Well as of several minutes ago the official announcement has gone out for the release of Launcher X, the wildly anticipated competition for SilverScreen, the current king of launchers. I’m going to download and try this out tomorrow, because it’s to late now to give it any sort of good look. I mis-anticipated this a couple of days ago when I was sent a review copy of Launcher+, which has a similar name but is really a mediocre product. I’m not going to judge X before I try it out, but there has really been an almost Microsoft-like delay in the release of this project. When it was first screenshots were posted, it implied that the product would be released that month (it was about half a year ago if I remember correctly) and people were bouncing off the walls. Months later, there are more units with high resolution than ever before, but Pocket Sensei is going to release version 3 of Silverscreen any day now, and I’m thinking it’s going to rock the boat quite a bit. When Silverscreen was in the early 2.x releases it could have been cut off early; now it has gained quite a bit of well-deserved momentum and dislodging it will be much harder.

Preparing for the new server has been taking up a lot of my time, telling clients about it and also making sure everything is tidy before we move stuff over. The plan, after everything is locked down, is to move all the accounts over (shouldn’t take more than about two hours) then point the DNS records on the old server to point to the new, and in the meanwhile the nameserver IP addresses will be rolling over to the new server, and we should be able to take down the old server by mid next week, after making double sure nothing got lost in the shuffle.

I’m extremely excited because I found a wonderful deal on a new dedicated server and I’m faxing in the contract finalizing everything today. The company worked with me getting exactly the specs I wanted, even though they were a little strange. The new server is going to be at a much nicer datacenter as well with higher quality bandwidth (not Cogent). Also I’m going to be working with Mat of HLUG to lock the box down pretty tightly. Mat was on News.com yesterday along with HLUG for their discovery of the Tcpdump trojan. Also on Slashdot here.

Anyway I’m trying to think of a good hostname for the box. Right now I’m leaning towards “Plato” but I’m open to suggestions. It’s hard though, like naming a child. Of course I would never call a human child Plato. 😉

I finally updated to the official .61 Cafélog release, and I couldn’t be happier. I was using the CVS version for a while, but I was inconsistent in updating it so some files were older and some were bleeding edge. The posting interface has improved quite a bit, especially in terms of making the pingback and trackback features easy to use. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that my smart quotes for PHP script is included by default and can be turned on in the config file. Speaking of which, I have a new version ready that is much faster then the current one, and this is actually the second day it’s been on this site. I’m going to test it a bit more just to make sure nothing slipped by, and then I’m going to release the Movable Type version at the same time. Oh that reminds me of my new favorite feature of b2: you can “filter” nearly everything through any number of functions. How cool?

Oh yummy, another server-side language, this one claiming to be faster than both PHP and Perl. Perhaps, but does it do anything?

Whoop dee doo. Maybe if this had come years ago before CD were as common as floppy drives. Maybe if it was priced significantly lower than CD technology is now. Maybe if everyone still used Zip disks and this was completely backward compatible. Maybe then I would consider this worth it. It’s strange to see a one-hit-wonder company struggling for relevancy like this.

Update: I forgot to say what made me really mad about this: I got seven emails from Iomega to the same address telling me this “wonderful new product.”

Macromedia has announced Contribute, which they look to be positioning as an editor for the mases. Everyone who has attempted to architect a client editable web page runs in to this problem early on. Either you just have them put in raw text, and maybe do a little fancy formatting to make it readable, or you invent your own “simplified” markup language, like many bulletin boards offer, or finally you just try and teach them HTML and hope that a missing end tag doesn’t turn your entire design into a link, or some other catastrophe. Taking a more robust approach to this problem are the editors which take HTML in a text field and put a WYSIWYG editor on top of this. Internet Exploder has a version of this integrated, but it gives such ugly code that it has been known to break mirrors. Mozilla (the meat behind the new Netscape) has a much more promising version which generates better code, but still has a lot of bugs to be worked out; I know because this is the solution I used for a recent client. There are also products like Editize which are quite nice.

It looks like Macromedia is trying to target the medium to large website developers who are tired of doing trivial updates and the managers who don’t want to go through said developers whenever they want to change text of some sort. Let’s say that this is implemented throughout an entire company, is that a good thing? I would say that just because everyone can have a voice on the company website, doesn’t mean they should. Also I’m suspicious of any product that says it’s “easy as Word.” The pricing point of this product and more importantly how it interfaces with the server will ultimately tell if this product is going to be the next big thing, a product as big as its vision.

While browsing around two things have caught my interest. The first is a great collection of tips in PHP that has some extremely nice code in it. My only objection to anything he has is when he discusses $PATH_INFO, and gives the example:

<location "/products">
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</location>

This is a hassle because it forces you to have a file with no extension, which under most operating systems doesn’t use the same handler as .php files, and it adds a needless step. Why does it seem that no one knows you can have a file called products.php and use multiviews to access it just like you would above?

The other thing I ran into is a pretty neat little class called ezSQL that I think I’m going to use for a project I’m doing. I found out about it through an article called PHP and Working with Databases (for the Lazy Sod), which couldn’t have a better title, especially if targeting people like me. Interesting things to check out if you’re into that sort of thing.

Of course all this browsing was down to entertain me while I was trying to install Gentoo Linux, the most promising distro I’ve seen in a while. I wasn’t able to get it to work on either my desktop or laptop but I haven’t given up hope yet. If I run in to a roadblock however the problem is that I have rehearsals on Wednesdays now and wouldn’t be able to make it up to HLUG where maybe Mat could take a look at it. Worst comes to worst I’ll go to SuSE or something.

All this and I still need to clean up that mail script to send to Mike. Long day!

Of course now all this LDAP stuff is distracting me. I already use IMAP for getting to all my email so having a universally accessible contact list is quite attractive. We’ll see how that goes . . .