The Apple TV is now shipping, and some lucky blokes like Walt Mossberg were given demo units to play with early.  I don't have much to say, other than as it stands now I will not be purchasing one, and here are some reasons why.

I want my DIVX!

Seriously Apple, come on.  H.264 is actually a beautiful codec; I have no complaints with the quality that you can get out of it.  What I will complain about is the footprint.  I can get the same, or better quality, from a DIVX encoded file that is sometimes half the size.  Period.

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And man am I tired.

This ApacheCon was probably the busiest for me.  Between hacking on the secret project, and attending talks I barely had anytime to hang out with the extremely cool people that were there.  Austin was an extremely cool place.

I will write a proper entry on this once I have recovered, but for now I leave you with this very important question:

Why in the world did the water in Austin taste like moldy dirt?

Pictures and more witty banter to come.

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Well not exactly, but close enough to warrant the title I would think.

I know that I was supposed to publish another tutorial before this one, but I hacked this up last week, and thought it was cool enough to preempt the other post.  So at work the new design we just launched called for a rotating, hyperlinked slideshow, with cross-fading.

Normally it would be "To the Flash Cave!", but I was feeling extra crotchety so I decided to basically recreate Slideshow Pro in PHP, CSS and some JS-foo.  Nothing to spectacular, but it is shiny.  Be warned, this is a very long tutorial... use at your own risk.

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I have arrived here in Austin and have checked into my hotel.  Other than the hotel not having any record of a reservation in my name for today, things have been pretty smooth.  Well it looks like doing something out tonite is a bust, since I am feeling pretty crappy from the flight out here.  Maybe tomorrow night when more people I know are actually here.

I am sitting here once again at Gate 3 at Bluegrass Airport wating to be whisked away to ApacheCon.

In a comical twist of fate, I am going to be arriving in Austin a day early for the conference... everyone else will be arriving tomorrow (Sunday). So if there are any WordPressers in the greater Austin Area who wold like to get together and have some coffee or something, I would be up for it.

I will be staying in the new Hilton Austin downtown, so if you want to hang out, you can give me a call there, or comment here. I wouldn't mind getting together in the evening sometime this coming week as well.  The Good Dr. will be at ApacheCon as well... and I might be able to convince him to come out for a bit as well.

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For any of you who signed up to be updated as to the release date of this book, ignore the emails from Amazon you are getting.

The publisher and I parted ways months ago, and there is no book to buy.  I have the 11 of 12 chapters I wrote, and I hope to one day have it published; either through another tech publisher or something like LuLu.

Again, if you get an email saying my book is to be released on the 16th, ignore it.

My thanks to Shawn for bringing this to my attention.

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The rag-tag group of techy types from Wilmore have arrived (at least in part) in Columbus, and are readying themselves for the fun and penguins to be had tomorrow at Ohio Linuxfest!

I for one am very excited about this conference.  I first attended 2 years ago, and it was one of the best conference experiences I have had... Apachecon in Germany not withstanding.  If you are planning on being there tomorrow, find me and say what up, if you are not planning on being there tomorrow, then mark your calendar for next year; it is well worth your time.

Gotta go now, time for bed.

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Yes, it is that time of year again, International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and in celebration here is the desktop I made last year to celebrate.  Download and enjoy.

I apologize for the lack of updates lately, but things have been hectic at work, at home and at work #2 (my social software company, currently in stealth mode).  I am prepping a new tutorial on abusing the object system in PHP 5 for wealth and glory as well as polishing up an update to CJD Notepad that among other shiny things, integrates your notes with the Write Post screen, so you can access those notes from everywhere.

Until next time then.

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New episodes of IT Crowd will begin airing this coming Februrary!

I was clued into a fallacy in this post by Ben, so it has been updated.

And while we are talking about the British Networks, when are you people going to get your head out of your collective arses, and stop restricting your web video of shows to only Brits.  You know, some of us over here in the colonies would like to see that stuff too.

Anywhoo, if you are an IT Professional, you need to see this show by any means neccesary... I will leave those means up to you.  Gotta run, I have to force an unexpected reboot on one of my machines.

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