Chris Meller

Did I Miss Something?

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:30:32 -0400

*gasp* What could it be? Multi-Pass, baby! Did I miss some announcement?

Recursive Chicken

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 12:40:31 -0400

Welp, I slept insanely late today (about 6:45pm), but here's something for your Saturday night enjoyment... I present to you Recursive Chicken! If only there were a cow version! Check out the rest of the chicken-loving fun here!

Have You Hugged YOUR SysAdmin Today?

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 06:11:54 -0400

Well, have you? Today is the 6th Annual Sys Admin Day! You know, not one person has thanked me today? Not a damn one... Our secretaries are recognized on "Administrative Professionals Day", our bosses are recognized every day, even our janitor is recognized... But not our Systems Administrator... Thanks to WinBeta for supporting the cause!

This Week in Habari

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 09:45:11 -0400

Habari Core

Lots more work has gone into refining Habari 0.7 this week. There were 28 commits changing 2,289 lines of code, 9 new tickets, and 6 closed tickets. Rick was able to land several fixes for moving core code from using the old Tags structure to the new Vocabulary system. He also updated a couple of Vocabulary-related unit tests, fixed Vocabulary problems in core themes, added the ability to delete custom post content types, and managed to close 2 tickets in the process. Owen refined a lot of the Blocks / Areas code, making it possible for plugins and themes to define their own Scopes and reducing the complexity of configuring and outputting block content. Michael made another batch of changes to quickly bring some of our code into line with the established Coding Standards. I fixed a bug in the Charcoal theme when displaying the URL of a comment author, uncovered a bug or two and created tickets, and found that a bug reported in a ticket was caused by some code for publishing posts that's poorly placed in the admin and needs refactoring. I also rewrote our entire Subversion hook for detecting changes in the Extras repository and building zip files for the /dist list so it's much more concise and easier to maintain, though it's not quite ready for production yet.

Habari Extras

The contributed extras repository is where the real fun's at this week. There were 57 commits changing a massive 3,580 lines of code! Rick and Mike both put a huge amount of work into getting the Threaded Comments plugin cleaned up and back into shape. Owen updated the Gray theme so that it works in 0.7 and used it as a testbed for implementing all his Blocks and Areas code. Anyone looking to play with these features should check out Gray for the most current examples. I made a few additional tweaks to the Export plugin, which exports your blog into the BlogML XML format for easy backups or porting to other systems. I also created and tagged the 0.1 release of the Export Snapshot plugin, which builds on the Export plugin and lets you keep point-in-time snapshot exports of your blog for later download or restore. Colin also swooped in and surprised us with an update to the Twitter plugin so that it now works with the new OAuth authentication system they're using. Very cool!

New Open Data Set for South Carolina Employee Salaries

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:52:48 -0400

Each year The State newspaper submits FOIA requests to all state agencies and compiles a database containing salaries of all employees making at least $50,000. This data is then made freely available through a useable but fairly crappy little web interface provided by Caspio. If you know a particular employee's name, simply want to see who makes the most money, or just want to skim the salary numbers for a specific agency (25 at a time) this is great. If you actually want to harness the data and do something interesting, though, it... well, sucks. So this afternoon I wrote a script that scrapes the HTML output generated by the Caspio database and spits it out into a convenient CSV file. A couple of quick formatting fixes in Excel later and it's now available for download over on my BuzzData account. I'm going to run a couple of basic queries over the data, but don't have any major plans. If someone else has any ideas, please contribute them to the BuzzData project and post a comment. Happy visualizationizing!

Javascript Documentation

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 07:19:10 -0400

At the end of the Yahoo! javascript videos I mentioned earlier, they include links to all the major documentation sources for browser Javascript implementations. For convenience, I thought I'd just link to all of them right here on a single page:

Mozilla

Here

Microsoft

Here

Apple

Here

Opera

Opera has no formal documentation on their DOM implementation. Instead, they simply link you to the W3C.

