CHRISdotTODD

The Net Neutrality bills are not fairing well in congress, but states are still pushing. Anne Broache published an article today, " State governments push for Net neutrality laws ," that talks about the push by New York and California for the feds to adopt a net neutrality law. It is great to see states step up where the feds have failed us. I have been pretty worried that this would be one more thing that the average consumer was going to lose out on. News.com seems to be following this rather closely, with a special website covering the issues, including some videos. I found an opinion piece by Cory Doctorow , published in Information Week that does a good job telling how folks will lose out if there is no protection from the bandwidth providers. This is a great quote from Cory, " It's a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it." And he concludes with, "This is the start of the network neutrality fight, not the end o

I wonder how popular is RSS? Does the average person now know what RSS is? And if so, do they use it? I have been using Feedreader for some time now, and I like the preview of headlines that appear in the lower-right corner of my screen every hour. Occasionally, I even read the articles associated with the headlines. I have had trouble matching up my interests -- finding feeds on topics of interest -- as well as making the time to read them. I find my self most often reading the headlines while I am waiting for another process on my machine, and therefore my computer is slow to respond to reach the details to read. I find that I tend to follow technical related topics more than other items, but I wonder if my adoption would be even higher if it was even closer to the work I do. I hear surprisingly a lot that managers in my organization do not want to go to a website to get status on a project or to get data -- they want it fed to them via email or even worse, invite them to a meeting.

On Friday I installed Microsoft Project Standard 2003, and the main view window was completely blank. I went through the menus and options, tried updating Windows and the Project Service Pack, and tried to repair and also re-install. Nothing helped. I called Microsoft -- they give you two free calls for their $600 package. It took 20 minutes to get an agent (roughly 10 minutes of hold and 10 minutes for a Call Taker to start a trouble ticket). I spend another 35 minutes with a Project Specialist, and nothing he had me try worked. He promised to call me on Monday, and he did, but after another 20 minutes, he was stuck again. He promised to have a more senior person call by Tuesday. During the two calls, I learned that through disabling the Display Project Guide feature, everything else works. I also learned that this feature requires Internet Explorer -- I wonder why that is? I mean apparently Microsoft has not learned their lesson about making applications dependant on IE. And further,

I have been using a 3G (3rd generation) iPod for some time that would not hold its charge. I was forced to always keep it plugged in and miss the advantages of listening where ever I wanted. Then in April I ran across an article that said there are replacement do-it-yourself batteries. Sure enough, I found one at Fry's. [I just searched Google on "ipod replacement battery," and got over 5 million results.] It was not easy, but I did successfully change the battery. The not-so-helpful instructions within the package were line drawings, so I went on a search for better instructions. Most of what I found was not any better. Take for example the instructions from ipodbattery.com . They have a much better visual representation than my original instructions, but they never really help you understand how to remove the case and just how hard it is. I eventually found eshop.macsales.com , and they provided a video -- once I learned how to navigate to the right video. In their exam

Net Neutrality is continuing to get a lot press, so I have attempted to gather various sources of information that I have found and put it all here. Adam Livingstone of BBC Newsnight recently wrote an article, " BitTorrent: Shedding no tiers , " where he made several good points. First he starts with an analogy about driving your car down the road, and as you get closer to a place of business, your car begins to slow down. And if you turn around, it speeds back up. Later Mr. Livingstone puts a different twist on the analogy -- instead of losing speed going to the same store, when you go to a rival store, your car goes faster. From that perspective, as long as the speed to the first store is reasonable -- but it's not resonable to take my broadband speed and slow it down to dial up or worse. Mr Livingstone also introduced a new, interesting concept, Cachelogic, which is used to speed up content delivery in a P2P environment. I wont go into the details

By the time you read these, I will have gotten this problem fixed... I recieved a notice in my email that my Blog has been disabled to to suspecting that my blog is spam. This system has detected that your blog has characteristics that resemble spam. Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerly apologize for this erroneous result. Though I guess I can understand that spammers can consume a lot of bandwidth and storage, so a mechanism is required to protect against it, I find it hard to beleive that this blog fit into the suspicion category. Tell me, for the few who are reading this, does it feel like spam?

Have you heard of Skype? Now owned by eBay, Skype is a cheap or free way to make phone calls using the Internet as the transport ( VOIP ). Think of it as instant messaging, but with audio. Many Podcasters are using Skype to record interviews, as the quality is as good or better than recording a traditional phone call. (Right now I am in the process of trying different techniques for recording the Skype calls for use in Podcasts -- once I feel confident in my solution, I will post it here.) Cheap or free you ask? If you and the party you are calling have Skype installed on your computers, then the call is completely free. If you want to call a landline (a phone number - Skype calls this SkypeOut), from the U.S. and Canada to the U.S. and Canada, it is also free until the end of the year. The posted rates are $0.021 per minute after the end of the year. So if you like this service, and want to continue at no cost in 2007, you will need to convince you family and friends to put Skype on

Microsoft has made this rather confusing. If you support Windows with Internet Explorer or are a web application developer, read on; if not, skip to the last line . The way I read security Bulletin MS06-013 , the change has already been released, but a patch in IE is keeping it from being active. As quoted in the bulletin, "This Compatibility Patch will function until an Internet Explorer update is released as part of the June update cycle, at which time the changes to the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX controls will be permanent." This is also taken from the bulletin: Some of the important modifications include the following: Security level for the Internet zone is set to High . This setting disables scripts, ActiveX controls, Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (MSJVM), and file downloads. Automatic detection of intranet sites is disabled. This setting assigns all intranet Web sites and all Universal Naming Convention (UNC) paths that are not explicitly listed in the Loc

I did some more research on Net Neutrality, and learned more about how big of an issue this is. The issue is that cable companies and telcos are pushing to charge more for premium services, such as video content. Further, they want to throttle back the bandwidth allocated to content not purchased or provided by them -- unless the content providers pay them for the bandwidth -- bandwidth they are already paying for. Consider this, content providers already pay for bandwidth every time someone downloads content off their servers -- this is how their network service provider collects revenue for services rendered. The cable and telephone companies want the content providers to pay them again for their content to travel over their network to your home or business, which you have already paid for too. Many folks also believe that without net neutrality, network discrimination would slow economic growth and innovation. Net Neutrality advocates include Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Google, Amazon,

Are you aware of the changes to how the ActiveX Control works within IE? Most (possibly all --– I am not sure) IE plug-ins use ActiveX to load within the IE browser; and therefore if your site's user base is predominately IE user, which is true for most of us, this presents a potential big problem. If you are lucky, users will only have to double-click on controls instead of single click. (The first click is to activate the control, while the second is to use the control.) This is an exert from Microsoft's site, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912945/en-us : This update changes the way in which Internet Explorer handles some Web pages that use ActiveX controls. Examples of programs that use ActiveX controls include the following: Adobe Reader Apple QuickTime Player Macromedia Flash Microsoft Windows Media Player Real Networks RealPlayer Sun Java Virtual Machine You can download the update today from the same page to test for yourself -- I understand this will be pushed d