Matthew Botos

I finally got around to writing some code to parse feed statistics from my log files. (Man, is my PERL rusty!) In January and February 2007, I had 53 subscribers, defined as repeat visitors from a unique IP address without “bot”, “crawl”, or “search” in the name of the user agent (browser or reader software).

The most popular reader by far was Firefox, both the 1.5 and 2.0 verisons on Windows and Mac. The Mac Safari browser also had a few hits, as did NetNewsWire. RSS Owl and NewsGator made solo appearances, and NewsGator is even nice enough to tell you how many NewsGator subscribers you have in it’s user agent string.

Another interesting hit was from Blue Coat DRTR, which is a Dynamic Real Time Rating (DRTR) system described on their website:

The new DRTR feature is based on patented technology that can ”on the fly” categorize new, unfamiliar Websites as they are being requested and then block or allow access according to the rating DRTR assigns and in accordance with the organization’s or user’s policies.

The Wall Street Journal had an interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings today, in which he comments on the future of his business:

If one thinks of Netflix as a DVD rental business, one is right to be scared. If one thinks of Netflix as an online movie service with multiple different delivery models, then one’s a lot less scared.

Our view is we should get to every Internet-connected screen over the next two years, as we also grow the title selection.

And on competing high definition DVD formats:

We have all the titles on HD-DVD and Blu-ray. They’re running neck-and-neck, but the total volume is less than 1% of our volume. Consumers want high-def, but the perception of a format war is freezing consumers out. Until that perception stops, very few consumers will try the new high-def discs.

He also mentions YouTube and Internet video as not intersecting with Netflix’s subscription market, and recommends Animal House as a leadership movie.

Gizmodo handily sums up the state of legally downloadable TV and movies, including Amazon’s Unbox, and shows how to do an honest review in Apples and Oranges Hands-On: Apple TV vs. TiVo Series3 HD with this quote:

It’s now possible to download TV shows and movies with TiVo, using Amazon’s Unbox service. Both Unbox and the iTunes Store don’t have enough movie and TV show content for our taste, and both can’t deliver HDTV movies or TV shows. So in our mind, for now, they both suck.

In a word: wow. I’ve written before about what a great show Battlestar Galactica is, and they proved it again with this finale. Without spoiling anything, they wrapped up this season’s latest story of Baltar’s trail with a good bit of drama, and then kept piling on the tension by picking up the main story arc of the unknown enemies among us and the search for Earth. The twists, along with some good musical choices, made for a mind-bender of an episode, aptly prompting the Digg thread “What the FRAK just happened!” (warning: obsessive discussion and spoilers). It’s gonna be a long wait until 2008 for the series to pick up again…

Asking Why Does DVD Cover Art Suck So Much? turns up some pretty cool movie posters and comparatively lackluster DVD covers. To throw in my own two cents, I think the two serve two different purposes.

Posters, like teaser trailers, can be minimal and artsy to draw you in and create buzz when you see a handful walking into the theater. DVDs, on the other hand, are on an endless shelf with hundreds of others, long after the buzz has died and people have forgotten who was even in the movie. Throw a few big pictures of the stars on it and hint at the plot with the background in a very basic design, and maybe you’ll grab that nanosecond of someone’s attention it takes to spur the purchase of your movie over all the others.

I finally plugged my HDTV into a Kill A Watt power meter, and was pleased to find it only draws around 160 watts when on to around 260 watts watching TV in power-saving mode. That’s much better than the 400+ watts I expected from previous research into TV Power Consumption.

Buying a LCD instead of plasma would’ve been a greener choice, but since it isn’t on that much, it was a fair trade to make for better colors. Of course, it would be nice if TV manufacturers enabled power-saving mode by default instead of making you hunt for it.

To put those naked numbers in perspective, 160 watts is about what I managed to put out on the elliptical trainer this morning.

It seems my blog feeds aren’t showing up to date posts in Newsgator to NetNewsWire, but are fine in Bloglines and others. The feed validator threw a few warnings on relative URLs and bad links. The URL Absolutifier plugin solved the first problem. The second I fixed by hand, though it would be handy to have a plugin that checks links before you post. I don’t know that such a trivial change will fix the problem, but let me know if it does.

While it’s nice being able to store most website passwords in Firefox, it quickly becomes a chore to find one when you need to enter it manually elsewhere (ie. Quicken). Enter the Password Finder extension, which adds a search box to the password manager. Two caveats: on my MacBook, I had to enlarge the window to see the search box at the bottom, and you can’t remove passwords without clearing the search. Still, it is a handy way to find the one you’re looking for.

I got a surprisingly targeted piece of blog spam via email today. The subject read “Matthew, for your blog - Netflix CEO on XXXX List”, and it was some magazine pimping their annual list of people to watch and urging me to link to it. They won’t get a link, but I will give them some credit for being clever enough to crawl my blog and pick up both my name and mentions of a company and person on their list. Reed Hastings has only appeared here once; Netflix a few more times. I also wonder if ZoomInfo will now consider him part of my network…

As the snow started to melt, Anne and I trekked along the Schuylkill to go tango dancing. The path offered a nice view of the changing facets of the Cira Centre, and gave me a chance to learn that the whale painting is actually a Wyland wall!

View the Along The Schuylkill photos