Category: Tech

Winter in Chicago often brings cold winds with a chill to freeze an unwary soul. But it does have its upsides. For one, fashionable, sexy boot season begins downtown! So in honor of this wonderful time of the year, and Amazon’s aStores coming out of beta, I’ve begun work on reBootzu.

reBootzu is an online boutique of sexy women’s boots. The boutique was built using Amazon.com’s latest storefront API, the aStore. The new API makes it very easy to quickly set up an Amazon affiliate storefront with very little html required. Calling it an API isn’t really accurate. Storefronts are set up using a wizard on Amazon.com, almost anyone can do this, but like most things on the web, those with more web design experience will get the best results.

I had a lot of fun looking picking out boots for the site. But for me the real fun was in building something new. In this particular case, I want to see just how much I can do without resorting to PHP scripts and in as little time as possible.

When the big outsourcing to India craze began in earnest, I would often rant about how U.S. corporations didn’t seem to realize that they were essentially giving away the family jewels and growing their next great competitors. Now it looks like the chickens are beginning to come home to roost as described in India 2.0: The new garage culture on Mercury News. From the article,

“We are not scared of multinationals. Let them be scared of us,” said Rajjat Barjatya, chief executive of Rajshri Media, a start-up spinoff of the venerable Bollywood entertainment company, Rajshri, that is creating content exclusively for mobile phones. That’s the attitude.

There are a lot of smart and ambitious people in India who are not going to be content to work in call centers for U.S. corporations for very long. And this is good, I like competition. What I don’t like is the short sightedness that I think has led to the gutting of future IT potential in the United States. Young people are staying away from tech careers in droves because they see those jobs going overseas. And don’t let anyone get away with the lie that the jobs left because of a poorly educated populace. Those jobs left because someone somewhere else would work for a lot less money. And now that formerly cheap labor is getting into position to eat our collective lunches.

Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat! Nothing up my sleeve! Rooooar!

That’s how this whole computer repair/upgrade thing has felt. I swallowed my pride and returned yet another nonfunctional motherboard and this time returned the CPU too. And finally, it looks like I have functioning system once again! I won’t go on about some of the insane default BIOS settings (like silent boot) or having to call Microsoft to get permission to activate Windows again, or even essentially having to reinstall XP plus SP2 and patches patches patches!!! I’m just happy that the ordeal is almost over.

This time for sure!

Right now my home PC which I depend on for some day job work and general coding fun, is in pieces under my desk… <\3 As near as I can tell, the old Athlon XP finally gave up the ghost resulting in many crashes to the beeps of death. Little did I know that my mourning was to be long and painful. Generally, I've always liked doing upgrades and moving on to something better. But this time, the ugliness that is tech, sometimes, bit me squarely in the ass. Right now I'm working on my 3rd motherboard and 2nd power supply. I haven't thrown the Pentium D 805 over the side just yet, but it may be next (more about the 805). Part of the problem I ran into was that while I was happy with my old system, the world moved on by and even the m*f*n power supply specs changed. This is what I think caused the no POST problem with the first two boards I tried. Unfortunately, nothing in the sparse documentation made mention of the power supply. Later I learned that I would need an ATX 12V power supply, what I didn’t know though was I would need a ATX 12V version 2.0 and not the version 1.3 I’d just brought home! I’ve been so frustrated with this whole component compatibility and quality issue, that this may be the last box I build myself. I just don’t have the time for this sort of thing anymore!
It is now many miles and many days later that I now have what I think is the right power supply and hopefully I can get my rig back up sooner rather than later. WillowBrow’s PC and trackball just do not get along with me and the kids computer isn’t any better. So me and my XBox 360 have been having a little more quality time than usual lately! Still, I really want to get back to my virtual home.

A couple of days ago I received notice that my Japanese Flashcards gadget had been accepted for inclusion to the Google Gadgets library. Yaay! I’ve been Googlefied. My Google developer’s t-shirt, hat, and a pen were delivered to my office this morning. These are small trinkets, but in my world, the world of geeks and nerds, these are great badges of honor.

A few years ago, when I got swept out the door in a wave a tech bubble burst and overseas outsourcing, I wasn’t feeling too good about being a software developer. It seemed like it didn’t have any value anymore. But yesterday, during my walk, I realized that most people can’t do what I do, and there is still a need for it. But most importantly, I still love doing it. I’m still hoping to get rich by writing that next great little thing (can’t give away the store here yet), but the fun is still much more important to me.

