OK, thanks for being patient. All the old blog posts are here now, and the blog is running under Radio. At this stage it pretty much just works like before, but at least now I have the flexibility to add more features (trackbacks, comments, categories, etc)

I had hoped it might be easier than this. Why can't I just point Radio at my old RSS feed and have it suck in all those posts (as posts I mean, not in its aggregator). One of the unfortunate side-effects is that my posts from the last month or so all show up as being posted today (I guess from Radio's point of view, they are).

Anyway, it's done, so let's move on.

Date Weirdness

Yes, I know the dates here have gone screwy. I moved from the beta of Powerblog 2 to the release version this morning, and the rot has set in. It use to deal OK with the fact that I don't do dates in US format, but now it doesn't. The RSS feed seems to be fine, and articles created under the beta also seem OK, but new articles are buggered.

I've been thinking about going to another tool for awhile (Radio maybe), so maybe this and the fact that Danny tells me my RSS won't validate, might push me over. Suggestions anyone? I need a desktop tool, as I need to be able to blog offline. Most solutions I've found seem to be server-based.

Cowboy Bebop

Since FBO have re-sent my DVD's, I've been watching Cowboy Bebop - Session 4. It's going to be a sad day when I reach the end of Session 6. Bebop has been the most enjoyable of all the anime series I've watched.

The other series I've been trying out to replace my Cowboy Bebop addiction haven't really done it for me (Rurouni Kenshin, for example. Samurai X was OK, but the slapstick in Rurouni Kenshin really annoyed me).

Someone suggested I try FLCL, but I want to do a little more research first. My copy of Rurouni Kenshin Vol 1 is destined for eBay, and I'm not in a hurry to order another one on spec.

Any other suggestions?

Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for WinXP

I have a bunch of ISO images of product installs, and it's always a pain in the bum to have to either burn them to CD or extract them using something like WinISO to use them. To make matters worse, I've just downloaded a not quite 3gig DVD ISO file and need to install, and of course, can't find a DVD Burner anywhere.

Luckily, a quick Google turned up this, Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP, an unsupported tool from Microsoft which lets you mount an ISO file as a drive letter. You have to manually install (there is a readme.txt file) but it seems to work well, even with 3gig ISO's.

Kudos to www.fbo.com.au

This probably only of interest to Aussie readers, but anyway...

I've ordered Anime from www.fbo.com.au a couple of times with no problems, but my last order never arrived. Talking to Lexie (spelling?) at FBO, it appears to have been delivered to our building, but where it went after that I don't know.

Strictly speaking, this probably isn't FBO's problem. They could probably have legally said "tough" and I'd have been out of pocket. But, they have ensured that they will be my first stop for buying DVD's in future. They are resending my entire order at no charge!

Problems occur, but a company that thinks like this will always get my recommendation.

How Embarrassing

Australia, a country in denial.

Man, this is kinda the same feeling as when you were a teenager and one of your parents tried to act cool around your friends :-(

Desktop Abstractions

Does anyone actually want to interact with their computer like this?

Seems like every few years, somebody pops up and decides that a desktop that looks like your house is exactly what non-computer literate people need to be comfortable using a computer.

I guess I have a couple of problems with this:

1. It's insulting. It kinda assumes that because someone is not computer-literate, that they are stupid. If you sat my Mum down in front of Windows, she wouldn't know where to start. But that doesn't mean she'd be any happier in something like 3DNA. She knows her computer isn't her living room, and she doesn't need it to be, she just needs it to be a little more intuitive. Let me give you a simple example. My Mum doesn't want to have to remember that Powerpoint is for presentations, Outlook is for email, Internet Explorer is for browsing the web, she just wants icons that say "Presentations", "Email", 'Web". That takes a minute of creating and renaming shortcuts on her desktop, not an investment in some wizz-bang, 3D, virtual reality doo-hickey.

