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.

2005 is over and it was a bittersweet year… on the one hand, I got a promotion at work and our second daughter (Elizabeth) was born in June. She’s gorgeous, all smiles, and is probably the happiest baby I’ve ever seen (her big sister, Allie, was also a happy baby but knew how to get your attention when she wasn’t happy! She’s 6 and that hasn’t changed).

On the other hand, my grandmother passed away this year and that’s been very hard for me. We were very close and I’ve always felt that she’d just “always be there”. My grandfather, is doing as well as can be expected given that they were married for 59 years.

We ended the year with our annual holiday pilgrimage to northern California. It was Elizabeth’s first time flying and she did just fine. Both the girls travel well, but it’s very hectic travelling with two little little ones – especially around the holidays. Whether we make the trip next year or stay home and start our own holiday traditions remains to be seen.

In any case, I’m excited about 2006. Things are good at work, at home, and we’re all healthy. I certainly can’t ask for anything more than that.

A recent issue of Business 2.0 magazine has a feature with a number of top executives and business world celebrities (Balmer, Zander, Cuban, etc) providing advice and insight. Most of them are the typical “power of positive thinking” type of thing, but a couple of them were really pretty good:

Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail. — Eliot Spitzer (NY Attorney General)

I really like this one because all subtlety is lost in email or IM. It’s so easy to fire back a quick response without reading it from the recipient’s perspective… and without the benefit of tone-of-voice or facial expressions, statements that were meant to sound neutral can seem overly direct or even derisive (I think this is especially true for tech professionals, many of whom are either very direct to begin with or not always strong on social subtlety).

Sometimes, you just have to pick up a phone or walk down the hall to make your point — in addition to making sure that the message is received the way it’s intended, it’s also often faster. For all the convenience of email and IM, the lack of subtlety and clarity often means it takes three and four replies to get a point across. So what might be a five minute conversation in person takes an afternoon to resolve via back-and-forth messages.

When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. — Warren Buffet

This one struck me because it’s so easy to go through the day bouncing from one task to the next without thinking about the big picture or how the outcome of those tasks is received. If you’re planning your day with accountability to a larger audience in mind, you’re more likely to focus on the right thing instead of just the next thing in front of you. It’s not hard to imagine that larger audience — your company’s management, its shareholders, your customers, your family, etc.

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.

So the conversion from .Text .09x to DasBlog seems to be complete. First, I started with the most recent version available on the SourceForge project site (currently 1.8.5223.2).  The conversion of posts mostly went just fine. To create the DasBlog content files, I used the RSStoDasBlog.zip project from Scott Hanselman’s site. After downloading the old site’s feed as XML, this utility went through and created all the dayentry.xml files that DasBlog needs. The trickier parts were in the details:

• I switched over to using FeedBurner to handle the aggregator feeds. It’s free, provides some good stats, and was an easy switch to make. DasBlog’s configuration allows you to specify a FeedBurner URL and will automatically serve that up whenever a request is made for the site’s feed. This was super-easy. You can subscribe to the feed with feed://feeds.feedburner.com/JeffDonnici .
• I created a new file at http://jeff.donnici.com/Rss.aspx, which was .Text’s old feed URL. The new file, simply provides an HTTP 301 redirect to the new Feedburner feed. This will ensure that any feed aggregator’s subscribed to the old .Text feed get updated to the new feed. This was also very easy.
• Then it became a manual thing… the conversion process doesn’t do anything with post categories. I actually like DasBlog’s handling of categories in that you can easily create them on the fly (as opposed to having to go to a separate Categories management page in the admin site). Unfortunately, the only way I saw around this was to go through old posts manually and apply the appropriate categories. I’m sure there’s a way to do this en masse, but it’s a one-time thing and writing up a script or utility to do it would have taken longer than the manual route.
• The next manual part involved going through any old posts that referenced other posts. In cases where I had a post that referred to an older one, I updated the URL for that reference to use the new DasBlog permalink. I also updated the few posts that had images or downloadable files on my server… under DasBlog, I wanted to use its content/binary folder so that backups of all content are a single-step. Here again, I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but it didn’t take long and is a one-time thing.
• That brings me to external links… Google, other blogs, and various wikis have links to the old .Text archives, which are now gone. I’m not sure what (if anything) that can be done to handle those… short of some sort of hard-coded 404 error page that has all the old URLs and their new URL and then handles the redirection. I know Google will update over time, but it’d be great if there was a clean way to handle the redirection automatically. I’ll probably slap together a custom 404 page so that visitors don’t get a generic IE/ASP.NET error page, but it’d be cool to have them just move on to the new address. Any ideas on that?
• I updated BlogJet with the new DasBlog settings… it has a built-in profile for DasBlog, so this was actually pretty easy. If you do this, don’t let the default profile’s use of /blogger.aspx throw you off — it works fine under the hood. I haven’t looked at the source, but it seems DasBlog’s HTTP handler catches that URL request and handles the web service calls automatically. I was pleased with BlogJet in the .Text days and it handled converting to the new system without a hitch. Very slick.
• DasBlog has a CAPTCHA system for discouraging blog spammers, as well as a “Blacklist” feature. I haven’t found any docs on how to use that Blacklist feature (looks like it used to be automated, but there were some problems with that), but hopefully a quick forum post will clear it up. I’m also surprised not to see an option to moderate comments.

