Many people will be spending their stimulus check on electronics or video games or HDTV's or a PS3, but remember, all of that money goes to Japan. The stimulus check is made to stimulate the U.S. economy, not other economies. Spend it eating at a local mom-n-pop restaurant. Don't buy electronics!

I read a TON of RSS feed stuff.  I read RSS stuff from all over the place.  I use Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader but I've got limited time to scan all of my RSS stuff and way too much info to wade through.  I built my own RSS dupe-finder and it was working well for about 6 months, but I decided to try http://feedhub.com a while ago to do the same job.  When I first tried FeedHub, their servers were not super stable (they still are unreachable on occasion when I need to leave feedback (thumbs up/down), but it's minor enough to live with.  The service collects feeds from all over the place and can use statistics and heuristics to only give me the "top 100" or only like 50% of my daily articles.  If I have less time, I crank it down and FeedHub gives me only what I can ingest.  I'm not going to go into the details of how FeedHub works - try it out yourself and see if you like it.  If you need every article from a certain source, keep it out of FeedHub, but if you just want to get the most important news from 20+ news sources, FeedHub is your answer.  It nukes most dupes.  It gives me an option to move priorities around depending on topics or popularity, etc ...  Very well done!  :)

Ok, you probably got here because you just googled getting the "Bad Handshake" with perl's DBD::mysqlPP with old_passwords=1 set on the server. To fix, change old_passwords=0 on the server, restart the server, then create a new account using the new password types, then use that one to connect to the DB. Once you do this, you can change the server back to old_passwords=1 (the setting only affects how mysql creates passwords, not validates them) and restart mysql.

Ok, I bought an LG 1080p 42" LCD HDTV last month to replace our aging SONY 53" rear-projection 4:3 television and after a few intimate weeks with it, I've got a few thoughts about HDTV.

I love PIXAR movies just like the next guy and my kid loves them too. I've got a PS3 which plays blu-ray movies and there's nothing better than a PIXAR movie played in full 1080p at 30 FPS with no compression for 90 minutes. It's better than the movies. In fact, I think that it's a little too good. Why? How can something be TOO good? Let me explain...

First of all, when I unpacked my HDTV from the box and hooked it up, it looked great. It was crisp, bright and very vivid color-wise. But after just a few minutes of watching TV and a couple of movies, I found that it took effort to watch a movie. I couldn't understand, but I figured it out.

All of the attention to detail, all of the technology improvements that went into making my TV experience the very best that it could be makes viewing normal television TOO good. It's too crisp. I'm looking for detail, and finding it, then analyzing how much detail there is, and then losing the big-picture and missing some of the movie or tv show.

Pronto adds local shopping to its bag of tricks.  Check it out!

Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer from Andy Goralczyk on Vimeo.

Check out the new open source movie.  An animated movie built with Blender and other open source tools.  The entire movie, characters, images, etc ... can be used and modified.  That's open-source, baby!  :)

http://www.calacanis.com/2008/03/07/how-to-save-money-running-a-startup-17-really-good-tips/

A link to Jason Calacanis' 17 tips to running a successful startup. Personally, I agree with most if not all of them. Great way to save money and get things rolling super-fast and super-efficiently. For those of you who don't know, Jason Calacanis is a pretty good internet visionary - responsible for Mahalo.com and thisnext.com (social shopping - like pronto.com, but not really as good)

I kind of like the darth vadar one.  :)

All programmers and developers should be forced to develop on a 200Mhz Pentium computer with 32MB of ram. This would keep their applications, trimmed-down, sleek, fast, and remove any need for huge memory/cpu hogs like java, python, perl, javascript, etc ... C programming is still a very good option for programming and can do fantastic things with a 200Mhz processor and 32MB of ram. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge perl fan and I'm currently trying to learn python, but my 1.6 Ghz work machine sometimes comes to a screeching halt when by browser is thinking about something (javascript or other). I hate that! I have a 200Mhz machine at home and can install linux on it and as long as I'm not doing anything browser-related or starting up anything too huge, 200Mhz is *totally* enough horsepower for getting most tasks done (email, any OS-type programs, ssh somewhere, download files, listen to audio, ...).
Forcing developers to work on under-powered, under-sized computers will magically produce faster, smaller, tighter programs that run cleanly on anyone's PC. The problem with MS Vista, massive games and other huge applications and unnecessary upgrades is that the programmers are given the top of the line computers to develop on. Long-gone is the day that a game comes in a 100k, 5-second download, but they're still possible. Why not? Because they don't have to. Many of my friends long for the days of the old Zork games or 8-bit or 16-bit games - why aren't small programs like that still getting made? They're fun!

"There has been a long standing rumor regarding NASA running Fedora which all of us in the Fedora community have been always intrigued by. Is it true? What are they doing with it there? Why don't they run RHEL or CentOS. Fortunately enough, a couple of weeks ago, I got to experience NASA behind the scenes, first hand, and hang out with the coolest members of the Fedora community, and find out the answer to these questions and lots more."
The main article: http://jaboutboul.blogspot.com/2008/02/fedora-on-final-frontier.html

After giving a speech at an elementary school, President Bush allows the kids to ask a few questions. One little boy, Billy, gathers the courage to raise his hand and asks, “How come you invaded Iraq without the support of the U.N.?”
Just as Bush begins to answer, the recess bell rings and he says they’ll continue afterward. Half an hour later the kids come back inside.
“Where were we?” says George. “Oh, yes - does anyone want to ask me anything?”
A different boy raises his hand and says, “I have three questions: First, why did you invade Iraq without support from the U.N.? Why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early? And third, where the hell is Billy?”

MSN, Yahoo & Google all have single-sign-on services to tie their properties together. If you have an account on one service, you don't have to fill out a 'new user' form on any other XXXXX-owned site. IAC doesn't have a single-sign-on service, but they desperately need one. Also, it's a great opportunity to put the IAC logo out there and have it become a known symbol of quality internet websites. If you see a single-sign-on widget on ticketmaster, ask.com, match.com, pronto.com and others and you stumble upon some tiny other IAC site, you may not want to join it, but just seeing the familiar single-sign-on widget gives the user a warm-fuzzy that this site is part of a larger family of trusted sites. It almost seems like a no-brainer and could be implemented by a php programmer in a few hours. How come this isn't being done?

Ah, TurboTax and modern technology, how I love thee.  :)  I signed up with T-mobile for GPRS data access (additional $19/mo), so I'm all set up at the relatives in Pueblo, Co this weekend doing everyone's taxes for them.  E-filing, electronic PDFs of the returns.  All done wirelessly (Bluetooth to the phone and GPRS to the Internet) from my mother in law's living room table.  :)  Posting this also via GPRS using Windows Live Writer (one of the better blogging utilities that I've found - unfortunately, it's windows-only (duh)).  BTW, T-mobile sent me the wrong settings for my GPRS settings on my phone when they sent the configs to my phone via SMS, so I had to look online to find the "access IP" for tmobile.  Once I changed that, things worked well.

It's friday evening and I'm going home! Woohoo! I'll be pulling an allnighter tonight and staying up late with my newborn to let my wife sleep tonight. She's been very good and letting me sleep all week, so now it's my turn to stay up. :) Have a great weekend everyone!

So, Google finally sent me a check for $30. By first ad revenue check since putting google ads on my different domains for over a year. Perhaps I should be more agressive at the ad placement, huh? :)