Secret Agent on Soma FM

Two of my favorite internet radio stations for background listening are on SomaFM: Secret Agent and Indie Pop Rocks. (I should really try out some of their other stations.)

Most often I listen to them on my living room stereo via my Roku early in the morning when the kids are up playing at the crack of dawn - or earlier - and I'm sipping on a cup of coffee.

Will the MacBook Pro support Aero Glass?

Ok, the new Intel CPU Mac laptops have been announced. I'll be buying one.

Digression: the name "MacBook" is terrible! Why kill the PowerBook brand? The only laptop brand with comparable strength is the ThinkPad, and Lenovo just paid a gazillion dollars to buy that name from IBM. Meanwhile Apple tosses "PowerBook" in the trash. Duh.

It's generally accepted that it will be possible to install Vista and other x86 OS's on MacBooks, though driver support will be a question. I'm sure the mac-o-verse will find a way to make them work eventually.

My question: assuming drivers can be found, does the MacBook's hardware
support Aero Glass? The MacBook has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. (The slower MacBook has 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM; the faster one has 256mb.)

ATI's provisional "Vista-ready" list of chipsets says "Mobility™ Radeon® X300 Series or higher" supports LDDM. But the x1600 is not listed in the full list. Is x1600 "higher" than x300?

And if it is, would that support Aero Glass, or just Aero? Generally people say that no existing mobile chipsets would support Aero Glass.

While I'm on the topic - here's the link to Microsoft's hardware guidance for Vista.

Maryamie: In Defense of Geeks or Ten Reasons Why You Should Date a Geek

"So ladies, here are ten best things about being married to a geek."

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users » Slacker Manager

If you use del.icio.us (and if not, why don't you?) then you'll want to check this out. Good tips for newbies and power users alike.

Seattle Public Library LibraryLookup bookmarklet

I fixed up a LibraryLookup bookmarklet for Seattle Public Library so it works correctly.

Just drag this link into your browser's shortcut/link/bookmark toolbar:

Lookup at SPL

I'll let Jon Udell, the LibraryLookup originator, explain what a LibraryLookup bookmarklet is for and how you use it.

"If your local public (or college) library uses one of the online catalog systems listed here, you may be able to create a bookmarklet that will help you look up books in your library.

After you've 'installed' your bookmarklet by dragging it to your browser's link toolbar, you can use it to look up books at your local library. Let's say you're on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book's info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results -- see tips below.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library's lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result."

There is a bookmarklet for Seattle Public Library on Jon's site, but I think a backend change at SPL broke it. If you try to use that one, you will get the following error from the SPL website: "Sorry, unable to execute search Shortcut was not found. Aspect = ISBN".

I just hacked the URL to change ISBN to ISBNEX, which makes it all work hunky-dory. To be precise, I changed this:

javascript:var%20re=/([\/-]|is[bs]n=)(\d{7,9}[\dX])/i;
if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;
void(win=window.open('http://ipac.spl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?index=ISBN&term='+isbn,
'LibraryLookup','scrollbars=1,resizable=1,width=575,height=500'))};

to this:

javascript:var%20re=/([\/-]|is[bs]n=)(\d{7,9}[\dX])/i;
if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;
void(win=window.open('http://ipac.spl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?index=ISBNEX&term='+isbn,
'LibraryLookup','scrollbars=1,resizable=1,width=575,height=500'))};

Thanks to Jon Udell for this in the first place, and to Finn for prodding me to finally figure out why it was broken. And three cheers for public libraries!

Browser compatibility:

Firefox 1.5 on Mac & Win: works.

IE7 on Vista Dec CTP (5270): works, but you may need to adjust security settings to add it to your link toolbar to drag and drop it to your links toolbar - try adding this website to the trusted sites list, or maybe add the bookmark by right-clicking.

Safari: doesn't work. Does not spawn a new window to execute & display the SPL search. Leave a hint in comments if you figure out why not, maybe related to the window open command?

IE7 gets Googled

Using IE7 in Vista build 5321, I went to Google. And what does Google offer me but an IE7-specific update to change the default search engine?


Funny. Google's certainly not waiting for Vista to ship.

Virtual PC Express for SA - and its use in the enterprise for Vista testing

So - Virtual PC Express is going to be "free" for Microsoft's large customers. That is, if they have Software Assurance - in other words, pay Microsoft a boatload of money annually for, fundamentally, upgrade rights.

(Of course, VMware's VM Player is free, too - all you need is a copy of VMware Workstation to create the VM - and what client IT pro doesn't have that? Or can't just download a 30-day fully working trial version?)

On to my real point.

Some folks on the Vista / Virtual PC Express teams need to write up a step-by-step "Here's how to create a VPC VM of Vista Beta 2/insert latest stable build here set up exactly as you'd want so you can hand copies around to people in your company for testing/early checking out in a portable sandbox environment."

I'd be happy to talk to you (and blog further) about what enterprise customers need here.

ssh for Vista: Yes, please!

From the 11/29 Vista Beta chat:

Q: Are there any plans to incorporate SSH? Telnet is ancient, archaic and
provides little security. While we still need it to talk to our hardware
devices, soemthing secure like SSH would be very helpful.

A: Gawain [MS] (Expert): We have an active issue on improving telnet /
adding ssh, so I know the development team is aware of it.

Vista dev team: Please do include ssh in Vista.

It's insane that Windows is the only OS still under active development which does not include ssh in a standard distribution. I say this as a professional whose job is Windows in the enterprise.

Same thing applies for sftp, too.

I won't go through the reasons why secure alternatives to completely insecure but common tools (telnet, ftp) should be available by default; if you need a lesson give Steve Riley or Jasper Johansen a call.

Microsofties, if you need an enterprise customer to weigh in on this to get the feature to make the cut, comment on my blog and I'll get in touch.

Amazon has tags!

I know I haven't been keeping up on my surfing, but I was surprised when I was on Amazon.com and saw a little "tag this" text entry box next to an item description. Sure enough, Amazon is getting into social tagging. Kewl...

Tags: By default, everyone can see your tags. Your tags will help others find interesting products, and likewise you can see how other customers have tagged products. For example, suppose a book is tagged 'Philosophy'. By clicking on that tag, you can see what other products customers have tagged 'Philosophy', and you can see what other tags people who use the 'Philosophy' tag use. As you navigate using tags, you will find more and more interesting products, as collectively organized by other Amazon customers.

New Poll: Majority of Americans Support Impeachment

"New Poll Shows Majority of Americans Support Impeachment;
ImpeachPAC is Launched to Support Pro-Impeachment Candidates

By a margin of 53% to 42%, Americans want Congress to impeach President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Zogby International, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,200 U.S. adults from October 29 through November 2.

The poll found that 53% agreed with the statement:

'If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment.'

42% disagreed, and 5% said they didn't know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 2.9% margin of error."