I’m sure I’ll be tweaking settings over time as I learn my way around, but so far it seems good. I really like what I’ve seen so far of the DasBlog internals and it fits my needs great. Adding my own theme is the next step and hopefully the CAPTCHA system for comments will keep the spammers at bay.

I finally settled on dasBlog for the new blog engine and this will be my last post using the older .Text. I spent time with both dasBlog and Community Server, but in the end dasBlog won out. Some of my thoughts on the decision were:

• dasBlog is much easier to get up and running quickly.
• Getting Community Server running for a basic, one-person site seemed more of a hassle than it needs to be… rather than having it be an option during the install, you have to go through a bunch of config files and modify the HTTP handlers to redirect requests to the single-person blog. For someone who just wants to have a basic personal site and not spend a bunch of time doing web development and/or site administration, it just seemed too arduous.
• I liked that Community Server included photo galleries, but there are lots of other options for this, including NGallery (on which the CS Galleries are built). Plus, it didn’t seem clear to me that the galleries and the blog could appear to be different sites (e.g. each on a different subdomain).
• dasBlog seemed to have much better performance (both were tested on the same machine). While I didn’t dig into the code to see why this was, my assumption is that CS just has a lot more plumbing underneath it.
• Surprisingly, I found converting existing .Text posts to dasBlog to be easier and more straightforward than converting them to Community Server. The nice thing about dasBlog is that its native storage is XML files, so re-recreating the archive is pretty easy.

So now I’ve got it up and running on my local machine and need to start the process of going to the server. So far, it looks like this involves:

• Getting it up on a temporary subdomain so I can make sure I set remote permissions correctly.
• Transferring all current posts.
• Changing dasBlog to use a FeedBurner feed instead of its local feed. Also make sure that the old .Text feed URL is redirected with 301 to the FeedBurner feed.
• Archive the old site.
• Move the new site to the old site’s subdomain.
• The only other thing remaining that I see will be to find a way to correctly redirect URLs for old posts to their new URLs under dasBlog. Not sure how to do that yet, or even if it can be done in a straightforward way (e.g. without hand-redirecting each URL). I’m open to suggestions on this one.
• Figure out dasBlog’s themes and templates so I can do something original (though the canned themes are actually pretty nice).

So… here goes.

I got around to installing the latest CodeRush and Refactor Pro this morning and was pleasantly surprised… the install recognizes that I had both VS.NET 2003 and VS.NET 2005 installed and offers to register the add-ins with both IDEs. I was expecting to need two installs, each specific to a different version of the IDE (seems most control libraries are going this route right now).

Even cooler was that the settings and preferences I set in 2005 were used for the 2003 install as well. Given the ton of options CR and R! make available, it was nice not to have to wade through all the preferences twice! Well done, DevExpress!

As a hobbyist musician, I don’t write many music/composition related posts here, but this incident is worth noting. A couple of years ago, I purchased a sample CD called “Fat Boy Slim – Skip To My Loops”, distributed by AMG UK. I purchased it from an online retailer and it came in a shrinkwrap package. When it arrived, I opened it up and listened through its contents. It wasn’t right for the project I had in mind (I thought the MP3 demo files provided by the site I bought it from were pretty much the best the CD had to offer)… so it went on the shelf.

Last week, I was organizing and planned to list a bunch of stuff I no longer use on Ebay, including this sample CD. I listed it and then had an email from Ebay this morning informing me that the listing had been removed for “copyrights violation”. I was thrown by this because I made it clear in my listing that this disc was an original disc, with the original case, and documentation. I know that sample libraries are pirated all the time and wanted to make clear that this was not a copy. In any case, the email from Ebay had an email address in it for the copyright holder and suggested that I use that address if I have questions on why my listing was pulled.

So I sent email to designerbaby@mac.com to see what rights had been violated. This is when the fun started.

“Matt”, apparently the guy in charge at AMG UK, wrote to explain that the license couldn’t be transferred and that if someone bought it, they could “innocently get in trouble” and would have “bought nothing in effect”. It didn’t make sense to me, so I asked him to clarify how it was different from plain old music audio CDs – which are bought and sold second-hand all the time. Or from software applications that are legitimately sold by one party to another (provided the seller no longer uses it and didn’t use what they sold for an upgraded version that they are still using). My question was, if I’m not keeping a copy for myself and I haven’t used it in any projects, how is it different from selling a used music CD if I didn’t copy it or leave it on my MP3 player? I also explained that as a software developer, I’m sensitive to piracy of software and developers are, of course, free to license their work however they like… but that this type of approach wasn’t making sense to me.

