I’ve been subscribing to Scoble’s feed since shortly before NorthernVoice2005. He’s been an interesting source of info and opinion, but he’s also afflicted with a strong case of braggadocio regarding “secrets” that he’s privy to [1, 2, 3]. That pisses me off. If you know a “secret”, even just acknowledging that there is a secret is betraying that trust. Like it or not, Robert, when you signed on with MS, that was part of the deal. And you re-up every time you cash a cheque from Redmond.
The latest round of secret-bragging was related to the still-unreleased MSN Virtual Earth “google killer” – Robert was basically marking the secret as “his”, in a misguided attempt to generate buzz.
So, I checked out MSN Virtual Earth (it was up this morning, it’s down now – wonder why…), and it sucked badly. Maps wouldn’t completely load. I couldn’t zoom in more than three notches. The “Locate Me” button requested a FREAKING ACTIVEX CONTROL to do its job (and the non-ActiveX version failed to do anything). So, based on Robert’s pre-release pimping of Virtual Earth, I can only conclude that MSN Virtual Earth SUCKS BADLY and will be no challenge for Google to deal with.
See, Robert, that’s another reason why “secrets” are embargoed until a certain date – the software may not have been fully cooked before you started pimping it. But, the buggy steaming POS that I saw is how I’ll remember it.
I’ve been trying to call Scoble out on this, but it’s bouncing off… I left this as a comment on his blog:
…buzz is more than “I know a secret! neener neener! You’ll know too, on Monday!” Buzz is getting a community to give two shits about what you are evangelizing about. Playing the “my secret is bigger than yours, so I’m more important” game is kinda anti-buzz…
So, thanks to the wonders of RSS and blogosphere triangulation, I’ll still pick up anything important that Scoble talks about, without having the distraction of the lower signal:noise(brag) ratio.
The owners ratified the agreement today (after the NHLPA already ratified it), meaning hockey’s BACK! I suggested that the Learning Commons needs a superbox at the Saddledome. Nobody else thought we could sneak that into the budget.
Loving the new rules for the NHL. Should make for a much faster game! And shootouts to break ties? Awesome.
TSN.ca – NHL – Canada’s Sports Leader
One primary objective of the new rules will be to reduce the scope of defensive “tools” a team may effectively employ, and to create a corresponding benefit to the offensive part of the game – thus allowing skill players to use their skills and increasing the number and quality of scoring chances.
New rules:
- No more ties – shootouts!
- Two-line passes – should keep things faster going from defense to offense
- Restrictions on goalies – bigger five-hole, less out-of-net play
- Bigger offensive zone – biggest change here is shrinking the neutral zone, and moving the nets closer to the boards to reduce camping
- Changes to icing – preventing dumping
- Instigator rule – bigger penalty for being an ass at the end of a game. good move
- Officiating – zero tolerance, and stuff to keep play moving fast
- Unsportsmanlike conduct – the Anti-Bertuzzi clause
- Competition committee – good to see Iggie and Shanahan representing the players
I’ve been a relatively hardcore .Mac user since the day it was announced (as the free iTools service, several years ago). I stuck with it when it switched from free to a paid subscription. It had enough handy stuff that I could totally justify the approximately $160 CDN per year.
But, I find I’m not using any of the .Mac services now, except for iSync. My dad uses a .Mac email address that I renew for him every year (he started with a free account, too, and was caught when it switched to a payment model).
So, I’m spending ballpark $170/year, for iSync and an email account for my dad. I use Flickr for all of my photo sharing (blows the crap out of .Mac homepage album management), and I use my blog for everything else.
I would guess that I could work out some way of keeping my two macs in sync, and throw my dad a GMail account, for something less than $170/year. Then, I could allocate the leftover cash to paying for my GoDaddy hosting, and maintaining a FlickrPro account, and have enough left over to pick up a new iPod Shuffle every year.
Unless, of course, there is a serious upgrade to .mac in the works…
We finally pushed the next beta of the Pachyderm online/interactive presentation authoring app out the door today. It’s got quite a few fixes in the queue, but it’s definitely usable. The beta cycle should be interesting – roughly 200 people hammering on an app that we’re trying to finish/fix while they’re using it. That’s likely going to be a separate series of blog entries…
In the meantime, we’ve got the major wrinkles ironed out (at least to the casual observer’s point of view), and it works as advertised. It could stand some optimization (particularly in the presentation publishing code, which doesn’t do much caching at the moment), but it’s definitely working. The hardest part for us has been deciding when/where to draw the line on what “gets done” before we call it 2.0 – it’s so tempting to just keep going, especially since we all have some pretty cool ideas (and there is no lack of code that needs refactoring/cleaning up).
