SuperWonderBang

Last night, I went over to my buddy Justin’s house and we played through most of the Wii Sports games. Even my wife got into it, though she’s usually not much for video games. It probably didn’t hurt that she was striking me out right and left in Baseball and beat Justin in golf. We had a good time around the machine. It certainly made for conversation and excitement. I guess the commercials are pretty straight on.

With Guitar Hero, the Wii, and all this stuff On Demand, I seldom make time to write. I shared a story recently with a friend of mine. His response was extremely positive. That, in addition to some interesting new ideas, has really gotten my writing jones kicking up. I just need to make the time.

Speaking of time, several folks at work are instituting the GTD way of doing things. I normally poo-poo these organizational “religions,” but folks are having success with this. It might the thing that helps me set aside time to write. My goal is to have something published in the next year. Obviously, doing that with a novel is a huge challenge, but a short story is not completely out of the realm of possibility. I have one right now that I think is publish-worthy and another that needs a rewrite to get there. A few more complete stories and the odds are good that some literary journal might publish one.

Technorati Tags: writing, guitar hero, wii, gtd, time, publishing

I was sick on the 4th of July. No great big deal as I’m not a huge celebrator of holidays, but I was sick the next day, too, which meant I had to work from home. It seems like things are more hectic when I work from home, than if I am at the office. That’s odd to me.

To make me feel a little better, my wife bought me Guitar Hero II for our Xbox 360. I ended up playing until my hands were cramping. I’ve done the same thing tonight and writing this post is much more difficult than it should be. To that end, I’ve been reading up on the possibilities for secure RSS feeds.

We are looking at using RSS feeds at work, not just for basic public information, but for account-specific work as well. It seems that the jury is still out on RSS in the enterprise. Much of it is focused on letting employees access enterprise data. There is little information out there regarding a user of a service authenticating and receiving data in a feed based on who he or she is while also encrypting that data via SSL/TSL.

Most solutions munge some combination of HTTP basic authentication or LDAP or propriety authentication with the industry standard SSL over HTTP. This doesn’t do much if the feed also needs to indicate to the system what data it should return. So, that’s like three levels of interaction.

In addition, we are wanting some of the feed data to be available when the application is not. Things like maintenance feeds or outage updates. These feeds are more “public” in nature but need not rely on our app or database to be accessible to function correctly.

I’ve looked at some offerings from Worklight, Newsgator, Attensa, and KnowNow. I don’t have a good feel yet for which of the products can actually do what I need. In the end, I suspect I will be rolling my own because of some thorny business needs for which these products don’t seem to have built-in answers.

Technorati Tags: rss, enterprise rss, worklight, newsgator, attensa, knownow, secure rss, guitar hero, xbox 360

According to Apple’s own retail iPhone locator, not one Apple store sold out of iPhones. Not one.

So, all those idiots who stood in line for days or even 30 minutes just wasted their time. The best part about this is though is that all the bastards on eBay trying to make a quick buck off of these things are going to get nothing.

Anyone who wants one bad enough to pay $1000 or more for it on eBay is going to be able to go to an Apple Store tomorrow and walk right in and buy it. In addition, they can wait until Monday and buy them from the online Apple Store.

This is a victory against those trolls who buy 10 Wiis/Ps3/Xbox360s and want to charge ungodly amounts to everyone else.

Well, my testing of Google Reader went fine, but alas, nothing gives me the RSS joy of FeedDemon. Sure, I could run it inside a Parallels window, but that just seems silly.

Instead, I found the free, open-source solution, Vienna. It’s a very nice RSS reader and emulates a lot of the functionality I use in FeedDemon, which is my main goal here. I’ve only been using it this morning, but so far it seems perfect.

After my Windows installation become flaky, I finally decided to make the full-time jump to a Linux OS on my laptop. I have used Linux for years in the server environment and have toyed with it on the desktop. Part of me was just bored I guess, but I took the leap.

