RexTech

I'm not much of a graphic-arts person but I found myself on Friday needing to finish a couple quick graphics-related tasks. First I needed to find out the rgb values in a Flash movie, so I could duplicate them in an HTML mock-up. Then I needed to cut out a couple icons from the aforementioned Flash movie, make them into little gifs, but also make the backgrounds transparent.

Now I didn't know how to do either of those tasks, but I did have Macromedia Fireworks installed on my PC. Mostly because it came with Dreamweaver, not because I use it myself. But I fired it up and ran a couple questions thru the help system.

I am so grateful to modern help systems. Just a couple quick keywords in Fireworks got me exact step-by-step instructions for what I wanted to do. The transparent-gif thing I might have figured out on my own, but I would never have been able to figure out the eyedropper thingy to pick up colors from an image. Luckily I didn't have to--the program showed me what to do.

In a way that's what makes Google so powerful--it's a help system writ very very large. I'm thinking at some point there's a natural merge between the software help and Google help. That's kinda the direction we're headed with Google Desktop, integrating local and Internet search.

In a way that's actually one of my frustrations with Google Desktop--the fact that it doesn't index all the help files scattered around my PC. If I'm trying to solve a problem, there might be a program already on my PC that can solve the problem. But unless I fire up each program and query its help system individually I'll never find it. Maybe the next release of Google Desktop can fix that.

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If you're overclocking your PC so high that it requires a dry ice cooling system, I think maybe you're pushing too far. C'mon, let's just wait for Intel and AMD to figure out how to safely up the clock speeds.

Moore's Law is still in full effect, processors are going to keep doubling in power every 18 months or so. Just be patient and the hardware will catch up with the demands of the software. Do you really need to play Doom 3 at 120 frames-per-second?

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In most programming languages they have this notion of context--variables and sometimes methods have different meaning depending on the context in which they are used. For example, you might have a method that uses a loop variable called myLoop, and you might have that same variable name in multiple methods. But each of those is a distinct context, and so they have a totally different variable myLoop. The name is the same but the values depend on the context.

When I saw this post about David Chappell visiting Microsoft to talk about Indigo, I was immediately confused. I had no idea the star from Comedy Central was also a developer conversant in the newest Microsoft communications technology. Then of course I realized they spelled their names differently--the comedian has an "e" on the end of this last name.

But totally out of context, the note was just funny when I first saw it in my RSS stream.

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Nice rebuttal to an earlier News.com article lamenting the decline of America's youth in a recent programming contest. I don't think it's totally settled--I do still sense a general decline in younger programmers.

It just seems natural though given a culture of grade inflation in the name of self esteem. Let's not give students bad grades because it harms their self image, but in the end that means giving good grades to students who don't deserve it. And they can then move on with those good grades and get a good job, and turn out to be idiot programmers. I've worked with a fair number of people who fall into that category--should never have been allowed into programming to begin with.

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Check out what an old colleague of mine from the BYTE Magazine days is doing with del.icio.us:

All about screencasting

He's using it to bookmark and organize his own writing. In a nutshell, he has done something similar to what we tried (and largely failed) to do with our "How do I" pages. He has shared his expertise on this specific topic to anybody who wants it. And he's done it using totally free and public tools.

I'm so slow, I think I finally understand what this tagging stuff can do. Maybe it isn't just a fad for the digerati.

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Full disclaimer here--my employer owns and operates Newsburst.com. But even if they didn't it would still be my favorite RSS reader. What I love is that it's accesible from anywhere, so even when I'm on the road or at a friend's house I can pull up the feeds I like.

But the feature that has really come in handy is the Categories. These let you group your feeds--for example, I have one group of gadget-related feeds (Engadget, Hack-a-day, etc.). So when you click on the category Newburst pulls in all those feeds, merges them into a single feed, and shows you the latest 25 items. Very handy to quickly scan what's going on with all them.

Now the problem is that my WebDev feed, which has the work-type stuff I read, is being overwhelmed by the MSDN posts. There's so many MSDN posts that some mornings when I check it, all of the 25 latest items are from MSDN. I couldn't see any other posts.

So I've had to move MSDN into its own separate Newsburst category, which I'm calling Microsoft for now. I suppose eventually I might add one or two other feeds into that category but for now I think MSDN is going to fill that all by itself.

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So Flickr quietly switched their photo pages last week from Flash to DHTML. Very impressive--it's a pretty seamless replacement.

Some of the behavior is a little different. As I recall the Flash photo page would slowly fade out the comment boxes but in the DHTML version they seem to just blink away. Minor thing but I guess you can't emulate everything in DHTML.

Still, the list of AJAX apps is growing. I'm gonna be interested in seeing how Microsoft responds with IE 7. That's the big unknown--despite Firefox's gains IE still is the dominant browser. Microsoft could easily screw up life for all these AJAX apps by doing something non-standard in IE7.

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Microsoft, or rather MSN, has released their toolbar with desktop search. Now the geek in me wants to download and give it a try. The problem is that I'm already running one desktop search engine--Google Desktop.

I'm sure my PC could handle the overhead of yet another indexer analyzing my desktop documents. It's a 2.8 GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM. Not exactly state-of-the-art but plenty fast enough to juggle two desktop indexes.

I just am a wee bit nervous about giving access to my desktop to all these different programs. Not that I'm a total privacy freak but I am one of those people who shreds all my credit card bills and receipts just in case. You never know who's out there, and if I've got two indexers running that means twice as many opportunities for some hacker to find a way to upload the indices for his own nefarious schemes.

