Recently in High-Tech Category

It's a sad day...I've decided to remove my weather podcast. The reason for this is an email I received from weather.com which clearly outlines their T&C for use of their XML data feed. Specifically, I am concerned about these conditions:

"YOU MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH AMONG OTHER THINGS...AS ALL OR PART OF ANY STREAMING VIDEO OR AUDIO CONTENT OR FOR DELIVERY BY ANY MEANS OTHER THAN STATIC DISPLAY ON A TRADITIONAL WEB PAGE ON YOUR WEBSITE OR DESKTOP APPLICATION."

"Your Website or Desktop Application must...display weather data for no more than three (3) locations at a time..."

I am most likely in violation of one or both of these. The whole T&C seems to go against all of the reasons that would drive you to provide an XML feed in the first place...to me, at least. It certainly makes it impossible to use for any type of mashup or any other interesting app.

So, I can get weather data for no more than 3 locations and can only display it as a static web page...whoopdeefuckingdo. Completely useless.

Wow, how many ways can Microsoft bungle Vista? I'd love to sit down and write a lengthy blog entry on all the things that are wrong with it but, thankfully, a few faithful readers and other news sources have it covered way more in depth than I have the time for.

Asus P5KC motherboard...$154.99
Intel Core2Duo 3.0 GHz 1333 FSB 4MB Cache processor...$299.00
2 GB DDR2 PC6400 memory...$69.99
Thermaltake 650W modular power supply...$149.99
GeForce 8800GT 512 MB DDR3 video card...$269.99

60 FPS while playing World of Warcraft, ability to tab in and out of game instantly, load-up times in the single-digit seconds...priceless.

If you're experiencing a system stutter every 20-30 seconds on your Dell system, try shutting down the Dell Wireless WLAN Tray Service in the Service Manager. I was having this issue with the brand new Latitude D830 I purchased. I first noticed it while listening to music with Windows Media Player, the songs would skip every 20 seconds or so. Moving the mouse around continuously revealed that this was affecting other system activity, as well. After shutting down nearly every app that was running on my system, I managed to make the issue go away as soon as I shut down the service I mentioned above. In the past, I have had issues with the Dell-provided software that has come pre-installed on their laptops. Dell, I'm sorry, you make great laptops but your software sucks. It has gotten to the point where, as soon as I receive a new system from Dell, the first thing I do is uninstall all of the Dell software. Hopefully, this fix will save you time and headaches. I suggest disabling the Dell Wireless WLAN Tray Service completely, it is not required. I did talk to Dell support and hopefully they will add this to their known issue list, or at least fix the service and provide a patch for their customers.

I got tired of the Windows Mobile experience and decided to shop around for a new phone. The Blackjack was a decent enough phone, but I was paying quite a premium for a lot of features I wasn't really using. Windows Mobile phones are really best suited for corporate users who are connecting to an Exchange server and who manage all of their contacts, appointments, etc. in Outlook. Bleh. Not to mention, Cingular (well, AT&T now, I guess) charges twice as much for their unlimited data plan if your phone falls into the PDA or Smartphone category. Lame. On top of that, I run a lot of Google mobile apps these days, and they just don't run well on Windows Mobile, for one reason or another. Google Maps has a Windows Mobile version, but even that one gives me errors often, especially when panning quickly. I realize that's not Microsoft's problem, although I do blame them for the poor Java support. I've rarely had an issue with running Google mobile apps on my Blackberry.

I shopped around a bit and decided to go with the Helio Fin. This phone pretty much has everything I want, and I am going to cut my monthly bill by *more* than half. Not that money was the primary issue, but it doesn't hurt. It has a 3 MP camera, which is pretty sweet, and GPS, which is a feature I have been wanting very badly. So now Google Maps will show me my location as I drive around. It also geocodes any photos you take, which is a really cool feature. I'm looking forward to playing around with it. About the only thing I think I'll miss is the QWERTY keyboard. I guess I could have gotten an Ocean, but I've read mixed reviews about that phone. I'll probably do a little mini-review on the Fin (not that anyone cares, but it is a relatively new phone) once I've used it for a few days.

