Ugh! I just found out that my Audiovox SMT5600 (that I did a mini review on here does not mount as a normal drive). You know, something that any USB drive does these days. Instead it appears as a special Mobile Device thingy mounted to My Computer in the Windows Explorer. WTF?

Now I can’t use my cool photo-downloading application (Downloader Pro from Breeze Systems). It can’t “see” that special Mobile Device thingy.

You know what I think? I think this smells like some sort of DRM fiasco. Smells like someone is trying to protect some lame-ass ringtone downloads from being copied or some such thing. Either that or Microsoft’s Smartphone Product Marketing Managers don’t know what they are doing.

I can help if it’s the latter.

• The Smartphone when connected to the user’s PC shall mount as a drive accessible to applications such as, by way of example, a photo downloading application.

Cut-and-paste that into the damn product marketing requirements document. Either that or stop screwing us with DRM.

Wow! I kind of like it… WordPress that is. Like they say the world-famous five minute install is spot on. I might have even beaten that mark.

So far, I have noticed that it’s really fast when compared to MovableType. Sometimes MT just seems to hang for a bit when saving posts.

It took me a while, but I finally found (it took a long time to find one that actually worked) and installed (this was fast) a Textile2 plugin that I then had to debug (this took a long time too). Textile2 is a text-to-HTML interpreter that lets you more simply add HTML to your posts (test it out here). Anyway, the plugin for WordPress is called Text Control. On MT I’ve been using Brad Choate’s great Textile2 plugin.

The “bug” with Text Control has to do with the zip download file text-control.zip. This zip file didn’t automatically create a text-control sub-directory. This sub-directory is where all the files in the zip download should be placed with the exception of the main text-control.php file (i.e., into wordpress/wp-content/plugins/text-control/). By moving the files into this new sub-directory, I “fixed” the bug. It took a while to figure out what was going on, since the plugin kind of works without the text-control sub-directory — you can set up Text Control in the options menu, but it will not actually function and gives errors when publishing.

Aside from the minor plugin WOT, I’m really liking WordPress. I’m probably going to move my blog over to it, once I get more familiar with the interface and tweak the templates a bit.

Update: 2005_03_26
Jeremy Zawodny posts his thoughts on the future of WordPress and MovableType here. The comments section of the posts is worth reading if you are considering WP or MT.

How many times have you seen this message?

Flickr is not having a “massage” — it’s having a melt down. Let’s hope that the folks at Yahoo! can fix this.

I suspect that scaling problems like this helped the folks at Flickr choose Door Number One (a pile of cash from Yahoo!) vs. Door Number Two (a pile of cash from some VC conditional on becoming a “real” company — e.g., one that can scale, handle all the legal issues, start marketing, etc. Basically, a lot of work).

Update: 2005_03_25
This massage parody is a crack up. Replace the “www” in the address for fun.

Gizmodo posted this about the HomeSeer RFID Starter Kit sold by iAutomate.com. Kind of cool. With the kit you can…

• Control the lights, HVAC, garage door or security system when your car approaches or leaves your home.
• Detect if vehicle is in the garage.
• Detect a person entering or leaving a room or area.
• Arm or Disarm Security by individual tag.
• Automatically open a “pet” door when your pet approaches the door.
• Control, Lights, Music, and Temperature

…among other things. Not so sure about how secure all of this is (i.e., controlling your security system, etc.), but here’s a link to the user manual that might have some details. The HomeSeer RFID Starter Kit runs $477.95 (ouch!).

BTW, it uses COM ports! Uhhh… have they heard of this new thing called USB?

errh, that’d be over 100K downloaded.

I’m looking at installing a copy of WordPress to try it out. It has some significant advantages over Movable Type such as: password-protected posts, multiple authors and instant publishing with no rebuilding. In addition, there is a very robust plug-in community. And with Six Apart now concentrating on Typepad (instead of just Movable Type), WordPress’ advantages vs. MT will probably grow in the future.

Here’s a handy how-to on migrating from MT to WordPress, and here’s a thread on WordPress’ site on MT vs. WordPress.