W3C

Here

A Guiding Light for Those that Can't Find What they Love in Life...

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:21:26 -0400

I've got some friends going through rough times in life right now. One isn't happy with her path in life, and the other doesn't know what he wants to do with his life... Having gone through some similar periods in life (I'm not sure they ever really end), I tried to offer my somewhat more ag

You've got to find what you love...

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 12:27:05 -0400

It was four months ago, almost to the day that I first found and read the 2005 Commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave to Stanford University, but the words still echo in my mind on a regular basis. When I wrote that post, I was trying to help out a friend who was having trouble seeing the path life was mysteriously supposed to take, and yet it now seems that I'm the one finding comfort and meaning in those words. On a whim, I thought I'd see if I could track down an audio version of the speech and hear this magnificent and heartfelt advice given in Mr. Jobs' own voice. Surprisingly, I found it. Not surprisingly, you can get it on the iTunes Music Store in the Stanford section, along with a video version. For those who may have missed it the first time, here's the entire speech, directly from the Stanford News Service, along with an MP3 version for live streaming. Feel free to follow along as you listen. Hopefully Steve can help a few more people find what they love in life... [audio:http://chrismeller.com/user/files/steve_jobs-stanford_commencement_2005.mp3]

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now. This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.

iPhone App Suggestions

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:24:47 -0400

UPDATE: As requested, added iTunes store links for the incredibly lazy. I've been asked by a couple people what apps I'm using on my retro original iPhone, so here's a quick list, in no particular order:

iNetworkTest - Speed Testing of EDGE / 3G. Their site even maps your location for each test, which is cool.
VoiceRecord - For quick notes. The only thing I ever used regularly on my previously jailbroken iPhone.
AOL Radio - There's a good radio station out of Atlanta that broadcasts through it.
Google Mobile - Have yet to actually use this, I just go to Safari, but I keep telling myself I'll use it.
NetNewsWire - Still too horribly slow, waiting for a new version for it to become really useful.
Pandora - Works well, even over EDGE.
Twitterrific - Free version.
WeatherBug - Best weather service there is, and they've got apps for every platform imaginable. Interactive radar map kicks ass.
Epocrates Rx - More for interest, since I was in health insurance previously. It's a cool app to play around with for a while, and has limited use after that.
Fuel Guage - Calculate your fuel efficiency. Really spiffy.
Mobile News - Not particularly useful unless I'm stuck somewhere and bored, then it can be a quick way to get a current events fix, including local news (based on your coordinates).
Facebook - Useless, but well done.
Bloomberg - The ultimate stock market app. Kicks the default stocks app out of the water.
Jott - Transcribe voice notes. You can't beat that. Have yet to decide if it's worth replacing Voice Notes or not.
Shazam - Listens to a song and tells you the name, artist, etc. That's so amazingly awesome I can't even describe it.
WordPress - I don't blog often enough for it to be useful, but who knows...

Do that Funky Beta Thang!

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 01:23:29 -0400

Ever wanted to be one of the lucky beta testers for none other than Microsoft? Welp, now's your chance... Just incase you didn't know how it all works, in order to become a member of a beta program at Microsoft, you typically log in with a Passport account at Microsoft Beta (formerly Betaplace). You then find the link indicating that you were provided with a Microsoft Guest ID. After entering the ID (which we'll get to in a minute), you're taken to the project's intro page. Remember to complete any "Invitation" or "Nomination" surveys displayed, otherwise you stand no chance of being accepted! After the survey responses are reviewed, you may or may not be accepted, based on the answers you provided. They generally look for a wide variety of testers, so you never really know. So what is this magic Guest ID you have to enter? Well, it's a random mashing of the Beta program's name. Sometimes you'll come across a story at WinBeta or BetaNews that lists the ID when referencing a program, but generally you'll be sent an invitation directly from Microsoft referencing it. Thanks to the power of the internet, that is no longer true! There's a long list of active Beta Guest IDs here! NOTE: This is in no way a guarantee that you will be accepted to the program. I'm also not able to confirm 100% accuracy of this list. I have glanced over it, and from the half dozen programs I'm a member of or have been invited to / applied for, it appears valid. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

Stewie iPod Ad

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 14:34:35 -0400

I came across this at some point last week here, and just had to post it... I take it from the "Fox" watermark at the bottom that this was actually shown... well, on Fox. Wish I'd seen him dancing around, especially after having just watched Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story. If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, then you're a loser and don't deserve to read my blog, so be gone vile beast!

