I have been looking for something that will do this for years, and have finally found it.  The service rssweather.com is based on HAMWeather platform which appears to have very good Canadian coverage.  There are lots of tools out there for using NOAA data or weather.com data, but neither allow you access to Environment Canada weather alerts and Environment Canada local radar.  Both of these items are available from rssweather.com, and also in RSS form which is great!

I personally have subscribed to the weather feed for my area using Outlook 12, and have set a rule to alert me whenever anything comes in with the subject “Weather Warning”.  I hope to be able to leverage this to convince tool developers for various weather widgets to source Canadian data as well.

I just installed the Office 12 beta on my Thinkpad laptop and noticed that the fonts in the new Office app all had a very aliased appearance to them.  I turned on and tuned windows XP’s cleartype feature using the Cleartype Powertoy and it the app seems much more usable.  I highly recommend it to anyone who might be evaluating Office 12 on an LCD screen.

Well this is fun to watch I must say. The headlines today all imply that the board has shut out the Open Text offer but when you read deeper, they are just making a play for more cash. The Open Text offer was 27.75 and the board wants 27.85. We shall see how this shakes out, and more interestingly (for me anyways) to see how this affects the rest of the market. Here is my completely unresearched and seat of the pants feeling on the market (in other words, not worth much of anything other than water cooler talk):

• OTEX continues to gobble up market share. There are opinions on both sides that say this is either good or bad but when looked at through shareholder glasses, market share equals survival (not necessarily my opinion though).
• I personally believe that other ECM players will join the race for market share, and major acquisitions will be part of that strategy.
• While documentum was and is the big dog in the ECM software market, I now see documentum as a small division of a hardware company. It is unlikely that EMC cares much more about building out its software strategy unless it’s a new way to sell storage. I don’t expect EMC to get into this software market share fight in any major way.
• Filenet is the competitor that I see more and more in the marketplace and I doubt that they will take this lying down. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them make a bid for either Hummingbird (unlikely IMHO) or another tier-2 ECM player as a market share grab.
• I have no idea what the big guys are going to do. Microsoft is a huge up and coming player, and they may rely on their cheap software and partners to build market share organically. However, I personally think that having a direct sales force and specialized consulting group remains important in the ECM space to ensure that the correct value is being sold at the correct levels. Microsoft has the opportunity to do an architecture play and sell “all Microsoft” into a company but by doing this I believe that they will marginalize ECM which will be a huge mistake for any corporation. The concept of managing and controlling your unstructured information (documents, emails, images, etc) is a business-first problem. Attacking it from the bottom-up though the IT department will spell failure for many large organizations; failure that will only be realized after the first big lawsuit finds you with your pants down.
• Will Microsoft eat anyone? There have been plenty of rumours but to be honest they like to keep their own technology and Sharepoint 2007 has been a massive investment for them. They’re unlikely to make any large technology play but I do think they are weak in addressing the business problem directly. If it’s technology they’re after it will probably be some small outfit we’ve never heard of to fill a specific gap. If it’s a sales force and savvy consulting force they want, it will first take a big shift in philosophy (from partner-based to direct delivery) before that can happen.
• Will IBM or Oracle eat anyone? That’s a distinct possibility and they both have different acquisition styles. In the case of ECM there is a big opportunity for someone to pull off the “we’re not Microsoft” story and either of these players could do it. IT departments are slowly warming up to Microsoft but there are plenty who don’t want to buy into Windows server, SQL server, and other prerequisite technologies. Lock-in is a dangerous game, and that would be their card to play.
• The old WCM standbys like Interwoven and Vignette will probably be
  gobbled up by someone who needs to improve their web content management
  story; web content by itself is less and less useful these days. I
  hope that if/when they are acquired the proud new owner moves quickly
  to integrate WCM with the overall ECM platform or the value of the
  acquisition will be lost.
• Other potential suitors: SAP should have an interest in linking ERP business intelligence and ECM knowledge, but that has been speculated for years and if they were going to do it, they should have done it by now via Open Text/IXOS. Google hasn’t come up because they don’t seem to be very enterprise savvy yet, but ECM is a huge search problem and one that they could jump on via acquisition to get very quick penetration into the enterprise. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see another hardware vendor enter the fray - ECM requires enterprise disk and ECM search requires horsepower. Maybe ECM would be a good fit for SUN since they seem to be weak on purpose these days.
• Will there be a pure-play ECM vendor left once this is all over? Simply stated, yes. The problem is too big and too important to be commoditized and I believe that there will continue to be a very small handful of pure-play vendors who address it very well.

So who will win amidst the market consolidation? It’s anyone’s guess right now but I do expect the consolidation to continue. While I do have many friends and contacts in this industry, I do not have nor do I want anyone to give me inside information. This is pure speculation by a guy who’s been doing it now for over five years. I find it fun to play the guessing game and even more fun to look back a few years from now on this post to see just how wrong I was.
Footnote: Stellent is conspicuously absent from this post, I know. Given that I work at Stellent, I think it would be a mistake to discuss in a water-cooler type post something about which I do obviously have inside information. To discuss STEL would imply fact, which this post is not. Sorry.

