I’m sorry we can’t come to the phone right now, we’re busy playing Mario Kart: Double Dash!

Woohoo!

Yes.

Best. Xmas. Ever.

Enough said…

I thought about wishing people Happy Holidays, hoping that would be generic enough to not offend anyone, and to include all, but I guess some people do not celebrate any holidays, and I don’t want to anger those people by excluding them. Then I though of wishing people Happy Something, but believe it or not, there are people who really don’t want to be happy, or at least don’t want anyone telling them to be happy. So Holidays is out, and Happy is out. I then though I should just say End of Year! thinking that, you know, it is the end of the calendar year, right? Can we all agree on that? What? Some people don’t use the same calendar? ugh… screw it…

End!

Those evil folks at Google published their 2005 Zeitgeist, so I thought I’d see how hip I am (or ain’t) by checking their lists…

Google.com - Top Gainers of 2005

1. Myspace - I’ve used it. The UI is a nightmare. Not for people over 25.
2. Ares - no clue…
3. Baidu - no clue…
4. wikipedia - Yes, I’ve edited the Podcasting page…
5. orkut - Probably haven’t used it since January 2005.
6. iTunes - Use it daily.
7. Sky News - no clue…
8. World of Warcraft - A videogame, right? Have not played it…
9. Green Day - Knew these guys back in the early 1990’s when Al Sob was in the band…
10. Leonardo da Vinci - Crazy inventor guy. He’s cool.

Google News - Top Searches in 2005

1. Janet Jackson - don’t care…
2. Hurricane Katrina - bad news, sucked big time.
3. tsunami - bad news, sucked big time.
4. xbox 360 - don’t care…
5. Brad Pitt - don’t care…
6. Michael Jackson - don’t care… scares me…
7. American Idol - don’t care…
8. Britney Spears - don’t care…
9. Angelina Jolie - don’t care… (no, really!)
10. Harry Potter - Saw a movie, was ok, have not read the books.

Froogle - Top Searches in 2005

1. ipod - Despite my (helping in) inventing podcasting :) I still don’t have one.
2. digital camera - Had one, it broke, now my phone takes my photos.
3. mp3 player - I have one, or three.
4. ipod mini - Don’t have one of these either. (But my cousin does.)
5. psp - Don’t have one. Would like one, even though Sony sucks.
6. laptop - Have a whole bunch of old, underpowered laptops.
7. xbox - Dont’ have one. Don’t want one.
8. ipod shuffle - What? No screen? Don’t want one.
9. computer desk - I have this! Woohoo!
10. ipod nano - Don’t have one. (Fingers are firmly crossed though!)

There ya go… 2005 in review, courtesy of the evil folks at Google, and the non-evil folks at RasterWeb!

Microsoft finally admitted IE/Mac is dead. Or will be dead shortly.

What about your Mac OS 9 friends? First of all, they might want to upgrade to Mac OS X. Apple has made amazing strides in the last 6 years… (Yes, I do know people still running Mac OS 9.) The last time I had to deal with Mac OS 9 browsers I picked WaMCom, which is basically Mozilla.

In all honestly, I’ll miss IE. I mean, think of the humor that will be lost!

So much for “release early” eh? I finally, after a few requests, got around to putting up the code I used to sync my del.icio.us bookmarks with Scuttle. (See: Why Scuttle is neat.)

Go ahead and grab delisync and please make it better, because while it sort-of works, it also sort-of sucks… And I’d like a better version.

This code assumes you have a local Scuttle install, if not, change the code. (You should be able to point it at Scuttle.org or any Scuttle install where you have an account.) Also, you will have to hardcode your username/password’s for del.icio.us and Scuttle…

All of this magic is really possible because Scuttle supports (most of) the del.icio.us API, so in theory you could do things in reverse, or upside down, or 3 ways from Tuesday, whatever that means. If only all of the “social bookmark” sites had API’s… (At least one other has told me they are “working on it” or something like that…)

Let me know how it goes. I’m not completely against improving it, but I think others may be better suited than me to do so… It’s GPL‘d so have at it.

(See Also: Scuttle at Sourceforge.)

Yo… We’re looking for a Linux Server Admin who wants a full time gig. you should know Apache and Tomcat and MySQL, and it would be nice if you knew a bit about JSP, PHP and Perl as well. When I say “know” I mean “know how to keep these things running and optimized on a bunch of Linux servers” and not “know how to write code in PHP, Perl, Java…”

So anyway, are you a Linux Server Admin? Do you know one? Get in touch with me… Thanks…

I know, living on the lake is nothing but pleasure right? Summers swimming, winters ice fishing, or skating… Skating you say? You think it’s easy building a good ice rink?

At first, it was just a matter of shoveling the snow off of the ice, but as you walk across the ice, and sled across the ice, and (attempt to) skate across the ice, the ice gets pretty unsmooth, which makes the skating part a bit difficult…

Oh sure, we’ve tried sweeping and shoveling, and it’s not like we have a zamboni laying around, so next we’re going to try watering the rink, and hoping that it freezes smooth.

Now I’ve got to go find all of the hoses, some duct tape, rubber gloves, and a copy of The Mighty Ducks…

In the process of attempting to finally install the iLife ‘05 (why oh why is it not 2005?) suite I managed to have it fail, but still fill my drive, so I attempted to clean things up and make more space and that failed and the system got a little hosed and so I ended up finally installing that new larger hard drive I’ve had sitting in a box for the last few months so I could do the Mac OS X 10.4 upgrade…

Installing Tiger was not a huge deal. It failed twice until I cleaned the DVD real nice, then it went pretty darn smooth, and the install process managed to pull the data from my old 10.3.9 system which was on old hard drive #1. Yay for Apple. The G4 is a nice machine to work on, so swapping in a new drive is pretty painless. I used ditto to copy old hard drive #1 onto new hard drive, then pulled out old hard drive #1 and put in old hard drive #2. I still have to wipe and reformat old hard drive #2 into a single partition for nothing but media files (podcasts, videoblogs, music, etc.) but that should be painless. (old hard drive #1 is going into the kitchen iMac.)

