Monthly Archives: June 2005

Podcasting and the Commons

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Dave Winer has been talking about the lock-in Apple seems to be performing with it’s new Podcasting support. One of the things he mentioned was no links in the descriptions of the Podcasts. Obviously this is a problem and really needs to be solved so that BigCo’s aren’t shitting on the little guys.

I think one of the common denominators across Podcasting is the license they are released under, CC. Why can’t the Attribution clause specify that in the context of the Internet a Hyperlink is Attribution. This is the law of the jungle out here in the Internet anyway, let’s make them play on our field.

Excel Autofilter Usability

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In my opinion one of the coolest features in Excel is the Auto-filter. It works quite well when using 1 drop down filter but when combining more than 1 it can become quite hairy. In my experiences not many people use multiple filters so it doesn’t particularly matter. The thing that really get’s on my nerves however is the custom widget that is used for the actual drop down. It doesn’t behave like ever other drop down box. Your scroll wheel doesn’t work and if you type into it, it always matches the first letter rather than adding to your search string. I have a sneaking suspicion this is a remnant from an early version of Excel.

PHP Development Environment

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This popped up in my aggregator thanks to PlanetPHP. My development environment is similar to the one Sean uses, I use Eclipse (3.1RC) with PHPEclipse, TortoiseSVN because the silly SVN client doesn’t work that well in Eclipse, Vim and jedit as my secondary editors and Putty for SSH. I do most of my development against MSSql so I use Query Analyzer and Service Manager, I do however have Apache and MySQL installed. I don’t think I really have anything special happening though.

I wish I could use Zend Studio it’s just really hard for me to get used to and I end up going back to what I know.

Geek Conversations

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Robert Scoble, Joe Beda, and Ted Leung were all at the Friends of Maryam BBQ (Scoble’s wife). There was a bunch of geeks there, similar I’m sure to one of Scoble’s blogger dinners but they were all there under a different pretense. I’m curious, does conversation always end up on the current technology at these kind of family and friends dos? Do you feel guilty that that’s all you talk about, I certainly do when I’m chatting when I’m around geek friends, because you don’t end up finding out how their netball team is going, or how their sister’s wedding was. Just wondering how differently everyone’s mileage varies.

I think the name of the bbq pretty much answers the question.

Views in MS SQL server

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I do a little bit of development with Microsoft SQL server and recently I edited a couple of tables and some really weird problems started popping up. A few of the views that were referencing that table weren’t behaving at all, really wierd faults as well. It turns out to fix the drama, you need to open edit the view and resave it, I think the server needs to recompile that particular stored function. I wonder if there is a way to force that.

Mac and PowerPC

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There has been alot of speculation regarding Mac’s switch from IBM to Intel chips. In his usual discussive way, Daring Fireball suggests that it is distinctly possible that the Mac is changing to x86, though I think that possibility is out of the question.

It’s reasonably obvious that some of the industry powers (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) believe that the PowerPC is a powerful processor with their use of it in their next generation consoles. It’s interesting though that gaming consoles don’t need an avenue of improvement due to the fact they won’t be upgradable.

The other reason I believe it won’t be x86 is 64bit. The Intel chips aren’t 64bit at the moment and there is very little reason to change to a whole new platform that isn’t 64 bit, Apple can leverage their entire control of the platform and hardware (not to mention the Unix underpinnings) and move to an entirely new level of performance that no other hardware platform can produce. If it is a move to 64bit, I wonder why it’s not AMD.