Quiet Earth now on DVD

Awesome Quiet Earth is finally out on DVD. This used to be my favorite science fiction movie when I was a teenager. I cant wait to get it.

Applebee’s is a good corporate neighbor

This weekend we had a brekfest fundrasier at Applebee's on Barrett Statioin Rd for Montessori Insights my son's school. I think it's great that Applebee's allows there locations to do this. In my view they are excellent corporate neighbor's. Thanks Applebee's!

MSN adCenter - Is this a joke?

I received this error message from the new MSN adCenter using FireFox on a Mac.

I couldn’t agree more about RSS

Jackob Nielsen made a statement about RSS today in the Wall Street Journal which I 100% agree with.

People who are in the field often use the term 'RSS' [Really Simple Syndication] to refer to 'news feeds' because that's the name of the technology. But in one of our studies, 82% of those we surveyed did not know what RSS meant.

So one of the real strong recommendations is to stop calling it 'RSS' and start calling it 'news feeds,' because that explains what it does.

- Via WSJ.com 

RSS 2.0 Title element encoding

I just ran into this RSS title encoding problem myself. I choose to double encode the title elements. Meaning encode your HTML first then do the XML entity encoding. Unfortunately the RSS 2.0 spec won't help you; because it doesn't say what it can or can't be. I don't allow HTML to be included in any of our RSS title elements. However, I do allow basic characters such as &, < etc… to be included in the title element. 

So when I encode the following:

AT&T

It will look like this in the RSS document. 

AT&amp;amp;T

BTW, FireFox and IE Readers don't support double encoding. As RSS readers they suck anyways so why support them? Maybe they will change there evil ways.

Microsoft and the Gates transition

Bill Gates is going to transition out of Microsoft over a 2 year period so that he can work at his foundation full time.

IMHO, the wrong guy is leaving. It should be Ballmer leaving instead of Gates. I doubt Ozzie and Mundie will be able to get anything accomplished under Ballmer, he lacks the vision of a great leader.

Update: Ehh, not 2 seconds after I posted this article. I found this article on CNN that says the same thing. - Via Slashdot

The Apple Open Source Snub

Tom Yager of InfoWorld posted and excellent article on why Apple's silent snub on Open Source matters to the average person.

My story got such wide attention because lots of people — whose numbers well exceed that fraction of a fraction who would tinker with or compile an OS kernel — understand why breaking a promise, and saying nothing about it, matters. It’s not about code. It’s about character.

- Tom Yager of InfoWorld

RSS e-commerce and work

As some of you know I am a software developer and I work for a sales company called Indoff. Recently we released a new piece of software for our sales people to compete on the web.

It has been difficult for Indoff sales people to compete on the web because we have such a unique program. Where are sales people are highly independent which creates a very decentralized system. Unlike most organizations where they have a centrally controlled sales-force and web site.

Our new web network of partner sites allows for each of our salespeople to sell a product niche in anyone of our 4 divisions, Material Handling, Promotional Products, Business Products and Office Interiors. The software allows our sales Partners to control the product and content being published.

Technology

We are using quite a few new technologies in our sites which should make a big difference for the customer and our sales people. For instance we have RSS 2.0 everywhere from the catalog pages to the about pages. All the sites have built in Weblogs and integrated Google Search (via Google Mini) we are trying to participate in the Google Site Maps program but it doesn't seem like Google is actually putting us in there index yet. Here is what sitemaps.xml looks like.

We will probably in the near future integrate the Google AdWords API into the software once it comes out of the Stone Ages. So that it will be easier for our sales Partners to create AdWords listings for the products they are trying to sell.

We will be releasing our NEW corporate web site at www.indoff.com in a couple of weeks. Which, will turn our corporate site from a dull static site into a central aggregator sort of like the River of News which will be utilizing all the information being published from our Partner web sites.

Here is a sample of some of our partner web sites that are now up and running.

• Custom Promotional Products for corporate promotions.
• Antimicrobial Office Supplies and related products.