I was attempting to update the Java on my Vista box, so I could use some horrid download manager (don't ask) and got this wonderful little gem of a message:

Going to java.com and clicking through did get me to a JRE setup I was allowed to install.

Reading blogs today is an exercise in frustration.

NASA is conducting an online poll to name Node 3 of the ISS, which will be installed in December.  One of the choices is Serenity.  It’s a good name, and fits well with Unity and Harmony (the names for Nodes 1 and 2) and of course it’s also the name of the ship in Firefly.

 

Go vote.

Trey and I have been watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars since it's season premiered.  It's somewhat of a bonding thing.  Mary says I've corrupted him.  8-)  Now Fox have finally premiered Dollhouse (a show I really wanted to watch - or at least try) in the same timeslot.  I realize that Turner and Fox are the TV equivalent of mortal enemies (bear with me, it fits the theme) but couldn't they have realized that SciFi people may already be watching TV Friday nights.  I'm guessing Fox was just trying to recapitalize on the old X-Files Friday night.

At least they both have full episode streaming which is Mac friendly.

Carl shot a few off camera flash shots to play with his new toys, and one of them had something I meant to ask him about, so as an experiment, I decided to add a note to the picture.

As we were discussing it, he decided he didn’t quite agree with my comment, and went to see what he could do about it.  It turns out the photo owner can do pretty much anything they want with the notes placed on their photos (change the text, move and resize them, or delete them.)  The bizarre bit is that when he changed the text, the note was still attributed to me.  We never looked at it as someone besides one of us, but it does make you realize that you might want to trust the person who’s photo you are commenting on, otherwise they could make you look like a real jerk by changing your note.

Free Library of Philadelphia has a great session with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done.

I found it very strange to see this in my list of recommended books on Amazon’s home page.  Clicking through on the “Why is this recommended for you?” link pointed out that this book is written by David Allen.  No, it doesn’t appear that it is that David Allen, but obviously Amazon doesn’t know that.

In quite a departure from their original stance on digital music distribution, Metallica is selling each of their shows from their current North America tour as a digital download.  I picked up the FLAC version of their Houston show for $13.  They also have MP3s for $10.  The quality is really good.  They have the right amount of crowd noise, and the balance between James and the band is good.

Browsing around their site, they also have 20 older concerts available for free download.

For years, my employer has been almost anti-Microsoft.  Yes, we always had Windows laptops with Office on them, but the entire network backend was Sun.  My mailbox is on a Sun Java System Communication server, which I access via LDAP.  We also have a Sun online calendar server, but I've never used it.  I've actually always just had Outlook on my work machine also access my personal Exchange account.  Tasks, Calendar entries, and Contacts lived in my personal account, and was easily synchronized to my phone.

Now my employer is testing Microsoft Exchange as a mail and calendar environment.  I'm not on that pilot, but I do have a new laptop with our newly released Vista image, which appears to assume I'm on that pilot.  I attempted to add my personal Exchange account to Outlook, which ended up in a vicious cycle of authentication pop-ups for the Global Catalog on my personal network and the work network.  This has caused it to have a ton of trouble actually receiving any mail.  I usually take my Mac to the office, and Outlook Web Access works quite well, so I don't have an issue reading my personal mail, but I do only want to have a single calendar, which is available to my on my personal machines, on my phone, and on my work machine.

After a bit of Googling, I decided Google was the answer.  Google calendar and the Google Calendar Sync plugin for Outlook.  Basically what this does is on a scheduled basis, it synchronizes your Outlook calendar (in my case a local PST based one on my work machine, and an Exchange based one on a machine on my home network) with your Google Calendar.  It can either be two way or one way (you specify which one way.)  I'm using two-way on both machine.  So far I haven't had any sync issues.

My only complaint so far is that Google's calendar doesn't have any tagging, labeling, categorizing support.  Using the web interface only, you can create separate calendars, and they are color coded.  I suspect that this is how they intend people to segregate their different appointment types.  Unfortunately, the Outlook sync app can only sync one Outlook calendar with your main Google calendar.  I generally categorize (which color codes) all my Outlook calendar items.  Personal, work, Scouts, etc.  Unfortunately for now, all that data doesn't make it into Google's world, so also doesn't make it back and forth between the two copies of Outlook.

I was hoping that Windows Live Calendar would be a solution, but it doesn't seem to sync, that plugin seems to add Live as a new data store in Outlook.  Thread here.

Even though it has been out for a while, I just attempted to use the Amazon Universal Wish List feature.  This is really cool.  It found the product image, and grabbed the Web Page title.  I was given the opportunity to change the item title, price, and add a comment.  When viewing my wishlist, it sits right along side everything else, with only slight differences.  Great job Amazon.

