Category: Rants

Partial Feeds

~ rbonini

Partial Feeds are the worst kind of feed there is to subscribe to. They drive me insane.

Fortunately, a few bloggers (in my blogroll, that is) are seeing the light and changing to full text feeds. Recently Michael J. Totten changed to full text feeds and I read more of his stuff now as a result.

Steve’s post at the Ransom Thoughts blog ( found via Scoble’s link blog) has the exact same thoughts about this. He goes a bit further than me and says he’s unsubscribing from partial feeds.

Feeds are there for the express purpose of giving people easier access to your information, not baiting links to drive up the PageRank and roll in the AdWords revenue.

Remember the blogosphere is a community with a vast amount of information contained in its many pages (and feeds). Since it is a community, a single blog survives only by the grace of others that link to it.

So be nice to people when it comes to full text feeds – let them read your stuff with as little effort as possible – it’ll help your blog in the long run.

The first comment to Steve’s post puts it best:

Life’s too short for [a] clickthrough.

In the Name of Google….

~ rbonini

Shel Israel’s latest post had me metaphorically rolling on the floor with laughter:

1. If you ask God for enlightenment, you may never get an answer.  Google gives you one in just a few seconds.

2.  God may or may not help those who help themselves. But Google helps those who blog and blog often. Posting three times a day is likely to give you more quantifiable results than praying three times a day.

3. People seem to get into trouble when they start thinking their god is better or more powerful than other people’s gods. Google is even-handed.  it gives equally to all people who asks it the right question.

4. For an allegedly all-knowing being, some people seem to think it is important to flatter God all the time. Perhaps they think he/she/it is insecure. Google needs none of that. Like your mom and her homemade food, Google only requires that you visit now and then and you will be rewarded.

5. So far as I know, not a single person has ever been killed, or even assaulted, in Google’s name.

Quite right. Now, about Microsoft….

Microsoft Surface, part 1

~ rbonini

Like the rest of the blogging world (Scoble, ScottGu, Sam Gentile to name a few), I’m assimilating the possibilities of this new Microsoft technology.

( in fact, I think I’m making Microsoft sound like a not-so-bad version of the Borg – They are characterized by relentless pursuit of targets for assimilation, their collective consciousness that enables rapid adaptability to almost any defense, and the ability to continue functioning properly despite seemingly devastating blows. They have become a powerful symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against whom “resistance is futile.” – couldn’t resist that quote)

I’ve just gone to the Microsoft Surface site and found that its using, wait for it, Adobe Flash Player 9.

Beta or not, Silverlight should have been used here – when you use your own products, it inspires confidence in your customer base ( in Microsoft’s case, .Net developers).

And I like the logo. Its in similar vein to  the Silverlight one. The new, high tech, sci-fi like logos Microsoft are now using show how Microsoft is positioning itself to ride these new technologies into the future and guarantee its continued existence. Just a thought.

Two things I’d like Google to Do

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Just a short post while I’m thinking about this.

Number 1 – Integrate your winning search engine into Google Reader

The number of times I’ve read something and forget from which feed or when I read it is unbelievable. I have to go trawling though my feeds BY HAND!!!!! looking for it. Its a hit or miss affair with a less than 50% success rate. Very frustrating.

Thus I have to either post items to my Link blog ( you’ll see it in my side bar) or star it. Neither of which are substitutes for a good search facility.

It would do wonders for my blogging 🙂 !

Number 2 – Integrate Google Notebook into Google Reader

Again, a good tool for bloggers.

Right now I have a ton of stuff about Microsoft/aQuantive waiting to be blogged about. And it would do so much to help if the notes pointed to the original material instead of to Google Reader ( I use the Explorer extension to right click and add  the selection to my Notebook)

While we’re on the subject, Google might want to add a “Share” feature to post stuff from your Notebook to your shared Items feed. Its such a pain when you come across something worth sharing and its NOT in Google Reader

(this is turning into more than two things, but hey, I’m helping improve things)

Number 3 – Make it easy for bloggers NOT on Blogger to work with Google Reader

But this I mean the “Add to Google” button that bloggers use. Mine either flat disappears or doesn’t work. And I can’t remember the page where you get them from ( I DO remember that it took me an age to find in the first place).

Secondly, work with other blogging engine to get them to allow users to add a clip of their shared items to their blog. My solution at the moment isn’t nearly as good as what Google provides via JavaScript ( making it impossible to add to WordPress).

Number 4 – Allow us to see how many people subscribe to our shared items feed

For no reason than this would be really cool.

In fact, this plays into Google’s hands. the more people add an items to their link blog, the more popular the item is. And the more people subscribe to a link blog, the more authority  that link blog has, thus helping Google better rank items shared. In short, its the RSS/Atom version of their PageRank system.

