I’ve been streaming a lot of http://Live.Twit.TV when I get home from work in the afternoon and after recently discovering Boxee for the Mac and all of the great geek content on Revision3.com, which is built right into Boxee, I have been thinking about buying an Apple TV.

The idea was to install a browser on the device for streaming Live.Twit.TV + have Boxee to see other stuff.  After a few Google searches on browsers + Apple TV, I finally bit the bullet on Friday and bought the device from WalMart at $228.

I got it all set up, and then set out to hack the hell out of it, as it doesn’t come with a browser.  I know, how stupid is that?  First I had to enable SSH via a patch stick creator http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator Once done, I used a program called FUGU, http://www.freemacware.com/fugu to FTP the "couch surfer" program.  Then a variety of command line keyboard mashes and all of the sudden "couch surfer" appeared in the Apple TV menu.

Unfortunately, it never actually loaded anything.  It would either go to a black screen where nothing was shown, or it would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself.  I tried several versions of the program and eventually even tried installing Firefox. Nothing worked.  After 3 days of reading blog posts and how-to’s I finally got fed up and decided I was going to try http://www.aTVFlash.com, who has a $50 USB stick that is guaranteed to not only install the browser, but Boxee and a few other things.

Now before I dish out $50 on something that who knows if it will work, I “found” a version of the patch stick program on the internet.  I “tried it out” with the intention of, providing it worked, actually purchasing from the website the USB stick.  Now the “found” patch stick program did indeed work, installed Boxee and XBMC, and the couch server browser!

So I was almost on my way….except after this patch stick was applied, the Apple TV’s menu became somewhat flakey, unresponsive, AND it would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself.  This concerned me greatly.  The final nail in the coffin for my Apple TV experience came when I fired up the Couch Surfer web browser the patch stick had installed. I headed over to http://live.twit.tv, which uses a flash player to stream video of Leo Laporte, and saw a blue Lego block in place of where the video stream should have been.

Upon further research, there appears to be a OS X 10.4 Tiger only “framework” called CoreAudioKit.Framework that is required in order to enable flash on the Apple TV.  You can’t use the Leopard version from your installed Leopard OS, you can’t use the Leopard install CD to grab the files…you have to have a Tiger disk and depending on which conflicting blog post you read, you may actually have to have Tiger installed in order to get the proper coreaudiokit.framework files to Fugu over to the Apple TV. 

It was at this point that I began an hours long search for the CoreAudioKit.framework files on the internet, which didn’t net me any results.  I even tried my Leopard version of the file, for giggles, to no avail.  I failed, was unable to get Flash installed and then I had what the religious folks call a “coming to Jesus” moment….

I had spent 4 days straight reading countless blog posts and how tos trying to install a browser.  I had “patched” the Apple TV repeatedly to get SSH enabled, Boxee to work, XBMC to work, Couch Surfer installed, Flash Installed and all I got out of this entire experience was a very angry 4 days, a browser that didn’t do the one thing I wanted it to do, no way (aside from buying a copy of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, a 4-year-old OS by the way) to get Flash installed, and a jacked up Apple TV menu that was ½ the time unresponsive and would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself for no reason repeatedly.

Bottom line is that I reset the Apple TV to the factory settings last night, packaged it back up in its original packaging, located the receipt and Wal-Mart bag from my Friday purchase, and placed it upon the shelf near the door to take back at my earliest convenience.  Consequently, I hooked up an XP based laptop to my TV using an s-video cable and an audio cable going from the laptop to my TV and was streaming Live.Twit.TV in full screen glory on my 50” Sony 2 minutes later.  Granted, there’s not a Boxee for Windows available for download yet, but I can live with viewing Boxee on my Macbook for a while.

A late Feb. firmware upgrade released by Apple for the Apple TV has broken the Boxee install on Apple TV devices.  Talk in the nerd-o-sphere is that Apple is being hush hush on reasons.  Not much that I have seen will even speculate.  Others, like the lovely and talented Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV have flat out begged Apple to re-enable the functionality of the very cool Boxee open source software.

With a late Q1, early Q2 rumor about Apple releasing new hardware updates to a variety of their products, many of which are obviously overdue, I am willing to speculate that the reason Apple bricked Boxee is because of a potential relationship with Netflix.  Boxee ties directly to your Netflix account, a process I just completed within 1 minute.  Within the last 6 months, Apple and Netflix began to play nice, wen the Netflix streaming video functionality for their subscribers was brought to Safari.

So let's have a look.  Apple and Netflix are now smooching sisters.  "Sure, use our browser to stream your content."  "Hey thanks, this is working out well for us to deliver our stuff to your very loyal fan base."  Alright, so now lets toss Boxee into the mix.  "Hey, we're open source, we can put Boxee on anything."  Netflix says "Sure thing, butter cup.  This is a great idea because we, as Netflix, want our customers to be able to see our movies on any device.  We're even streaming to Microsoft XBox and some Blue Ray players, heck even some new LCD TVs!".

Apple takes a second look and low and behold, they are sort of taken out of the picture streaming Netflix to people's TV because Netflix is pushing the Roku player (oustanding device, video evidence).  If they are going to make a push to offer more Apple features on the upcoming release of Apple TV, wouldn't "Hey, stream Netflix too?" be a huge selling point?  YES.  But if you can stream Netflix without having to upgrade your current Apple TV hardware, why would anyone switch over?

