Joel Dow

Delicious RSS Issues? FeedBurner to the Rescue!

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:58:05 -0700

Having trouble adding Delicious RSS feeds to MyYahoo! or another feed reader?

MyYahoo! was unable to add RSS feed from Delicious because of a 502 Bad Gateway error. I even tried using Yahoo Pipes as a proxy with no luck. Enter FeedBurner. I was able to add the Delicious Most Popular feed (http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/popular?count=15) to FeedBurner to create http://feeds.feedburner.com/delicious/lnqy. The FB feed works perfectly on MyYahoo! now. I find it funny that Delicious and MyYahoo are not playing well together since both are owned by Yahoo!

Feel free to use the FB feed above or create your own Delicious feed proxy using FB.

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Visual Studio 2010 and Norton Antivirus Compatibility Issues

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:36:00 -0800

On my work laptop I'm running Visual Studio 2010 and was required to install Norton Antivirus (To my shegrin). I typically create website projects (rather than web application projects) since they compile at runtime and seem faster for development purposes for me. However, one day I found the need to create a proxy library for use in a site I was working on. Every time I tried to build the project, Visual Studio would hang for 30 seconds to a minute at least. I searched for a solution but found none suitable. I ended up uninstalling Norton and everything works fine now. I installed MS Security Essentials instead.

I've heard that VS and Norton don't play nicely so this was confirmation. If you're experiencing similar issues I recommend doing the same.

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Who knew?

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:38:00 -0700

Who knew there was a market for the Jewish version of the ever-popular game Apples to Apples?

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A CAPTCHA for Plumbers...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:22:44 -0800

Funny CAPTCHA found on reCAPTCHA.com.

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The pros and cons of James Cameron's Avatar

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:16:37 -0800

Last week, in lieu of a Christmas bonus (you know, the economy and all) my boss took our team to see James Cameron's new movie, Avatar in IMAX 3D. Overall I enjoyed the movie and found it to be very entertaining. There were however some aspects of the film I thought were poorly placed and could have been left out. Let me also say that I am a Sci-Fi fan, as long as it's not too far out in left field. There has to be some tie back in to a sense of reality for me to enjoy it. My Avatar pros and cons are:

Pros:

Fantastic special effects - What do you expect for a movie costing hundreds of millions of dollars to create.
Likable main character - It's hard not to like the main character, Jake Sully.
Very imaginative - While the Na'vi and Pandora are very cool, I personally found all the technology used by the military to be much more fascinating.

Cons:

'Unobtanium' - Seriously?! What kind of name is that for the 'unobtainable' resource found under the Na'vi's 'home tree'? For all the creativity elsewhere, this was laughable.
Am I watching a video game trailer? - Many of the special effect scenes were so complex they were entirely computer generated. This felt a little too much like the little video segments you get between the levels of a video game.
Thank you Al Gore - 'We sent the humans back to their dead planet', 'they had killed everything green'. Why does every movie coming out of Hollywood these days insist on having some sort of political agenda or slam towards those with differing views? Just the other day my wife and I rented 'Julia and Julia'. Even that movie contained a Republican slam.
Lacking in originality - As far as the plot goes there are too many other movies I can point to and say, 'That was basically what happened in xyz'.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but gives some of my first impressions of the film. Though there were plenty of cons I was still able to get past them and find the movie very entertaining. I will not however be buying the DVD.

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Vista's Bad Rap

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:30:56 -0800

Don't get me wrong. I don't love everything about Windows Vista, but I think it seriously got a bad rap. Microsoft simply wasn't prepared enough to combat the initial backlash so the all-out attack ensued. I like Win7 a lot too.

First Posterous post. Exercising my brain to think in more than 140 character sentences. Peace.

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