Scott Hanselman has a funny way of blogging about things right after I start using them.  In this case, he's talking about RSS auto discovery.  I had just been digging around in my dasBlog theme to ensure that I had the right tag for RSS auto discovery earlier in the day.  Auto discovery is a great little mechanism for, if nothing else, alerting the user that you have a feed available (in case they didn't notice your feed icon).

As I embark on this blog project in the hopes of being interesting enough to garner a regular readership, I've done a lot of thinking lately regarding the nature of content syndication and its ultimate place in our society.  I'm a religious user of a RSS.  I monitor about 25 different feeds on various topics using an online aggregator (up until a few days ago I'd been using Bloglines, but now I'm giving NewsGator a try).  I'm an advocate for RSS.  I wrote a whitepaper for Commerce's online banking product management suggesting how we could implement private account information feeds in our online banking site.  Unfortunately, though, the response was lukewarm.  It seems I failed to take into account that only 4% of Internet users knowingly use RSS.

So what's the deal?  Why hasn't RSS caught on?  I've read some ramblings lately of "information overload", and that the feeds are providing data faster than people can keep up with them.  I suppose that may be the case if you have 50 or 60 feeds, but for my purposes, 25 seems to be a good number.  I set my aggregator to only show new items, I skim the headlines, and if the article doesn't seem appealing to me, I let the reader mark it as read automatically.  I don't ever browse the web anymore.  I just check my aggregator to see if there's any new content, rather like e-mail.

So, what's the difference?  Why does everyone use e-mail, yet nobody uses RSS?  Surely, subscribing to a site's feed isn't such a complex notion.  It isn't any more complicated than e-mail.  I think the issue is one primarily of awareness.  When I presented my whitepaper regarding RSS in online banking, the most common response I got was, "What's RSS?"  Obviously, these people are part of the other 96%.  After I explained what it was and what I wanted to do with it, everyone thought it was a really groovy idea, but doubted if anyone would use it.  I bet if it had a sexier name (rather than an acronym), everyone would be using it.

So, as an advocate of RSS, what do I suggest we do?  Spread the gospel.  Show people how your aggregator works and how convenient it makes retrieving your Internet content.  Firefox users may not realize that it uses RSS automatically (via auto discovery) in a feature called Live Bookmarks.  IE users will have a similar feature in version 7.0 (currently in beta).

I've seen this on both Fark and Slashdot today.  I wonder how it tastes?  Mmmm...  Green bacon.

I've been trying to get an internal Commerce Bank DotNetNuke portal going.  The idea is that everyone on my team has enough projects, we don't need to be devoting man-hours to putting together minor internal websites when a content management system would do the job.

According to the DNN installation whitepaper, the basic installation is just a virtual directory in IIS, with a SQL authenticated data connection.  This would never fly with our DBAs, as they insist on Windows Authentication on all new projects.  No big deal, says I.  We'll just set up a Windows domain account with the proper rights in SQL Server, add <identity impersonate="true" userName="domain\account" password="password" /> to web.config, change the SQL connection string to reflect this change, and we'll be golden.  Well, not so much.

See, everything in DNN seemed to run fine, with the exception of the scheduler.  The scheduler is the part of DNN responsible for purging old data and indexing the site for search.  I read the scheduler whitepaper, and there was nothing in it other than some very basic concepts.  I Googled every term I could think of relating to DNN and scheduling, but found nothing related to my issue.

I finally decided to try running DNN in its own App Pool under the new Windows account.  To be honest, I've never really had much of a need to run anything under anything other than DefaultAppPool.  I created the new App Pool, assigned the virtual directory to it, pointed FireFox at it, and got nothing but "Service Unavailable."  D'oh!  Wonder what's up with that?  A little Google work found this gem.  The TechNet link is dead, but he gives enough detail to figure it out.  As he describes, I added my account to IIS_WPG and verified it had the other permissions he mentioned, fired off a resetiis, and everything was fine.

So I suppose what was going on behind the scenes had to do with DefaultAppPool running as Network Service, my DNN application running as my Windows account, and between the two of them not being able to launch the scheduler thread.  I feel a little silly having spent more than a day on this.  Why couldn't I find any information to lead me to the conclusion that I needed to run in a different App Pool?  Why did I have to dig and dig and experiment to figure this out?  Why couldn't there be something in the scheduling whitepaper that describes the permissions associated with scheduling?  Is this indicative of my own lack of knowledge, or is this something anyone might stumble into?  While I adore DNN as a project, I think it really needs some updated, in-depth documentation.

My 13-month-old son, Connor, managed to lose my remote to my Netgear MP101, and, like all really great gizmos, it's completely useless without the remote.  My wife Michelle called Netgear, and the customer service rep claimed that they won't sell replacements (I later found this to be untrue, but that's another story).  After doing a little research, it seemed that Netgear apparently couldn't be buggered to use anything resembling a common remote scheme, and short of getting a JP1-compatible remote and hacking it myself, I was going to have to either retire my MP101 or purchase a new one off of eBay just for the remote.

Then I happened to find Logitech's line of remotes.   Convinced it was the best way I could again be able to use my beloved networked MP3 player, I decided to go ahead and get their slightly-better-than-entry-level offering, the H659.   At a price of less than $100 at Amazon, it wasn't an impulse buy, but I'd been craving a new gadget to play with, and this fit the bill.

