September 27, 2006

NYT Reader Released in Beta

The NYT has released a beta version of its Times Reader software, which I found first at the Reinventing College Media blog and then at CNet. I’ll try not to get too bogged down in the whole “Why isn’t there a Mac version” whining that seems to be prevalent, but suffice it to say that if you like to read the New York Times on a computer screen, it’s a pretty cool way to go.

The layout is similar in many ways to a traditional newspaper, but the rendering is quite striking. It’s a standalone application that continually checks for new content and uses the new Windows Presentation Framework on the still-in-development .NET 3.0 platform as a rendering engine. All’s I can say is that if Vista looks this nice, it’ll be a great upgrade. The text is clear and smooth and the photographs have great detail and punch.

That said, it’s kind of sad and weird that we need a proprietary application to make things look this good and work this smoothly. The transitions between sections are slick and the stories read as easily as they do on the page, if not easier. You can print and email stories, make notes to yourself, search, pretty much do anything but read opinion columns (unless you're a TimesSelect subscriber -- ye gods, why don't they just give up and let the columnists go free). Mac users aren't happy that there isn't a Mac version, but they'll either get over it or keep howling until the Windows Presentation Framework for the Mac is made available. In the meantime, it's not like they can't access the Web site.

You hear that kvetching a lot from Mac users and I can't say that it's not annoying. The Web is now littered with proprietary podcast links (curse the guy who set up the phobos.apple.com domain), so I don't feel particularly bad that Apple users are excluded here. I'd rather see the NYT try something new without having to sweat supporting every OS which is, let's face it, often the part of the process that takes the most time. Java would have been a nightmare here and this is a good example of what MS's new presentation architecture can do. Seems like a lot to like. I thought the Times has handled it about as well as they could.

But anyway, it's an interesting new tool and definitely worth a download.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 12:18 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2006

Father's Day is Coming

If anyone's wondering what to get me, this is it:

Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2006

Crimp-o-Mania

Good link on crimping one's own ethernet cable. I'm going to be doing a run through the crawlspace this weekend to get wired ethernet to the den, so this will come in handy.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2006

Darn you, WinSQL

I've been a big advocate of WinSQL by Synametrics for accessing and maintaining Oracle tables where you don't have permissions to use the Oracle GUI tools. With the new version of the freebie WinSQL Lite, though, they removed the ability to browse tables. Very bad. I've moved over to PL/SQL Developer from some folks in the Netherlands called All Round Automations. Works well enough, but more complex interface than I'd like. I'll get used to it though.

Funny side-note: All Round Automations' address is a street (or lane or boulevard or dirt road) called Krooshooplanden. They're No. 11 if you find yourself in that part of the Netherlands.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 02:52 PM

March 06, 2006

SEJC Blogging Presentation

I was supposed to post this presentation a couple of weeks ago, but I totally forgot. If anyone's still interested, here's a PDF of my SEJC "We are All Journalists" blogging presentation.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2006

DIY Xbox 360 Case

This is nothing thrilling, but I enjoy the way the author writes. His enthusiam for Velcro and for the can of glue gave me a chuckle.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2006

NetFlix throttling

There's a lot of conversation going on about Netflix's now-admitted policy of "throttling" heavy users of the service by slowing both new shipments and returns of old ones. Frankly, I'm a little baffled at people who defend it when the marketing materials clearly say that the service is "unlimited."

I'd be lying if I didn't say that I fall into the category of being a heavy user (though I go in fits and starts, sometimes not returning movies for a week or more), but I definitely see that if I return my movies within a day or two over several weeks that additional days begin to appear between the time that Netflix shows them as being returned and often before another movie ships out.

Cap the number of movies I can get in a month if you want to, but let's not pretend like it's actually unlimited.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2006

IE 7 Preview Release

Have spent a little time this afternoon playing with the IE 7 preview. Some good stuff, some bad. I'm not wild about the interface, which isn't quite as slick as Opera's.