I'm been reading feeds in Google Reader for quite a while now.  It's full of AJAX-y goodness, plus the convenience of being able to read my feeds anywhere is fantastic.  I recently started "sharing" feed items that interest me.  (Mostly to enhance my own memory, but they are also down there in the left sidebar, or you can subscribe here.) 

Google recently added a notes feature to Google Reader, which allows you to add a note to any shared items, but also allows you to create notes and share items from any page on the web via a bookmarklet.  At this point Google Reader could almost be used as a full-fledged blogging platform.  Neat.

On both a Windows XP and a Leopard Mac machine, today's Firefox update failed when trying to use the partial update, and had to resort to a full update download.  The Full download seems to have worked on both machines.

A New ASCII?  Well, something.  I've seen this before, but it is always brilliant.  Star Wars Episode IV via Telnet all done in ASCII art.  Just  telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

 

I have 10 invites to the Evernote beta if you're interested in checking it out.  Just comment here (make sure you give me a real email address) and I'll have them send you one.

Wow, this is cool.  Adobe now has a beta of their online, flash-based, light image editor, Adobe Photoshop Express.  It is seriously fast.  It can do most of the basic editing things that you expect from a free app (crop, rotate, red-eye removal, color balance, change to B&W, etc.)

The service comes with 2GB of storage, and a flash based photo gallery.  The only thing that wasn't obvious is how to download the images in the gallery.  The images in the gallery also don't seem to have much in the way of metadata.

Cool.

and it can purchase and download books over the air.  I'm a big fan of eReader, having found them to have a good selection of current titles, a nice reader, and a sensible DRM scheme (encrypted with your CC#.)  This just makes it better.  Access to your online bookshelf does indeed work, and with 3G downloading a title is pretty quick.  And you can't beat the price.

thanks jkOnTheRun

I was taking a quick look at my blog statistics to see if people were handing the redirect ok, and noticed some interesting data in the User Agent info.  Four obvious online news readers are subscribed to my blog, and as you can see, at least among my few readers, Google Reader is the most popular.  It goes right along with what Carl said last month.

NewsAlloy/1.1 (http://www.NewsAlloy.com; 1 subscribers)
Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 1 subscriber)
Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; fee...
NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 1 subscribers)

Scott Handelman is pointing to the updated Windows Live Writer, and is including some hacks to it and dasBlog which make it even more useful.  The thing that really interests me is its ability to upload images using the metaWebLog newMediaObject method.  This was the main thing holding me back from using WLW all the time.  I think I'll have to check it out.

No this isn't some smack the monkey flash ad, but rather an art/web expirement by Bill Shackleford of The Ohio State University Art and Technology show "Digescape".  Basically, every unique incoming click adds one second to the air compressor, with the hope of popping a six foot diameter baloon in less than one day.

"Blogged"click here

One of my colleagues showed me the Google Photo Screensaver, and I thought it was quite nice, so I wanted to install it.  The unfortunate thing is it is part of the Google Pack, and requires you to install it through the Google Updater, which for some reason isn't Run as friendly.  Oh well.  There are a collection of site pointing to a Google stripped version of it, but I'm a little nervous about that one.

So I got it installed, and the screensaver is pretty good.  The fact that the first four images are the Google logo (on my dual-screen system) is a little annoying, but I can live with it.  I like the fact that you can add multiple sources for the images (that's much better than the XP default one.)  I stuck a bunch of photos from My Pictures, as well as the share on our server where we store our digital photos.  It seems to handle it ok, except it doesn't do such a good job of randomizing.  It seems to select a few subdirectories, and randomizes from within those.

Craig Pringle shows us how you can use one of the higher SKUs of Windows Vista and a Wacom digitizer to have a true ink experience, including TIP, flicks, and ink in One Note.  Maybe I should put Vista on my desktop, just for this...

I got home last night, and Mary says, I left a surprise for you on your desk.

Jeri Ryan is on the cover if this month's FHM magazine, and she picked me up a copy.  How cool is that?

Microsoft/Sysinternals has migrated most (all?) of their utilities onto a MS.com site.  Interstinngly enough, for all the Microsoft look that it has, it still has a Sysinternal feel.  They've updatted several tools, as well as combining a few of my favorites (RegMon and FileMon).  Take a look.  I've already downloaded Process Monitor.

Finally.  Now all I need to do is backup, and upgrade.  I'm excited.  Check out all the details at Scott's blog.

This is just brilliant.  Chris Pratley points to Mike Tholfsen's upcoming smash hit "My One and Only OneNote".  Ok, so smash hit is probably a bit far fetched, but Mike is definitely talented.  The music is good, and he has a good singing voice.  Plus, who can beat a song based about everyone's favorite cult note taking app?

I like it.  I'm going to download it.