Microsoft OneCare Beta

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 04:09:44 -0400

I got back from vacation just a short time ago and immediately checked my email. After only 3 full days away from the 'net, I had over 400 new email messages waiting to be sorted through. Thanks to Mozilla Thunderbird's SPAM filter, I really only had to pick through a few dozen. Among those legit emails was one from Microsoft, confirming my acceptance into the Microsoft OneCare beta program. If you've never heard of OneCare before, check out their description during installation:

You are signing up for the Windows OneCare(TM) Live BETA (1 PC) for free for one year. Windows OneCare is the premier protection and performance service for your Windows XP PC and includes comprehensive Antivirus and Firewall Protection, PC Maintenance, and Backup. You must agree to the Windows OneCare Live Subscription Agreement to access the service. Product key required. Valid in US only.

This brings my total current beta count up to 6 and my total historic beta count up well over a dozen. Most of the other programs at the moment are somewhat boring. I'm beta testing the new Microsoft Shell (which should also be in the Vista beta if I remember correctly), as well as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2, among some other geeky things. Unfortunately, while interesting to me, these don't exactly make for the best blog material. OneCare, however, should. With any luck, I'll have something interesting to report very soon (and maybe even some screenshots). I actually read the SLA before blindly clicking "Accept" on it, which featured this paragraph:

5. CONFIDENTIALITY. The Product, including its existence and features, and related information are proprietary and confidential information to Microsoft and its suppliers. Recipient agrees not to disclose or provide the Product, documentation, or any related information (including the Product features or the results of use or testing) to any third party until commercial release of the Product; provided that thereafter Recipient agrees not to disclose or provide to any third party any information that has not been made public by Microsoft as of the commercial release of the applicable Software or Hardware. However, Recipient may disclose confidential information in accordance with judicial or other governmental order, provided Recipient shall give Microsoft reasonable written notice prior to such disclosure and shall comply with any applicable protective order or equivalent. Further, Recipient shall not be liable to Microsoft for disclosure of information which Recipient can prove (a) is already known to Recipient without an obligation to maintain the same as confidential; (b) becomes publicly known through no wrongful act of Recipient; (c) is rightfully received from a third party without breach of an obligation of confidentiality owed to Microsoft; or (d) is independently developed by Recipient.

What do you think the chances of them actually kicking me out of the program for blogging about it are? Sure they say it's against the rules, but does that actually mean against the rules? I'm sure the Vista beta agreement said something similar (if not exactly the same), but everyone and their brother is blogging about it... Surely a little extra publicity wouldn't be a bad thing. I really expect to be somewhat blown away by the program, so it's not like I'm going to bash them non-stop. Ahh well, we'll see if there's actually anything noteworthy first.

12 Maddening Hours

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 13:45:54 -0400

I spent 12 total hours banging my head against a maddening problem. Our DBA at work is off until Wednesday, but we needed to get an export sent to a company by Friday, absolute latest. Promblem is, this export doesn't take into account a new set of people who have a special plan setup. In comes Chris. I don't know how the export's done, more than that it's taking Oracle data and spitting it out somehow using a Delphi app. Less than 24 hours later, I've added 300 lines of SQL to the export stored procedure, taught myself how to re-compile and test a stored procedure, checked my logic, and fixed the Delphi app so that it'll spit out the correct fields that I've added in certain records. Re-compile the Delphi project and check everything back in to SourceSafe, and it's time to call it a day... and by that I mean pick up another project incredibly similar to this last one... Oh no, have I opened a door here?