Who knows what's stored in the index files these programs generate--all my confirmation emails for Amazon.com purchases, eBay transactions, etc. Wouldn't want all that getting into the hands of some evil hacker type person.

I'll stick with the Google Desktop for now. Until I hear about some really compelling feature in MSN Desktop Search that makes me want to switch.

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I've got this simple Outlook filter set up so that any time an email has [TechRepublic] in the subject line it gets moved into my newsletter folder. So I can read them later and they don't clutter my Inbox.

Unfortunately I happen to work at TechRepublic and on occasion people send me emails about an HTML bug they need me to fix in one of the newsletters. So they often forward the newsletter itself and insert theire question at the top. This of course screws up my simple little filter, those emails get dumped into the Newsletter folder and I don't see them until the end of the day when I get around to taking a peek at today's newsletters.

I'm gonna have to make a more sophisticated filter, I can't just do a simple search in the subject line for [TechRepublic]. I hate that--the Outlook filter wizard is pretty good at basic stuff but when you have to try and figure out more complicated filters it gets hairy. Sometimes I wish there was just a SQL-like language I could use to write my filters in Outlook instead of using the wizard.

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Microsoft's PowerToys were initially these fun little add-ons you could download for Windows. Like little widgets to let you open a DOS shell from the current folder, or one that let you turn a folder of images into a screen saver. Just freebies that weren't officially supported by Microsoft.

Turns out even the tools developers at Microsoft want in on the PowerToy action. They've published some PowerToys for Visual Studio. If that's not geek I don't know what is. An add-on gadget for your favorite development platform.

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Wow, Flash really is ubiquitous -- Flash 7 is on 90% of all US and European Web browsers. Flash overall is at 98% penetration which means essentially everybody can receive some kind of Flash content.

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That's a bit embarassing--just one day after releasing Netscape 8, they have to release a security patch. Luckily since it's based on Mozilla Firefox it was able to pick up the same fixes as Firefox. Though a week after Firefox itself got those same patches.

Which makes sense--Netscape 8 is a redistribution built on top of the core Firefox engine and you'd expect that Firefox would get out a patch before any of the redistributions built on it would.

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One of the giants of modern mathematics, George Dantzig, passed away a couple weeks ago. He invented the Simplex Method, basically created the field of linear programming.

It's one of those examples of the right person at the right time. Computers and linear programming hit at about the same time, and the growth in computer horsepower helped fuel the use of linear programming to solve ever more complex problems. Dantzig discovered Simplex at just the right time, when computer technology was evolving to really utilize the power of what he had discovered.

His discovery contributed so much to modern life. Could FedEx and UPS even exist without linear programming to optimize their delivery schedules? How would we route electric power efficiently across continental power grids? But while there's plenty of coverage for the season finale of Desperate Housewives, the passing of a 20th-century giant goes largely un-noticed.

Well, a few people did notice. And hopefully a few people will not forget.

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Jakob Nielsen consults for a lot of companies and in that role he gets to take a look at many corporate Intranet sites. He says that the basic designs seem to be converging into what he calls the canonical Intranet home page.

Our intranet here where I work is pretty close to that pattern--has a thin left-hand navigation column and a wider right-hand column with the body content. Doesn't have a third column, but still it hews in general layout to the pattern Nielsen describes.

Interestingly, our TechRepublic.com site has in recent months moved towards a flipped version of that design. The left-hand column is wider and contains the body content, whereas the right-hand column is narrower and tends to have more navigational/related items.

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Well, the one semi-normal person on G4 is leaving. Kevin Rose's last day is this Friday. He's leaving to start a show about technology, kindof the original stuff he did on TechTV.

I think G4 has really screwed the TechTV audience. If you didn't know it before it's now abundantly clear that they only bought TechTV to get the audience, to get the clearance on networks like Dish. All they wanted was access to those cable networks, they couldn't have cared less about the people who used to watch TechTV. They dropped months ago the phoney "G4TechTV" moniker they had adopted right after the purchase was announced.

It's too bad, I enjoyed a network with a mix of tech and gaming shows. Now it will be all-gaming, all the time. And I don't think that's going to be as much fun to watch.

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This is cool--somebody (with apparently a ton of time on his hands) has deciphered most of the parameters behind Amazon's image engine. It makes sense when you think about it--Amazon couldn't possibly hire enough graphic artists to manually create all the variations of all the product images they store. It's very cool to see it in action.

For example, I took this TechRepublic book and added the little discount bullet and a drop shadow:

and here it is with the "Search Inside" icon slapped on top:

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Beautiful, the buggy Netscape 8 browser has yet another nifty bug--it appears to break IE's XML renderer. Of course Microsoft's typical response--uninstall Netscape 8. AOL, of course, dismisses this as a minor bug affecting only a small number of users, and promises a patch next week.

Not sure yet whom to blame for this mess, I suspect that it will turn out to be a little bit of both Netscape's and Microsoft's fault. What I lament the most though is how this might negatively impact Firefox. As the foundation for Netscape's new browser, it may get painted with the same brush of negative publicity.

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Just got the Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 DVD, haven't had time yet to install it and play around. There's definitely a lot of new stuff though to play with--DNJ Online has an extensive set of articles detailing what's new in the tools and the APIs.

I'm of course especially interested in the new Web development features, even though my employer is largely a Java shop. It's still good to see what's going on in the .NET/VS world as that will no doubt influence Java IDE's such as Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.

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Hey, apparently Microsoft has promised that Longhorn will do away with those infamous "My" directories, like "My Music" and "My Documents". They'll just be plan "Documents" or whatever, no "My" prefix.

