In the past, I would go through the not-too-painful-but-still-tedious process of reformatting and re-syncing all of the content.

I just discovered that I can simply restart the Zune, and when I connect it back up to my computer, everything is back to normal. I guess we still live under the principle of “when in doubt, reboot.”

Really, of all things – Twitter??

Be careful out there with your 140 characters.

I was disappointed to see VirtualPC is no longer supported for Home versions of Windows. I was also disappointed to see the free VMware Server equivalent of VirtualPC had disappeared.

However, I just discovered the free VMware Player now not only runs VMs, as it always has, but also allows you to create them! You can also create and run 64-bit guest VM’s if you have the appropriate hardware, which I do. VirtualPC can’t do that. Sweet!

Update: A co-worker (thanks Shane!) mentioned to me the free VMware Server is still available. I’m going to try out Player, hoping it is more light-weight, and see how it goes first.

“A Time for Choosing” by Ronald Reagan

“Translation: If your company is deemed “critical,” a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.”

Yikes.

I want one!

Originally, Magnolia had the interest and investment (skills if not money) of some people at the core of the web development community. They were focused on building out a bookmarking site that focused on a pleasant, well thought-out user interface. Things started good, but it appears they got distracted over time.  Things I’ve noticed over the years:

• It started for me when search wasn’t fully working, and you could only search on tags, not titles and descriptions. This took a long time for them to figure out.
• They have also struggled with tag management, especially when it comes to groups.
• There is no way to do mass tag management in a group.
• It is impossible to match a group’s taxonomy without opening multiple windows to view the group’s tags.
• They have also seen their share of server downtime, which is a bit unfortunate when you are hunting for a work-related resource.
• Now they seem to be focused more on login API’s and an activity stream – which still hasn’t populated for me, my home page has been blank since they launched it – rather than finishing up what I would call phase 1.5 or phase 2 tagging functionality and group management.

I’m sure there are a lot of behind-the-scenes reasons for the above, but my perspective is from an end-user (client). I kept waiting for them to polish up what was missing, but they kept adding stuff that didn’t really matter for the purpose at hand. I think they started developing more for themselves, and began to forget the point of Magnolia.

I liked the concept they were building, with a nicer (ie, more pleasant to the eyes, and easier to user) interface. I really like some of the minor social aspects, like being able to thank users for bookmarks. I also like the concept of groups, although they need a bit more work to see the full value in both user and tag management.

However, the most recent network/server outtage gave me enough time to check out Delicious, and I found my new home. Working through tagging my imported bookmarks has been a pleasure. Very easy and quick. I do miss screenshots of the web sites, but it’s not a huge loss, and would definitely trade for easier tag management. I like the Firefox extension, although in full mode it needs a little work to be able to move icons to different areas of the status bar. Tag bundles are awesome, and I’m just starting to think through how I want to use that. Near-inline editing of an existing bookmark is fantastic. Overall it’s been a great experience so far. I’m also experimenting with the feature to post bookmarked links to my blog. We’ll see how that goes, but I think I like it so far.

And besides, all the cool kids have been here for awhile.

With the glowing endorsement out of the way, this post is really about a recent ‘rant’ Dave made in regards to socialism vs capitalism. I couldn’t agree more. In the last couple of years I’ve felt the encroachment of envy in various areas of our lives. Having someone else try to guilt you into ‘donating’ your precious time, energy, relationships and money to their pet interests is a real peeve of mine now. Check out his couple minute monologue on the topic here:

Bass Fishing and Butt Scratching – or read the transcript (but voice is better)

He later responds to negative feedback in the following clip that’s just as worth the time to listen to:

Butt scratching backlash

So be careful of the “change” you ask for. Not all ideas are created equal!

I’ll post some tips on moving from Nucleus to WordPress pretty soon for anyone who is interested.

I started this blog using Nucleus back in January, 2005. I remember researching the different blogging platforms, and there were a ton to choose from. Moveable Type was pretty popular, but I don’t remember too many others really standing apart back then. I’m glad I didn’t choose Moveable Type, because it went to a pay model not too long after. I’m pro-capitalism for sure – I like my paycheck, but my blog content isn’t necessarily worth shelling out money for a blog engine.

I chose Nucleus because of the technology and the active development. That, and it readily supported multiple blogs. However, development seems to be dropping off, and if I want support for a feature that is core to other platforms, I have to look at a 3rd party plug-in that may or may not be well written and may or may not be supported in the future. I started to write a plugin, and had some questions on the API, but didn’t receive a response. So that wasn’t real motivating.

Also, Nucleus announced a theme contest last year, with real cash-value prizes. I was excited to see what the community might come up with, but was also beginning to think it might be a measure of the level of community support it had. Well, the first bad sign was that the contest deadline was pushed out six months. I didn’t take that as a sign that people were clammering over developing for Nucleus. Then, once the contest was over, I was definitely disappointed. There were a few designs, but only a few, and a lot of the designs were by the same handful of people. Hrmm..

So with Nucleus I’m sensing a dying community and support dropping off unless someone comes in there and shakes things up.

All that being said, I’m looking at WordPress. Several people I respect use WordPress, and it seems to have really good community support.

The challenges:

• Import existing content into WordPress. I think I’m going to have to do this by importing via a really large RSS feed.
• Redirect popular post URLs to their new URL in WordPress. For instance, my post on resetting the passwords in SharePoint gets a lot of search engine hits. I can do this via mod_rewrite on Apache.

The good:

• I can 404 some posts that I decided I didn’t want out there. For instance, some family ones that I decided I wanted to keep more private still exist in the Google search index because the pages do not return a 404 error. They just show post not found.
• RSS feeds for categories and even comments, which I think is pretty cool.
• Better theme support. I’ve seen some cool things done with WordPress themes.
• I’ll look at implementing friendly URLs this time around.

The bad:

• I will lose comments. This isn’t horrible, but not something I’m excited about.
• I will lose embedded images and video. I can still go back and add these again, so not a huge loss.
• Since WordPress is more mainstream, more people are targeting it for security problems.