The Many Faces of Mike McBride

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Saturday, June 08, 2002

Random thoughts at 1 AM

There's an inherent flaw in using Google's "pages like this" function. Some blogs can appear to be alike one day because they both discuss a certain topic, but may generally have very little to do with one another. This is especially true when you get a group of people talking about going to Gnomedex, because while we may have that event in common, the normal, every-day topics of our blogs may not intersect much at all. To some extent this is also true of following links, because if you enjoy the tech/geeky side of this blog, some of the non-tech blogs in my blogroll may not be to your liking, but I find them interesting.

Over the last few days, I've re-learned a couple of valuable lessons. One, stuff changes on the internet fast! It was only late March when I did Part 1 of the News Aggregator Showdown. and two months later I had people asking me to re-review some of the entrants because they had new versions out and fixed the problems I had. In those two months, or less, my opinion has completely changed because of the hard work put in by developers. Second, I learned that if you're going to put your opinion online for all to see, you had better be prepared to back it up, and able to re-think it as more information becomes available.

With all the talk about RSS feeds and reading blogs through a news reader, let me just say this. Some blogs are simply better when you see the whole visual layout and wouldn't be the same in a news reader. That being said, most tech blogs aren't in that category (especially this one!), so it makes more sense to follow tech blogs in a news aggregator, but some other blogs really don't work as well that way, because they're about personality more than just information. When considering the personality of a blog the layout, the blogroll, the other links, everything come into play. You don't get that in an RSS feed.

Dave, Scoble, and a bunch of other folks are coming to grips with the fact that you can't always trust journalists to give you the truth, that they might be influenced by advertisers or the media conglomorates that they are employed by. No, really? You think the NYT, CNN, or NPR have their own agenda and are more than willing to sacrifice a little truth in pursuit of that agenda? Of course they are, the only thing surprising in your rants is that you seem to think this is something new. It's not. ( Although it may be more obvious because of the current economic and technological situation, it's been going on since well before I was even born.)

Here's hoping you all have a good weekend!

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Friday, June 07, 2002

Neighborhood things

I was looking around, trying to learn more about this weblog neighborhood concept when I ran across Mark Pilgrim's little Python script that lets you use the Google API. So I thought I'd search on this blog and see what comes up as a neighborhood. I took a quick copy of the page Mark's script puts out and as a temporary curiousity I thought I'd post it here.

It's sort of interesting, there's some blogs on there I've never read so I'll have fun checking that out, but my wife might not be happy to find out she's not in my weblog neighborhood. *L*

Eventually I'll maybe find a way to have it consistently updated, or use something besides the Google API, but for now, this is sort of fun. :)

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I knew it would happen

But I didn't think it would happen this soon! Jonas dropped me an email early this morning asking why I didn't cover Feedreader in the latest article. For the record, I did cover Feedreader in one of the followups to Part 1. It crashed repeatedly when I tried to run it and try it out, so it got tossed from the game. Jonas informs me that I can go to their support forums and find a pre-Alpha version that works better, assuming I can figure out how to switch it from Estonian to English. I think I'll wait until there's a real Alpha or even Beta release before looking at it again, because I don't want to work that hard at getting it right now. I need a freakin' break from aggregators for awhile! Despite Jevon's claim that I am "Authority on all things aggregated", I am actually kinda tired of testing them out for now. The ironic thing about this title is that while I've worked quite a bit on testing feed readers, I have very little idea of the technology behind creating the feeds. If Blogger didn't generate one automatically, I'd have no idea how to build one for this site. *L*

In other news:

Trillian has released version 0.73:

No, this is not the next-generation Trillian we've been working on!

Microsoft was kind enough to alert us to a change in the MSN servers that would have negatively affected Trillian. Thanks, Microsoft!

Sometimes even Microsoft can be on the right side of an issue. :) (link via Dane)

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Thursday, June 06, 2002

Showdown Part 2

After a lovely meal of fajita's and El Salvadoran Beer, prepared by my wonderful, recipe collecting wife, I've managed to finish writing Part 2 of the Free News Aggregator Showdown this evening. Go have a look at the new, updated information. New versions called for a whole new look at things, and there has been quite an improvement since the original piece was written. I must give props to the developers who were willing to listen to my complaints and get some things worked out. Nicely done, keep up the good work!

