Xobni
I’ve been using the Xobni outlook plug-in for the past couple of weeks. And I love it. A few of the features don’t really work for me (Skype out, mobile number displayed rather than work), but:
- the search feels as fast as LookOut
- threaded conversations are the way email is meant to be read
- attachment discovery adds valuable context about your interaction with a correspondent
And the price is right (for now). If your professional world lives in Outlook, then you need to try Xobni.
Housekeeping
I’ve completed some general housekeeping here at Take the First Step. If I’ve done it correctly, then there will be fewer 404 – Not Found errors around here.
The first step for the budding webmaster is to register your site at Google Webmaster Tools. That will you a window into how Google sees your site. I like to check once a week to make sure that the Googlebot can find everything that it is looking for.
The next step is to learn how to interpret your web server log files. Your mileage may vary, but here’s how I look for 404 errors:
$ zgrep -w 404 access_log.20080512.gz | cut -d ' ' -f7,11 | uniq -c 1 /blog/2004/09/27.html "-" 2 /blog/topic/software/2003/08/18.html "-" 1 /id/1319/jms-providers/ "-" 1 /id/1318/leopard-part-4/ "-" 1 /id/1317/brief-history/ "-" 1 /id/1316/march-drabness/ "-" 1 /id/1315/march-madness-08/ "-"where:
"zgrep -w 404" retrieves lines with the word 404 from my compressed access logs "cut -d ' ' -f7,11" defines a space as field delimiter and retrieves the 7th and 11th fields from those lines "uniq -c" shows the unique lines preceded by the instance count
Here we see some failing radio userland links and a mis-behaving client that is adding a trailing '/' to my page links. A little htaccess magic and the 404's are cured.
Terroir Coffee
terroir: the “sense of place” that geography bestows on the wine, coffee, or tea grown in that place.
My formative years as a coffee drinker were spent at the Coffee Connection in Harvard Square. George Howell, the founder of the Coffee Connection, advocated a lighter roast to bring out the flavor of high quality beans.
When I graduated and moved out to Northern California, I fell under the spell of the darker roasts favored by Alfred Peet. Driven by availability more than choice. And dark roasts were all I drank for the following 20+ years.
So I was thrilled to learn that George Howell was back in business at Terroir Coffee. I ordered a couple of bags and I was very pleased to see that they were roasted only 2 days before they arrived via UPS – apparently roasted the day they were shipped.
The taste – well, I’d have to say that my taste buds are seriously confused. I’ve been drinking dark roasts so long that my decaf La Lapa didn’t really taste like coffee. That being said, I find that I’m actually finishing my coffee rather than dumping out the last third. And I found this morning’s decaf Pike Place espresso quite bitter.
I’m plan to give my taste buds a month to relearn the taste of coffee. I’ll let you know how things turn out.
Open Source JMS Providers
I’d like to take a look at JMS and the leading contenders for an open source JMS provider seem to be:
Circumstances are pushing me to JORAM by a process of elimination:
- ActiveMQ seems to be happiest with Java 1.5
- The last release of OpenJMS seems to have been back in June 2006
- JBoss Messaging appears to only run inside of JBoss
I’ll let you know how things work out.
Leopard Configuration IV
- Map the Caps Lock key to a second Control key via System Preferences.
- To be Continued …
The full configuration list can be viewed at my MacBook Configuration Log.
Brief History of Blogging
GoldBlogging is discoveredGoldBlog rush begins- Early
prospectorsbloggers stake claims - Some get rich, most get blisters, merchants make a bundle selling
- Disillusioned
minersbloggers abandonclaimsblogs - Disputes begin over
ownershiprole in history
I was going to comment on: Writers Blog Till They Drop, but Marc Andreessen got there first: New York Times covers blogging. And I somehow ended up with this. Go figure.
March Drabness
That was a disappointment. I was expecting great things from the 4-13, 5-12 match-ups in the East and South regions. But it didn’t work out that way. All the favorites won handily on Thursday. And the “close” game on Saturday was the 65-54 “upset” of MSU over Pitt. A game that wasn’t as close as the score.
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is one of the great events in sports. And if Denver 2008 was a bit of a disappointment, then it’s only because I was fortunate enough to attend Denver 2004 and Oakland 1990.