I love it when a cliché gets twisted up and acquires fresh life. I've come across this "remix" before, but it never fails to bring a smile: "Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." It's obviously tongue-in-cheek and I couldn't find its originator anywhere online though it shows up extensively.
March 2006 Archives
Slashdot is abuzz about the story that Go Daddy has moved to Windows from Linux. The comments range from frothy to dismissive. The latter is the appropriate response because the move was only for parked domains. Go Daddy still offers up Linux hosting of all stripes and many of our applications run in Linux environments. These parked domain pages have *zero* customer interaction.
Nothing to see here, move along.
[UPDATE: Oh yeah, the good news to come from this is that Quick Blog got a nod in the press release. Okay, so it's not a huge mention but no other application got so recognized.]
[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]
What?! Windows Vista is delayed again? This time past the invaluable Christmas buying spree? The hell you say! It just can't be because XP was released in October 2001 and no major operating system developer would go 5½ years between releases, would they?
This post from FoldedSpace.com about how men and women view chores differently is spot on. That's me and Sandi to a T.
[UPDATE (3/23/2006): Scott Adams weighs in with another gender difference spotting.]
I just spoke to my friend Mike Finkel last night and he told me that he's deeply involved with the ultramobile PC initiative at Intel. How cool is that!
This web application called Spark is awfully close to a cool brainstorming application I developed at my last job. It was one of those flash in the pan ideas that occurred to me while I was sitting there deploying a new version of the online banking system. It was about 2 in the morning while I was waiting on our slow-as-molasses Data Processing team to bring the mainframe back up when inspiration hit.
It was a Jerry Maguire moment. I spent the next three hours developing the entire application in rough form just so I could get all my ideas out. I got them all in there and I loved the idea. Naturally, management was perfunctorily interested and I never got the resources to clean it up. I think it was an amazing tool and I will definitely develop a version of it one of these days, maybe make it open source.
As for Spark, close but no cigar. They missed a lot of opportunities there.
I read Matt Haughey's overview of reBlog on Lifehacker with considerable interest. I am a Bloglines user too and it often is hard to keep up with the 280 or so feeds to which I subscribe. I like the idea of a feed aggregator designed for power users and I can't imagine a feed reader that requires installation on a server to ever be ready for the average user.
I installed it and imported my OPML list from Bloglines. It got about halfway through the list the first time before it timed out. The second time worked better because most of the feeds had already been set up. The keyboard navigation was everything Matt said it would be except for the fact that it wouldn't hold my keyboard navigation setting in the session—a known problem. Having to hit the "/" key on every page was annoying but I still didn't have to move my hand from the keyboard.
Then it hit me. This is my application at this point. I've installed it, blocked access to the world, and I can do whatever I want. So I changed the session-reading logic so that there wasn't a possibility that keyboard navigation could be off. And it worked beautifully!
It's really simple: open up the file /your-reblog-folder/library/RF/Utility.functions.php and change line 125 from : 0); to : 1);. If it's not line 125 in your installation, find the line after the line reading REF_USE_KEYBOARD and make the change.
The other day I was at the neighborhood QuikTrip and I got $5 over on my transaction. The next day at work I went to use the money but it wasn't there. It seems that the QT cashier neglected to give me the money. I'm sure something like this has happened to you before.
After work, I stopped by the store and told the manager Jim of my problem. Without a further question, he popped over to the nearest register, opened it up, and handed me a sawbuck. I was flabbergasted. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that I go there once or twice a day but I was still very impressed at the customer service.
I recently had occasion to create a Windows service that was actually two Windows services within the same process. It was quite an ordeal because there is practically no documentation out there aside from the comment in the Main method of the service class automatically placed by VisualStudio .NET.
For posterity, here's what I learned:
- "Error 1083: The executable program that this service is configured to run in does not implement the service." This occurs when there's a mismatch between the ServiceName in the InitializeComponent method of the service (or wherever you've set such things) and the project installer. Both services need to match.
- In the project installer, there should only be one ServiceProcessInstaller instantiated and one ServiceInstaller per service.
- There should only be one Main method for the entire service and it doesn't appear to matter which service has it.
- Each service should be defined as if it were an independent service. For all intents and purposes, it is. They will show up in the Service Manager as separate services and can be controlled independently.
- I'm not particularly clear on the advantages or disadvantages of this approach. Design-wise, this method suited my needs.
I hope this helps someone searching for this information.
