The latest issue of Busi­ness­Week covers Atlas On Demand, the product that I've worked on for the last six months, in a piece called TV Eyeballs Close-Up

Ever since the advent of commercial television, ad­ver­tis­ers have wondered exactly what they get for the megabucks they spend on 30-second spots. After all, the networks and cable companies offer only a crude ap­prox­i­ma­tion of who is watching what. With such thin in­for­ma­tion, ad­ver­tis­ers can't target specific neigh­bor­hoods or consumer tastes. As for converting ads directly to sales, well, that's virtually impossible. Yet the Web, with its so­phis­ti­cat­ed per-click metrics, does all of that billions of times a day. "The problem," says Yankee Group analyst …continue.

I installed dasBlog at Emma's The Wheel site, so that she and the other knitters in Team Ireland can blog during the 2006 Knitting Olympics. What an ordeal that was! But that's a post for another time. (It's not working yet, due to per­mis­sions issues that require the in­ter­ven­tion of support at our hosting site.)

I decided today to create a favicon for The Wheel, based on the logo that I drew last year with Inkscape.

A favicon is a 16x16 icon which shows up in the tab in a tabbed browser, such as FireFox or IE with MSN Search. For example, the little gvr icon that shows up if you're reading this on …continue.

Back in October, I joined Atlas Solutions as a senior software engineer. The company just held its first "partner summit", to educate some of our key partners on the kind of work we're doing and new de­vel­op­ments. An attendee blogged it. I'm working on video on demand, the stuff that Scott Ferris talked about.

I saw some of the pre­sen­ta­tions being rehearsed last week, but a lot of this is stuff that I've never seen before. I come from a software background, after all, not an ad­ver­tis­ing background.

A useful compendium of health risks associated with excessive computer usage: Is Your Computer Killing You? RSI, eye strain, deep-vein thrombosis, insomnia, etc.

A little app that I find useful in reminding me to take occasional breaks is Workrave. Though I've gotten all too good at ignoring it.

Time for a break.

I re-read Scott Hansel­man's blog post on using Consolas as the Windows Console Font, and I decided to put together a registry file to make it a little simpler. (You'll have to rename the file to console-font.reg after down­load­ing.)

The registry file includes entries for:

• Andale Mono
• DejaVu Sans Mono (an extended version of Bitstream Vera)
• Consolas

As Scott says:

(I'm afraid I can't distribute Consolas online or provide a download out of abject fear. That said, you can find it in any version of the Longhorn bits.)

Or Office 12, I believe.

Update, 2008/01/15. The Consolas Font Pack is the easiest way to get Consolas, if you don't have Office 2007 or Vista. Tech­ni­cal­ly, you are supposed to …continue.

Via the Win Tech Off Topic mailing list, I learned about Pandora earlier today. It's an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project.

You create stations in Pandora by telling it an artist or song that you like. It starts playing music that it thinks you will like, based on its reasonably extensive database of carefully char­ac­ter­ized music. You can tell it if you par­tic­u­lar­ly like or dislike its selections, to guide its future offerings on that station. You can have up to 100 per­son­al­ized stations.

So far, it's doing a good job.

A year ago, I ran into a problem with Skype squatting on port 80, which I had long forgotten about. Today, I ran into one with Skype squatting on port 443.

I was trying to set up SSL on my Windows Server 2003 dev box. My ultimate goal is to experiment with client certs and server certs for SOAP, but that's a story for another time. I was running into all kinds of strange problems, ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the relatively strange IIS con­fig­u­ra­tion on my machine.

I tried SslDiag. In hindsight, it pointed me towards the underlying problem, but I couldn't see it at the time. I did a lot of digging …continue.

See what Thun­der­bird 1.5 RC 1's spelling checker flags as misspelled words.

Seems to be a known bug.

Two weeks ago, I completed a year as a contractor at Microsoft. After the permatemps lawsuits, no contractor may work more than 12 months at Microsoft without taking a 100-day break. (Con­trac­tors are free to work elsewhere, of course, during the break.)

Emma quit her job at washington Mutual the same week in order to set up her own business. It will be months before she starts making money, so it seemed prudent for me to find a full-time job.

Last week, I in­ter­viewed with Amazon. This week, I in­ter­viewed with the group at Microsoft that I just left, Atlas DMT, and Google.

Microsoft and Atlas both made very attractive offers. This …continue.

(Originally posted to Cool Stuff at EraBlog on Sun, 09 Feb 2003 08:02:27 GMT)

Emma bought herself a TiVo Digital Video Recorder a few weeks ago. I had heard it said that TiVo changes the way you watch TV. It's true. Emma is fond of Home and Garden Television (HGTV), which has a lot of shows about re­dec­o­rat­ing and re­mod­el­ling. They're padded un­mer­ci­ful­ly, constantly recapping what they showed you before the most recent break. She can work through an ostensible 30-minute show in under 10 minutes by skipping from highlight to highlight.

Our TiVo also has a DirecTV satellite receiver built in, giving us access to far more stations than we had on …continue.