Posts in Technology
The following Url provides a bunch of details on a specific recording:
https://<TIVO-IP-ADDR>/TiVoVideoDetails?id=xxxxxx
xxxxxx is the id of the recording you want information on.
Here are some of the known Url's for accessing content on your TiVo. (This only applies to TiVo's with the TiVoToGo update.):
- https://<TIVO-IP-ADDR>/nowplaying/index.html (username:tivo password:<your media access key>)
- http://<TIVO-IP-ADDR>/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer
- https://<TIVO-IP-ADDR>/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2FNowPlaying
That's it for now.
Well it's about damn time! Last night, both of my TiVos finally got the service update for
TiVoToGo. Let's see, I only signed up on the priority list 4 weeks ago.
So now that I have it, what should I do with it? The obvious answer is transfer some shows from TiVo to my computer, which I started doing last night (Texas vs. Michigan in the Rose Bowl, if you must know). However, I hear that this update added a web server to TiVo, and that there are Urls to get at Xml feeds of the data. I say that it's time to start playing around with that. How about an RSS feed of what's on my TiVo? Ok, so maybe you don't care about what's on mine...
I'll let you know what I come up with.
Well, the install didn't exactly go smoothly, but I now have fiber installed all the way to the house. Fiber for my internet connection and fiber for the phone line (note: not VoIP).
I won't go into details on the difficulties during the install, I leave it at Verizon messed up, and it took an additional two days to make it right. To their credit, I will be getting a generous bill credit, and like the rental car commercial, they try harder.
My last speed test showed that I am getting the bandwidth that I am paying for, so that is good. Now I just need to see about getting the dynamic DNS functionality in the router they provide to work with my EasyDNS account.
I placed my order yesterday for the
FIOS service from Verizon (and for their phone service). For those of you not familiar with this service, it is fiber to the premises -- that means the connection from my house to the outside world is fiber. That's right, fiber all the way to my house. My internet connection will be over the fiber, as will my phone service. Sometime by mid-next year, I should be able to cancel my cable service, as Verizon will be offering TV over the fiber.
Needless to say, I am very excited about this! Once the install happens, I'll post again about the overall experience.
By the way, I ordered 15 MB down/2 MB up.
I'm preparing to migrate my webserver to Windows Server 2003. Seen as how I am going to do a clean install, I needed an easy way to move all the various websites off of the server and over onto a temporary sever. At first, this seemed like a daunting task, but I remembered bookmarking
Tools and Documentation for Upgrading to Windows Server 2003. I wish I could remember where I first saw a link to this, so that I could give proper credit, but it escapes me at the moment. Anyway, included in the tools is the very handy
IIS 6.0 Migration Tool. This tool automates many of the steps required in moving web sites from IIS 4, IIS 5, or IIS 6 to a clean installation of IIS 6 running on Windows Server 2003.
So far, so good. The only downside that I have seen so far, is that you must run this tool once for each site that you want to migrate. Naturally, I retrieved a list of the sites to migrate from IIS 5 and have now put together a nice little batch files to take care of all of the sites.
Let's see...mail server has been migrated, so all that's left is the database. Fun.
[Listening to: Daylight - Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (05:28)]
In case I haven't mentioned this before, if you work with technology for a living, take a look at
O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf. At a minimum, sign up for a free 30-day trial. If you can swing it, buy a subscription, or get your company to buy one for you. It is well worth it.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Safari, it is an online library of more than 1,400 (currently -- they add more all the time) of the best technology books. The books are from familiar publishers like Addison Wesley, SAMS, QUE, New Riders, Microsoft Press, O'Reilly, and several others. The features include advanced search capabilities, a list of recent searches, recent pages views, notes, and bookmarks. There is a search to locate specific titles (by Author, ISBN, TItle, or Publisher, as well as a tree view for drilling down by category and for browsing the contents of a title itself.
My company bought subscriptions for us over a year ago. I didn't use it for the first couple of months, but it has become an indispensable resource since then. Sure, the content isn't quite as portable as a real book, but you can print out individual pages. Besides, when you are sitting at your desk, it probably doesn't matter if you physically have the book in hand or not -- the most important thing for me is to be able to find what I need quickly. Oh, it's also allowed me to stop lugging so many books back and forth between work and home.
To give you an idea of the quality of titles available, here is what is currently on my Safari Bookshelf:
[Listening to: Tin Pan Alley - Stevie Ray Vaughan - In the Beginning (07:41)]
I've been running Windows Server 2003 RC2 on a dev server for some time, and have been eagerly awaiting RTM. After hearing yesterday that Windows 2003 Server had gone gold, I started keeping my eye out on the MSDN Subscriber downloads page for it. About mid-afternoon today, I logged on to see if the final version was there yet, and what do you know, it was!
