17 Oct 2006
I'm into about day 4 of using Google Reader for my RSS feed reading. So far, so good. I'm getting through feeds much more quickly; I've even added a few more feeds because I've found it faster getting through feeds in the Reader interface.
Only a couple of flaws at this point:
- If you keep the Reader open in a tab or browser window, it can seemingly get out of sync. I've had a couple of times when the reading window thinks the feeds are read, but the left column doesn't, and moving back and forth results in things getting weirdly out of sync. I'm guessing it's just a web-performance issue (as it's doing a ton of HTTP/XML work everytime you read a bunch of feeds), but that's something you don't run into when you're using a desktop client.
- I miss being able to highlight/color code certain feeds or search terms. That'd be a nice feature, as right now, feeds aren't differentiated particularly well when you scroll down.
Otherwise, I haven't found a reason to move back to a desktop client yet. I'm rather impressed.
15 Oct 2006
I use my RSS reader a lot. Currently, I use RSS Bandit, which I like a good bit. It does RSS very well, and doesn't try to do too much more, i.e. it does exactly what I need. I don't need podcatching abilities (though they'll be there in the next version) since I use an iPod and iTunes does an OK enough job.
It even allows me to do some manual syncing of my home computer with work, by FTPing the data files up to my FTP site, then downloading in the new location. So, I can keep my RSS/information habit under control by checking my feeds every few hours at work and at home, and never get overloaded. It's crude, but it works well.
Now, one of the things that popped up in my feeds the past week was about the interface and functionality improvements in Google Reader, Google's online feed reader tool. So, given that I use GMail and GCal, I figured I'd give Reader another shot. I'd tried it when it first came out and found it to be a complete abomination.
I exported my OPML feedlist from RSS Bandit, imported it into Reader, and off I went. The "River of News" view (all stories are sort of thrown together in one long column of news and you scroll through it), which is a view people swear by, but I've found cumbersome in every tool I've ever used. It's perfect in Google Reader. Literally, perfect. I had a few hundred items to read when I imported my feedlist, and I just scrolled through them. It marked them as read as I scrolled past. See something interesting? Stop and read it more closely. It works remarkably well and immediately made me realize I could probably add more feeds to my feedlist and move through them more quickly than I do through RSS Bandit. This shouldn't be construed as a knock on RSS Bandit -- I just think that the Google Reader team has nailed the interface. I'm probably going to spend next week only in Reader and see if I like it enough to switch permanently.
Oh, and, like GMail, you can use it from your mobile device (i.e. your cell phone). Again, it just sort of works the way you'd expect, and gives me something to read when I'm grabbing a meal or waiting in line.
Of course, since it's web-based, I can view my feeds from anywhere. No cumbersome syncing. That's handy.
The only knock on it, at least so far in a few days of use, is that it's not nicely integrated into the Google interface, I'll say. I don't use the Google Personalized homepage that much (I generally search right out of the search toolbar in Firefox). It's not part of the upper left nav in GMail or Google Calendar. I know Google Reader is technically still part of Labs, but I'd love if I could customize the Google upper left nav and add/replace links there. A real integration, just as a link there, would make it much easier for me to pop open the 3 Google apps I use.
Hopefully, I'll check back next week to update on how my switch to Reader has worked. I haven't even scratched the surface of some of the functionality -- like reading lists, where you can mark something you've read to share and then publish your reading list (as HTML or as a feed), which is kinda like del.icio.us without tagging. It's the old link-blog model, but done in a really really easy way.
On to other topics ...
I've been on vacation this week, with the last few days spent with some friends who came up to visit (and go to a football game that shall not be mentioned). Stories forthcoming. However, it sort of caused me to fall behind on my podcast listening. My RSS-based information consuming habit is sort of overbearing at times, but I'm becoming very good at skimming and not needing to check everything out.
I open iTunes, find 10 podcasts to listen to, and notice that 5 of them are the new Gillmor Gang episode. The show has already started testing my patience with it's 4.5 minutes of ads to start the show, and another 30 seconds at the end. Sure, I can skip through it with my iPod or iTunes (and I do), but it means that each individual episode is about 20-22 minutes of real audio, broken up into 4 or 5 chunks, and I just find it terribly annoying. On top of that, I've just found the content utterly lacking in anything meaningful for probably the past few months. It's not the Gang of old, with Jon Udell and nice guests talking about identity or groupware. You know, interesting technology discussion driven by the technology and accentuated by the knowledge and personalities of the participants.
