Rob Cannon

 http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=ADBL&script=412&layout=-6&item_id=617618

If you are a commuter, you need to check out Audible.  It is a great way to get downloadable audio books that you can play through most MP3 players.  It’s a great way to pass the driving hours.  The best deal is the premium plan where you get two books a month for a fixed price.  The link above is a new bundling deal with Sprint where you will be able to play these books through your SmartPhone.  I would love to combine my book reader (right now the old Audible Otis) with my SmartPhone, but I can’t imagine how short the battery life would be!

One great feature of Audible is that once you purchase a book, you can download it again whenever you want.  They keep track of the books that you own.  It’s the missing feature that keeps me from checking out the various music download services.  Those downloaded songs just don’t seem permanent to me.  Either your hard drive crashes and you loose all of your purchased music or you can never find what you want on all of those backup CD’s shoved in a drawer somewhere (plus you have to manage those backups). 

It would be a great value-added feature for a download service to promise eternal ownership of the song that you purchase from them and you don’t have to worry about the backup.  Plus, it would pretty much kill any possibility of customer churn as a customer would have a big incentive to stay with one download service.

  http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vppin143966771sep14,0,5921308.column?coll=ny-news-columnists

“Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history. That was the day the "blogosphere" took down CBS News.”

I guess other people are picking up the significance of what I posted a few days ago.  For the longest time, Freedom of the Press was meant as a safeguard against a government that has gone haywire.  The press is there to challenge the government when it is trying to abuse its power.  But what happens when the press tries to abuse its power?

Over my lifetime, there has been a shift in the broadcast news from a institution that delivered facts and checked them (do you remember when the editorializing was confined to an editorial segment at the end of the news?) to one that tries to deliver sensationalized stories or tries to tailor the news it reports to a specific agenda.  But until very recently, there has not been any widespread power to keep the press in check.  Sure there have been a few watchdog organizations such as the Media Research Center and Times Watch, but their exposure has been fairly limited.

You would think that competitive pressure between news outlets would serve as correcting mechanism, but it seems that the Press has a herd mentality when it comes to new stories.  If one outlet reports on something, they all flock to it.  How else do you explain why the Ramsey and Peterson murders are huge headline stories when hundreds of other murders (some even more sensational) just get ignored.  Any time a big story breaks, it doesn’t take long for the collective press to come to a consensus on how to report the story.

But now, there is the blogshere.  Millions of people are reading various blogs that deal with all kinds of topics and this has developed into a new channel to deliver news and ideas.  When something fishy appears in the Press, that can get challenged and the idea (if it is worthy) will spread like wildfire through the blogsphere.  Suddenly there is a practical means to keep the Press in check.  And it seems to be working.

Now I don’t expect the blogsphere to replace the Press as a means of delivering news, but it will server as a reminder to the Press that its job is to report FACTS and not push sensation or political agenda.

Now back to more technical discussions….

 CBS has been trumpeting new documents (from 1972 and 1973) that purport to show that President Bush was given preferential treatment during his days in the National Guard.  The problem is that the documents where created with Microsoft Word!

Typography experts were suspicious when they noted that the letters and memos used proportional fonts and superscripts, features that were very uncommon in the early 70’s.  In all likelihood, these documents would have been produced on a typewriter and not a word processor.  So some bloggers started their own investigating and found that when they retyped the documents into Microsoft Word, the spacing and line breaks EXACTLY matched these “30 year old” documents.

What I find interesting here is that bloggers are able to get on this news much faster than the professional news organizations.  CBS, with all of their experience and experts, were not able to notice that these documents were faked.  I wonder how long it will take for CBS to fess up? 

UPDATE 1:
I did not make this post as a political comment.  You will note that I did not comment anything one way or another about Bush or his service.  My interest in posting this was for two reasons (both technically related as this is a technical blog).  The first reason was that Microsoft Word was (allegedly) used to fake these documents and I find it interesting that whoever produced these documents did not notice that there was anything about them that would not pass for a document created in the early 70's.  The second reason was the involvement of blogging in uncovering this foregery.  It took one blogger to notice the use of new type setting techniques and another blogger took it even further by comparing the output of MS Word to the documents posted by CBS.  I find the speed at which a key portion of a major news outlet's big story was shown to be false by the blogsphere to be a telling sign of the changes that are coming in how we get news.

