December 4, 2003

Comcast’s HDTV and DVR Box

Matt Haughey’s PVRBlog gives some more insight about Comcast’s new PVR box:

“Comcast was testing the PVR waters, but it looks like the rollout will soon be going full-force.”

December 3, 2003

Personal Service Oriented Architecture

Michael Kanellos from CNET exposes some of the research at Microsoft to make search a greater part of its Windows operating system. The following are some interesting quotes from the article:

“Search in many ways is brute force,” Dumais said. “If the two of us type in a query, we get the same thing back, and that is just brain dead. There is no way an intelligent human being would tell us the same thing about the same topic.”

December 2, 2003

jpcache with Movable Type

I’m again using jpcache with my blog. This time however, I’ve integrated the PHP-based gzip and caching capabilities of jpcache with Movable Type.

You should see a significant speed improvement through out the site — especially on some of the longer category pages.

It was fairly easy to incorporate into MT since I’m already outputting PHP files from my MT templates. Basically, after following the uncomplicated install guide for jpcache and running a few sample test pages, all I needed to do was “prepend” the jpcache script to the end of my PHP files.

December 1, 2003

BitTorrent, Blogs and Web Proxies

Don Park gives a good overview of BitTorrent, but also provides an interesting perspective on how blog software in general could utilize BitTorrent technology.

“In my opinion, flash flood nature of blogs will be well served by BitTorrent. Likewise, link-happy nature of blogs will complement BitTorrent well. Ultimately, I think a tailored variation of BitTorrent should be built into blog clients and servers for download sharing of feeds, images, enclosures, and other blog-related resources. BitTorrent will encourage media-rich blog posts without applying power-law to the bloggers’ wallet. BitTorrent means blog torrents.”

November 30, 2003

Linux Home Theater PC HOWTO

Brandon has assembled a comprehensive Linux Home Theater PC HOWTO, which is definitely worth a read if you’re planning on building your own Homebrew TiVo-like device.

November 26, 2003

Disable MovableType’s Send Entry Script

The file ‘mt-send-entry.cgi’ in a default MovableType installation can be used to relay spam. If you’re not using the script to allow your users to “Send this Entry by Email”, you can safely remove the file from your MT install or change the permissions so that the script cannot execute.

However, if you need the functionality Ben Trott has posted a fix, but IMHO, you’d be safer pushing this function client-side using a mailto with some JavaScript

November 25, 2003

Finance for Geeks

Eric Sink, the man behind Marketing for Geeks, has just published an article for MSDN called Finance for Geeks, which is an overview of accounting principals from the “technologists” perspective.

Definitely worth a read if you’re starting a software company or working with finance systems.

November 24, 2003

Home-Brew PVRs on Linux

Joe Stump over on the O’Reilly DevCenter puts together a well-rounded overview of The State of Home-Brew Personal Video Recorders on Linux (Think: Open Source TiVo). The article also includes a good threaded discussion as well. Well worth a read.

Incidentally, I’ve decided to investigate putting together my own PVR. I was inspired mainly by a recent InfoWorld article on the savings you can expect by build your own systems.

I’ve set my budget to be about $400 and so far I’m leaning toward using MythTV and ideally the KnoppMyth Bootable CD MythTV Install to make things easy, which is based on the amazing Knoppix Live CD Debian Distro.

November 23, 2003

Google to Atom

The Well-Formed Web has made available a
Google2Atom web service that will generate an Atom feed from a Google search query

However, you’ll need your Google API key to generate the feed.

November 22, 2003

JiWire: WiFi Hotspot Directory

I haven’t looked for a WiFi hotspot directory in quite some time, but I was just alerted to JiWire via Street Tech this morning and I must agree with Gareth that it is indeed comprehensive.

In fact, I learned that my local public library has its own free public hotspot!