stuart test blog

I am now the proud owner of a FeedDemon 2 license! I’ve been trying to decide on a feed reader recently and with so many cool online readers available I thought I didn’t need an offline version. But at the end of the day, nothing beats a full, desktop application for speed and functionality. And the great thing about FeedDemon is that it synchronises with NewsGator Online which means I can always stay up to date even if I don’t have FeedDemon installed. I’ve also been experimenting with some of the interesting FeedDemon features, like the keyword searches that use one of several blog search tools to present you with a feed based on what keyword you enter. I’ve set up three for microsoft, apple, and google for the time being and I’ll see how that goes before playing with it more.

I also picked FeedDemon because the parent company, NewsGator, seems to integrate nicely with other software too. They recently demoed their online service synching with IE7, but the coolest thing is that I can add any feed to my account by using the Google toolbar in Firefox. A subscribe button on the toolbar is highlighted every time I visit a site which has a feed available, and all it takes is a click on the toolbar and I’m redirected to the NewsGator site where I can choose what folder I want to keep the feed in – very handy indeed!

Some of my favourite technologies at the moment are RSS/Atom/ICal – I’m really enjoying how I can synchronise data across all sorts of platforms and applications. The only thing that would make it perfect is if I could subscribe to my Plaxo calendar through ICal – I’ve raised this as a request on their forums.

I use Netvibes as my home page, and I highly recommend you check it out. I’ve been using it for the last six months and it has grown from strength to strength. I have also tested out all of the other home page services available and none of them compare to Netvibes. I use it to aggregate all of my data in one easy to use view. I can access my Gmail, my Icals (not Plaxo yet), my del.icio.us bookmarks, as well as a handful of my favourite feeds, such as Digg, Engadget, and TechCrunch. If this is what Web 2.0 is all about, I love it!

We went to see the Rolling Stones in Wellington yesterday, and what a concert it was!!! They are definitely still the greatest rock band ever – the concert rocked from Jumping Jack Flash opening track, right through to the encore of Satisfaction.

I first saw them in 1995 on their Voodoo Lounge tour and I was very impressed that the same supporting band had stuck together too. Not sure if I’ll get to see them again so I’m glad that this concert was such a banging one.

I won’t write too much about this as there is so much being blogged already, but Apple have just released a product called Bootcamp which gives users of the newly updated Mac operating system a graphical utility to repartition your disk and prepare it for the installation of Windows XP.

No more needing to hack the bios or anything else like that, and although Apple isn’t supporting Windows XP on new Intel Macs, they are providing the tools to do it for free. More reading here…

• On Memeorandum
• Boot Camp Beta Installation & Setup Guide (PDF)
• Apple’s official announcement

This was widely accepted to happen sooner or later, but Microsoft have today announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 will now be available as a free download. As both the Enterprise and Standard editions will now be free, the Standard edition is becoming redundant as there is no reason why you would run Standard instead of Enterprise. So only the Enterprise Edition is being made available as a free download.

This definitely makes the virtualisation game a lot more interesting now. VMware recently discontinued the GSX line of their software, instead releasing a free version called VMware Server. This version only runs on server operating systems and provides a similar feature set to Virtual Server. VMware though, are still selling VMware Workstation and the top-of-the-line ESX server – Workstation is designed for use with desktop computers, whereas ESX Server is designed to run on large, enterprise-level servers. Microsoft doesn’t yet have a competitor for ESX – ESX includes a Linux kernel that it boots off so there is no need to run ESX on a server operating system.

In my own tests, VMware has always outperformed Virtual Server or Virtual PC, so I don’t think that VMware is any trouble at the moment. But the recently introduced support of Linux operating systems under Virtual Server, definitely makes the Microsoft package more attractive to those Microsoft-shops out there.

I just noticed this on the Microsoft Connect site – Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. Previously these additions have only ever been available for Windows guest operating systems, so this is a big deal that Microsoft is now working on the Linux versions.

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OK – so this may be getting a bit boring… but I have heaps of different invites available to give out to interested people. I have the following:
* 100 Google Gmail invites
* 5 Windows Live Mail invites
* 10 Windows Live Messenger invites

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My previous post about Plaxo joined in with the blogosphere’s opinion that Plaxo needed to apologise for their spam they had knowingly sent out. This morning I discovered that Plaxo’s CEO had made a full, public apology – even to the point of making a dig at themselves with a picture of flying pigs in the post.

This apology is greatly appreciated from someone who has both been the receiver and unintentional sender of such spam. I’m sure this will be good for Plaxo’s business. Thanks.

Links:

• My previous post.
• Plaxo’s original post
• Plaxo’s CEO, Ben Golub’s apology

Blog post from the beta @ amanzi site looking at the new co.mments service which allows you to keep track of blog posts and comments.

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I love YouTube! You can find some of the most amazing and funny clips on the site. Without YouTube I would never have seen these…

• Microsft iPod parody
• Chris Bliss the juggler. (To appreciate this, you should watch this one first.)
• Natalie Imbruglia – “Torn” being ‘signed’ by a comedian
• Robot dance

Plaxo have made a couple of high visibility blog posts today saying that they are restricting the amount of automatic emails (a.k.a. SPAM) get sent out by users of their service. This seems like a good thing but it’s the way that they went about it that is leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.

A summary of Todd Masonis’s post today reveals the following facts:

• Plaxo have known for a long time that they were spamming people
• But it’s OK – they were only spamming people to build up their customer base
• Now that they have enough customers, they’ll stop spamming you
• They also want to be good net-citizens, that’s their other reason for stopping the spam
• If you had joined Plaxo sooner, they would have stopped spamming you
• And by the way, it wasn’t Plaxo spamming you – it was their customers.
• (Did I mention that they’re not sorry about it either?)

I’ve been using the Plaxo service for the last couple of years and have unintentionally spammed my entire address book a couple of times, and have been flamed for it too. Especially from the people that I have no reason to stay in contact with! Plaxo have always made it too easy to spam your address book – I have never seen a warning message pop up that says: “You are about to send out hundreds of emails – are you sure you want to do this?”

But moving on, they say they are going to stop the spam and that’s a good thing. Apart from that, Ive always enjoyed using their service – it works great for keeping your Outlook data synchronised between multiple computers or profiles. Let’s hope that Plaxo hasn’t caused too much of a bad name for itself among the influentials.

UPDATE: Plaxo have now made a public apology, see my post here.