I am convinced that Apple killed Boxee with the latest firmware because they have an Apple sanctioned Apple TV Netflix feature on the table and in an effort to sell the new, shiny hardware later this year, they had to disable Boxee on Apple TV in order to make their relationship with Netflix continue to grow positively, despite how such action might affect the Netflix / Boxee relationship.

Any thoughts are welcome.  I am not an Apple Insider, I'm a chubby guy on my recliner in Omaha....but this totally makes sense, correct?

Review: iCam from SKJM, LLC
Purchase with this button:

Back in December, I posted my iTunes App Store wish list.  To quickly recap my desired app, I needed a way to stream video from my unibody Macbook (unboxing) to my iTouch / iPhone (unboxing) Shortly thereafter, a commenter left me a message telling me about one app that might suit my needs, iCam.  Produced by SKJM, LLC , this app was exactly what I was looking for.

The initial setup of the $4.99 app was pretty simple.  First I installed it on my iTouch, then I install a client (iCamSource) on my MacBook.  These two pieces of software work together to stream my iSight camera video directly to my iTouch via my iTouch's wifi connection to my home network.   

I had some trouble today figuring out why sorting a dataset wasn't working.  Basically my SQL statement put an ORDER BY 'column' DESC but when I dumped it into a dataset, for some reason the order disappeared.  I figured out that in order to sort a DataSet, you actually have to put the data inside that DataSet into something like a DataView.  Then, you sort the DataView with myView.Sort. Here's my sample, working code.

 public void GetItemNumber()
        {
                string sConnectionString = "Data Source=sqlserver;Database=MY-DATABASE-NAME;uid=userid;pwd=password";
                SqlConnection objConn = new SqlConnection(sConnectionString);
                objConn = new SqlConnection(sConnectionString);
                objConn.Open();
                try
                {
                    string MySQLStatement =
                        "SELECT ItemNumber FROM ItemTable where ItemNumber " +
                        "LIKE '%" + this.txtItemumber.Text + "%' ORDER BY ItemNumber DESC";  //this DESC doesn't seem to do anything.

                   using (SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(MySQLStatement, objConn))
                    {

                       //fill the DataSet

                        DataSet ds = new DataSet();
                        da.Fill(ds);
                      //Create DataView using the data in my DataSet.
                        DataView myView = new DataView();
                        myView = ds.Tables[0].DefaultView;

                     //sort in DESC order with ColumnName

                       myView.Sort = "ItemNumber DESC";

                        foreach (DataRow dr in ds.Tables[0].Rows)
                       {
                           this.txtOutputItemNumber.Text = myView[0].Row[0].ToString();
                        }
                    }
                }
                catch (System.Exception e)
                {
                    this.lblErrors.Text = e.Message.ToString();
                }
                finally
                {
                 objConn.Close();
                }
        }

That should save somebody some time some day.  If this helps you and you use it, please post a comment or link to this post.  Thanks!

Brian, my fellow Linux buddy at work, shot me over an email from his iPhone this morning with a photo attached.  He installed KDE4 on his Ubuntu 8.10 netbook, an Acer Aspire One that I have been jealous over for the last few months.  The device is cool as hell as is, but now he's got it dual booting between XP and Ubuntu 8.10 and he's got Gnome and KDE as options.

It is clear that the KDE4 desktop environment is much prettier than the 'poop' colored Ubuntu, as I have seen it referred to across the web.  The load screen changed to a pretty blue "Kubuntu" graphic instead of the orange Ubuntu one and following that, the loader has some cool fade-in effects as it comes up.  Overall it's got a very clean OSX-ish gloss to it.  It's a bit different to get used to KDE4 after having used GNOME for so long, but the prettiness of it outweighs the learning curve.

I told Brian that the last thing he needs to do on this netbook in order to become king of nerds, is to install OSX on the netbook, too.  If he does it, I'll let you know....in fact, if he does it, I'll video tape him triple booting the thing and stick it up on YouTube.

A friend of mine at work today said she was infected with something yesterday on her home PC and asked for help removing it.  I thought it might be a good idea to explain to the world the scam that these Antivirus folks are pulling.

Here’s their game…You visit a website and you see a popup and there is malicious code in their popup that runs in the background…  OR it pops up on your machine because some OTHER piece of spyware is already on your PC…You could see something that probably reads like this.

It doesn’t matter if you click OK or Cancel, since it is a pop-up, they have coded both buttons to install the bad guy.  The only way out of this is to just close the browser completely…best bet is a CTRL+ALT+DELETE, kill browser.

OK so if you don’t see that pop-up, they have an even trickier way to get you to install their crap…check this out...

Holy crap, you say…It looks like my C: has bad guys, man, I’m infected all over the place!  But….please notice….the address bar!  It’s a web page you are viewing, not your My Computer.  It’s a web page built to LOOK LIKE it is your “My Computer”.  They even go so far as to animate the red text areas and show it counting up from 0 infections to 362 infections so it looks like your PC is actually being scanned right in front of your eyes and it is finding bad guys.  This is then when the pop-up to clean the system shows…Most people click the OK, POW you’re infected…some people click the Cancel, POW you’re infected.  Either way, POW….right in the smooch factory.

Alright, so it’s on your system, it runs and tells you to scan….now what…why do they do this?  Well, because the same a-holes that make this program ALSO make the $60 software to clean it.  They want you to “register”, and by “register” that means they want you to pay them the $60 to remove it off your machine.  It’s the equivalent to me coming to your house, breaking a window, and saying “Hey, I can fix that window for $60…” and you giving me the cash to fix it.  Same principal...