Update 1:

Maybe Google should make a new acquisition:

Joke apart, Google Notebook is really an online yellow sticky, while Zoho’s Notebook is a full-featured multimedia application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily, be it text, database, spreadsheet, image, drawings, audio, video – you name it.  The only thing the two “Notebooks” share is the name, otherwise they simply play in different leagues.  I tend to agree with Read/WriteWeb:  “Zoho Notebook offered different things than Microsoft OneNote and more things than Google Notebook.“

Windows Home Server AntiVirus

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

I’m following up my previous post on this.

I left a comment on McAffe CEO David DeWalt’s blog (great blog, if you ask me) asking about a WHS version of McAffe Antivirus.

I just received an email reply from Customer Services (they prefer me not to post it). Although they do not have a home-use version at the moment, they will consider it if future demand dictates. Which means I’ll have to go to the Small and Medium Business section to buy it.

I’d like to congratulate McAffe for their great response and customer service (Even though I’m not a customer, yet). Which brings me to the latest post at the Security Insights Blog:

McAfee’s goal is to help our customers protect what they value. Everyone – parents, small businesses, Fortune 500 enterprises, government agencies – have information and assets that they value. And McAfee is here to help you protect them. But what about McAfee? What do we as a company value? Clearly, our employees rise to the top of that list. The more than 3,800 of us are the heart and soul of McAfee.

Of course, our customers are just as critical to us, as are those who have chosen to trust in us as an investment – our shareholders. McAfee is a partner-focused company, so the thousands of companies with whom we partner are indispensable to our success. Our suppliers provide us with the necessary tools we need to operate. Finally, we value our communities-including our natural environment and our local neighborhoods-for these are where we live and work.

And that’s how I like to demystify “corporate responsibility” from confusing buzzwords we read in the media to real meaning within a company. At McAfee, our approach to corporate responsibility simply involves our commitments to protecting what we value: our employees, customers, shareholders, partners, suppliers, and communities. With that introduction, welcome to the Corporate Responsibility thread of our corporate blog.

You’re on the right track…

Windows Home Server and SageTV

~ rbonini

There is quite a bit of news about WHS floating around this week.

Rick at One Man Shouting has this to say:

Lots of Software partner announcements as well.  The most interesting in my opinion is the SageTVintegration.  Basically you can pump all your media to your Home Server, including PVR functionality, and use simple extenders to deliver your content anywhere. I’m not sure if SageTV allows for live TV watching, but it’d be awesome to move to a model where the only TV tuners in the home were connected to the Home Server, and all your channels and saved content were available to any TV, PC, or portable device.

Wish I’d thought of that. It makes great sense. And since my Server is in the Office/TV Room adding a tuner or two and hooking it up to the ariel would be trivial. Not sure if SageTV works in the UK with Freeview or not but its definately something worth investigating.

The SageTV website has this to say:

Enjoy all your TV, Video, Music or Photos anytime, anywhere using SageTV Placeshifter to connect to your Windows Home Server from any broadband connection

Connect your TVsat home to SageTV on Windows Home Server with SageTV Media Extender

Handles nearly every Video, Music and Photo format

Works with Cable, Satellite and Broadcast TV around the world including NTSC, ATSC, PAL and DVB

Now if I can just get the Antivirus sorted out…

Here is the Press Release

A flicker from Flickr

~ rbonini

I’m not a Flicker user myself but this story totally makes me want to stay away:

Rebekka is a single mom and art student living in Iceland. She’s an artist and a talented one at that. She does amazing things with her camera. Recently she discovered that a gallery Only-Dreemin had been ripping her off. They’d sold thousands of dollars worth of her images and when she caught them and tried to make them give her the money that they stole from her they refused. So Rebekka did what anyone with a following on the internet might do and she posted about her frustration and plight on her flickrstream. And her story resonated loudly with the flickr community. Her story made the front page of digg and by days end she had 100,000 views on this particular photograph with hundreds of supportive comments.

So what’s got me pissed today? What’s got me pissed today is that according to Rebekka, Flickr has removed her image from their site. That’s right. Not only did they remove and kill her image and her *non-violent* words of protest, but they censored each and every one of us who commented on her photograph, who offered support to Rebekka, who shared in her frustration by wiping every single one of our comments off the face of the internet forever.

That is bad. So Microsoft is not the only “evil” tech giant…

Help out by lending your support: Digg Thomas Hawk’s post.

"Patents Pending"

~ rbonini

I really should be craming for an exam, but this is more fun.

Over the past few days there has been a huge amount of hoohah over Microsofts Claim that thereare 235 patents that have been violated in OpenSource products.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted a lenghly reply that attack the root of Microsofts way of doing business:

With business down and customers leaving, we had more than a few choices at our disposal. We were invited by one company to sue the beneficiaries of open source. We declined. We could join another and sue our customers. That seemed suicidal. We were offered the choice to scuttle Solaris, and resell someone else’s operating system. We declined. And we were encouraged to innovate by developers and customers who wanted Sun around, who saw the value we delivered through true systems engineering.