Horray, Scott Hanselman has added the ability for dasBlog to select a different theme for Mobile devices.  This is something I asked about a while ago, and I'm really glad to see its finally coming out.  That is, if 1.9 ever ships.

Holy hand grenades, Batman.  Check out this list of indispensable tools that Scott Hanselman has put together.  I'm going to be rebuilding my work machine next month.  I need to do this list for myself, so I'll plan on posting it here.  (by the way. my list is way shorter.)

Gallery has released a VMWare image with a fully functioning LAMP environment with both current versions of Gallery.  I think this is fantastic.  Our Gallery is running on VMWare Server, and I find the whole environment to work really well.  However, I do see some challenges if you deploy your Gallery from this image, and don't know anything about it.  How do you do upgrades?  Maybe they will encourage the use of the Pre-Installer?

I'm sure you've heard about the Chuck Norris Facts.  Well, now's there's another site along the same vein, except on crypto.  Enter Bruce Schneier Facts.  hilarious.

I downloaded a copy of Windows Live Writer, and I'd have to say its pretty slick.  It looks pretty, and has a Drafts and Recent Posts support that looks really nice.  dasBlog doesn't support uploading images from it, so if someone is reading, that would be a nice feature.  Otherwise, I can always use the web interface for loading images.  The other thing it doesn't support which would be nice is post dating (that doesn't even seem to be a feature of the app, at least not yet.  It is beta.)

 

I think I'll play around with this a bit.

BTW, this is being posted with it.

I noticed a bright an shiny new item on Google's homepage this morning:
New! Personalize your computer with gadgets from Google Desktop.  They look just like Yahoo Widgets, Vista Gadgets, or Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets.  Do we really need another source for these things?  (although this one does look interesting, if you're already using Google Calendar - I'm not.)

Cnet is reporting that Microsoft has bought Winternals, including its products, and the Sysinternals freeware tools and community.  The article says that the purchase was less about the products, and more as a way to hire the two co-founders of Winternals.  Sysinternals website is getting hammered, but I was able to get in to Mark's blog.  Whew, 240 comments so far.  nothing terribly interesting in the blog entry that isn't covered in the cnet article, except Mark's commitment to continue to blog on the sysinternal's site.

I've used both the sysinternals and wininternal's tools, and they are top notch.  This is a great move for those guys, and I hope that it will bring great new things to windows as a platform.  Hopefully Mark will still have time to debug Sony's future rootkits.  8-)

Roy Osherove is running a geek desktop contest.  The grand prize is a Premium MSDN subscription (that's a seriously cool prize.)  Here's my entry:

Click to view a larger size.

A long, long time ago (I can still remember), Toys R Us had their own website, complete with a B2C engine for online purchases, wish lists, etc.  Several years ago, they moved their entire operation to Amazon.  Today I received an email announcing their new online store, which appears to be totally separate again.  I wonderd what happened, so off to google I went.  MSNBC.com reports that Toys R Us sued Amazon, for diluting their online presense, by allowing other toy companies onto Amazon.com.  The judge agreed with Toys R Us, but didn't award any monetary damages.

I have to say that Amazon.com has really been pissing me off these days.  There are so many different companies selling stuff through Amazon, I rarely find things that are actually sold by Amazon (except books.)  An of course Amazon doesn't control anything except the clicks when purchasing from one of these stores.  Now, don't get me wrong, there's still value in the commentary that other people provide on products there, but its no longer my first online stop for purchases.

In an apparent move to combat lost sales due to VMWare Player being free, Microsoft has decided to give away Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for free.  It also says that versio 2007 will be free come next year.  I think I'll stick with VMWare, but this is cool anyway.

Check out Stellarium, this month's SF project of the month.  Stellarium is a cross platform, open source, planetarium for your PC.  Cool.

David Rasmussen (presumably a member of the One Note team) has started a new One Note focused blog.  This will be one to watch.

I still think online backups have a place in most people's backup strategy.  Lifehacker points to a PC World article reviewing 17 offerings.  I've yet to find the perfect choice for our home network, but that's not for lack of offerings.

ABC has started streaming full episodes of their Prime Time shows, starting the day after they air over the air.  The above screenshot (click for the full sized view) is of the viewer on a 1024x768 machine.  I didn't seem to be able to make the video any larger (although I didn't read the help, so it may be there.)  The player is flash based.  The ads are annoying.  They obliterate the entire player, and thus are much larger than the video size.  You also have to click to continue the video after the ad finishes playing.

I can't see that this will get much use.  Who wants to watch a tiny video on your PC, while you have a fast enough connection to stream it.  I can see downloading, but I guess they don't want to infringe on the iTunes sales.  I suspect I'll have to be really desparate to watch one of these completely.

