Sean’s Blog

Microsoft loses another customer

So over the weekend (my weekend is MTW), I had a host of computer related problems.  I figured that since it had been about a year, it was time for a fresh install of Windows XP.  I probably should have done it earlier since all the crap Dell loads a new box up with, but I have been lazy.

I backed up all my important files, pulled my windows registration with the Magical Jelly Bean Key Finder, and then got my install disks together.  It was then I realized that I no longer had the Dell install disks.  So I dug up a old copy of Windows XP Media Center.  I figured that since that is what I had on the box, and I had a legitimate licence key for it, no problems.  Boy was I wrong.

The install went smoothly.  I used my key when XP asked for the registration during the install, and everything  proceeded.  It was afterwords that I ran into the problems.  After the updates, Windows Genuine Advantage needed me to activate and then register.  No problem, I had done this before when I patched the box in the past.  This time though, Microsoft was having none if it.  After trying 3 times to make sure I didn’t make a typo, I checked the sticker on the top of the computer.  Here was my first big surprise.  The registration number on the Windows sticker was different then the number that came off my computer.  I have no idea what Dell was pulling here, but I was relieved and thought that using the code on the box itself would take care of activation.  Again, no luck. Whatever I tried, Microsoft would not activate Windows XP.

Now I know there are several “work arounds” that will get around the activation and Windows Genuine Advantage validation, but there is a matter of principle here as well.  I paid for my copy of XP when I purchased the system from Dell.  I am upset with Dell for not providing the raw OS install disks like they used to.  Worse though is Microsoft setting up a system that will lock out my computer or force me to pay $140 for a liscense that I already have.  As as an IT Security Professional I feel ethically bound not to crack the security on a product (even though I fee that I am within my rights to do so).

I’m left with several choices now. Pay 140 bucks for a new XP liscence which will be obsolete in a year or so, $250 for a new copy of Windows Vista, or bite the bullet and make the switch to Linux.

Since paying for XP dosen’t make much sense, and I’ve already decided I am not going to Vista, I’m left with Linux.  I’ve been running Ubuntu on my laptop without problems for about 6 months so that looks like the path I will be taking.    I’ll keep you posted on how it works out…

Update and a new Food Blog!

It’s been a rough couple of days. First I was sick, then I tried to upload my Death Valley pictures to Flickr and I was a quarter way through when they took the sight down for maintennce. The I notice that I was getting some weird messages on my personal fire wall and discovered I had a virus. After repeated attempts to clean it and in the name of saftey, I am now in the process reinstalling XP on my main desktop.

But anyways, I have also started a new food blog, for cooking, eating, and the general fun of setting stuff on fire indoors and out It is called Sean burns stuff. Take a look.

Back and sick

I’ve made it back, but after 110+ degree temps, all night drinking binges, and Vegas buffet food, my immune system apparently shutdown on the plane and a picked up a nice bit of sickness, so I am working on my pictures and will hopefully get this stuff all together this weekend or earlier next week, but right now my plans consist of working and then going home and sleeping…

Death Valley Blogging…

…well, not really.  I am leaving for my sister’s fiance’s bachelor party tommarrow in Vegas, and since I have 4 days off before everyone arrives in Vegas, I am going to get my camp on in the hottest place in North America.  I plan to write about it when I get back so stay tuned….

Creating a feed with Yahoo Pipes

I’ve seen several mentions of Yahoo Pipes, and played with it once but never really spent any time to make something worth while. But today, since I had some time on my hands, I decided to take another stab at it and I was pretty pleased with what I could whip up.

Yahoo Pipes is a way to consolidate feeds and add some logic to it. What is cool about it, is that Yahoo has put alot of features into it and wrapped it all into a slick GUI package.

For my example, I created a Cooking Pipe, so I could scan the new recipes to see if anything caught my eye.

First off, log onto Yahoo Pipes. Here is where we will create our first pipe.

