Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Microsoft to Go After iTunes
If you’re not subscribed to 100 feeds you may not have heard that Microsoft is preparing to launch a service to compete with Apple’s iTunes.
Everything planned right now is in the “not done yet” stage, so it’s a bit early to make any predictions. One thing Microsoft will have to do very well to make a dent into iTunes sales is come out with a great media player that will sync automatically with all their software. A very smooth iTunes store -> iTunes -> iPod is one of the biggest reasons Apple is so successful right now. Microsoft will not only have to mimic that, but come out with a cheaper device with more storage that does more/performs better, otherwise Apple will keep on selling their products well simply because so many deem them as “cool”.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Convention Updates
Well, the convention was definitely “in town” by Friday. It was obvious when I went into the bodegas on my corner and five midwestern women were in there and asked me if Ground Zero was within walking distance. I told them “yes, if you have a few hours”, then smiled and told them with five they might as well just hop in a cab over taking the subway (if they could find a cab who will let all five of them in).
Today Ninth Avenue had the parking lanes coned off and four police on every corner. A bit crazy for the distance we are to the convention.
Here’s a CNN article: Tens of thousands protest GOP convention
A few channels also have the protests airing live.
Friday, August 27, 2004
Not Looking Forward to the Convention
Protests and such started for the Republican National Convention today. Blah. It’s not that I hate when NY gets crowded, as it usually is crowded, but this is the type of thing where most people I know, including Republicans are saying “please go somewhere else”. The extra people are just extra people, you manage to get around them somehow. The extra police and security checkpoints aren’t horrible either. The protests are usually the worst. They completely block off streets and walkways, the people involved are usually after anyone not within their group, yelling at all who walk by as though you’re closely aligned with whoever they’re hating at that point. Cathy (my girlfriend, a nurse, for those who don’t know) heard about how one of the so-called protests is going to involve flooding hospitals with calls about chest pains when Bush is talking. What? That’s productive? Holding back a hospital from helping people who are actually sick and injured is easily one of the dumbest things I’ve heard yet.
What won’t be fun is my walk to work the next week as it’s generally right down Broadway through Times Square, stopping at 37th Street. Times Square will most likely be hell. Perhaps I’m jumping the gun, but any time they even close part of it for any reason - or even if it just rains - it’s hell. Cabs will be out of the question. The subway will not just be super crowded as well, but there will be few places you could probably feel less safe. That and because of the location of the stations, it’s only one or two stops anyway and I tend not to take it unless it’s pouring out. So walking it’ll stay, and there’s very little “out of the way” other then perhaps going up and down 6th Avenue or 9th Avenue, but that’ll add time to the commute and I sure know I’m not going to volunteer to do that.
Maybe things will be smooth and I’ll have little delay, doubt it, but I’ll try and play the opitimist until something crappy happens.
Perhaps I’ll carry my camera around and do some amateur photojournalism.
Thursday, August 26, 2004
RSS in the Money
RSS, one of my favorite “toys” on the web (as I love syndication) is attracting serious money according to Wired News.
Technorati, a company that’s like a search engine of blogs through rss feeds, received funding, which reportedly totaled $6.5 million. So what’s the company doing with the cash?
“We’re putting our investments to work building infrastructure and providing service to a population that’s growing at an explosive rate,” wrote Technorati founder David Sifry on his blog Monday. “Frankly, we’d rather talk about that than about the money others have invested in us.”
More funding into rss companies to come - but I am curious to see where the money does wind up and how or if it will help the technology in any way or just help these companies become larger.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Matisyahu: Hasidic Reggae
From the “now I’ve seen it all” department I present to you: Matisyahu, Hasidic Reggae star. While I have no idea how much of a “star” he is, his name’s gotten around and I caught him on Jimmy Kimmel last night.
From his interview on the show after he performed it seems he was just a “normal” guy growing up, liked reggae as a teen and stuck with it. He became religious a few years ago and I can’t think of anything that would advance his career more then that. His performance on the show was pretty good too. Which then brings up the question - is it weird that he’s Hasidic and performing reggae or is it weirder that he actually didn’t sound bad on the show? I’ll admit, I’m not into reggae all that much, so what the hell do I know, but a lot of musical acts sound like crap on late night shows and his didn’t. In the end, I think he’ll get at least part of his 15 minutes from this, good or bad.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Will DVDs Be In Your Future?
Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com and current Dallas Mavericks, HDNet and a bunch of other things owner, writes about
HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future.
It’s simple in theory, and there are obviously some things that need working on, especially for people to rely on hard drives more. Reliability would be concern #1. Sure, a DVD can get scratched, but the odds of a DVD going bad compared to my hard drive crashing are pretty low I’d assume. Some would say that’s why hard drives are becoming so cheap to begin with (made cheap, priced cheap). Anything that I’ve ripped from tape hasn’t been to dvd, it’s to mpg2. Same thing in viewing, but I’ve got the files all saved on a big hard drive, and when I can, backed up on another. It’s not close to cost effective right now, but it’s much more flexible for viewing then DVD and it also is portable in mass (one of my external drives could probably hold 60 DVDs and many more “DVD quality” movies).
The worst part of the whole discussion is you know the best technology won’t be backed by the big companies, only the most profitable. All we can hope for is backwards compatibility, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Monday, August 23, 2004
ISAPI Rewrite for WordPress
One of the biggest perks of running Apache as opposed to IIS is a nice native rewrite engine. Apache’s mod_rewrite can make most urls super-clean in just a few lines. Luckily IIS has a decent answer for it, although not native. ISAPI Rewrite from Helicon Tech is an ISAPI filter that works in a very, very similar manner as mod_rewrite. They have a free version, the biggest drawback being you can’t use it site-to-site, it’s only for global rewrites. The full version, currently at $69 (with some decent discounts starting at just 2 server licenses) allows you to go site-to-site with the filter.
I found a few leads about how people translated mod_rewrite for WordPress to ISAPI rewrite. Few were doing me any good until I came across DA Williams’ post at Blue Crescent Tech. In fact, I was able to almost use his rules out of the box. For one thing, I did not have to delete the line relating to the comments feed that he said he had to delete. The other was that it seemed he had no line to rewrite the main feed link that WordPress uses. Following the simple conversion instructions he left I was able to add it back into my httpd.ini file easily.
What I added to my httpd.ini file:
RewriteRule /archives/category/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/author/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?author_name=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/author/?(.*) /index.php?author_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&page=$5 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&feed=$5 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/trackback/?$ /wp-trackback.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1&withcomments=1 [I,U,O]
I’m glad I got it working here, seems to be giving me no troubles and is super fast (so far). I hope to implement this on quite a few other sites.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
The Palm
So tonight was good, shared a six-pound lobster with my girlfriend at The Palm. An early birthday dinner from my parents. Fewer dinners are better then huge lobsters cooked well and this one was pretty damn good.
Not sure about the rest of the night, it’s still fairly early, we didn’t go out until a little after midnight last night and I’m still waiting for a few people to call, but I think tonight may be a movie night anyway… nothing exciting, but hey, the lobster was good.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
And so it starts
This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. In fact, it’s something I semi-started a while back and put on hold, deleted and then restarted it again.
So why blog? Right now it’s to simply share a voice. Pretty much the same reason anyone else does.
I think we all want to set topics when we first start. Most just want to throw out an opinion or link to cool things they find and I’m not far off from that.
Subjects should be technology, sports (heavy on the hockey I’m sure), movies, television, video games for when I find the time, along with anything else that crosses my path that I deem worthy. I’ll also throw in a run-on sentence or two.
A design will be coming here eventually, but until then I’m just going to have a very simple design. Easy on the eyes and easy on the loading time - for now.
One of my main issues was which domain to use. vodkafish.com? VodkaFish has been a name I’ve been using online for almost 10 years. It’s not exactly the most professional thing in the world, but it’s not like it’s on my business cards. So what to do? Use it? Use another generic name? I’d love to get a variation of my real name, but all those domains have been taken for quite some time. I asked a few people and they all said “vodkafish.com” - of course, they already know me as VodkaFish and what I’m about is already also known to them. But in the end this is the logical choice. A name I use on a slew of sites, it’s here to use and hell, it somehow already has a Google PR of 2 to build upon.
And so it begins… I step into the blogsphere or whatever catchphrase they’re using today…