I've been interested in trying Vault for years, but can't seem to overcome the, "but Source Safe is free argument."  Assuming you're in the market for one of SourceGear's tools, they are offering a discount, as an excuse to try out their shopping cart software.

In the ad email I received from eReader.com (my favorite eBook store, in case you didn't know) they had a small sidebar listing several books you should have read to prepare you for the daVinci Code movie coming out next month.  Here's the list:

• The Da Vinci Code
• The Sion Revelation
• Templar Revelation
• The Jesus Paper
• Secrets of Judas

I've been thinking about purchasing PGP Desktop, mostly for the secure email ability.  I use Outlook against an Exchange server for my email.  From what the PGP website says, I need PGP Desktop Pro instead of the Home edition (a $100 difference in price, unless I go the annual subscription route.)  The thing I can't quite figure out is why, if the Home version supports Outlook, does Exchange make a difference.  Its not like the server is doing anything with my key (or at least it better not be.)  I searched through their knowledge base, and there's actually not a lot of information, so I went searching for the ability to post a question, or at least send an email.  It doesn't look like that's possible, unless you've paid for support.  If you want pre-sales support, they want you to call them.  Well guess what, they aren't answering the phones at 10:20 pm. Oh well, an X.509 certificate from        Verisign is quite a bit cheaper anyways.

I remember seeing all the postings last week about the Firefox and Thunderbird upgrades, but I didn't really have time to mess with it.  This morning, I fired up Thunderbird, and up pops the following dialog:

This is a really nice way to do upgrades.  Nice and painless.

Great new trailer posted for The DaVinci Code movie.

Quicktime teaser available here.

Lifehacker points to a cool download: Desktop Earth 2.0. 


I'm not sure if its cool enough to give up my girls, but its still cool.

Lifehacker pointed to an interesting looking application, DeskTask.  It connects to your Outlook, and posts your calendar and task information in a transparent window on your desktop.  Cool.  The posted screenshot kind of reminds me of Dashboard on a Pocket PC.  I've downloaded it, and installed it.  It doesn't seem to do anything.  I wonder if it doesn't like Outlook 122007.

How to Do Stuff posted a guide on building your own hollowed out book type safe.  Amazon sells several different types.  I think I've even seen them at Barnes & Noble.  One of the cool comments is a guy who made an iPod case out of a Moleskine.  Cool.

T-Mobile is offering all T-Mobile wireless subscribers free WiFi on weekends at all their hotspots.  Just go to a particular webpage, type in your phone number, and they'll SMS you an access code.  Cool.

Its a site that allows you to create a map showing the states you've been to.  There's also another site that will allow you to create a map with the countries you've been to (mine there is much less impressive.)

create your own visited states map or check out these Google Hacks.

Apple has posted a new trailer for X-Men The Last Stand.  It looks really awesome, and Jean Grey is back!

Redmond magazine current issue has an article (text online) with user tips about fighting spyware.  It features a quote from me about not letting users run as Administrators, and the print (and pdf) version includes a picture.  I get the pdf version, but I'd like to have a print version for posterity's sake.

I've been using FolderShare for a while now, and except for my problem where it decides to freak out when mobsync runs, its worked quite well.  Today when logging in to their site to make some configuration changes I was greeted with this in the page header:

Its been discussed for quite a while that this was obviously going to be part of the Windows Live offering.  I've even heard that the FolderShare technology is in the new Windows Live Messenger client.  I guess I find it interesting the they stuck the Beta moniker on it.  This is an app that has been commercial for quite a while before the Microsoft acquisition.  Maybe they are making changes to the service to further integrate it into the rest of the Windows Live offerings?  Maybe they are working on moving the backend from php to apsx?  I expect to see Passport logins on this service sometime soon.  Let's hope the pricing remains reasonable, or that it gets bundled with other parts of the Live offering (which seem to have decent pricing so far.)

Scoble has decided that he's returning his Cingular EDGE card in favor of a Verizon EVDO card.  The last time I played with a Verizon EVDO card, I was unimpressed.  Maybe it was reception.

It’s only been a couple of years, and Apple is about to sell its 1 billionth iTunes track.  You can't click on the Apple site without seeing the counter and on some pages a really nifty scrolling record of "recently purchased" track album art.  I had it up on the screen and 1,000 tacks were purchased in just less than 1 minute.  By my math that’s less than 6 days until the 1 billion mark is hit.  I wonder if sales will accelerate as people try to win the uber-cool Grand Prize for buying track number 1 billion.

This is a really interesting idea if your organizatio is heavy into RSS and uses Exchange.  Rather than have your users all downloading RSS feeds, have your Exchange server do it.  Glen Scales has posted a script which will download an RSS feed, and post items into a Public folder via CDO.

