Yes it's finally here, the yellow cab of the sky is beginning to offer wifi on their planes. On my flight home from Oakland I was informed Southwest was on a free beta period in which you could access the internet once the plane was above 10,000 feet. First question: "Free beta," does this mean our friendly SWA will charge? Given their cost cutting business model, I would bet on yes. The second question: Why above 10,000 feet? Did I use it on the flight? Sadly, no. I was coming back from a weekend of
turning 30 in which sleep was, well, optional. I look forward to seeing the free wifi on all Southwest flights in the future and hopefully the corporate Southwest gurus will let wifi be free!.
The Kindle --
 My thoughts: I'm sold, I'm in love and if
everything keeps on the right pace the Kindle should entirely change the way collegiate
educational systems sell books. Jeff Bezos (Amazon's founder), come here and give
me hug. Let's look at the device, then discuss how the Kindle could
be one aspect that will push Amazon right through the economic downturn
and how the Kindle has the potential to affect the educational system.
The
Kindle is an electronic reading device that uses a technology called
e-ink. E-ink makes reading an electronic device easy on your eyes. The
battery on the Kindle will let it run for two weeks without a charge.
It also allows you to download a book nearly anywhere, by using the
Sprint PCS network (a possible saving grace for a slowly dying Sprint).
On the Kindle one can email pdf's to the device for reading, surf wikipedia, and browse
most of their favorite blogs. It also allows you
to add annotations to pages, search through entire books (a favorite
feature of mine) and with the Kindle 2.0 you can have it read to you. From
a nerd perspective it's the little things. When I'm reading in the
morning eating my Coco Puffs, I continually find myself fighting to
keep the book open to the page I'm reading. New books always seem to
want to shut. With the Kindle, the book is always open and a page turn
is one quick button push. I also appreciate when I'm discussing a book
to a friend; I'm able to run a quick search and pull up the exact
excerpt from the book. Finally, when I see a book I want, I download
it in little over a minute. No driving to the book store (assuming
they have it in stock), no waiting for the book in the mail and best of
all it was considerably cheaper than buying the book new, in most cases
half price. What excites me most are the possibilities for the
Kindle. If universities start to adopt the Kindle (UPDATE: After the release of the Kindle DX Jeff B. has announced they will be working with universities as early as this fall), it could be
revolutionary. Since most books purchased on the Kindle are half off,
the device will pay for itself in two semesters under normal course
load, possibly one. Students will not have to carry 3 or 4 books along
with a laptop to various classes throughout the day simply a laptop and
a Kindle. No more waiting in long lines at the book store. 1 click for
each book you want and you're done. Being a grad student
and working full time means I have to step out during lunch to get my
books, a one click option would be a nice time savings for me. Examining
the Kindle from a financial perspective gives Amazon a positive
outlook. Imagine every university adopting the Kindle in the same way
every college student adopted iPods. Amazon.com would be the iTunes music store of
the book industry. Setting the bar for digital distribution and
providing the platform for Amazon to break into the hardware industry.
All these aspects build upon Amazon's core competences while staying
with it's strategy of delivering books cheaply and easily. Wallstreet
felt the same way I did and Amazon saw a 10 point stock jump when
rumors of the new Kindle started to circulate a week before it's
release.
With Amazon's latest release of
the Kindle it is posed to establish a " lock-in" for digital book
distribution. They're a company to keep your eye on, the next couple of
years could make or break the Kindle and redefine how American's and
American students read and buy books.
The love I have for Apple continually grows stronger. Here's why.
Other then Apple's continual innovation, leading the market in trends:
iPod, iPhone, iTunes, superior technology in their OS, and overall
beauty, their customer service really wraps up the complete package nicely.
My latest example is an expanding battery (see image). An
issue that has been tracked back not to a specific computer
manufacturer, but to the company who makes the batteries. This company
sells these batteries to Dell and Apple. Understanding the fact that
each manufacturer (Apple and Dell) gets the batteries from the same location, how they
deal with the situation is the issue at hand. Scenario 1 -- DellHad I bought a Dell with
Microsoft Windows, I would have to call Dell, speak with an Indian
representative (work through a language barrier that is only exasperated over the phone), have
Dell email a return slip, print the return slip, mail the battery back and have
Dell send me a new battery, a 2 day process at minimum. In my experience I would estimate 3-4 days.
Scenario 2 -- Apple
Not the case with Apple. I go online, make an appointment at my local genius bar for 7:15 PM the very same day, (note: Apple store is open until 9:00 PM on a Saturday...wow), walk in at 7:15 PM, an "Apple Genius" sees me promptly; takes one look at the battery and tells me I have a defective battery. Next the "Apple Genius" goes in the back gets a new battery, scans the old battery's and new battery's barcode and slides the new battery into my laptop. He then looks at me and says, "You are good to go." Wait?... what?... 7 minutes, that's it? No out of coverage warranty talk or I need your name, your address and the name of your first born? ...Nice, peace "Apple Genius". It took more time to walk from my parking spot to the store than the appointment itself. That is what makes a lifetime Apple customer!
