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? 

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...

I mentioned that I'd be doing this in an earlier post, but I underwent Achilles tendon repair surgery just a few days ago. It's been an adventure, with several new constraints added to my daily life... primarily, I have to stay completely off my right leg. It can't bear weight at any time and should be elevated as much as possible. When I do move around for the occasional personal-hygiene break, I'm on crutches.

It's been this way since the surgery on Tuesday and will continue until March 5, when I have the post-surgical followup with the surgeon. At that point, he'll take the splint/bandages off and check things out. From there, it'll either be a hard cast for a few weeks or more of this splint/bandage thing that I'm currently in.

The surgery itself went very well (I'm told -- I was out)... I was given the option of a "nerve block" just prior to the surgery. Basically, the anesthesiologist (try typing THAT on pain meds) shoots an anesthetic into the back of my right leg, just above the knee. That completely numbed it from the knee down for about 18 hours. It made the period immediately following the surgery a little more bearable as I only had to deal with the grogginess of being completely under and not the additional pain in my leg. The surgeon told me that the rupture was up a little higher on the leg than is normal, but the repair went well and "the fibers look good."

Once the nerve block wore off, though, it was time to make a dent in the pain prescription. It still hurts pretty bad when those wear off. The pain is mostly a combination of sharp pain and swelling. When the leg's wrapped up as tight as mine is and then needs to swell... well, there's nowhere really for it to go.

Washing up in the morning is a trick, but we're getting a routine down... mostly, it's just really hard being confined to either a bed or a couch for this long (and over a week to go). There's only so much a guy can do to occupy his time when one leg has to be at nose level all the time.

I can't imagine going through this alone and my wife has been absolutely wonderful, helpful, and supportive for me. I'm really NOT a very good patient. 

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.

I've mentioned several times here that I've played soccer off and on for most of my life. I played outdoor soccer year-round as a kid in California, then checked out indoor soccer after we moved to Colorado and also started coaching youth soccer several years ago. Last weekend, my soccer-related activities came to a screeching halt as I ruptured the Achilles tendon in my right leg.

It happened during an indoor game with our company team last Sunday. About 30 seconds into the game, I received the ball, turned toward the goal, and suddenly felt like I'd been toe-kicked right above my right heel. I also felt a "pop" and stumbled forward. I limped/hopped my way off the field, not sure what had happened but it was clear that something was very wrong with my foot. I could mostly control it, but not well and it wouldn't hold weight. I learned later that a couple other guys on the team heard the "pop". Yikes.

I managed to drive myself home and then we went to the ER to have it looked at. They didn't even need to take any images of it to know what had happened... apparently, it's that obvious when it happens. I was splinted up, given pain meds and crutches, and referred to an orthopedic surgeon.

So this week has really sucked... As if the pain in my lower right leg weren't enough, I'm using crutches for the first time in my life. Short distances aren't too bad, but a few longer ventures this week have left my wrists and armpits very sore. And I really don't like being so dependent on others for simple things.

Anyway, I've got surgery scheduled for this Tuesday afternoon. It's an out-patient procedure that takes a couple of hours or so. After that, I have to stay off it for 10 days and will be in a cast for 6 weeks or so. Then comes the torture physical therapy... but, I'm told that I can be back on the field later this year (end of summer or fall). Assuming, of course, that I feel like I can trust it... maybe the trust will come back as it gets stretched and strengthened this spring. We'll see.

I learned that this is a very common sports-related injury for men as we get older, especially those who play sports with a lot of start-stop motion. I stretch pretty regularly and my calves are fairly strong, but it's "just one of those things". The more interesting fact is that it almost never happens with women. I'm told that the only time Achilles problems occur for women is when they frequently wear high-heels.

So... if this weblog gets some really wacky posts over the next couple of weeks, blame it on the meds.

After my post about signing up for Share Your OPML, I spent some more time cleaning up feeds and getting an OPML file available for use. As I mentioned in the post, when I put an OPML file on my server and pointed the SYO site at it, it didn't work (just a blank page). Uploading a file directly to their server worked great. I found that even when trying to fetch that file myself via the browser or wget, I got a 404 error -- despite it clearly being in the right place.

It turns out that the SYO service couldn't see the file, and it was my fault... the sub-domain on my server didn't have the MIME type information it needed for an OPML file. Now that that has been entered, I went back to SYO and confirmed that it's working correctly. I think the only thing SYO could have done differently would have been to let me know that the file wasn't found (404)... but it's working (and fast) now, so all's well.

Thanks to Dan who commented on the original post, looking for details so he could look into the issue on the service.

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.

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.

(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. 

I've been meaning to try the BlogMailr service <http://www.blogmailr.com> from the guys at
Telligent <http://www.telligent.com> for a while now. Their "supported blogs
<http://www.blogmailr.com/supported-blogs/> " page makes it look as if dasBlog
<http://www.dasblog.info/> support is a bit sketchy, so we'll see. I'm also not clear on
how all the formatting, image placement, and attachments might (or might not) work, but here
goes.

The signup process was certainly very easy, providing just an URL and username/password
combo... it didn't ask for any sort of FTP or API settings, so we'll see I'm not sure how an
attachment will work out here.

Let's see: (Photoshop Actions File I downloaded a while back for B&W Conversions)

[removed]