Insomnia

I was made aware today of a new RSS utility called AideRSS. It takes the content of a blog, analyzes it and collates a whole whack of statistics related to the relevance of the content, participation of readers, other people that link to it (diggers, reddit, del.icio.us etc...) and gives each post a ranking. That it itself is cool.

But then, it republishes the RSS feed for the blog. But the twist is that it republishes it in multiple flavors, filtered by their PostRank score. So if you follow a lot of blogs, you can subscribe to the "just the hits" RSS feed and you will only be made aware of posts from that blog that generated a lot of "excitement".

Here's what my blog looks like when viewed through the AideRSS tool. It determines that about 50% of my posts are "great". I don't know if that is good or bad.

Insomnia - AideRSS

Labels: tech

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Finally, I got rid of my glass ceiling



A quick look at the reliability meter tells me that I am having a much more stable system.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is related to my last "tuning" of disabling the Adobe quickstart application. There was another Windows update in between and the number of failures has been a lot lower recently. Pretty much all the failures that I see in the reliability meter now are Windows shutdown failures. You shut the computer down and it freezes on shutdown. Aside from that, my system has been really stable. I guess I am going to stop bitching about it now.

Labels: Vista

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This morning, I received an letter from WinZip Computing. In this letter, they were respectfully asking me to make sure that no unlicensed copies of their software was being used at our company and to prepare for a call from their representative that will assist us in our audit.

I'm going to channel Seth Godin here but that was an awful piece of negative marketing. The letter is full of words and phrases like: "It has come to our attention" and "internal compliance". Nowhere in the letter do they tell me what their software can do for me or my organization and why it would be a good idea to give them money instead of using what is available for free in my OS or on the internet. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind paying for software, I make my living from people selling software. But it has to add value.

What is more ironic is that I got this email because we were a WinZip customer. We bought licenses a few years ago when there was a compelling reason to use their software. Now that the reason is not so compelling, they "threaten" me into compliance instead of telling me why I should continue to do business with them. If I was not a customer of theirs, I would not have gotten this "request for compliance".

There was an email address on the letter and I will follow-up with them with a letter thanking them for the reminder that I should let everyone on my staff know about the existence of excellent WinZip alternatives like the free 7-Zip. And that they should uninstall WinZip to be compliant with their license requirements.

Labels: work

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