replaces Flash with a small logo that you can click if you want to view it), and a bunch of web development and related extensions.

Oh yea, it's also free.

So are there things I miss from IE? Sure... there are still a number of sites that don't work well in Firefox. IE's by far the most popular browser, so some designers don't bother to test their sites in other browsers. When I run across those pages, I use a Firefox extension that puts "View this page in IE" on my right-click menu.