This is so cool.  Just like their free player, VMWare now has a free Server virtualization platform.  I'm definitely considering using this in our home network.  Now all I have to decide is what host OS to run it under, Linux or Windows?

Here's a really great use for Google maps.  Connect to Family Watchdog, type in your home (school, day care, office, whatever) address, and it will query your local sex offender database, and post your house along with marks showing where they live.  For Texas, when you click the dots marking the offenders, it give you their name, and picture, and other relevant information.

AskMen has posted thier list of the 99 most desirable women for 2006. 

Jessica Alba - number 1.

Natalie Portman comes in at number 9.

Jennifer Garner comes in at number 66.

I haven't managed to read it yet (I know, its only 21 pages, what am I waiting for), but Microsoft has posted a whitepaper on running as a non-user (or least privilege to user accounts.)  Download.

Applet posted a trailer for an upcoming movie called UltraViolet. Starring the ultra-hot Milla Jovovich, it looks like its along the same vein as Dark Angel (the government creates super soldiers, and then decides they want them dead. Guess what, its not that easy.)

In the same vein as the Google pack, but without the auto-update goodness, and Real Player badness, Lifehacker has posted their Lifehacker Pack.  Ok, so its basically just a list of good free or open source software downloads.  The comments are good, too.

The wife and I were at our new local Borders store yesterday.  We mostly stopped in to see how it compared to Barnes & Noble.  We did manage to spend $40, however.  It seemed to have more non-book things (cards, CDs, DVDs, etc.) but less books.  The shelving was all very modern, as though it had come from IKEA.  There's something about the dark wood shelves that BN uses that just makes it feel like a bookstore.

One of the really cool things Borders did have are touch screen info kiosks.  I used one to look up Robert Scoble and Shel Isreal's Naked Conversations.  They didn't have any.  It said something to the effect of "Its on its way.  Talk to the info desk and you could have it in 3 - 5 days."  I'm not sure if that means they've ordered stock which will be delivered in 3-5 days, and they can hold one, or that its special order.

BTW, Robert and Shel, where's the eReader or MS Reader version?  Adobe Reader is just horrible on my Jam.  I love reading eReader books on my Jam.

DasBlog has a really nice WYSIWYG online post editor.  Unfortunately, you have to be really careful.  I just had a nice long post written, and accidentally used the same tab to change sites.  Post lost.  Crap.

Lifehacker has been posting a series of PC desktops, trying to find the most useful.  One of the desktops from user Rooze had a screenshot of their monthly calendar on it.  I've been thinking how useful this would be, but why does it have to be a screenshot?  I've got web access to my calendar through Outlook Web Access (OWA.)  If your organization uses Exchange, or you have a hosted Exchange account, you probably do too.  Heck, you can probably do something similar with a Yahoo calendar.

Thanks to KC Lemson's blog entry on OWA URL parameters, I was well on my way to figuring it out.

Calendar monthly view:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Calendar/?Cmd=contents&view=monthly

Calendar weekly view:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Calendar/?Cmd=contents&view=weekly

Calendar daily view:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Calendar/?Cmd=contents

For the tasks, I found the Next Seven Days view to be the most useful.  Active Tasks seems like it would make more sense, but it includes Tasks which don't have a due date, which to me means someday/maybe:
https://server.company.com/exchange/useralias/Tasks/?Cmd=contents&veiw=Next%20Seven%20Days

I will probably not keep this much information on my desktop.  For one, I usually have Outlook open, but this might be useful once in a while.  For another, the 1024x768 resolution of my Tablet doesn't lend itself to this much information.  Maybe I should just have the Monthly view?

Here's a screenshot with the monthly calendar view, daily calendar view, and tasks (yes that's right and actual productive day today with no meetings scheduled!!)

Click for a larger view

By the way, here's the wallpaper behind the calendars.

"A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice." -Edgar Watson Howe, novelist and editor (1853-1937)

From AWAD today.  BTW, this is a great daily email with cool words and quotes in it.

I've veen using FolderShare to keep my work documents synchronized between my work laptop and my tablet.  It works pretty well, but I've got a few suggestions.

1.  It needs to be more aware of Offline Folder synchronization.  It still freaks out everytime mobsync runs.  Now that its a Microsoft product, hopefully something can be done about this.  Maybe Scoble is listening, and can put a bug in someone's ear for me.

2.  It doesn't give the user any manual control over conflict resolution.  If something comes up (such as a file being in use) the two options it gives you are Retry and Exit.  Exit really means shutdown FolderShare and don't sync anything at all.  Of course the dialog is system model, and really big.  Where's the "skip this file" button?  Where's the "use the file on this computer" button?  Where's the "keep both copies of this file" button? 

