Archive | December 2005
Prepaid XBox Live Subscription cards are eaten by the service if your passport account has other premium Microsoft services attached.
Several XBox Live subscribers are in a suspended state, awaiting Microsoft’s help. The problem has been around since day one of the XBox 360 launch(I’ve been affected since 11/23/05). Depending on the duration of the service purchased and whether or not they purchased a headset, some users are out as much as $70. Also, misguided suggestions from customer support have resulted in people losing game saves.
Major Nelson(XBox Live representative) said on 12/1 that a fix was being tested. That was 16 days ago. http://forums.xbox.com/2/1145218/ShowPost.aspx#802691
Diet Coke and Mentos
The Diet Coke and Mentos phenomenon rages on. We tried 4 bottles yesterday at Homestead. Here’s a shot of the action:
Update: Here’s a howto and some of the science background.
Update 2: The photo was taken by Gordon. Travis sent me this excellent video of 5 trials of the Soda+Mentos experiment on a news show.
Frames-based theme for the Gregarius(sic) Aggregator
I’m almost done with my Frames-based (well, scrollingdivswithscrolllocationpreservation-based) theme for Gregarius. sameerd on IRC (Freenode, #gregarius) has been a source of much assistance and encouragement.
The theme works for me as is, but several changes need to happen before it can be committed to svn:
- The Javascript needs to work in IE (very close).
- The magic numbers in the layout need to go away.
- The Gregarius default look and feel css files need to be re-integrated.
I’m done hacking on it tonight. Hopefully, I’ll be able to put in a few hours tomorrow night to finish it up.
Dream Aggregator Features
- Button: Hide feeds with no unread items. This would trim the sidebar down to just the feeds that need to be visited.
- Drag and drop for organizing within categories and folders.
- One click sticky(like BlogLines Keep New), but hide the items in another tab(like Gregarius).
- 2 Frame interface(like Bloglines) so I can navigate the list of items without disturbing my place in the list of feeds.
- Integrated font size slider so I can quickly and easily adjust the display.
- Online, of course.
- Integration with my blog (wordpress) and my bookmarks system (del.icio.us) is currently handled with Firefox extensions, and I’m ok with leaving it that way.
- RSS Feed for items that I mark as sticky.
- RSS Feed that lists feeds that were subscribed to recently.
- Inbox: An easy way for people to send me links that they think will interest me. An rss feed for gmail works fine, I guess, but maybe the Aggregator should have this functionality built in.
- XML views for all ‘screens’ so when someone builds a cool client side interface for our online aggregators, we’ll be all set.
John Tokash 