Now we get our feeds. I used some feeds from cooking sites I frequent:

• http://www.epicurious.com/services/rss/feeds/newrecipes.xml - From Epicurious.com
• http://www.epicurious.com/services/rss/feeds/LatestFeatures.xml - From Epicurious.com
• http://www.epicurious.com/services/rss/feeds/dailydish.xml - From Epicurious.com
• http://feeds.101cookbooks.com/101cookbooks - From 101cookbooks.com
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/elise/simplyrecipes - From SimplyRecipes.com

We will now add these feeds to the pipe. Drag the Fetch Feed Icon to the workspace. Add each feed to the box (click “+” next to URL to add more feeds). Now create a link between the Fetch Feed box and the Pipe Output box. We now have a working pipe:

If you’ve done everything right, you should have output in the Debugger pane (at the bottom).

But, looking through the feed, I see alot of seafood recipes. I dislike seafood, so I don’t want to see any recipes about it. Here is where the power of Pipes come in.

We are going to add a filter for the types of seafood I don’t want to see. We’ll do this by clicking on Operators, and then choose the filter box. Now we can set that filter box to block any thing that would indicate a seafood recipe. In this example, I am just looking for the words fish, shrimp, mussel, or salmon in the title of the article. There are ALOT of options to filter on and you could get very sophisticated with this, but we’ll keep this example simple.

We now have a pipe that gives us recipes, but filters out (most) seafood recipes.

Now you can clone this (or any public) pipe and customize it to meet your needs. This just barely scratches the surface of what pipes are capable of. For some more complex examples, browse the pipes and see what people have created…

ProfileFly - All your profiles in one place (sort of)

A couple days ago I wrote about how I thought identity aggregation was going to be a big new thing in the near future since we have all these “identities” all over the place. So imagine who good I felt when I read Lifehacker’s article “Condense your contact info with ProfileFly“. So I logged onto ProfileFly and proceeded to fill out a profile with all my disparate blogs and sites and whatnot…

Imagine my disappointment when I got to my consolidated profile and I have a myspace knockoff page staring me in the face… I guess I should have had some idea looking at the front page, but you live and you learn. Maybe it is just a matter of tasted, but this isn’t really what I had in mind, and it definitely is not the central place I want my online identity access from (PerezHilton.com is one of the default bookmarks if that tells you anything…). Maybe I am just to old and grumpy.

Well, here it is for anyone interested : My ProfileFly Profile (plus I can’t figure out how do delete it… )

WSJ - “You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well”

The Wall Street Journal has an article about how having a common name can hurt you in Google’s page ranking (“You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well”). The meat of the article, to me, more talks about having an “online brand”. What I mean by that is that you are associated with your pages. For example, when I look for myself on Google with “Sean Lavelle”, 6 of the Top 10 hits are pages associate with me.

But the really problem is how to differentiate your pages from everyone else named Sean Lavelle? How do they get my pages instead of :

• A story about Sean Lavelle, a Sinn Fien politician, who was a paid informant for the British (if I read the story correctly).
• A different Sean Lavelle’s genealogy search
• A Sean Lavelle, who bought a pub in Ballina, Ireland
• Some pharmaceutical research from Sean M Lavelle

While I am pretty happy about where I fall in that list (#1, #2 are my resume on Emurse.com, the other 4 are this blog), I could see where some people would run into a problem. I didn’t really do anything to improve my search ranking, other then tagging posts that are about me and my online identity with the keyword “Sean Lavelle”. Now if your name was John Smith or some other very common name, there is no way just doing that could get you on the first couple pages.

A couple in the article talks about finding a name that is not very popular for there soon to be born baby. Now frankly, this is ridiculous, as by the time the child grows up I really don’t think we will be using Google (at least in the present form). And I’d be kind of pissed at my parents if they named me Saraswathi Lavelle solely so it might help my Googlability. Not that Sarawathi is a bad name, but not solely based on popularity.

I think that then next big thing we are going to see are Identity Aggregators. Some way that ties all this information together and allows an identity to be searched for instead of a string of text. Spock looks interesting in this regard and if I get an invite to it, I will attempt to share what it looks like with you all.

And just one note on a pet peeve of mine. Whenever I read in an article that the search for “XYZ” returns 4,832,973,543 results (actually 22,700,000) it drives me crazy. I don’t know if the article’s author knows, but a search for Sean Lavelle(210,000) is different for a search for “Sean Lavelle”(990 results). On searches for any documents that contain “Sean” or “Lavelle” while the later search will only find “Sean Lavelle”.

