Section: Blogs

Ok, I’m really starting to feel bad about not having an Xbox 360 yet…

Jan 9, 2006 1 min.

My book is about to come out (don’t worry, I had a 360 to use while writing the book… so my lack of one now does not reduce the accuracy of the book 🙂 ), and I work at a place with probably one of the world’s highest concentration of Xbox 360 fans …. and I don’t have one yet. I pre-ordered from EB Games, but I didn’t pre-order quite soon enough I guess (October), so they haven’t gotten down to me yet.

Phil Ringnalda questions the value of letting Google and MSN index his pages…

Jan 9, 2006 1 min.

I love this… and the funny thing was, I had just finished searching MSN for “Phil Ringnalda” (because I had forgotten his URL, well actually because I kept spelling his name wrong when I typed it as a URL) without much success. Phil Ringnalda: Searching Where I’m Not Hated … I don’t have any way of knowing whether Google first decided I was garbage, and then decided that made me a duplicate of other people aggregating me, or decided I was garbage because I was a duplicate of people duplicating me, but I know it isn’t helping: the only time you should let search engines index the output of an aggregator is when that’s the only place the feeds appear as HTML.

Turns out the VS ‘read me’ authors have a sense of humour…

Jan 8, 2006 1 min.

ReadMe Item of the Day (from The Coding Monkey) Was reading the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Readme and happened upon this rather humorous note: Setup fails if the installation path is customized to path with more than 128 characters excluding the drive letter and the slashes. (We realize it is ironic to put this information in a file that is installed by setup, but at least you know that we know about the problem you have already worked around).

Audible.com, one of the few free offers I signed up for that I’m still using…

Jan 5, 2006 1 min.

Along with Zooba.com, I’ve kept my Audible membership as well… (and Columbia House DVD and BMG Music … oh, and Vonage… ok, there are quite a few free offers that I ended up keeping!!). Audible is pretty handy for those of us who have the occasional long driving trip, I burned ‘Getting things done‘ onto CD along with ‘Accidental Buddhist‘ (3 CDs apiece) and it really made the time fly driving to and from my Mother’s house up in BC… never listened to anything in the car though, and while I take a few podcasts to the gym sometimes I’ve never tried taking anything from Audible.

Have you tried my RSS editor? Comments?

Jan 5, 2006 1 min.

Ok, so I’m fishing for comments… not compliments at least, but I’m still fishing… I’ve seen a fair bit of traffic to the install point but not a single email or blog comment about this app… go ahead fire away (and yes, I know that it doesn’t do Atom feeds… yet).

Interested in building your own Gadgets for Live.com?

Jan 5, 2006 1 min.

Ok, so I must admit that the whole Live.com/Start.com thing looks so much like a “Digital Dashboard” (anyone else get into that fad when it was cool?) that I feel like I’m back working on building my own components into the Outlook Today page…. but cynicism aside, it is still a cool idea and the very open system for creating and adding your own gadgets rocks. If you are wondering how to get started, then check out Adam Kinney’s article to learn exactly what you need to do.

Updated my personal site to use the Firefox/IE7 feed icons…

Dec 31, 2005 1 min.

As per the blog entry “Feed icons” and using icons pulled from the new feedicons site. Hopefully MSDN will follow suit as well, which would probably be pretty easy… it looks like they are mostly linking every instance of the ‘old’ RSS icon to the same graphic. I’ll suggest it and we’ll see what happens.