Jun 22, 2007

Viddler

I started uploading family movies at Google Video recently for my family to enjoy. One thing I hate about Google Video and YouTube is that there is no way to share video without the person watching the video to be bombarded by other video's and comments that are inappropriate for all eyes.

I was happy to discover Viddler today. I'm going to give it a try to see how well it works. Let me know if you've had any experience that would help me know if this is the online video panacea I've been searching for.

Disable the Windows Key

I have been using Parallels for some time now and one annoying thing I keep running into is that when I use cmd+tab or cmd+anything while Parallels is active, Windows thinks that I'm hitting their windows key and pops up my start menu.

Since I never use a hot key for the start menu, I started to look for a way to disable it. Sure enough, I found a way. I found this web site that shows you how to do it. Basically it's a registry hack. So I created a reg file that can be imported that does the trick. Create a file with a .reg extension. Then add the following lines:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,00,5B,E0,00,00,5C,E0,00,00,00,00

Save the file and then double-click it in Windows and, of course, reboot. I know this worked on Windows XP. I'm not sure if it will work on Vista.

Jun 21, 2007

New Look! New Feature!

I updated my blog today to show a new look and feel.  I also added a new feature that I love.  I started to use Google Reader as my RSS aggregator about 2 weeks ago.  I used to use iGoogle but I thought I would try a real reader for a while to see if I liked it.  The feature that I added to the blog is the Recent Articles of Interest.  This just shows articles from the "Shared" folder in Google Reader.  Very nice.

Worklight Puts Web 2.0 on Corporate Data

I stumbled upon a new product by Serendipity Technologies called Worklight.

Worklight is a secure and scalable server based software product that provides workers and consumers with 'Web 2.0-style' access to corporate data stored in enterprise information systems and applications... Worklight extracts information from enterprise applications and serves it in a secure and personalized fashion using a host of web 2.0 technologies, both inside and outside the firewall. Personnel are able to easily define their own application views, and then display them through tools like RSS aggregators, popular web based personalized homepages, or desktop gadgets.
(taken from the Worklight Product Sheet - registration is required to see the product sheet!)


The architecture is pretty simple and it's very close to my Event Based Reporting idea. Basically, you build a server product that aggregates snapshots of data from different data sources and applications. Then you feed those snapshots via RSS feeds, Web Services, and the like.

I really think this approach is the future of data delivery. Of course there will always be a need for printed reports, but actionable data needs to be delivered in more general and malleable forms so that tech-saavy managers can gain the competitive edge they need.

Looking for a new blog host

I'm looking for a new place to host my blog.  I'm really into free blogging and I love Blogger, but I can't find any nice free tools that I can use to post to the blog from OS X.  

I use Journler to write all of my blog posts, but it has stopped supporting Blogger.  The application recommends LiveJournal (or any other metaWeblog compatible site), but I have yet to see a LiveJournal blog that isn't exceptionally ugly.

Does anyone have any ideas or can point me in the right direction?