Dylan Greene dot com

I'm on my way to New York to see Monty Python's Spamalot with my family.

Spamalot stars David Hyde Pierce ("Fraiser"), Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and Hank Azaria (Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Apu, Comic Book Guy, Cletus, Prof. Frink, and other voices in Simpsons) .

Which would you buy? The Apple monitor or the Dell monitor?

They're both use the same LCD panel from LG/Philips, but Apple's monitor cost $500 more than Dell's. Find out if this translates to a better deal in AnadTech's comparison review of both monitors.

Two good ones from ProBlogger.net:

• How the Most Highly Visited Blogs Earn Money
• Why Adsense is Not Suitable for All Blog Topics

Readme files. Does anybody actually read them?

What you may not realize is the amount of effort that goes into the creation of these rarely seen beasts.

Link: 28 Steps to Yak Farming

After reading that, you might put a little more thought before skipping the readme.

Word is that these image were leaked by MTV and the press... Microsoft doesn't comment on rumors, and officially the next generation XBOX hasn't even been formally announced yet, so they're being hush-hush... for now....

The next generation XBOX will debut Thursday, May 12, at 9:30 p.m (every time zone), on MTV, in a big media event with Elijah Wood and the Killers.

New downloadable multiplayer maps for Halo 2 are now available. To get them, go to "Downloadable Content" within Halo 2's XBOX Live menu.

Bonus Map Pack: Containment and Warlock are free.

Killtacular Premium Map Pack: Turf and Sanctuary are $5.99 together, or wait till late June and they'll be free.

Click the names of the maps for full previews with videos. I haven't purchased the premium maps yet, but I had great fun with the two free ones and I hear Turf and Sanctuary are even better.

And despite rumors saying otherwise, you will not lose your friends list by downloading the maps.

From OhGizmo!:

Leave it to Ideationdesigns.com to come up with an improvement on the thumbtack. Not only does it look good, but it can do two things the old thumbtacks couldnt.

First, it prevents whatever paper youre tacking from swivelling in the wind, since it has two needles.

Second, you can thread strings or wires through them for countless creative uses.

More info...

Passover starts tommorrow!

What's Passover? Wikipedia explains Passover.

And today is my brother Trevor's birthday. Happy birthday! If my math is right he's 25. Otherwise he's -25.

As you can see, my family has a lot of fun on Passover.

This is one of my favorite pictures:

Happy Passover!

An excellent Passover Flash, this one is a mix between South Park and Super Milk-Chan.

This one features is much better, in my opinion, than the Jib Jab Passover video just released.

Source: JewSchool.

Google requires employees spend 20% of their time on something unrelated to their real work, but that will still benefit the company. It's created some great new projects, such as Orkut and Google Suggest.

Atlassian, the company behind the awesome bug-tracking tool JIRA, adapted this strategy as well. Here's a great blog entry of what was created using 20% time.

I don't use their software, but this makes me want to.

Joe Beda, who left Microsoft's Windows team to join Google, has a great post about 20% time as well as a follow up.

A very quick Flash: The 60 Second Seder. When it comes up click it to start.

Saw this on JewSchool.com.

If you are in the market for an HDTV, you might want to wait just a little longer.

From Gizmodo: TI 1080p DLPs On Their Way

Not terribly exciting news, but it's important in that true HD-quality, low-cost DLPs are on their way. DLP prices are already falling as we speak, but a massive influx of chips from TI and other manufacturers is definitely going to change things up this summer.

Mitsubishi will be using these new chips in a line of 52- to 73-inch sets.

Press Release [Audioholics.com]

I think this might become popular for metro and airplane commuters, but I'm not sure about beyond that.

Web site: http://www.msnvideodownloads.com/

Mini-review: http://www.lostremote.com/archives/004493.html

Anybody have any experience with these devices? I saw a bunch at CES 2005 but none caught my eye as a "must have" geek device.

If only everything in my kitchen was as cool as Frankie Flood's pizza cutters, I'd cook all the time.

What's next? Monster Kitchen? Pimp My Appliances?

Source: Gizmodo

The best web and graphic designer I know, and the only one I talk to on a regular basis, got an interesting call from Microsoft.