On the one hand I think that's good, those names always annoyed me. On the other hand I think about people like my Mom, who have gotten used to the way it works now and will just be horribly confused if the folder names change.

Of course I don't think Mom will be upgrading to Longhorn. She's still running Windows 98 just fine, it does all the stuff she wants it to do. As long as AOL keeps coming out with versions that run on Windows 98 I don't see any reason to upgrade her. That's pretty much all she uses her PC for anyway, surfing the Web and email via AOL.

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Very nice--somebody has come up with a PCI card that holds up to 4 GB of DDR RAM, enough to hold a Windows XP install. It has a battery back-up to maintain the RAM image even when the PC is unplugged.

So the idea is you install this card, install some RAM onto the card, and then install Windows XP onto the RAM disk. Then you can boot your PC off the RAM disk, the XP boot is supposed to be just a few seconds when it's done this way.

It's a little pricey still given the cost of DDR RAM but where this would make sense is a media PC. That sucker is not going to be unplugged anyway, and the near-instantaneous boot would make it act like any other piece of entertainment electronics. Instead of acting like a PC.

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Two tech/gearhead conferences start today, opposing camps and on opposite coasts. Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference is happening in San Jose, and Microsoft's TechEd 2005 is happening in Orlando. For once I think Apple is going to steal the spotlight, if the news about their switch to Intel is true.

I do own a Mac, but it's just one of the computers I use. So I don't think I'm a Mac partisan, but this Intel news makes me wonder what the future holds for Apple and OS X. Hopefully we'll get some clarity out of Steve Jobs' keynote today at the WWDC.

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Very nifty, here's a demonstration that shows flip-book style animation via CSS. As you move your mouse over the image, it flips thru a sequence just like one of those old-school flip-book animations.

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An interview with Steve Ballmer at TechEd 2005. Typically bullish sentiment from Mr. Ballmer, but no new insights into Microsoft's plans for world domination.

Very nice--I had wondered how people would debug all these AJAX apps that are sprouting. Well Julien Couvreur has created just the thing, an AJAX debug window script. Excellent, it's no Eclipse IDE but it's a great start.

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For everyone who thinks a Prius doesn't get good enough gas mileage comes a 70-mpg four-seater from Daimler-Chrysler. Unfortunately the article says they aren't going to actually produce these, it is just an engineering test bed.

Figures, given all the other bad decisions they've made lately at Daimler-Chrysler comes another bad decision. I think a lot of people might buy this car. It's actually kinda cool looking and it gets amazing mileage. What's not to like?

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More fun with AJAX--somebody has a demonstration of an AJAX-based spell-checker app. Similar to Google's spell checker for GMail.

Makes you wonder just how far these apps can push--spell checking and address completion are two features I loved in Outlook and now you're able to do those in Web-based mail apps such as GMail. I think Microsoft has reason to worry, when the ease-of-use features you'd normally expect in a Windows-based app can be accomplished in a Web-based app.

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So Apple's little bit of news this week kinda overshadowed everything else, but Microsoft has been busily plugging its products to IT professionals at the annual TechEd conference in Orlando. A couple of our editors went down and one of them sent in some photos he took at the event.

This one in particular caught my eye--that's the most video screens I've seen in one since the Celine Dion show in

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Nice summary from somebody at Microsoft as to why they ship so many different versions of their C++ compiler. There's various flavors of the x86 compiler, and the 64-bit versions as well. And of course there's x86 versions that cross-compile into 64-bit. It's all kinda confusing to me but I guess it does make sense if you think about it long enough.

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A nice Business Week profile of one bank that has succeeded at using virtualization software to dramatically reduce the amount of hardware they need. A large part of why Microsoft shelled out the money to buy Connectix a couple years ago--they wanted the Virtual PC technology to speed along their own server virtualization efforts.

Microsoft doesn't care how much hardware you buy--they're perfectly okay with companies buying just one Intel-based server and running multiple (licensed) copies of Windows on that machine. Of course it doesn't necessarily help Intel, which is why some pundits think Intel will eventually buy Apple. So it owns a hardware/software manufacturer that can be focused on helping drive chip sales rather than just its own software sales.

I kinda doubt that Intel/Apple thing. But I do not doubt the benefits of virtualization. It's the real deal, and any prudent IT shop needs to be at least evaluating the various virtualization technologies to see if they might be worthwhile.

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All morning I've been in anti-harassment training. Yes it could have been a deadly-dull topic, some lawyer/talking-head droning endlessly on and on about ADA and FMLA and how you should document every personnel action blah blah blah. But it turned out a lot better than that, mostly because we had an excellent instructor.

I did however have the misfortune of being stuck in the manager's session. It's the longer of the two--employees only have to sit thru a couple hours but the manager's session was four-and-a-half hours long. Though again it went by fairly quickly because the instructor was so engaging and she did a great job answering questions along the way. Helped a lot that she's a real live litigator in the anti-discrimination field so she was able to draw on real experiences to spice up the conversation.

It reminded me about how important an instructor's skill can be to successfully absorbing knowledge. I love programming, for example, but I've had professors who were so horrible they made it into a real chore. On the other hand I generally hate history class but I had a great instructor once in American History who managed to make it very interesting.

I fear for our future given the teacher shortages we read about these days. If there's a shortage that means the field may have to draw upon some less-than-skilled educators to fill in the gaps. Could be we're raising a whole generation that's going to be turned off a lot of subjects because of that.

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Okay, another completely useless but way cool JavaScript demonstration--a UNIX-like terminal for your browser. The main site has apparently been Slashdot-ed so it's up-and-down. The mirror site seems to be holding up better so I'd use that for now.

