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Unless you’ve been living in a box you’ve probably heard about Joost. It’s coming.

What is Joost?

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

It’s like tv and the net all mashed together. Not only can you watch tv, but it comes with the benefits of the net built in. Things like search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program - so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. The coolest feature is that you don’t have to wait to watch what you want. Unlike you’re easy to use cable tv box with DVR, you don’t have to wait until a program is scheduled to play to watch it.

The inteface looks slick (as it should), they have screenshots of the display over on their site aso you can check them out. Joost is not yet open to the public, but they have a widespread beta going on. You can request signup for the beta here or ask someone who is already a beta use to send you an invitation (if you have one send it to me!).

This isn’t just another web 2.0 experiment. The guys who created this also made two programs that shook up their respective industries…. Kazaa changed P2P and made it widespread and usable (tho I never really liked it) and Skype which really brought free voice over IP outta the realm of geek toys into the hands of everybody.

Joost will be advertising supported. I wonder if that means no skipping over commercials? If it does, then I fear it will be of limited use to me. If they just display ads on the side, or perhaps a 30 second clip at the beginning than I don’t see how this can fail.

I ran across a cool site today, TLBox. The site is a toolbox for developers and has a section dedicated to web design. The web design section contains links to color scheme helpers, icons, fonts, CSS, widgets, tutorials and more. The main site focuses around programming in general and has sections broken down into .NET, AJAX, C, C#, C++, Flash, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and Ruby just to name a few. Definetly worth a click:

 TLBox for programmers

TLBox for web designers

System restore is never anything I found particularly useful… in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever even used it. However, I’ve always left it enabled just in case. In Windows XP you could configure the amount of drive space System Restore uses via a slider control. No such control exists in Windows Vista and by default the sucker is configured to use up to 15 percent of your available drive space! Ok… 15% for something I don’t think I’ve ever used… I don’t think so.

To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

My laptop currently has a 60g drive and it’s allocated 5.136g of space. Of course this isn’t visible via the interface but to find out you can open a command prompt. Click on the start menu (or the orb as it seems to be called nowadays) and in the searc box type ‘command’, right click on the Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator. You’ll then see a DOS command prompt open up… type the following to see the current settings:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

What you’ll see is something like the following:

The command to set the amount of space used follows this syntax:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So to configure your drive to only use 2 gigs of space on your C: drive you’d to the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

That’s it! You’ve recovered some space. If you find system restore useful I’d recommend not touching this setting, or at least not reducing it too much. But if you’re somebody like me who’s never used it you can easily reclaim some space.

“People everywhere complain that Wordpress is slow, or that they can’t survive a digg. They die if they get more than 10,000 visitors a day, their hosting providers ban them for using too many resources, and they cry because they have to purchase expensive hosting plans. If this describes your plight, before you run over to Survive Digg hosting and plunk down even more money, take a look at your Wordpress setup and LAMP stack. You can make them better.”

I’m not running a LAMP setup, but there’s still some great information in here even for those not running LAMP.

read more | digg story

How many auto updates have you received since you installed Vista? I bet it’s not anywhere near 100! TheHotFix.net has what THEY call Vista SP1. Pay attention here because this is NOT Microsoft’s Service Pack 1 release. In fact I bet this package pisses MS off to no end. I’m suprised they haven’t been slapped with a court order to take it down. But if you’ve got an issue with Vista check the site out, they may have the fix you need.

If you travel over to TheHotFix.net’s VistaSP1.net page you’ll find a listing of 86 different Vista fixes. They also have what they call their Vista SP1 Preview pack which contains over 100 fixes.

Here’s the linkage: VistaSP1.net

Is Google just freakin unstoppable when it comes to search and advertising? Probably! They just went through a bidding war with Microsoft, won, and dropped $3.1 BILLION dollars to buy DoubleClick. DC helps its customers place and track online advertising, including search ads. I think they’re also responsible for a lot of those Flash based ads… something Google doesn’t currently do. So now Google has text ads, and the Flash ads on lock down… good luck MS and Yahoo, you prolly won’t be catching Google in online ad revenue any time soon.

I’m a customizer. I love Windowsblinds, I’ve used all kinds of sidebar applications like SysMetrix, Desktop Sidebar, etc. When I first heard about Vista including a side bar I was pretty excited… then I loaded some system monitoring gadgets and it all went downhill. Perhaps it’s the fault of the gadget creators themselves and not Vista Sidebar, but that thing ate up some serious resources. My laptop is getting older (Dell XPS Gen2, 2.0Ghz, 2g RAM) so for the longest time I didn’t bother running the sidebar. After some discussions with a co-worker I decided to play with it again and loaded it up with some gadgets. Suddenly, it wouldn’t load or it would load but there would be no gadgets and Task Manager would report it continually gobbling up memory. I have no idea if it was a specific gadget that caused the problem I just knew I wanted it fixed.

The Sidebar Properties window has an option to restore the default Vista gadgets, but it was greyed out. No love there.

