[gmail delete:currentMessage]

Wow. After all this time of wishing GMail would have a simple delete button, it is finally there. Wonderful. No more “select messages, click drop down, selecte ‘trash’.”

What a happy day. Now is there a keyboard shortcut?

Considerations

I’m sensing that one of the next big buzzwords for the industry is “considerations.” It is often asociated with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), but probably is a broader concept.

DRM

A while back, Adam Curry has an interesting definition of DRM.

DRM = Don’t Rob Musicians

I liked that one.

Printing Google Maps sucks

When Google maps came out, I thought it was neat like everyone else, the dragging and everything. But what I loved most was how “pretty” they were. OK, the technical way of saying it would be that they were very readable.

It became my main source of driving directions and especially printing a map of the destination so I could see the streets around it. Knowing what streets are just before a turn are as important as knowing the actual street (or you will be doing many loops).

For at least the last month, Google has been worthless in this areana. When you hit the “print” link or “print…” (in Firefox at least), you get a very poor quality map printed. And it almost never has street names (because it has such a low resolution).

I’ve reverted to the following two options:

- Do a screen capture and print it in Photoshop (on my Windows machine) or Preview (on my Mac).

- Use another service.

I’ve done the former a bunch, but am at the point that I’m likely to revert to a “less readable” (aka pretty) map since the print version on Google is as unreadable as it gets.

If I’m at home, going someplace in the DC area, and using my Windows machine, then I actually use a CD Rom product (from Rand McNally, which bought Thompson maps I think). They are VERY readable and great (I buy the old Thompson real maps because they are the most readable…better than ABC). I still need to find an alternative for the other times/destinations.

Running video over UTP (Cat-5)

After we moved in to our house 4 years ago, I started wiring it. While wireless is fine, having wires in the wall has great value. While I have coax for video, I have FAR more Cat-5 cables.

So I wanted to run video and audio over these lines. While I’ve heard of people just soldering on some RCA connectors to Cat-5 cables. I’ve also heard it is less than perfect quality (of course that person didn’t wire up his ethernet cables correctly either).

The right answer is to use a “balun”…which converts between balanced (the RCA side) to unbalanced (the RJ-45 side). I spent $150 for two (one for each side), but they can be had for much less now. For example you can get the Unicom VAA-U501-VA Video/Audio Media Adapter at places like Rapicom for under $30 each.

I finally had cause to use them. I wanted to pipe audio from my Mac to the whole house. So I connected my Mac to one of these, Cat-5 to the other, then a audio patch cable to my video modulator (which pumps what is connected onto channel 117 on all TVs in the house). Bingo, quality Christmas music throughout the house (and all in sync).

Why not just connect a long audio cable from my Mac to the modulator? I tried that but the hum from the grounding issues made it unexceptable. The “balun” approach is the “proper” solution.

Ads inline to articles?

While I read a fair number of blogs, I still keep track of “news” related items and commentary in real print magazines. While I read some stories and bits, if it is something I want to remember or dig deeper into (ad or article), I’ll rip it out, throw it on a pile and look it up later (sometimes a day, sometimes 3 months).

I was just reading an article in eWeek titled “MetaLincs debuts discovery software.” I decided I wanted to add it to my del.icio.us since it deals with visualizing information. When I looked at the article on-line, I noticed a bunch of things that looked like call-outs in the article. But they were not directly from the article. At first I thought they were ads. In looking further, they are links to articles related to the content they are near.

The good part: the links look somewhat related (I wonder if it is automated in some way, or all manual).

The bad part: They look like ads to me. But this is probably because much of the trade rags are very press release sounding. Companies announcing new products, features, releases.

If you care, since I just renewed all of my free subscriptions, here is my current reading list:

1. eWeek
2. CIO
3. Information Week
4. CIO Insight
5. Baseline
6. CRN
7. VAR Business
8. Oracle Magazine
9. Network Computing
10. Software Development
11. Queue (from ACM)

Plus Communications of the ACM.