August 2003

It’s a 10GB unit that serves as a removable external hard disk (USB 1.1) but its primary function, for me anyway, is as an MP3 player. It normally sells for $149 on Amazon but they’ve got a $50 Amazon mail-in rebate which brings it down to $99 and at that price it’s not a bad deal. Powered by 4 AA NiMH batteries, it can play for up to 10 hours on a single charge and there’s an Open Source software project that’s been pretty active for quite a while now called Rockbox.

The way it works is you simply plug it in to your PCs USB port and it appears as a removable drive (just like a USB thumbdrive thingy) and you can copy files in and out at well. Later, in your car, for instance, when you want to play something, you use the controls built on to the player and treat it like you would any Walkman or stand-alone CD player. If you wanna store regular files on it, fine … obviously they won’t play but you can do it if you like.

There are larger players but with the $50 mail-in rebate, I just couldn’t beat it.

And for those who are looking for a new opportunity, RSSJobs will search on 4 sites: Monster, Dice, HotJobs and UCSD Job Link (a job board at UC San Diego).

I dunno that I’d go giving them money yet, though. The domain was registered on July 13 of this year (by a guy in (gasp!) San Diego) and it looks like the searches go directly to the standard search facilities of the 4 boards. I’m curious whether the guy that’s started the service has gotten the OK from the targets. Also, there are only 4 boards, there’s no company information (the contact page simply let’s you enter a comment/email) and, on top of everything else, the service is pretty restrictive. For $5/month you only get 10 saved searches, each delivering up to 25 results. For free you get 5 saved searches, each delivering a maximum of 10 results.

Dan Gillmor reports this response he got from Microsoft when he asked them what they were gonna do with/about weblogs.

Pirillo’s really hard at it! He just released this RSS reference site.

Actually called “Windows Mobile 2003 Software for Pocket PC,” this article from the O’Reilly Network is a good overview of the differences between the 2003 release and the 2002 version.

Found DasBlog.net from the ASP.NET weblogs, too. It’s another weblog engine written in C# using the .NET framework.

Just another warning: bloki.com has got their act together on their weblogs so I’ll be moving my weblog soon. I’ll post the new link soon.

Good how-to article here on transforming XML into RSS. Got this from the ASP.NET weblogs.

Netcraft reports in this article that 26% of the sites running Java Server Pages run Windows while only 17% run Solaris. Linux is the clear winner, though, with 40%.

Another good set of info from today’s Lockergnome Tech Specialist. First, this link to a procedure to “convert” your Windows 2003 Server to a Workstation and then a link to the Microsoft Help DLL database where you can look up which DLLs are installed and used by which products.