Just click on the "open terminal" link and you'll get the little gizmo to pop up. Can't say that I see anything particularly useful about it but it's very fun to see what you can do with some ingenuity and a bit of JavaScript code.

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Brendan Eich, the guy who invented JavaScript, has posted some thoughts on the past, present and future of JavaScript. His point about JavaScript's stagnation is well taken. Other languages like Java and Perl have been evolving these past few Internet years but JavaScript has been essentially standing still. And in the programming world that's the same as moving backwards.

Unfortunately I'm not certain there's enough impetus from the community to drive a new version of JS. It may be up to the players in the browser field, which means Microsoft and the Mozilla.org. I kinda don't see those two agreeing on a common next-generation JS standard.

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A few years ago Apple did that whole Switch campaign where they highlighted a bunch of people who had switched from Windows to Macintosh. I was right there with them--three-and-a-half years ago I gave my Mom the old ThinkPad and got myself a shiny white iBook.

I've really liked that little laptop, and OS X is a great operating system. But the iBook is getting long in the tooth and it's time I get a new laptop. The first thought of course was to stick with a Mac, but then two things happened that changed my mind.

First, Apple announced their switch to Intel. Which means any new Mac I buy now is an instant relic. Apple will still produce "fat" binaries for a while, software that works on both the Intel-based and the PowerPC-based Macs. But if you buy now you're guaranteeing obsolesence.

Second, when I started pricing laptops I found a nice HP that had 512 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, built-in wireless 802.11g, and a recordable DVD for $850. There's no Mac anywhere near that price with matching specs.

So I've gone with the HP laptop, which arrived last week. Now I need to migrate my apps and data and I'll be switched back to an all-Windows lifestyle. I've always had Windows at work and now I'll have it once again at home as well.

I'll let you know how it goes.

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So I am in the midst of switching back
over from a Mac to a Windows laptop, and I already know two things I'll
miss about the iBook: the startup chime and the near-instant wake-up.

The
startup chime is just one of those things Macs have always had--hit the
power button and it gives you a happy little sound to tell you it has
begun to boot up. The specific sound has changed thru the generations
but there's always been a Mac startup sound.

Windows has a
startup sound but that's part of the OS, it doesn't fire off until
you're well into the OS boot. On the Mac the startup sound happens
right after you hit the power button to turn on the computer, it's part
of the hardware boot. I suppose there's probably some PC laptop
manufacturers that have something similar in their hardware but
apparently not the HP laptop I have.

The wake-up is also much
faster in my ancient iBook than it is in the brand spanking new Windows
laptop. Both have a similar suspend feature--close the lids and the
computer goes into a low-power suspended animation. Open the lid and
the computer wakes up, but the old iBook wakes up much faster than the
HP laptop. Not a huge deal I suppose but it is a little surprising that
the disparity is so noticeable.

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So I am in the midst of switching back over from a Mac to a Windows laptop, and I already know two things I'll miss about the iBook: the startup chime and the near-instant wake-up.

The startup chime is just one of those things Macs have always had--hit the power button and it gives you a happy little sound to tell you it has begun to boot up. The specific sound has changed thru the generations but there's always been a Mac startup sound.

Windows has a startup sound but that's part of the OS, it doesn't fire off until you're well into the OS boot. On the Mac the startup sound happens right after you hit the power button to turn on the computer, it's part of the hardware boot. I suppose there's probably some PC laptop manufacturers that have something similar in their hardware but apparently not the HP laptop I have.

The wake-up is also much faster in my ancient iBook than it is in the brand spanking new Windows laptop. Both have a similar suspend feature--close the lids and the computer goes into a low-power suspended animation. Open the lid and the computer wakes up, but the old iBook wakes up much faster than the HP laptop. Not a huge deal I suppose but it is a little surprising that the disparity is so noticeable.

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Pardon the pun, but the solar power market is suddenly hot again. Every time there's any kind of energy crisis or bump in the price of gas, there's usually a spike of interest in alternative energy sources. A couple companies with different approaches to solar energy just received millions in VC money.

HelioVolt is the one that interests me--their cells can apparently be applied similar to a coating onto other materials and structures. So it might be applied to roofing materials to turn your entire roof into a solar power generator. Or maybe the roof of your camper could be coated to generate electricity when you're communing with nature in the middle of nowhere.

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Jack Kilby, who invented the integrated circuit back in the late 1950's, has died. Circuits built onto a chip instead of having to use cumbersome vacuum tubes and the like is one of the great inventions of the 20th century. It literally paved the way for every digital gadget we use today--cell phones, computers, digital wristwatches, EKG machines, everything is built out of these microchips.

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On the one hand you want to write form-validation code in JavaScript because it can be responsive to the user--no round-trip of the entire page back to a server just to find out there was a problem with the ZIP code. But you'll have to implement the same validation anyway on the server side in case users don't have JavaScript enabled or are running a browser (like a cell-phone) that might not support JavaScript.

AJAX to the rescue--lightweight server-side validation with client-side interaction. This handy degradeable form validation routine seems to do the trick. Haven't tested it out myself yet but the write-up seems solid.

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Microsoft thinks RSS is going to be pivotal to how people consume the Web in the future. They're adding support for RSS in both the next IE and in Longhorn. Look for the first fruits of this effort to appear in IE7, and in future betas of Longhorn.

I think they are on to something--RSS is about much more than simply a list of the most recent news stories. We use it here to export feeds of content between different platforms (i.e., Windows/IIS to Linux/Apache). It's a nice portable way to export/import data of all kinds between different machines.

