I’m claiming my Bloglines feeds.
I’m not sure if WordPress is going to tweak the claim key or not. Cross my fingers and hope for the best.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Bloglines announced new Publisher Tools that allow you to claim your feeds.
Christian Zander sent an email to the FreeBSD-Hackers list detailing NVIDIA FreeBSD kernel feature requests. Having high quality video drivers is a very good thing:
NVIDIA has been looking at ways to improve its graphics driver for the
FreeBSD i386 platform, as well as investigating the possibility of adding
support for the FreeBSD amd64 platform, and identified a number of
obstacles. Some progress has been made to resolve them, and NVIDIA would
like to summarize the current status. We would also like to thank John
Baldwin and Doug Rabson for their valuable help.This summary makes an attempt to describe the kernel interfaces needed by
the NVIDIA FreeBSD i386 graphics driver to achieve feature parity with
the Linux/Solaris graphics drivers, and/or required to make support for
the FreeBSD amd64 platform feasible. It also describes some of the
technical difficulties encountered by NVIDIA during the FreeBSD i386
graphics driver’s development, how these problems have been worked around
and what could be done to solve them better.
UPDATE Thu 13 Jul 2006 @ 2:30pm : BSDTalk has an interview with Andy Ritger and Christian Zander from nVidia.
The big news for today: Google Checkout. There is an official announcement about the service on the Google Blog, complete with a 2 minute video touting Google Checkout features. This service has been expected for quite awhile (remember the rumors about Google Wallet?) and has been widely seen as competition for PayPal.
I think Google might finally be learning some lessons from Microsoft. First, they need add new services that generate non-ad based revenue. With a stock price of over $400 per share I expect to see more and more pressure applied to Google to generate A LOT MORE MONEY as time goes on. Second, leveraging new services with what you already have. Integrating the service with AdWords will provide a way for Checkout to grow. Not only grow, but grow in a way that others (PayPal) will be unlikely to duplicate, at least not easily. Third, many people still trust Google, so now is the time to strike before a major reputation dip hits. There are are of course plenty of people who have been distrustful of Google for quite awhile, but I think the “main stream web user” still gets a mostly warm fuzzy feeling when using Google services.
If Google really has learned some of these lessons, expect the integration march to continue. How about sending payments via Gmail, Google Talk, or SMS? Scheduling payments via Google Calendar? Twisting this around a bit, how about getting Checkout credits instead of a check for your Google AdSense account?
There is a reason that PayPal has been making features similar to these available, because Google can come in and do it without having to partner with anyone else.
This might be another example of Google coming into an existing field late in the game, but doing it so much better than everyone else that they quickly become the dominant player. Then again, Google has launched so many so-so services over the last 18 months that may do nothing more than live on life support.
There is a new teaser trailer for Spider-Man 3 up today. Looks promising.
One word: Venom
Isn’t that the truth 
The big news at the end of last week is that WinFS will not ship with Windows Vista. If you follow that link you should be warned that it is mostly spin. Don’t believe me? You’ll see gems like:
It’s great technology and we are super-excited to be productizing this way.
Productizing? Is that even a word? The folks at Merriam-Webster Online don’t seem to think so. I checked a few other dictionaries and turned up nothing. So Quentin Clark, what exactly is productizing that makes you “super-excited”?
Back to WinFS, it seems that it will be absorbed into the next version of SQL Server and ADO.NET. Given the last update to SQL Server (2005) took five or six years, is there any hope of seeing WinFS in SQL Server before 2010? Of course if you want to bring up file system announcements from Microsoft you could argue that the basis of WinFS was announced almost 15 years ago with Cairo. I expect that the general concept of WinFS will buried from a PR stand point as quickly as possible by Microsoft.
At some point I hope to see a giant collective “we’ll believe it when it ships” response when Microsoft announces yet another new technology that will change everything. Oh yeah, and it will ship in the next version of Windows.
