Xagronaut

iTunes decreases my blog consumption

After all this time, I’m finally blogging again. I think the issue has been the lack of time (other things are more important?) and the lack of motivation (i.e., burning desire).

Oddly enough, I think podcasts have taken me away from blogging. Since I no longer use NewsGator and FeedStation to download podcasts (I use iTunes instead), I spend less time in my news aggregator. Oh, I still consume blogs, and I think that they’re still a great innovation, but I’m not using them like I used to.

A twist on blog consumption: Text-to-Speech conversion

One new product that puts a twist on consuming blogs is Odiogo. It’s software that will “audify” RSS content to create MP3 audio consumable by your media player or portable audio device.

This is similar in concept to a combination of products I saw a while back: mixing FeedForAll, an RSS publisher, with TextAloud from NextUp.com. This combo allows you to create a “podcast” version of your blog. TextAloud also has other uses for text-to-speech conversion as a stand-alone product.

Odiogo, on the other hand, combines an RSS aggregator with a text-to-speech converter in one product. The price is fairly accessible at $29.99. I may try it. There are some sample audio clips of Odiogo available.

One thing I noticed is that Odiogo seems to offer only one voice (male). TextAloud, on the other hand, offers multiple voice options with a range of sampling rates from vendors including AT&T (Natural Voices), NeoSpeech, Cepstral, and ScanSoft (RealSpeak). TextAloud comes only in a Windows version and costs $29.95.

FeedForAll costs $39.95 and is available for Windows and Mac. They have an interesting set of partners offering complimentary products related to RSS feed consumption, RSS-friendly web hosting, and podcast creation.

Conclusion

I may try the audio blog content option. Unfortunately, most of my podcast solutions involve a lot of manual labor to put it onto my player (my Palm Zire 72 with an SD card). The other downside is that the text-to-speech output can sound somewhat bland, causing me to zone out instead of actively listening. I’ll put it on my Someday/Maybe list (GTD).

Michael Lehman’s BuzzCast kept the music loop for the running for an entire ten minutes while talking to Jeremy Mazner about Microsoft’s PDC 2005! Dude, kill the music! It’s sooo distracting!

Even worse than that, MSMobiles.com released an hour-and-a-half podcast rambling about cellphone news, with opera-style music playing in the background almost the whole time! Dude, the music has to go, and I’m not going to listen for an hour and a half. Sorry.

I searched for Michael Lehman today, after listening to the first Buzz Cast on MSDN’s Channel 9. I found his Radio weblog. After browsing his list of podcasts I came across this one and left a comment about a typo. As I was typing, I decided to throw in this tip (reposted here for the benefit of readers):

I filter podcasts through NewsGator Online Edition. I subscribe to podcast feeds via NG online and review them occasionally. I pick the ones I like and save them to a My Clippings feed for podcasts. I am subscribed to that feed on my home PC via Radio Userland’s news aggregator.

Radio Userland downloads enclosures in the background at a configurable number of hours after midnight. The next day, the podcasts I selected are cached on my PC.

This allows me to selectively download podcasts instead of wholesale downloading anything that comes across in the feed. Of course this technique means that the downloads are a little time-delayed, but I like the control.

Michael Lehman has a pretty cool radio voice. He can read fast too. Just listen to him give the contest information for the PDC event in the Buzz Cast!

Michael’s podcast, the Manic Minute is available on his Radio weblog via this feed.

I found an article that describes several command-line utilities that can automate SQL Server tasks.

These commands include:

We use a couple of these commands at my current client as part of our build/migration process.

Microsoft Excel is a widely used tool in American business. For that matter, the computer spreadsheet category, in all its incarnations, is one of the primary business tools period, next to the word processor.

I happen to use Excel frequently for data analysis and general business math (add, subtract, multiply and divide!). Nothing fancy really. However, I do consider myself to be a power user, relatively speaking. Now, I haven’t mastered statistical formulas, pivot tables, or every feature of the graphs and charts, but I believe that I have mastered the 20% of functionality that yields the 80% of results, and then some (maybe 35/90).

I believe that one of the most overlooked and powerful features of Excel is the conditional formatting feature. This allows things like changing the background color of a cell based on cell values or formulas–simple but very powerful. In fact, with a few simple techniques, you can find data mismatches, unused data, duplicate data, or matching data–all visually so the opportunity for error is greatly diminished.

Amazingly, I’ve found that very few (actually none) of the people to whom I have mentioned this feature have ever heard of it, much less used it. That is why I feel it to be my personal duty to extol the virtues of this feature to the few that read this blog.

The conditional formatting dialog can be found under the Format menu. Note that it does not appear when you right-click on a cell. I believe that this is an unfortunate omission on Microsoft’s part, not only as a missing convenience, but also as an opportunity to advertise this useful feature.

