Interesting news search play for the bigco's -- "We're very pleased to announce that Topix.net has taken a majority
equity investment from three of the largest newspaper and media
firms in the US -- Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett." (a href="http://blog.topix.net/archives/000071.html">Topix Blog)
"One other thing that blew me away: When you start OS X for the first time, you're asked if you want to move from another Mac. I've been using an iBook - which will now become my wife's as a replacement for her XP box - so I said yes. One Firewire connection and 20 minutes later, and everything I cared about on the iBook, including all of my personal configurations, was moved to the PowerBook." - <via Blogarithms)
For you poor souls who are still on a PC it's likely your mind can't even grasp how insanely easy it is to move from one mac to another. I know before I Switched I wouldn't have thought moving between computers could be less than 2-3 day event.
[]: http://www.blogarithms.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/19/moved-to-mac-status-report/
"First, it's quite amusing the turn around that Clay has made since his post two years ago about WiFi vs 3G. Suddenly the ubiquity, usability and versatility of mobile phones is a compelling platform and not something to be dismissed as closed and essentially redundant as he originally wrote. (Us Mobitopians responded to his nonsense back then and I still remember it clearly.)" (via Russell Beattie)
Overall I think this is a good thing, but sometimes people do change their opinions on things and it's very easy on the web to link back to a specific point in the past without considering or reading anything that has occurred since then.
Part of what I'm trying to do with HelpSpot is change the game for help desk software using RSS. Seth Godin has a nice post about how RSS/Blogs are changing communication and applications. He points out Basecamp which lets you manage your projects with RSS goodness.
On a side note, it's interesting to take a look at technically how he linked to Basecamp. He did it in a very search engine optimization friendly way. Rather than link to "Basecamp", he instead used "Project management and task management software: Basecamp". This is much much better from an SEO perspective for the Basecamp site. Wonder why he did that?
Need a screenshot (and more) tool on the mac? FlySketch is it. It's so cool that I don't even really know how to describe it. It basically is a window that can be turned transparent over any part of your screen, you can then annotate on the transparency then capture the screen. Watch this video
Interesting thread starting on Joel's talk at ETech conf. Kareem works at ESPN, seems like that would be fun. I've always wanted to work in the fantasy sports division at Yahoo (never used ESPN's version).
I've spent the better part of the last 2 days trying to get a simple CSV formatted file to dump to Excel reliably. What a pain in the ass. I've been doing some updates to a ColdFusion back end system I built for a client a few years back and one update was to do a basic data dump to Excel.
The data isn't nice simple fields but big tables some of which have long text fields with nasties like tabs, commas, and quotes. Anyway I escaped everything, quoted the fields, dealt with the line endings but always something wouldn't work. Often Excel would break fields up incorrectly, etc.
Anyway I found a nice simple solution, at least if you can use Office 2003. It turns out that since Office 2003 there is an XML format that you can use which Excel will open up very nicely. It even lets you specify infinite sheets, workbook info, style info and more. I didn't find any really good details on the MS site though I'm sure they're there. All I did was build a tiny workbook and save as Spreadsheet XML.
The fields were remarkably easy to figure out considering this is a Microsoft thing. So if you're looking to do Excel dumps and you can live with the Office 2003 or newer limitation check it out.
"If you're going to configure Account Lockout policies in a real-world environment, set the Account Lockout Threshold policy to something high like 50 or 100 invalid logon attempts." - (via ITreader.net)
I couldn't agree more. I've dealt with many an overzealous IT administrator who thinks anything higher than 3 is a security risk. This is just incorrect when you look at real world attacks and more importantly is poor policy from a users perspective.
Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater - The help desk software I'm working on has a REST interface. I may do SOAP as well (though I prefer xml-rpc). It mostly comes down to customer demand. All the underlying functions are the same, it's mostly dealing with the additional support costs of more interfaces and with SOAP being somewhat complex that worries me a bit more. REST is so simply simple. Pass a url and get back xml, duh.
"The problem with IT today is that there is a huge difference what software applications logically are and how the IT department actually deliver them." (via LeapLogic)