I've pulled down the
Standard Edition and the
Web Edition. I'll probably pull down the
Enterprise Edition tomorrow.
Thank goodness my MSDN Universal Subscription was just renewed.
After reading
Brad's post on working with a dual monitor setup, and after hearing good things about it from my friend Zach (no site at the moment), I decided to give it a whirl. Fortunately I had an extra monitor and video card, so I was able to try out the dual monitor setup without laying out any cash.
I don't have the two monitors situated ideally at the moment, but even so, I don't see how I will be able to not utilize this setup going forward. It just makes sense. So now I am going to look for a new monitor, most likely an LCD. Brad likes his new
ViewSonic, and I've heard good things about the Samsung models.
For those of you who have made the switch from CRT to LCD, did you move down in viewable area, stay the same, or go up? If you moved down, are you happy with that decision, or do you wish that you'd have gone with a larger LCD? Are you using a dual monitor setup?
Unable to staunch continual financial hemorrhaging, divine is reportedly close to declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy (perhaps even today). As a premier CMS package, we think divine's...
[Trends and Features from CMSWatch]
I'm very glad that I helped steer my employer away from Divine's CMS when we were looking to replace our content repository recently.
It is great that Dallas is one of the cities on Microsoft's
Tech·Ed Conference rotation, but I don't know that it is so great when you live only 30 miles away from Dallas.
I usually look forward to attending conferences, not only for the cool stuff I will learn about, and the great people I will meet, but also as a time to simply get away and unwind. I just don't know that that is possible when attending a conference in your home town. I mean, do I hit my company up for a room downtown so that I can be close to all the action? If they agree to that, what will my wife say? And my son? "Daddy's gone on a trip...to Dallas." Gee, that is something we do all the time. And what if my company doesn't agree to that? What if they say "no, you are less than 30 miles away, we can't get you a hotel room." Then what? How likely am I to spend 12+ hours a day around the conference when I am waking up at the crack of dawn to get there and then not getting home until 10 or 11 PM? Where is the chance to unwind in that?
Perhaps I am off base, and I get a little too much pleasure from attending conferences. Maybe I should just be glad that I have a job at a company willing to pay for any of it at all.
What have y'all done when faced with the option of attending a conference in the same city you live in, or in a nearby city?
What I'd really like to do is attend
this.
I'm bored. Redsign? Write some code for the weblog app? Start a new project? Take a nap?
What was that -- Get back to work?
I will use the events of the past 36 hours as a wake up call. I will backup my data regularly, I promise.
I will thank my lucky stars each day that I had been using my laptop for development purposes lately, and that the latest code was there, and not on my now dead desktop HD.
Plans for dev work on the 'ol weblog app were derailed earlier today. I spent my afternoon and evening (and now, actually) rebuilding my primary machine at home. I think I will go ahead and give Ghost a try once I get everything installed again.
Sigh...
My
wireless ethernet bridge just arrived. Too bad I've got some other stuff to take care of today -- I can't wait to get this thing hooked up to my Xbox and use the Xbox live service. Guess I should use this time to think of a username for the service.
One of my most anticipated gifts this year was Xbox Live. Now the question is "how should I connect it?"
My office shares a wall with our living room, and the wall just happens to be the one that the TV is on, so I could easily run CAT5 between the two rooms. But I've also got a wireless access point in the house. So I set out looking for wireless solutions for the Xbox. Lo and behold, I found
this. Now I need to see who carries them locally, and decide if I want to fight the post holiday crowds.
I just finished loading up .NET Server RC2 on my old desktop. Everything went well except that my 4+ year old Netgear NIC wasn't recognized. This is odd, as it was recognized when I installed beta 3 of .NET Server on this same box a few months ago. Oh well. Instead of digging around for a disc I know I'll never find, or looking for the drivers online, I just slapped in a NIC that came with my DSL installation kit. Worked instantly.
So now I am going to play around on RC2. I think I will install the SharePort Team Services and then create the weblog solution web that comes with FrontPage 11.
I am sure it sucks, but I've got to see it. I'll keep you posted.
Well, I just installed beta 1 of Office 11 (I obtained it at the Microsoft booth at
XML Conference and Exposition 2002). So far, I've played with
XDocs, including designing a form based on a web service, and also a schema. I even went so far as to connect to a database for populating the data for a couple of drop-down lists. Seems very straight forward (at least for the simple things I've tried so far). Based on the little time I've spent with it and the demo at the conference, I can see a lot of use from XDocs for capturing data.