If it is the 360 version, a Google search here or there will net results.  It will   NOT  be cleaned by CCleaner, McAfee, Symantic, Norton, AVG, Spybot Search and Destroy…  Most of these bad guys wont' be.  And I can't offer much here in terms of a fix due to the evolving nature of these infections  Best bet is to get clues from the program that is on your machine and Google search that specific program's manual removal steps...most will involve some sort of registry edits.

I have tried everything under the sun to create entertainment for myself...or at least shift my lifestyle in a way to fulfill my entertainment needs for the few hours a night I have to consume entertainment.  I have a Roku for streaming TV and movies to my television from Netflix, a Wii when I need to rock some tennis or ski my fat backside down a mountain missing 7 flags (ug, I know), I have a Tivo for time shifting content of my choosing from network and cable broadcasts, I have a 5 disk DVD changer, I have the highest level cable with HD + "On Demand", I have an iTouch full of video podcasts and audio podcasts...  Basically at any given moment between 6pm and 10pm I should be in complete control of how I spend my evenings...at the mercy of NONE....even the big whig "we know better than you what you want to watch" network broadcasts.

But even with all of this technology at my fingertips, I still have been finding myself struggling in the evenings to entertain my brain in either a fun way or a meaningful way.  I'd say 1/4 the time, I am generally enthusiastic about what I find on TV.  I have certain television programs I dig. The Big Bang Theory, Dirty Jobs, Survivor (I know...get off my ass), Big Brother (I know...get off my ass), The Amazing Race, Mythbusters, The Office, and a handful of others.  But the other 3/4 of the time from 6-10pm I am searching out things...looking for something that doesn't suck...or at least doesn't suck enough for me to turn the channel.

Tonight, thanks to a posting on Facebook, someone pointed me in the direction of http://live.twit.tv.  I thought "why not, it's either freaking American Idol, which I hate, or some crap on cable about UFOs or Monsters...."  So over I switched to watch Leo Laporte, a guy I listen to weekly on This Week in Tech.  Well I hve just spent the last 3.5 hours watching Leo Laporte and his various guests create shows, discuss technology, discuss the podosphere, and basically entertain my nerd brain this entire time.  I actually have had my 50" LCD Sony Wega TV turned off for hours because I've been watching this stream on my Macbook (holy crap, 24% battery left..I better charge).

So is this the future of my nerd entertainment?  Have I just evolved from a nerd that watches Cranky Geeks on my iPod from the toilet, listens to TWIT at work, and generally hits G4 TV every now and then for nerd news delivered by random hot chick into a dude that has spent way too much money on technology to satisfy my nerd entertainment cravings only to spend every waking moment watching video streams of nerd news on the internet instead of watching the cable I pay $130 a month for?  

 Leo Lapore, Twit, the entire Twit.tv network are far more entertaining to this geek than crappy broadcast television.  The few things I actually dig I will probably continue to Tivo and catch when time permits...but my days of watching "Extra Extra" just because it is on at 6:30 and it's either that or Wheel of Fortune, which I can't watch because our stupid dog barks at the door every time a correct letter "ding" dings (the dog thinks it's the freaking doorbell). are completely over.  I think I have truly set my mind at ease with not having to watch my TV and my cable just because it's a big TV and I am paying out the ass for cable programming.

If it sucks, it sucks...and I won't watch.  I will find my own content....I will watch it when I want and how I want....I will not be forced into the mind numbing boredom of crap, crap, crap any more....I, my friends, will watch nerd shows on the internet.  Thank you very much Leo Laporte! 

I recently decided I'd try out the Google Analytics service to see if it was any better than StatCounter.com, who I have used for years.  Much to my delight, the details were about the same.  What did throw me, though, was the key word searches that landed people here on Nerdnology.com.

The #1 item people have come here for was the short review I wrote of the iPhone game "Field Runners" and it seems that "field runners strategy" was the key to people arriving at this .com.  So apparently there is a large market for strategies on iPhone games...at least that iPhone game.  I think due to the fact that I, too, enjoy iPhone games and there is obviously a market for discussion of said games, I might try to do some more iPhone game review blogging in the future.

The second thing that has really driven traffic to this site lately has been the post I did regarding how to tell programmably how many leap years are between two dates. I don't find this overly surprising, as when I was googling suggested solutions prior to writing my own code, I didn't see very much.  It's nice knowing that spending the time to write code to solve my problem and sharing it with the world might be helping out some other programmers out there.

The biggest single day hit came when I posted about how my 4-year-old daughter was going to switch to Linux on her PC, the "orange one" as she refers to Ubuntu.  This hit didn't come from Google search terms, though.  It came from a posting I did over at www.digg.com, located here, and netted nearly 500 hits in a matter of a few days.  It also gained me the most Diggs for any of the 23 posts I've done over there with a whopping grand total of 59!  haha.  So there is also a blogging market for cute stories about 4-year-old girls preferring one OS to another.

Another interesting tidbit of information relating to traffic and this site is that the video podcast I worked on for a while and eventually published to YouTube, episode 1 of Nerdnology was about the Roku Netflix player, only netted about 550 views on YouTube.  Amazingly, though, my 9 minute long no audio, only songs playing in the background, unibody MacBook unboxing has had over 11,000 views on YouTube!