Enabling PHP Write Access on IIS

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:06:04 -0400

Unfortunately at work I'm stuck hosting PHP on various versions of Windows with IIS. For the most part things do just run (though I yearn for a nice Nginx + PHP-FPM setup that has decent URL rewriting), but figuring out what security settings to change so that PHP can write to a particular file or directory has always been a problem. Side Warning: Be aware that if you ramp down the security on your application's directories too much IIS has a tendency to start throwing 500 errors with no real warning or logic. On each one of your directories that PHP needs to be able to write to (in my case it was cache, logs, and upload, in case you were wondering), right click and go to Properties, then the Security tab. Click Advanced at the bottom, then Change Permissions at the bottom again. Now you want to Add new permissions. If your Windows server is a member of the domain, it will probably default to searching the domain tree in the From this location box. Change this back to the local machine Unless your domain has a special group for IIS setup, in which case you should already know how to do this and need to stop reading., hit Advanced, and then Find Now on the right. In the potentially long list of local users and groups, find the group IUSR, select it, and hit OK and then OK again. Now the tricky part, which permissions do I actually need to grant? Well, that's totally going to depend on what you're writing. For my purposes, I needed to be able to Create files / write data, Create folders / append data, Delete subfolders and files, and Delete. You might need to enable attribute changes or not need to include Delete permissions... That's up to you. When you're done, be sure to check the Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object check box to apply the new permissions to all the child files and folders and then go through all your OKs until you're done. Rinse and repeat as necessary, but now your PHP application should be able to write to the proper locations and all will be well with the world... Or as well as it can get when you're running PHP on Windows with IIS.

The FeedLounge Time Vortex...

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 02:33:00 -0400

Now that I've been using FeedLounge for a while, I've noticed one key problem. Since I started using FeedLounge, I've been maintaining multiple RSS readers. It's Onfolio and FeedLounge on Windows, and NewsGator Online and FeedLounge on my Linux laptop. It's a pain in the butt to keep up with multiple readers, but after putting all your eggs in one alpha-released basket and getting burned once, you'll learn your lesson quickly (no, it wasn't FeedLounge that burned me). Since I've been using multiple readers simultaneously, I have noticed one key problem in the FeedLounge system - update frequency. According to their documentation, they take the average time between updates for a feed and update at twice that interval (ie: if a feed has a new post every 8 hours, they update every 4). This sounds really great in theory, but in practice, I've noticed that quite often NewsGator updates feeds and has new items ready for viewing much more frequently than FeedLounge. Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere on their site where they specify how often their feeds are updated, but I'd hazard to guess every 2 hours (which seems to be a standard across all RSS readers in general). No, I haven't done any actual tests, but suffice it to say it's a big difference (otherwise I wouldn't have noticed it). I know this is a tough area to change. You have to ballance update frequency and server / bandwidth load. For the casual reader, I'm sure the FeedLounge approach is just fine. If they only check once or twice a day to read all the new news, I don't see any reason every 4 or so hours would be a problem. For those of us with 100 feeds and a growing addiction to RSS, however, it's a different story. I can't go more than an hour without checking up to see if there's any breaking news I should be aware of. Even at work, I'm constantly hitting refresh, just to see what's going on. The way I see it, part of my job is to keep up-to-date on the latest news in the tech industry, so it's not a big deal. So, what do you think Alex? Could we up the refresh frequency when you guys get some more server horsepower setup? Maybe this would make a good feature for paying customers (who would logically be more RSS-addicted than the casual free user)... Maybe if I link to Greg Reinacker's blog enough, he'll tell us NewsGator Online's secret update interval...

Belly up to the FeedLounge Bar, Boys...

