Brennan’s Blog

An insightful opinion piece explains that while we have been laughing at Microsoft for their shortcomings this past year the offers from Apple have also been fairly lackluster. For example, releasing a new iPod with a longer battery life, larger storage and new color selections is about as innovative as Vista including an improved security model. These are the new features we should be expecting and should not find surprising.

There is also the question of how similar Vista is to MacOS X. This is by no accident but there is also nothing that Microsoft and Apple can do. They are constrained by the user interface that the common user will understand and accept. The windowing model is dominant across MacOS X, Windows and Linux (KDE/Gnome) desktops because it works and people expect it. If you want to start pointing fingers, you could suggest that Apple copied X Windows which came from Xerox PARC back in 1973. Apple did not have their visual interface until 1984. Finally in 1992 Microsoft released Windows 3.1. The "sharing of ideas" is rich in the history of these user interfaces.

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This is going to get interesting real fast. You can now add content to MSDN documentation with the new MSDN Community Content. It acts partially like a wiki but it does not use wiki syntax. Instead it has a very limited WYSIWYG editor which does not allow for adding links. I attempted to add links to MSDN tutorial pages from the class members page but it would not allow me to add those links.

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Just in time for the weekend, Microsoft has released the long awaited service pack for Visual Studio 2005 as well as the release candidate for the much touted AJAX solution.

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For a little bit of internet nostalgia, head over to the All your base are belong to us page over at Wikipedia. The video is still funny. More below...

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I use Skype regularly to chat, but also use it to have a regular phone conversation as well. Having the audio come through my computer speakers with a microphone sitting on the desk is so much better than holding a tiny phone with questionable reception to my ear. Now Skype 3.0 has been released. And this release has the ability to do video. I am not sure how long Skype has had video, but it appears they are shipping full support for it now.

This is really great stuff. My idea for using this is to rig a home video conferencing system, especially for the holidays, between members of my family over their existing broadband connections. Connecting a laptop to the full-sized TV to show the video while placing the camera and microphone above it would really make for a worthwhile call between two homes. When you have a big family spread out across the state and country that is invaluable. And I am sure once you can get your more non-technical family members comfortable with it they would use it more often. I also like the idea of my older niece tutoring my younger niece across the state with her math homework. When you can talk freely and position the camera over your notebook it is very helpful.

I came across a mention on Digg.com about Java 6 being released. The official press release shows that it was released yesterday. Yet, I am not seeing any mention of the new release at major news sources like CNN and ABC News. I cannot even tell if Sun had a launch event for this release. The mere fact that the news did not hit Digg.com until the day after should be an indication that this was not considered a major event by many.

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Many, many times in the past year I have had people email me about not being able to download a zip file from this site using Internet Explorer. It seems that once it is downloaded the file is corrupt and they cannot open it. This is very disappointing because I create these zip files with the zip file support built into Windows Explorer in WinXP SP2, yet IE has a problem with them.

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Over the last couple of weeks one of my servers became sluggish and the web server became completely unresponsive. Initially I saw the Spam Assassin process was chewing up the processor. Today I saw that a distributed attack was hitting my WordPress installation as spam comments were immediately deleted by Spam Karma. The server status was showing various IP addresses hitting the comments post page which would max out the number connections I allow for the web server. To overcome these attacks I am trying out the Apache DoS Evasive Maneuvers Module which manages an automatic blacklist which will stop these frequent hits from these remote servers. I have also limited the Spam Assassin service which should make it much less likely to allow it to be the resource hog it has been lately.

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When I pull images off my camera I have these large files which are just too big to upload to flickr.com. Instead of the 1mb+ sized images I want to knock them down to a size which does not take forever to upload and kill my monthly limit on a free flickr.com account. To do so previously I was doing it manually with Paint.NET. But I wanted to make it easier with a utility which integrates directly into Windows Explorer.

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Besides jogging the dial between static, bible readings, country music and heavy metal I did not know of a good way to find good music for the holidays. In Milwaukee the stations have changed so the much the past 2 years that I do not even know what is all out there. So I found the Radio-Locator. A quick search on Milwaukee shows lots of stations with holiday music.