As of midnight tonight, Zune services will be going down for maintenance, and will be out of commission for up to two days. While this is probably devastating for Zune pass subscribers, at least the powers-that-be at Zune.net are doing things right.

On Sept. 26, I received an e-mail message letting me know that the services would be unavailable during that time. In addition, if you visit the Web site right now (there’s a screen shot to the right), there is a very blatant message informing you that the services will be down for up to 48 hours.

While I’m not sure this maintenance downtime is going to be good for the Zune bottomline or increasing its following, I am hoping that the maintenance will also include some nice upgrades to the service.

I simply cannot imagine iTunes being down for two days (although, I suppose it’s possible that it’s happened, since I never use iTunes, personally).

It seems like an odd business decision, but I am impressed with the level of notification.

A new site has launched that’s part game, part test. It’s called “The List” and once you figure out how to use it, you will be tested on your coding skills. When you launch the site, all you receive is a linux prompt. You need to know the right commands to get into the game. Can you solve the problems they present?

My supervisor sent this to me at work the other day. It really is an amazing promotional piece. You may need to watch the video more than once to get the full effect, but it’s definitely worth watching again. I am truly amazed at how the developers were able to put this together, but I am incredibly impressed.

I assume that it’s all done with Flash, but I really am not 100% certain. What do you think?

Link

Linux Mint is the first Gnome-centric distribution I have chosen to review. Previous to my recent research into Linux builds, I had not heard of Linux Mint. As far as Linux distributions go, Mint is still rather young, having made its debut in late 2006. However, it’s based on Debian and Ubuntu, and really brings a lot to the table.

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Caching seems to be the new trend. But aside from all the marketing, it’s really a lot more than that. If you don’t have the money to buy those lovely Zend products, you might find yourself turning to the world of Open Source (again). And viola! You’ll be helped.

There are two ways to cache with PHP - as far as I know -, one is using PEAR’s Cache_lite class. There’s an article already about it on Devshed, but since someone already spoiled it and I am not too much of a pear-lover myself (I like wine-berries, oranges and stuff), I’ll talk about phpCache. So here we go.

So, at first we’ll start with the principals. What does this caching thing do? And why do I want it?
Caching is used in a million things. For example, there is your browser’s cache, which saves a website to your harddrive so next time, you go to this website, it’ll come up a lot more faster on your screen. Your ISP probably also offers caching through a proxy server. In this case, highly frequented websites are downloaded to the ISPs proxy server and delivered to you a lot faster than if you would go to the site directly. Thumbnails of larger images are a way of caching too.
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I realize that I already posted today, but I wanted to make another post in honor of the new season of Heroes. I am really excited about season 3 starting tonight. I was really kind of disappointed in the way that season 2 ended earlier this year (most likely because of the writers strike), and am really looking forward to see what they’ll do with this season.

Apparently, the first hour tonight is going to be a recap of seasons 1 and 2, to try to draw people in that might not have watched in the past. That will be good for me, as I watched the show extremely haphazardly the first season. I really only started to get into it after Malcolm McDowell joined the cast. Of course, at that point, I was in the middle of moving out of our old place and into our new place, so I missed the last two episodes because I didn’t have any television connections.

Anyway, whether you’ve watched Heroes before or not, you really should check it out tonight. It’s a great show for geeks and non-geeks alike.

I realize I’m a little late to the party, as it’s been a few days since I’ve synced my Zune. However, Zune 3.0 is here. In addition to two new hardware models from Microsoft, those of us that already own Zunes (the original devices and the 2.0 devices) get to reap the benefits of the software/firmware update.

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I’m sure this problem has always been around, but I hadn’t noticed it nearly as much for the last few years. So many people seem to be using Flash on their sites again, relying on it, and javascript, to render much of their design.

The problem, of course, is that a user without javascript or without Flash, doesn’t get to see much of what everyone else sees.

So, my question is why everyone seems to be using so much Flash again, recently? Why are so many home pages being built almost completely with Flash, only to completely fall apart when javascript of Flash is disabled? Why use Flash at all when 99% of the things being done with Flash (aside from things like YouTube videos, etc.) could be done with javascript and AJAX nowadays, and could be built to degrade gracefully for those without javascript?

An interesting discussion on this subject was started over at CollegeWebGuy.com. Since then, I’ve come across even more examples, though I don’t really feel right in sharing them.

It just bothers me, as someone who railed against Flash for so long only to see the days of pointless Flash splash pages finally go by the wayside. Now, to see Flash seemingly making a comeback in such a big way (at least, among higher education Web sites) really upsets me. To me, it actually seems almost lazy.

Why bother putting in the effort to develop sound DOM javascript and AJAX that degrades when you can put something together in Flash in a few minutes?

Enough of my tirade. What are your thoughts? Am I just super-sensitive to this, or are you noticing a comeback in Flash usage, as well? Does it bother you to see that, or are you okay with it? If Flash is necessary for certain applications, what are some ways you can make it accessible to disabled users?

One of my colleagues forwarded a good article from MSN to me today. I thought I would share it with you guys, in case you didn’t see it for yourselves. Enjoy.

I recently heard about a new program called Boxee. The program is currently in the alpha stage, so you will have to apply for an invite on their Web site. When I applied, I received my invite within a few days.

Boxee is a media player very similar to Windows Media Center. In truth, it’s actually based on XBMC (Xbox Media Center).

I signed up for the invite knowing that it was only available for Mac and Linux. However, I did not realize that the only Linux flavor for which it’s been built, yet, is Ubuntu (technically, Gutsy Gibbon and Hardy Heron). Thankfully, I was planning to install Linux Mint Elyssa on my home machine, anyway, which is based on Hardy Heron.

So, I went ahead and installed Linux Mint Elyssa (a post about that will be forthcoming) and then installed Boxee.

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