I can take the ridicule of owning a Zune, have for a few years, but this is just frustrating.  My Zune crashed on me this morning.  Couldn't listen to my year end podcast reruns on the way in this morning.  Turns out I'm not alone after all.  30GB Zunes all over the world fail en masse

[UPDATE:]  It appears as though the fix is in.  Looks like a simple leap year bug that will self-correct by 12:00pm today.  More Zune goodness is just 11 1/2 hours away!  Now if they can start supporting it on XP64....

TTFN

iFart for the iPhone went on sale Dec 12th.  It's been less than 3 weeks and it's sold over 100,000 copies @ $0.99 per copy.  Not bad for a virtual whoppie cushion.  Want to do better?  How about reversing the process.  Write an iPhone app that detects farts and rates them.  Go social with it similar to the virtual lighter app and I think you'd have a party favorite.  Again, never underestimate the immaturity of mankind.

F***MyLife.com appears to be a site along the same lines as the plans for CollegeConfessions.  People logon and confess how bad they have it while others vote "I agree, you life is f***ed" or "You deserve it"  Not sure there is any possibility for a business plan behind it but not everything has to make money.  Then again who would have thought Jerry Springer would last this long?

I think I'm going to get a T Shirt made that says "My other scripting library is jQuery"  Seems like pro.to.type is just too "also ran"

Kinda disappointed that my 3.0GHz dual core box isn't good enough to transcode HD in real time. 

SSE appears to be very interesting.  Fits in nicely with yet another project I'll never complete.  It appears I'm doomed to live a life of knowing what to do but never actually doing it.

DNN 5.0 has been officially released.  A buddy of mine is going to take it for a test drive and let me know what he thinks.  DNN is another one of those platforms which is too good to be ignored but still not "it"  I use it.  I hate it but it is better than the alternatives and you can't beat the price.  I'm really hoping for some major advancements in the near future since they now have some funding.

TTFN

The "kids" got a 360 for Christmas so I've been playing a bit.  I installed TVersity, added my media and BAM! I'm up and running.  The whole thing couldn't have been easier.  I can now use the Media blade on the Xbox to access all of my music, pictures, videos and podcasts.  TVersity takes care of all of the work of encoding content on the fly to make it compatible with the Xbox which eliminates the need for all the crappy scripts I use to use to convert from one format to another for different devices.  The only glitch so far is I'm having trouble getting anything close to real-time conversion of HD content (H.264 I think) from a Matroska (MKV) container despite my somewhat beefy box.  It appears to be about .75 to 1 which means I have to start it going then pause the movie for about 15 min / hr to keep it from stopping every few seconds during playback.  I'm sure I can tweak some settings to speed it up but for now it's just not that critical since I don't really ever have time to watch movies anyhow and "normal" content works just fine.

My next goal is to figure out a way to hook up an MRSS feed to TVersity with credentials.  The idea would be to provide a way for a user to tap into a secured account ie. subscription VOD rental or PPM service.  Alas I have much to learn about UPnP before that's going to happen.

I've also finally got around to setting up a dev box on EC2.  I'll try and go into the what and how in a later blog but the ideas is to have an on-demand dev environment with each client's data stored on separate EBS volumes which I can mount as needed.  The main benefit of course is having a single custom environment available to me from anywhere.  Couple that with a thumb drive with Portable Apps, Firefox/Elasticfox and I may be able to say goodbye to laptops altogether or at the very least reduce it to a cheap netbook.

TTFN

I've abandoned dasBlogin favor of BlogEngine.NetThe main reason for making the change is that BlogEngine appears to have better community support.  The down side is I just read that BlogEngine will be releasing an update over Christmas so I'll have to update it soon however the conversion was about as painless as it could be.  All told it took about 15 minutes to make the switch!

I'm hoping the new engine will write better posts than the crap my blog usually contains ;-}

TTFN

Ek Palmer

I forgot how much fun it can be working for a tech savvy boss.  It has been a while since I worked for someone who could tell the difference between software and hardware let alone actually write a piece of code.  In that time I had forgotten what a difference it makes and how much more fun it is when your boss not only understands what you're doing but can actually get excited about it.

One of the owners of the company I currently work at recently joined the church of AWS.  He began by wading in with S3 then immediately followed it up by latching onto CloudFront.  It was less than a week from idea to implementation and we were serving millions of requests from the cloud.  Needless to say I was quite impressed being a faithful follower of AWS myself.  At a "normal" company that would have been weeks or months but since the boss is a techy and has both the power to make the decisions and see them through it only took a few days.

But why stop there?  He then came across another AWS service called Mechanical Turk.  I've often wanted to work on a project where I could apply this but have never come across one that both fit and would be accepted by management.  He sparked on an idea yesterday morning and had created an mTurk job by the afternoon! 

Just too cool!

TTFN

Ek Palmer