As for getting back to posting regularly, expect a change from how I used to do it. I will still write my own posts, but expect more informational posts from other sites piped in.

Please check back in a few days after I make it through the 4th weekend and I should be back to more of a normal posting schedule.

Great! I thought. When I visited the creators website, I saw that they had other tracking software, one for movies in particular (All My Movies). Of course I wanted to see how well it worked, and wondered how they would pull off the same trick they did with the books. Well, thanks to sites like IMDB.com and Amazon, they have all the actors listed, screenshots, the movie synopsis, and way more that they simply pull into your program after you either enter the title, OR even better the barcode that gurantees you get the right information and don’t pull in the cartoon version of one of your favorite movies.

After playing around with movies that I actually own, I entered ones that I wanted when I realized they give you the option of creating a wishlist (finally!) of movies you want to get (or have people get you). They have multiple layouts you can use to view the information for each movie, and even better, if you like sharing what is in your collection with the rest of the world, they give you the ability to export the html code for the layout to simply paste into a webpage!

If you are more of a ‘don’t need the DVD’ type, the program can even search your hard drive for what you’ve copied off your legally bought DVDs (wink). I haven’t tried this portion of the program out yet since my laptop is the only place I do this at.

All I have to say is that if you finally want to get an idea of what you have and not have to thumb through hundreds of cases over and over when someone asks what you’ve got, check out All My Movies.

Movie Database Software

By Liam Tung, ZDNet.com Australia, News.com
Posted on ZDNet News: Jun 19, 2008 6:09:26 AM

The makers of Wine claim that version 1.0 is the first such “stable” release and have said that although compatibility is not perfect, thousands of applications are reported to “work very well.”

Member and former president of Linux Australia Jonathon Oxer told ZDNet.com.au that the Wine project is “an attempt to make Windows irrelevant.”

“Essentially, it’s an effort to supplant the underlying operating system layer and allow Windows software to run on a Linux platform without requiring Windows to be installed,” he said.

A challenge for the Wine project is creating libraries that perfectly emulate Windows libraries.

“It never will be stable because the target keeps moving. As each new version of Windows comes out, the underlying libraries are also changed and so, Wine has the same problem as a typical Windows developer who is attempting to write software to run on Windows,” said Oxer.

Oxer said he considers the tool a Linux “migration path” for existing Windows users because they can move their applications across, even where they haven’t been designed to run on Linux. Although Wine’s original purpose was to provide a compatibility layer for office applications, the most popular use of the tool today is for gamers who want to play Windows games on Linux systems.

The only non-gaming application in Wine’s top 10 most popular applications is Adobe Photoshop CS2, which is in second place behind Guild Wars.

Wine, not surprisingly, has been the target of anti-piracy campaigns by Microsoft. In 2005, Wine users were prevented under the Windows Genuine Advantage scheme from receiving Windows updates.

Fellow internet giant Google, however, has chosen to support the program, recently contributing cash to the open source project to ensure that Adobe’s Creative Suite software still runs on Linux systems.

A list of Wine-compatible applications can be found here.

Glassdoor sets up a way for people to rate the companies they work for — anonymously, of course. A Microsoft employee can respond to a survey of 16 questions about job satisfaction, enter information about his or her salary, reply to essay-style questions, and give CEO Steve Ballmer an approval rating. In exchange, the employee would get full access to the site — a “give to get” formula intended to convince people to participate.

If it works — if people enthusiastically jump in the way they do on TripAdvisor — then Glassdoor could be profound. Barton and Glassdoor CEO Bob Hohman showed me a preview. Anyone trying to decide what company to work for could get a view of the company previously only available by word of mouth.

You could starkly see how happy engineers are at, say, Google vs. Yahoo. One page Hohman showed me compared engineer salaries at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple, showing that Apple pays far less than the other three — but still woos engineers who believe in Apple’s philosophy. Another page shows that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has a not-great approval rating while VMware CEO Diane Greene has one of the top approval ratings in the industry.

Glassdoor won’t just be a boon to job seekers. It could become an important investment tool, helping Wall Street see more clearly into a company and its prospects — from an employee point of view. It certainly will be a resource for journalists — a window into a company almost impossible to come by otherwise.

Barton and Hohman initially funded Glassdoor, and it since raised $3 million from Benchmark venture capital firm. It plans to make money on advertising and keep the site free to anyone who contributes information. Hohman says filters will help prevent companies or disgruntled employees from gaming results.

All in all, Glassdoor struck me as one of the more important new Web ventures I’ve seen in a while.

