Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Yet again, the code I posted to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe has expired…I’ve posted a new version that will work until February 28, 2004.

More info (and instructions) here and here.

UPDATED: expiration date extended through October 31, 2004 – download the updated version from the links below.

Download: msi | zip

Going to the PDC? Look me up! You can send email to pdc2003 at rassoc.com to catch me immediately…try to keep it short, as it will be forwarded via SMS.

I will also be at the Weblogger BOF session, of course, on Monday night. See you there!

Hmm…this phone comes with both a mono headset and a stereo headset. Which teased me into thinking that the phone, plus a large SD card, would make an awesome MP3 player. However, using the stereo headset, the sound quality leaves something to be desired. There’s pretty much no bass response whatsoever.

So now I’m wondering if it’s the phone, or the headset. It’s got a pretty small plug (2mm maybe?), and of course my normal headphones don’t have this side of plug.

Any ideas? Or has anyone else tried this, and could report what they found?

If you’re going to the PDC, be sure to come to the Weblogger BOF session – we’ll be giving away a couple of NewsGator licenses, and possibly a couple of other items.

See you there!

I picked one of these up yesterday…after calling AT&T a few times (I’m an existing customer), I got the impression that it would be a week or so before I had it in my hands. So I called the local Best Buy, and they had a whole box of them – so about a half hour after that, I had one in my hands!

I have to say, this is a pretty cool device. In fact, my only complaint so far is that certain mMode functions (like the location services) don’t work…or, more specifically, they don’t show up on the mMode menu. If you type in the secret URLs, some of them will work, but some of them show errors. I would hope AT&T will get these things worked out soon.

Ok, two more complaints…it runs SmartPhone 2002 (instead of 2003, so only one email box), and no camera. But hey, we can’t have everything all at once! ;-)

Great form factor, though – my first impression is that I think Motorola did a great job with this phone.

Over the weekend, Scoble talked about how he uses NewsGator to read 618 weblogs and feeds. Wow! If he tries out the search folders with NewsGator in Outlook 2003 (as mentioned here), he’ll probably like it even better.

After reading Scoble’s post, Craig Burton decided to give NewsGator a try. Craig says:

I downloaded Newsgator and played with it for a while. I really like it. So far I only have about 70 feeds to watch.

I then worked on Amphetadesk for a while. It took me longer to set up 25 feeds in Amphetadesk than it did the 70 in Newsgator.

That’s what I like to hear! :-)

Since I was a pressplay subscriber, they switched my account over to the new Napster service beta. For those of you dying to know, it’s almost identical to the old PressPlay, but with a different GUI. The biggest change seems to be the name!

If all three of the below apply to you:

• You work in a small company with 1-10 employees
• You love NewsGator
• You would be willing to talk to the press for a few minutes

Sweet! Webmonkey has built an Outlook Today screen which contains NewsGator posts. Check it out!

Dare Obasanjo on RSS-Data:

I had originally planned to ignore the proposal along with the ensuing interest in the format that sprang up in a few weblogs but after seeing an article about RSS-Data in EWeek which attempts to legitimize what is basically a bad idea I decided to go ahead and post a critique of the proposal.

[...]

The bottom line is that it is hard to see how Jeremy Allaire’s proposal is any better than the status quo and in many ways it is worse.

Dare and I don’t always agree, but in this case I couldn’t have said it any better. The RSS-Data proposal takes the god-awful (IMHO) XML-RPC serialization format, and pushes it into RSS feeds. And at the end of the day, you’re no better off than you are with RSS extensions, except that it’s harder to read, and more difficult to parse.

Les Orchard has also posted (1, 2, 3, 4) about RSS-Data, with some examples.

I don’t get it…if the goal is to get aggregators to understand arbitrary extensions, this doesn’t help. Not at all. The client still needs to know what the information is…changing the serialization format used isn’t relevant to solving that problem. We’ve already seen lots of namespaced RSS extensions, with more coming. This is the right way to extend a XML document – create a namespace, and put your new elements into it. It’s not rocket science.