…that I agree with and that applies to life in general. Robby Russel is talking about spending some time every day to keep up on your field and try new things and says

This is a very important aspect of being a developer in any environment. Otherwise, you

So the much improved yahoo webmail client has been in beta for more than a year now, and they’ve been slowly rolling it out to their customer base. If you’re impatient and want to get in on the beta without waiting, follow these instructions over on cybernews.com. I just did it now (24th, around 9PM) and it was still working fine for me. In brief this is taking advantage of a glitch in their system but it seems harmless enough, but use at your own risk.

I’ll also observe that having played around with it, they’ve failed to learn one of the lessons of gmail – yes, gmail has ajaxy goodness, but it’s also drop dead simple and loads relatively quickly. The yahoo mail beta fails on both those counts. Still, it’s an improvement over the existing yahoo webmail client.

Check out Autoviewer, which is by the same folks who brought us Simpleviewer. It’s a very slick little system that lets you create galleries using either Google’s Picassa tool or by manually editing a couple of text files. If you’re a picassa user this is a great way to easily get image galleries online. If you’re not, it’s still worth a look if you want to post image galleries with a slick interface.

Google will eat itself. That’s the premise behind gwei.org, where they’re using the money they make from google’s adsense program to purchase google shares, with a goal of ultimately owning the company. I laughed when I realized what they’re up to. However, at the present rate it’s going to take 200,000,000 years to achieve that goal. Let’s hope their adsense network is growing at some exponential rate to compensate for this.

Even if the concept doesn’t interest you the site’s worth checking out just for the trippy background patterns. Just stay away from the bright tie-dye colored one, I have a hunch it would cause seizures if you stare at it too long.

This is a pretty slick web 2.0’ish site that has full api documentation for a collection of programming and markup languages. Next time you’re struggling to remember to, say, set a background color in CSS, try gotapi. It’s not doing anything you couldn’t easily find elsewhere, and in fact many of the api docs for these languages I already have installed thanks to tools like devboi, but they’re all in one place and stitched together with a decent interface.

Blizzard makes the incredibly successful game World of Warcraft. The game has bugs, like any game. One of them causes folks with certain ethernet cards and settings to get disconnected when they turn in quests in the game. It’s super annoying. What’s worse is Blizzard hasn’t documented the issue very well, and since I did, and wrote about it here (after struggling to resolve the issue), google now sees me as the source of the solution to the problem. You can test this yourself by searching google for ‘disconnect turning in quests’ and look what you get, by way of example. It’s not the only combination of terms which gets you here.

I continue to get comments and email about the pieceI initially made about this which provided the fix, and it’s been the number one hit on my website now for several months. Today I finally emailed Blizzard using their tech support form, we’ll see if they do anything about it. I’ve copied my original email below.

I’m tempted to use Digg and similar sites to try and embarrass Blizzard into finally taking care of this, at the least by giving their users better documentation. We’ll see where the support email gets me and I’ll go from there.

The original support request I sent them is below.

Hey,

Heads up for you folks regarding the constant disconnects when turning in quests bug – my website’s post on this issue is the #1 search result in google for the solution to the problem for a lot of your customers, and they’re coming to me instead of to you because your site doesn’t have adequate information. Please consider updating the information about the quest disconnect bug and adjusting ethernet driver settings such that it’s accurate and my site stops being the source of the solution.

(or just fix the bug 😉

(or pay me for the bandwidth I’m saving you 🙂

Kidding aside, lots of folks would be happier if you would spend some time at least documenting the issue and the solution better.

the post that folks are using:

http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/2006/01/03/how-to-fix-constant-disconnects-when-turning-in-quests-in-world-of-warcraft/

Thanks,

Long, long ago at the dawn of the public use of the internet, I convinced my employer to let me play with community building tools. One of the ones we brought online was ThePalace, a cross platform graphical chatroom with avatars, audio, an emote system, and simple games like chess and checkers. We brought it online in an attempt to interest the local community in the kinds of resources we were building (I worked for a family owned regional media company), and to a small extent we succeeded in getting local community participation, but for a complex set of reasons we mostly ended up overun with sometimes rowdy Australians. In a great example of what a small world we live in, several years after this one of them ended up in my office looking for work. He’d met his wife online and emigrated to the US, and this all came out during the interview process.

Anyway I mention all of this because today I happened across Hive7, and immediately thought ‘wow, it’s The Palace all over again!’ It’s worth checking out even if you have no real need for a browser based graphical chat system, just so you can admire what they’ve accomplished with a shedload of javascript. One word of advice though – bail on the first room as soon as you can. The number of people that tend to be congregated there will bring your browser to its knees, but there are several rooms and the interior tends to be less crowded.

Also note you may need to use Firefox to check this out – safari may choke on the javascript and opera definitely does.

I’ve talked now and then about how poor the broadband offerings are in the US compared to overseas. Check out this brief news item on betanews covering Comcast’s rollout of 16Mbit service in select markets in the US. Markets which just happen to be locations where Verizon is rolling out their high speed FIOS service. By way of comparison, in most markets cable companies are offering at best 5Mbit and in many markets they are still only offering 2 or 3Mbit service. What’s driven Comcast to offer 16Mbit? COMPETITION. Local communities should stop offering monopolies to the cable companies because lacking competition, they’re not going to provide better services. The lack of ubiquitous symetrical high speed broadband in the US is leaving us at a competitive disadavantage compared to asia especially, a competitive disadvantage that will reveal itself over the next decade or so as they become the innovators in the network space we invented. You can see tangible evidence of this stuff already happening in places like South Korea.

This stuff really really pisses me off. Republican leadership in Washington has only been hurting things since the FCC has been bending over backwards to give the network providers what they ask for, even letting them sneak out of prexisting arrangements. (anyone remember that the FCC declared that AOL had to open its IM networks more than 5 years ago, for example?). Meanwhile I can only push things back up my pipe at 20k/sec, which is 20% of what I used to get from Time Warner back when they first rolled out broadband service in Portland, Maine in the mid 90’s. So in 10 years or so, my upstream is actually an order of magnitude lower than it used to be. Meanwhile my cable company is running tv ads promoting the use of my cable modem as a video phone to chat with my grandmother. Right. In the parallel universe where the south korean telco is providing me unfettered bandwidth and not playing at being a media congolmerate. Fuckers.

Anyway, that’s a bit of an angry ramble, but I’ll close with the observation that there is hope for us, at least on the east coast in Verizon territory where I am, since Verizon intends to push FIOS out to all customers eventually. (though at a guess it will take them forever to reach me in western MA. Good thing we’re bringing in Internet 2 to my place of work).

Check out the Pasteboard Recorder, a great little free utility for those using OSX. It stores a configurable number of the last things you copied to your clipboard and can handle many data types, not just text. I’ve been using it quite a bit since I got my new laptop, and it makes a handy blogging tool for when you’re working to collect a set of links that will be used in your weblog post.

(Pasteboard Recorder is a universal binary for those of you who’ve made the transition to Macintel)