I’m still in Minneapolis at the No Fluff Just Stuff thing, because, you know, it’s The Year of the Java…

Actually, I’ve seen a lot of stuff that isn’t Java. I attended sessions on agile development, Ruby (including some Ruby on Rails), Groovy, and even Ajax.

I’ve got all sorts of notes and bits to type up, but I’m too tired (like a bicycle) right now, so I’ll save that for later. Out of everything I’ve seen so far though, I think Ajax is the one I’m most interested in. It probably was before as well, I just need to find a few spare minutes to experiment with it. Onward!

Ahhh, Madison, it’s been a while, and the Dane County Regional Airport, nice to meet you. It’s a small airport, really small. I think the gates are numbered 1 through 10. Security check-in took less than 5 minutes. (Oddly enough a reporter from Madison emailed me yesterday about podcasting, hoping I was local.) I’d like to spend some time exploring Madison again this Summer, we’ll see how that goes.

The flight to Minneapolis was short and sweet. I almost think I would have preferred to drive, and it’s less waiting around and more on the move. Nonetheless, I’m now in Minneapolis at the airport borrowing an electrical outlet, which is never easy to find at an airport. Oh you can find them, but they’re either carrying 200+ volts with some funky heavy equipment outlet, or they’re located in poor locations, like right below the payphones or along a wall with no seats. This time I’m in a comfortable seat right next to an electric wheelchair that’s recharging. Power!

My co-worker is delayed. Seems the authorities had a plateful of hassle for him at the airport because of an expired vehicle registration, so he missed the flight by five minutes. (Missing the flight by 5 minutes due to vehicle related issues seems to be a trend among my co-workers.) He said he’ll be here 2 1/2 hours later. More time for me to sit around doing nothing. Actually I’ll take this time to check wireless connectivity here, since they seem to allow access to some site for free… Main screen turn on!

If Barbie was a programmer she might say “Internationalization is hard!”

In all this much to painful research on i18n and unicode and charsets, and all that jazz, I happened across this:

Argh… Yeah, you see those ?’s in there… Is it just me on my computer, using my browser that sees that? If we dare try to validate http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javaint/ we get the message: No Character Encoding Found!

Believe me, I am not picking on O’Reilly or Andy or David, who are all probably 10 times smarter than I am in internationalization issues (and other things.) I am merely pointing out that after beating my head against my desk trying to solve form submission and internationalization and localization problems, I’m about ready to give up on these computer things and go back to printing ink on t-shirts…

In kindergarten the kids have show & tell each week, and they have to choose a thing to show based upon the letter it starts with, so this week was x or y. (Usually it’s just one letter, but those are a bit tougher for kids.) In the interest of helping future generations, I offer up this useful computer tip:

  egrep -i '^[xy].*' /usr/share/dict/words

As long as you’ve got a whole bunch of words in /usr/share/dict/words (and I do on Mac OS X) you should get a nice list of words that start with x or y. Here are a few favorites:

• xenon
• xenyl
• xylographer
• xylyl
• yaffle
• yeldrock
• yis
• yite
• yoldrin
• yokel
• youngun
• younker
• youze
• yox
• ytterbium
• yttrocolumbite
• yurt

Please keep in mind it may not be possible, ethical, or even legal to bring some of these things to school. Worth noting is that at least three of those words mean “yellow-hammer” and the word “youze” is not the same as the one used in the phrase “youze guys” made popular in certain parts of the US.

R.I.P. Duane, R.I.P… Former WISN 12 News Reporter/Anchor Duane Gay Dies.

The tech was out last week Friday, and got the cable modem installed at it’s new location (right after he installed the Moxi.) He tested the line, looked good, we talked about splitters, and avoiding them, and all was well.

I spent the next day and a half setting up 4 machines, a new Linksys WRT54G, and other various neccessary stuff, and all was well. All green lights.

So when the HandyTone 486 ATA arrived last night, I made an attempt to install it, but realized I had no connection!

I checked my logs (of course I log connection outages) and realize that I had about 10 hours of downtime yesterday, and about the same the day before! Argh! This will not do! I power cycle the modem, try multiple computers, log into the http server in the modem, reboot it, no good. I make the call…

I explain things, including when my downtime started, ended, etc, and the guy wants to know how I know when it was offline if I wasn’t home, and I explain how I log it all, to which he remained silent for a minute. I then got my connection back, just as we were scheduling a tech to come out, and then I lose it again. Frustration abounds.

Someone will be out Monday. After that, the connection is fine the rest of the night as I configure the HandyTone. In the morning the connection is fine as well. I leave the house, and a few hours later, it’s dead again. Double Plus Argh!

Either my ISP shuts off my connection everyday when I leave the house, or the cats are up to no good…

There’s a new Linux box at my house, and it’s connected to the TV set. It’s a Moxi.

It does the TiVo-like things, such as recording one program while you watch another, and “season pass” type recording, and pausing live TV, etc. It’s also got a nice looking UI that is pretty darn usable. (Oh, and from what I hear the Moxi is cool because it can do it’s jazz in high def.)

I’ve not spent a ton of time with it yet, but so far I’m liking it. The main reason I never bought a Tivo was because I didn’t want to have to buy a device and then pay each month for service. So the Moxi is owned by my cable company (just like my cable modem is) and I’m just renting it. It’s a trade off I guess, but it’s one I’m comfortable with right now.