Since the move to Podshow, the Gillmor Gang has been pretty much unlistenable and a general waste of time. There's little insight to be found, as it's simply a platform for the participants to bitch or proselytize for their meme of the day. I've stuck with it, hoping that it would eventually veer back into what made the show great. It hasn't, and after listening to one chunk of the latest show, I've decided I'm done. It's like 24. I gave it two years and gave up.
Now, what that has done, is reminded me that I most enjoyed the work of Jon Udell on the show. Fittingly, he had left the Gang a while back, and the show lacked his ability to take a new technology and immediately make real world sense of it. It was his explanation (and demo) of del.icio.us that made me go "a-ha" and realize what it was all about. Well, he's got a weekly podcast that much closer to what the Gillmor Gang used to be, and I've dropped the Gang in favor of his show, and I'm smarter for it.
Finally ...
For those of you who missed it, I'm trying the podcasting thing. Check out my last post for the details and give it a listen. I realized today that I hadn't included and obvious link to the podcast feed to add it to your iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, so that's now linked there. I've also submitted it for inclusion in iTunes, so we'll see how that goes.
12 Oct 2006
I'm so funny. Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Timely, and amusing.
Yes, I made a podcast. I've been fooling around with it for a while, never really zeroing in on what to do. Some folks were encouraging me to do a basketball podcast (which still might happen). But, I realized that I spend the bulk of my time here writing about the music I'm listening to and shows I go to, but I don't really expose anyone to that music, other than a few mp3s or links here and there.
So now I can force my music upon the four or five people who actually come to the site.
For now, I think the podcast will live as an off-shoot of my blog. If I keep it up, or people like it, maybe it'll get its own place to live. Or, maybe I'll get a cease and desist long before that happens.
On this show:
Here's the feed to just the podcast (in case you don't care about my ramblings).
In the interest of full disclosure, I've setup a little Amazon affiliate thing so if you like a song and go buy the CD from Amazon, I get like 5 cents.
09 Oct 2006
For a while now, I'd been keeping in the back of my mind that Harvey Danger was coming to Great Scott on a Thursday night. I was all jazzed to see them, but I also knew that I might have a basketball game that night, when we'd already be short players. So I didn't buy a ticket ahead of time.
Thursday rolls around, my game is at 7pm, and the show is at 9pm (which means HD probably don't go on until 11:15 or so). I get out of work and fight traffic to get down to Waltham on time for the game. It's the first game of the season, so it's always a bit of an adjustment to get back into the flow. I also have a tendency to be overly critical of my own play. However, I rocked. Probably the best I've played in a few years, which I think was directly related to the fact that the other team constantly kept throwing passes that I could just rip and start running the other way for easy hoops. So, it's probably a whole lot less my good than the other team's bad. But whatever. I'll take what I can get.
After our victory (a narrow 1 point win because we were short players and played 4 on 5), I drove home and checked out the Great Scott website just to make sure the show wasn't sold out. Of course, they just can't tell me, so I call them and the fellow answering the phone is nice enough to let me know that they're definitely not sold out yet, but it looks like the crowd is starting to get there. So I should hurry.
I hop into the shower and remember that I'm out of shower wash or body wash or whatever you call it. So I squeeze out a couple of handfuls of the anti-bacterial hand soap that's on the bathroom sink and use that. I'll smell like hand soap, but I'll be germ free. I throw on my rockin' Dear Leader tee and my nerd glasses and get into the car, realizing that I've yet to eat dinner and I'm certainly not going to eat it at Great Scott. Needing money, I stop at Walgreen's to hit the ATM and grab some quick food. I buy a fruit punch Gatorade, some weird caramel nut balance bar, and a bag of Jelly Bellys. Quite frankly, if I pass a bag of Jelly Bellys, I have to buy them.
Guzzling Gatorade and eating something that passes as chocolate, I head down Fresh Pond towards Soldiers Field Road. My normal route takes me up Market St. then back down Cambridge St., but only because I've never figured out which road crosses the two (I now know which one!). I turn down Harvard Ave. for parking, before realizing I'm about to park to go into Harpers Ferry. It is just now, right about 9pm, that I realize I don't remember exactly where Great Scott is.
