GenXJamerican

I saw one of these as a clearance item at MicroCenter yesterday, so I picked one up to try it out.  In the tiny bit of time I’ve used it so far, the only annoyance (and a minor one at that) is turning the mouse on and off.  I find it challenging to move the slider on the bottom of the mouse without clicking the mouse body a few times.   I like the little trackball on the top for 360 degree scrolling (though I don’t find myself scrolling sideways much with a 24" monitor).  I haven’t played with the configuration tool much yet, but it appears to give you a wide variety of ways to customize the mouse’s behavior.  We’ll see how the battery life is.

iPod nano

The iPod I mentioned yesterday is the 4th (!) one I’ve owned. Each of the previous ones was sold to help fund the upgrade to the next one. I love this one even more than all the previous ones because it handles video.  The video is watchable, even at that size.  The nano makes great use of the screen when it isn’t playing video too.  The earbuds that came with this one are better than the previous ones, but I’m still going to buy a better set.

Thoughts on MacWorld

The most important product announced there isn’t MacBook Air–it’s Time Capsule.  I think far more people will find a use for wireless drive backup than they will for a really thin laptop.  Because Time Capsule also works as a router and can share a USB device (or devices if you plug in USB hub), you could conceivably share even more hard drive space and a printer to every machine on your wireless network.  As far as I can tell, Time Capsule provides more capabilities than Mirra Personal Server (a comparable backup/Internet access product) at a lower price ($300 for the 500GB version) in a much smaller form factor.  After a copy of Leopard, I think a Time Capsule will be my next purchase from Apple.

I just started playing with Google Webmaster Tools yesterday.  I was very interested to find out where this blog has been showing up in search results.  According to the “top search queries” stats, the queries my site appeared most for were “ndbunit” and “failed mergers”.  Considering that I only wrote one post about NDbUnit, and one about the Daimler-Chrysler split, I found that surprising.

Webmaster Tools includes a lot more statistics that look as if they’d be very informative.  I’ll explore them later, as well as trying out the sitemap functionality.

After dealing with a few of the gigantic URLs to SharePoint documents in e-mail, a custom version of TinyURL seems like a good idea.  It looks like this guy thought so too.  A bit later,  Mike Marusin did as well.  I do wonder if the latest version of SharePoint provides that functionality out of the box though.

It looks like Google Desktop 5.5 has a bug that prevents users from opening forwarded e-mail attachments.  There are more details in this Google Groups thread.

Scott Hanselman updates this list every year.  I use 4 of his top-10 utilities on my work laptop (my personal machine is a Macbook Pro).  I use TestDriven.NET a lot as well.  If you use Windows, the list is definitely worth a look.

A number of the applications Hanselman refers to can be found at Open Source Windows.  It’s all really good software  with an even better price ($0.00).

Thanks to Judge Dale Kimball, we may finally be rid of SCO.  Since he ruled that they never owned UNIX patents, they owe Novell 95% of the money they got from Microsoft and Sun for the license rights they sold.  It’s doubtful they have the money, so they’ll probably have to declare bankruptcy.  It couldn’t happen to a more deserving company.

This Sunday’s Opus comic strip captures the hype perfectly.

I did get to play with one for a few minutes at an Apple store in Maryland yesterday.  It handles its primary job (being a phone) very well.  The sound quality was good.  The interface really is as clever as the advertising suggests. A quick finger swipe moved whatever you needed in the right direction.

Typing with the iPhone turned out to work better with your index finger than with your thumbs.  Whatever logic they’ve got in there for guessing what you meant when you mistype something works extremely well though.

That said, I don’t see myself coughing up the dough for an iPhone anytime soon.  Functional and attractive as it is, I don’t need that much of an upgrade over the Razr (which while it has plenty of shortcomings, fits nicely in my pocket and only cost me $100).  Besides, if version 1 of the iPhone is this good, imagine version 2 ;-)

I’m trying it out on my laptop at work to see how I like it (I’m all Mac at home now). In regular use, the speed advantage Safari is supposed to have over Firefox isn’t really noticeable. Most sites I visit render correctly, except for the occasional message in Yahoo! Mail. It has the sort of problems I’d expect rendering ASP.NET web controls, but so does any browser that isn’t IE.

At least for now, I wouldn’t ditch Firefox for it. I might use it more on my Macs though.

We were pointed to this blog entry by one of the DBAs at work today.  I didn’t fully understand the difference before I read this post.  The bottom line: seeks are preferred.  I know I’ll be looking more carefully at query plans from now on.

That’s the gist of this rather comforting post at groklaw.net about Microsoft’s claims of Linux patent infringement. It baffles me that a company which made over $12 billion in profits last fiscal year would stoop to the sort of patent trolling last seen from SCO Group.  It seems desperate.  It’s the kind of move I would expect from a company who had clearly lost the battle in the marketplace and didn’t have any other cards to play.