Author Archives: daniel

RSS adverts go mainstream

Google has moved RSS adverts into a wider beta, and Robert Scoble has been considering the benefits or otherwise of them. And he ranks types of feeds from worst (Headline only, with ads) to best (Full text with no ads).

Deciding whether or not to put adverts in your RSS (and indeed if your feed has all your text or just the partial text) is, I think, a matter of what you’re trying to do with your content. To bring it to total black and white, are you trying to make money, or get your ideas out?

Reality, of course, is shades of grey. For one thing, if you go the total black option (headlines only, ads in the feed, and presumably more ads on the site — since that’s the only reason you’d want to provide only headlines in the feed) then unless your content is pretty damn compelling, you’ll get no readers (at least not from feeds, and this is increasingly the way people consume their web sites), and thus no money, and your content goes nowhere.

Other end of the scale (full text in feeds, no ads anywhere) is okay, as long as you don’t get snowed under by readers, and end up paying so much in bandwidth that you can’t afford it anymore. Not likely these days, but theoretically possible, especially if your content is multimedia.

For most of us, I suspect, the balance is somewhere closer to white than black.

Daniel’s new box – part 3

I asked Tony if he knew anything about a good broadband sharing router to buy. Now I’m a two PC household again, no way was I going back to using Internet Connection Sharing. Okay, so it works, but it’s fiddly, your main PC has to be on to use the second one, and getting the firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro) to work with it was a buncha hassle.

Tony said get a LinkSys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband Router. So I did. Well okay, I read up on it a bit first to verify it was what I wanted, and then I got it. Widely available in AU for about A$130.

I don’t actually need wireless at the moment, but may at some stage, so I can turn it on then. It was surpisingly easy to do the basic setup… I’m betting there’ll be more hassles though when I try to get the work extranet software and BitTorrent running with its firewall (and the XP SP2 firewall), as well as enabling file and print sharing between the two PCs.

(Here’s one page about BitTorrent and firewalls, and ooh lookie, a shiny new page that uses the same model router as I just got as its example!)

Next step is to load up the new PC with all its software, and move my files over. I doubt I’ll write about it here unless something spectacularly bad or amusing happens though.

Is Windows getting too net-centric?

Searching Microsoft Office onlineIs Windows (and Office) getting too net-centric?

Case 1: Printer drivers

I hooked up my Lexmark E322 printer to my new computer. Windows XP recognised it, then wanted to go out onto the Internet to get the driver. But the computer’s not online yet. The XP CD apparently doesn’t have the driver. I suppose I could use a separate (online) computer to go to Lexmark’s web site and find a driver, but isn’t that over-complicating things? If XP knows what the printer is, why doesn’t it have the driver on the disc?

(Hey, here’s the web page for Lexmark’s E322 drivers. Someone please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke having three URLs embedded in one like that.)

Case 2: Office 2003 help

To take a theoretical example, search in Word Help for mail merge. It searches Office Online, then presents me with some options. The most useful one turns out to be on their web site.

Obviously having a lot of this content online is beneficial in reducing what is installed on local machines, and even the size of install packages on CDs. It also lets the vendors easily keep software and content up to date.

But… What if my network’s down for the day? What if I’m in a corporate environment and haven’t been granted Net access through the firewall? What if I’m setting up a PC for my mother to use just for word processing, with strictly no Net access?

Today I can re-install and use old versions of Windows, including printer drivers and application help, without network connectivity. Will the same be said for Windows XP in ten years? What if Microsoft drops support for it, including their online driver library? Will Office 2003 still have help available at the end of this decade?

Of course it’s not possible to keep users’ CDs or computers updated with the latest drivers and help files, but shouldn’t at least a basic version of these essential materials be available without network connectivity?

PS. Even after I did get the PC connected to the Innanet, when it tried to go get the driver by itself, it couldn’t find it. So I’ll be downloading it from Lexmark after all.

Daniel’s new box – part 2

Part 2. Took the day off to pick up the machine. My friendly computer shop guy let me know he’d found a better keyboard/mouse bundle which saved me a few bucks, so the total cost was exactly $1200.

12:25. Just the basics plugged in — monitor, mouse, keyboard. Power it up. Certainly boots into XP fast. “27 days left for activation.”

Fiddle around with the defaults. The shop thoughtfully named the main account after my company name, but I want it to be Daniel… try renaming it, but the Docs & Settings subdirectory won’t rename. MyDocuments can be moved, but not its parent. So eventually I just create a fresh account for myself. Accounts for the kids too — no Administrator privileges for them, oh no.

14:10. Speakers plugged in and working. More playing about with settings (Hello Windows Classic theme). Tested a DVD. All works well though the eject button on the drive isn’t overly responsive. Hooray, the bundled PowerDVD happily grabs frames, something I sometimes want to do. The bundled Nero looks a bit light-on though… will want to be getting a real copy for DVD burning.