So taking these things into consideration, it appears that there is for sure a market for things written about the iPhone, iPhone games, cute stories of kids and computers, and people love to look at Macs.   And it seems that these are all things I enjoy too.  Knowing this, I may attempt to refocus this blog into something a little more friendly to people interested in such things and less on my quest for a Wii.  It would sure be nice to get traffic here on a variety of topics, though.  Perhaps I just need to adjust the way I ping the internet so Google will grab my posts in a more meaningful way.

That's all for now, just sharing... 

I was rocking some Keith and the Girl this morning, one of my favorite comedy podcasts…a couple in NYC doing a show from their home.  Great, great stuff...my daily delight.  15 minutes into Episode 896 and I hear a weird noise…then I hear nothing.  Nothing at all.  I glance at my iTouch screen and it’s black.  I try the center button, nothing.  I try the top reset button….nothing.  I try plugging it into my charger even though I know it’s got a full charge….nothing.

I quickly went through my mental checkbook, realized it would be 4 pay periods before I could part with $220 (recent Wii purchases have killed me financially), and nearly splattered my drawers.  2 months without an iTouch?  No way, can’t do it.  I’m too hooked.  My Podcasts, my Pandora, my AOL Radio, my other apps.  Just 13 months into owning my first piece of Apple equipment, the iTouch purchased in January 2008, I realize how much I need the iTouch.  After just a seconds worth of thinking about it, I need my October purchased MacBook. 

Apple HAS me.  I have become so dependent on my daily routines, which center around having the iTouch in my ear nearly all day and the MacBook connected to my fingers all night, that I can't fathom what it would be like not to have my iTouch...not to have my Macbook.  If it came right down to it, if my iTouch crapped out on me this morning, I'd be going to the Apple Store over lunch, buying the newest 8GB iTouch, and then spending the next 3 weeks eBaying things from around the house that "I don't really need" in order to finance the "emergency" iTouch purchase.  Am I disgusting?  Am I sick in the head?

Yea, I have a few other MP3 players laying around that would do the job (sort of) to get my daily podcasts pushed into my brain that I could use while I save up $50 at a time in order to pay cash for a new iTouch...but they're nowhere near as epic as the iTouch. I realy feel that going from an iTouch to anything else would be such a downgrade, such a step backwards, the perfect example of devolution that I just couldn't handle it.

Luckily after holding the button on front and the button on top for about 10 seconds, the lovely, glorious shiny, silver Apple logo appeared on the dark screen and moments later I was back into the Keith and the Girl episode.  Now, though, I am worried that the year old iTouch is on the brink of death.  I better start saving up for the inevitable now...

Apple flat out has me.

As you may have read, I have been having quite a bit of trouble over the last month regarding my 4-year-old daughter's computer.  So much trouble, in fact, that I have wiped the drive clean multiple times putting on Ubuntu, gOS, openSuse, and even Windows 7 Beta.  None of these OSes, would play "very well" ripped DVD backups of the movies in my daughter's collection.  And due to incredibly annoying wireless network card support not working right out of the box for any of the Linux fair, I never actually got her machine connected to the net with any Linux os.  A complaint for another post...

 Anyway, this whole time, I assumed there was an issue with the operating systems just not being suited to read the drive as well as XP always had in the past.

I should have known better....a quick peak at the external hard drive's remaining space using Windows 7 Beta's quick glance at remaining hard disk space feature, the one really cool thing about Windows 7 Beta, I noticed that I only had about 7% of free disk space left on the hard drive.  From past experience, I was aware such limited free space on any drive will cause problems so I decided first thing I'd do was to defrag the drive, move some movies off, then defrag it again.  Unfortunately, it appeared that the defrag option in Windows 7 Beta didn't work.  It froze up at 9% and never got any further, even after leaving it on all night.

Figuring it was a Windows 7 Beta problem, I broke down and put XP back on her machine (yet again) and tried to open the "My Book" drive for a quick view, but the drive wouldn't open.  Confused, I moved the "My Book" over to the Mac, connected it, and nothing happened.  Back to the XP machine for an additional confirmation and sure enough, the drive appears dead, dead, dead.

So I've lost all of the DVD backups of my daughter's movie collection.  It looks like the night for me will consist of hours and hours worth of rubbing tooth paste on old DVDs trying to buff out the scratches and then hoping they aren't damaged to the point where I won't be able to get a working movie file for playback on her computer.

Oh, as far as a Windows 7 review, it looks kind of pretty, very Vista like for my taste.  I was bummed doing something as simple as defragging a hard drive failed.  Oh, I was also incredibly disappointed that I had to use a Vista driver for my network adapter and that driver, apparently, sucked mucho poocho.  In attempting to stream Netflix via IE in Windows 7 Beta, the network connection dropped every couple of seconds, which forced Netflix to attempt to reestablish the connection.  This made streaming Netflix to Windows 7 Beta impossible.  Oddly, now that XP is back on the machine and the XP wireless network adapter is installed, streaming Netflix to the XP machine once again works fine (so far).  So it is entirely possible that the driver support for Windows 7 Beta is less than stellar.  Only time will tell.

It won't matter to me, though, because my next machines (for the foreseeable future) will probably all be Macs. 

Since I found the Wii, I have been thinking about trying out the Wii Fit, as I am about 50 bills overweight, I could stand to loose a few pounds.  Granted, if I stopped eating out for lunch all the time, stopped stuffing my face at the wonderful and glorious China Buffet all the time, cut back on the luscious nectar of the gods (I've been on a Heineken Light kick lately), and ended my late night snacking of peanuts and M&Ms, I'd probably loose a few lbs naturally.  But in order to really look like the stud I am inside this pudgy Stay Puffed Marshmellow Man exterior I'm currently sporting, I'm going to actually have to get off my butt.  What better way to do it than to make a game of it?  In steps the Wii Fit concept.