Some outstanding bugs/issues/thoughts:

Stuff I like:

Decent beta, but let's hope they get this thing whipped into shape before release. Surprising number of bugs, in my mind, considering how long it's been since IE 6.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 02:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2006

Review of Vista Build 5270

BentUser has a worthwhile review of a recent build of Windows Vista. Some good screenshots, particularly in comparison to XP. I'm glad that Windows Media Player is getting an overhaul, as it's one of the most uncomfortable media players I've ever used. I like the speed of WMP, especially compared to the Windows version of iTunes, but the interface can be challenging.

The "live" task switcher looks great, though for people who run with 15-20 windows at a time, I hope it'll still be usable.

Glad to see Media Center functionality making its way to the over-the-counter OS's, since the current version has to be installed from an OEM machine. MCE is really nice software that doesn't get nearly enough attention. I think that'll change once more people get their hands on it.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

iPod Wish List

  1. Why can't iTunes and the iPod play protected and unprotected WMA? Sure, the all-you-can-eat services might take a little business away from the iTunes Music Store, but it would basically turn the iPod into even more of an unstoppable juggernaut than it already is.
  2. Why no "Now Playing" queue? The On the Go playlist is unnecessarily awkward. Most players have a "now playing" list that you can easily add to to queue up the next song you want to listen to. That's how I'm habituated, so it'd be nice if the iPod worked the same way.
  3. Why can't iTunes make iPod-compliant video? It'd be nice if you could drag any video into iTunes, including unencrypted DVD VOBs, and get video easily into the iPod. It's an awkward process right now.
  4. Why can't the Mac iPod updater update a PC-formatted iPod? It can read the data (which is great for those of us who live on both platforms), but it can't update it unless it's on its native OS. Not a deal-killer, but annoying.
That's all for now. Get to work on that, Apple.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

5G iPod Goodness

My history with iPods has been a little spotty. I had a 10GB first generation unit which I really liked, but I found iTunes too slow and clumsy to be of much use. It prematurely gave up the ghost and I moved up to a 40GB third generation model which I've been using the past couple of years. Still no big fan of iTunes, so I'd moved to other programs -- Media Jukebox, Yahoo Music Engine -- to manage my music, trading the iTunes integration for a different choice of client. Not sure why, but having ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe running 24-7 on my machine has always struck me as bad software design.

I got my hands over the weekend on a 60GB fifth generation iPod, and I guess all I can say at this point is uncle. It's an amazing piece of hardware and iTunes seems to finally be at a point where it doesn't feel like I'm running it through Virtual PC in reverse.

Out of the box experience: The box is much more slender now than previous generations of iPod, but that's mainly because they give you so much less. No dock, no remote (they took the pins off of the iPod itself), no Firewire. Just the iPod, a USB cable, the white earbuds (quickly tossed in a drawer), a dock shim and a software CD. All very nicely designed, all wrapped in plastic that feels eerily like human skin.

The device: The new iPod itself is a great-looking unit with an extremely sharp color screen. Like lots of color screens, it's hard to read with no backlight on, but the backlight comes on every time you touch the controls. I'm not wild about the ersatz Mac OS X widgets in the iPod interface, but that's a minor sin. Videos I encoded look tremendously sharp and bright on the screen, although there are now so many menu options that you can get lost digging around in the multilevel interface.

How's iTunes? iTunes has made huge strides, which some great podcast support. The video integration is strange (why does it default to playing videos in that little window?), but workable. The library and the music store are as slick as ever, even if the product runs those damned services in the background all the time. I had a minor installation snafu, but it was my fault since I didn't close my browser like the Quicktime installer told me to. I had to uninstall and reinstall Quicktime and all was well.

How's the video support?: It's probably no surprise to anyone that the device and software combination is absolutely awesome. I ended a couple of episodes of "Home Movies" with the Videora iPod Converter and dumped them on, bought a song from the iTMS (Ben Folds' hilarious "Bitches Ain't S***"), synced up 4,200 songs and I'm off to the races. It's kind of a pain to navigate that many songs, but that's kinda my problem.