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The Supreme Court has ruled that file-swapping networks can be held liable for copyright infringement that happens on their networks. Doesn't mean they will be--the ruling sends the cases back to the lower courts to re-try based on the new interpretation of copyright law.

The good thing is that the Court did not summarily judge the technology itself. It was the actions of the companies they focused on, whether those companies took the kind of actions you would expect from somebody who wants to prevent illegal copyright infringement on their networks.

Doesn't mean they had to have stopped all infringement, just that they showed an effort to stop it. It's the Betamax rule--you can't stop all infringement but you can do things to show you're not encouraging infringement.

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So the fine folks at RealBasic have released a beta version for Linux. I wonder if the market is ready for this though--the impression I get is that people using Linux tend to be bleeding-edge types, the kind of folks who write Perl and know how to compile C programs using gcc. The person who wants to use RealBasic doesn't seem like that same audience.

I could be wrong though--definitely the thought of being able to cross-compile something to run on all three major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) is appealing. That's kindof the Java dream and you do get close with stuff like Eclipse. RealBasic could be the big thing that brings more day-to-day programmers, the business programmers rather than the bleeding edge programmers.

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Okay, I just sold off my iBook and thus my journey back to the Dark Side is complete. I am now a Windows household, no more Apple Mac for me. Well, I do have an old G3 tower that my employer was gonna throw out. But it just sits in the spare bedroom gathering dust--last time I powered it up was months ago to help Twinkie and The Trivia Geek burn some CD's for a work event. It has been silent ever since.

And now with the iBook gone I will no longer hear the sweet happy Apple sound when you power it up. The HP laptop I bought has no happy sounds of its own, just the Windows XP sounds. But at least that HP laptop is now mostly paid for, thanks to the rebates and the sale of the iBook. That's pretty good, I rather doubt when the time comes to sell off the HP that it will have retained value as well as the old iBook did.

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The new laptop I bought has a 60-day trial copy of Microsoft Office installed on it. Now I don't use Office except for work--I use AbiWord whenever possible for my own writing, and browser-based email like GMail. So I don't really need Microsoft Word or Outlook.

However, there are times when I might need to open up a document from work on my personal laptop. So I was thinking about using RockXP to retrieve the Office key from the computer at work and use that to register the Office on my laptop. It just seems wrong to purchase a whole license for Office when it's only needed occasionally on the laptop.

Is that wrong? It's not like I'm giving the license to a different person, it's only me. And there's never a time when I'd need to have Office running simultaneously on the two machines--so why do I need two licenses?

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Tim O'Reilly supporting Perl in a J2EE/.NET world. Though he points out (correctly I think) that Perl has lost ground to languages that offer more core support for Web programming like PHP and J2EE.

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Interesting speculation about some of the real motivation behind Apple's switch to Intel. The article claims that the real motivator is not the Macintosh line at all--it's getting Intel's XScale processors into the iPod line as soon as possible.

Some good points but I think the overall thesis is a bit far-fetched. Apple could have made the iPod-to-XScale transition without having to also make the Macintosh-to-Pentium transition. It's probably a combination of factors--the cheaper price, the Xscale's superior performance, Intel's vastly larger market and research budget, etc.

I'm still sitting on the fence about whether this whole switch to Intel was a master stroke of genius or the dumbest thing Steve Jobs has ever done. I guess only time will tell.

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Clearly the interest level in AJAX continues to grow, as we're seeing more and more apps and more and more articles about it. Here's a particularly good intro to the technologies behind AJAX.

I gotta get off my butt one of these days and try my hand at building an AJAX app. But I have no idea what to build, I'm simply not smart enough to come up with all these clever ideas I see every day.

Maybe I'll get inspired eventually, more likely one of our biz dev folks will see something clever and convince management that we should build something similar here. That will force me to learn it at that point.

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So a friend of mine at Google put me in touch with their PR department and we managed to negotiate the loan of a Google Mini. That's their sub-$3,000 search appliance. We've had it for a few weeks and I absolutely love the thing. They'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers :-)

Anyway, here's a review of the Mini that I put together.

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So when I get in to work this morning, I cannot log into my PC. Windows is throwing up a rather cryptic error message--it says it cannot connect to the domain. But the cryptic part is that it gives you a couple possible reasons it might not be able to reach the domain. It says the domain controller may be down or otherwise unavailable, or my account may not be found in the domain.

That seems like a completely useless error message. That describes pretty much all the possible scenarios for why you cannot log in. It doesn't help the user narrow down the problem whatsoever.

Thankfully I did remember to bring my laptop in to work, and that's what I'm using now to post this. I am able to connect to the wireless network, which requires a VPN login. So I'm pretty sure the domain controller has to be running, which means the problem is related to my computer's account name.

Now our admin did change the PC name last night, as part of a clean-up project he's doing. I bet that caused the problem. I've filed a help ticket with our IS department and I guess in the meantime I wait. And try to use Outlook Web Access to read all the email that has accumulated over the weekend.

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Somehow this one got past me--the Flash Player 8 beta
has been live for about a week now. Haven't tried it myself, at this
point it's really mostly about checking that older apps still play
correctly in the new player.

It's not that big a deal really until Flash 8 itself comes out
later this year. Then you'll start seeing apps requiring Flash 8.

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So I've been a user of Yahoo almost since the beginning, and I really like what they've been doing lately in the Yahoo Movies section. I noticed recently they've incorporated a recommendation engine into the system. They've had for some time a gizmo that lets you rate movies, now they're taking that data and telling you whether you'd like certain other movies or not.