I’m excited to see what sort of tricks the Moxi has up it’s firmware. I suppose the Moxi FAQ and Moxi Tips will be quite useful. Oh, there’s also a bit on PVRblog about Moxi, and Engadget has Moxi stories too, and I’m sure much more… Isn’t the intraweb great?

Ok, I’m only what, six months late on this? I finally saw The Incredibles and I must say it was amazing. (You thought I was going to say it was “incredible” didn’t you?)

Maybe it’s just me, but I couldn’t help but notice at least some similarities to The Watchmen.

Be clear though, that is a compliment, I greatly enjoyed The Incredibles (and I’m sure I will again and again) and I’m hoping that I greatly enjoy The Watchmen as well.

I mean, how can you not love Rorschach?

We’re here today to answer the question, “What do kids want?”

Now you know…

Ok, it’s still a bit early, but as I’ve used Amazon more in the last month than I probably have in all of 2004, I thought I’d point you to my Amazon Wish List which I have painstakenly updated over the last few days, since, you know, I’ve got a birthday coming up in June, and you might want to start shopping early.

Keep in mind that if your birthday is anytime after mine, this can really help in attaining a better gift from me. Besides, any gifts you purchase for me may be tax deductable!

(Editor’s Note: Purchases may also not be tax deductable. We don’t know where he came up with that crazy idea…)

Matt suggests that “blogspot is no longer hurting america” because they’ve added captcha’s to the new blog creation forms. This is a good thing, but as someone who has been referer spammed by phony blogspot sites, I thought taking a random survey might be useful.

If you’ve not followed my “scientific methods” in the past, here’s how I typically do things:

1. Go to Weblogs.Com for a list of “Recently Updated Weblogs.”
2. Grab source of page.
3. Do a bunch of funky regex stuff in jEdit.
4. Do some math.
5. Publish results.

The results of the findings? I found 842 weblogs in the list, of which 556 were blogspot sites.

I didn’t have time to check 556 blogspot sites, but some of the prefixes for .blogspot.com were like so:

• kentucky-derby-entries-here
• las-vegas-lawyer-info4u
• medical-insurance-news
• sales-training-resource
• weight-loss-info
• web-design-info4u

So now that Google/Blogger have made some steps to stem the tide, I hope the next step is to clean up the existing mess…

(In case you’re wondering, from the list of 842 sites, spaces.msn.com came in second with 60 sites, and LiveJournal clocked in with less than 10 in the list!)

Oops! I meant “More on Databases” of course…

As I’ve mentioned, I deal a lot with database design done by morons, or at least people who somehow didn’t know what they were doing (not that I’m a database genius) but even the little things can bother me. I mean, if you’ve got a table named foo_header and it’s got 40+ fields, and another table named foo_detail and it’s got just 10 fields, doesn’t something seem wrong?

Where I come from, headers usually contain less data than the actual details of something. Maybe it’s just me…

We know that some folks can’t play well with others, but isn’t it refreshing to see that when smart people build things, they can work well with what other smart people build? (No, I’m not talking about myself here!)

Over at Upcoming.org they added a bunch of nice API’s recently, and there’s some news about how they are being used. Those Robot Co-op guys (who are behind 43 Things) detail it nicely in the aptly titled Building web services that play nicely with other web services.

This is where we see web services getting really interesting. When the web services start playing nicely with one another, you can begin to string them all together and build things that are greater than the sum of their parts.

It’s like that whole “do one thing, and do it really well” philosophy.

As for Upcoming.org integration, even our cohort over at Cambridge Lions has events listed, and our very own ocono.com is doing it too…

Is there no end to the web-interop madness? I hope not…

I should have a HandyTone 486 ATA sometime in the next week, which coincides well with the fact that I have a new phone number. In fact, I’ve got two new phone numbers, one is a SIP number, and the other is a virtual number, which means if you dial it, it’ll ring my SIP number…

So I hereby join the VoIP revolution. Not the Skype revolution mind you, as I really don’t wish to get locked into a single vendor with a proprietary format. I’ve got enough of that in my computing life already, thank you. I also didn’t want to join the Vonage $XX per month with locked hardware revolution, which might be fine for most people, but I’m a freak (and cheap) so it doesn’t work for me.

I’ll report back here on how things work using the HandyTone, my existing phones, and service through SIPphone.

Oh, if you’d like my new phone number(s), get in touch.

I’ve seen a few sites that try to “help” you find your way when you get lost… If you happen to request a page that does not exist, you get a 404 error, which means “Not Found.” The typical response (or at least I think it is) is to present this information to a user, and perhaps provide links to the home page of the site, or a sitemap, or a search box, or something of use, but I’ve seen sites that use a meta refresh to whisk you off to the home page after a few seconds. As the old saying goes “this is broken.”

The first problem is, I may never see this error in time. I often load pages into the background, into new tabs, and by the time I view the page, the message about not finding what I’m looking for, and being automatically redirected to the home page, is gone and I’m at the site’s root, and I don’t know why. Bad.

Bad number two, is that in some cases I can no longer see the URL of the page I requested. I’ve even seen a few sites that seem to redirect the 404 to a page that does not maintain the URL you requested, so you lose that information. I don’t care for that either.

(Don’t even get me started on sites that send you a 200 OK status code with a page that says 404 Not Found because that’s so backwards it makes my head hurt…)

(A good browser should allow you to disable the meta refresh “feature.”)