A cell is allowed to have up to three conditional formats. For example, a number value could have three different colors if it was positive, zero, or negative, respectively. Or a cell could be specially colored if its value was the same as the cell preceeding or following it. This can be helpful for spotting duplicates, although there are more effective ways to do this without using conditional formatting.

I just used this feature today to compare values that were supposed to match but didn’t. Rather than using the error prone technique of manually inspecting and formatting the data, I used conditional formatting and a formula to highlight mismatched values. The result was a professional-looking spreadsheet that I presented to management to visually illustrate a scenario that needed remedied. And of course, since I was the one who did the analysis, I will likely get credit for the proposed remedy. Bonus!–not $$$, just brownie points. And I did it with very little manual work on my part: just a couple of database queries, some conditional formatting, and some headings finish it off–oh, and repeating rows for page headers too. Fun stuff!

So, without giving a complete tutorial on conditional formatting, I urge you to check it out in the Excel help documentation. I admit, I’m probably being negligent in my responsibilities by leading you this far only to leave you without detailed instructions, but time is short, and I’ve at least wet your appetite. But, just to provide some degree of assistance, here are a few links to learn more:

Once you master the conditional formatting technique, you will likely find multiple uses for it that will make your life (if only slightly) easier. Enjoy, and here’s to the 80/20 rule!

Drupal is a versatile open source content
management system. I’m trying to install it for my own use, but I need to
upgrade my PHP version first. My friend suggested that I rebuild the
server with an updated Mandrake or SUSE distribution. I’m currently
running Mandrake 8.2, and I can’t get patches for it anymore.

It just sounds like the task is going to be a major pain. Plus, I don’t
think I have any way to burn an ISO image from Windows XP. Drat! Maybe
I’ll have to dual boot to Win2K to use my CD Creator software that no
longer works under XP. More work.

A friend of mine is considering replacing his entire small business website with Drupal. I think
that’s a smart move. Right now his website is still developing (partially
under construction) and I think now is a good time to make a move like
this. It will support his blog as well as a number of
other features. Good stuff. Jeff K., if your out there, I hope you don’t
mind me referring to your site. As they say, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

PHP and SQL Security. An anonymous reader writes “PHP and SQL Security are being proven more weak every day. Uberhacker.Com is running a PHP and SQL security research project to … [Slashdot]

Bookmarklet request.

Anyone know if it would be possible to create a bookmarklet that emulates an EyeDropper style application: as you move it around the page it shows you the hex colour code for the pixel directly under the mouse pointer? I’m pretty sure it can’t be done but I’d love to be proved wrong.

[Simon Willison's Weblog]

I’m thinking that the document.onmousemove would have to be set to a function handler that interrogated the event object to determine the underlying target. Once the target was acquired, a simple query on the background color and a message to the statusbar and voila! There you have it.

Of course, this does not directly answer the question. What’s missing here is the code. I’ve pieced together a bookmarklet that inserts a div and/or form into the current document and allows drag and drop capability. I imagine there would be some similarities however.

Oh, and by the way, I’m only making these assumptions on an IE platform. I can’t and won’t make guarantees for other browsers.

Update:
After more thought, I agree with Simon on his assessment of the possibility of an EyeDropper style application. That is, I agree that a pixel-based bookmarklet is not doable–only a page element-based bookmarklet. That would exclude any images used in the page, so such a bookmarklet would be of limited use.

RSSify was pretty cool. It could turn a non-RSSing blog into RSS for consumption by aggregators. But here’s the catch–it caught on so much that it was hogging precious bandwidth (see below). Successful grass roots services (not necessarily limited to XML-RPC/SOAP) face the same problem–becoming the victim of their own success.

23-Mar-04 3:00:30 pm Please stop using RSSify. Unfortunately I can no longer bear the bandwidth cost of running this service so I’m turning it off. There’s a mirror at http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/services/rssify/rssify.php. There may be others.

RSSify is a rather horrible hack that shouldn’t be needed any more. Please ask the owner of the site you’re reading (http://handheldlib.blogspot.com/) to change to a system that generates RSS natively such as Blogger Pro or Movable Type. Alternatively consider hosting RSSify yourself rather than using my bandwidth. [RSSify for http://handheldlib.blogspot.com/]

Oh, and by the way, note the mention of the Blogger Pro subscription. It’s not that expensive for the year. That’s why it surprises me so much that Dave Barry’s weblog doesn’t use the pro version. Come on Dave, if you don’t want to fork over the cash, have somebody pay for it. Your readers will thank you.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 is out and available for use.

…By the way, I notice there’s an RSS feed on [Microsoft's] security page. That’s a good one to subscribe to.

This link brought to you by [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]