Jim says this is cool

Tales of futures past is a site that my friend Jim from Portland (OR) says is really super neat. I can't actually browse it because my mothers increadibly slow dialup (46.6K) makes browsing image heavy web site too much to bear.

Back to work on Monday (after a 8 hour coast to coast and a hour drive from Providence, RI) and back to high speed and my CloudMark spam filter...

Tim Ewald: Messages are the model

Tim Ewald has a very interesting piece about his wish to use Relax NG instead of XML Schema. Tim has an interesting point of view and was one of the first people to clearly explain to me why rpc/encoded was bad and document/literal is good. My first reaction to this was that he has gone off the deep end (again), but as usual he has me thinking. A particularly telling point: "We can do a lot better than RPC. If we don't, then what was the point?"

Pimp my Ride!

This pimped out car is sweet! I am not sure what you do with that much computing power in a Toyota, but I like the very nice builtin look this guy managed to get.

Digital Cable Ready (DCR) TV's sound cool

I discovered an very interesting audio-only interview about Digital Cable Ready televisions. I usually am up to date on this stuff, but this technology took me by surprise. According to the interview, the industry is working on a 2-way version of this, but are rolling out the one-way only version now. Time/Warner already provides these cards to their customers, and Motorola also manufactures them too. What does it do? It is a card that plugs in to the back of your DCR TV and gives you access to all your digital channels via the built in tuner of the TV. This includes all the encrypted channels you pay for. But the one way version means no pay-per-view and no video on demand. Two things I am willing to give up for the convenience of getting rid of a box. And the thought of plugging one of these cards in to a Tivo makes me drool.

Here is an interesting USA Today article on DCR from June 1st. Not nearly as positive about it as I am.

Comcast will probably still get me to pay for the box, because they are rolling out the Motorola digital box with the built in DVR in the Boston area soon, perhaps as soon as next month, and I want something that will record HDTV and this looks like the solution. It isn't Tivo, but the recording capacities listed for this box sound great (it has an 80 Gig hard drive). Check out the sweet Flash interactive demo!

When I am in the mood for a rant...

causticTech is a great place to read a good diatribe about the tech industry. His recent postings about language snobs and press releases are classics. Check this guy out!

Bluetooth Luggage

This is very cool. You can get Bluetooth luggage tags now. "Bluebird signals your cell phone when your luggage is nearby. There is no need to fight the crowd at the carousel. Have a seat on a nearby bench and read your magazine instead." How sweet is that? I think I want one for my birthday. :-)

Bill Gates Email hoax revealed!

Wired magazine has a very interesting article on the Bill Gates Email hoax. The author actually tracked the guy who wrote it down!! Great stuff.

Open source from Microsoft

This is an interesting tidbit, the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset has been released as Open Source on SourceForge.net.

This is a first for Microsoft. I don't have much faith that this will start a cultural shift at MS, as proprietary software (and destroying competitors) is too baked in to the company (IMHO) to be changed in anything less than decades. But still, I have to respect Rob Mensching's attempt to improve installation on windows ('setup' as he calls it).

Having written the installation for CF on Unix and then being forced to maintain it for years, I was always obsessive about making it a nice experience. Things like making sure you could always install over the top of the current or any previous versions. Things like making sure uninstall always removed everything so you could install clean.

Glen Daniels

Dave Chappell blogged my former co-worker Glen jamming on stage in Chicago. Crappy camera phone pictures, but fun anyway.

Comments!

So blogger has added a comments feature, which is cool. Ditched the squawkbox comments, which means I lost all of the previous comments, but what can you do?

The most important thing is I get Email when someone posts comments, so post away!

New look

Blogger has rolled out a new interface, so if you ever actually read the blog from the web site, it looks pretty nice now.

Check it out!

Some really good rants

This guy has a lot to get off his chest! Some good stuff here.

Yeah, I know I am jumping on an already crowded bandwagon linking to his blog as other, more famous, people already have.

Google mulls RSS support

CNet is reporting today that
Google is mulling RSS support for blogger customers (like me).

The fight over RSS and Atom is very surprising to me, even though it shouldn't be. I understand where the Atom people are coming from, but did we really need to start another "standards" war over this?

Not enough postings

Recently my friend Andrew (no link 'cause he doesn't have a blog!) complained that I wasn't blogging enough. So this entry is for him. :-)

I like the idea that Rory over at Napolean.com has - the "After Blog mint". Of course, as Andrew points out I just don't post enough to really use the idea.

I saw Harry Potter today in the IMAX theater. Nice theater, good movie. I might have had my expectation set a bit high from reading all of the accolades from critics who called this the best one yet. It certainly was the darkest one yet - the director washed all the color from Hogwarts!