Installing iLife ‘05 was simple, and I can finally play with Garageband a bit. (Whee!) Other than that, I’ve still got the under the hood stuff to do, like install Fink and all the *nix tools and utils I need.

Luckily, I moved almost all of my web apps over to my Linux box running XAMPP a while back so those are not affected. Best of all, I can now let my aggregators download at will without worrying about disk space on a daily basis. (Well, for a few months anyway…)

As for the Little Sleep? I got about 4 hours…

Yahoo! loves buying things! They just bought del.icio.us!

See also: Upcoming is Yahoo!, Flickr Buys Yahoo!, and Oh No! blo.gs for sale!?

(I swear I’ve gotta work harder at making Yahoo! buy me.)

I mean, they let blo.gs go to crap, but otherwise, things seem pretty good. I just get worried about Yahoo! owning everything. Unless they buy me. The only thing that will ease my worries is if Yahoo! buys me, then I just won’t care anymore….

Oh sure, first it was the Zombies, and now it’s the Santas…

Sadly, I can’t make it to Madison to videotape this Ho Ho Holiday Event, but I’m hoping someone can…

(Note: I may have to revise my plan of moving to Madison in 2017.)

We were working on an application that dealt with dates, and in the database, I asked what we should use for the expiration date, and someone suggested some time in the year 2050.

I wish I could laugh at that, or think it’s a good idea, but it worries me. I mean, this seems to presume a few things:

• We won’t be around, so it’ll be someone else’s problem
• The code won’t be running by then and will have been replaced

The first one bothered me because I don’t really like to leave problems behind for other people to deal with. I mean, that’s what happened last time right? I’m sure the guys writing code in the 1970’s were like “Hey man, this code won’t be around by the year 2000, so just use 2 digits to store the year! Groovy!” or something like that… But I’m here to say that I did fix code that broke in the year 2000, and it wasn’t fun…

The second one bothered me because it’s sad to think that the code we work on today will probablty be useless in a few years. In fact, within 5 years I’m sure people will be complaining about how crappy it is, and keep asing when it can all be moved to a new system. I say that because I’ve seen it happen before, and that’s how we got here in the first place…

You just can’t win, can you? Oh well, I suppose we won’t have to worry about it after 2038…

I finally upgraded the old Quicksilver. Sure, it used to run at 733 MHz but after discussing with Mr. Barrett the merits of upgrade cards, I choose the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4 1.6 GHz.

We’ve now got a somewhat respectable G4 Mac. This was much cheaper than a new/replacement Mac (which I can’t afford anyway) and since the Intel-based Macs will probably be out by mid-2006, why bother replacing it now? Not to mention the fact that it’s got 1.5 Gig of ram, a DVD drive, multiple hard drives, a second video card, and an extra USB card…

Any downsides? Well, the install was not simple. Luckly, I had stumbled upon a nice write-up recently, so it wasn’t a total nightmare. (I did take about a dozen attempts though, involving putting the card it, taking it out, messing with the open firmware, and installing software…) In the end, I think it was well worth it.

I’ve been playing with Odeo this week, and I must say, there are some nice features to play with. But, as usual… I find bugs…

Mainly with the RSS feeds. Now, in recent talks with Dave Slusher about AmigoFish, we talked about the problem of outputting invalid RSS feeds, and since AmigoFish sort of re-purposes/re-publishes data from existing feeds, it can be quite difficult to clean everything and output valid XML. (Also, I believe AmigoFish is a one-man operation.) But Odeo, aren’t they a (somewhat) big company with many employees and funding and all of that?

I told Dave I’d cut him a little slack on invalid RSS. With Odeo, I submitted a bug report. To be fair, the Odeo feed was valid, but with warnings. The classic “Apple iTunes DTDs/dtds” warning: The prefix “itunes” generally uses the namespace “http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd”

I’m hoping Odeo can fix this as quick as the guys at Upcoming.org/Yahoo! did. Which brings me to my next point… I’m starting to think I should just freelance myself out to Web 2.0 companies as a service that will test, break, validate, suggest fixes, etc. for their sites. Even the big guys constantly screw things up. Why?

Need some background? See I’m gonna hijack eWeek and More on podkeyword.com first… eWeek has an update: Podcast ‘Hijacker’ Says Business as Usual.

Is there a fix? Well, Atom has a link rel=”self” thingy so a feed at the URI http://my.org/feed/url/ would have this inside the feed: <link rel=”self” href=”http://my.org/feed/url/”></link> How does this help? Well, in theory, if the iTMS (or whoever) was getting the vegan.com feed from podkeyword.com, they could compare the URI to what is listed in the actual feed. Yes, you could still capture, modify, and reserve the feed, but that’s malicious, and were not talking about that (yet.) Since Apple has it’s own namespace’d stuff, it could easily add something like Atom’s rel=”self” thing, right?

This all comes back to the whole issue of claiming a feed doesn’t it? I’m still thinking I could come up with a devious method to defeat any of the existing “claim this feed” mechanisms out there today to actually hijack a feed. (Heck, I’d even use 200 OK’s instead of 302 Found’s like podkeyword does.) Lucky for you I would only do this to point out the flaws in the existing systems. We all know that when it comes to money making schemes I’m not as smart as those other early adopters of podcasting…