Recently I discovered a fabulous project called ybox2.  It is a very small set-top box that you have to self assemble.  By very small, I mean that it fits inside an “Altoids” box, which would be slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes to those over this side of the Atlantic. It comes with a TV output, an Ethernet connection and a lot of interesting programming capability.  Most interesting to me is the Twitter app that receives updates from your feed.  There are some other good applications available too which might make it worth the investment in time.

The original YBoxes were made for Yahoo’s Open Hack Day and subsequently sold off for about $130. One of the guys at the event was a designed called Robert Quattlebaum, who subsequently hacked together some updates and released them to the public.  His updates weigh in at less than half the price of the original, and are supposedly more flexible.  The only drawback that I can see is the reliance on television to handle the display.  Now, there is another option which seems to be to buy an old portable DVD player and use it for display purposes.  That’d likely double the price though, which isn’t really the goal of this project. 

It comes with a built-in web server, which does give it some interesting possibilities.  It has 32k RAM which doesn’t allow that much storage, but the CPU is very powerful and does have enormous potential. Oh, it fits inside an Altoids tin, did I mention that? 

An interesting thing happened over the last twenty four hours.  I had saved this post as a draft and went away to do other things.  The concept really excited me however, and I wanted to do something with a small device that would display interesting information to me.  It had to be separate from any of the PCs I have here, and I had to be able to display a Twitter feed on it.  That was my main motivation really.  I wanted to be able to keep up to date with the news without having to start my PC or switch to a different application. Then it hit me. I have something that does this already. Not only that, but it has an operating system that I can write applications on. It is of course my Pocket PC, my trusty iPaq that I have had sitting here for ever.

I recently updated it from Windows Mobile 5 to version 6, which has resulted in a substantial speed increase.  This version also allows remote display of Windows Sidebar applications, which has a lot of potential for.. well play really.  I would post screen shots and a mini review of it, but it unfortunately doesn’t work with the Toshiba Bluetooth drivers on my laptop.  I presume there will be a fix however which will deal with that issue soon enough.

Microsoft have just released a new beta build of Windows Live Writer.  Changes include updates to image handling (there is now lightbox support) and some UI / editing changes.  Most of the difference is under the hood though.

Writer Zone: Technical Preview: Now Available for Download

I'm typing this on the balcony, on a beautiful summer evening without a cloud in the sky.  There are some kids playing football on the grass below, and its all really idyllic.  So what's new then?  We just bought some furniture for the balcony; a very low table and some large cushions to sit on.  The table is rich dark solid oak, with heavy legs but not so heavy that it can't be moved around easily.  The cushions are low enough that you could sit on them and under the table at the same time. We also bought a bunch of coloured glass candle holders to provide illumination during the evenings.  Its all pretty cool really. 

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but the quality of housing here in München is so far in advance of London that it scares me.  We are paying overall substantially less here than we paid when living in London.  Not only that, but the quality of just about everything is better than it is in London.  Our apartment is in a managed building, so one of the tenants (called a Hausmeister) has a full time job to take care of things here.  He cleans all of the public areas (corridors, lift, cellars, washing-machine room etc), makes sure the rubbish gets taken out and collected, organises the recycling, keeps the heating running (not necessary at the moment!) etc etc.  Its all so very clean.  Even the underground parking has a car-wash in it. 

My one complaint, if you could call it that, is that the walls are too solid.  Wireless signals have to be boosted for every room or they just don't work.  Infuriatingly the signals travel better through the ceilings than they do through the walls.  I could therefore connect to several of my neighbour's WLANs with better reception than I would get on mine if it wasn't boosted by a second router.  In time, I'll change the whole thing over to 802.11n, but I really want to wait for the standard to be ratified first. The problem is that they don't expect the standard to be fully ratified until 2009 (yes FIVE years in the making).

So anyway, have to sand down the new table now, as I oiled it this morning...

Surprisingly enough, AOL seem to have stepped up and put some numbers on the table to try and merge with Yahoo!  Supposedly AOL (or Time Warner) have valued themselves at $10 billion which is way down from the last estimate of their worth. Under the deal, the AOL folks would all switch to being Yahooligans (or would that be YahAOLigans?) with the exception for the dial up business. 

I'm not sure what that means in the US, where the dial-up and connectivity business has been in tatters for years, but there would be no impact on Europe as those businesses were sold off to Carphone Warehouse, Neuf Cegatel and Telecom Italia.  I think if anything, the new company should seek to leverage both brands in Europe to a stronger entity.