So my quest began earlier this week, much the same way as when I attempted to obtain the Wii itself.  If you didn't catch my antics then, here's the link.  I was talking to a friend of mine at work, J, the same girl who blew her eye to smithereenes playing Guitar Hero.  She stated she'd been given the thumbs up by her hubby to acquire the Fit and it was her mission to find one.  Shortly after our visit, I was speaking with my wife on the phone and after putting the initial bug in her ear, I was able to conclude the conversation with a "Do whatever you have to do" style answer...you see, my lovely bride is of the opinion that spending money on video games isn't a very adult thing to do, especially since she wants new carpet in the house.  But I worked on her, got the "whatever you have to do" I was looking for, and I promptly began my mission.

Google bombing local stores, placing phone calls, and even driving to a Best Buy that was supposed to have the device according to their website netted me nothing.  I even took 1/2 a day (not entirely specifically to get the Wii Fit...there were other reasons too) to allow for some searching time to no avail.  At one point in the afternoon, my PDA rang with an email from J, still at work, who informed me that a Game Stop just up the street from where I would be had some and that she was heading there over her lunch to acquire one.  I had to go pick my Linux using daughter from preschool right in that area about an hour after that.  And even though I was on a vicious time limit to return in order for my wife to head out for her thing, I grabbed my daughter from pre-school, bolted up the road pushing the limits of my alloted time, ran into the Game Stop with my daughter and asked the guy behind the counter if they had any Wii Fit.

He informed me that they had just sold out that day...  I asked him if the last one was sold to a girl "about this high".  He confirmed.  The last one, it would appear, was picked up by my friend J just a short time before I arrived!  She's got my damn Wii Fit!  And of course, she stopped by my cube this morning to tell me all about it's gloriousness.

So my mission will continue this weekend, as I await the arrival of the Sunday paper and the various ads inside, hoping to spot one place advertising that they do indeed have the Wii Fit in stock.  I can see it's going to be another 8am Sunday morning trip 1/2 way across town to a random store to try to get this stupid game.  I sure hope it's 4.8 out of 5 stars turns out to be worth all of this effort!

-Corby- 

 PS On a funny note, as J was describing using her Wii Fit last night, she stated it was confusing at first because every time she had to step left, her Mii would step right and visa versa.  So she played several of the beginning games in this sort of reverse mode, thinking that just must be the way the Wii Fit works.  It wasn't until her husband informed her of the fact that she probably had the Wii Fit board backwards that things really started to come together for her.  I suppose just turning the board 180 degrees seemed too simple of a fix...who knows.  But yes apparently you can have the Wii Fit board backwards just like J did.  ROFL.  

The 5-year-old PC in my daughter’s room, her PBSKids.com and “Daddy, I want to watch a movie you ripped from my DVDs I’ve since destroyed because I can’t put anything away properly and they’ve all become scratched beyond repair” computer, pissed me off for the last time last night.

All I wanted to do was open up the E: drive, an external hard drive where I have all of her DVD movies backed up, a practice I highly recommend if you've got a child.  They WILL destroy their DVDs so if you don't want to be out the $20 each, make an .mpg backup of them!  For whatever reason, this simple task of loading a movie for her caused Explorer to freeze (not responding) and it was like pulling teeth trying to get it to quit being a pain in the neck with CTRL+ALT+DEL repeatedly.  After a few minutes of fighting with it, I actually pulled the plug out of the wall in disgust.  I have never been so angry attempting to do a task (start a movie) that should literally take 15 seconds (Click drive, click folder, click sub folder, click movie to launch VLC and play) as I was last night after minutes of angrily fighting with the idiotic, frozen XP box...  My poor daughter, who was looking forward to some Wall-E, was instead stuck watching the 50-year-old "Snow White" on VHS as her settle down for the night movie.

I am officially moving my iTouch to my Macbook this coming weekend (currently on my daughter’s XP box)…something I’ve been holding off doing but now will make it official.  I am putting the kid on Linux full time.  Installing VLC should handle all of the .mpg and .avi file formats http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ so I should be good to go.  It’ll even handle the DVDs she hasn’t yet scratched beyond repair.  She can have her PBS kids, she can watch her backup .mpg movies while using the original DVDs as coasters for her sippy cups, and if she does want to stream some Netflix, I am going to figure out how to get Safari to run on WINE and stream that way (as Netflix only works with Safari on a Mac and IE in windows).  http://phorolinux.com/how-to-run-safari-in-linux-using-wine.html

That's right, my 4-year-old daughter is switching to Ubuntu Linux.

So after slamming every store in Omaha over their lack of Wiis and giving the kid at one particular Walmart a hard time over his belief that they'd have the Wii "tomorrow early", I phoned said Walmart at 8:01am the following day, got the same kid, and sure enough he said they had just put a few out.  I, being a guy and very happy about the fact that at any given moment I am 3 minutes (max) away from leaving the house, tossed on my Misfits hat, flip flops (faster than shoes and socks...and yea, it's Jan. in Nebraska...not a smart idea), and jetted 13 minutes across town, a drive that should have taken 22 minutes.

When I arrived at the Walmart, I swear I saw two dads dropping off boys aged, perhaps 12, from different cars.  I just knew those little bastards were on a Wii hunt, too.  Knowing that if I cut through the sheets and pillows area, I'd be able to cut of about 15 seconds worth of walk time, I opted to bail left when those two boys went right.

