Month: August 2005

This week’s 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week’s list is formatted as song title, artist, and album (in italics):

  1. Tato Wa Biso, Ray Lema, Gaia
  2. La Hormiguita, Juan Luis Guerra, Ni Es Lo Mismo, Ni Es Igual
  3. Only Love, k.d. lang, Invincible Summer
  4. Preacher in the Ring, Pt. 1, Bruce Hornsby, Spirit Trail
  5. Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again), Grateful Dead, Nightfall of Diamonds
  6. Everything Happens to Me, Wynton Marsalis, Standard Time, Vol. 3
  7. Soon Come, Peter Tosh, Bush Doctor
  8. Compliment, Collective Soul, Dosage
  9. Can’t Even Be Bothered, The Charlatans UK, Between 10th and 11th
  10. Bass Trap, U2, Best of 1980-1990/B-Sides
  11. Listen to Her Heart, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Greatest Hits
  12. Compay Gato, Los Super Seven, Canto
  13. Mojo Haiku, Little Feat, Shake Me Up
  14. Triad, The Byrds, The Byrds (Box Set)
  15. Winter, The Rolling Stones, Goats Head Soup
  16. 3×5, John Mayer, Any Given Thursday
  17. It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Bob Dylan, Live in Brussels 12-Nov-2003 (bootleg)
  18. Your Love, Neil Young, Archives Be Damned Vol. 2 (bootleg)
  19. Whirl-Y-Reel 1, Afro Celt Sound System, Volume 1: Sound Magic
  20. Discipline, Joe Jackson, Blaze of Glory

[*] My one exception is to limit each artist to one track per list. If the same artist appears a second time, I skip over that track. This week, Bob Dylan and Wynton Marsalis would each have had an extra track on the list otherwise.

Surprising browser stats

This is interesting. According to SiteMeter, the excellent service I use to monitor my Web traffic, 31.8% of all visitors to this site are now using Firefox. That’s up from 24.76% last October. While the Firefox share grew 7%, the share for Internet Explorer 6.X dropped almost exactly the same amount, slipping from 64.88 to 57.37%.

Browser_share_20050806

Another curious stat jumped out of this chart, however: Internet Explorer 7.X has gone from 0 to 2.51% market share since Beta 1 was released just over a week ago. That’s much higher than I would have expected.

Of course, these numbers are for a site that is aimed at techies and bleeding-edge types. Out in the mainstream, the numbers are very different, I bet.

Bloglines confirms problems

SiliconBeat, part of the Mercury News family, confirms that Bloglines is having “issues”:

If you’re one of the many folks who read SiliconBeat through Bloglines, you may have noticed that our content is sometimes many hours old by the time it shows up in your Bloglines reader. Apparently, Bloglines is struggling with growth issues. Spokeswoman Cathy Thompson tells us the service has outgrown its current set-up, “and that’s slowing down the processing of new posts during peak hours.” Thompson characterized it as a temporary problem, until Bloglines can move to a new co-location server facility run by its parent company, Ask Jeeves/IAC. Here’s hoping the move comes sooner rather than later.


Pardon me, but this is BS. Why isn’t this information posted on the Bloglines site? Why don’t support representatives include this information in their correspondence with people who send them e-mail reports of problems?  When do they expect to have a fix? Why doesn’t Bloglines have a community site where users can exchange information? Why doesn’t Bloglines have a blog?


Meanwhile, NewsGator Online (also free) is getting more reliable every day. If you’re dissatisfied with Bloglines, check it out.

Bloglines is broken

So, after I complained yesterday about Bloglines not updating itself, I started keeping an eye on the spider. After taking almost all of Thursday off (including the entire business day on both coasts), it woke up around just before midnight last night, and it came back a few times early this morning. But then the Bloglines spider apparently decided to take the rest of the day off, because it hasn’t been back in nearly seven hours.

A commenter on the previous thread notes that he is experiencing the same problem with the Slashdot feed.

