Day: June 28, 2005

InfoWorld: Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS: I’m having IE4 flashbacks!

InfoWorld: Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS: I’m having IE4 flashbacks!

About time someone called RSS for what it truly is — ActiveDesktop redux. Just kidding. Back in the day, when Forbes.com was looking for Microsoft’s blessing, we built an active desktop CDF channel that pushed a "quote of the day" onto the user’s IE 4.0 enabled desktop. The thing was an utter kludge our CTO John Moschetto cooked up in a short amount of time.

What did it do for us? Not much, other than the right to say Forbes was baked into IE 4.0. 

 Me, I like to compare RSS to good old Pointcast.

Current reading list – June 28

So much to read, so little time, and I refuse to concede to books-on-tape:

1. The World is Flat – Thomas Friedman. Everyone got worked up into a lather in May about this book. I dunno, so far I still think Walter Wriston nailed it better and earlier than everyone else. This is a good CEO book for the people who are late in getting the joke.

2. DHTML and CSS – Jason Crawford Teague. Why? Why not. CSS rules and WordPress is a good place to practice one’s chops thanks to the Presentation/template editor and tons of good stylesheet examples to mess around with.

3. Building Oracle XML Applications: O’Reilly, Steve Muench. My world revolves around an Oracle axis these days. If you can’t get rid of ’em, join ’em.

4. Don’t Make Me Think: Steve Krug. Web usability guide — couple years old, but the title is a mantra.

5. The Brand Gap: Marty Neumeier. Don’t ask. It’s on my desk. I should read it.

6. 101 Tivo Hacks: O’Reilly. The Tour de France is upon me and I need many hours of capacity to save Lance’s quest for number 7 while I toileth at my desk. Time to break out the Torx and bless some new mucho-gigabyte drives and stick em in the faithful Tivo.

Geeking Out — stuff I’m playing with

I must be in some geek bio-rhythm cycle where all I do is download stuff and mess around in php files. Here’s what I am playing with and why:

1. MySQL – why? Because it’s there, it’s the "M" in LAMP and any good web application around these days is written with it in mind. Although I operate in an LOAP (the "O" stands for Oracle) environment, LAMP is where it is at if you want to mess around stuff like MediaWiki (the opensource engine behind Wikipedia), vBulletin (threaded bulletin boards), and Drupal (community focused content management system).

2.  phpMyadmin – a gui app for working with MySQL. An evil little critter to get installed, by the sysop at Cape.com, my ISP, says I can do it, so do it I shall. I needed it last week to recover a lost admin password for this blog, and I’ll need it before I can install ….

3. Drupal – a CMS that is also a very friendly blog platform, or so sayeth my colleagues elsewhere at IDG who are using it as the foundation of their community initiatives, some going so far as to trash forums in favor of Drupal blogs.

4. Odeo – a podcast aggregator/synchronizer. I’m off to Best Buy to snag a pair of iPods to start messing around with auto-synch streams with a future eye towards a CXO radio show. Beta but pretty useful.

5. Audacity – Dan Gillmor says this is the thing to use to cut a podcast, so download it and try it. It’s a nice alternative to good old SoundForge.

6. Adobe Premiere, Adobe Premier Elements – for messing with digital video. 

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