Continuous Integration using an LCD-TV: considerably more advanced than an Ambient Orb. Showing the face of the developer that broke the build is a nice touch. {via}
Our team blog is now up and ready for business! It's called Quick Blogging, which is the name I came up with for the time being, and I've got the second entry. It made it through the process with only the addition of the ® symbol.
I doubt anyone outside of the people I've directly told has been there, but that will soon change. I can't wait to see what sort of comments we get!
[UPDATE: Bonus points if you know where the post's title came from.]
[UPDATE (3/14/2006): Some fargin icehole named Roman Moroni left a comment.]
[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]
The absence of Dave certainly didn't last too long! We're moving Dan Esparza over from our WebSite Tonight team and I couldn't be happier. Well, strike that, I could be happier if I knew him beyond cursory salutations. But I am happy because he's a blogger and a fairly advanced WordPress user, which means that he'll have a lot of fresh ideas for Quick Blog.
He moves into the office next week into the crummy desk since Greg is moving over to Dave's lordly setting. I'm keeping my window view because I just love staring at cars. (Well, and the occasional stupid pigeon that thinks the window barrier isn't there.)
[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]
The worst part about travelling for me is the renting of hotel rooms. I abhor it mainly because I know exactly how variable the rates are. It's always made sense to me that room rates should vary with the peak travel season or amenities, but the rest of it seems completely arbitrary and designed to extract the most money possible. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I always feel like I'm the rube who's paying through the nose so those-in-the-know can stay in the same hotel for $9 a night.
I've used Priceline in the past and it always impressed me with its appealing slogan—"Name your own price"—that did not match the reality of the site at all. I tried to name my own price and gradually came to realize that my expectations of price naming were not in sync with any hotelier's. When coupled with the site's bizarre feature that you couldn't name your own price for the same hotel twice, I gave up and went back to my rube-dom.
That all ended tonight. We're travelling to the Fillmore/Santa Clarita/Valencia area at the end of March for a get-together with some of my wife's Internet friends and so we needed to get some accomodations. My wife was able to find a room at the Holiday Inn for $136 per night. This is in March, mind you, and we're talking about the Holiday Inn. I believe I paid less for that at a Marriott or Hyatt in Manhattan Beach in September. My sucker alarms were going off full blast.
Her friend on the scene recommended the Hyatt Valencia as the place to stay. She said it was an incredible hotel, but that it was pricey. We saw a rate of $186 per night quoted elsewhere and thought that that was très chérè. Priceline, as usual, disappointed so I decided to give Hotwire a whirl and see what I could come up with. They won't tell you what hotel you're staying at until you've already paid, which is kind of snarky to my way of thinking, but they did say it was 3½ stars and regularly $186.50 per night. I figured that there couldn't be that many hotels in Valencia, California with those exact same stats. At the quoted $103 per night, I also decided that we could do a lot worse.
You've probably guessed that the hotel in question was the Hyatt and you would be right. Not only did I get a great rate but I broke my string of bad hotel-booking luck. I'd rent a car, but I don't feel that daring.
Ahh, the 1.2 is out there. This is definitely the biggest release since 1.0 and I am very proud of both how much is packed in there and how cleanly the release went.
The new drag and drop is done using script.aculo.us—just like WordPress's implementation of drag and drop—and makes use of some additional features to change the image as the sidebar components are dragged from one list to the other as well as the ability to move from one list to the other by double-clicking or clicking on that little icon. This is the onDrop functionality that script.aculo.us is really lacking that I mentioned in that previous entry. I had to use an onmouseup event handler to know which item was dropped. I'll still probably implement onDrag at some point because the workaround isn't particularly elegant.
I also implemented some much needed list page improvements, revamped the blacklist completely, and added a blogroll feature that people have really been clamoring for. I've got big plans for each of these things in subsequent releases, so keep your eyes peeled.
Dave, he who is heading north, finally got his mobile blogging stuff in for paying customers, an autocomplete feature using Ajax, and comment paging. I know he got a ton more stuff in there as well, but I can't remember them offhand. Greg got some additional statistics and feed size limitations into this release in the relatively short time he's been on the team.
In blog-about-the-blog, as we like to call it, news, we got briefed by our marketing director about some guidelines that we need to adhere to when writing on the company blog. I'll see if I can post them here (with appropriate disclaimers etc.) so you can see how restrictive they aren't. If I can't, which is understandable, then you'll have to take my word for it and see how we present ourselves. I think we're going to be able to talk in our own voices and say what we want without fear of reprisal as long as it's accurate and positive. That seems quite reasonable to me since we'll probably get enough negativity in the comments as it is if Bob's blog is any indication.
[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]