Much to my surprise, they weren't headed towards the land of Wii, as I didn't see them in the Entertainment area.  So I go to the counter, ask the guy if they had any Wiis, and he said "Yes, right this way sir."  Now after my initial desire to punch him in the head for calling me 'sir', I'm only 32 after all, I followed him to the Wii case, watched him unlock the glass box, and pull out a very Mac-like Wii package.  I politely declined, twice, the extended warranty, plopped out my xmas money that had been burning a whole in my pocket for weeks, and exited the Walmart with my Wii. 

Quick, simple review of what I've seen so far...  Wii sports is fun.  Tennis = Aces.  Baseball = Aces.  Bowling = OK.  Boxing = not into.  Golf = fun but my 4-year-old daughter likes it better than I do...probably because she beats the tar out of me in it.  Wii Play = kind of worthless except for the fact you get a second Wii controller.  Mario Galaxy = aces.  A blast, so fun.  Worth it if you are a Mario fan from the 80s like me.  They have come so far...

Well, that's it.  I got the Wii, me and my daughter enjoy playing it, and now I'm working on building a wii bowling league management website for my wife's co-workers, all of whom are Wii league bowlers, but are forced to email scores to one poor sucker with a massive Excel document and apparently way too much time on her hands...

-Corby- 

Venting time, appologies in advance.  I am working on a website that is driving me crazy....as all of my past GoDaddy Windows hosted .NET website have been.  I blew nearly $200 last year getting away from GoDaddy hosting in order to get decent database support for my Visual Studio 2005 because I was so damn frustrated.  Here I am again, a year later, doing something completely different but needing cheap hosting, .NET 2.0, c#, Visual Studio 2005 and I'm back to GoDaddy hosting because I am poor.  Surprise surprise, I can't connect to my mySQL database with VS, I have to jump through hoops to even read a table and I have just blown 3 hours google searching how to get an Insert to work.  Did I mention I'm a .NET web developer for a living who deals in SQL every freaking day???

 I now recall why I plopped out the $200 for discountasp.net hosting last year.  GoDaddy Windows hosting when it comes to working with Visual Studio 2005 and asp.net websites SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS....  I am so pissed right now, I'm giving up for the night.  This is just flat out stupid.

Just found this out, thought I'd share.  For some reason, iTunes skipped downloading a podcast episode last night of http://www.keithandthegirl.com and since I have listened to every show of theirs in order, all 871 of them so far, this freaked me out.  872 was missing, but 873 was there.  So I went to iTunes using my iTouch, selected the episode for download, and off it went.  A few minutes later I thought it would be a good time to update any Apps I have on the device.  Two updates were available and when  hit the "Update All", the iTouch crashed back to the desktop.  Tried again, same result, tried again, same result.

It appears that, unlike a PC/Mac that can handle downloads from multiple sources and stores them in some sort of queue, the iTouch / iPhone doesn't have this ability.  If you're downloading App store updates, you can't download a podcast from iTunes at the same time....and visa versa, as I described above.  The apps are so independent of each other and the iTouch / iPhone seem not to notice or care, that nothing running on the device knows what else is running on the device and when you do something super crazy like try to download a podcast and update your apps at the same time, all hell breaks loose.

I guess I shouldn't complain...The podcast download is nearly done, I'll be listening to my show in no time, and then  can update my app store apps.  I just found it odd that such a whicked cool device like my iTouch can only download one thing at a time...

Over the last 3 days, I have made approximately 11 physical store visits and another 40 phone calls to Game Stop locations, Best Buy stores, Walmarts, Targets, Shopkos, ToysRUs, shopping malls, and anything else under the sun I can think of that might sell gaming systems.  Not one, not a single one, has the Nintendo Wii for sale and 95% of them claim they have no idea when more will be coming in.  Two of the Walmarts I spoke with said to come in at 7am tomorrow (Sunday) and they "should" have 3-4 but taking that claim and putting it up against the "no idea" I got out of all the other stores, I somehow doubt the Walmart employee manning the electronics counter on a Saturday afternoon really knows much about anything.  

In fact, the same claim came from my local Best Buy during one of my calls yesterday..."We've got a truck coming in tonight.   Get here when the store opens and I'm sure you'll get one."  So 8:30am rolls around today, I bundle up my 1-year-old as momma and the 4-year-old were still sleeping and off to Best Buy we go.  Surprise....I arrive, the spot on the shelf that is supposed to hold a massive 2 Wii boxes is empty, and I hear from the girl running that area stacking Guitar Hero boxes literally to the rafters "No, no idea why she told you we'd have some today....we never really know what's on the trucks."

Question, why are there 800 Guitar Hero boxes if there's not a freaking Wii in this city to connect them to?!?!  UG! 

My frustration level with finding a Wii a week after Christmas has just reached it's tipping point.  I am a 32-year-old guy, nostalgic about Nintendo, excited for a Wii, and I've even got my wife and 4-year-old daughter on board with the $250 purchase (amazingly!).  But what is a man to do when he has $250 cash ready to plunk out for a gaming system and 40 phone calls and 11 trips to the store later, I have no Wii to show for it? 

