1. Okay.  I wanna know.  I wanna know what focus group was picked to review the new Facebook and its usefulness.  And I wanna know now.  Here’s my problem.  Or rather, here’s their problem.  As of now, Facebook looks like the script kiddie who lives in his parent’s basement munchin’ on cheetos while he plots to take over the Internet.  This time last year, they were the professional company with efficiency and connectivity in mind.  In other words, they took a step backwards.But, of course, you know what I mean.  The Home Page.  Sucks.  First of all, we’ve gone from Live to hitting F5 to refresh the page every 10 seconds.  What the hell is that?  Pardon the French, but how does “getting the AJAX out” compute with Facebook?  In the words of the great Bill O’Reilly, “DO IT LIVE!”

   More Home Page woes: they’ve decided to compartmentalize everything.  Wall posts look like status updates.  And the worst part has to be the news feed is definitely not the full feed.  In the greatest part of the old Facebook was the Live Feed (Log Mode).  You see everything in a list.  Easy to scan and see what you want to find/comment on/like.  The best part is the filtering.  That should have been a pre-req of the last home page.  Filtering makes it easy to see wall posts, added friends, status updates.  But, like I said, the greatest part is that I’m missing stuff </sarcasm>.  Why am I missing stuff?

   The T&C (Terms & Conditions) of a regular “company” now exists as “Rules & Responsibilities” over at Facebook.  Who is running this company?  A bunch of socialists?  I don’t want a set of Rules.  I want the Terms by which I can use your damn service.  Strap on a pair.
   

2. Mint.com brings all things money to your fingertips.  You have bank accounts, 401Ks, IRAs, and even credit cards.  So, why not have them all in the same place?  At Mint.com you can.  I was able to get logged in to my Citizens Bank account, my CitiCard credit cards, and even my Sallie Mae student loans.

   The fun doesn’t stop there.  Once you set up your accounts, you can also add assets like real estate, vehicles or other valuable property.  Then, Mint gives you over to your home page, which is basically a budget tool for managing how much you spend a month.  It takes credit card purchases, categorizes them, and then you can set budgets on categories.  You can also take a look at spending trends over a period of time.
   

3. JavaScript downloads are a dime a dozen these days.  But, I found a couple I would enjoy using over and over.  Here’s one such menu that I enjoy using:

   Webber 2.0 Dock Menu

   I’ve taken the liberty of implementing it on the new Final Edge website. 

   This awesome little piece of JavaScript just tweens the dock up and down based on where your mouse is on the page (onmouseovers).  Just take a look on the author’s site for intructions on how to implement it.

Hope that was interesting for you.  I haven’t been here in a while, and all three things happened about the same time, so I had to give them some equal reporting on.

The apps give you complete control. And with the Internet wherever you go, you never miss a beat. I’ve been able to find the nearest ihop at 12:30 at night, have their phone number, and call them to find out if they are open 24 hours. Today I was sent a text in Spanish. In 2 minutes, I had a translator app, figured out what the text said, and responded in Spanish. Tell me you can find me something better.

I have only 4 quarrels with it: you can’t run multiple apps at a time, there is no removable memory, you have to own a Mac (or hackintosh) to develop apps for it, and the battery life isn’t great.

Many people have complained about the typing on it. Hands down, the easiest typing ever. If my fat fingers can type on it with no trouble, then it’s not a problem. The autocorrect feature easily fixes any mistakes you may have committed.

There you have it. I’ve made my way into the smartphone world and it rocks. Signing off from my iPhone, goodnight.

SimplePie makes dealing with a feed amazingly easy.  SimplePie is just one include file which is a class built to handle RSS feeds using PHP’s various XML extensions.  The class itself is very long (347KB), and yet full of a lot of useful functions dealing with RSS.  Before uploading SimplePie to your server, though, make sure you meet its minimum requirements.

SimplePie’s constructor is so easy to use, in fact, all you have to do is call the constructor with 2 parameters: the feed’s URL, and where you are putting cache.


<?php
$apod = new SimplePie("http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod.rss", "./simplepie/cache");
?>


From here it’s really easy to manipulate the feeds items.


<div class="RSS_Header">
  <div class="header_title"><a href="<?php echo $apod->get_permalink();?>"><?php echo $apod->get_title(); ?></a></div>
  <span style="font-size:9px; color:#999999;"><?php echo $apod->get_description(); ?></span>
</div>
<?php foreach ($apod->get_items(0, 5) as $item): ?>
  <div class="RSS_item">
    <div class="title"><a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a></div>
    <?php echo $item->get_description(); ?>
  </div>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<div style="padding:12px 0px;"><a href="<?php echo $apod->subscribe_feed(); ?>">Subscribe to the APOD feed</a></div>


Just wanted to throw this out there as a really easy way of dealing with RSS. I’m definitely going to continue using this on future projects.

There also is the option right now to upgrade your iTunes library to DRM Free “iTunes Plus” music.  If you go to the iTunes Store from iTunes, and click the link on the right “Upgrade My Library to iTunes Plus,” you are directed to a page where you can pay $.30 a song to upgrade.  If you have been collecting iTunes music for a while, this is going to cost you.  I paid $21 to upgrade 94 songs.  But in the end, being DRM free is just worth it.

The price structure will also change.  This was perfect timing too.  Apple has been trying to find a way to deal with the increase delivered by the Copyright Royalty Board.  From the blog over at Wired,

As part of their general muscle-flexing of late, music publishers asked the board to increase the royalties paid to publishers and songwriters for the sale of digital downloads from 9 cents to 15 cents per song.