Making my life more ridiculous, it's at this moment that I crack open the bag of Jelly Bellys and pull out the first one ... which I get into my mouth only to realize it's plum, the bastard child of all Jelly Bellys. I hate plum.
Thankfully, I notice some people walking and realize that I'm not insane and Great Scott is just another block down. I slide down, hang a left on Comm Ave., just hoping I can luck into a parking spot.
And I do. About a block from Great Scott. Things are looking up. Haven't hit another plum bean and I found free parking in a great spot like a block away.
I head up to the door, walk in, pay for my ticket, and get a Sam Adams Octoberfest. It's a decent crowd, though when you're in Allston and school is in session, it's hard to gauge how many folks are there for the show versus how many just decided they wanted to hang out for the evening. As I'm looking around, Sean Nelson, the lead singer of Harvey Danger, walks by. He's not a small man. Probably 6'2" or 6'3".
The opening band, Harris, is just getting ready to start, and I find myself a nice spot on the wall where I can lean and not be too much in the way. Harris starts off and their guitarist closest to me is just all over the place and really fun to watch. As local bands go, these guys were pretty good. They obviously have a little bit of a base, as they had some folks there singing along with them. They had one song, "Carousel", that stuck in my head and could easily be on the radio. The rest of it still seemed a bit rough around the edges. But, apparently they'd had a shakeup in the band and people were playing different instruments. They seemed like nice guys, too. A pretty decent opener and the set break allowed me to go get another Octoberfest.
So Many Dynamos followed up Harris. They're out of St. Louis and they play music that I don't generally find enjoyable. Except they rocked. They are an indie rock/pop/electronic band; it's not really my genre, so I wouldn't even know who to compare them to. And, quite frankly, if I heard that album, I'd probably be pretty disinterested. But they were just so fun on stage, bouncing around, bantering wittily ("We're halfway through the set. I'm feeling pretty good: I only feel like we're a third of the way through"), and just having a good time. It was infectous.
If you're wondering, most reviews seem to compare the band to The Dismemberment Plan and as a punkier Hot Hot Heat. I've sadly never heard the former, and can sort of see the latter comparison. Very "sort of".
Smartly, I took a moment between songs to go grab another beer and hit the bathroom (except in reverse order). If you've ever been to a show at a place like Great Scott or TT the Bear's, you know why.
When So Many Dynamos finished, things got crowded fast. All of the folks who were only there to see Harvey Danger, sort of stormed to the front. I don't mind so much when it's people who seem to actually dig the band (in this case, it was mostly those type of fans). I do mind when it's people who've heard one song and think that entitles them to push their way to the front. Which always reminds me of the night at a Fountains of Wayne show when I saw two college aged girls try to push their way to the front, bitching at people left and right. One of them tried to push past the wrong people and got laid out (right in front of me!). It made my night.
I digress.
I had my spot, had a beer, and was ready for Harvey Danger. I have a tendency to check out band sites before a show to get an idea of what the set might be like, and I'd learned that the aforementioned Mr. Nelson had been having some throat/voice issues. As he took the stage, he acknowledged as much and said they were going to start out with a quieter song to get warmed up. He breaks into "Pike St./Park Slope", which is a fantastic song and helps to illustrate some of the, shall we say, verbose lyrics that Harvey Danger utilizes.
Maybe we could run away and start a little repertory moviehouse or something.
She said, "sorry but I think you might be just projecting on to me. Why don’t you try LA?"
Repertory. Awesome. I mean, come on, this is a band that can work the word interminable into a song. How can you not dig that?
After that, I don't really remember the setlist. They played a great mix of stuff off of all 3 CDs, and sounded pretty amazing for a band that hadn't toured in 5+ years. They turned a song off of the re-released version of Little by Little called "Picture Picture" into a crowd sing along, which was lead into by a very funny 60 second or so monologue describing the "sacred covenent between an audience and performer" in a call-and-response chorus. There were even helpful cue cards to make it easy. That sounds like it could be very pretentious or even cloying, but it wasn't. It was really cleverly done. The band worked into "Little Round Mirrors", which I enjoy a lot, neatly working the chorus from Guns-N-Roses "Paradise City" into it.
