Tech
Saturday, September 04, 2004
A Preview of ESPN Broadband
As you all know I’m a hockey nut. ESPN was advertising they were showing all games, however four weren’t on the tv schedule. These four are all on ESPN Broadband.
It pops into a large-ish window and has a SportsCenter/ESPN video game like feel. I think it’s all Flash 7 (which is fine since they’re catering to a broadband/cable audience). The video isn’t clickable or right-clickable, I’m going to assume it’s streaming through Flash 7 rather then integrating another format, but you never know.
They’ve got their pipes going strong as the picture quality is very good. I’m watching Finland beating Sweden 4-3 in the third period right now. Easily the nicest integrated streaming video I’ve ever seen. To be able to see the puck in a small window through a live feed is pretty decent work.
Now, this hasn’t been over-promoted, so hopefully if they boost it more, they’ll keep the bandwidth at this high level, the rare stuttering is the only thing that can bring it down. Even when a live game isn’t on, they have some news clips to watch. Also, after the game is completed, it’s supposed to also be available on demand.
There’s a “free preview” from now until Monday. It will be a service available to certain subscribers of cable or dsl companies. I read how RCN has a deal with them, so this should be included for all RCN subscribers, but I have not read anything about Time Warner NYC (my current provider). Hope they pick this up if they haven’t already; there’s supposedly already some bitterness between ESPN and quite a few cable services due to the high price ESPN charges per subscriber (and some cable systems even wanting to make it a premium channel).
Thursday, September 02, 2004
The Next Step in Blogging
So I’m not just blogging now (not that I’m a heavy blogger), but I’m clip blogging too.
First off, if you aren’t using Bloglines as your rss reader, you’re missing out on a mighty fine (free) service. Much easier then bringing my updated blogroll back and forth with me between work and home (or wherever else I may be). They have a few things to help you out too, like browser plugins to easily subscribe to feeds and a nifty little notifier to let you know when your favorite blogs are updated.
So what the hell is a clip blog?
Well, as you read your feeds you can “clip” certain ones, which automatically leaves a link to the article/blog post that you were reading along with any other thoughts you want to add. It’s all those little things you like or hate or just find cool that you’re not going to make your own separate blog entries for.
Now go, start your own clip blog, or just make your life easier and use the feedreader.
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Nintendo DS May Have Free Voice Over IP
GameSpot is reporting that Nintendo DS will be used in conjunction with the built-in wireless 802.11b networking capabilities to offer voice-over-IP chat—in effect, allowing gamers to use the DS to make free phone calls at wireless network hotspots.
While this may not help a soul in rural parts of America, those in cities with hotspots popping up all over the place may be able to have yet another easy way to place a call, especially if a hotspot hits one’s home.
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”.
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.
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.