This may be the first Apple product I purchase. Walt Mossberg has a good review. I'm currently using a BlackJack, but have been mostly unimpressed. I'm not a huge fan of Windows Mobile, I think it's bloated, slow and has other annoying issues. For example, ActiveSync starts itself automatically several times a day. I don't use ActiveSync, and it is a huge power hog. I get easily double the battery life if I kill ActiveSync, the problem is I have to bring up task manager repeatedly throughout the day to see if it is running, since it seems to spawn itself at random times. The T-Mobile Dash, at least, lets you disable ActiveSync entirely, which leads me to believe this isn't a problem with Windows Mobile as much as it is Cingular's problem for customizing their OS poorly. Additionally, the Cingular tools do not uninstall properly. I tried their email software, then removed it shortly thereafter because it didn't work properly, then every five minutes or so I'd get a popup that told me it couldn't launch the email executable because it couldn't find it. In order to make this problem go away I had to install it again, but cancel halfway through the email setup. Moreover, the BlackJack only has 64 MB of memory, hardly suitable for loading any music. Sure, there is the MicroSD slot, but why should I have to go buy additional memory cards?

The iPhone comes with 4 or 8 GB of memory, larger display, longer talk time, higher resolution camera, comes preloaded with Google Maps, can play YouTube videos...what's not to like? About the only two downsides I can think of are a) it's very expensive and b) I'm not quite sure how well the touchscreen will work for texting, emailing, etc. Oh, and I would have really loved it if they had added a GPS receiver, although I'm sure the battery life would have been significantly impacted.

At the very least, the bar has been raised...significantly. And, we're one step closer to the day when your phone is your entire music store, web browser, email client, navigation system, camera...oh, and a decent phone, as well.

Safari is now available for Windows platforms. You can download it here. Quite frankly, I don't expect it to do very well in this area. Windows users mostly use IE because that's all they know. Developers, and others who actually care about things like standards, are already using Firefox. About the only good thing I can think of as a result of this is that developers will now be able to test their web applications on Safari without having to buy a Mac. As usual, the announcement by Steve Jobs was full of useless rhetoric. The "most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world"? Oh, really? Based on what. Terms like "most innovative" are so ambiguous that they shouldn't even be used without some sort of qualification. As for "the most powerful browser in the world", I'd like to see some actual metrics. How about talking about standards, where Safari is probably even worse than IE. Or maybe Apple doesn't think it's an important criterion.

More here.

I just caught wind of a new project Google is working on called Google Gears. From the link:

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

Store and serve application resources locally
Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

This is particularly interesting to me, at least, given my most recent post. One of the drawbacks I mentioned with using Google Docs & Spreadsheets is that you can't work with it offline. There is speculation that Google will provide support for Google Gears in some of their products, such as Gmail and Docs & Spreadsheets. This is actually a great feature for people who travel a lot. Take Gmail, for example. Sure, you could enable POP access and work offline using Thunderbird or some other mail client, but it would also be nice to use the browser as you always have and just have it work. This is another step closer to having the browser be your main application for most of your needs. And a step closer to a platform-agnostic world. InformationWeek has a good article on it.

Naturally, Google Gears is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Although it's in pretty early beta, lots of problems being reported on the newsgroup.

Google just gets it. They've really made my life so much easier. From Google Calendar, which has finally helped me get somewhat organized, to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which has helped me manage and share documents that I work with on a regular basis, they just get it.

