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.
Tag: Technology
TeamCity 3.0
Now there’s a freeware version of it that supports up to 20 users and build configurations. We were looking at setting up CruiseControl.NET again for continuous integration at work, but this will be much easier.
Apple Stuff
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.
Google Webmaster Tools
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.
URL aliasing
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.
Google Desktop Bug
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.
I hate DTS
I’ve spent a good chunk of this week trying to revise some DTS packages to account for changes in how MapQuest provides access to data they’ve geocoded for us. Since I haven’t used it in years, I’d forgotten how much I dislike the user interface for it. It probably didn’t help that I was trying to edit this things with a plug-in you install for SQL Server 2005.
Trying to have separate development and test environments to avoid the horrors of doing development and testing in a production environment is quite a trial also. I think you can put settings in a configuration file, but it’s probably something like an INI file.
It’s probably just as well that DTS was replaced by SSIS. I did use that to do a bit of flat file validation for the same project and didn’t find it nearly as painful to use.
Windows Software “Best Of” Lists
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).
Universal vs. Apple on DRM-free Music
A very interesting take on Universal offering DRM-free music directly instead of through iTunes. I think the writer is on target in describing the motives of Universal in cutting Apple out as a distribution channel.
If memory serves, the big record companies tried to push Apple into variable pricing not long ago. That move didn’t seem to work, as the 99-cent single is alive and well on iTunes.
The idea of Apple signing artists directly is an interesting one, but I don’t see Apple signing artists anytime soon. Artist management is quite far afield from what they do best. It might violate their recent deal with Apple Corps too. That said, if Apple could make it easier and cheaper for indie bands to put their music out without violating that deal, they’d probably make some money they aren’t currently getting. It might even help them sell more iPods (which is really the whole point of iTunes anyway).
Die patent troll, die!
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.