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 09:35:06 -0400

Today Alex and Scott announced their Pricing for FeedLounge, since their public beta will launch January 16th. For those of you (like me) who have been curious, it'll be $5 a month or $49.95 a year. For those of you (like me) who suck at math like rocks sink, that yearly plan comes out to $4.16 a month, which is really a pretty fair deal, considering you'd pay $24.95 for NetNewsWire or $29.95 for FeedDemon. It's a particularly good deal when you consider that you've got two developers working on their own to develop this product from the ground up. It's an even better deal when those developers are actively answering questions and tracking down bugs before your eyes in the forums. I, for one, can't wait for the launch. Even though I'll be given a free 2 month credit for being an alpha tester (really, shouldn't I be paying them for the priviledge?), I plan on putting my money where my mouth is as soon as I can tap out that credit card number. I urge everyone to give up their cheesburger every month and check out FeedLounge. It's a kick ass product now, and I can't wait to see what these guys have coming next!

Mail Migrations, the Final Piece

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:57:43 -0400

I've spent the past two days or so managing my email migration from DreamHost to Google Apps for Domains. Over the weekend, DreamHost had some scheduled maintenance. Not only were their main page, panel, and all webmail down for an extended period, but they were moving the cluster I'm hosted on... for the second time. This is soon after a typo killed their entire network by firewalling out the entirety of the internet. Of course this downtime would have to come as soon as I'm ready to send one of the half dozen emails I'll actually send this year. All in all, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I think DreamHost offers good service, for the price they charge, but sometimes 'good' just isn't 'good' enough. I moved my blog to SliceHost previously, and email was the last link in the chain. While I'll still use them for massive bandwidth and storage, there's no chance I'll be putting anything mission critical on their network again - it's just not worth it.

B-Squares

Mon, 09 May 2011 21:43:44 -0400

I saw B-Squares posted on the Sparkfun blog. One of the neatest things I've seen in a long time, they're magnetic so you can simply attach them to each other and build out your circuit. Amazing idea and I love that it's being bootstrapped through Kickstarter. I've wanted to get into hardware hacking for a long time; if I had the money right now I'd be all over the Super Recipe Set to get started easily.

Google vs. Yahoo! - Translation Match, Round 1

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 05:46:40 -0400

I found a post over at Download Squad today, entitled Google wins at machine translation, which links to this story from CNet's News.com. From that article:

Google scored the highest in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests conducted by the National Institute of Science and Technology.

Well, even though their tests were in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English, I thought I'd give it my own test in German-to-English mode, just because that's the only recent real-world example I've actually got. Just for fun, we'll also compare the results of a paragraph with Yahoo!'s translation (which is powered by Systran, which always makes me think of the line from "Pirates of Sillicon Valley" where Balmer goes "Fortran, ohh, Fortran!" in a mockingly sexual voice... Anyway...) . Here we go: Original Content

Wenn ihr mal eine Geschichte wie aus einem Meg Ryan Film lesen wollt, dann seid ihr hier genau richtig. Alle einmal zusammen: *awwww*

Source: Cigarettes & Alcohol Google

If times a history as from a Meg Ryan film want to read it, then are you here exactly correctly. Everything once together: * awwww *

Source: Google Translation Yahoo!

If times a history as from a Meg Ryan film want to read it, then are you here exactly correctly. Everything once together: * awwww *

Source: Yahoo! Translation Actual Author's Human Translation

While the Yahoo translation is quite close to what I wrote, it’s mixed things up a bit. A more suited translation would be “If you want to read a story just like a Meg Ryan movie then this is the place to go??

Source: Post Comments Uhh... yyyeeaaahhhh... I can't say either machine-translations are even close to what is claimed to be the actual translation / intent. Nor is Google particularly more accurate than Yahoo! (uhh, they're exactly the same?). Anyone that speaks Chinese want to translate that same sentence from English to Chinese for us so we can perform the same test again, with the same specs as the cited test? As with anything, we have to remember that any such test is purely subjective. Since human speach can be taken / intended in so many different ways, based on intonation and attitude, we can't expect a machine translation to be perfect, can we? Boy I wish we could... I remember trying to cheat on my French homework in high school using Altavista's service at the time... Yeah, that didn't go over terribly well with the teacher...