Take Docs & Spreadsheets, for example. In the past, I would have used Word for creating my documents. There are several problems with this approach. First, I'd have to make sure that every computer I intend to use has Word installed. I work on 3-4 different computers on any given day. That means I have to make sure that whichever one I am using has the latest version of the document on which I am working, so I have to copy my Word document over and over to each machine. And heaven forbid I decide to boot into Linux on any of those machines, I won't be able to work on my document at all. With Docs & Spreadsheets, I am free to work on my document from any platform and any computer and I am always working on the latest version. For example, today I am working on a software requirements document while sitting at Starbucks and all I needed to do to get up and running was to just open my browser and navigate to my document. The power of hosted applications is that you never have to worry about installing and upgrading software (and we all know Office is not cheap) and I never have to worry about my hard drive crashing and losing changes or, worse yet, my entire document. I can see really only one or two arguments for using Word over Docs & Spreadsheets. The first is that you need to have an Internet connection to work on your document if you're using Docs & Spreadsheets. Is this really an issue any more these days? I don't think so. Even if you consider this a valid argument, it is somewhat mitigated by the ability to save your document as an RTF or Word file, if you choose. Then you can work on it locally and import it back to Docs & Spreadsheets when you are connected. The second is that there are many features in Word that are not available in Docs & Spreadsheets. This argument is valid, but really, how many of those features do you use? In all the documents I have created, I have rarely used any of the features that Word has that Docs & Spreadsheets does not. Even things like bookmarks are supported. So, let's counter with what Docs & Spreadsheets offers that Word does not. I've already mentioned some of these, such as being relieved of having to buy expensive software and synchronize the latest version of your document between all the systems you are using. How about the ability to collaborate on a document? What if I want two or three people to work with me on my requirements document? Piece of cake. I just add them to the list of collaborators, and I can specify if I want them to be able to just view the document (for those who will be reviewing it) or to edit it. Hosted applications are cool. Collaboration is cool. Google gets it.

What about Google Calendar? I used to manage (or at least I tried, and failed miserably) my appointments and schedule with a paper calendar. I've also tried MSN Calendar. Again, Google just gets it. My favorite feature of theirs is calendar sharing. I can add all of my friends calendars and easily see their free/busy time. No more calling or emailing around to see when someone is free. I look on their calendar, if I want to have lunch/dinner with someone I check their free/busy time and schedule something on an open slot. They get a notification, add it to their calendar and you're done. Reminders can be sent to your phone, email, etc. (although this feature isn't unique to Google Calender). And Google is continuously working on adding support and features for mobile phones, so you can always stay on top of your schedule.

Another app I love is Google Maps. Recently, I blogged about the ability to create custom maps. Lots of people are taking advantage of this feature. Everyone from politicians, to public service agencies, to honeymooners are essentially photo- and video-blogging their trips. What if I want to try out a new restaurant? I do a search for "sushi", for example, in Google Maps. I get markers for all the sushi restaurants in the area I am searching. I click on the markers, see ratings, links to web sites, reviews, etc. I pick one, click Send To Phone, grab my keys and head out the door. On my phone I get an SMS with location. If necessary, I fire up Google Maps on my phone to get exact directions.

And one of the most important features which is common to all of these apps is that Google exposes APIs for nearly everything they create. This means that more and more applications and mashups are being built on their services. This creates an endless number of opportunities for extensibility and customization. I'm sure most of you have seen things like the crime stats sites, which are mashups created by using crime information and Google Maps. That's just one example of thousands.

So, thank you, Google. Thanks for making my life so much easier. Thank you for just "getting it". For understanding how people work and live and helping me save time. After all, isn't that ultimately the point?

Despite anything I may have posted earlier, I really do think Vista sucks. I tried it briefly and have since moved back to XP on all my machines with the exception of one laptop. Vista is just a pain in the ass. Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks so.

You can now create custom maps using Google Maps, complete with placemarkers, photos, video, etc. This is exactly the idea I had several months ago, but my project never really came to fruition. I'm sort of glad now that I didn't spend too much time on it since Google's version, obviously, has a lot more features. I've got a couple of trips coming up in the next two weekends, so it'll be fun to take my camera and GPS receiver around and create some maps of the trips. I suggest you go to Google Maps and click on the My Maps tab, then check out some of the featured maps. It'll give you a good idea of the kinds of things you can do.

Update: I forgot to mention another very cool thing you can do with this new feature...if you click on the KML link from within one of your custom maps, it'll download a KML file to your computer which you can then open in Google Earth and view your markers in a 3D map, or post the file on your web site and point your Google Earth-using friends to it and share your maps. Very cool stuff.

It appears there actually is some truth to this particular rumor. I've made it no secret that I'm a huge fan of Google. I think they're right on the mark with their apps and the philosophy behind them. A phone is not too far of a stretch for them. Consider the fact that they have always viewed mobile devices as an important platform and several of their apps already run on Java-enabled phones, such as Google Maps, GMail and Google Talk. The phone is rumored to have a GPS receiver, which makes it a perfect device for running Google Maps.