For someone in charge of a consumer-oriented business, his follow-up was unbelievably condescending and rude. Some choice quotes:

• That's shareware basically, are you really saying you thought sample CDs were shareware or something. Get back on some kind of sensible track... [this was after I asked about the license PDF on their web site, which speaks specifically to commercial use of the samples.]
• If you're looking for a consumer example that's better you could use going to the movies. You can't give your ticket to someone else if you didn't like the film, etc. [Of course not, but I can’t un-watch a movie. I couldn’t un-use the samples either if I’d ever used them in any work]
• Or what about taking samples from the music CD? Is that OK? No? Hmmm, maybe there's your difference? [in response to my question about how music CDs are re-sold all the time… since when is sampling a music CD for your own work acceptable, and how did we make this leap?]
• If a demo song exclusively uses samples from the CD too I can't see how you can have any complaint about that either, you can make that exact track using the CD, how can it be 'nothing like'? That's plain daft. [”Daft”? Nice… now I’m an idiot for thinking that the demo files for the CD weren’t representative of the discs overall content. Matt apparently never bought a CD he didn’t like based on one radio hit that he heard.]
• The FACT of the matter is few people will say they 'never used' the samples and even less will not have kept some if not all of them and have the opportunity to use them in the future. [Ah, here’s the crux of it. My statements that I haven’t used it and didn’t make a copy are clearly not to be trusted. Few people are NOT pirates.]
• You should avoid all sample libraries probably if you didn't like this one anyway, many think it's still one of the best ever released. [In addition to being daft, I also seem to have poor musical taste… my not being happy with this particular disc likely means I won’t like any commercial sample libraries. Don’t tell Sony, with whom I’ve spent thousands.]
• All you really need to do is understand a few simple ideas and know what you're buying, then there's no problem. Not only didn't you understand the basic concept, you seem to think the samples you heard in advance and are on the CD somehow misrepresent it although they're all there too - the whole thing seems to have been one big haze. [Yes, I’m in a big haze.]
• If you're really a software developer this is like page one stuff and should be easy to understand. You're not a software developer right? I claim my £10 prize! [Of course, I’m not. I’m actually a guy who re-sells sub-par sample CDs on Ebay for a living.]

Nice, huh? This is how the guy in charge at AMG UK treats a paying customer who’s not clear on how the licensing of their sample CDs is different from other copyrights. Ask some questions and get treated like both a criminal and an idiot. But I suppose when your customers are stuck with a product they don’t want and don’t have any options for giving it to someone who might actually use it, you can treat people this way.

My suggestion would be to avoid AMG UK’s products altogether. I’ll be passing that suggestion on to friends and colleagues, as well as various music discussion groups I frequent.

UPDATE: Just as I finished writing the above, I received Matt’s latest email to me, which is included in its entirety below. Anyone coming across this post can make their own decisions on doing business with AMG UK or not. My response to this was simply “I’ve said all I need to say on the matter. Thanks for clarifying the license terms.” and a link to this blog post.

> With nearly any consumer software package, I *can* resell my license
> to someone else if I'm no longer using it (provided I didn't use the
> license I'm selling to upgrade to a newer version that I *am* using).

That's rubbish.

So audio CDs
> can be legally re-sold and most software licenses can as well...

Ditto.

The buyer
> just takes the rights that the seller had (and no longer has). It's
> apparently your sample CDs that are licensed differently. So now I know.
>
Pretty much all software is like this. Whether you realise it or not, ask someone and they'll tell you. Then you'll know about that as well as sample software.
 
> In any case, your condescending and inappropriate response to my
> questions,

Whatever. That's your problem rather than mine I think. Read the mails again and if there's anything that can even be interpreted as rude I'll be amazed. It's an easy out if you've got no answer that makes any sense.

> as well as your rush to treat me as though I'm pirating the disc,

This is plain wrong. It's never been suggested. My objection to eBay wasn't on that basis and I never said anything of the such. Although I've never suggested it the idea that would wouldn't keep a copy of the data on the 'off chance' you might need it one day is as fanciful as your other ideas.
In your World where people are legitimately transferring software licenses I imagine you're suggesting that they all delete it too I suppose? Anyone with half an idea knows that over 90% will not of course.

simply
> confirms my decision about your business. Thanks.
>
Given your track record of:

A) Knowing nothing about software licensing - your business?
B) Not believing the demo made with samples from a CD is a valid representation of it.
C) Believing I have been rude (prior to this mail) or accused you of pirating our work.

I think it's fair to assume your 'decision' is equally ill-informed as most of your factually unsupportable decisions have been so far. The fact you can get the founder of a successful and long-established business to 'waste' so much time with someone on a Saturday (the facts) is what actually says more about AMG than whatever 'decision' you've come to. You actually wouldn't get that degree of *respect* from anyone else in my business I doubt although I'm sure you will be incapable of appreciating that fact along with the others that should have been equally obvious.

Cheers - Matt 8)