Even alternatives like eBay and Craig's List are netting little results, though oddly if I were so inclined I can find a 400lb man on Craig's List to punch me repeatedly with chicken livers while singing Black Flag's "Who's Got The 10 1/2?" that appears to be no problem.  *shrug*  At best, there are Wiis listed on Amazon $100 overpriced, on eBay $300 overpriced, and the most promising post on Craig's List from Dec 24th for my area had the Wii up for $700.  Riiiight.

So I am Wii-less, yet don't want to be.  I find this a very odd situation.  I want something that I can not have, yet I know there are countless bratty, spoiled, snot-nosed 12-year-old ungrateful boys just down the street in every direction, in my very own neighborhood no doubt, playing their Xbox or Playstation 3s while their new Wiis sit left unattended to and unloved.  The world, it appears, is unfair.  What will I ever do for fun?!  Maybe I'll call up that guy and let him beat me up with the chicken livers...

Two weeks ago, I posted a video podcast episode discussing the Roku player, how it worked, the ease of setup, and so on.  After having two weeks with the device, I thought I'd write a quick review regarding having the entity as a living piece of technology in the house.

First off, I still love the form factor of the player.  It's very small, smaller than most external USB hard drives I've got scattered around the house.  The built-in wi-fi is genius, the connection options are great, and the remote is so simple, a 4-year-old child could (and has, in my house) run it.

Disappointing, though, is the Netflix selection.  On Christmas day, I had a handful of family members over, movie buffs all of us.  With their curiosity fueling the fire, they tossed out movie after movie to me as I searched each one on Netflix to see if it was possible to stream.  Much to everyone's disappointment, 85% of the films they named were NOT available to stream.  Netflix would happily mail them to me, but not deliver them to my Roku on demand.  Now please note, these were not all brand spanking right from the box office movies like Iron Man or The Dark Night (neither are streamable at the moment).  We hit some oldies but goodies like One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest, Annie Hall, Dances With Wolves, Top Gun, and even Porky's for God's sake!  None were available to stream.  These movies are 20+ years old and any viable financial benefit to keeping them in the "for mail only" category is just flat out crazy!

Not being a business man, I really don't know much about how Netflix determines what they turn into streamable items and what they don't.  I'd sure like to know so if any of you have inside info or links to details, please post in the comments.  

So after two weeks with the Roku, I still give it a 10 for 10 when not taking the lacking Netflix content into consideration.  I'd have to give it a 4 of 10 when you do take into consideration the poor movie selection.  If Netflix would please be so kind as to focus on getting a LOT more movies in their stream queue and focus less on getting old episodes of Family Ties (yes, I'm serious...you can now get season 1 of Family Ties streamed to you....but no ALF?!?!  WTF?), they'll have a LOT more success selling Roku players.

On a good note, I can and have been streaming the first season of Dr. Who...and had I paid $4.25 per DVD (I think there are 4 episodes on a DVD) it would have already cost me about $15....so in terms of financial savings buying the Roku vs. renting from the local Hollywood Video, the Roku has almost paid nearly 1/6 for itself so far just in Dr. Who episodes alone.  Though it must be said I can't stream any Battlestar Galactica nor Stargate.  *sigh*.  Netflix, get your stuff together and start digitizing your ENTIRE library.  You will, only then, slay Blockbuster... 

As a recovering gamer addict, 3 years straight playing Everquest, I am well aware of what it is like to take gaming a bit too far.  I may or may not have been guilty of skipping school to raid Fire Giants, ensuring an empty Gatoraide bottle was close at hand for long spawn camping, and constructing a cone blanket apparatus hovering above my head and vented the tip of the cone out the apartment window with PVC pipe melted and bent with a series of Bic lighters in order to have a cigarette every now and then without having to leave my gaming chair.   Extreme is one thing, physical harm is another.  

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with a co-worker, J, about how her holiday weekend went.  Her excitement about receiving a Wii for Christmas could not be contained.  As she described the glorious moments of bowling and tennis, I swelled with jealousy.  I've been trying to talk my lovely bride into a Wii for our family for several months, to no avail.  J went on to describe how she had purchased for herself and her fiance the acclaimed "Guitar Hero" just after getting their new Wii.  As she mentioned this, I noticed that one of her eyes looked as though she had been assaulted with a fork, perhaps a rock slung from a distance.  To avoid being rude with the "Your eye looks like hell, what did you do?", as I'd prefer to stay on her good side because I thoroughly enjoy her occasional visits to my otherwise droll cubical, I left well enough alone and didn't inquire about her apparent injury.

As our conversation continued, she began to detail an account of a 5-hour Guitar Hero playing spree she and her hubby-to-be went on just days before.  As she described rocking out to the various tunes, mastering the easy and medium levels, discussing thrashing with GNR's Slash, and demonstrating not only her whammy bar action, but also the guitar neck horse reigns motion (my only possible description for how she illustrated wrenching the neck of the guitar in Marty McFly fashion circa the Enchantment Under The Sea finale guitar solo from Back To The Future), she gestured to her eye, bloodshot like it had escaped a drunken sailor and crawled into her socket looking for respite.  

She stated that during their 5-hour rock session, she felt something a bit funny in her eye and began to get a migraine headache.  It was shortly thereafter that her man, B, noticed her eye suffering from what appeared to be some form of inner explosion.  J had rocked so hard, so long, that she had burst a blood vessel in her eyeball.

When I asked how in the hell she managed to cause a blood vessel to explode while playing a video game, her response was simply, "I think I just forgot to blink....for 5 hours." 