FoO's work is like the fine meals in an upscale trendy downtown restaurant - it's usually experimental, sometimes controversial, constantly cutting edge, and always damn impressive.

According to my FeedBurner stats page, the circulation of my RSS on the first 24 hours of using FeedBurner was an awesome 303 people.

That should show the awesome power that RSS has. I can't even name 303 people, so it's not just people that know me interested in reading the silly things I write. Hi, curious onlooker!

According to Google AdSense, web pages on my site in that same 24 hour time period were looked at by people 11,730 times. I don't know how may unique people that is since many visit multiple pages, but I'd guess around 8,000 people. That shows a huge potential for growth for feed readers. Or the next market Microsoft or Google will take over.

If this whole "RSS" and "Feeds" thing doesn't make sense to you let me know and I'll write a blog entry about.

I resisted joining FeedBurner for a long time because I didn't want to give up full control of my feeds. FeedBurner has some nice features, such as adding Amazon ads and showing stats of how many people subscribe to your feed. Since I wrote my own blogging tool, it's not hard for me to add those features, or to do them even better, but that takes time away from other projects, so it was time to let somebody else take care of it.

FeedBurner has a setting that lets you set the "Original Feed URL" - so if FeedBurner shuts down or starts charging, I can make a quick preference change on my site and my RSS subscribers will resume getting their feed from here.

WorkBoxers has a FeedBurner Review, which I found out about on ProBlogger.

According to NeoWin.net, the next version of Internet Explorer will support tabbed browsing. The screenshot seen to the right is their proof.

Also, possibly even more noteworthy, is that they say that the next version of Internet Explorer will include a RSS aggregator.

This will fulfill Reason #4 for why RSS is not Ready for Prime Time, an article I published in January 2004 about why RSS isn't ready for most users.

One of my favorite blogs is ProBlogger.net from full time blogger Darren Rowse.

I consider his blog entries to be meaty. By that I mean they all contain rich, usable substance.

I love discovering new things, and I always find out something new from his blog. In addition, ProBlogger.net is about making money from your blog, and at $300-$400/day from Google ads, Darren is well qualified to write about this.

Also, while it seems crazy in these days of RSS feeds, I subscribed to his newsletter and issue #1 was great, and even included more information not on the site.

Visit: http://www.problogger.net/

Damn... I finally added tag clouds to my site and now Zeldman says they're the new mullets.

Before:

After:

Read the New York Metro article to find out what changes they made and how they got to this new design.

Source: Seth Godin

But still no word on the credit-card sized asthma inhaler.

From We-make-money-not-art.com:

The Star-Kick has been awarded the Technology Transfer Award at the meeting of the European Robotics Research Network (EURON).

• Mozilla flaws could allow attacks, data access.
  Source: news.com
• Known Vulnerabilities in Mozilla.
  Source: Mozilla.org
• The Pros and Cons of Firefox.
  Source: InformationWeek

Download new version of Firefox.

From Kotaku: Tetris-shapped shelves.

The Starving Artist was the first place I saw this.... Here's the scoop and his take on it.

StartSomethingPC.com

I have no idea what this is...

I hate teasers like this. At least say what the point is, or who the target audience is.

The one good thing? It has an RSS feed.

Oh - and if you stare at the page too long, the glow seems to fade in and out. Maybe Microsoft and IDSA are reinventing the light bulb.

Leave your guesses for what this is in the Comments....

From Jeremey Zawodny's linkblog:

http://www.rideaccidents.com/

High-paying Google Adsense Keywords:

mesothelioma $84.08
mesothelioma attorneys $80.93
mesothelioma lawyers $69.04
malignant pleural mesothelioma $55.95
Asbestos Cancer $54.17
mesothelioma symptoms $53.66
peritoneal mesothelioma $52.27
trans union $51.91

This is part of a list of how much advertisers pay per click for those keywords, but this information could be out-of-date or even just made up.

I don't get anyting close to these ammounts for clicks on my sites, even when you work in that Google keeps at least half of what advertisers pay per click.

Source: http://www.4morebusiness.com/adsense_keywords.html

From Engadget comes this quote from Verizon's CEO:

"Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house? The customer has come to expect so much."