So we took that advice. We started by securing the software assets we were building – so that we could convey them under trusted open source licenses to a community we’d just started nurturing. We redoubled our focus on innovation, in hardware and software, that would differentiate our offerings. Not just as good as the competition, but vastly better. We supported Linux on our SPARC systems, and forced ourselves to open up every business we operate – Solaris wasn’t the hammer for all nails. Nor was SPARC. Nor Java.

In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.

If that didn’t sting enough, Tim O’Reilly compared Microsofts claim to the one McCarthy made about here being 206 commmunists in the state department:

Does Microsoft’s claim that Free and Open Source Software infringes on 235 Microsoft patents remind anyone of Joseph McCarthy’s famous claim about communists at the State Department? Whether or not it’s true, citing such a number without providing any detail is such a classic FUD move that, to me at least, it just makes Microsoft look ridiculous. More recently, it’s reminiscent of the bluster of the SCO case against IBM.

The question I keep asking myself is: If it comes to it, who is Microsoft going to sue? Open Source Software by its very nature involves a cast of thousands.  The second issue involves the way that Microsoft is going to prove it. The only way it can do that is to show that its own propiotory code is exactly the same as the code in said Open Source Software. Which negates the whole idea of keeping your code under wraps.

Perhaps, and this is a long shot, Microsoft should follow Sun and reap the benifits:

In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.

Net result? Our contributions, from Java to OpenOffice to Gnome and Mozilla, now account for in excess of 25% of all lines of code within your average Linux distribution (yup, read that sentence again – or see the report, here, page 51). We joined forces with the likes of Google and IBM and Red Hat to drive the Open Document Format, accelerating document interchange. ODF is now accelerating globally, as the standard trusted by governments and academic institutions for multi-generational document interchange. It is an unstoppable force, no threat can kill a country’s drive for independence or self-sufficiency (remember, the network’s a social utility, too).

Windows Home Server Re-install, part 2

~ rbonini ~ 4 Comments

Well, its been a week since I had to install the CTP of Windows Home Server.

The long and the short of it is that the Upgrade option in the setup simply does not work – no way, no how. It stopped after the first reboot. It was insane. So I capitualted and copied all my data off the two secodnary hard drives as it was impossible to access data stored on the primary hard disk ( the one with the OS partition). I even tried recovering the hard drive to no avail. Which wasted the entire afternoon, I might add. So thanks to Folder Duplication – I did not lose one shred (no pun intended) of data – THANKS GUYS!!

So I did a new install over the old one and it worked like a Swizz car. It was a total breeze ( it might be going a bit far to say my grand mother could have done it).

I do like what they have done with the Console UI. Its more Vista-ish. Everything is well layed out. There is a helpful label at the bottom of the connector that informs you when storage is balanced.

The settings tab is re-designed. I like the inclusion of the Shutdown button under the menu instead of in a submenu – it saves a click. There are now settings for the Remote Access and Add-in bits. You can register for a custom domain from Live Custom Domains service that actually works very well (the wizard is supurbly designed). You can also auto-configure your router from here. I tried and it didin’t work (Linksys router WAG54G if anyone wants to know).

The process that actually does the configuring is called portfwd.exe and it hogged my system for hours. This slowed down everything. There isn’t actually an option to cancel the config (why???) and simply ending the process buys you a few minutes since it will start up again. the solution is to go into Control panel and click on Services (Control Panel should be in the Start Menu – if it isin’t, customize the Start menu to show it). Find Portfwd.exe and disable it.

Besides that small hickup everything runs smoothly.

This release of WHS really is good. I just need to get my hands on an Add-on or two to test that functionality.

I’m wondering, though, if you can back-up programatically to WHS. This would/ could give finer-grained control over back-up shecedules than is currently possible. It might even allow a few people to write somthing to back-up Macs or PC’s without the Home Connector.

If anyone is interest the WHS team do have a blog.

Millions

~ rbonini

Ever wondered how much Microsoft makes an hour (via)?

Microsoft today announced quarterly revenue of $14.4 billion and net income of $4.93 billion. In other words, Microsoft’s daily net income is about $55 million. That’s $55 million in pure profit every 24 hours. Do some quick math and you’ll learn it takes Microsoft only about…

  • 10 hours or so (yes, hours!) to exceed Red Hat’s quarterly net income of $20.5 million.
  • four days to exceed Research In Motion’s quarterly net income of $187.9 million.
  • four days to exceed Starbucks’ quarterly net income of $205 million.
  • one week to exceed Nike’s quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
  • two weeks to exceed McDonalds’ quarterly net income of $762 million.
  • two weeks to exceed Apple’s quarterly net income of $770 million.
  • 18 days to exceed Google’s quarterly net income of $1 billion.
  • 23 days to exceed Coca-Cola’s quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
  • five weeks to exceed IBM’s quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
  • 10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart’s quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.

Can’t they at least make Vista cheaper?