2. It doesn't work. OK, let's assume my Mum really does want her PC to look like this. Will this help her get up to speed? I don't think so. Look at the screen shot on this page. Will a non-computer literate person know that to open a document, they click on Media sign on the wall? Is that intuitive?

3. It doesn't scale. Ok, let's assume that 1 and 2 above are wrong, and this IS exactly what my Mum is looking for. What happens once she is comfortable using this interface and wants to get into more advanced stuff. With this, there is not a nice progression over to the "normal" Windows interface. She pretty much has to toss out what she's learnt and go back to being a newbie.

OK, so that's 3, not a couple, and given time I could probably ramble on further, but am I off base here? I don't deny that from a geek perspective the technology in this is pretty cool, and I would never suggest that Windows does a good job in terms of being easy for a novice to use, but I don't think this is the solution.

I suspect a big part of helping novices is to let them work in a task-based approach, not in an application-based approach (the example in point 1 above). I have nothing but gut instinct to justify this, but I suspect the advances will be made with smaller tweaks to the exisiting UI, not by throwing it out and replacing it with a video game.

Episode 26 - Nobody Likes You

Episode 26. Hotel broadband rocks!

O'Reilly

Speaking of eBooks, Safari comes close I think. I like that I am subscribing to a library of books, rather than to a specific title. I'm still trying to decide how effective the whole download token thing would work for me, given that the bulk of my programming time these days is in Qantas economy class with no access to the net.

I also thought O'Reilly were onto an interesting idea with the Visual Studio.NET editions of their Nutshell books. Having the text of these reference books available integrated into HTML Help 2.0 in C#Builder and Delphi 8 appealed to me a lot, however they don't seem to have expanded this offering beyond a handful of titles.

eBooks are Software

The Free Beer post below made me think of the whole eBook thing again.

I currently receive a number of magazine subscriptions in electronic format, and I love it. It takes bloody ages for hardcopy magazines to make it all the way to Australia, and I have no problem at all reading PDF versions of magazines on flights, etc. Worst case, I can print out the specific articles and read them in the proverbial.

So why are eBooks so unsatisfying, when magazines in this format rock?

Part of it for me comes back to updates. Magazines are almost meant to be transient (although don't mention the boxes of Delphi Magazine, DDJ, etc back issues I have in my garage), but books are supposed to be longer lived. As far as I can tell, most eBooks don't come with updates. The Indy book is one exception, but I wish more eBook publishers would treat them like software. Give me minor updates for free, and charge me (a reduced amount) for major upgrades, or let me subscribe so I get everything for a year.

eBooks give publishers the cost model of software, but they don't seem very keen to pass on the other benefits to end users.

Free Beer!

Just stumbled across Srinivasa Sivakumar's list of free sample chapters from (mostly) .NET related books. I kinda expected them to be fairly light on detail and not terribly satisfying, but I've just read one on remoting which solved a specific problem I've been having. No substitute for the whole book, but a great way to know if they whole book is worth buying. 568 samples and counting.

LookOut - Full Text Indexing for Outlook

I'm a bit of a packrat when it comes to email. I constantly receive warnings about exceeding my space allowance on our mail server, and have PST files so large they would kill a brown dog. I just can't bring myself to delete mails because "you never know when I might need that". I blame my Dad, actually. Over the years he has had to build successively larger sheds to house his collection of stuff that might came in handy one day.

Well, rather than having to deal with the source of the problem, technology has once again allowed me to live in denial. LookOut, from http://www.lookoutsoft.com/, is a free download that adds full text indexing to Outlook, and I'm totally smitten.

Yes, once you install it you'll have to let it index your folders (make sure you go into Options and check out what it is going to index. It's default wasn't quite aggressive enough for my liking), but this can take place in the background. And yes, the indexes will take up a bit of space, but not as much as I expected.

But I guarantee, the first time you enter a search and have it return in less than 2 seconds, having searched every piece of mail you've hoarded away for the last few years, you will not care. This is what Outlook Search should have been from the start!