He also thinks that municipal WiFi is "one of the dumbest ideas ever."

Talk about a CEO not in touch with his customers...

I'm pleasantly surprised by how many names I recognize in the Gnomdex Blogroll.

Gnomdex is a conference I'll be attending this summer that focuses on RSS, blogging, and other related technologies.

A blogroll is a list of related blogs - in this case the blogroll is a list of blogs from people who will be attending.

I'm not sure I like Amazon's new look.

BTW, that's a shameless link to my mom's book, the New Jewish Holiday Cookbook, just in time for Passover.

Saw this on Joel on Software:

JunkFax.org: Congress is about to do for junk faxes what they recently did for spam: Make it LEGAL as long as a qualified advertiser puts an "opt out" notice on the faxes!

And we all know how well CAN-SPAM is working.... I get about 1000 spam messages a day, glad I don't have a fax machine to worry about too.

From Slashdot:

"Apparently Intuit thinks it's okay to share information about taxes with third parties. According to this article, Intuit is using a third party tracking technology on all tax forms submitted to the IRS. "We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax. The IRS disavows any knowledge of this, saying "The IRS does not take a position on Web tracking tools." Makes you wonder where your tax information is going..."

Is this okay?

This edit of the Revenge of the Sith trailer is funny, but most Jedi n00bs won't have the haX to understand it.

Heck, even I had to look up some of the terms in UrbanDictionary.com so that i could be teh roXXorz.

UPDATE: Even better - a total spoof of the trailer! Thanks Mike!

First there were Graphics Cards to add graphics to your PC.

Then there were Sound Cards to add sound to your PC.

Then there were 3D cards to add 3d graphics to your PC.

Now Ageia is coming out with PhysX - a physics card for your PC and maybe even the next generation game systems.

TeamXBOX has a great interview with Ageia's CEO.

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. I love the physics in games like Half Life 2, it would be great if that kind of realism was available to every game.

If you click on a photo caption my site brings you to photo album and jumps you to the image for that caption, scrolling the page to the right image if necessary. (Example)

The disappointing problem is that you can't see that particular image until Internet Explorer or Firefox download all images on the page that happen to be in the HTML before that image. This happens even though all of the images before the image you are trying to look at are off the screen. This means that you have to sit there and wait for all preceding images to load before you get to see the one right on your screen.

The fix seems simple: IE and Firefox should load images that are viewable to the user first, and then load off-screen images.

I can probably fix this via some fancy JavaScript, but it seems like more work than should be necessary.

If you shift-click a link, it will always open in a new browser window.

This is helpful when reading a page like this one, and you see a link you want to visit, but your not done reading this one. Shift-click the link, and come back to it later.

I wish that trick also worked on the Back and Forward buttons, Favorites, History, Windows Explorer, and everything else in life.

Tim Wolters, a former webMethods coworker, is blogging the creation of his new startup company.

1. Top Ten indicators you've just founded a startup company
2. Startup Formation Series
3. Startup - The first week
4. ....To be continued...

This isn't Tim's first go at starting a company. His last company, Dante Group, was bought by webMethods in 2003, which is how he became a coworker.

Should be interesting.

Google Maps might be cooler, but MSN Maps gave directions I can use.

Hint: You can't drive in on the road in front of the White House anymore, and DC is full of one way streets, which MSN Maps clearly labels.

BTW, Scoble says Microsoft has some cool map stuff in the works. All I know is that Microsoft's TerraServer has been online for years without any hint of merging it with their MSN Maps service, and even though TerraServer has much higher resolution images than Google's Satellite view, Google's is much more fun to play with since the page doesn't need to reload.

Also, notice on both TerraServer and Google the tops of the White House and surrounding buildings are blanked or blurred out! I wonder what else is missing.

The final version of MSN Messenger 7.0 is now available.

I was a beta tester for this, and I'm glad to see that they've listened to beta testers requests and complaints. My biggest issues are with the Wink and Nudge features. I'm sure there's people that will love them, but I'm just glad they can now be disabled.

I like the the Display Picture feature, but it's interesting that I'm typically the only one that actually uses their real picture. It's used more as a way to express oneself than to show who they are.