My ISP just bumped the speed again on my standard internet package.  I now get 10 Mbps down and 1Mbps up, for about $45 CAD a month (and yes I do really see those speeds).  Before I moved to this area, internet service was always an issue of fighting with someone over speeds, quality, uptime, whatever…  Cogeco has been rock-solid for six years and continues to be one of the best providers in North America.  I also get several other things that make life simple:

• up to 3 IP addresses
• my IP addresses are relatively static (has changed three times in six years)
• great support via official channels, and amazing support on broadbandreports.com 

Due to a server crash several months ago several articles were lost.  If you came to this link looking for DVD to WMV archiving options please click here. 

Based on some articles a couple of days ago, I decided to give OpenDNS a try. They promise to deliver a faster DNS service, with more interesting features like phishing detection and typo correction.

I was skeptical, I mean sure they can provide cool features but can they really provide faster DNS service than my ISP’s local servers? I did a couple of traceroutes and was shocked to discover two things:

• my ISP’s DNS server is not local at all, it appears to be outsourced
• OpenDNS servers were reached in an average of 20ms faster

Interesting. I’m warming up to this idea now, since the physical travel time isn’t an issue now I’m willing to give them a chance to prove that the software itself is superior in both performance and functionality. They make a strong case on their site for some of the fundamental changes they’ve made to DNS and why they are needed. One concept that stuck me is that while home internet speeds have increased immensely, the number of DNS requests your computer makes per second has gone through the roof (both because you’re requesting things faster and I assume because page makeup has gotten significantly more complex). If DNS isn’t up to speed, then suddenly this basic service can start to become the bottleneck.

So am I impressed? Well here’s what I’ve noticed:

1. No complaints from the wife. This is a router-level change and so it affects everyone in the house. She hasn’t noticed, which is a good thing.
2. Page loads certainly aren’t any slower. In fact they might be just a little faster at initial page draw, but I have no data with which to back up that claim.
3. My every day typos are gone. Ahhh, now that’s nice. I still do alot of browsing by typing in the URL bar, and I’m very happy with the fast and correct replacement of my fat-fingered web addresses. It’s like a dialing wand for your router.

Found this one via digg, a very cool video of what happens when you mix diet coke and mentos.  Then it gets really crazy, a recreation of the Bellagio fountains using diet coke.

Normally I’d use this as a reminder of how out of shape I’m in, but this time I think that the task itself bears some responsibility.  We are getting ready to move into a new house, and the last four weekends have been full of heavy labour.  Last weekend my father helped me to  pull up the carpet from all of the rooms upstairs and we made a couple of runs to the dump to get rid of all of it.  I left the “easy” stuff for later, the hallway and the stairs, because it’s a relatively small area that I can manage by myself.  Yesterday was the day that I made that attempt.
I attacked the job with pliers and a utility knife, and made almost constant use of the pliers to pull staples.  And oh, there were staples!  The stairs alone took me the majority of the day, and I was developing blisters before I was halfway done from the pressure that the pliers were putting on my hands.  Jodie and the girls came over later in the afternoon and I asked her to take the staples out of the bottom stair because my hands just refused to grip those pliers any longer.
The good news is that the carpet is all up now, I’ve filled the floor with new flooring screws to get rid of squeaks, and we’re ready to receive the new carpet this week (fingers crossed that it arrives before moving day).
The moral of the story:  hire a student to pull carpet from the stairs next time!

Due to a server crash several months ago some articles have gone missing.  If you came to this link looking for an ATI TV Wonder Elite review please click here.
I’ve gotten four telemarketer calls tonight, and the night is still young. What’s up with that? I actually fel sorry for the poor bastards who get me on a night like tonight… Katlyn is with Grandma, Jaimee is asleep, and Jodie is at baseball so I am home alone and bored. Cheesy telemarketing plus google means that I get to have lots of fun and get an oppotunity to truly waste their time. The last call was for a vacation club with no strings attached. I led the guy along, got all the way to booking the appointment, he’s probably salivating over his pending commission cheque and then I had just a couple more questions.

“I was wondering if you could tell me the outcome of the following lawsuits that were filed against your company…”

“Would you agree with the label of ’scam’ to describe your primary line of business…”

So on and so forth. Teehee! So who’s next? Bring it on!

President Bush delayed Prison Break tonight and I caught the majority of his speech.  For the most part it was to be expected and addresed many of the issues that needed to be addressed to calm down the very public immigration debate.  What really caught me offguard though was reading between the lines of the one anecdote he gave.  I don’t have quotes available yet, but basically he said that a Mexican citizen who joined the marines and got injured in Iraq is the kind of person who he would stand beside for citizenship.  It had eerie linkages to Starship Troopers, where the only way to guarntee citizenship was to serve in the military.  “Join the Mobile Infantry and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship.”

I would guess that most sane parents probably stopped smoking around their kids decades ago, and those who still do won’t be affected by any so-called “proof” that they are doing their children harm.  This study showed increased carcinogens in the urine of babies whose parents smoke.  I wonder how we as a society can use this information to protect our most vulnerable members?

CTV.ca | Carcinogen found in urine of smokers’ babies