Argh: The only thing I miss, and miss bad, is support for the Yahoo Unlimited music service. Subscription music is unequaled for sampling new stuff -- $.99 per song adds up quick compared to $5 per month -- but no Apple players support it, or, for that matter, WMA. If Apple would suck it up and allow protected WMA music, they'd be unstoppable in this space.

If you want an MP3 player, it's hard to do better than this device. You don't get anything in the box but what you need, but that helps keep the price down and, for what you get, it's a bargain. Nice job, Apple.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 17, 2005

Sony's Braindead Firmware Updates

Rented a couple of PSP games for the flight -- "Burnout Legends" and "Namco Battle Museum" -- for the flight to Anaheim. I get on the plane and both games require the 1.52 PSP Firmware Update which is included on the UMD disc. Fair enough, but the firmware update requires the unit to be plugged in, even though I have a full charge. So on the plane, which, let's face it, is when you're most likely to use such a thing, you're completely unable to play the games. Very annoying.

That said, I installed the firmware update once I got to the hotel and Burnout is freaking great.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2005

Adding Digital Certificates to Pocket PC

Saving this for later, but hoping it's what I need:

http://www.petri.co.il/adding_root_certificates_to_windows_mobile_2003_ppc.htm

Posted by Lee Clontz at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2005

Let the whining continue

The folks at Slashdot are all worked up that the head of Go, a company that was doing work on pen computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is suing Microsoft over crushing his business.

It's really getting pathetic, folks. Whether you believe Microsoft to be a monopoly or not (it's not -- they're an exceptionally powerful company, but hardly a monopoly), it certainly wasn't a monopoly in the late 1980s. Like most successful technology companies, MS plays hard -- sometimes too hard -- but all these companies (like Be, who's technology was so terrific that Palm bought it and never used it) coming out of the walls to collect some free settlement money really need to suck it up.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 03:09 PM | Comments (0)

Get It Now

Pleonard is very excited that the loathsome T-Mobile -- their new marketing message being "Great service unless you want to use your phone indoors" -- is moving to Google for their mobile Web service.

Clearly, Pleonard has never experienced the sublime joys of Verizon's "Get It Now" service which, in addition to having the catchiest name of any of said services, has the kewlest interface ever.

(Seriously, I wish I could find a screenshot, because GiN has the tackiest interface ever. It's like the unholy love child of Game.com and the GIMP.)

Posted by Lee Clontz at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 03, 2005

ColdFusion Screen Scraping Blog-Rebuilding Script

Ugh: my soon-to-be former host, AffordableHost, somehow torched my MySQL database that had all of my MovableType databases earlier this week. All that was left was mt_blog, mt_category and mt_author -- the three easiest tables to manually rebuild. Fortunately, the blog couldn't be rebuilt, so my static pages were untouched in the /archives directory.

In the interest of my own sanity, I wrote a screen scraping script in ColdFusion to go through each page and dump it to an SQL file with the appropriate INSERTs. If you're interested, I put the two scripts (minus any self-referencing parts) in the extended entry below. Enter your site in the ***YOUR SITE HERE*** area and it will dump your blog into a TEXTAREA with MySQL-friendly syntax. It should properly handle escaping quotes and whatnot. Worked fine for my 150-ish posts, but your mileage may vary.

Either way, it's good to be back. I'm on with PowWeb now, which has a vastly improved package compared to AffordableHost's (which has really gone downhill since it was purchased by DotCanada earlier this year). Hopefully I'll continue to be happy, but the package is pretty killer.