Need to add my IM? Visit my Contact page for my info.

Wow, there's a lot of blog search engines. Yet another reason why blogging is great for business...

1. 2RSS
2. Ageless Project
3. aggregator.weblogs.co.uk
4. Blawg Search
5. Bligz
6. Blogarama
7. Blogdex
8. Blogdigger
9. Blog Dump
10. Bloghop
11. Bloglines
12. Blogmatrix
13. Blogrunner
14. Blogsearchengine
15. Blogstreet
16. Blogvision
17. Blogwise
18. Bloogz
19. Boogieplay
20. Daypop
21. Eatonweb
22. Fastbuzz
23. Feedster
24. Get Linked
25. GetBlogs
26. Globeofblogs
27. LocalFeeds.com
28. Memigo
29. NewsIsFree
30. Pepys
31. Popdex
32. Postami
33. PubSub
34. RDF Ticker
35. Rootblog
36. Search4Blogs
37. Sindic8
38. Technorati
39. Waypath
40. Zopto

Source: EBook Marketing.

Now only if I knew which one to use....

I don't care how many video games and systems you have, this dude has more.

I find doing my taxes to be fairly boring.

Any suggestions for how to make it more fun?

Click on Comments to see what I've come up with. Can you think of something better?

I'm constantly tweaking the code for my site, getting it ready for mass consumption from friends hungry to use this for their own blogging desires:

Here's some changes I made over the last week:

• Blog paging (Previous/Next Page) . This is needed on more blogs. If you look at most blogs, when you get to the bottom of the page there is no way to easily see the next set of entries. Users expect Next Page, so that's what I added. I've also seen sites that use "Previous Page" because you're going "back in time" - I felt that was just semantically confusing.
• New photoblog, captionsblog, categories, and archive pages, all with better URLs and paging.
• Google Adsense ads - I've had Google ads for a couple years, but I typically kept them hidden at the bottom of some pages. By changing the size, placement, frequency of the ads, and some other tweaks, I went from making $0.03 a day to about $15/day. I also blocked sites advertising Bob Dylan merchandise. Not that I have anything against him, but pretty much all of my ads were for him, and that doesn't target my audience well.
• Finally, I changed the URL schema. Those reading via RSS might have seen duplicate entries because of that. Sorry, nothing I could easily do to prevent that.
  • URL 1.0: \blogs.asp?blogID=1234
    This was ugly and exposed variables and page names that users didn't need to see.
  • URL 2.0: \posts\1234
    This was shorter, but didn't give any context to the page. The word "posts" caused many Google Ads for fencing and other uses for wood posts. Another problem was that every comment, photo, caption, and anything else with a unique ID had it's own url (\posts\1234\5678). I thought this would be helpful, but it just filled Google up with lots of pages with the same content. I don't want to be thought of as a Google index spammer, so I made further URL changes bring us to version 3....
  • URL 3.0: \1\1234_Lots_of_software_updates
    The 1 is for posts, then the ID of the post, then the blog title for easy reference and to make Google happy. Since post titles can change, that part of the URL is actually ignored behind the scenes. If I need to jump to specific comment or photo I use #value in the URL.

I wrote my own URLRewrite code that fast and efficient for my needs, so old URLs never break. Some search engines still look for URLs from the Windows 95 site I ran until 1996. I'll be making more changes as I have time in the evenings.

ImprovEverywhere has been doing mass-scale pranks in New York City since 2001. How massive? Pranks, or missions as they like to call them, often involve over 100 members, including actors, coordinators, hidden cameras, and quick getaway plans. In the photo above, 61 people are in various store windows, all dancing in sync. They come, do their thing, and disappear.

The descriptions and photos are often really funny, and unlike what you might see on MTV, nobody gets hurt - even in the really funny ones.

Wondering where all your hard drive space went? WinDirStat is a free open source program that shows you your disk usage statistics and helps you clean up unneeded files.

The bottom half of the screen is called a treemap, a concept invented by Ben Shneiderman, who happened to be my human-computer interaction professor at Maryland.

