Pomona Class of 2007. Congrats L.

FTP Clients for XP. I have been limping along using the native support in XP for FTP but I am ready to buy something. The shell support in XP seems so flakey, particularly when I have a couple FTP windows open. I need something that lets me have a couple windows open, sometimes pointed at the same FTP site but different directories. With an explorer view. Download.com data suggests WS_FTP or SmartFTP.

WS_FTP, FTPx – just installed WS_FTP. It seems robust but doesn’t really provide the explorer view I need – it doesn’t help me copy files from one FTP site to another for instance. Anita recommended FTPX and I just downloaded and tried this. MUCH better. the tree interface is nice. still doesn’t seem to fully permit drag and drop between two FTP windows but I suspect I can live with.

SmartFTP. Finally tried this. Wow this one I really like. Very robust tree operations, very easy to drag/drop files across FTP folders. The best of the bunch so far.

Forest Ridge and WiFi. Nice article about Wifi at Forest Ridge (and other places) – The Wi-Fi Boom

Ignition Holiday Party. A nice evening last nite, it was great to see everyone out of the office and with their families. Thanks Jon and Elizabeth for hosting. Hoops won the hand-made sock contest with his “Ghost of Christmas Past” socks, Deneen won in the store-bought division. I had a lot of great ideas for socks but no time to execute – the story of my life :)

Pure Networks – Win an XBOX! My buds at Pure Networks want some help understanding people’s home network configs. A free Xbox out of it maybe.

URL Remapping under IIS. OK I am finding all the tools for this. www.streamcatcher.com StreamCatcher seems like a complete and supported product. The ISAPI URL Remapper is a lot cheaper but also seems more limited. There is also a tool from a company called ZmeY whose website seems a little confusing.

Permalink Namespace Mapping. I am sure there are solutions to this problem out there. As i futz with the implementation of my blog under the covers, I am causing changes in the permalink namespace for my site, mostly because IIS wants filename extensions to help it figure out which script engine to use, and these filename extensions end up showing up in the namespace. I am sure there is some way to either configure this behaviour out of IIS, or inject some piece of code that does some lightweight name fixup so that my old permalink namespace will always work. Need to dig around on this today.

DNS problems. Man DNS resolution has been terrible the last couple days here.

Categories. Jon Udell’s struggle with categories on his blog. I am not a big fan of categories because I believe that a) people don’t take the time to tag all their content appropriately, and b) our sense of proper categorization changes over time creating a management/mapping headache. I am much more interested in adding a great search interface to my site with really good and adaptive stemming support as the way to find all articles on a topic.

Source for Scripts. HotScripts.com

Outlook 11. Pointed to byEVHEAD. Eliminates need (along with Exchange upgrade) for vpns – that alone seems worth the upgrade. I wonder what % of vpns are installed just for exchange. I think VPN vendors will be unhappy.

Bowl Schedule. ESPN.com: NCF - 2002-03 Bowl schedule – the Rose, Orange, and Fiesta all seem pretty interesting. Sugar Bowl is too regional to really have much buzz. I am also interested in the Outback Bowl – Michigan vs Florida, two great programs. Virginia vs WVU in the Continental Tire Bowl seems like a fun matchup. The Seattle Bowl sounds like a snoozer – just no heat between Oregon and Wake Forest.

Moblogging versus BlogWalking. On 0xDECAFBAD

Weblogs for the Rest of Us. Trying to get most of the teaching staff to use weblogs appears to be a trial. I think the comment that “it is easier to use email than a blog” is very important – if we want to rope in every user in our organizations, we need to get weblog use as easy as email.

There is a lot of inertia to email – people stare at their inboxes all day and use that email editor all day. We need a plugin for our email products that just posts cleanly to a blog from the new message form. maybe you can just type in blog name in the TO: box.

And a plugin that lets you see responses and new blog items right in the email app, maybe right in your inbox.

Sun Whining. Agree with folks like Sam. The real problem for Sun is that they have not created any reason for anyone to care if Java is bundled with desktop machines. If my brand spanking new Dell came with a Java VM, would I as a consumer care? What would make use of it that I find interesting? There is no reason for me to demand a Java VM, there is no reason for OEMs to want to bundle one. If Sun had made it compelling, it would be easy for them to end-run MSFT and get OEMs to bundle the right VM – they bundle software all the time – look at all the shovelware that comes on new machines.

I do want my machine to come with CD burning software, with DVD burning software, with picture capture software. I’d be interested in a machine that came with all the right blogging software to let me easily create blogs and photoblogs. But Java? What does it do for me as an end user?