I was hoping to do a quick write-up by now, but I'm still downloading it. I guess I can comment on the RC2 release. It's pretty slick...lots of eye candy. I like the translucent frames. I'll have to get used to navigating around the new folder structure, but I'm already getting familiar with it. I like that they followed the *nix approach of everything being under the user folder, they've really simplified that structure, you're basically one or two clicks away from anything you need - one to open your user folder, and another to go to your downloads, pictures, etc. And even some of those folders are on the Start menu, or you can add the ones you use most.

The good news is that there seems to be very good driver support out of the box. I'm running the 64-bit version and it detected and installed drivers for all of my hardware except for my Epson R1800 printer, which is not too surprising since it is a fairly high-end photo printer and probably used by about, oh, 0.0001% of Windows users. But I was pleased to see that it properly detected all of my other devices, including my Radeon 9800 Pro video card and my Hauppauge PVR-150 TV Tuner card. Speaking of the tuner card, setting up Media Center was a snap, I was watching TV on my PC in about 15 minutes after going through the setup process. More importantly, all my motherboard hardware was set up properly. In the past, with previous versions of Windows, I've always had a bunch of hardware that showed up in Device Manager that was lacking drivers until I got around to installing the VIA 4-in-1 driver package, which would always lead to several reboots, and then I would typically have to download additional audio/video/USB drivers from the motherboard manufacturer. I didn't have to do any of that this time, it all just worked.

The task bar is really slick now, when you mouse over items in the task bar you get a pop-up window that is a miniature version of the application it corresponds to, and updates in real-time to match what the application is displaying. RSS feeds are in the upper right corner of the desktop along with a clock.

There were a couple of issues I had with RC2, so I can't wait to play with the final release sometime later today or early tomorrow. One issue was that my machine would never completely shut down, I would always have to do a hard shutdown. The other was that, if I left my machine on, periodically I would hear the Windows start-up sound. I'm not sure what it was doing, but when I'd eventually get back to the machine it would tell me there was a problem with a driver, but I was unable to determine which. Hopefully these have been fixed. I guess I'll find out soon.

I hesitate to classify this post in the High-Tech category, considering Mark Cuban is a techno-idiot. Well, he's at it again. Mark Cuban is a tantrum-throwing basketball team owner. He should stick to making an idiot of himself by staring down David Stern any time he feels the officials or the rules have slighted him. The players on his team shhow more maturity than he does, and considering we're talking about the NBA, well, that's pretty sad. He happens to have a shitload of money, but hey, you know what they say about a fool and his money. As my favorite quote from Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry days goes, "a man has got to know his limitations". Sadly, this guy doesn't.

Ever find yourself sitting on the freeway at a complete stop thinking "what the fuck happened to cause this mess?" Well, although I can't help you fix the problem, I can at least try to help you by letting you know what is happening. At least, if you're in San Diego (maybe other cities soon, if I can get motivated). How, you ask? I wrote a page that will load up on your phone browser and give you the latest sigalert information directly from the California CHP site.

The usual caveats apply when we're dealing with the scraping of (very crappy) HTML code. And you'll need to learn all the abbreviations they use, since I have no idea what they all are and wouldn't want to try to convert them anyway. For example, you might see something like this under the description:

EB I8 JEO N JOHNSON AV

As you can deduce, this means "Eastbound Interstate 8 just east of N Johnson Avenue". Anyway, it should be fairly easy to use. Just point your phone browser to http://www.jorgev.com/cgi-bin/sigalert.cgi.

The links don't work right now, I'll get that working in the next day or two. As always, if you have suggestions or want to report a bug, leave a comment.

The guys at Google have added another feature to Google Maps, one that I personally have been wanting for a while and that I think most people will find very useful: saved locations. Any time you enter a location when doing a search, it will save it to this list. You can then add a label to each saved location. This paves the way for faster mapping and routing, since you can then use their AJAX search box and match on the label you created.

