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Three in the Family

~ randyaa ~ 12 Comments

A man and a woman had a little baby,
Yes, they did.
They had three in the family,
And that’s a magic number.

Gotta say, we’re excited. We’ve got a little’n on the way.

Yep, a little baby Aldrich.

Rachel is about 4 months Pregnant right now. Naturally we’ve known for a while but we wanted to wait to share until we had something to share.

Yes we know what it is (maybe you can tell from the video) and yes we have the name picked out. However; you’ll have to wait and see.  That’ll keep you reading though right?

Baby Aldrich @ 18 weeks:

And, the video of when we told my in-laws:

UPDATE: The video of my in-laws might need an explanation.  We gave them a photo-book of our dogs. The first picture had a label on it “The Grandkids” and the last picture was of the pregnancy test.

Good stuff, Pumped.

Google Reader is Magic

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

I have a sort of love-hate relationship with the new Google Reader Explore functionality.  Some of the stuff might be interesting, but honestly it’s just another distraction that I don’t need.

sort-by-magic

Did anybody catch the new sorting features though? We’ve known that Google is magic for years.  Apparently they’re now being public about it.

Syncing with FolderShare (part 2)

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

It’s taken me over a month to write this.

It should be awesome then!

Nah sorry, just more of the same old crap.

In Syncing with Foldershare part 1 I outlined what I was using FolderShare for. I’ll now outline my reactions after using the service for a while.

FolderShare advertises three main features. Sync My Folders, Share With Friends, Access My Files.

FolderShare Features

Share With Friends – This feature is completely unnecessary. There are literally thousands of ways out there to share a file with your friends. Having a directory synchronized with your friends seems like overkill. As far as the collaborative nature of the feature, collaboration itself belongs on the web. As such there are many online tools such as Google Documents or gliffy provide much better mechanisms for collaborating with others.

Access My Files – This feature scares the crap out of me and if if there is one reason I stop using FolderShare this will be it. It allows you to access every file on any of your computers that is currently connected to FolderShare. This means if someone gains access to your FolderShare account they can access everything from the web.

Surely you mean only the files or directories you’ve told FolderShare to share?

Nope sorry, Everything. A big downside to FolderShare in my mind is the fact everything is configured from their website. You can add a new computer to ‘sync’ with and add sync points right from the website if you have access to the account.

Sync My Folders – This is the only feature I find useful and frankly the only feature I want FolderShare to provide. This allows you to pick (different) folders on two (or more) different computers and sync their contents over the web. They synchronization is recursive so if you have seperate partitions for data feel free to sync the entire partition.

Lessons Learned

FireFox profiles -Firefox keeps some files in your profile locked whenever it’s running. If you have the (synchronized) profile open on more than one computer you will start to get notices that FolderShare cannot copy a certain file. Your only options are ‘retry’ or ‘exit.’ If you choose retry it will obviously fail unless you close FireFox. Choosing to close firefox means you will need to wait several minutes before resuming your work. If you choose exit FolderShare itself exits and you lose your synchronization completely. This didn’t bother me to much I just got in the habit of making sure I closed FireFox on my laptop before attempting to use it on my PC.

After a few weeks however; my PC and Laptop started to get out of sync and at some point Firefox (or Windows I’m not sure which) decided it would be a good idea to reinitialize my entire profile and I lost everything on my laptop. At this time I determined the headaches FolderShare was giving me synchronizing Firefox profiles wasn’t going to work for me. I need a new solution so if someone has one please share. Note that I’m looking for a way to synchronize everything including plug-ins not just settings and history (what Google can currently offer)

iTunes Music Library – As I don’t use iTunes all that often on my home PC this feature is working excellently. However; it suffers the same problems as the Firefox profile synchronization in that the two PCs cannot both run iTunes at the same time.

Security – FolderShare uses your normal Microsoft login. This means that if your MSN account is compromised it instantly exposes all of your personal files on your home computer. This is very scary to me. To make me a bit more at ease FolderShare needs to add some local security features.

  • Only Files and Folders shared Locally (from the PC itself) should be exposed to FolderShare
  • To add a PC should require some sort of authentication from one of the PCs already part of the synchronization

Usefulness – FolderShare seems to be incredibly useful to synchronize data. That being said it seems fundamentally flawed for synchronizing application data that needs to be used very often. The fact that FolderShare synchronizes over the internet as opposed to network connectivity is awesome. This means that even if I’m on the go, when I make a change to a file I’m synchronizing it gets backed up at home.

Fix Those Pesky Unread Shared Items

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

I’m a fan of Google Reader. I’ve written here before about their new improvements and how great it is to work in an iterative development area where improvements happen daily.

Even a great team has a failure once and a while. They recently added the ability to see your Google Talk Friend’s shared items within Google Reader. While this shows that Google has great plans for integrating their services, I’ve had problems with this feature right off the bat and from what I understand I’m not the only one.

