November 2004

The day after

November 29, 2004

Trying to catch up after the holiday.

Dave Winer is working on eliminating referer spam. I'm not sure how his system works, and undoubtedly it's better than I would have thought of but it seems to me I sometimes see as "referrer" the last page someone visited even if they didn't click on a link. So if I go to www.scripting.com after visiting a page with no link to Scripting News will it get blacklisted.

I mention this because I was looking at Scripting News on my new Treo650 this morning. What RSS readers are available for Palm/Treo devices. Most of my blogging could rapidly become mBlogging. The best part is never sitting somewhere and wishing I had something to read. For the podcasting crowd we need a aggregator that can be run in the PalmOS and uses the built in networking to catch podcasts.

Can you stop the rain?

November 27, 2004

Not that we really want the rain to be stopped. Tonight brought another round of rain on top a November that is already in the list of the wettest on record. More rain for the Mohave!

Why is Drupal missing?

November 27, 2004

I was cleaning up bookmarks and came across OpenSource CMS. Interestingly there is no mention of Drupal on their site. Why would that be? It is widely used and seems to be one of the most robust Open Source CMS solutions available.

Car dealers don't make it easy

November 22, 2004

So I called Findlay Volkswagen a bit ago about the Emissions Workshop! light on the Passat. I wanted to know how long it would take for them to hook it up to the computer when I bring it in so I could make an appointment. They have no idea. Or that's what Brian wanted me to believe. He tried to explain that because of the 150 possible causes of the light being on they had no idea how long it would take to hook up the computer and check it out. Hogwash. They know exactly how long it will take. I finally asked if it would take more or less than six weeks to get the diagnosis.

One of those days

November 21, 2004

The Bryan Adams song of a few years ago asks have you ever had one of those days? Yes! Today was the day for a Thanksgiving trail ride. Of course it started raining last night and has been raining and snowing ever since. Las Vegas is below the snow level, but the early morning trip to pack everything up was more than we could handle. Sarah and Linda went to the lunch portion of the ride in the car and I went to work. Time to install Subversion. Head over to Wilfredo Sanchez's site to pick up the necessary parts. Of course there are no directions. No specific instructions. It turns out Sanchez must be in the midst of refresh because several files are dated Friday and the tools don't work. Time to drive home in the rain and snow.

Some rice with your Curry?

November 20, 2004

I'm trying the attachment. I was looking at Adam Curry's site where he talks about Google picking up on his move. The ads I saw pointed out another problem with computer matching words. Google serves up an ad for Curries of the World on Adam Curry's site. In this case Curry != curry.

Blogging tools

November 17, 2004

I was reminded when looking at Joe Trippi's Drupal site of a podcast from BloggerCon III this weekend. Scoble was leading a session and there was a great deal of discussion of categories. Drupal makes categories so simple and everybody can easily subscribe to the man feed or any category they want. Can't decide which category to put something in, it doesn't matter. It can easily go in more than one.

Juris Prudence

November 17, 2004

"The issue is not whether the decision should have been decided in the Florida or U.S. supreme courts, but that the Constitution had been violated. ... The only decision was to put an end to it after three weeks and looking like fools to the rest of the world. It was too much of a mess." said Justice Antonin Scalia.

There is an old addage that says it's better to keep one's mouth shut and let people think you a fool than open your mouth and prove it. Thanks to Justice Scalia for collectively proving to the world what they only thought until then.

Blogging, podcasting and Sundays

November 14, 2004

It has been a good Sunday. Lots accomplished. For one, most (not quite all yet) readers are reading this on the new server. It works very well and the transition was smooth.

I've been listening to some of the sessions from Bloggercon III. A commentary about the Podcasting session by people who were there said it's moderator (Adam Curry) was a bit of an elite. Thank you. I'm pretty sure Dave Winer will never consider it valid feedback but he should. Aside from terrible audible that makes some of the sessions almost unlistenable, the thing that has been driving me nuts is how the self-proclaimed "un-conference" is so much more elitist and snooty than the pedestrian trade shows and conferences put on by vendors.

What does all that mean... for me it's simple. I want good information. BloggerCon imposes a strange (to me) anti-commercial bent. This is supposed to mean you don't talk about your own product. There are countless times where people talked about their own products. However, when a very useful vendor started talking about how they use their own product to solve the problem being discussed, the elitist powers were there to squash them. Too bad I almost learned something.

Podcasting pet peeves

So I have some pet peeves with podcasters. First of all the name of your show belongs in the Album field. It's just plain rude to put "birds sitting in the window." As the name one day and something else the next. iTunes (and my iPod) now say there are countless albums... Also, it should remind us that just because somebody creates content does not make them an expert on the tool. For example the iPod is a great recorder for podcasts. And contrary to the repeated comments on The Daily Source code, it fast forwards and rewinds easily - just the same as every CD player I've ever used.

So the perfect gizmo that I want is a holder, that holds two iPods side by side, provides power, and uses one to record. A small mixer/fader would allow mixing the second iPod with the live microphone input. A small 2-3 pound recording studio to go. Now if I just had the time to do it.

Blogging tools aren't there yet either

There's a lot being done on the production side of podcasting. Please let's not forget we don't have good tools for blogging yet. There are some good fragments out there. There are bits and pieces that look good. There is not a single solution that works as it should. Dave Winer has the right idea. Life is an outline. There are subheads and there are links to nodes, but a perfect blogging tool will integrate with my workflow not create a second, parallel flow. Today I write a memo and if I want to then copy part of it to the blog. Same with an email etc. But it should be a flag on a paragraph or document that says send it to my personal blog or send it to my work intranet blog.

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