Setup is easy.  The remote attaches to your PC by way of USB.  You then browse to Logitech's wizard-based configuration site that walks you through the setup process.

The slowest part of the setup was the first step (after creating an account on the website), entering the device information.  The wizard requires make and model of all of your devices.  Not that it's hard to come up with model numbers, it's just time-consuming.  We had to get a flashlight to inspect our 10-year-old Sanyo bookshelf stereo (left over from college), and we had to write all of these model numbers down and transcribe them faithfully into the wizard.

Once equipped with a knowledge of what devices you own, the wizard sets up some default activities.  By activities, it means what you do with the devices and how they relate to each other.  For instance, when we want to watch a DVD, we need the TV on, the DVD player on, and the TV set to Input 3.  When we want to listen to music, we need the MP101 on, the stereo on, and the stereo set to VIDEO input.  I tried as hard as I could to be creative and outline every possible activity we perform with the living room entertainment center, but in the end, I could only come up with 3:

1. Watch Cable DVR

2. Watch a DVD
   

3. Listen to MP3s

For each activity, you set the devices for that activity and any settings they require.  When you think you're ready to go, you click a button that generates a small binary file which is opened by Logitech's client software on your PC.  After about 3 minutes, the remote reboots itself with its new configuration.

After playing with my new toy for five minutes, I was in love.  The remote keeps track of what activity you're doing and what each system's state is.  For example, if I'm watching Cable DVR, then the TV is on and tuned to Input 1, the DVR is on, but everything else is off.  If I were to select the "Watch a DVD" activity, the DVR would shut off, the DVD player would turn on, and the TV would switch from Input 1 to Input 3.  If any of the devices should be in a state contrary to the remote's belief (like the TV is off when the remote thinks it should be on), just press the help button and a step-by-step troubleshooting guide corrects the issue.  Even Michelle, who isn't afraid of technology but balked at spending $100 on a remote, was impressed at the intuitiveness of it all.

If there's a limit to the customization of the device and activity configurations, I haven't found it yet.  The interface allows you to map any function to any button, as well as creating text-based custom buttons at both the device and activity level.  The approach I've taken is to have a simple list of necessity custom buttons for activities, and then set up the device menu with every function I could ever need.  The result is that most of my usage is activity-oriented, and only occasionally do I need to browse through all the commands for a given device.  I have yet to need to get out any of my original remotes.

Not everything is positive, though.  The remote has some other less-interesting features, like the ability to load some channel guide and program information for display through the LCD screen.  I tried to use it, but it's ultimately useless in the face of the DVR's GUI interface.  And my first H659's LCD screen died after 2 weeks, but, on the up-side, this gave me a chance to enjoy Logitech's awesome customer service.  They gave me my RMA number and dispatched another remote immediately, without requiring me to send in the broken one first.  It showed up via DHL five business days later.  (I actually still have the broken one on my desk...  Note to self:  send it back to Logitech ASAP!).

Overall, I have to recommend it whole-heartedly.  It's not exactly cheap, but it's not their most expensive model either (Scott Hanselman recently reviewed the Harmony 880, which is significantly more expensive).  I'm so enamoured with it, I'm thinking of buying one for my den, in which resides my DLP projector and Xbox 360.

Pros:

• Intuitive interface

• Easy to setup and customize

• Pretty backlit display and buttons

• It works with my MP101

• Awesome Logitech customer service

Cons:

• What's the point in the on-remote program guide?  Doesn't everyone who would buy one of these have some sort of on-screen guide?

• What happens when Logitech decides to no longer provide setup via their website?  Will they provide an offline solution?  Or will I just be expected to retire the remote?

• Casual consumers may be put off by the price

This is my latest attempt at a blog.  My previous attempts were of lower quality than what I had envisioned, so I'm taking another whack at it.  Ideally, I'm trying to model myself as a one-man Slashdot, bringing forth news and articles most important to me, and hopefully, you, the reader.

So what does "most important to me" mean?  This means that what you'll read will include:

• Hardcore geek stuff, like C# code samples.
• Articles culled from IT news sources, such as Slashdot.
• Articles of interest (or humor) from other general sources, like Fark.
• Reviews of software and gizmos.
  
• More hardcore geek stuff, like Star Wars book reviews.
• Thoughts and comments on video gaming, particularly Xbox and Xbox 360.
  
• Occasional musings on the Kansas City Chiefs.
• Occasional thoughts on fatherhood and family.  Expect to see cute photos of my kid from time to time.
• Maybe, possibly, a very rare comment about Freemasonry (my fraternity) or the Knights Templar.
  

• Anything overly political and/or of an inflammatory religious nature.  Suffice to say, I am basically libertarian in all my beliefs, religious and political, and to me that implies that my beliefs are mine, yours are yours, and it's not my responsibility to bring you to my way of thinking.  I believe in a supreme being and in civil liberty.  That's as far as I'm willing to affirm my faith and politics in the eyes of the public.
• Anything overly critical of Commerce Bank, my employer.  Constructive criticism is one thing.  Openly biting the hand that feeds you is just stupid.  So, from this point forward, pay heed to the disclaimer listed on this blog (the one about how my opinions are not those of my employer).

Without further ado, let the blogging begin.  Thanks for reading!