Lots of buzzing around about the announcement of Yahoo’s feed “mashup” service, Pipes.

This has never been a newsflash type blog, but I wanted to at least get in on the Pipes-posting-palooza.

Seriously, I have no idea what’s up with these things…I don’t know if it’s really useful, or if there was some sort of Digg / O’Reilly fueled tipping point. No idea, as the service is currently down.

Is Tim O’Reilly right? “Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet.”

I love surprises. Hopefully this new toy really does live up to the hype. At the rate it’s gathering buzz, I assume the cool-kid backlash will happen around 2pm Central Time. Hurray for buzz!

Solaris went open just as I was leaving full time sysadmin work for full time programmer work. I haven’t checked in on the project over the past few years (2 really…is that “few years?”), and was pretty surprised to see that Open Solaris is scheduled to become “Solaris 11″.

TextDrive is migrating all their FreeBSD servers to Solaris 11, which scared me when I first heard it. I remember the days of trying to get a basic LAMP’ish stack running on Solaris 7. It was tremendously frustrating back then. Everything was optimized for Linux, nothing compiled out of the box. It was a real pain.

It’s good to see Solaris still has some popular momentum, especially under the command of guys like Textdrive’s Jason Hoffman who has clearly been toying with it a lot.

Edited to add this link to a nice analysis, http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/03/28/has-solaris-turned-the-corner/

Simon Willison on pretty URL’s. Simon is so good at pointing out common sense stuff that for whatever reason hasn’t yet entered the realm of “common sense.”

His point in the above is that with all the fancy aggregators out there in the world, it’s important to not only have pretty URL’s, but also to have consistent URL’s. If you want to show just how del.icio.us your site is, it makes sense to have consistent URL’s, so that http://whatever.com/index.php and http://whatever.com/ don’t split up your tags.

Again…totally common sense…now that Simon has said it.

Remember this gripe from a few months ago about how hard it is to learn Emacs?

Well, I got over it, buckled down, and learned. Now I do all my coding in Emacs, and I’m happy doing it. Huzzah!

I messed around a bit with this blog and Tastebud last night, adding Google Adsense to both sites, adding “Digg this!” style links to blog posts here, and upgrading the WordPress installation here.

The “Digg this” buttons are courtesy of Peter Harkins lush Sociable plugin. That thing is great. As for Adsense, I’ve sort of been fighting it for a bit, but really like the idea of making pennies a day on these two hot web properties. I had Adsense up and running on the Improv Apiary before it collapsed in a fit of childish whining. We’ll see how it goes here. Of course, I won’t actually be able to tell you how it goes, as it violates the terms and conditions of the Adsense contract. If you see me walking around with new gold fronts, you’ll know I’m doing alright.

I keep reading these thrilling tales of Second Life riches. It’s pretty appealing. Then I always get to the part about “even furries get their own city.” That little enclave of deviant teddy bear fetishists is the bit that scares me off. That, plus the bit about never getting to kill Trolls, fly spaceships, or mine ore. It just sounds…boring. The promise of fantastics virtual real estate wealth kept pulling me back in though, until today. Nice write up (found on Slashdot) comparing the Second Life real estate phenomena to a pyramid scam.

My vague interest in Second Life stood on a pretty wobbly pedestal, that’s now totally been knocked down. There’s still some neat potential in Second Life, like this project Matt Biddulph is working on, but the whole “get rich quick” take on Second Life is officially dead to me.

Also, there’s a bunch of furries in there. Don’t forget about the furries.

I found this article covering the current state of internet enabled cat feeders in the world.

My favorite line is, “In the two years since Chris McAvoy first explored the concept of a Net-enabled cat feeder, the technology has advanced in leaps and bounds”

Hehe…clearly I’m a forward thinker.

Here’s a really great write up on how Rex Grossman is the most inconsistent (statistically) quarterback in the past 12 years. The punchline is, the second most inconsistent quarterback in the league won the Super Bowl last year (go Steelers!). The second punchline is, Grossman had some of the highest highs in the league…so, as long as he’s on a high this Sunday, quarterbacking won’t screw up the Bears.

I like the “consistency” analysis too. From a fantasy perspective, I picked up Grossman as a backup quarterback relatively early in the season this year. I put him in after Ben’s (I have no idea how to spell his last name) appendix burst, and was super pleased with his early season streak of great numbers. Then he tanked, then he’d be great…tank…great…it was frustrating. I’ve been toying with the idea of grading consistency against the database at pro-football-reference.com this Spring / Summer to prepare for the 2007 fantasy football season, that article above is a great formula for quarterback rating. By the way, I finished #13 out of 14 players this years fantasy league. The “Ben Wear a Helmets” started strong, but crapped out quickly. My Dad won the league. So at least one McAvoy is great at fantasy.

The Pro Football Reference Blog is a really great read. I’m pretty sure I’ve recommended it in the past, but wanted to give it another plug.