February 6, 2004

Yet Another PVR Install Log

This time by IBM luminary Sam Ruby. The post details the start of his experience building a dedicated MythTV box based on Debian, but the wisdom will eventually…

“… be automated, published, and shared.”

“But, first I have to get it working repeatably…”

We expect nothing less from you Sam ;-)

February 5, 2004

South Mountain

A picture of me riding in South Mountain

February 4, 2004

More First Experiences with MythTV

It sounds like Tom Walsh over at Newsforge and I share many of the same first experiences and conclusions in regard to building and using a Home Theater PC (HTPC) based on MythTV.

Tom Walsh writes: “Would I say that anyone could put together their own PVR? No! It takes a level of competency and comfort with Linux to attempt such an undertaking. You need a good deal of patience with often time-confusing documentation. But if you persist, ask questions of those in IRC, and purchase high-end hardware, I am confident that you too will be satisfied with your results.”

February 3, 2004

Dave Elections

Prognosticator Dave Pell of Davenetics and NextDraft fame is at it again, this time with Electablog (RSS feed too), which Dave describes as…

“electablog provides a daily (and sometimes nightly) slicing and dicing of the mad dash that is America’s election cycle. Think of it as C-Span meets the Daily Show meets the little girl from Whale Rider meets Dennis Miller before he lost his mind.”

Dude! When do you sleep?

February 2, 2004

Site Search Still Sucks

Jim Rapoza over at eWeek laments over the sorry state of customer facing corporate search. Here are some good quotes from Jim’s article:

“…there is one thing about the Web that remains poor: site search capabilities.”

“As we said in the 1997 article, if visitors or customers can’t find what they want on your site, they will often simply leave.”

“The search capabilities on most company and content-oriented Web sites are as bad now as they were several years ago. In fact, eWEEK Labs was dismayed to find that we could have easily rerun an article we wrote back in June 1997 on how to improve site searches…”

January 30, 2004

CBGB’s Photographic History

Nostalgia: In the mid-80’s the Sunday Matinees were sweaty, smelly, sometimes scumbag filled Slam Dance Fests, but man… were they fun!

January 29, 2004

The Internet Never Forgets

The other day I was browsing through the Wayback Machine and discovered a number of four-year-old weblog entries I posted to my then homegrown blog tool. They weren’t earth shattering entries, but I figured I’d bring them back home.

So, after a few quick regular expression hacks I managed to format them for import into MovableType (complete way links to archived pages on the Wayback Machine)

Brewster Kahle, you rock!

January 27, 2004

Mapping Google News

This is nifty:

Google News Map: “Why not parse Google News, find the first name match and draw a map with the latest headlines on the coordinates of the countries.”

January 26, 2004

My First Week with STeVo

Last week I finally completed building my Home Theater PC (HTPC) — aka PVR (personal video recorder), DVR (digital video recorder), homebrew-TiVo or what my wife Catherine lovingly calls STeVo ;-)

On my Wiki I put together some of my initial observations and install notes for those of you interested in building one these boxes yourself [more here]

January 23, 2004

Rich Client Ubiquity

Michael Sippey has a couple of good comments regarding Salesforce.com’s recently released “Office Edition,” which integrates its hosted SFA tightly with Microsoft Office:

“The company that championed went overboard with their “no software” positioning is now touting their integration into the world’s most widely used piece of personal productivity software. Which really isn’t that big of a deal, when you realize that this fits in perfectly with Microsoft’s strategy of morphing Office into a combination productivity app and very rich client…”