The machine’s storage component, which is made by Toshiba, is the highest capacity SSD available for notebooks, the company said.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
June 18, 2008 08:35 AM

Toshiba on Tuesday introduced a 2.4-pound notebook that the vendor claims is the lightest laptop with a 128-GB solid-state drive and DVD drive.The Portege R500 series also is among the thinnest at 0.77 inches, Toshiba said. The device has a 12.1-inch, backlit light-emitting diode display for indoor and outdoor viewing and meets the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s highest standards for energy efficiency.

The machine’s storage component, which is made by Toshiba, is the highest capacity SSD available for notebooks, according to the company. Because SSDs have no moving parts, they tend to be faster and more durable than traditional hard-disk drives and use less energy. SSDs, however, are considerably more expensive.Toshiba this year started shipping its 128 GB SSD that first appeared in the company’s notebooks in Japan. The drive achieves the unusually high capacity through the use of multi-level cell NAND flash technology. Most SSDs today are single-level cell drives, which store 1 bit of data in each memory cell. MLC drives, on the other hand, store 3 or more bits in each cell. While MLC drives have slower transfer speeds and higher power consumption, they are also far less expensive to make.

In shrinking the size of the notebook, Toshiba said it used its proprietary “high-density mounting technology” process to enable dual-sided motherboard component mounting. The process results in a motherboard that’s a third the size of a mainstream 15.4-inch notebook’s motherboard, Toshiba said.

The notebook, which offers eight hours of battery life, has a base configuration that includes a 1.33 GHz Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Core 2 Duo U7700 low-voltage processor and the chipmaker’s Graphics Media Accelerator 950. In addition, the device has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless support. The Portege R500 series starts at $2,999.

Toshiba is not the only computer maker to offer lightweight notebooks. Other vendors include Apple, which offers the Macbook Air, and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), which recently introduced the Voodoo Envy.

How to take how Google treats its employees and use it to your advantage.

I had an opportunity to visit a friend of mine who works at one of Google’s satellite offices (not the main GooglePlex in Mountain View, Calif.). It was an eye-opening experience on several levels: the number of people still working late at night, the numerous perks, the free food, a fleet of bicycles that anyone could use for their errands, the evening exercise classes and the on-staff masseuse.

What, you don’t have an on-staff masseuse? Well, that might be a bit much. But it got me thinking about ways that you can make your own shop more desirable and your staff more willing, and most of these don’t cost a lot, either. Here are some suggestions.

Find someone in accounting that wasn’t schooled at Hogwarts.
I can’t tell you how many organizations where I have worked had accounting black holes or magicians working there.

You know the drill: You send in your paperwork, and nothing happens for weeks while someone has placed your paperwork at the bottom of their in-basket or, worse, lost it completely. Get accounts payable to actually reimburse the staff quickly, say within a day of receipt, and you will boost morale quickly and easily. No one likes to wait for checks, and you shouldn’t make your staff feel unworthy because they incur business expenses.

Listen to your staff’s needs.
Sure all those free snacks and catered lunches and dinners help, but understanding what your team really desires is key. At the Google offices, an expensive espresso maker was the centerpiece of the kitchen, but what impressed me was the wall of snacks that rivaled Trader Joe’s in its range of offerings. But what really mattered was that the staff had input into how these items were selected, and their suggestions were acted upon quickly.

Learn from how you communicate with your boss, and don’t make the same mistakes.
How easy is it to get your boss on the phone when s/he is out of the office? Or on e-mail? I remember at one place I worked it was rarer than some endangered species sighting, and when an e-mail arrived, it was treated like some artifact ala Indiana Jones.

There are some bosses who are too intrusive: They are on instant messaging, they subscribe to your personal blog and Twitter feeds, and they want you available 24/7 to respond to their queries. Find the best middle ground, and learn from your boss’ mistakes.

Hire someone to fix your desktop and laptop fleet in-house.
One of the best parts of the Google office was the room where you could bring your PC to have it repaired, upgraded or otherwise attended to. The room reminded me of my high school AV (audio-visual) squad days–of course, back then we barely had electricity, let alone computers. But what was more important was how this demonstrated the importance of having working machines for Google’s employees.

At many IT departments, the squad room is filled with antique parts and outdated supplies. Or worse yet, you outsource this function and your equipment disappears into that accounting black hole, never to be seen again.

Not at Google: You could get just about anything fixed while you waited, or a new machine if yours had a serious problem.

Finally, think of IT as managing creative people, not clock-punchers.
I have seen many different kinds of people working in IT, and the best companies understand that they have professionals who, let’s face it, are somewhat quirky and unpredictable. Understand these quirks and what motivates people, and you will attract the best and brightest.