I've also opened up Word and briefly looked at it's XML features, including creating a document based on an XML schema. This didn't seem quite as intuitive, but I need to spend more time with it. My inclination is that Word is not yet ready to be used as an XML editor. For now, we'll stick with XMetaL and XML Spy.
Finally, I opened up FrontPage. I won't go into any of the details of FrontPage other than to say that one of the prebuilt web solutions that it ships with is a weblog solution. Since I have been building a weblog app, I find this interesting. So now I am off to setup the Frontpage weblog solution. More to follow.
I've been using
SpamCop to filter spam for several months now. Initially, I relied on the many blacklists that they use, but recently switched to implicitly blocking all mail, and explicitly allowing only mail from legit addresses/domains. This worked very well, aside from the minor inconvenience of having to add addresses to my whitelist from time to time. Recently, I've been getting more and more spam with my own email address in the from field, which means it is making it through as my domain is on my whitelist. It's time to look for another solution.
I've tried
Spam Assassin, but didn't like it enough to shell out $30 for it. Today, I came across a review of
CloudMark SpamNet. Visit their site to read up on their unique approach to fighting spam. After I've used it for a bit I will post a review.
Can't we just pretend it is 1999 again?
Windows XP rocks! I can only vouch for the Pro version.
Places to get it cheap
- PriceWatch.com - Go here for discount codes to save even more.
- Directron.com - I bought my copy of XP from these guys. Got my copy the day after it was ordered.
- DirectDeals.com - Another good place to pick up a copy of XP.
Went to CompUSA last night to browse. I do this from time to time, even if there is nothing specific that I am looking for. To my surprise, they were selling
this for only $149. That is $30 less than the standalone Wireless Access Point was selling for. After verifying that the price was for real, I hurried to the counter to pay for my new toy and then raced home (actually to the in-law's house, which is where we are staying this weekend) to set it up.
First, a little background information. My father-in-law's house has a broadband connection through their cable provider. I have my own IP address with them for when I visit, so that I can get online using my laptop. Within 15 minutes, I had configured the Router so that it was now being treated by the ISP as though it was my laptop (it was connected), connected my laptop to the built-in switch via CAT5 and surfed the Internet through the router, and had then configured the wireless LAN and the wireless card in my laptop to talk with each other. Done. That fast. So no more cables running through my in-law's house as I move from one room to another with my laptop...I am untethered, and I love it!
By the way, I bought the device for eventual use in my own place, not specifically for use at the in-laws.
Another gem of bias by the media.
It seems as though a ZDNet writer received some information about an error message that a reader ran into on a Microsoft site and decided to write an article about it. The article, titled "Microsoft.com error reveals IDs, passwords", unfairly attempts to shoot down Microsoft and the .NET technologies. It takes a friend of the author to save the article by pointing out that this error has nothing to do with problems inherent to .NET, it has to do with a programmer putting code into production that should not have been.
The code was left in debug mode which exposes lots of nice details to developers when errors occur, details that should never be seen by the general public. Aside from the debug mode issue, the error was caused by a variable not being declared. Why didn't this pop up in testing? The error prone code should never have made it into production. Perhaps I should apply for that job with Microsoft that was recently posted on one of the many job boards.
Funny, I was just thinking about
this.
We are currently living in a friends apartment in SW Fort Worth while we sell our house in Colorado. Our friend has not been staying at the apartment for quite some time and had disconnected cable and phone service. Thinking that we won't be here for long, I have decided not to turn these services back on. Only problem with that is, no Internet connection for me. I have purchased a wirless network card for my laptop and service from MobileStar so that I can at least go to Starbucks and other locations and get a high-speed connection. The service is great, but it is not at home, and that had me thinking about seeing if any neighbors had a high-speed connection that they'd be willing to share wirelessly.
Did I mention how kick ass
MobileStar is? If not, it KICKS ASS!
I am now sitting in Terminal E at DFW Airport waiting for my flight to Denver and surfing via my MobileStar Wireless connection.
Anyway, going to Denver tonight, moving the household over the weekend.
I am sitting in a Starbucks at a Barnes & Noble typing this. When I am done, I will be publishing it like I always do when I am online. That's right, I am online. I discovered a great service (especially great for me as I am without a phone line and no cable, thus no Internet),
www.mobilestar.com, that allows me to use my laptop or PDA (if I had one) to connect to the Internet using a standard wireless network card at many locations including Starbucks, hotels, and airports.
This is sooo sweet.
Is anyone else as frustrated as I am when dealing with changes between .NET beta 1 and beta 2? Probably not.
This site is now running under the .NET Framework beta 2.