January 2005 Blog Posts
I've been hunting for NAS for a while and never seen one I liked, until now. Buffalo Tech are releasing the Kuro Box, a linux powered, empty NAS shell waiting for a drive. It's a shame there's no multiple drive support, but the Kuro community is wonderfully active in adding new software features to the box and Tom's Hardware likes it. It's a shame Microsoft won't promote this sort of community, the licensing costs for CE are bad enough for this sort of device without having to add file sharing and the cost of Windows Powered NAS boxes are obscene....
Now RSS feeds can sprawl over the My MSN pages. scoble (how many links is that now Robert? Do I get a channel 9 guy soon?) announced it a couple of days back, but there were no instructions on how to add suitable "flair" to your pages and display a suitable link users could click to add your feed to their MSN home page. This afternoon Gretchen Ledgard's husband, "Josh (heh, bet you're not used to that Josh <g>) rolled out his new "pimped blog" and there it was, a little "add to my MSN" button.
Lets set aside the stupidly...
Hands up who remembers the <blink> tag? Hands up who remembers Microsoft adding proprietary tags to HTML? Each time someone extended (and broke) the HTML standard the internet community got their pitchforks and flaming torches and stormed the castle proclaiming "Standards are good, proprietary is bad". Now google has done the same thing and Scoble, Winer et al are proclaiming them as saviours.
So why the imbalance? Why is google allowed to break a standard without any questions being asked? Why is google suddenly a darling when Netscape and Microsoft were decried for the same action? Sure it's nice...
So I'm writing a set of interfaces and base objects for the c# persistence layer I wrote about last week. As you expect you have an interface every object for persistence must implement (IBaseEntity if you must know, it basically requires an implementation of an IsDirty property), some relevant exception classes, and then the base persister class. Here a CLR "limitation" raises its ugly head.
My persistence base class has a constructor that accepts a SQL connection string and four Save methods, all with the internal access modifier. As you may know this limits access to these methods to classes contained...
There are some amusing images of Bill Gates appearing on the internet; apparently he posed for Teen Beat magazine. Whilst the old MS logo is funny, as is the presence of a Mac in the background, I just have one thing to ask;
Gareth Keenan, Bill Gates seperated at birth?
Don't you love those wistful "come to the server room" eyes?
[update] Snopes has the photos, but points out that the description is inaccurate;
these images were publicity photos taken for the initial release of Microsoft Windows in 1985.
I think scoble may be missing the point with the latest blog news. Martin Schwimmer licenses his blog (as do I) under a creative commons license which prohibits commercial use. He has decided that bloglines.com is making commercial use of his content and so he asked them to stop using his feed. This is perfectly in keeping with the creative commons license he has chosen, and does not stop people subscribing to his content in aggregators that republish his feed as part of a commercial exercise. To my mind this is no different than taking a web page you have...
Netcraft release a snide article today sniggering that apple.com stayed available following the release of the Mac Mini, whilst the Windows 2003 powered MacWorld Expo site failed after Steve Job's keynote address. Why the comparison boys? You have no idea if MacWorld Expo has the same bandwidth, web server count, load balancing and switch setup as apple.com has. You could be comparing a couple of Windows 2003 boxes to Apple's rather large server cluster running apple.com; you're also ignoring the fact that Apple hosts their images on Akamai's edge servers. When slashdot starts sticking up for Microsoft then you really...
Dave Sifry has responded to Roland Tanglao's thoughts on Technorati's "new searches". As I'm a link slut I subscribe to the Technorati cosmos feed for my own domain. In his response Dave said
When you do a search using Technorati, you'll get every post since the beginning of time (well, actually about 2 years ago onwards), not just the results from the moment you created the watchlist.
I don't find this to be the case. I've been scobalised and nowhere in my Technorati feed. I find it hard to believe that Robert isn't sending pings off to update the Technorati index.
Even...
I'm currently consulting on two banking projects, which provide translation, validation and distribution of various data feeds from various mainframe based systems. It's almost a BizTalk system, but BizTalk is too heavy in terms of infrastructure requirements and licensing costs, even the Microsoft representative suggested that a roll your own solution would be better. We've currently discussing object persistence and where it should happen.
There are two distinct camps, with one group who believe that objects should have an understanding of their own persistence mechanisms and the other camp, where I am commandant, believes persistence should be in a separate logical...
There has been a spate of bloggers being fired because of the contents of their blogs and loud cries of censorship echoing over the internet. Probably the most "famous" example is Delta Airlines and the Queen of the Sky blogger, who is widely cited as an example of unfair employer behaviour. Setting aside the specifics of that case (and I do believe Delta's reasoning that her photos in uniform were against her terms of employment is stretching something) and any reasoning around free speech she's attempting to create a movement for a bloggers bill of rights. Lets look at the...
In 1996 AOL would not let anyone from the English town of Scunthorpe register, the town name was filtered as an obscenity. AOL's technical support staff suggested they enter their town "Sconthorpe" until the filter could be adjusted. Apparently my code is as laughable. As you may have read I produce a list of referral spammers and somehow youcangetit.co.uk was listed. They are most definitely not referral spammers, or indeed any type of spammer. The unfortunate appearance of tit in their domain name may have triggered one of my filters. My apologies to both them and anyone who thought they...