DVD Collection

Like books and music, your DVD collection says something about you

Drama
Close Enounters of the Third Kind
Dead Poets Society
One Hour Photo
Seabiscuit
Shawshank Redemption
Stepmom
The Boxer
Thelma and Louise
Top Gun

Romance
13 Going on Thirty
Chocolat
Little Women
Sixteen Candles
West Side Story

<>

Action
Batman
BraveHeart
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park III
Last Of The Mohicans
Lord Of The Rings
Shanghai Knights
Spider-Man
Six Days Seven Nights
The Patriot
The Sum of All Fears

Western
The Good The Bad and the Ugly
Unforgiven

Comedy
Big
City Slickers
Elf
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Parenthood

Kids
A Bug’s Life
A Christmas Story
A Cinderella Story
All Dogs Go To Heaven
Agent Cody Banks
Cheaper By The Dozen (Steve Martin)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Finding Nemo
Freaky Friday
How The Grinch Stole Christmas (Animated)
(The Second) Jungle Book
Lilo & Stitch
Monster’s Inc
National Velvet
Nightmare Before Christmas
Shrek
Spy Kids
Say Anything
Tarzan
The Cat In The Hat
The Lizzy McGuire Movie
The Princess Bride
The Princess Diaries
The Incredibles
The Wizard of Oz
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
What a Girl Wants

Small Kids
Barney’s Night Before Christmas
Charlie Brown Christmas
Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
Charlie Brown Halloween
Dora’s Christmas
Dora’s Fairytale Adventure
Dora’s Pirate Adventure
Pippi Longstockings – Pippi’s Adventure on the South Seas (Animated)
Trevor Romain – Being a kid (Animated)
Veggie Tales – An Easter Carol
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Wordpress

Wordpress is becoming the most popular opensource blogging software.
It supports my favorites features: multiple posters, categories, and RSS feeds per category.
It also supports creating pages off the home page which makes it a very nice website CMS.

Links:
Wordpress and comment spam
Mark’s Blog about WordPress

Ellie the Jack Russell

I should have posted when we made our decision to get the Jack Russell.  Jane felt strongly about getting a small dog.  My Australian Cattle Dog will have to wait for another time. Besides, they had gone to visit a breeder in Lulling and already had their sights on a female pup.  Ellie has been with us for about a month. We picked her up on June 28th.  Cute aint she?

Sniping on Ebay

How to Snipe on eBay
EBBay Bidders Sold on Sniping
Why sniping isn’t necessary (read comment)
Why eBay charges to use their API
Beyond eBay, Yahoo & Amazon auctions compared
Third party eBay apps
eBay API and Open Source Great comment thread, including:

The problem with ’sniping’ is (as I see it) largely caused by people
failing to understand the auction process. Many people seem to put in
the minimum bid required to make them the high bidder and wait to see
if they are outbid. If they used eBay ‘properly’ they would just put in
their maximum bid at the start and if someone snipes them with a higher
bid then they haven’t actually lost anything. If someone tries to snipe
them with a lower bid then they still win.

EBay Service Fees

We understand that charging for API usage certainly discourages some developers from getting started with the program.

As
a result, we’re constantly reviewing data and listening to the
community to make sure our pricings and offerings hit that careful
balance spot between encouraging innovation and preventing runaway
costs.

Some developers have tried "screen scraping" eBay.com;
however, most of them have found that’s a bad way to build a commercial
application. The site changes every two weeks. That’s means your
application can break on a regular basis, and you will need to devote
time to repairing it. Additionally, it is against our terms of service
to screen scrape, so you could be shut down at any time.

In my
opinion, given the hourly rate most developers can charge for their
services, $500 a year is more than worth the time savings. However,
every developer must make that choice for themselves.

Adam Trachtenberg
eBay Technical Evangelism

Scraping EBay, a bad idea?
Official Ebay User Agreement

7. Access and Interference.

The
Site contains robot exclusion headers. Much of the information on the
Site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed
to eBay by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not use
any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Site
for any purpose without our express written permission. Additionally,
you agree that you will not: (i) take any action that imposes, or may
impose in our sole discretion an unreasonable or disproportionately
large load on our infrastructure; (ii) copy, reproduce, modify, create
derivative works from, distribute or publicly display any content
(except for Your Information) from the Site without the prior expressed
written permission of eBay and the appropriate third party, as
applicable; (iii) interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper
working of the Site or any activities conducted on the Site; or (iv)
bypass our robot exclusion headers or other measures we may use to
prevent or restrict access to the Site.