Short answer, please don't make comments about Bush and Iraq and Kerry, etc...  That is not what this is about.

UPDATE 2: Debunking of the debunking being debunked...
I followed the link about the debunking and I saw this update “you might have noted that the White House did not release those records, they merely passed along without comment copies that had been sent to them by CBS“.  So, it looks like Boing Boing was just plain wrong.

 I had a weird problem with my computer and .NET Windows forms applications.  Every time that I would select another window and then reselect the .NET application, the app would cause a NullReferenceException.

This occurred even with the simplest application (i.e. the one created from the Visual Studio wizard).  I had thought something had corrupted my .NET or Visual Studio installation. 

I was looking at uninstalling and reinstalling everything, but I decided to do some googling.  I finally came across a reference in the newsgroups that mentioned the Kensington mouse driver and I thought “Hey, I have that mouse”.  Sure enough, uninstalling the Kensington driver fixed the problem.  I am glad that I went googling for a solution as I would never have guessed that the mouse driver could be responsible for that kind of problem.

I was so thankful, I made sure to send an email to the person who posted the solution to thank him.  Now I am posting the problem and solution to make it easier for the next person to find the solution.

 Just a warning:  Installing the latest Whidbey Tech Preview will break an installation of Reporting Services.

Has anyone found a way to fix it?

 Not exactly programming related, but Microsoft is going to put one of my favorite board games online:

Mayfair Games Inc. Press Release
February 17th, 2004

Mayfair Games is proud to present the following Press Release-

Catan GmbH is proud to announce that it has executed a very special license agreement with the Microsoft Corporation for the creation of the “Catan Online Game,” which Microsoft will publish in the Summer of 2004. Now the world of Catan will be only a mouse-click away! This rich, multi-player game will embody all of the beauty and elegant, interactive features of “The Settlers of Catan”— Klaus Teuber’s award-winning board game—which is published in English by Mayfair Games Inc. of Skokie, Illinois.

Available on Microsoft’s Premium Game Service, the Catan Online Game will be accessible via both the MSN Zone and MSN Messenger. There will be multi-player online and download variants, each with rich graphics and a sophisticated AI. You’ll be able to play solo or with up to three online friends knowing that the game can always provide a challenging opponent or replacement player… real or virtual .

Besides using Mayfair Games familiar Catan graphics, Microsoft will be working with Mayfair, Kosmos Verlag, Capcom, and the other Catan publishers to develop a vibrant worldwide cross-marketing program. You’ll have ready access to simple tips and tutorials, as well as links to Mayfair Games, The University of Catan, Professor Easy, and other popular Catan-related sites.

Soon, this best-selling game will be only a link away for everyone using the Internet, making it easy to explore what is one of the most popular board games ever!

 It looks like Microsoft has finally “announced” the long rumoured convergence of the Xbox and the Media Center.  Check out this brochure available in Microsoft Downloads: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=ed01d0d5-a82b-41fc-8d72-8d8954d59704&displaylang=en

It also looks like similar technology will be available as a stand-alone device that hooks to current television and it will also be built into new televisions (no word on who will be providing this hardware).

Now all that is needed is a more specialized version of the Media Center PC.  I don’t want the monitor (it’s going to be hooked to my HDTV ready widescreen TV).  I certainly don’t need to have it bundled with a printer.  I don’t even want a keyboard or a mouse.  I want a super TIVO that it gong to be easier for me to customize.  Just give me some .NET interfaces so I can hook in my own code!

UPDATE: I forgot to blast The Registry for it's lame analysis about the demise of the Media Center PC.  The probable reason that MS didn't have any press-releases about Media Center PC's is because they just released an upgrade and there won't be anything new happening to them for a while.