What’s Rocking Me This Month …

I link to all these through Amazon, so you can listen to clips if something looks interesting.  Here’s what I’ve been listening to in April:

• TV On the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain : This is a deeply weird, rocking album.  So non-traditional, but so good.  Start to finish this is a good album.  I can see why so many reviews picked this as album of the year for 2006.  Essential Tracks: Blues From Down Here, Whirlwind
• Silversun Pickups - Carnavas : Distorted guitars, driving songs, what’s not to like.  Sounds a little like Smashing Pumpkins during the glory days.  Essential Tracks : Little Lover’s So Polite , Dream at Tempo 119
• Yeah Yeah Yeah’s - Show Your Bones : Karen O & and company rock it out.  Solid aggressive rock and roll. Essential Tracks : Gold Lion, Phenomenon
• Girl Talk - Night Ripper : Mash up’s aren’t exactly my cup o’ tea but this one is so all over the place it is really a work of art.  Mixing in The Breeders, Smashing Pumpkins, Kansas and assorted hip hop, it makes for some good listening. Plus, I read in Wired that he still works a 9-5  cube job! Essential tracks… Just let it play.
• Brand New - The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me : Definitely a sadder and more grown up album then either  Deja Entendu  or  Your Favorite Weapon.  Still very intense. Essential Tracks: Sowing Season, Degausser
• Evergreen Terrace - Writer’s Block : A album of all covers, by a metalcore band.  What else needs to be said?  Brilliant!  Essential Tracks: Maniac , Sunday Bloody Sunday
• Clutch - Robot Hive / Exodus - One of my favorite bands, Clutch sounds like the love child of Grand Funk and Mastodon.  A rock and roll tent revival is the best way to describe it…  Essential Tracks : 10,000 Witnesses , Gravel Road

Plus my my April ITunes playlist (…and yes that is the Geico Cave Man song) :

• Black Wave/Bad Vibrations - The Arcade Fire (Neon Bible)
• Dream At Tempo 119 - Silversun Pickups (Carnavas)
• Arc of Time - Bright Eyes (Digital Ash in a Digital Urn)
• When The Sun Goes Down - Arctic Monkeys (Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not)
• Gold Mine Gutted - Bright Eyes (Digital Ash in a Digital Urn)
• For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti - Sufjan Stevens (Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State)
• Out the Window - Violent Femmes (Add It Up (1981-1993))
• No Cars Go - The Arcade Fire (Neon Bible)
• Phenomena - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Show Your Bones)
• Remind Me - Röyksopp (Melody A.M.)
• O Valencia - The Decemberists (The Crane Wife)
• Parting Of The Sensory - Modest Mouse (We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank)
• Blues From Down Here - TV on the Radio (Return To Cookie Mountain)
• Dashboard - Modest Mouse (We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank)
• Last Stop: This Town - Eels (Electro-shock Blues)
• History Song - The Good, The Bad & The Queen (The Good, The Bad & The Queen)

What’s Your Web2.0

Engtech is running a meme to find out what web 2.0 applications we actually use. Sounds like a good survey, so I thought I would add my $.02.

The rules are:

1. Link to this post and the post of whoever tagged you.
2. Create a list of the web2.0 sites you use and categorize them from “daily use” to “weekly use” to “monthly use”. Include links to your accounts if you want so people can friend you.
3. Tag a bunch of people you want to join in.

Nobody tagged me because all my freinds are Luddites but I’ll take the initiative:

Daily:

• Google - Gmail, Google Notebook, Google Calender
• Del.icio.us - For linking / bookmarking
• Tumblr - for my tumblog
• Wordpress

Weekly:

• Emurse.com - For my resume
• Flickr - for photos
• MySpace - Cause I’m a loser
• Wikipedia

Monthly:

• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon

My Week in Photos - 05/04/2007

Here’s the link for this weeks pictures. I was playing a bit with the digital macro function on my point and shoot camera, as well as the stitch function.

My Week in Photos on Flickr - 05/04/2007