I'm a Zend Certified Engineer!

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 05:54:16 -0400

As of 12:10pm today, I officially became a Zend Certified Engineer at the Pearson Vue testing center in Greenville!

Testing the Slice

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:02:36 -0400

I've had a slice at SliceHost for longer than I care to admit by now ((About 6 months, but don't tell anyone.)), I just hadn't quite gotten around to ever testing and configuring it the way I wanted to. Well, I finally got around to wiping out whatever I'd been playing with there before and dumping on their stock Debian 4.0 image. After running through their tutorials on setting up Apache ((I never expected it to be that different than other distros.)) and PHP, I was good to go. The base system with my webserver and database running read at about 25 MB of used RAM. Not bad for a fully functional, if barebones, webserver. I'd been worried that, coming from a fully dedicated box with 1 GB of RAM, I would run into a memory bottleneck, but fortunately that didn't seem it would be a problem. The next important step was to do some testing. I played around with MySQL, running some basic queries, just to see if it was noticeably laggy after a casual poking. Again, everything looked fine. The next, and really final, step was to dump a copy of my blog on the slice and see how it ran. After some complaining about the default max_upload_size value in PHP, I got a copy of my database imported using phpMyAdmin and a quick scp -r later and I had an exact copy of my blog setup and ready to go. All-in-all, it looks like performance is at the very least on-par with the other hosting I've used in the past. The performance over DreamHost, where my blog has lived for several months while I really decided where to host it, represents about a 10% improvement ((Going purely by the stats in the footer of my theme.)). I'm still not ready to make the DNS switch, but at least I've realized I'm being too paranoid about the memory limits. In the end, the only other reason to stay with my expensive dedicated server is the convenience of Plesk, which scratches my lazy itch perfectly. If I can get a few scripts hobbled together (in one language or another) to help automate things like vhost and database creation, I may be able to do away with Plesk entirely. One final problem, and one I'm looking for opinions on, is what to do about email. I'm not planning on dumping DreamHost any time soon ((I use their massive storage for backups as well.)), but I would like to move my email along with my blog if possible. So who do you use for email? Any problems? Only condition is that they have to offer IMAP...

Microsoft Brings some Vista Features to XP

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:22:00 -0400

Early this morning, as my insomnia-driven computer addiction ensued at hours in which even the birds refuse to wake, I noticed that a couple of new Windows Updates had been deployed by my in-house WSUS box and were ready for installation on my client machines. I thought we'd already had our patch-Tuesday for the month, so I decided to check out what was being updated. Much to my surprise, there was a new version of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection (aka Terminal Services client) app available. Since, as far as I remember, there has never been an update to this program (since it's initial inclusion in Windows XP), I thought I'd go check it out. Thanks to my handy dandy (unofficial) Microsoft Download Notification RSS feed, I was able to quickly track down the stand-alone download package ((Oddly enough, Googling around and searching both Microsoft.com and the Microsoft Knowledge Base directly proved to be useless.)). For those that may be interested, the short description of this update is:

Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Client 6.0) provides a way to use any new Terminal Services features introduced in Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" from a computer running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1.

This simple update boasts a host of changes. Most notably are:

Lots of new Authentication updates
32-bit color support
Font-smoothing capability
Terminal Services "Remote Program" capability
Enhanced Device Redirection (for things such as printers connected locally)

My favorite feature, however, is without a doubt the new Monitor Spanning capability. That's right, now I can finally utilize both of my monitors when doing a remote desktop. Oh sweet joy of joys. Microsoft, sometimes I just can't help but love you guys ((And god knows I try not to...))! For those interested in more details, here's a link to the stand-alone download, and the knowledge base article ((By the way... When did these start requiring passport logins? KB articles have always been publicly available, haven't they?)). Update: In case you have difficulty finding them yourselves, here are download links for other platforms. Still, I'd probably just snag it over Windows Update... Windows 2003: here Windows 2003 x64: here Windows XP x64: here

Scoble's Vista Idea

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 11:24:53 -0400

Finally, Scoble has an original idea! I'd love to see some quality user-provided images on the Windows Vista desktop! No more of that crappy PR-bullshit bliss picture. Here here, Scoble! This is why I still subscribe to your blog! Less random links, more genuine original ideas! Too much to ask?