Okay, here's the form page:

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="Yes">

<cfif not isdefined("form.sitename")>
<cfoutput>
<form action="" method="post">
Site URL: <input name="sitename" type="text">
<BR>
Subdirectory for archives: /<input name="archives" type="text" value="archives">
<BR><input type="submit">

</form>
</cfoutput>
<cfelse>

<cfoutput>Generating content for #form.sitename#...
</cfoutput><BR><BR>

<cfset allMyChildren = ArrayNew(3)>
<cfoutput><textarea rows=80 cols=120></cfoutput>
<cfloop from="101" to="185" index="fred">

<cfset currentFred = fred>

<cfif fred lt 10><cfset currentFred = "00000" & fred>
<cfelseif fred lt 100 and fred gte 10><cfset currentFred = "0000" & fred>
<cfelseif fred lt 1000 and fred gte 100><cfset currentFred = "000" & fred>
</cfif>

<cfset currentURL = "http://www.***YOUR SITE HERE***.com/archives/" & currentFred & ".html">


<cfinvoke component="rebuildmt" method="getAllFiles" returnvariable="allFiles">
<cfinvokeargument name="mySite" value="#form.sitename#">
<cfinvokeargument name="myDirectory" value="#form.archives#">
<cfinvokeargument name="whichfile" value="#currentURL#">
</cfinvoke>

<cfoutput><cfif allFiles[1] neq "NULL">INSERT INTO mt_entry VALUES (#fred#,1,2,2,0,0,'__default__',NULL,'#allFiles[2]#','','#allFiles[3]#','','',NULL,NULL,NULL,'#allFiles[1]#','#allFiles[1]#',NULL,NULL,'');

</cfif></cfoutput>
</cfloop>
<cfoutput></textarea></cfoutput>

</cfif>

================================================================

And here's the .CFC it calls:

<cfcomponent>
<cffunction name="getAllFiles" access="public" returntype="array">
<cfargument name="mySite" type="string" required="true">
<cfargument name="myDirectory" type="string" required="true">
<cfargument name="whichFile" type="string" required="true">

<cfset myPath = mySite & "/" & myDirectory>


<cfhttp url="#whichFile#" method="get" resolveurl="yes" />

<cfset thisfile = cfhttp.FileContent>
<cfset allMyChildren = ArrayNew(1)>

<cfset headlinestring = "<h3 class=\Stitle\S>.*</h3>">
<cfset headline = ReFindNoCase(headlinestring,thisfile,1,"true")>
<cfif headline.pos[1] neq 0>
<cfset headlineOutput = #Mid(thisfile,#Evaluate(headline.pos[1]+18)#,#Evaluate(headline.len[1]-23)#)#>
<cfset headlineOutput = #Replace(headlineOutput,"&apos;", "''","ALL")#>
<cfset headlineOutput = #Replace(headlineOutput,"'", "''","ALL")#>
<cfset allMyChildren[2] = headlineOutput>
<cfelse>
<cfset allMyChildren[2] = "NULL">
</cfif>

<cfset bodystring = "</h3>.*<a name=\Smore\S>">
<cfset body = ReFindNoCase(bodystring,thisfile,1,"true")>
<cfif body.pos[1] neq 0>
<cfset bodyOutput = #XMLFormat(Mid(thisfile,#Evaluate(body.pos[1]+7)#,#Evaluate(body.len[1]-23)#))#>

<cfset bodyOutput = #Replace(bodyOutput,"&apos;", "''","ALL")#>
<cfset allMyChildren[3] = bodyOutput>
<cfelse>
<cfset allMyChildren[3] = "NULL">
</cfif>

<cfset datestring = "date=">
<cfset date = ReFindNoCase(datestring,thisfile,1,"true")>
<cfif date.pos[1] neq 0>
<cfset dateOutput = #Mid(thisfile,#Evaluate(date.pos[1]+6)#,#Evaluate(date.len[1]+14)#)#>
<cfset dateOutput = #Replace(dateOutput,"T", " ")#>
<cfset allMyChildren[1] = dateOutput>
<cfelse>
<cfset allMyChildren[1] = "NULL">
</cfif>


<cfreturn allMyChildren>
</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>
========================================================= Enjoy!

Posted by Lee Clontz at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2005

Excellent Centering with CSS Resource

Was trying to center a DIV vertically and horizontally for a project I'm working on purely using CSS. It's not really possible, it seems, but this site had a great hack that worked like a charm. It's kinda bizarre to implement, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 12:40 AM