We'll just have to see what happens.  This certainly makes the fight interesting though.  Is the final outcome going to be Microhoo, YAhoLoo or a bunch of unhappy companies?

I have this tool that I use sometimes to packet sniff XML stuff.  I keep forgetting the name of the damn tool, and for some reason always think it begins with a "P". It doesn't, it begins with "F", and its called Fiddler.  F. I. D. D. L. E. R. Fiddler.  I have no excuse in future for forgetting the name of the tool, disregarding the fact that I have downloaded it to my server. Fiddler can be downloaded from http://www.fiddlertool.com.

Its looking like Microsoft was serious when they said they wanted to buy Yahoo!  Microsoft offered $44 billion to buy Yahoo! which valued them at around 60% higher than their market capitalisation at the time of the offer.   In an open letter to Yahoo's board, they have said they'd start getting serious if they didn't accept it.  By serious, that means they're going to start a proxy fight by electing a new set of directors to Yahoo's board.  Linkage.

Twingly is a search engine that purports to be spam free and index only blogs. Its a lofty goal that seems to actually work.  I've done a couple of searches on it and seem to have gotten only genuine results so far.  Now, I haven't searched for anything like "Britney Spears", or "sex", but the results for technical searches seem just fine to me.  I've been doing various searches while I write this post and its getting more and more impressive.  I'm off to play for a while...

On October 18th 2001 I made two posts here. One where I said I was going to bed, and one afterwards where I said I had stayed up to do some work on this site.  The first of those posts has the time stamp 17:00 and the second has 19:43.  Now, while I don't think I'd be going to bed at 19:43 or 17:00, I think there was a fuckup in the server time zones somewhere over the last many years that caused this.  Its highly likely that I wouldn't have programmed in time zone compensation at the beginning of this blog, and that's where the time discrepancy came from.  That's not a bug anymore, so its ok. 

However, the first of those posts was done at 17:00.  Every other post before that, right to the beginning of when I started this blog has a time stamp of 17:00.  The thing that I changed shouldn't have caused the dates to mess up, but it seems to have done exactly that.  Bizarre, and strange, and this bug has hit the record for me for the longest time to find : Seven years, seven months, ten days. Awesome!

I've upgraded the server from IIS6* on Windows Server 2003 to IIS7 on Windows Server 2008. There we a couple of configuration issues that needed to be resolved before it all came back, but its done now. Chief amongst those were the instructions provided by my host.  While they warned at several points that you needed to know what you were doing with IIS7, there were also some basic instructions that I had to hunt for in order to get it all up and running.  Things that I wasn't expecting like the need for a different login to the one I had been using before.  All of the info was available in FAQs sequestered around the site, but there was no coherent "This is what has changed and how you proceed" documentation supplied from my host.  Still, this process is only a few days old and the documentation is still being written. My host (DiscountASP.Net) are typically very cutting edge for the price they charge, so I can't really complain.

The new server is running very fast.  I suspect that this comes from the physical server being under-crowded with web sites rather than the software being substantially faster.  However, Microsoft have released some impressive stats for IIS7, so you never know.

I have another Windows Server 2008 at home and its running a development version of this site.  It allows me to make changes to a development system before I roll them out so that you can see them.  My goal was always to have maximum up-time for DaveWhite.Net, and this facilitates that nicely.  I believe that the three hours or so that we were down today make up the longest time that this domain has been down in about eight years. Wow, I just had a look and the first post I ever made to this blog was nine years and sixteen days ago.  Three thousand, three hundred and four days.  Anyway, time for sleep.

* IIS is Internet Information Services, which is a piece of software written by Microsoft to handle web sites.

OK, so its half one in the morning, and I'm tired.  I should know better, but I'm going to do it anyway.  I have been experimenting with BlogEngine.Net of late, and I really like that engine.  So, I've decided to use it here instead of my own roll-your-own blog.  I'm going to make the change now.  As soon as I click Publish, then I'm taking LPC down and installing the new engine live.  Right.  Here goes...

OK, so after doing a sanity check on everything, I figured that this could wait until tomorrow.  There are a lot of pages on DaveWhite.Net that need to be redirected, copied or adjusted.  If I do this now, then I'm going to break my web site and I don't want to do that.  Again.  So, I'll check some things first.  Firstly, there's a new version due out very soon (ie: days rather than weeks) so I may wait for it based on what's in the changelog.  Secondly, my hosting provider have rolled out IIS7.  This might be a good time to upgrade.  I need to see if the engine works on IIS7.  OK, going to get some sleep for the moment, will update tomorrow with what I'm doing.