Over the last year, I've been casting an increasingly worrisome eye at my Comcast bill, which just keeps creeping up every 6 months or so. I have both cable modem and a digital package with HD, so I'm embarassed to say my bill runs over $100 a month easy. Lately this has just seemed more and more excessive, especially considering I'm often complaining about my lack of free time. Between church stuff, girlfriend, other friends and just keeping up with everything else I'm interested in, I really would be better off without so much TV as a distraction. I mean, I grew up without a tv, much less cable, but cable has gotten to the place where I think of it as another necessary utility like gas or electric. And that is obviously absurd when you think about it. Plus I have a
Netflix subscription too, so it's not like I don't have other stuff to watch. I don't really watch much cable anyway, mostly it's Comedy Central and Food Network and couple other things here and there. Besides, a lot of TV programming is showing up online (legally from the networks) and you can always go the BitTorrent route anyway.
So anyway, I've been thinking about OTA (over the air) HD programming for awhile now. I bought my tv a bit too early to get a built-in tuner (and the first gen ones kinda suck anyway), but for the price of one month's cable bill I can theoretically buy an HD receiver and get free tv after that. Chicago is a great market for HD OTA programming, maybe the best in the country. The big question is whether I can pick it up with an indoor antenna or if I'll need something on the roof. So I'm going to give it a try. I haven't had a landline in ages, but DSL has gotten to the point where it is almost troublefree and cheaper than cable modem. Certainly sufficient for my needs and a stark contrast to my first Bellsouth DSL experience that involved barely supported NT 4 drivers for a PCI modem. Besides, it looks like I'll need a line for alarm monitoring if the burglary problem in our neighborhood continues.
So Monday I'm getting a phone line hooked up and DSL is supposed to be on Tuesday. At that point, I'll finish out the season (got to see the finales of Lost, Alias and 24) and then Comcast is going bye bye. I figure I don't watch much tv in the summer anyway (I hate baseball and everything else is reruns), so I should have plenty of time to figure this out. May involve getting an antenna installed on our condo roof (which I think I can get approved), but that's still cheaper longterm than paying cable every month. Everything old is new again. I remember as a kid before cable was around everybody had a big antenna on their house. That's going to start happening again as I think all new tvs have to start coming with a digital tuner built-in. And sooner or later this switch-over from analog to digital broadcasting will happen. At which point I hope to be ahead of the curve getting free HD programming to my heart's content.
In response to a recent patent suit that Microsoft lost, they released an update that changes IE. The update causes items in object tags to require a click to activate. The most obvious time you'll notice this will be with Flash files. In the case I ran into, the Flash file still loads, but when the mouse hovers over the animation an outline appears around it and you see a tooltip with the message "Click to activate and use this control". Here's a
thread about it with a fix that seems to work, at least in my situation. The post near the bottom of the page has the best explanation of what to do.
So it took a little time, but I've finally moved the Clarity blogs over to a customized version of
Community Server 2.0. We have a decent number of customizations, particularly around our global categories that aggregage content across all our blogs. I didn't want to start moving my changes until I had the final RTM codebase. Unfortunately, I had started a change log to keep track of my changes to the source code, but it wasn't super complete. So this time I wanted to both document the code and also have a document listing out at least all the changed files. Also wanted a sql script that would make any necessary changes to the data layer. So all that took some time, but now I feel like I know where our customizations are. I'm still interested in writing about how we implemented the global categories and that should be easier now that I have better documentation.
I did run into one issue that I hadn't seen before and it took me awhile to track down. I was deleting a blog and when I did all the global category stuff broke. Turned out the table that links posts to categories was losing all global category data. The reason: when a user's account is deleted, the code loops through that user's categories and deletes all rows in the table for a particular user category and post. Because of the way our global categories work (to allow any user to post to them), it was also looping through all the global categories and deleting rows for those as well. Took awhile to figure out, but makes perfect sense now. Kinda glad I ran into this now versus later because now I won't have a surprise if I have to delete a blog. Turnover at Clarity is so low it's not something that I need to think about very often, which is a good problem to have.
Telligent has announced they will introduce tags with
version 2.1, ala
Del.icio.us or
Flickr (or a myriad of other sites), but I still think we are going to want to keep our global category approach. It just works better for us. I'll have to wait and see how it is implemented though. It's enough work to get our customized code into a new codebase that I don't think I can upgrade with every minor version, unless there is something very compelling. and even then, I may start trying to do a diff on the source code trees and just grab the stuff I want.