At some point, I can't remember if it was during the normal set or as part of the encore, they pulled up a woman onto the stage (she was a friend of the band, it seemed) and she did the female backing vocals to "Old Hat", which is probably my favorite Harvey Danger song. Just an all around great set, with no discernable voice problems, no discernable jackasses, no problems at all.
They finished the set with "Flagpole Sitta", which is the song that they're most famous for, but, as you'd expect, has a tendency to bring out the douchebags. And bring out the douchebags it did, as someone decided it was a good opportunity to start a mosh pit. But, my faith in humanity was restored when his girlfriend yanked him down to the floor by the back of his shirt. Ah, I loves the rock.
After that, I made the quick walk back to my car, and headed home. I had some Jelly Bellys on the way home, and even the plums tasted ok.
(Image from Flickr via splunkton who I don't know, but I found the image then followed to his website which is ridiculously awesome. Seriously. Check it out.)
05 Oct 2006
So, this past Saturday was my 10 year High School Reunion.
I'm honestly not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it was pretty cool to see some people I hadn't seen since June of 1996, many of whom have obviously grown up, matured, gotten married, had kids, but still seem almost exactly the same. On the other hand, it was odd to be standing there surrounded by people who've grown up, matured, gotten married, had kids, and I'm still living in an apartment, playing video games, and trying to avoid doing anything that requires responsibility. On the snarky hand, there were enough people who've put on a lot of weight to make me feel good about where I'm at physically. It sounds mean, but I'm sure people were mocking my shaved head and nerdy glasses. So nyah.
Advice on surviving your reunion:
- Don't show up early. Show up like 45 minutes in, so you can likely spot the people you want to avoid ahead of time.
- Drink.
- Go with a friend who will have your back when you're talking about someone and they start walking towards you. Always a faux pas to mock someone as they come up to say something complimentary.
- Find a spot where you can only be attacked from one, maybe two directions. If you can see people coming, you can plan accordingly--play the alphabet game to remember their name, think of what you had in common in high school, invent some obscure rumor about someone who isn't there.
- Drink.
- Try to remember that everyone else probably feels the same that you do. And take advantage of that by making up important facts about yourself.
- Don't talk about your porn movie.
- Do talk about your girlfriend's porn movie.
- Drink.
In all honesty, it was a pretty good time, and I survived and even saw some people that I wish I had seen more over the past 10 years. I'll enjoy it again in another 5 or 10 years.
In other news ...
Harvey Danger tomorrow night!
27 Sep 2006
I just bought myself two new tees. I've got a couple of old reliables:
The Peeps T:
The Jelly Belly T (this isn't the exact one I have, but it's close):
My Dear Leader lion shirt, which I can't find online, and my Ben Folds "Rockin' the Suburbs" shirt which I also can't find online.
Courtesy of Busted Tees, I'll be adding two new ones to the rotation:
The Oregon Trail!:
Saint Dorothy Mantooth!:
I'm quite excited.
25 Sep 2006
I really, really do. I despise it. Over the past few weeks, we've been battling in our hosting environment to come up with solutions to a myriad of issues with ColdFusion and how it scales. Now, I don't think that ColdFusion was really designed to be used in a shared hosting environment, with hundreds of sites and thousands of hits per second throwing traffic at it. It certainly doesn't scale well enough.
Now, I know there's a ton of heavily trafficked sites that use ColdFusion. It is possible for it to scale. It's just not possible for ColdFusion to scale when the code in question isn't specifically designed to do so. We've got thousands of customers spread across a handful of servers, and they've all written code that, well, let's say it's not professional. It's all basic "open database, run query, output data" code, 99% of the time against an Access database.
75% of the time, ColdFusion handles its end of the bargain pretty well. We're running IIS6, Windows Server 2003, all the normal stuff. The problems end up being two fold:
- ColdFusion still uses ODBC
- ColdFusion uses Java
Our two basic problem scenarios are cases where we get a lot of concurrent database queries and ColdFusion's ODBC service simply decides it can't handle it. Rather than fail gracefully (allowing us to catch the stopped service and restart it accordingly), the service just keeps running, but simply doesn't do anything. It actively rejects all TCP/IP database connections, and leaves customer sites basically dead in the water.