That’ll do for now, other stuff to do.

New console wars start

Microsoft announces a bunch of XBox 360 game collaborations and confirms XBox 360 will be compatible with (old) XBox games, though there’s some doubt over how it will be achieved, and evidently it won’t be clean: Microsoft representatives did say they would start with more popular titles such as “Halo,” then move down the line.. Yeuch, sounds messy.

Meanwhile Sony has pulled the covers off the Playstation 3, with what sound like some very impressive performance stats.

Oh, and some mob called Nintendo with a console called Revolution appears to be destined yet again for third place.

(Thanks Tony)

Daniel’s new box – part 1

I’ve got a new PC. After the old one died, I’ve been surviving on a single machine for a while, but it was time to have a second one again, if only so both the kids can play games at once while I’m busy on the XBox!

Part 1… the purchase. Well I considered various things…

Notebook or desktop? Notebooks are getting more powerful, and I love the idea of surfing from the couch. But really I need a good, speedy workhorse machine with plenty of connections.

Mac or Windows or Linux? My brother-in-law is a strong Mac advocate, and I love my iPod, but ultimately I wanted to stay in my comfort zone. I’ve used Windows for many years, at work and at home, and I’ll continue to do so for quite some time. And on occasion I need to do work from home, and some of that involves Microsoft proprietary tools (cough, cough) like Visual Basic. So for now it’s gotta be Windows.

Which vendor? I’ve had my share of little companies and of big ones when buying PCs. But over the years I’ve heard from various friends about the good work of Landmark Computers, a medium-sized company here in Melbourne. So I decided to try them.

So I went along last Thursday to their city shop and talked to one of their guys, figured out what I wanted by starting with their “Predator” model, fiddled the config a bit (no monitor as I already had one, no floppy, no modem, 1Gb RAM, XP Pro instead of Home, that kind of thing) and put in the order. I was hoping it’d be ready by Saturday, as it would be very convenient to drive in and get it. They said they couldn’t promise that, so points for honesty.

On Friday they rang to say there was an issue with the graphics card, and if it was okay they’d bump me to a higher model for an extra $25. They also said they’d go for a better case for no extra cost, and that it wouldn’t be ready before Monday. Cool, I replied.

Stand by for part 2…

Xbox 360

XBox 360As everyone on the planet would know by now, Microsoft has revealed the design of the new version of the XBox — which they’ve called the XBox 360, which shows the marketing bods have won over the dev geeks, who I’m sure would have been happy to call it the XBox 2.0.

There’s a bunch of info on the hardware specs which make it sound suitably groovy, with the most notable thing being a move away from Intel CPUs over to the Power PC. Presumably this will give it more power for the money, which after all is MS’s money, since it’s not like Wintel machines where they just tell the manufacturers the spec — oh no, this thing they have to build themselves, so they’ll want it to be as cheap as possible.

There seems to be no official word on XBox 1 compatibility with this thing, though evidently a user survey hinted that the 360 would play the old games. They must have some pretty good brains working on getting that going, but then I suppose these days you can run PC software on Macs using Virtual PC, so software Intel emulation on a PowerPC isn’t anything new.

And the price and availability? Well they’re saying end of the year for US and Japan (and Europe???). The rest of us will have to wait for sometime next year. With the price of the console likely to be about double what an XBox costs now, it remains to be seen if the games for it will really blow people away enough to shell out for it though.

Hey I wonder if, unlike the PS2, it’ll stand up like in all the pictures without you having to buy an optional stand?

Ten years ago…

Yesterday, I bought a computer. With a bit of luck it’ll be ready on Saturday.

As it happens, it’s not quite ten years since I bought my first “new” PC. (Before that I’d used 8-bit computers and an aging 286.)

Just for a little nostalgia, here is part of the advert from the company I bought it from all those years ago, the now defunct Rod Irving Electronics, of A’Beckett Street in Melbourne. This is from the 6th June 1995 edition of The Age “Green Guide”.

The system I bought from them was the Pentium 60 on the right hand side. I’m sure you’ll be impressed at the spec, as well as the marketing. (At the time, the Australian Peso was worth about USD0.60, by the way).

Rod Irving Electronics catalogue from 1995

This computer was finally disposed of in rather spectacular fashion in 2003, though the speakers and that mighty 4x CD player still work (currently stored as spares).

MSDN fun

A couple of rather silly-sounding entries from MSDN…

Visual Basic: Class ContainedControls

Member of VBRUN – A collection that allows access to the controls contained within the control that were added to the control by the developer who uses the control. — What?

Win32 API: DeleteFile (via Josh)

Windows 95: The DeleteFile function deletes a file even if it is open for normal I/O or as a memory-mapped file. To prevent loss of data, close files before attempting to delete them. — uh huh.