I've got about fifty movies rated, and the recommendations they generate have been remarkably good. For example, the system said I would probably like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and indeed I found it a very funny movie. Johnny Depp is just remarkable in it.

The system is also good at pointing out movies I probably won't like. It's predicting I probably would not like Monster-In-Law or The Perfect Man. That's a good bet as I'm not a Jennifer Lopez fan nor a fan of chick-flicks.

Yet I never had to explicitly tell the system those preferences. I graded a bunch of movies, which tended to be sci-fi and action flicks. The few women-oriented movies on my review list, like The Joy Luck Club, tended not to fare well in my ranking.

It makes me wish I understood more about how these systems arrive at their recommendations. Somehow it's able to discover that both Joy Luck Club and Monster-in-Law are chick flicks, and then make the connection that since I did not enjoy the former I probably would not enjoy the latter. But is it that simple or are there even more sophisticated rules it processes to arrive at the conclusion?

Anyway, so far I've been impressed with the quality of the recommendations. I will have to try the flip side, go to a movie it says I might not like and see whether indeed I do not like that movie.

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For those of us a certain age, Star Trek was our first real glimpse at what technology might become one day. And Scotty was our first exposure to an engineer. The man who played Scotty on Star Trek, James Doohan, has passed away.

I always felt sorry for him and the rest of the crew, typecast to be those characters. It was jarring sometimes to hear him speaking without that Scottish brogue I'd come to associate with him. And apparently people were always coming up to him and saying "Beam me up, Scotty!"

But he did enjoy a certain enduring success that so many actors will never have. It's sad to see him go, a reminder of the inevitable passing of time and the passing of that more innocent and optimistic time. RIP Mr. Doohan--it was a pleasure to have made your acquaintance thru the TV and movie screens.

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One of the things that constantly comes up throughout any career is having to mentor and/or teach various new skills to newbies. This seems especially true for us in engineering--I can't begin to count the number of folks I've walked through their first TCL template, or their first JSP, or their first snippet of JavaScript.

The problem is that I"m not really any good at teaching. I constantly forget to cover beginner material and just leap right into the template. Which is why teaching tools like BlueJ have always interested me.

It does feel kinda weird that a lot of schools are apparently using Java as the intro programming language when it's not really particularly good for that. Basic and Pascal seem like a lot simpler starting places. Even Perl in some ways might be simpler since you can just dive in.

I'm not totally convinced BlueJ is the answer. It's certainly a lot less intimidating than firing up Eclipse but is it really any better? At the end of the day I'm not sure that attempting to hide the complexity is doing the students any good. They gotta see it and struggle thru it and eventually they will get it. Or they just aren't cut out to be programmers.

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I think Windows Vista is the dumbest name
Microsoft has ever come up with. They just announced this will be the
name for Windows Longhorn when it finally ships sometime this decade.
I'm no marketing whiz and so I could be completely wrong about this. The announcement could be a brilliant master-stroke because it will definitely get a lot of buzz from both the traditional press and the blogosphere.
You know the old saying--there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Anything to get people talking about and interested in Longhorn. Er,
Vista.

Sorry but whenever I think of Vista I think of the road
in Boise where I grew up. It's a long stretch of strip-malls and
fast-food restaurants. A center of commerce, sure, but not very pretty.
That will be the image I see whenver I hear "Windows Vista".

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Not certain why, but the $99 price for this Jornada 680e
was just too good to pass up. So I've ordered one, standard shipping so
I have no idea when it will arrive. Hopefully in the next week or so.

The
thing is I really need something that is very portable yet can allow me
to take occasional notes. There's no way to really take notes on the
Sony Clie I currently use as my PDA. I can sorta using Grafitti but
it's painful. I'm hoping it will be a bit better with the Jornada.

If
it works out I'll be seeling the Clie. It has a gorgeous
high-resolution screen which I'll miss, but it's worth the tradeoff if
I can get some reasonable note-taking out of the Jornada instead.

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Not a surprise at all really, that the announcement of Windows Vista tripled the mentions of the word "vista" in the blogosphere. I'm actually a bit surprised it didn't have an even larger effect.

But to put it all in perspective, there was an even larger increase in the usage of the word "Wonka" when the movie opened compared to the increase in "vista".

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If you're into it, there's some screenshots of Windows Vista,
the operating system formerly known as Windows Longhorn. Doesn't look
all that special but this is only a first beta. And it's impossible to
tell from a screenshot how the thing actually works and behaves.

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Dammit, the ActiveState folks have started up some blogs that I should really try and read. But who has time?

What's annoying is that they don't seem to have a combined feed of all their blogs. You have to subscribe to each one separately. Or use Newsburst, which is what I do, to combine them all into one stream.

I'll just have to make time--they do good work there at ActiveState. It's worth trying to keep up at least occasionally with their latest.

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So being the voyeur that I am, I find Esther Dyson's Flickr blog fascinating. She's everything I'm not--rich, jet-setting, well-connected, influential. I love to see how that half lives, and she seems happy to share it.

But one thing I've noticed is that when I view her photos like this one, the little Google AdSense ad in the right-hand column is often something about Dyson vacuum cleaners. Which just seems like a poor match--yes it's the word "Dyson" but surely there's better matches. I mean, since she's a VC wouldn't some kind of ads related to venture capital or banking or whatever be a better match?

I wonder how difficult that kind of deeper contextual understanding will be? Or is it deeper--maybe I'm wrong and maybe matching on Dyson vacuum cleaners is actually a very good match. Depends on how well that ad does when it displays on Esther's Flickr blog.