We've worked around the ODBC issue by having a test page that makes a database connection, which we query every X seconds, determine if the ODBC service is still working, and if not, we actually kill the process and restart it. Obviously, we're adding a little overhead to the box by doing this (not a ton, but it's overhead) and we're not really solving the root cause, which is that the ODBC service doesn't behave the way a normal Windows service should.
This issue is sort of hinted at in this ColdFusion TechNote, but there's no solution other than to limit connections, which is not easy to do in a shared hosting environment (well, not in any meaningful, cost-effective way). Not to mention the fact that using ODBC and DSNs is pretty antiquated and I'm not sure why ColdFusion hasn't deprecated it completely in favor of DSN-less connections (which are not only more reliable and have marginally better performance, but are far far far more portable).
The second issue is simply that ColdFusion uses Java. There's nothing inherently wrong with Java (just as there's nothing inherently wrong with .NET or any other run-time environment). They all have their places. This just isn't a place that Java works well. The Java process gets progressively larger because customers don't write applications that really care about garbage collection or optimization. They're not homogenized. There's hundreds or thousands of very different applications, that instantiate different objects, and then the Java garbage collection has to try to figure out exactly how to handle it. Sometimes it works well. Other times it thrashes the CPU usage up to 100% and causes the box to simply hang out while it decides what to do.
We've been mucking with ColdFusion and JRE settings to work around this, and we've basically mitigated this problem through trial and error, and also some monitoring that will push traffic over to another server if the main server is "hung" and then route traffic back again when things are back to normal.
It's taken us a few months to get to this point, a few calls to Adobe, and a whole bunch of trial and error. Each time we solve one problem, another pops up that needs investigation and resolution. Having now played with ColdFusion for about a year, I can safely say that I would never pick it over Perl or PHP, but I can see why someone might select it over ASP or .NET, which have slightly more difficult methods of connecting to and handling database info.
Still, I despise ColdFusion. It encourages its users to do stupid things (I cannot even tell you how many customers I've had to inform that their code doesn't work because they're using a reserved SQL word as a variable or table name -- something that happens far less frequently with ASP or PHP users). It relies on a bunch of server-side technology that renders its usage fairly non-portable. It's got a horrible design for IIS, leading to cases where ColdFusion dying can cause IIS to stop serving HTML pages on the box (thanks wildcard ISAPI filter!). In a nutshell, ColdFusion has pretty much been the bane of my existance for a few months now, but we seem to have it handled at this point. If I ever ran my own hosting company, I'm 99.999% sure I'd never offer ColdFusion, at least not without charging a significant premium.
I despise ColdFusion.
23 Sep 2006
I went out after work a couple of nights this week. Good times.
Then I came home.
- 3 movies from Netflix.
- 13+ hours of new stuff to watch on the DVR/TiVo.
- 450+ items in my feed reader.
- 10+ hours of podcasts in iTunes.
I'm slowly working through it all. Thankfully, looks like the weather will cooperate and this will be a nice weekend to catch up on some TV and movies. I get weirdly stressed when this happens. But then I just browse through it, remind myself I'm not really missing out on anything, and I feel better about things. I lead a somewhat puzzling (lame, boring, ridiculously stupid) life.
19 Sep 2006
So, I'm a Nintendo dork. I talked about the Nintendo DS a while ago, and I still play the crap out of it.
I'm now completely enamored with their next system, the Wii. Silly name, awesome idea. I'm sure I'll talk about it more at some point.
But I just realized today that, because the Wii is going to support the Opera web browser, and because it's going to support Flash .... I can watch YouTube videos on my TV through the Wii. I can't tell you how awesome that is. I don't love watching TV on my computer. Well, I do, but not as much as I love watching it on my actual TV.
Think of all the stupid stuff on YouTube. Now think of how much more stupid stuff you'll watch when you can do it while laying on your couch. That right there is icing on the cake.
18 Sep 2006
My friend Greg has started posting again and running his movie on his website, Project Working Stiff. It's a funny movie, more of a romantic comedy than you'd expect from the subject matter. It has a couple of literal laugh out loud moments, and some really great indie rock/pop music.
Go watch it. If you like it, post about it, or tell someone else to watch it.
Heck, I might setup a little spot on this here site for you to watch it (except it means I need to setup a Brightcove account, which I don't have time to do right now ... but stay tuned).