Microsoft's Virtual CD App

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 07:45:18 -0400

Well, I don't personally have any use for it, but I did find this post interesting. I never knew Microsoft had anything that would natively mount ISO images as a Virtual Drive. Apparently neither did anyone else. I actually tried this on my work pc (what a gamble... it's not like I'm the system administrator or anything, is it?). The process was long, drawn out, and complicated, but it did work. I was able to mount our Outlook 2000 ISO image from a mapped network drive and hit AutoPlay to launch the installer. Interesting tidbit... It certainly doesn't stand up to other products such as Daemon Tools, Ahead Nero or Alcohol 120%, but if you're in a bind and need something with absolutely no fluff (or want to write a program similar to those above using the MS driver), it should work out. If you're too lazy to read the above article, you can download the App directly from the Microsoft Download Center here. It's a self-extracting Zipped EXE file. Not that it says clearly that it is not supported by Microsoft at all. Use it at your own risk, for all that it could break... UPDATE: I made a typo in the title... that's my bad... It's fixed now.

A Dying Woman's Last Wish...

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 01:02:30 -0400

Well, as much as I hate to do it, I’m going to violate a dying woman’s last wish by revealing this startling news to you, my loyal readers. I know, I know, I’m a horrible person. If I’ll violate a dying woman’s last wish, is there nothing holy left in the world? Apparently not. At 7:11 am (EST) this morning, I was presented with this exciting news via electronic mail. Please read with me…

My name is Mrs. lousia Wilson i am a dying woman who have decided to donate what i have to church.I am 59 years old and i was diagnosed for cancer for about 2 years ago,immediately after the death of my husband,who has left me everything he worked for. I have been touched by God to donate from what i have inherited from my late husband to you to do the good work of God,rather than allow my relatives to use my husband hard earned funds ungodly.Please pray,that the good Lord forgive me my sins.I have asked God to forgive me and i beleive he has because He is a merciful God. I will be going in for an operation in less than one hour. I decided to WILL/donate the sum of $1,500,000 (One million five hundred thousand dollars) to you for the good work of the lord, and also to help the motherless and less privilege and also for the assistance of the widows according to (JAMES 1:27). At the moment i cannot take any telephone calls right now due to the fact that my relatives are around me and my health status.I have adjusted my WILL and my lawyer is aware i have changed my will to you and he will arrange the transfer of the funds from my account to you. I wish you all the best and may the good Lord bless you abundantly, and please use the funds well and always extend the good work to others. Contact my lawyer with this specified email(brianvariesesq@netscape.net) and tell him that i have WILLED ($1,500,000.00) to you and i have also notified him that i am WILLING that amount to you for a specific and good work.I know i dont know you but i have been directed to do this.Thanks and God bless. NB: I will appreciate your utmost confidentiality in this matter until the task is accomplished as I don't want anything that will Jeopardize my last wish. And Also I will be contacting with you by email as I don't want my relation or anybody to know because they are always around me. Regards, Louisa Wilson

I’m sure you can all now see why I would be so anxious to share this life-changing and exciting news with the world. I quickly drafted a response to her lawyer at the email address indicated, asking Mr. Varies, Esq. that he please expedite this issue so that I may collect my allotted amount as soon as possible. I will, of course, keep my loyal readers appraised to the situation. Be forewarned… Once I’m a millionaire, I will likely be out enjoying all life has to offer for prolonged periods. Rest assured I will always return to this blog to keep you apprised of my travels.