Overall, I really like FolderShare.  It does exactly what I need it to do.  Obviously we'd like to see a bit of Grooves P2P technology where it detects when the clients are local to each other, and doesn't funnel all the transfer across the internet, but other wise its working pretty well.

Maybe Microsoft will take Loren's suggestion to Google, and build it into FolderShare Live.  The idea is you've got an online backup account that synchronizes with your machine.  There are a ton of services that do this today, but none that I know of do it in a real-time way like FolderShare does.

Downtown Houston is full of one-way streets, and since I don't go down there very much, I no longer remember which directions most of them go. Well the convention center website to the rescue. They have a pretty good downtown Houston map, which shows the directions of the streets, as well as the location of some of the parking lots near there. Too bad it doesn't show all the parking, that would be really useful.

Watch online here.
His futuristic kitchen, office, and airport PCs were really cool. How do I convince my manager that I need those three huge LCDs? I found their Media Center story really good. Of course they are there to make it sound good, but as long as the DRM all works, it looks pretty impressive.

Colin Walker (of randomelements) has taken Scoble's suggestion to heart, and is making his blog more mobile device freindly.  I just tried it with my blog, and he's right, what a pain.  On my Pocket PC, the content does slim down pretty nicely, but with all the navigation, etc. on the left, you see that first.  I wonder if anyone has started a mobileview for dasBlog.  Or even just the ability to use a different theme based on the user-agent?

feedicons.com has published a standard set of "feed" icons (matching the Firefox and new IE7 ones) except in more colors than just orange. I still need to change my icons here.

Is this the killer productivity app for Windows like QuickSilver is for the Mac? Yesterday I listened to the JKOnTheRun podcast where they interviewed Buzz Bruggeman from ActiveWords. I just installed the demo, and I have to say this is pretty sweet. Basically, it monitors everything you type, and is able to act on special keywords. It sounds really simple, but in the quick amount of time I've been playing with it, I can definitely see how it can improve productivity. I may be buying this one for all my machines.

I do have some initial nits to pick. The biggest one is that its not LUA friendly. Bad, bad, Active words. All of the .aws files it installs are really just MS Access databases, and the user needs write access to them. It also creates a USERS directory under the program directory, and then for each user under that it stores their settings. This really needs to be in the Application Data (or Local Settings\Application Data) portion of the users profile.

It seems that Microsoft has been consorting with the enemy. The IE team has collaborated with Mozilla, and have decided to use the Mozilla icon for feeds in IE and presumably windows. Maybe I should change the icons on my site?

Apple has poted a trailer for The DaVinci Code. Looks fantastic (of course it doesn't hurt that I loved the book.) Tom Hanks as Langdon is an interesting choice, but not one I would have picked. However, Iam McKellen as Sir Leigh is fantastic.

For various reasons, the RSS reader that is built into Outlook 12 isn't working for me, and I'm just a little nervous running intraVnews against the beta, so I'm starting a search for an external RSS reader. My first stop is RSS Bandit. I tried it quite a while ago, and found it to be lacking, but it appears to have improved quite a bit. I especially like that it pulls comments from some blogs to be read right in the reader. Nice.

Scott Hanselman points to a couple of dasBlog forums that I didn't know about. I'll have to check those out.

I've been readily Slashdot for years but lately I've rarely clicked through to the comments. I read it via an aggregator.

With their anti-Microsoft comments, and my pro-Microsoft world, I find it quite tiring. Carl has mentioned that he pulled it out of his aggregator and now only uses it as a home page.

A number of comments and posts have mentioned Digg as then source for geek news. Maybe I should switch.

I've been using w.Bloggar for quite a while, but its times like this when I want a truely offline blogging client ( that supports dasBlog, preferably.)

I pulled several articles out of the aggregator worthy of comment but don't have anything better than OneNote to store offline posts in. Maybe I should find an open source C# client, and hack in some offline support. p.s. My handwriting either sucks, or MS's handwriting recognition still leaves a lot to be desires. Of the four posts I wrote, none converted to text without a lot of help. Of course the several glasses of beer and wine didn't help.

Don’t you love First/Business class?

Go Sydney! MSN has an interesting collection of kickass girls. Alias's Jennifer Garner comes in at #2.

Scott Adams has posted a PDF version of his book God's Debris for free. Download it now.

Do you love tabs, but don't want to use Maxton? Do you prefer the speed and security of Firefox, but occasionally need to use IE? Then have I got the extension for you. IE tab uses the IE engine inside of a Firefox tab. I know, its perverted.

Looks like I'm not the only one having problems.

Hello,

We have received numerous reports this morning of users being unable to access BetaPlace, experiencing long delays, and some reports of download issues. We have escalated the problem and it should be resolved shortly. We appreciate your patience as we work to correct the issue.