So, I bought a Garmin GPS 18 since I didn't need a UI or anything for my maps project, and it works via USB port so I don't have to worry about batteries. After discovering that it isn't so easy to read a USB port with the available .NET stuff, I searched the Garmin site for some tools to help. Sure enough, they have a neat utility program that creates a virtual serial port that spits out NMEA-0183 compliant data, and thankfully the .NET framework guys saw fit to finally make reading from a serial port about as simple as possible. So I go to the NMEA 0183 site and it turns out they want $270 for a copy of the standard. They're out of their fucking mind. Thankfully, a quick search on Wikipedia led me to this page, which subsequently led me here, where some kind person has published the data format. So I rewrote my parser and now am happily using my new GPS 18 for sending my coordinates to my server. Of course, this wasn't without a couple glitches along the way. The NMEA is, well, a marine electronics association. Obvously, these guys aren't interested in altitude much. So, unfortunately, that means that the data stream I am getting doesn't contain any information for this. On the plus side, however, I do get my speed pre-calculated for me, only problem is that the unit is knots, but the conversion to mph is simple enough. I've added some stats to the map page now, so you can see my current coordinates and velocity. Just don't take any screenshots and send them to the CHP...mmmkay?

Finished up my live map. Of course, it only updates if I've got my GPS location upload program running on my laptop and my EV-DO card hooked up. To make it at least somewhat interesting, I load up the last 20 points so you have something to look at. It works pretty well. If you are really interested in seeing it in action, let me know and I'll set up a time to show it off. I think it's pretty slick. After I got it working tonight I drove around town for a bit. My friend Ian was kind enough to take some screenshots of the app in action, I've posted a few of them below.

You've all seen the commercial, right? On a whim, I decided to see if I could do some live GPS tracking using Google Maps. Of course, rather than grep the web, I decided to just try to do it on my own. Turns out, it can be done pretty easily. I was able to throw something together in less than an hour. Now, this is a pretty crude example, all it does right now is every 10 seconds I move the marker to a new location on the map, and draw a line from my last point to the current one. But you can imagine how, with a little bit of work, you could track, say, your delivery trucks, city garbage trucks *cough*, etc. All with very little work and (best of all) for free! I'm not quite finished with the page, though. Since I have an EV-DO card now, I am gong to write a tiny app to use my Geko 201 to capture my GPS location as I drive and upload the coordinates to my site, then you'll be able to track my position as I drive around. I won't have this working for a couple days, time allowing, so for now you'll just see the random spot generator. You can see it here.

And don't agitate my dots.

I probably love it even more than Kip from Napoleon Dynamite. Actually, I'm pretty sure I do. But there are times that technology scares even me.

What happens when you work 60-hour weeks for the last three months? Well, for one, you miss a lot of news, like the release of version 2 of the Google Maps API. They added what I'm sure was a highly requested feature: geocoding. I think I might go back and finish off some of the projects I had started with this API.

Incidentally, there is now also an API for their Calendar. And Google Spreadsheets was recently launched, too. Those guys have been busy.

Netgear has announced their Gigabit wireless networking package built on 802.11n. Gizmodo has the scoop. So now I guess I have to decide whether to re-fit my house with Gigabit switches or just go wireless. This is actually a somewhat compelling option for me, especially since I frequently grab TV shows from my Media Center and put them on my laptop. Even with my current 100Mb network, it can take a while.

Finally! The one online application I have been waiting for!! Google Calendar is finally a reality. To me, this is the killer web app. The pieces are all slowly coming together. Search Engine Journal has an article on it. What's that, you say? MSN has one already? Yeah, I know, I've been using it for a couple years and it's a piece of crap. Google's Calendar is more functional and useful for me already. It is also integrated with Google Maps, so if you enter an address for the location of your calendar event, you'll get a link to map the location. Check out the calendar sharing. And the natural language event entry processor. Cool stuff.

No, not that dream. My dream is that someday people will be able to use their IM client of choice and communicate with any other IM user, regardless of network or client. Old timers will remember something called RVP, which stood for rendezvous protocol. This was a collaborative effort on the part of several large companies to produce a standard for communicating via instant messaging. Unfortunately, RVP never went very far. In the meantime, ICQ, AIM and MSN continued to get more and more users locked into their proprietary IM systems. Well, Google has at least taken a step against that trend. And with their recent 5% stake in Time Warner, they could soon have the largest user base.