Speaking of good work, thanks to everyone who's been leaving comments, sending emails, or posting to the forums over the last few days. I am really enjoying and learning from the various conversations. It's really gotten me excited about what we're doing here with this little site.

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Gloomy morning

Man what a gloomy start to the day we got here in Columbus. Rainy, gray, blah. It's one of the few days I actually am glad my office doesn't have any windows.

The password switch didn't go too badly, the ISP was kind enough to bend the rules a tad and send me a list of all the user passwords for our office. I think after a handful of direct phone calls from users here they quickly figured out that they didn't want to deal with these users, that's my job. Yeah it's not the most secure thing, me having all the passwords, but it makes things easier. (And I'm certainly not giving them to anyone!) Although I can't help but be saddend by the fact that the prospect of dealing with our users made them change the rules in mid-stream. It somehow seems offensive, doesn't it? And for the record, there were 2 people who deleted the email with their password and one so far that I had to walk through entering it. Better than I thought. :)

I did get the newest version of Aggie, RC 3, last night. It does seem to read all of the feeds better. The only feed that Amphetadesk would read that Aggie wouldn't was Scripting News, but a quick email exchange with Joe gave me the answer to that by using RSS Auto-discovery to get the proper feed from Dave's site. So my 10 feed test list is being completely read in both now, so I can't use that as a decision point anymore. I'll have to really dig down and look at the pros and cons of each, when compared to how I would use it. More on that front soon.

Have you seen where Hotmail is going to charge for using it's service to retrieve mail from other POP3 accounts? Like their service doesn't suck enough as it is? Actually, the POP3 retrieval is about the only thing of value that the service has, but it's not enough to make me want to pay them for it!

Speaking of Microsoft, with their record on security, should we not all be slightly cynical when they come up with a product called TRUSTBridge?

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Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Sounds like a bad Caddyshack joke.

But there does appear to be a Gopher Hole in Internet Explorer. There's a simple fix for it in the article as well, unless you happen to be using Gopher with IE, in which case I have to ask where, and why? :)

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Let the games continue!

Just heard from Joe, the creator of Aggie, who also has a new version out and wants me to test it out and give him some feedback as far as the feeds that I couldn't get Aggie to read. I'll be documenting some of that this evening, I think, and passing it along to him.

By the way, let me just say that I'm highly impressed with all the developers that I've had email exchanges with, as far as their willingness to listen to suggestions, fix problems, and generally work hard to get things right with their software. No matter how things turn out over the next few weeks as far as what aggregator I choose to stick with, all of them have impressed me in that regard and I'd recommend any of them. My decision will, ulitmately, come down to which one meets my preferred way of doing the job, which is always different than your's. So try them all and see which you like better!

I'm waiting with baited breath this afternoon. The new passwords from our ISP should go into effect this afternoon at some point and I am on edge about people's ability to change it themselves. We'll see how it goes.

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Tuesday, June 04, 2002

Giving it another chance

I got an email from Morbus, the mysterious creator of Amphetadesk, offering me the opportunity to preview the Alpha of version 0.93, so that I could give it another chance to stack up in the Freeware News Aggregator Showdown. He disputes my claim that the download was over 4MB and that it ran extremely slow. It may be that I simply got a f***ed version of it from one of the mirror sites, so I'll give it another shot. (That, and I'm a total sucker when a programmer offers to let me test stuff!!) Whatever changes there may be in 0.93, I can tell you right away that the speed issue has been addressed completely. It's much faster and usable than whatever that was I downloaded back a few months ago! :) More to come...

Now if I could just find someone who can explain this whole Weblog Neighborhood thing that the Radio users are all gaga about. I sort of get the idea, and I, apparently, even show up in some of their neighborhoods, but I really don't understand how it works or what it means to be in someone's neighborhood. I think I focused so much on getting stuff fixed at work that I can't get my head around the idea for now or something.

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Doing my best Kevin Spacey impression

"I rule!"

First off, I did figure out what was going on with my template here, turns out it was my fault, blogger didn't like those ampersand characters in the javascript for the blogrolling.com stuff, so I'm going to simply keep a copy of my template code as a text file on the server and edit from there, instead of in Blogger's web-interface, because the web interface chokes on the code. No big deal, the web interface will still accept my copy/pasted code and make the changes when I publish, so all is good there. By the way, I figured that out last night, I really think that I was somehow not going to be able to go to sleep until I got something to work right, as weird as that sounds. *L*

I also, in slightly under 2 hours this morning, figured out what was wrong with the database and got it fixed! Turns out we had a corrupt record, all I needed to do was figure out at what point in the search the database choked and delete that record. It turned out to be an old record for a company that has since merged, so there was even no reason to keep the record in the active file. That's a huge load off my mind!