The “unit test” presentation that I use to make sure the authoring/publishing process is working with each update is available. Not very exciting, but available. OK. It has a whole lot of cute photos of my kid in it… This presentation will be modified at will, to test out new templates and features etc… and may be borked and unborked without warning.
I spent the morning off campus (well, at another non-university-of-calgary campus) working in a place that actually made me appreciate the openness of the U of C networks.
I was installing a web application on a new server for them – something that usually requires a network connection (both to download the bits to install, and to let people use the thing after it lights up). The server was behind a scary virtual lan setup, and couldn’t see anything outside of its own hub. No internet. No WAN. Nothing. And, nobody can see the server. You have to physically go to the server room, and plug into the same hub as the server in order to see it.
Apparently, if their IT notices a new machine on the LAN, they kill the switch. They block all IM traffic (I tried IMing Julian for some advice at one point, only to be blocked by the IT Nazis).
Frustrating as hell. I literally could not (would not?) work under such a restrictive network regime. Any place where you can’t google to find what’s going wrong, or to find a quick answer, is just plain unproductive. Any place that restricts communication (for whatever reason) is doing more damage than good. They may be saving money, though…
I firmly believe that putting the demands of IT ahead of the needs of the users is a dreadful thing to do. Without the users, there is no need for IT. IT is there to SUPPORT the people, not reign them in. It shows a pretty insane level of mistrust, and that is no way to run a post-secondary institution. It’s a pretty crappy message to send your people – we don’t trust you, and your needs are secondary to ours.
The U of C network folks, in spite of my complaining about them, are several orders of magnitude better than what these people have to settle for. I’m slowly learning to appreciate them a bit more 
I’ve had to use a MacOSX 10.3 laptop for a little while this week, to get it set up to run as a temporary CAREO server. What struck me is that while I was using the laptop, just how much I missed Dashboard and Spotlight. If you’d have asked me, I would have said I didn’t use them much, nor did I care that much about them.
But, take them away, and boy do I notice. I kept hitting command+space to find apps and files, but nothing happened. F12 didn’t do anything. Frustrating 
After the latest MacOSX 10.4.2 update (which seems to have made Spotlight MUCH faster, and make Dashboard use MUCH less resources), I find I’m actually using Dashboard quite a bit now, to check temperature/weather, check GMail account, and now to indulge my strange craving to keep tabs on a few webcams. And, I’m using Spotlight all the time – from a simple app launcher to full content index file locator.
A while back, I was interviewed by FastForward Magazine (a Calgary weekly mag) about podcasting. I missed the issue when it hit the stands (something about being out of town or something…) but it’s in their online archives. They don’t include the somewhat dorky photo of myself and a very artistically sketched iPod in the online version though. Might have to find a dead-trees version and scan that in…
FFWD Weekly – June 16, 2005: Podcasting changes the future of broadcasting
From sports commentary to pub conversation, sharing information takes a new form. Once in awhile a technology comes along that is so simple, so accessible and so perfect that it has the potential to change the way certain activities in society are carried out. Podcasting, according to those who use it, is just such a breakthrough.
The Battlestar Galactica Podcast commentary for episode 1 of season 2 just showed up in my iTunes podcast subscriptions! Great to see executive producer Ronald Moore keeping up the podcasts for the next season.
Must… resist… urge to listen… before watching episode…
Can’t wait to watch the season opener!
Update: That was one kick-ass season opener! So, what happened with Tighe and Adama to get them booted out of the fleet years ago? Hmmm….
I’d seen somewhere on the blogosphere (perhaps on John Dowdell’s blog?) that Macromedia was running a public beta of the Flash 8 player, and that it apparently kicked some serious performance ass over the current version.
I just downloaded it on one of my systems, and holy crap is it fast. Why wasn’t flash this fast all along? Loads fast. Almost psychically responsive (things happen instantly, with no lag).
Macromedia – Flash Player : Macromedia Flash Player Public Beta
One thing that has been bugging me since moving my blog to GoDaddy for hosting, is the PITA that MySQL backups have become. Back when I was on the Learning Commons’ webserver, I could just create a crontask to dump the MySQL tables every morning. No SSH or shell access to my GoDaddy account means using a web interface to backup, which is less than automatable.
WordPress to the rescue! There’s a WordPress Database Backup Plugin that can easily download or email database backups to you, and when tied with WP-Cron (a cron-like plugin for automating stuff), it’s fully automatable! I now have daily database backups gzipped and emailed to my GMail account for safe keeping.
I heart WordPress…