Thank you,

Office Customer/Partner Programs Team

Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft, has started a new MSN Spaces blog.  It will be interesting to see how transparent the blog really is.  Subscribed.

I see that there's a new Map module for Gallery. It basically links latitude and longitude info iin your phoitos with a Google map. This is a really cool idea. Now I need to get a GPS, and start geotagging my pictures.

With Microsoft's acquisition of FolderShare, its now free. Even with the problems I had with it during Offline folder synchronization, this type of syncing is exactly what I'm looking for. And the price is good. I'm trying it again.

with a catch. There's a new beta service called mozy that is offering 2 GB of free online backup space. It only supports XP (I wonder if it really only supports XP, or if it will work on Win2k3?) A client runs on your machine to push the files to their server. The client does 448-bit blowfish encryption before the files are uploaded, and 128-bit SSL while the files upload. They get to send you spam.

I liked their list of alternatives:

• Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store them at your brother-in-laws office like it's your religion.
• Pay $100/year for an online backup service that uses old, mediocre software.
• Buy a $200 external hard drive and obsessively "push the button" and hope your office doesn't burn down.
• Do nothing and don't worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating "I'm in my happy place, I'm in my happy place".)
• Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friends server over his DSL line.

Maybe its time to fire up another free gmail account, and give this thing a try.

Check out this clock.

Microsoft has bought FolderShare to be part of Live. Press release.

This should be interesting. I wonder if this will still have similar payment points, and I wonder if the backend will be rewritten in .NET?

This is an interestin new service.  You add your get tagged site to a service, and it keeps track of the bloggers near you.  Scoble has the map in his sidebar.  I didn't really like the look of it, but the idea is interesting.

Yahoo has the abillity to print your own postage stamps with your own photo and caption. Its $16.99 for 20 stamps (which is $0.85 a stamp.) The price goes down if you order more sheets. They are big stamps, 2.5" x 1.5".

Cool. I got an invite from Erica at Lifehacker to be able to post comments on the Gawker media blogs. Thanks, Erica.

Its pretty cool, and the Fullscreen version looks fantastic. Aeon Flux featurette on Apple.com

My email 10-14-2005:

I am trying (for the first time) to use your service, but am failing miserably. I'm trying to upload 6 mega pixel photos that are between 2 & 3 MB. I've tried the one by one method with Firefox, and the quick upload gui with Internet Explorer, but with both tools the uploads failed. I've just tried sending a single file via email to see if that works. I do have broadband internet.

My real question is, do you have a max file size that you allow?

Their response 10-20-2005:

Thank you for contacting walgreens.com customer service. We are currently experiencing an unusually high volume of email. Please accept our apology for the delay of this response. This is in response to your e-mail regarding maximum file size.

In order to provide you with as complete an answer as possible, it will take some extra time to fully research this situation. You will receive a response as soon as more information is available.

If you have any further questions or need additional information regarding our website, please reply to this e-mail, or contact us at the toll free number below.

We at walgreens.com look forward to serving all of your prescription and drugstore needs.

Come on. Does it really take six days (or at best three business days) to tell me they don't know the answer to my question?

Novell has an interesting looking FolderShare like project, built on Mono, called iFolder. There's a Linux based server that is either an open-source simple version, or a commercial complete solution. Clients are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. On the road map is a server-less version, which is currently working between two Linux clients.

This will be an interesting one to keep an eye on, but I don't think its quite ready to use yet (at least not for me.)

FolderShare is working ok. It seems to get confused when I reconnect my tablet to my home network, and my offline files synchronize. I think during that time My Documents isn't actually available, so FolderShare doesn't know what to do. Restarting FolderShare seems to help. I know that I will have to pay for it. The real question is "Is it worth $49 a year?"

I wonder if I can find enough code samples to implement something myself using the FileSystemWatcher class in .NET?

I decided I should try some other places. My next try was Target/Yahoo. They offer the same free 10 4x6 prints. Uploading 5 prints worked flawless. There's even a Firefox extension that allows drag and drop from Windows explorer onto the upload page. I got to the ordering screen, only to find out that not all Target stores are in on this yet. Definitely not any close to us. There are only two listed for the entire Houston area. Their pricing is still good. For printing at a Target store, the cost is $0.20 a print. For delivery its $0.15 a print, plus $1.99 for delivery of up to 50 prints.

We're going to a birthday party tomorrow, so we're going to wait and order after that.

BTW 100 prints mailed to you is $18. Just slightly cheaper than pick up at Walgreens.

I picked up the prints from Walgreens, and they look pretty nice. Just like regular photos.

