A Curious Collection of the Musings of One Jeremy Wise

I’ve held off for some time on upgrading to an iPhone.  The tax for leaving Verizon was too high, and AT&T’s network is not desirable, especially around West Michigan.  So I was rather pleased when Verizon announced the coming of the Motorola Droid.  I was excited because I’ve been an avid user of Google products (Google Apps for your Domain, gmail, Picasa, etc), and because it’s an open platform with a fairly simple development environment.

I’m learning Eclipse now, and bringing my Java memories back to life.  The hardware is quite impressive, and it’s nice to have a modern phone with me.  The downsides:  The camera isn’t the quickest (or highest quality), and there are still issues syncing with Microsoft’s Exchange servers, but for a first round, the Droid is awesome.

I couldn’t believe my eyes… Google just released a utility that syncs Outlook’s calendar (required by work) with Google Calendar (preferred by me). Now I can use Google Calendar and still integrate with the rest of the office!

Google Calendar Sync

I went shopping this weekend for an SD memory card for my PDA and camera.  I figured since the 4GB cards are out now, the 512MB would be dirt cheap.  I was right… but it gets better.  Best Buy had the 512MB cards on sale for $19.99.  It took me a while to find that deal, but eventually I did.  But they also had a $69.99 price tag on the 1GB cards.  I saw the rebate line under the price and a final price of $29.99.  “Great,” I thought, “Another mail in rebate gimmick.  Not gonna bite; I can get these things for $35 online, including shipping.”  But no!  For once, Best Buy had an INSTANT rebate!  So I walked with glee to the counter and purchased a 1GB SD card for only $30!  Beautiful!

While spending the weekend with some friends, I was introduced to one of the coolest Pocket PC applications ever, Voice Command. I know I’m not a very big Microsoft fan, but they have done an incredible job with the Pocket PC platform, and this is a huge step forward.

Voice command allows you to issue simple commands to your PDA, and it will either talk back to me (if I ask it for my next appointment or what time it is) or launch a program or play some music. The application requires no training, and has been flawless so far at matching my words with contacts, songs, and events. Very cool toy for a very useful toy :)

I came across one of the latest Firefox flicks, and this one is absolutely hillarious.  My apologies that it’s in a QuickTime format, but I’m not a video editor, so you’ll have to view it as such (yes, with Windoze even).  You can find the video here.

At the recommendation of Topher, I’ve finally moved my blog from Springthrough’s back-room web server to a more widely-accessible hosting solution — Dream Host.  The features available at Dream Host are incredible, including FTP/SSH access, multiple domains, email (with support for SMTP across a port other than 25), one-click-installs for WordPress and other neat software, PHP/MySQL support, and much more.  The service will cost $10/mo, but I can do a little side work and develop some websites and cover that in a hurry!  Thanks, Topher!

At long last, I’ve upgraded my blog to the latest Wordpress (2.0.1). This comes with a new look for the page, although most of the changes are under the hood. Wordpress is certainly one of the best (if not the best) blog software on the Internet!

OpenOffice.org 2.0 was just released today. Head to your nearest mirror and pick up a copy… and one for each of your friends… and one for each of your friends’ friends! Because it’s free software and you can do that kind of thing with free software.

How hard is it to install Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PHPMyAdmin in Ubuntu Linux?

apt-get install apache2 php4 mysql-server-4.1 php4-mysql php4-gd2 phpmyadmin

How hard is it to install IIS, SQL 2000, .Net, ASP, and ASP.Net?

Well, first you have to boot your machine. Then you have to find the CDs. Then you have to buy licenses. Then you ha…

Error: Insufficient Reading Time Reading M$ Instructions. Please reboot and install LAMP.

I found yet another interesting bug in Internet Explorer. If you include javascript files in your header, you must include the closing <script> tag, or IE will display the page as a big white nothing.

Valid:
<script type=”javascript” src=”myscript.js”></script>

Invalid:
<script type=”javascript” src=”myscript.js” />

This is a nuisance of sorts since I try to save bandwidth wherever I can. I hope this is on a list of issues to be fixed when IE 7 hits shelves late this year. I’d like to think Microsoft would just start shipping Firefox as the default Windows browser, but I haven’t seen any pigs fly for some time.