Though I won’t speculate about what happened behind closed doors, I would assume that the new pricing structure is to deal with the 6 cent increase on songs.  Instead of passing the increase directly onto the iTunes store as a whole, which would make songs $1.05, they have decided to charge for a song based on its popularity.

More popular songs will be $1.29, moderately popular will be $.99, and not very popular at $.69.  My guess here is that their profit comes from the top two lines of popularity making up for the songs that sell for close to no profit at $.69.  Though I would still rather find a highly popular song at Amazon for $.99 than $1.29, Apple is headed in the right direction (as opposed to shutting down the iTunes store altogether which was threatened back in October).

Here are the current specs:

The only thing missing is the Blu-Ray player that currently costs $85, a little too far above my budget.

The greatest part of this build is how it integrates with my original PC.  I have sound going from two PC’s to one set of speakers.  To accomplish this setup, I have set up two male-to-male 3.5mm speaker wires to a Y-splitter that essentially combines those two male plugs into one.  From there, I have a female-to-female coupler that joins the male end of the Y-splitter to the male end of the speakers.  The other great integration is the use of Synergy, a keyboard/mouse/clipboard sharing software so I can use my main keyboard and mouse to use both my PC and the new Media PC.

If you want to give your shot at a Media Center, I recommend the strategy of sticking with Windows, either XP Media Center Edition 2005 or Vista Home Premium/Ultimate.  Although I have heard good things about setting up Media Centers on Linux with such software as MythTV, it’s hard to find a capture card that will work correctly in Linux.  The WinTV-HVR-950 I have requires major driver modifications in Linux to play correctly with the DVR software.

The other reason is that Vista’s Media Center just makes it so easy to watch and record shows right out of the box.  The WebGuide 4.0 is a free scheduler software for recording of shows and integrates right into Media Center.  You can also add plugins to Media Center for numerous things.

• I just finished a job for Cutting Edge Glass & Metal with a few people from Taylor.  This is the most recent Web Design job I’ve done.  Pretty simple, but it was huge for the client.
• Putting a computer build together for a client in Harrisburg.  It’s a regular deal with a few extras like a TV Tuner and Wireless N card.
• Fixing up a friend of a friend’s computer with a new Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 and an OS re-install.
• Found a great deal online for 250GB SATA Hard Drives for $30 each.  Bought 6.  1 for a present, 1 for extra, and 4 for pre-builts I’m working on.
• Building 4 computers right now.  Specs are AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB Hard Drive, DVD Burner w/ Lightscribe.
• Trying to get rid of two 19″ widescreen monitors and two 22″ widescreen monitors hopefully on eBay.
• Working on the business plan for The Final Edge and hopefully becoming an LLC in January.
• Putting together a media PC for watching and recording shows in HD.  Should be a fun thing to put together.
• I now have a “COMMAND STATION” in my room which is just so awesome.

So, for now I’m signing off.  If you got anything, you know where to find me.

We all know about the drawbacks, UAC et al, but there are a few good things to be had here.  The build we did included a Blu-Ray player.  We started with Windows XP 64-bit (with 4GB of RAM), but soon found out it wouldn’t cut it.

1. Better security
   We all know this one.  Vista is the most secure OS out there.  Cool beans.
2. Driver Database
   A lot, and I mean a lot of drivers are now included in the default installation of Vista.  This is great because now, most of us don’t have to go looking for a driver for network controllers on a different computer.  There were at least 2 less drivers to install on Vista.
3. Blu-Ray support
   This is the kicker.  Win XP does allow you to play Blu-Ray, but personally I haven’t gotten it working due to driver complications.  With PowerDVD 8 basically having the market on Blu-Ray on 64-bit machines, they control what it works on, and what doesn’t.  XP 64-bit looks like Win Server 2003 to the PowerDVD Blu-Ray Advisor which tells you about what you are missing in order to play Blu-Ray Discs.  With this mistake, it fails.  In Vista, however, drivers aren’t a problem, and the BR Advisor sees everything fine.

That’s just a taste of why I thought Vista did better in this instance.  Here’s the application: XP is getting old, and 64-bit is the future.  Soon, vendors won’t fully support XP, which means we’ll be left with Vista and the new OS, Windows 7.  Each of these will become mainly 64-bit, so vendors will have to get with it, and release software that’s compatible (I’m looking at you, WinDVD).

In fact, being stuck at 3GB of RAM (and 1 more outside of the machine at the moment) is no longer any fun, and I’m considering the upgrade to 64-bit in the coming months.  Here’s my choice, now.  Vista or XP?  With these facts above, and many others out there, I’m considering Vista even more these days, even with its incompatibility with many of my programs.  Of course, I will do extensive testing to see what works and what doesn’t, and even find workarounds.  The point is, I, myself, am slowly warming up to the new OS.  What gives?

This bodes well for everyone since a good graphics card is no longer required for the OS, but mostly just for games.  This could possibly mean that Windows 7 could run on hardware that Windows Vista can’t run on.  ‘Tis a weird world Microsoft has “created.”

Final Edge Computing is going online soon, as well.  I need to shore up a few last minute things for the LLC and the tax situation, as well as UPS shipping.  Once that is said and done, I should be online.  As the date nears, I’ll be putting together a short bulletin list of the things we’ll be offering and services that are going up.  Stay tuned…