 Apple has a new RSS feed  for their movie trailers page.  This is really cool.  I like seeing movie trailers, but we don't go to the movies very often, so I don't see too many.  I try to catch them online when I can.  Now my RSS reader can tell me when new ones are online.  However, there's a couple of issues with the feed.  The links don't go to the specific trailer pages, and there aren't any enclosures.  Now I'm not really sure if Apply wants to have a feed with enclosures for their HD trailers.  Some of those are a couple of hundred megabytes.  Below is my email and their response on the issue.

-----Original Message-----
From: Movie Trailers [mailto:trailers@mac.com]
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2005 1:19 PM
To: Rick Lobrecht
Subject: Re: Issues for RSS feed of trailers

Hi Rick,

We're glad you like the new RSS feed.  We'll tackle the answers below:

> Dead Apple Movie Trailer team,
> I think its pretty neat that you've created an RSS feed for the movie
> trailers, but I have two issues with it.
>
> The first is that each item only contains a link back to the main
> trailers page, instead of the page of the trailer specified.  So if I
> want to watch the Harry Potter trailer (listed in the feed currently)
> I have to hunt on the page to find it in the small print down below,
> because it was released several days ago.
>
We are still shuffling around content and want to make sure the RSS feed has a known good destination to find the newest items.  As soon as we get content in it's final destination we will take another look at what is in the feed.

> I also don't seem to be able to subscribe to this with iTunes.  Maybe
> that relates to item #1 above.
>
We haven't had any comments about the feed and iTunes before so we will look into it.  Hopefully the answer/solution is a swift one and then you'll be all set.


Thanks for the email and we appreciate the feedback!

-Movie Trailers Team

We take a lot of digital photos. We're almost exclusively digital now. We also print a lot of photos on our Canon ink jet. It costs a fortune. My wife does most of the printing, so I can't get a really good read, but I'm sure we're at close to the $0.50/print mark. And that doesn't include the hundreds of prints that we printed on discount paper that just had to be thrown out. With all the recent news about how expensive home printing is, I've decided to start checking out the online printing services.

My first try is Walgreens.com

They have four ways to upload photos. The first is available on all platforms, a single file upload from your browser. The second is an active-x control (IE only) that allows you to browse around and tag photos, then upload them in bulk. The third is a Windows app that I can't get to work as a non-Administrator (although I haven't tried very hard.) The fourth is by email. The only success I've had is email. Trying to upload the pictures from our D70 fails. I assume they are too big. I've sent an email to their photo service people to find out if there is a limit.

I ordered 9 4x6s (they give you 10 free to try the service.) We'll see how they do.

For my Tablet and my Desktop, I keep all files on our file server, and use Offline Files to keep everything in sync. This works really well. Between my work laptop and my Tablet, there are several folders I try to keep synchronized. I had high hopes for the Microsoft SyncToy, but it just didn't work for me. My two biggest complaints are that it isn't schedulable, and it wouldn't overwrite read-only files. Since a large portion of the files I'm syncing are code that are in source control (SS marks them read-only if you don't have them checked out) that just wasn't going to work. My current solution is a set of batch files. This works fine for growing lists of files, but I don't handle deletes at all.

I've been seeing a lot of praise for FolderShare. They have a free option that allows you to sync two folders with up to 500 files each in them. This isn't rearly enough files for me, but I'm going to try it anyway. The clients install easily. All the configuration is doen on the web, and it works just fine with Firefox. I dont' see any performance issues. Files seem to sync pretty much immediately. Its even able to handle syncing into my offline My Documents folder on my Tablet. Interestingly enough, when syncing a read-only file from one machine to the other, the read-only bit is lost. This probably works for me, but I will have to play with it a bit more to be sure.

More to come.

In case you're living under a rock, Apple is now selling videos on iTunes. In addition to some 2000 music videos, they also have episodes of ABC's Lost, Desparate Housewives, Night Stalker, The Suite Life, and That's So Raven. There's also a few Pixar videos, such as Boundin' (from The Incredibles), Geri's Game, and Luxo Jr.

I love Lost, but haven't managed to see much of it this season, and we haven't gotten on the DVR bandwagon yet. I may just have to buy these to catch up. I wonder if DVD Jon will crack this DRM, so I can watch them on my Jam?

I just headed over to OrigienXBox360.com. The tree now has a ton of flags hanging on it. I clicked the British flag. It finally gets you to a quiz, but unfortunately filling out my personal info, only gave me European countries to pick from. I guess it will open in the US later today.

This is really cool. flhurricane.com has a map of the Rita track, done using Google maps.

Lifehacker points to a cool use of Google maps, measuring area.  When I first graduated from college, I would often have to planimeter maps to determine area (often at several contours, and then do some geometry to get a volume.)  My company had a digital and a mechanical one.  The digital one was way better for me, but some of the old timers swore by the manual one.  Funny, they never seemed to have to use them, they always had a junior engineer around to do it for them.  8-)