In the above treemap you can see that large blue rectangle taking up a lot of space. According to the key on the top right, that is my VirtualPC virtual machine image, which I used to play with an early build of Longhorn. I would have forgotten about that huge file if it weren't for this program.

More information and download: http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/

Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows, will replace or augment TrueType with OpenType, and it's got some cool new features.

Here's a couple:

• Contextual Alternates
• OpenType Fractions
• Ligatures

Coworkers blogging include: Benjamin Booth, John Ragan, Luis de la Rosa, and Graham Glass. All of them sit within spitting distance to me, and we all work in product development.

Since webMethods has hundreds of employees and offices around the world, my guess is that there are other webm bloggers that I just don't know about yet.

To see more webMethods buzz: Del.icio.us (bookmarks), Flickr (photos), Feedster (blog search), Technorati (mixture of previous three), and Topix.net (news).

Independent community site wmUsers.com also lists people blogging who use our software, Nifty!

From Ajaxian.com, for my friends at work: :)

You know you're a Java weenie when...

1. Hani viciously biles you, and you publicly thank him for it, calling it "an honor"
2. You go to TheServerSide Java Symposium even though you talk about how much you hate TheServerSide.com. You then try to hide in sessions as you blog that you only go because you like Vegas
3. You feel the need to tell the whole world that Sun has rejected your JavaOne talk, and then further embarrass yourself by claiming its some sort of conspiracy
4. You think its great that we have 45 XML APIs and 938 Web frameworks, claiming that "choice is a good thing."
5. You are excited about SQL AOP (and now SQXML AOP)
6. You complain that Maven is too complex and completely unusable, then gradually let it slip that you've never actually gone so far as to try it out before assailing it
7. You feel the need to blog every time you need a job or are offered a job
8. You go out and spend a small fortune on a 30" Apple LCD and then rub it in everyone's face... multiple times
9. You think that whoever doesn't choose to waste their money on overpriced, underpowered Apple hardware couldn't possibly have the critical thinking skills required to be a good software developer
10. After making a small fortune as a Java author and consultant you turn around and tell people it completely sucks and they should have been using Ruby for the past few years
11. After making a small fortune as a Java author and consultant you throw it all away to learn Objective-C and try to convince the world that managed code is just a fad and that platform marketshare really isn't all that important anyway
12. You are mercilessly rude to Microsoft for years until they send you on an expensive and exclusive "summit", after which you are all warm and cuddly with your new best friends in Redmond
13. You embarrass the entire Enterprise Java community by blogging about how neat it is that PHP wraps CGI state in variables (next blog: "Wow! Perl has this cool $_ variable!")
14. You endorse Struts for years and then overnight change positions and start claiming that it's a huge heaping pile of crap and taking irrational pleasure in bashing Craig McClanahan
15. You think naming client-side browser scripting after a cleaning agent will somehow change the hellish set of horrors that is dynamic HTML development ;-)

Happy April 1st -- Dion and Ben

I've always wanted a way to synchronize my Internet Explorer bookmarks and Firefox favorites across my work computer and home computer, plus my laptop and Media Center PC. All of the machines are behind some form of firewall.

At months of testing different programs, I found the perfect one, and as a bonus, it happens to be free. It's simply called SyncIt and available here: http://www.2go.com.br.

There's no special UI or tool to use. You bookmark pages using your favorite browser as normal. Every few hours SyncIt looks for changes computer and in your private 2go account for changes. If it finds changes it uploads them to the server and downloads the new bookmarks. It also tracks deleted and moved bookmark.

It's great being able to bookmark a page on one machine and not worry about figuring out which machine I used to find that cool page.

Somebody found my site and posted a message to Donald Trump thinking my site is an appropriate way to reach him:

Dear Mr Trump I just would like to inform you that during your show tonight I did notice that Chris was making the Pizza for his team and that he was not wearing any gloves , Im sure u are aware of the health factor on food preperation as u are well respected in your field so I thought I would bring this matter to your attention.

A viewer of you show John Albi

I don't know if The Donald reads my blog, but since I've never seen him near a computer I'm guessing no.

While on this topic, 50 Cent and the G-Unit crew probably aren't reading these comments on my blog either.