Unable to use the default method for restoring the defaults I set out to try and fix it manually. Here’s the steps I took:

1. Open task manager and kill any sidebar.exe process that might be running.
2. Open Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar (where <user name> is the user you log into Vista with).
3. Open Settings.ini, hit CTRL-A (select all) and hit delete. The file is now empty. Save the file.
4. Browse into the Gadgets directory.
5. Select CTRL-A (select all) and delete them. (Note: I couldn’t delete ALL of the gadgets the first try. If that happens reboot and try to delete them again… after the reboot you should be able to delete them all).
6. Restart Windows Sidebar.

Everything should load successfully now. You should see the default Sidebar with the clock, wallpaper thingy, and RSS feed. For some odd reason the “restore defaults” button is still greyed out… go figure.

Now that it’s back will I give Sidebar another shot? Probably. I love to tweak my system and I can think of a few gadgets I’d love to have always on access to… I’ll probably still shy away from the resource meters as I suspect they were causing the excess cpu cycles.

I have a word for Sanjaya… UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE. Maybe that’s three words? I’m to the point where I either need to stop watching (my mother in law did after they booted Chris off last season) or start pulling for this kid to win. There are a bunch of theories as to why he’s winning, my two favorite are Vote for the Worst and the idea that Indian call centers are swinging the vote his way. “Vote for the Worst encourages you to have fun with American Idol and embrace its suckiness by voting for the people who the general public and the producers are rooting against. We rally behind one choice so that we can help make a difference and pool all of our votes toward one common goal.” The Indian call center theory, which I even mentioned to my wife prior to hearing about it on the net, has the most sizzle. Some claim that it’s impossible because of time zone differences, not being aired live, and the voting period being in prime “call center” business hours. But then again Wikipedia says this so maybe it could be possible:

• American Idol is broadcast to over 100 nations outside of the United States, including many with their own version of Idol; however, it is not a live broadcast and may be tape delayed by several days or weeks (excluding Pakistan, India, Israel, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates in which it is also aired live).
• And this: International networks broadcasting American Idol - In India it airs live on Star World.

Yet another theory could be that the AI honcho’s are purposely keeping him on there (real votes be damned!) because… well let’s face it, America loves hating watching train wrecks… that’s why we watch the first few weeks of AI anyway. The shows probably getting more ratings because of him being there!

The best thing to come from all of this… free comedy. Every body is jumping on the Sanjaya bandwagon:

• Sanjaya Anthem
  WPvideo 1.10

  Sanjaya Anthem

  Download!

• Sanjaya on Weekend Update
  WPvideo 1.10

  Sanjaya - Weekend Update

  Download!

• Talk Soup
  WPvideo 1.10

  The Soup: House of Sanjaya

  Download!

April Fools day always brings a schmorgasborg of creative stuff on the web. Google once again jumped right in and did themselves proud. The first was GMail Paper with the tagline “You click, We Stack, You Get”. It’s a fake service that says they’ll print your emails and snail mail them to you. Which is funny itself, but the quotes from users is what really made me laugh “Now that I have Gmail Paper, I understand the difference between labels and folders. I had one message with two labels, but when I tried to stick the paper version into two filing cabinets at the same time, it just wouldn’t go.”

The better of the two was Google TiSP a free in-home wireless broadband service.

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Ya that’s right… Wifi via your toilet! LOL. Something tells me my buddy Archie already thought this up, but regardless it was still pretty funny. The site is worth browsing because they go into installation details, TiSP for Enterprise, In-Commode Package Delivery (yes they mean receiving packages bought via Google Checkout thru yer toilet) and comes in three tiers of service:

Classic. TiSP is in beta because as Google says “When things go wrong with TiSP, they go very, very wrong. Let’s leave it at that.”

Links: Google TiSP and GMail Paper

I kept seeing the name Kathy Sierra pop up out on the net. I usually don’t care much about the latest pop celebrity and what not, so I ignored it for a long time assuming that’s what it was. Then the headlines started getting my attention, indicating this gal had been threatened online. At first I thought, no shit this is the Internet lady what did you think would happen. I can’t tell you how many times some nameless person has taunted or cussed at me online. I assumed she was just thin skinned. Turns out that’s not the case.

Kathy Sierra is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series (finalist for a Jolt Software Development award in 2003, and named to the Amazon Top Ten Editors Choice Computer Books for 2003 and 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest community web sites in the world, javaranch.com. In addition to that she runs a website called Creating Passionate Users which is geared toward people fascinated by brains, minds and what science can tell us about the practice of making users passionate about their lives and tools. She was supposed to be speaking at ETech this year, but because of what has occurred online she’s cancelled the speaking engagement. She has received death threat comments on her blog, and threats of violence and sex posted on other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers.

How bad was it? Like I said, my first reaction was shut up ya cry baby. But… some of this really did cross the line. Not because any one incident was so bad, but it seems like she really became the target of these people and she crumbled under the pressure. Do I think she’s thin skinned… a bit. On her blog she talks about being afraid to leave her yard and how she’ll never be the same. I dunno, was I the only guy picked on by older bullies at school? You eventually get over it, you have to suck it up, and at some point you have to stand up to them.

You can read her full account of what happened over at her blog.