And just why the heck are they still running Google AdSense--they were bought by Yahoo months ago, for heaven's sake. Why aren't they one of the beta testers for the Yahoo blog ad network?

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For the most part our Builder.com site is in zombie mode. We occasionally post new content but it's never content written specifically for Builder. It's stuff we use elsewhere and just re-post it into the Builder skin.

On occasion we do have to dust off the template code over there and tweak stuff. Mostly it's ad calls, like a few months ago I tweaked a couple of the leaderboard ads (the large banner-shaped ads). And today one of my co-workers added an intromercial ad call, that's the ad which takes over the whole page briefly before sending you on to the site.

The site continues to get decent traffic just sitting there, with nobody really actively working on it. But whenever I have to go over and work on the code it feels like I'm in a ghost town. Like you'll look at the CVS datestamps and none of the other templates have been touched by human hands in months, some have been unchanged for years.

It's a weird electronic ghost town. I wonder how many other companies out there run similar zombie sites?

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Java stalwart BEA Systems is looking at ways to incorporate scripting languages into their Java platform. About damned time.

There's got to be some kind of happy medium to this mess--pure tag-based stuff like Velocity is too restrictive, while Java/JSP is a bit too open (you should see some of the insane things people have done in the JSP templates here at work). We need a way to separate presentation from the deep logic while still allowing some logic to happen as needed to accomodate presentation needs.

To me that's what I always loved about the old Vignette StoryServer system we used to run here. The template language was TCL (pronounced 'tickle'), which lets you do basic logic in the presentation template.

What I especially loved about TCL was that at the end of the day everything was a String. Even a function was a String, so you could actually dynamically edit a function to change its code on the fly. Though that's obviously not recommended unless you have a desperate hack you need to deploy that day (what, you looking at me?).

See an HTML page is just that--a big String. And TCL treats everything like a String--perfect match. On the other hand there's Java where everything is strongly typed, which can make certain things a bit more complicated than they need to be.

Not saying that TCL is better, I just think for building the front-end templates that a scripting language is a better choice.

Appropos of my quest for a better way to teach programming, I ran across a mention of another Java-based tool called Processing. It's an open-source project aimed at creating a language suitable for teaching but in a visual programming style.

That's
the part that intrigues me the most--it's designed as a language for
visual expression. The idea being that it would help teach programming
to folks who maybe think primarily in a visual medium.

I'm gonna
have to download this thing and give it a try. The other nice part is
that the output is a Web page with the necessary Java JAR files for
your project. So in addition to being a programming tool it's also a
sharing tool, it provides a simple way for users to share the programs
they develop on the Web.

It's a sure sign of how ubiquitous Windows has become, that a news magazine devotes a page to a story about the beta version
of Vista. That's just remarkable--20, maybe even just 10, years ago you
would have never seen a story about the beta of an operating system in
a mainstream magazine. One of the techie rags sure, like the old BYTE
(my former employer) or PC Magazine. But not something like Newsweek.

Windows has become such an integral part of our daily lives that
even a beta at least a year from release warrants such coverage. Is
there anything else even remotely like this? Maybe elections--those
start getting coverage a year or two in advance. Lots of speculation
and hype, yeah I think elections are a good one. But I can't think of
anything else that would get this kind of advance press.

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So the CIO where I work left the company
this week, and his direct reports are temporarily reporting to one of
the top business-side managers. Smart guy, has a firm grasp on
technology and on the business needs. Which makes me wonder if there's
really any need to replace the CIO?

It just does not feel to me
like we lost anything by replacing the CIO with a non-technical but
savvy business manager. If anything it is an improvement since the
business manager has a stronger grasp of what his business needs. The
engineering managers who report to him should be able to translate
those needs into action, there is no value that an extra person (the
CIO) would add into this equation.

The CIO is redundant in an
age where technology is everywhere. It would be like having a chief
desk officer, to make sure your desk is optimal

So the CIO where I work left the company
this week, and his direct reports are temporarily reporting to one of
the top business-side managers. Smart guy, has a firm grasp on
technology and on the business needs. Which makes me wonder if there's
really any need to replace the CIO?

It just doesn't feel to me
like we've lost anything by replacing the CIO with a non-technical but
savvy business manager. If anything it's an improvement since the
business manager has a stronger grasp of what his business needs. The
engineering managers who report to him should be able to translate
those needs into action, there's no value that an extra person (the
CIO) would add into this equation.

The CIO is redundant in an
age where technology is everywhere. It would be like having a chief
desk officer, to make sure everyone's desk is optimal. Desks are
ubiquitous, they are commodity, you don't need som

So the CIO where I work left the company
this week, and his direct reports are temporarily reporting to one of
the top business-side managers. Smart guy, has a firm grasp on
technology and on the business needs. Which makes me wonder if there's
really any need to replace the CIO?

It just doesn't feel to me
like we've lost anything by replacing the CIO with a non-technical but
savvy business manager. If anything it's an improvement since the
business manager has a stronger grasp of what his business needs. The
engineering managers who report to him should be able to translate
those needs into action, there's no value that an extra person (the
CIO) would add into this equation.

The CIO is redundant in an
age where technology is everywhere. It would be like having a chief
desk officer, to make sure everyone's desk is optimal. Desks are
ubiquitous, they are commodity, you don't need somebody at the "C"
level to handle desks. Isn't IT in a similar state--it's so much a
basic fixture of running a modern business that you don't really need a
dedicated technical officer to focus on it.

Definitely over-simplifying but it just seems like the day of the CIO may be coming to an end.