What others think about sniping

Is Screen Scraping legal?

Gartner Group’s Dataquest [2]
eBay Inc was successful in obtaining an interim injunction on the basis
of trespass which prevented Bidder’s Edge scraping eBay Inc’s internet
auction website. In the US, it is necessary to show a likelihood of
damage to succeed in an action for trespass. The court accepted that by
using over 100,000 automated searches per day, Bidder’s Edge Inc was
"draining" eBay Inc’s computer system resources away from legitimate
customers and that this had caused some harm to eBay Inc. The decision
has been criticised in the US on a number of fronts including on the
basis that the harm to eBay was not in fact sufficient.

Why I don’t like Bloglines

There is much to like about Bloglines.  Those that use it know what they are.
But I keep running into the limitations of a web based aggregator:

1. Selecting a story to save by clicking the checkbox causes a refresh of the left "tree-control" pane.  When I want to check several in a row there is a noticeable delay that slows me down.

2. I like the ability to save stories; and marking all stories as read automatically CAN be nice but most of the time it is inconvenient.  I often don’t stay on top of my feeds so folders often accumulate with 100+ stories.  Once I select a folder, the pressure is on for me to read those stories lest I click away from that folder and lose the concept of "unread".  I can’t do other things like edit my feed list until I finish reading the posts in the open folder.

3. It doesn’t support feeds requiring authentication

4. To edit your list feeds you have to select "Edit" to go into edit mode.  This view looks very similar to the "browsing" view so when I’m done I try to click a feed to display it’s items.  It just seems to ignore me.  I often forget I have to go back into "browser" mode by selecting the "My Feeds" tab again.

America’s Best Beaches

America’s Best Beaches
[via Dave]

Weblog content aggregators

The numer of services that aggregate bloggers’ content is growing.
Flickr. Technorati. Feedster. Pubsub. Bloglines. Blogpulse. Clusty. Blogdigger.
[via Scoble]

Porting Windows code to the Mac

Porting to Mac OS X from Windows Win32 API

Developing for the Mac

Cocoa
The Cocoa environment
provides an advanced, object-oriented API for Mac OS X that makes it
easy to create complex applications using very little code. The secret
is in the power of the Cocoa frameworks themselves: they provide
enormous amounts of useful functionality out of the box so that
developers can focus on writing the code that’s specific to the domain
of their application.

Carbon
The Carbon environment
provides fine-grained procedural APIs in C and C++ that are intended
for developers who are migrating applications from classic Mac OS to
Mac OS X. Carbon applications can run on Mac OS 9 as well as Mac OS X,
making Carbon a logical choice for those developers whose applications
need to run on both systems.

Cross Platform
For cross-platform desktop application development, Apple supports two environments:

The
principle cross-platform API on Mac OS X is Java 2, Standard Edition.
Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" provides both Java 1.3 and Java 1.4.2
integrated into the system. (Java 1.5 is also available as a developer
download; see the ADC Java
page for more information.) In addition, Apple provides the full JDK
for both Java 1.3 and 1.4.2, as well as implementations of Java 3D and
Java Advanced Imaging for JDK 1.4. Most existing Java applications run
well on Mac OS X without any modification, but some developers like to
take advantage of the unique integration that Apple provides with Java
in Mac OS X to make the user experience close to that of a native Mac
OS X application.

If you need for your application to run
on Linux or a UNIX platform other than Mac OS X, you may wish to take
advantage of Apple’s highly-optimized X11 implementation. Apple
provides a full X11 SDK as an optional install with the Xcode Tools.

XCode
Apple even provides the advanced Xcode Tools software development
environment free of charge with every copy of Mac OS X so that you can
start building great applications as soon as you get your Mac.

Xcode 2.1 is Apple’s tool suite
and integrated development environment (IDE) for creating
Mac OS X Universal Binaries that run natively on PowerPC and Intel-based Macintosh computers.
The IDE provides a powerful user interface to many industry-standard
and open-source tools, including GCC, javac, jikes, and GDB. Xcode is
designed to fully support the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks and Java.
It contains templates for creating applications, frameworks,
libraries, plug-ins, Java applications and applets, and command-line
tools. Developers can use Xcode to construct a user interface, test
code performance, and perform many other common development tasks.
For the latest Xcode release information and other details, see the
Xcode Updates page.

Java Resources

Java Almanac