Actually, to be honest, this dream is a microcosm of my larger dream...that we will all be able to communicate and collaborate regardless of platform, network, whatever. One of the major keys to this is using the web as a platform, which Google is sort of championing. I've sort of changed my mind about Google. Initially I sort of disliked them, mostly because they seem arrogant and narcissistic. But they have some pretty bright people working for them, and I think they're on the right track.

Lego has pretty much revamped their Mindstorms system and will be coming out with a new kit in August of this year, named Mindstorms NXT. Wired has an article on it. For the nexth month or so, you can sign up to try to get into the developer program, although only 100 names will be chosen so I'm not keeping my hopes up.

Google is going nuts...some of the Gmail features they've added recently include sidebar links to maps or package tracking if an address or package number is matched in an email message, Gmail mobile for your phone, and lots of other goodies.

Thanks to my buddy Ian for turning me on to Google Analytics. Also, in case you missed it, Google now has Google Local for your mobile phone. It's a pretty sweet app, I've been using it to find restaurants and stores in my area. You'll need a Java-enabled phone, which is the case for most phones purchased in the last year or so. With this app, I was able to get rid of Mapopolis, since it will not only find local addresses but will also give you driving directions, all in the palm of your hand. Too fucking cool.

Yeah, I stole that quote from Bugs Bunny, so what? I also have to say "so what" to the highly-anticipated, super-secret, market-shocking announcement from Apple about their phone/music player combo. Ummm, hi...I've been playing music on my phone for well over a year now. Actually, I take that back. To be completely honest, I very briefly did, but then stopped when the realities of low-capacity SD memory cards, low battery life, etc., sort of killed that idea. I thought it would be cool...it wasn't...and still isn't.

This ground-breaking deal doesn't make much sense to me. Last I checked, most kids have phones AND iPods already. So we're going to try to sell them yet *another* device that costs as much as their iPod, yet has 1/80th of the storage capacity? Oh, sure, SD cards will increase in capacity and get cheaper as the years go on and battery life will go up. At the very least, this idea is a bit premature. It'll be interesting to see how the market takes to it.

That's the rumor. I guess we'll find out tomorrow. If it's true, sign me up.

Back in May, Nokia announced the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. This device features a full Opera browser, Gnome-based UI, email client, RSS news reader, media players, and lots of other cool stuff. Nokia will offer a complete source distribution and SDK for the device, also. Very cool. Expected availability is Q3 of this year.

No doubt about it, Google wants to be the next platform. You should see some of the cool stuff that people are building using Google tools, the most recent one being Google Maps. What kinds of cool things are people doing with Google Maps? Well, maybe you need to find an apartment or house. Or maybe you'd like to check on crime in your area (if you live in Chicago). Very cool stuff. I'm in the process of putting together a map for my friend Ian's wedding in September, this should be a fun project.

*EDIT*

Boy, was I wrong. Apparently, Google isn't too happy about people hacking their maps.

*EDIT*

Boy, was I wrong...again. Google has released the maps API.

Google acquired Dodgeball today. I just got an email from Dodgeball about it, nothing in the mainstream news about it yet. Dodgeball is a pretty cool app, especially for the younger crowd. I would have loved to have it around 15 years ago, when I was out and about a lot more. Dodgeball was started by two NYU grad students, so remember that there are still fun and exciting things to be done out there. And hey, I have to think that getting acquired by Google is a pretty good thing.

I stumbled across this on del.icio.us. Tim Yang has put together a list of 15 things you can do with RSS and, having been a contributor to #3 and being an avid RSS user, I felt obligated to post a link. #9 sounds interesting, I might have to try that out.

I meant to post this a couple weeks ago, since I know at least one occasional reader who, like me, was very interested in this phone. Unfortunately, Motorola has cancelled production of the MPx. This came as a bit of a surprise, especially since I had been playing around with what appeared to be a near-finished unit at CES. I can't imagine why it got cancelled.

Tired of searching tons of BitTorrent sites for what you need? Yeah, me too. So try using Torrent Typhoon, it searches all major BT sites. It was a bit slow on a few searches I did, but I was pleased with the search results overall. And they have a FireFox plug-in, too.