Oh yeah, it's on now--Microsoft is talking up Atlas, a set of tools for helping to build AJAX-style applications. They even claim the client side will in fact by cross-browser in that it will support all "modern" browsers.

But the kicker is that they are building ASP controls to help facilitate interaction with the client-side, and of course all this richness will be deeply tied into Visual Studio. So to maximize your application you'll need to develop on the Microsoft platform (Windows running ASP.NET) using the Microsoft development tools (Visual Studio) and deploy to the Microsoft client (Internet Explorer).

This pattern seems oddly familiar. It's the old embrace-and-extend-then-smother approach we've seen before.

It will be interesting to see if the open-source community can respond. For example, can somebody build Atlas-like tools and APIs that work with a J2EE server as the stand-in for ASP.NET, Eclipse as the stand-in for Visual Studio, and Firefox as the IE replacement?

To me that's where things might be different this time than in previous embrace-and-extend events. The fact that there are legitimate competitors to the Microsoft products across the full development spectrum, from server to tools to client.

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Nifty--a Flash-based interface into either Google Maps or MSN Virtual Earth. Nifty that you can switch almost instantaneously between the two data sources.

What really amazes me though is how little improved the Flash experience is over the DHTML/AJAX experience. The Flash one is a bit smoother perhaps when you scroll around but otherwise I don't see any major improvement in using Flash as the UI to the app.

Makes you wonder if Flash is really just a multimedia/entertainment tool or the more general UI tool that Macromedia seems to want.

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Normally I really like working in the technology business. It's always amazing to me what a few chips, wires and lines of code can do. But where it can become a real bummer is when you have to work with folks who are not quite as tech savvy.

Take cookies for example. Turns out to be amazingly difficult sometimes to explain to business folks what we can and cannot do with cookies. Of course here at CNET we've added another layer of complication--we have an Apache module that makes some of our key cookies available in the Apache notes table.

This means we can do some basic cookie handling (i.e., is the user logged in?) at the tech production/HTML level. But more sophisticated cookie handling requires engineering effort.

To me that line is very clear-cut but it's not always so obvious to the business folks. So I'll get requests that the biz person thinks it can be done quickly as an HTML tweak, but turns out we have to turn to engineering instead. Then it's my job to try and explain why, and to prioritize the work in engineering's over-stuffed project queue.

Of course part of the blame is mine--I'm clearly not explaining well enough to the business what can be done at the quick-and-dirty tech production level and what requires engineering muscle instead. But I blame the business folks as well--if you're gonna work at an Internet company you better be able to understand what is and is not possible on the Internet.

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One of the current buzzwords that seems to be blowing around is Wisdom of Crowds, based on the book of the same name by James Surowiecki. The premise is simple: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few at predicting outcomes.

The author gives examples like the county fair where people guessed at the number of jellybeans in a jar and it turned out the average of all those guesses was almost dead-on. The idea is that a bunch of people, each working off imperfect knowledge, can converge on the "right" solution more reliably and faster than a few trained decision makers.

A fair number of us here at work read the book last year as part of, you guessed it, a management exercise. But unlike some management spasms (i.e., the whole ISO 9000/TQM mania that swept the planet a few years back) there's a very useful nugget of truth in here.

The reason I know this is not like other spasms is that there appears to be legitimate business models that can be spun directly from the Wisdom of Crowds premise. For example, News.com reported on a company called Jigsaw Data that's turning the premise into a "business contact marketplace".

Strictly speaking this initial part of the business isn't really Wisdom of Crowds. Sure folks are incented to provide good contact info (because you get contacts in return) but that isn't the crowd per se. Where it becomes the crowd is their future plans to use all the salespeople as provides of data about the private companies they call upon.

For example, it's hard to establish the number of employees at a private company. But if enough salespeople who call on that company submit their estimates for company size then the Wisdom of Crowd thesis should have them converge on something pretty close to the right answer.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of data they can squeeze out of the crowd.

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This may not be your 10 best but Slashdot linked to this page listing one man's top 10 CSS resources. Usual suspects of course like the CSS Zen Garden, but also some that were new to me anyway.

I think the two I will end up bookmarking and using the most are Position is Everything and CSS Vault. Lots of good resources and links to other resources.

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Cron is a service in Unix/Linux boxes that automatically runs programs on a schedule that you can set. Most operating systems have something similar, Windows has the Task Scheduler for example.

Whatever it's called, the cron functionality is used for an amazing variety of things from scheduling scripts you have written to automating the lights in your house. But what got me thinking about cron this morning was the number of automated email alerts I received overnight. All generated by various programs that were kicked off by cron.

Like the Google Mini that I reviewed--every Friday morning it kicks off a crawl of our Wiki intranet pages and sends out emails at the various stages. Or Bugzilla--somebody apparently set a remind date of today on a couple bugs, so I got cron'd email alerts from our internal Bugzilla server. Or our RSS Harvestor--a cron job somewhere fires it up every few hours, and it sends out status emails telling us when it's done.

And our admins have cron set up to remind them when it's time to remove accounts. Like the UNIX account of our recently departed CIO -- cron alerted them earlier this week that the account was past expiration and hadn't been deleted. So one of the admins nuked the account last night, which of course triggered more automated, cron'd email messages.

I don't think the original developers of cron realized quite how ubiquitous their little invention would become. It was just a nice convenient way to run house-keeping chores like archiving log files and such.

Now it's everywhere, in one form or another. I'm pretty certain that it'll outlive us--when our sun goes nova and burns the planet to a crisp, there will be some computer in some hardened military bunker that survives the blast. And it will dutifully run its cron jobs until the UPS runs out.

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