Sure, it helps to have a stock that trades at several hundreds of dollars a share, and a cachet that you can’t buy for being at the center of the Internet revolution. And that masseuse, too. But start acting like a Google, and you will attract and keep the talent.

Posted by Matt Asay

And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd…Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.

Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft’s heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don’t have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.

The numbers don’t get much better for Vista in 2009: 24 percent (compared with 29 percent for XP). That’s a big step up from 8 percent, but is it a sign of momentum to come or just a temporary stopgap while developers wait until Windows 7?

Nor has Microsoft made it easy to develop Vista applications, according to an article in ITJungle.com:

Unfortunately, that improved security posture makes it more difficult for developers to write applications for Vista (read: no more kernel-level access and UAC to worry about), and it also causes compatibility problems with older applications. Ironically, the wave of attacks targeting operating system vulnerabilities has largely passed, and today hackers have moved on to target applications. At the same time, Microsoft has provided iterative improvements in Windows XP security, bolstering its status as “good enough” and further eating into Vista’s pie.

Indeed. Microsoft doesn’t need to handicap itself on the desktop given its difficulties competing everywhere else. With Linux and the Mac taking ever-increasing shares of the developer pie, Microsoft would do well to shore up developer support for Windows.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, that probably means re-investing in XP and forgetting its “New Coke” moment with Vista.

“Windows is too monolithic,” says Gartner

Microsoft’s Windows operating system is teetering on the edge of catastrophic collapse. So say analysts at respected technology consultancy Gartner.

Of course, since the release of the troubled Vista iteration of Windows, sticking the boot into Microsoft has been a popular sport for cranks and commentators alike. More recently, the chatter has concerned the possibility that many businesses might skip Vista altogether and jump straight to the next version of Microsoft’s cash cow, currently known as Windows 7.

But when a serious operation like Gartner weighs in with such a damning appraisal, it can’t be dismissed as the usual anti-monopolist moaning.

Where’s the beef?

So, what exactly is Gartner’s beef? According to analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald, “Windows is too monolithic”. Through a combination of feature creep, a desire to lock users into a single software environment and the need for backwards compatibility, the latest version of Windows has simply become too big. As MacDonald says, “one size no longer fits all”.

The situation is so acute, reckon Silver and MacDonald, it threatens to render Windows irrelevant. They claim they are now routinely quizzed by clients whether they should skip Vista and stick with XP until Windows 7 rolls out, probably no sooner than 2010.

The problem stems from the fact that the PC has evolved from a relatively simple productivity workhorse into a multi-form-factor beast used in a wide variety of environments, each with different priorities. A typical home user might prize efficient performance and scalability. In business, reliability and availability are often key concerns, while efficient virtualisation support and security factory highly for server machines.

Bigger, bloatier

But instead of tailoring different versions to suit specific usage models, with each new iteration Microsoft has been making Windows ever bigger and more unwieldy. It’s all a misguided attempt to force users to use essentially the same product, in other words.

Whether you agree with all that, there’s little doubt that a consensus is building around the idea that Vista is fundamentally broken. One intriguing example of the current mood is a recent - admittedly rather unscientific - survey by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of Zdnet. His online poll found that of those who had chosen to give Vista a miss, 45 per cent based that decision on the analysis and opinions of others, rather than first hand experience.

If that is reflected in the wider IT community, it’s scary stuff for Microsoft indeed. What, therefore, should MS do? The guys from Gartner note there are signs that Microsoft realises that Vista is too “big” for widespread adoption. The availability of Windows XP starter edition has been extended to June 2010, for instance, and Windows for Legacy PCs also remains based on the smaller less demanding Windows XP kernel.

Cut down kernel

What’s more, late last year, Microsoft engineers confirmed that a massively cut-down build of the Windows kernel known as MinWin was under development. In contrast to the flatulent 4GB required to house Vista, MinWin can be crammed into just 25MB. And it’s MinWin that will form the basis of Windows 7.

Needless to say, actual usable builds of Windows 7 will be much, much larger. The basic 25MB build of MinWin has no graphics support, for example. But current speculation suggests several modular variants of Windows 7 will be spawned by MinWin, each restricted to components relevant to specific usage models.

All of which is highly plausible. However, the crucial unresolved issue is backwards compatibility. Much of the bloatware that is part of the Windows experience is necessary to ensure that the best part of a decade of legacy software works smoothly on contemporary machines. Take away backwards compatibility and you remove the main reason why so many have put up with Windows’ shortcomings for so long.

By Jeremy Laird