Friday, February 15, 2008

iTunes: why my wife must get Vista instead of Ubuntu on her new laptop

Being a geek, I buy gadgets. For Valentine's day, I bought my wife an iPod. Yeah, yeah, dinner too etc.

For our imminent anniversary, I'll be getting her a laptop. She wants mobility just around the house, and her desktop will be taken over by the kids.

I've been eyeing OLPC's offering, thinking that's what I could get for our 10 year old too and benefit from the networking things that device does so nicely. But since they are not offering the "Buy One, Give One" anymore, that options is gone.

I was thinking about the ASUS EEE PC too, since it's received good reviews and its ultra small. Her fingers are smaller than mine.

But the deal breaker is iTunes. She *must* have iTunes -- it's the thing she's really wanted. Not because it's the best, or cheapest. But it's what she knows, what her friends use, it's easy. Any laptop that doesn't support iTunes will disappoint her. And, fact is, she doesn't need a laptop, the pleasure she will get from having one and using it with her new iPod is the whole point. Everything. Not a "kinda cool, with concessions cause my husband is a geek, and thats really cool, but it comes with caveats*" outcome, I'm looking for here.

Yeah, I know, geek-readers, yo've been using your iPod on Debian or whatever for 2 years without a hitch, or your alternate-MP3-player-that-stores-2x-more-and-cost-.5-less on CentOS, but please see above. It's my wife, dude.

So, unless Apple comes out with an iTunes client for Ubuntu in the next couple days, I'll be paying Microsoft for an OS I'd rather do without. Yuck.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Google for Error Messages

I'm a total geek -- if you are, you may, like me, find this page completely hillarious: http://extension.usu.edu/?q=error

I stumbled upon that while exploring the problem of displaying error messages. To often people forget to turn of debug output in their production environments, revealing *way* too much to the public about their innards.

So, take the default error message for the code of your choice, and Google it. Find a lot of sites at their worst, if Googlebot happened to be spidering them then.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Google hearts Cupid

In the past I've blogged about Cupid.com running afoul of Google's mystical algorithm. That's a thing of the past, now it's the first search result for the term "cupid."

Our business model of advertising on local radio means we don't have to play the PPC game or get crazy worried about our Google search results, as long as we do well for branded search. For example, if you search for "online dating", the competition to get on that page is fierce/expensive, and we just haven't engaged in that pursuit.

Today I noticed, however, if you search for "online dating" or even "dating," Google's new "Searches related to" section includes "cupid.com" or "cupid." Very cool. Nice to be finally getting our props, just in time for Valentine's day.

Google, Cupid.com hearts you too.