Link via del.icio.us

So I successfully defended myself in traffic court on Monday, despite the officer lying during his testimony. I was going to type a really long rant but I figured no one really gives a shit and I knew after a few days I'd cool off. I'm still quite upset about the incident, there is something fundamentally wrong with the system when a law enforcement officer feels that lying in traffic court is acceptable. I'm convinced I would have lost, had I not had a witness in the vehicle with me at the time I was cited, who testified on my behalf.

Anyway, on to the more interesting stuff...I realize that this is very much a knee-jerk reaction to this incident, but I've starting building a video recording unit for my truck. I would have loved to present a video of the incident during my testimony in traffic court, had such a thing been available to me. Of course, not before I would have led the officer down his merry little path of lies. Am I bitter about the incident? Hell, yes!

Incidentally, had I known the officer was going to lie I would have argued my case in a completely different manner. So if you're going to challenge your ticket in court, you should be prepared for the officer to lie so you'll be ready when that happens. I sort of assumed he would tell the truth, and had no contingency plan in place.

I'm off topic again...so I'm building this system for my auto. Here is the list of items I have purchased so far:

Swann DIY Security Cam
VIA EPIA M Mini-ITX motherboard
Adaptec VideOh! CD video converter kit (The newer version is USB 2.0)
Fujitsu 80GB 2.5" laptop drive

About the only thing I'm missing is a case and an automotive power supply so I can run it in my vehicle.

Initially, I'm going to go with Gentoo for the OS, and probably use FAME for video encoding. I'll have some photos up in the next day or two. I hope to have it working tonight.

I hate cops.

Here are a couple of recent events related to spam. One spammer is suing the man who reported them, claiming that they have lost business as a result. I don't think anyone is shedding a tear for them. The man is asking for Paypal donations to help with his legal expenses.

Also, yesterday Google announced a new tag attribute for links on web sites. The way it works is, any content publishing system can search for links and insert a rel="nofollow" attribute and Google will ignore that link when indexing pages. Hopefully, this will discourage comment spam, which is a big problem for many bloggers.

MS finally did good on their promise to upgrade the capacity of Hotmail accounts. At some point during the day my limit jumped from 25 MB to 2 GB. If you can call that a jump...I should really call it a catapult. I'm still liking the threaded view that Gmail uses, though, and have already switched to that as my primary email, which is a testament to the importance of time-to-market. I mean, if you're going to be months behind the competition, you'd better be prepared to overwhelm the market with your product. Granted, both products are free so it's hard to make a real case here, but I think the message is still there.

I've found zero press articles on the upgrade actually taking place, btw. Not sure if it was just being rolled out slowly, or if I just missed an announcement somewhere. Although, on my Hotmail home page there has been a message saying that upgrades were coming in the Fall, but that has been there since early summer.

The Microsoft search engine beta was launched yesterday (can a beta be called a launch?). I haven't played around with it much, but I'm glad to see that my site is the #1 hit when searching by my name! I'm also glad to see that, unlike Google, they don't distinguish between 'a' and '

Students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have built a machine that plays the drums based on MIDI signals. The machine, named PEART (Pneumatic and Electronic Actuated RoboT, or after Neil Peart), basically controls sticks and pedals to produce beats fed through a MIDI stream.

The big complaint with drum machines, of course, has been that they don't sound very realistic. I've purchased some entry-level machines and they're fun to play around with, especially considering that setting up my real drum kit takes up so much space and makes a lot of noise, but they never sound quite right. Now you can get real sounds with the ease of using a programmable machine. I'd like to see how it handles some of the more difficult stuff like flams, Swiss triplets and rolls, as opposed to just 8th or 16th notes. Also, consider how many options you can get from a cymbal...you can strike it as usual (crash), or ping on it (ride), or play the bell portion of it. Still, quite a machine.

Links via BoingBoing and Engadget.

Engadget is reporting that the Motorola MPx220 is finally available. I've decided to wait for the MPx, which should be out before the end of the year. Full QWERTY keyboard, integrated WiFi and Bluetooth...it's a no-brainer.

Incidentally, if you ARE thinking about buying one, I'd definitely wait. I made the mistake of buying the 200 when it first came out and paid full price. In a month or two, you'll probably be able to pick one up from Amazon for $50 after rebates.