I recently had the need format a datetime field in SQL Server 2000. My first thought was to look for to_char(), which does the job in PostgreSQL and Oracle. No luck there because SQL Server doesn’t have a to_char() function. After some hunting around I found out about the convert() function. This does the same thing as to_char() (more or less) but instead of using traditional date formatting codes, “style codes”.
Yes, you read that right. Instead of being able to get a four digit year by specifying Y or YYYY, you have to look up the style code that matches the format you want. In my case I was look for DD MON YYYY format. This turns out to be style code 106. Here is an example:
SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(11), datetime_field, 106) AS formatted_date
Some time with Google turned up a page listing examples of various style codes. Here is another one about 40% down the page.
There is an alternative to convert(), datepart(). This allows you to pull out specific parts of the datetime field. So you could do the same thing as the convert() example above, but it would be much more verbose.
UPDATE Fri 7 Jul 2006 @ 11:30am : I really should have included a list at least some of the format codes in this post for future reference:
Robots is a fun movie with a good story. Sarah and Alice both liked it as well. The cast list is impressive, with lots of well known actors lending their voices to the movie.
I really only have major problem with story. There are a number of little scenes that are obvious references to very contemporary pop culture references. They were funny enough, but I think they will quickly become dated.
On the positive side, this is a movie that both parents and kids can enjoy.
3.5 out of 5
CNN is reporting that Gates to leave day-to-day Microsoft operations:
Chairman Bill Gates announced Thursday that he will transition from day-to-day responsibilities at the company he co-founded to concentrate on the charitable work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates will continue on as the company’s chairman after transferring his duties over a two-year period.
…
Microsoft’s Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume Gate’s title as chief software architect and begin working alongside Gates on overseeing all software technical design.
There will be two year transition so I don’t think we’ll be seeing major shifts until after that point. I suspect many people will reference this as the beginning of the post-Bill Gates era of Microsoft.
Being able to edit plain text in place is great, but why stop there? The next logical step is to using select options in place. If you’ve been looking for something like this then version 0.2.2 of Edit In Place is for you. Here is an example of how this works:
...
EditInPlace.makeEditable( {
type: 'select',
id: 'mycolor',
save_url: 'optionedit.php',
options: {
red: 'Red',
blue: 'Blue',
lightgreen: 'Light Green',
green: 'Green',
darkgreen: 'Dark Green',
pink: 'Pink'
}
} );
...
Pick a color: <span id="mycolor">Green</span>
...
To make this work there is a new editable type (select) and a new option (options). If you’ve been following Edit In Place then id and save_url are already familiar. Because the options option is a bit different than what we’ve seen before I want to explain in more detail.
In the example above the keys are red, blue, lightgreen, green, darkgreen and pink. They are used in the value portion of the option tag. The display names for the options are Red, Blue, Light Green, Green, Dark Green and Pink. These are what your user will see when using the select form. The display names are also used to figure out what the current selected value should be. In the above example the currently selected color would be green/Green.
The save_url script (optionedit.php) also gets additional information about the edit. For other types of edits the id and content variables are provided. For select edits there is an additional variable, option_name, that is passed in. The option_name is the display name for the option that was selected (i.e. Light Green). It is important that the script then returns the text of the display name so that it can displayed and used as the currently selected option if the user wants to edit it again. Where edit.php returned the contents (i.e. lightgreen) variable, optionedit.php returns the option_name variable. Nothing huge, but an important thing to remember when writing your back code to handle the AJAX save requests.
Go try it out on the updated example page and let me know what you think.
Poor Netscape, you’ve been so abused over the years. Microsoft beat your flagship product into the ground (don’t even get me started) and then you were sold for parts to AOL. Your name was turned to mud by being used for just another ISP. Now, now you’ve been turned into Digscape.
Oh the humanity!
In true Digg form the top post on Digscape right now is AOL Copies Digg.
Hey, you’ve got your Digg in my Netscape. Your Netscape is in my Digg.
Thus Digscape is born.
How long before the Netscape name is put out on the front lawn one more time to try and sell something else? Can’t we just let it go? You don’t see HP running around trying to convince people that Compaq and DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) are still around do you? Just let Netscape rest in peace.
Please.