Most blogs, including this one, thrive on a sense of immediacy. Indeed, using NewsGator I get updates at least once an hour, which means I can stay on top of breaking news. If Bloglines just starts ignoring some feeds for hours or days at a time, it’s broken. If it keeps doing that, it’s time to be replaced.

Isn’t it strange that no one from Bloglines has noticed this post and reacted to it? You’d think a company at the center of the blogosphere would be tuned in to reports of problems like this. Unless the priorities from the new corporate masters were taking them away from this core business. You know what I mean?

Windows Vista viruses? Uh, no.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Just look at these headlines on Google News!

Vista_virus_headlines

Except, as Mary Jo Foley points out, the headlines are, well, completely wrong:

A number of Web reports are claiming that the first Windows Vista virus has been discovered. While there is, indeed, a report of an Austrian virus writer unleashing five theoretical viruses targeting the beta version of Microsoft’s scripting shell (a k a “Monad”), that’s where the facts in this case end. Monad is not part of Vista. It’s not in the Vista Beta 1 build that went to testers in late July. Monad’s not in Longhorn Server, either.

You can use this story as a litmus test. If a news source picks up the “first viruses for Windows Vista appear” meme, you can assume they don’t know what they’re talking about, and you can scratch them off your list.

Update: Unless, of course, they’re the sort of responsible journalists that are willing to promptly publish an update.

AOL buys Xdrive

AP report:

America Online Inc. said Thursday it has bought the online storage company Xdrive Inc. to meet the growing needs of consumers with rapidly expanding collections of digital music, photos and other files.

Wow, that was close. I just canceled my Xdrive account about two months ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with the service. In fact, Xdrive’s technology and support were great. I just wasn’t using it, and it made no sense to pay $100 a year for something I wasn’t using. At $2.99 a month, Box.net is a much better deal. (Disclosure: Box.net very briefly advertised on this site a year ago, and I have a complimentary account on the service.)

I expect Xdrive to go downhill rapidly now that AOL is in charge. I hope I’m wrong.

Tip of the day: Get a second monitor

Bigger isn’t always better. If you’re lusting after a 20- or 21-inch monitor to replace the old one on your desk (especially if the old one is a CRT), let me offer a different suggestion: Get two smaller flat-panel monitors instead.

The advantages of two monitors are overwhelming. You can actually open two separate windows (a Web browser and an e-mail program, for instance) and work with them individually instead of having to fuss with arranging them on the screen or constantly minimizing one to get to the other. And you get more bang for the buck: a pair of 15-inch flat panel monitors should cost less than a 21-inch model, but give you much more of a productivity boost.

Most modern video cards, even dirt-cheap ones, support multiple monitors. The settings page in Control Panel’s Display dialog box is easy to use, and even lets you configure which monitor is left and right:

Dual_mon

Next to adding more RAM, this is the upgrade I recommend most.

Windows Desktop Search glitch

The more I use it, the more I like Windows Desktop Search, which is included with the MSN Search Toolbar. I especially like that you can use command line operators to create custom search requests, and you can save searches as Internet shortcuts.

I’ve found a few glitches, including one that’s very annoying. I use Outlook Express only as a news reader and not for e-mail; that means the newsgroup files get indexed, and I can search for words, phrases or people just by entering store:oe as one search term.

But here’s the glitch: The resulting list contains a series of posts that include the search term I specified. Some posts are HTML, some are plain text. I can preview the text posts, but the preview pane is blank for the HTML-formatted messages. I’ve searched the FAQ and the newsgroup and find nothing to indicate that this is a known glitch. Outlook files can be previewed regardless of their format.

Anyone from the MSN team reading this and want to comment? Scoble, can you forward this to someone who might be able to help?

Bloglines still broken

I got a response from Bloglines support saying they were resetting the feed for this site, but so far not one of my posts from today has reached Bloglines.

I’ve heard this complaint from others as well, so I don’t think it’s an isolated incident.

Mark Fletcher, is something going wrong at your company?