Archive for January, 2008

Please Stop Reorganizing MSDN

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

Oh look, another Google search result that leads to an MSDN page that’s gone missing (the 2nd link on the results page, at least as of right now). This happens far too often.  There’s really no excuse for Microsoft not realizing by now that search engines index their site, and that users use search engines […]

Government vs Nuclear Safety

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

The Ottawa Citizen has a short article that gives a good summary of what’s going on with this current issue of the government voting to re-open a nuclear reactor that the folks responsible for nuclear safety in Canada shut down (for safety reasons). The gist of it is that this is a small reactor whose […]

MyTV Genie

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I use Windows Media Center as my PVR, and for the most part, like it a lot.  It’s a huge step up from the PVR capability built into the cable box that Rogers supplies, although it can’t do HD. Something simple like “record every new episode of a show” is not possible with the Scientific […]

Dreamhost Billing Screwup

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Dreamhost, the host that hosts my blog and some other sites I play with, screwed up. But they did something that most companies don’t do when they screw up:  They posted a very good explanation of what went wrong, how they fixed it, and how they set things up so this particular problem won’t happen […]

0xC004E003

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

That’s the error message I get when I try to activate Windows Vista on my media center.  The product key is good; I called Microsoft and they even generated and gave me a different product key to try.  Same message. Vista has decided that my grace period is over (60 days after installation) and it’s […]

Stewart and Colbert Deliver

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

In case you weren’t aware, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is back (as “A Daily Show with Jon Stewart” – as Jon explains, it’s not The Daily Show without the full staff, it’s just A Daily Show), with Stewart writing his own material until the strike ends.  Same with the Colbert Report (now with […]

HD DVD vs Blu-Ray

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Looks like the Blu-Ray camp is making an attempt to end the format war.  Warner Bros just signed on as an exclusive, meaning now about 75% of studios are Blu-Ray exclusive. I still think this is a bad idea, because the lack of a combo format means stores will have to stock two SKUs for […]

LiveCycle Designer and Google Blog Search

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

I use Google Blog Search to search for the name of the product I work on – LiveCycle Designer – and then subscribed to the search feed using Google Reader.  This takes any blog mention of LiveCycle Designer and adds it to my Google Reader feed. I get real traffic of folks talking about Designer, […]

PDF and HTML

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Jeff Atwood’s “The Trouble with PDFs” post lists advanced layout as the virtue of PDF, but as he points out, there isn’t much these days that you can do with PDF when it comes to layout that you can’t do with HTML and CSS. The real benefit to PDF as far as I’m concerned is […]