So I'm in a better mood now, although in my desire to try out some new blogging software I discovered that Readyhosting will not only not support mySQL, but it won't add the required Perl module to run Movable Type either. I like the Windows 2000 hosting because I can use ASP, and I'm not really in a position where I can pay for another domain to be hosted on Linux to play with this stuff. Guess I'll live with the limitations.

I have been seeing some flow for my Freeware News Aggregator article this morning. Seems the flow started with Matthew and is moving around the Library Tech blog world. Cool, I hope you all enjoy it!

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Monday, June 03, 2002

I shouldn't have asked

Yeah, Geek, your comment was dead-on. I should have kept my blogmouth shut. I had to ask what else could go wrong, didn't I? The rest of the day consisted of still not getting any response from the ISP, my wife getting a bad migraine, having to have me drive her home and put her to bed almost immediately, the President's secretary informing me at 4:15 this afternoon that he was going to need a laptop for a presentation tomorrow morning, and me, finally, getting to run month end maintenance only to discover that something is wrong with either the scripts or the database, which is really, really not a good thing. Actually, let me rephrase that, the scripts work, they do what they're supposed to do, to the records they are supposed to do it to. Only thing is, the scripts never end. They keep searching and searching until I three-finger salute the process. Same thing happens to a few select searches, they find some of the records but choke on something and never finish. I'm going to try some work-arounds, but I'm not hopeful.
Any way you look at it, it does not bode well for the future of our membership database, something seems to be terribly wrong with it. Maybe I'll reboot the server it sits on tomorrow and see if that helps some of the SQL stuff get straightened out.

In other news:

Meryl has taken a look at Amphetadesk version 0.93 Alpha and seems to really like it. I might have to take another look at it and see if they've improved on what I wrote about 0.92. Unfortunately, she seems to have gotten a sneak-peak at it, because 0.93 is not available from the website. Bummer.

Kevin left me a comment as well about a new blog he's started up about his life working in IT. Cool! The more the merrier, and the more people blogging about their life in IT, the more information out there for us to share! (An absolute must in small company IT shops!)

MSNBC is launching weblogs. This is a cool idea, and they even have bookmarks and permalinks, the only thing missing is an XML feed, which would eliminate the stupid popups. I guess that's why they don't have one. Try again guys! (link via Dane)

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Off to a killer start!

No, not really. This week is off to a bad start all the way around. First, I don't really feel all that good, then I get to start out my day with Staff Meeting, which is always a royal pain, but particularly when you are asked to reiterate policy and procedure that has been in place for over 6 months, but some people still don't seem to understand. Then I get to show the new intern how to log on to the network. I was good and setup his network login and email ID's on Friday, so everything would be in fine working order when he got here today. The last time they hired a summer intern, they didn't bother to tell me at all, let alone what sort of network/email setup the person would need, until after they got here, so this was a steep improvement. Well, I thought it was a steep improvement right up to the point where he informed me that someone had given me the wrong spelling of his last name! Since usernames are based on the actual real name of employees, I had to run around and re-do everything this morning. I'm still trying to get hold of someone at our ISP to change the name on his email account. This isn't exactly how I envisioned my day going, since I'm supposed to be doing month end database stuff, not dealing with this!

Not to mention that in my haste to correct this, I completely forgot to show him how to setup his voice mail, so I've got another trek upstairs to do that coming at some point today.

I also spent some time dealing with a laptop that wouldn't start, it kept getting hung loading the AV software, but then, suddenly, did start for no apparent reason. So I'll have to look into that at some point as well.

And I still can't make changes to my template because BloggerPro has, apparently, choked on my template, although it does publish the template just fine, the code simply isn't available when I go to edit it. Hasn't been since late Friday night.

So what else can go wrong today?

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Sunday, June 02, 2002

Upgrade

Just as an FYI, I upgraded the forums to the latest version of Snitz last night. No major improvements on the user's end, but I was able to get the subscriptions working properly while I was tooling around in the setup! Let me know if you have any diffculty with them.

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