 There are too many damn bloggers. Thomas Friedman a 3 time Pulitzer Prize winner, eludes to this in his book "The World is Flat." As I write in my blog, I can't help but agree, but I'll ignore this idea so I can deliver how this book is applicable to technologists like myself.
Friedman starts the book out discussing the "10 flatteners" of the world and how these flatteners lead to the "triple convergence" (For a brief description of these ideas check Wikipedia). For most of us nerds, the technologies he discusses are nothing new. Using a big picture approach he wraps up these ideas with the triple convergence, provided points of view that, at the very least, will challenge you to think. It’s after he discusses triple convergence when the book really starts to get interesting. Friedman begins to discuss the affects these ideas are having and will have on societies, politics, outsourcing, wealth, schooling, and religion. He covers these ideas quite extensively, so I'll just cover a few of my favorites (which happen to be very touchy topics): politics and religion.
In discussing the effects of the triple convergence, Friedman refers to Karl Marx's manifesto which, in part, says in a purely capitalistic society, there will be no wars over religion or politics because those will affect business. Friedman then looks at how companies with global supply chains in two countries will work together, because, despite their differing political or religious views it will be in their best financial interest to maintain peace, in fear the company's who's supply chain is in their country, might pull out. This in turn causes the country to loose large revenue generators. Losing these generators would cause a loss in funding for schooling, technology, home grown business and the silly religious or political wars they would like to engage. Intriguing concepts...I think so.
For technologists this book should light a fire under your ass. Friedman reiterates how we have lead the race on technology, but as technology is becoming cheaper and other countries are focusing more on education in science and technology, we the American technologists, are not just competing with our fellow American's for a job or for the race to the next big idea. We are now competing with many other countries in the world. This also means we are collaborating with many other countries.
Overall the first half of the book was pretty boring, but as he started into the application of the topics he covers in the first half the book, the book became very interesting. I recommend this book to any techie who is interested in how tech fits in the big picture.
Jumping right in. The instructions on the dasBlog website of how to install dasBlog on a shared hosting environment are close to zero. The discussion boards offer some insight but in order to get some real feedback you had to post the question, wait and hope they reply soon...if ever.
I will start by showing you the painful way of installing dasBlog on a shared hosting environment and end with showing you the painless way on Godaddy.
Painful starts Below:
- Getting the Code and Getting it to Your Hosting Provider (Godaddy)
Get the code from dasBlog. Download the "web files" unless you want to tinker with the source, a topic I don't cover.
Unzip the code and pull out the "dasblogce" folder. I renamed this folder to "blog." Next I uploaded the folder to my hosting service at Godaddy
Edit the web.config and siteSecurity.config according to the instructions on the website. You will also need to change the permissions on three folders logs, content, siteconfig to have read/write access.
I will discuss the web.config edits a little because it seems there is a bit of ambiguity on the web with how the trust should be set up.
The out of the box setup of the web.config trust elements:
<!-- <trust level="Medium" originUrl=".*" /> -->
<trust level="Full" originUrl="" />
I simply removed <trust level="Full" originUrl="" /> so all I had was the commented out <!-- <trust level="Medium" originUrl=".*" /> --> element. I have heard some talk to just remove <!-- <trust level="Medium" originUrl=".*" /> --> all together and others saying if you un-comment the element the blog should work. For Godaddy removing the one line and commenting out the other is what worked for me. I always like to leave configuration setting in the file and just comment them out. I will forget about them if I don't....I blame college.
- Adding Virtual Directories and Changing Settings
This is the part which slowed me down. You will need to not only create a virtual directory the same name as the folder that holds the content for your blog, in this example that directory is named "blog", but you will also have to create 3 sub virtual directories under the "blog" virtual directory on Godaddy called "logs," "content," and "siteconfig." Notice the virtual directories are the same name as the folders within the "blog" folder.
Next, you will need to change the settings on all four virtual directory folders to have "anonymous access" and "application root." Finally you will need to change IIS7 from integrated mode to classic mode. (Update: i've been told that if you use the web.config file that is meant for IIS7 integrated you will not have to make this change. For right now the standard package with dasblog is the web.config which requires you to use classic mode).
Once you have followed these steps and followed the steps provided by dasBlog you should be good to go on installing dasBlog on a hosting provider the hard way.
Some of the problems I ran into.
- The first error I was recived was a "HTTP Error 500 - Internal server
error." This error really tells you nothing and was quite frustrating. I eventually fixed the error by switching IIS7 to classic mode on godaddy.
- The second error I encountered was "System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.SecurityPermission," This was due to the fact I did not have the 3 virtual directories set up under my "blog" virtual directory in IIS7.
Painless way
- Click "Your Applications" from the home screen of your "Hosting Control Center"
- Select "blogs" from the left hand menu
- Select "dasBlog" from the list of blogs
- Select "Install Now"
If by chance Godaddy states your hosting plan is not supported for this product. You have to have .net and IIS. If you have IIS7 make sure you have it on classic mode. Without classic mode, .net, and IIS, Godaddy tells you your hosting plan is not compatible.
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