I’m trying to upgrade all my EMI iTunes tracks to DRM-free on the new iTunes store. It cost me about $13. The interesting thing is that the downloads are so slow, it seems like they are getting killed. I assume a lot of people are doing the upgrade to DRM-free tracks, clearly A LOT more than they had planned.
I hate HBX. So. Much.
Check out http://www.fusestats.com/. It’s either hype (likely) or awesome (possible). It’s cheap in any case, so it’s worth a shot.
A few weeks ago, I started a silly experiment in SEO (search engine optimization.) If you google for “greatest programmer of all time” (don’t forget the quotes) I have a page that declares me as such, in the number 1 result. If the Google believes, it must be true!
The image results are even better:
You too can be the greatest [whatever you want] of ALL TIME!
1. Get a web site that has some level of page rank. Mine is only 4, so it doesn’t need to be big.
2. Make an HTML file, name it the-greatest-whatever-of-all-time.html
3. Put title, H1 and meta tags like I did in my version.
4. Wait for the google to work it’s magic, and crown you the King.
Of course, if somebody else with a bigger pagerank comes along, or has more friends to link to them, then you will be unseated. Sorry. It’s dog-eat-dog out there.
I wish there was an implementation of a parallel build tool based on ANT. It should be called PANTS (for parallel ANTs).
This link has a lot of great stuff, should I ever need to deploy a lot of Windows machines again. (shudder.)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/default.mspx
My work gmail account usage was up to 80 percent. One big missing feature in gmail is that there is no way to find/sort by the largest messages. Over 50% of my gmail space is in a small number of messages with big attachments, and it’s really hard to find them in gmail.
I’d like to be able to have in the search options a size setting. So I could do something like “find all messages with an attachment, larger than 4MB.”
It took me over an hour of work to clean up 1GB of big messages; I had to guess at what they were by searching for things other than size.
From Derek: http://zsync.moria.org.uk/
This seems like such an obviously, stupendously bad idea, that there must be something more to it. Redmond must have some insight that spins it around to a pure genius move.
The big sticking point for me is this: Yahoo is built on all open source: LAMP, etc. (Though I believe they are BSD rather than Linux, but that might be old. Same diff.) All Microsoft’s web services are (natch) IIS, .NET, ASP, etc. When then have to do new projects, or major new initiatives, or integrations, what do they do? I would expect any Yahoo! worth his or her salary to flatly refuse to work with Microsoft server tech. Do they just move on, leaving stuff that was historically LAMP as LAMP, and stuff that was MSFT as MSFT? And whatever team thinks up new stuff, they pick? Sounds like a complete nightmare.
Of course, to me, working in a company with more than 75 employees is a complete nightmare anyway.
I’m evaluating some Sun and Dell servers for work. They are pretty closely matched in terms of price, speed and features. One thing that is a quite a bit different is the remote access feature. Both systems have little dedicated tiny computers with their own ethernet cards. They let you connect to the machine over the network, via a web browser (or ssh) and power up and power down the server. They also have remote KVM (keyboard, mouse and video) access via their web interfaces.
I like the Sun implementation better.
Still, both implementations are better than the super-expensive and super-crappy Raritan hardware KVM over IP we had been using.
Gruber has a great post on the $500 price tag of the iPhone. I mostly agree with his thesis, which really boiled down is that if it works technically then it will be successful, because if people pay $399 for an iPod, why wouldn’t they pay $500 for an iPod + phone in one?
The only thing I have to add is that the price of the gadget really doesn’t matter. It will be the service pricing that makes or breaks the iPhone. If it’s $150/month for voice and data, it doesn’t matter if the iPhone price is $10, $100 or $1000: the mass market won’t be able to afford it. I presume it will be something like $100: my Cingular/AT+T voice and unlimited data plan on my Treo is about $95/month. That’s the tricky part of iPhone: if they want to sell 10 million of them, what’s the pricing plan they need? Blackberry pricing seems to constrain their appeal to the small number of millions (2-4 million is what I have read recently) of Blackberry addicts. If Apple wants 10+ million iPhones out there, they are going to have to appeal to a lower tier of wireless subscriber, maybe in the $40-70 range for voice + unlimited data. Or have some reasonable data rate that would allow web browsing at that price point.
my google reader