I’ll write up more later, I’m sure, but the two biggest issues by far have been wireless LAN drivers. This mess with running Windows drivers through ndiswrapper is ridiculous. I do have it working though It only took me an entire day of reading, testing, experimenting, and self-flagellating. The other problem is that I still haven’t gotten my sound working, which means no music on the laptop I made a post on FedoraForum, but it has no responses as of this posting.

The major positive impression I have this far is that it is so much faster than Windows. Apps start faster, even Java ones, and everything just seems to be more stable. There’s more of my journey coming up later.

Any recommendations on a 3-pane RSS reader? I tried Liferea, but I like the panes to be side-by-side not on top of one another. It didn’t seem to have the option to change. For reference, I loved Feeddemon on XP, so something that approximates that functionality would be cool.

Technorati Tags: linux, fedoracore, fedora core

powered by performancing firefox

It’s nigh impossible to cancel your Vonage account. I want to say at the outset that I never had a problem with the Vonage service. The quality was always good and I enjoyed all of the features that they offer. With the recent hullabaloo over the guy who was trying to cancel his AOL account, I thought their customer service might have gotten the message.

However, I spent ten minutes telling the guy I just want to cancel my account. He kept trying to sell me on keeping it. He was offering me lower and lower rates, giving me reasons why I should keep it. What I really wanted him to do was to just cancel the damn account.

Add to this the frustration of my having sat on hold for 30 minutes just to talk to the guy. That 30 minutes came after spending 15 minutes telling a first person what my issue was only to be transfered and have to go through the account verification process all over again. I was getting sucked into the customer service hell that Dell has become known for all over the web recently.

I understand that companies want to hold on to customers. Why, though, when I tell them that I like their service, that I recommend it to friends, but that I need to cancel at the moment, why don’t they just do what I ask? I have been a Vonage customer for almost 18 months. It’s clear that I appreciated the service. Why alienate me at the moment of our last contact?

Technorati Tags: vonage, dell, voip, customer service

I just don’t get why Flock exists. Admittedly, I’ve only been trying the new beta for all of 20 minutes, but it is simply the same as Firefox. In fact, I had to install the Performancing plugin to post this entry as the Flock blogging client is too skimpy (no categories?!).

Can someone please tell me how Flock sets itself apart from Firefox? What is its mission? How could it not have accomplished that mission with a suite of plugins and skins for Firefox? Why “develop” a whole new browser?

I understand this is just a beta, but the only hint of the value this may have is in the integration of the photo tools and the bookmark sharing tools. These are not that compelling to me or to a huge swath of the market. The tools are very nicely done. My hope and the only logical thing is that they become a platform for building API-based tools into Flock. Hopefully, these few tools with which they’ve started are only to prove their concept and the company or third-parties can use the copious numbers of APIs popping up to develop their own tools based on these UI and communication foundations.

I don’t want to be a naysayer. I just want to see the light.

Technorati Tags: flock, firefox

It's been in the news for a while that some enterprising coders had gotten XP to run on Intel-based Macs through a contest, but now Apple has gotten into the game.

They just released a public beta of Boot Camp, which will be included by default in OS X Leopard. This 83mb application allows XP to run easily on those new Intel-based Macs. This is really a coup. Windows and Apple have done everything they can to discourage running OS X on Intel or AMD-based PCs (but some have still done it), yet here is Apple openly and freely promoting the dual-boot configuration.

It certainly works as a marketing tool to sell more hardware. What I don't quite understand is how this affects the long-requested and rumored open market sale of Apple's OS X operating system. It seems to me that dream is still only a dream and that this news changes nothing on that front. Does it make sense for Apple to sell hardware for Windows-based machines? Not really, and this doesn't lead down that path. Judging from the available information, you would still have to run Mac OS X to enable XP as a boot option. There doesn't seem to be a way, with this software, to only run XP on an Intel-based Mac.

What does this do for Vista? Well, I think Apple answers that question with these two blurbs from the site for Boot Camp:

EFI and BIOS

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Word to the Wise

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

This makes the upcoming release of Vista very interesting. Will Apple finally get a serious toe-hold in the market? Or is this just one more blow to the dreams of the *Nix-ites and their "free OS" world?

Technorati Tags: mac, xp, windows, osx