My Google Gadget should show up in their library in a week or two. I’ll post a link when it does.

Update:

The gadget just went live in the library! Click here.

A Solar Shield has been proposed by University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel as an emergency solution to global warming. I love big tech and cool ideas, but obviously it would be best if we could avoid trashing our planet so badly that we need to do something like this in the first place. And of course, if less than altruistic agents got control of the shield, or if we just goofed up the calculations or execution, we could go from a little solar relief to a new ice age (there’s a James Bond flic in there somewhere). Still, this is one of those great, seven wonders kind of ideas that almost begs to be realized.

Here’s a really nice piece on moving from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. I’ve had an Ubuntu installation for a several months now and after some serious issues during the upgrade to Edgy (which turned out to be due to some system killing hardware conflicts), I really wish I could work in Ubuntu all of the time. I still have a few things that require Windows, most notably Windows development tasks that require Visual Studio. But, if I ever get the time, I may look into a virtual machine solution like VMWare. Of course, honestly I’d prefer to get another box altogether and just use VNC to work on the secondary machine, but the budget and space won’t really allow that right now!

The Daily Tech reports that Red Hat has announced that the City of Chicago is migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It also reports that the city has already saved about $250K by migrating. Amidst all of the stories about political cronyism and corruption, it’s good to hear not only something intelligent out of the city, but also something that saves me, the taxpayer, some money! As for Red Hat, they need some positives after Oracle’s announcement yesterday that they would create their own Linux distribution, cloned from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compete directly with Red Hat for customers.
Red Hat’s Announcement

There’s been a lot of talk about how people have put all sorts of personal stuff up on MySpace only to have it come back and bite them in the ass when they’re looking for jobs. The new Google Code Search may to doing this for some developers now. Kotte.org has an article summarizing a lot of interesting, and embarrassing stuff that people have found using the code search tool. Some of the things that are turning up may also open big security holes as usernames and passwords are also being revealed in some code. I guess the long arm of Google is going to force many coders to clean up their acts! I wonder if it’s time to get to work on a profanity filter plugin for Eclipse.

I was reading up on the new anti-piracy measures in Windows Vista on Information Week this morning and was reminded of that Star Trek episode in which Q first introduces Picard and crew to the Borg. There’s this scene after the Borg’s first curt surrender demand in which Q says something like, whew, they’re tough, you sure you don’t want me as a part of the crew?

In a nutshell, borrowing the car from mom for a hot date with the trampy girl down the block will be easier than trying to run Windows Vista if it even thinks your copy is not legit. But you know what, despite what some analysts are saying, people are still going to run Windows Vista because there simply is no alternative for at least 90% of users out there. Comments like this,

Wilcox, however, sees it as a mistake. “Microsoft’s making software potentially harder to use. I don’t think it’s a good move for them to make things hard when competitors are making things easier.”

are laughable. What competitors? The desktop OS war has been over for about 10 years now. Microsoft won, Microsoft is the man, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated, you will run Genuine Windows Vista.

I do agree that the potential hassles, to say nothing of the hardware requirements will make many stick with XP for a while, as I plan to. But we’ve seen this all before. Windows Vista will make its way into homes and offices via new PC purchases. And I’m sure that the next version of MS Office will have some Vista exclusive features to further drive open a wedge for Vista to get into the corporate space.

So Microsoft really doesn’t have anything to lose by getting tough on pirated Windows. I’m sure the pirates will find ways around the new checks, which ultimately will make trouble for hapless end users rather than the pirates themselves. But mass migration to Linux or MacOS is not likely to happen. If it were so easy to migrate, it would have happened already. Again, Microsoft won the OS war on the PC and they know it.

I ran across the ad graphic below yesterday, and as proof that sex sells, I’d love to get one of those, especially if the girl comes with it (dirty old man face)… Of course the association of the hardware with sexiness collides with a harsh reality as I recall seeing an old man wearing one of those yesterday as well! I may just wait for the implantable ones to come out in a few years.

The day began here overcast, cold, and rainy. It’s a dreadfully grey Monday, and my daughter missed her bus stop and ended up being late to school. But am I down? No Way! I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I am having a blast working on my projects in Eclipse because today things are just working the way they are supposed to. The icing on the cake is Subclipse, the Subversion plugin for Eclipse. Installation and setup where just flawless, perfect for the blah blah Monday I could be having. I am one happy geek right now!