Posts from — March 2006

An interesting article on FoxNews.com reports that the absence of an official Trek property may actually be good for the franchise as a whole. It’s an interesting position:

The consensus was they should give the franchise a rest, overwhelmingly. They’d been wringing it out for so long, the ideas were getting less fresh, they needed a period of time to rejuvenate. Everyone expects it to come back, but in 10 years, eight years, giving it time to clean house and let some new ideas be generated.

Indeed, this may not be a bad thing for the franchise, but what about for the fans? The real question is, with Trek out of the picture, Star Wars finshed and the Matrix over, where will SciFi go from here? Battlestar Galactica suddenly seems on center stage – and, it is arguably the best show on television right now. Well, next season, actually.

Topic:
FOXNews.com – Foxlife: Entertainment and Lifestyle News – Fox Features – Star Trek: The Lost Generation

My brother alerted me to this great plug-in for Firefox, from Performancing.com. It easily allows you to blog about any page that you see on the web. Simply right-click and select Blog this page… and you are off and running. In fact, that’s how I’ve created this post.

It will even do things like automatically add Technorati tags, perform trackbacks, etc. Pretty full featured and easy to use. You can see the full page you are blogging about, and yet have a full WYSIWYG editor to work with.

NICE! Thanks Mikey!

Blogged about:
Milowerx Journal » Blog Archive » Performancing Plug-In

OK, so I’m a big fan of WordPress, as most of you know by now.  I switched to it just a few months ago after doing an exhaustive search for a better platform than Blogger, which was really starting to drive me crazy.

Since then, Blogger has gotten a bit worse – timing out with comments and image uploads, etc.  All this was much to the annoyance of my family (specifically one person that shall remain nameless but whose initials are Michael Milo…) and therefore, was much to the annoyance of ME. :)  So, I’ve started doing a wholesale move of people from Blogger to WordPress based blogs, all hosted on Miloco servers.

One problem though – the standard WP post control is really a no-frills kind of a thing.  Most importantly, it’s not very intuitive when it comes to uploading images.  So, given that I would be moving at least 3 more blogs over to WP – blogs that are primarily used by people who don’t want to be bothered with the foibles of technology – I wanted to use a post control that was a little more user friendly.  Enter WYSI-Wordpress.

It’s essentially a “few-frills” replacement for the default WYSIWYG editor – most importantly, it includes an integrated photo upload option that provides a number of ways to easily include pictures in your posts. It even has automatic thumbnail creation based upon your size specification.  Very slick.

While it does include a neat little dictionary.com lookup button, I do wish it contained a full spellcheck option.  MS Word has ruined me for ever being able to spell on mie own.   But, that’s a wishlist, not a complaint.

This little exercise touches on two of the major reason why I choose WordPress – 1) plugins and 2) an active user community.  I really didn’t want to develop this component myself and with the WP user base, I didn’t have to.  All it took was a 5 minute Google search to lead me to a couple of different options before I finally settled on this one.  Problem solved!

Kudos to Joe Schmoe of Mudbomb for the plugin!

UPDATE!:

Just as I finished posting this, I noticed that WP has a spell checker set for it’s 2.1 release.  Of course, if you use this new plugin I’m talking about above, you won’t have access to that.  Choices, choices.  Hopefully Mr. Schmoe will update WYSI-Wordpress to accomodate the new checker.

Russians Gave Saddam US War Plans; Mole in CentCom Suspected

Man, this is NOT what we need right now. I knew that the French, Germans and Russians were in bed with Hussein before the war, but this is simply outrageous.

One would like to think that this (if true) is just the actions of a single person and not reflective of government policy, but who knows? Could this be the signs of a new “cold” war? *SIGH*

UPDATE:

And again?

Saddam General: Newsweek Translation of Saddam Tapes Wrong

Who knows about this information, but bet a load of this:

[Former Iraqi Air Force Gen. Georges] Sada also says that chemical or biological weapons were flown to Syria in 56 flights, but was unable to confirm it.

General Sada’s allegations are confirmed by others. A Pentagon official, John A. Shaw, who was responsible for keeping track of Iraq’s weapons programs, claims that special Russian troops in civilian clothes supervised the transfer of Saddam’s WMDs into Syria. An Israeli general, Moshe Yaalon, has made a similar claim. The general in charge of Pentagon spy satellites has admitted observing large truck convoys from Iraq to Syria before the war began.

Yikes.  I know that there has been certain information about this kind of stuff before, but I hadn’t heard anything about the Russians being involved.

This news is interesting to me for two reasons.  I love both games and animation , and I’ve also worked closely with IBM for the last few years.

IBM has been making a concentrated effort to push further into the SMB market (small & medium size businesses).  This has traditionally been antithetical to their “big business” mentality, but the SMB market is literally huge.  It also carries more low hanging fruit than the typical Fortune 500 company, that has everybody focused on them.

Turns out that IBM is also making this push into the animation and gaming industries, recently signing deals with Hoplon Infotainment, Online Game Services Inc. and RenderRocket.  The deals are around creating “innovative business models” that haven’t necessarily been considered before for companies of this size.  Read this as online gaming, on-demand delivery and increased reliability for existing gaming communities – basically (buzzword alert!) SOA and SAS.

SOA is a service-oriented architecture, meaning that it is specific content fed through a web service.  SOA abstracts the back end platform that the content or application comes from, and in turn, the provided service needs to know very little about the end user or consumer of the service.  This plug-and-play aspect makes it a real favorite for distributed applications.

SAS stands for Software as a Service, meaning something that sounds similar to SOA, but is very different.  SOA is a decoupled application architecture, whereas SAS means on-demand access to remotely hosted applications.  Think of it as starting up Microsoft Word, but not actually having the software installed on your machine.  Someone else makes sure it is up to date, keeps it security patched and is responsible for proper licensing – you just get to enjoy the benefits of use. 

SAS is a neat phenomenon that is really starting to take off – for 2 reasons: 1) it benefits software vendors, who want to create more reliable income streams from their software, and 2) the end user has no IT headaches regarding an SAS application.  Traditionally the realm of large corporations that need to roll out apps to hundreds or thousands of their employees, SAS is being moved into smaller companies because of the efficiency that it provides.  In fact, I expect that we will continue to see this trend move forward over the next few years and trickle down to the average consumer.

Apparently, what’s good for the goose is also good for the sparrow.

The only problem I see with that, is that we may soon have a monthly software bill, in addition to our cable bill, our internet bill, our phone bill, etc…  Progress costs, and make no mistake, the end user always ends up paying for it – whether it is directly billed like your phone or through higher prices of the end goods, it always comes out of our pockets.

Still, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Are you willing to give up your cell phone?

Kudos to IBM for thinking outside of their blue box.

So, just updated to the latest WordPress version.  Please let me know if there are any goofy things happening as a result.   Thanks!

Check out the specifics here.

HAHA!  Ok, this is fun.  Run on over to My Heritage, and see what celebrity you most look like.

My results?  Shocking…

With this image:

I got a 60% match with these distinguished gentlemen:

a 57% match with these guys:

and, my two favorite of all, weighing in at a 53% match:

I knew Denzel Washington reminded me of somebody!

H/T to Gribbit’s Word for the link…

UPDATE!

Jackpot!

To those of you who have come to know and appreciate my inner geek, you’ll love this.  I ran another photo of myself and came up with the jackpot!  A 55%, and two 50% matches for THESE GUYS!

HAHA!  You have no idea how truly thankful I am that Patrick Stewart was a closer match than James Doohan…