Her sight turned out not to be a casualty from the holiday weekend and the Guitar Hero rocking, though the same could not be said for the entire bottle of Visine eye drops she continuously applied one drop at a time to her suffering socket dweller in order to look presentable for work on Monday post Christmas.

This is indeed a true story.  Guitar Hero nearly blinded my friend, J.

-Corby- 

I unbox, display, discuss and connect my new Roku Netflix video streaming player!

YouTube link:  YouTube video!

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I've had an idea about creating a Digg-style social news network called www.BlogFloat.com devoted to New Media, bloggers, podcasters, video podcasters, social networks, and the like, for a while now and until recently couldn't muster up the man hours it would take to create one from scratch using the tools I am most familiar with (Visual Studio and ASP.NET). After the extensive programming I did on my Twitter-like site, www.bubeasy.com, I was sure this idea would remain in the idea realm and never materialize (like oh so many of my other concepts).

In search of an alternative route, I recently stumbled onto an article on Digg titled How to Build and Launch a Social News Site in 21 Days.

After reading the article and doing the mental calculations on how I could grab 21 days worth of time from my normally hectic schedule, I set out to research a bit more about the Content Management System featured in the article, Social Web CMS. I came to the conclusion that due to the fact I would be using a shared hosting account at GoDaddy and not having to run my own server (which would involve installing PHP, mySQL, and who knows what else), I should be able to get something up and running over a weekend.

Step one was to download and install the files on a free hosting GoDaddy account I had associated with another domain name. I wanted to test out the SWCMS before I plopped out any cash for the adventure and since I already had a Windows hosting credit, I thought why not? Unfortunately, after hours of heartache and visits to the SWCMS forum, with lots of support from a variety of folks over there, I opted to go ahead and buy the domain name I wanted, www.BlogFloat.com, along with some Linux hosting.

From there, I uploaded the files (I had some trouble using Filezilla on a Mac, as it seemed to only be willing to upload one sub-directory....if there were sub-directories within sub-directories, I had to manually upload them), did some slight tweaking, and then set out to Admin the new site. With great pleasure, everything seemed to work quite well.

I set out to try to tweak the graphics of the site by finding some Pligg-based templates on the web. After trying this one and that one, finding that things like the nav menu became broken or that certain pages wouldn't load at all, I re-uploaded the original files and basically started from scratch. Actually, I went through this procedure several times over the weekend as any time I seemed to tweak anything with a non standard template, things went to hell. Not that there is anything wrong with SWCMS, nor the templates, but I have been in the .NET world for a very long time and my PHP skills are foggy.

Administering the site proved simple, too. There is a module store that allows you to easily add existing modules to the new site, pretty much every setting for the site you can imagine is located in the Language menu, and the only notepad editing I had to do for the entire site was to re-write the FAQ page to suit my site's needs.

So over a weekend, purchasing the domain name and hosting on a Friday, tweaking, testing, and reloading from scratch a few times on Saturday, Sunday rolled around and I was pretty happy with the admin settings and layout (the default template “yget” is just pretty, I like it). I spent the day attempting to upload blog post links, editing a bit more in the Admin section, and that was it.

I showed off my new site to a few friends at work and was met with “wow” and “how long?” responses. The next step for the success of the site is to build the user network. My intention is to hit up every podcaster forum I can find, contact podcasters I know personally and ask for their support, and somehow I need to get the word out to the blogosphere, as such users would really, really find a site like this handy.

Imagine as a blogger that you are able to write a post, then post it at www.BlogFloat.com with a nice description and rise in popularity on the page based on the content of your writing. If people like it, you get hits. If not, then you try again with your next blog post.

I'm exicted about the future of www.BlogFloat.com. If anyone is interested in more details on how I made it work, feel free to contact me. Or, heck, just write a blog post, post it over at BlogFloat.com and I'll see it!

-Corby-

After some initial trouble getting things up and running, mostly due to issues with GoDaddy Windows hosting, I just wrapped up another $$ spending session and have purchased a domain name and Linux hosting for a new website that will use the Social Web CMS backbone.  The site will be like Digg but I am going to attempt to target it to bloggers.  Yes, most of what you will find on Digg is from national news sources, with some blog entries being found here and there...I want this new site, to be named shortly, to be specific to the bloggers, podcasters, and video casters of the world...but of course, all submissions will be welcome.

I'm exicted about the new adventure and hope to be able to release the domain name very soon.  Thanks to all the guys over at the Social Web CMS forum, especially Ash, for his answers to my many questions.  Thanks guys!  (By the way, guys, more questions to follow on the forum.  haha)

 -Corby- 

For the last few days I have been trying to get a Content Management System installed on my GoDaddy Windows hosting account to play around with a Digg-style blog submission website idea I have.  After days of headaches, I had nearly given up completely on Social Web CMS.  I opted to try just one more CMS, one called PHPDug and during the install process I had the same issue.  The only difference was that PHPDug provided a Google-able error message that netted me a working answer!

What was the error message?  

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

 After a Google search, I found my answer.

It turns out that there is an issue with the way MYSQL databases handle passwords.  In order to get the PHPDug installer to work, and the Social Web CMS I am assuming (about to try that next), all I had to do was open my database on GoDaddy, go to the SQL statement page, and enter:

SET PASSWORD = OLD_PASSWORD('MyPassword');

...where MyPassword was replaced by my actual database password.  I executed it and POW, I can see my Install screen!

Hopefully this post will help someone else down the road.  I have literally spent days trying over and over, deleting and recreating databases on GoDaddy.  Now, though, it all seems to work! 

-Corby-