My biggest problem was that the counter of unread items would go up but my ability to read said items was gone. I could no longer get updates of my friend’s shared items essentially rendering the feature useless. If you’re like me you’ve been plagued by the following screen since they introduced the feature:

Shared Item - Wrong Count

Thanks to Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide we now have a solution and it’s easier than you think.

  1. Make sure you’re logged into Google Reader and goto Settings -> Friends.
  2. Scroll down until you see the user who’s items won’t update correctly.
  3. Click Hide. You should see a picture like so:

    Hidden Google Reader User

  4. Go back to the main page by either clicking ‘<< Back to Google Reader’ or the Google Reader logo.
  5. Your friend should no longer appear at all in the ‘Friends Shared Items’ list.
  6. Go back to Settings >> Friends.
  7. Find Him/Her again.
  8. Click ‘Show.’
  9. Go back to the main page again.
  10. It might take a second but they will appear in the list again. Once they do they’ll have a small red ‘new!’ next to their name. Click their username.

At this point you will have their new shared items displayed. From now on things will act normally and you can mark the items as read as you see fit.

These instructions are a complete interpretation of Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide’s original post.

Up my (feed) Arsenal

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

A while back I posted about feed 43 and Feed Rinse.  Since that time I’ve become even more of a feed junkie.  I find not having to go searching for information a monumental time saver, and as such I’ve let my subscriptions grow to well over 200.  Also I’d say I’ve become much more informed which may or may not turn out to be a good thing.  My weapon of choice is still Google Reader and while talking with my friend Matt I discovered he has been using bloglines.  We talked for a bit about the different features and I came to realize Google Reader is missing a few really nice things.  Since our brief chat I’ve found several new feed tools to enhance my tool set.  There are three features which Matt takes advantage of which I was unaware existed.

  1. E-mail feeds.  Use this feature to sign up for a newsletter which you want to receive but prefer to read in a feed format rather than E-mail.  It can also be used for any site which you don’t want to have your email address.  This is especially handy for those sites which block the ‘+’ operator in your E-mail address (which I wrote about here).
  2. Tracking Shipments.  Create a feed that directly links to your tracking number so you can keep ‘track’ of where it is and what it’s doing.
  3. Public feed sharing.  Let people know what you’re reading and where.  I recently wrote about using the shared items feature on Google Reader but that was just for individual items.  This brings it to a whole new level.  It can also be used to share your blogroll so you can provide an automatic blogroll list via feed.

Let me first tackle #1.  A few days ago I discovered Mail Bucket.  This handy website will create a feed out of any email address you send it.  They allow dots, dashes etc.  All you need to do is have E-mails sent to blurb@mailbucket.org and the feed for that E-mail address instantly available at mailbucket.org/blurb.xml.  Remember though, this is publicly available so make sure no sensitive E-mails are being sent there.

#2. Matt happened across Power Sellers Unite.  This site allows you to create a feed from a UPS or USPS tracking number.  This is something I had previously attempted to find but other sites had been blocked by UPS.  Let’s hope this one doesn’t anytime soon.

#3. This one turned out to be much easier than I had thought.  As it turns out you can make any folder in Google Reader public.  Thanks to Google Reader’s tagging/folder system this turns out wonderfully as any feed can exist in more than one folder.  Therefor you can keep them categorized as you wish, and simply add a feed to the ‘public’ folder (or in my case use the blogroll tag).

Another helpful site I happened across recently that can help you Up Your (feed) Arsenal is Yahoo Pipes.  This fancy little site might one day replace both Feed 43 and Feed Rinse and numerous others but for now it’s just a site to keep an eye on.

We are Media

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Today’s Media sources are truly impressive. The pure amount of information available and the ways in which to get it are just astounding. After struggling for a long time I started with a blog. That helped, then I discovered Google Reader and that helped a little more. I then installed a wiki which only I have access to. That helped me manage my ideas and organize thoughts and helped a lot.

But today… today my good friend Tim let me in on a little secret. Google Reader’s shared items. I’ve always seen the feature sitting there and not really paid much attention to it. I noticed he had added his Google Reader’s shared items application to his facebook profile.

Suddenly, Like Robert Scoble, I am Media. I share lots of things I find all over the internet via lots of different tools. instant messages (or should i say Pidgin?) E-mail, In-person (gasp!), and our Blog. Recently I’ve been struggling with how to share these things efficiently. For a while I posted a lot of videos on our Blog. I don’t like this. The blog is supposed to be our thoughts and how people can keep up on what we’re doing. It had become a place to keep up on what we’re reading/watching. I didn’t want to use my site because that’s intended to be more of a professional atmosphere where I share projects, ideas and thoughts I have dealing strictly with the software industry (or wherever I end up).

Well now I’ve found my mechanism. If you are interested my shared items can be found here. There’s even a feed for those of you who like that idea. Also it’s now displayed on our website in a sidebar widget.