Adriaan and I have decided to part ways. We started this great partnership nearly 4 years ago under very different circumstances than what we find ourselves in today. Since joining ThoughtWorks last August, my level of commitment as a developer has risen a lot. The weekly travels, working with open source project, involvement in recruitment within TW, etc. mean that I have not been able to devote the time to ecto that it deserves.

While it is sad to see the relationship end, I gained a great friendship and his daughter photos always brighten up my day!

Name
The project will continue under the “Ecto for Windows” name until a new one is found. The hope is to have a new name by the end of next week. If any one out there has suggestions, feel free to let me know! Once it is decided, a new version of the application will be released with updated name, links, etc.

Sales & Support
As of right now, Ecto for Windows is no longer on sale. I have not decided on the course for the project yet. One of the benefit the partnership with Adriaan had brought was the sale infrastructure that he had in place. With that gone, I am re-evaluating whether keeping ecto as a commercial product is a viable option.

Even though I have less time for the project, this by no mean I am less committed to support ecto as it stands now. Ecto 2.x will be fully supported by me, just like it has been for the last 4 years. The new support forum is located here: http://mineblogging.com/support/ The existing messages from old forum will be migrated to the new forum some time next week.

Future development
The development of the next version of ecto (e.g. version 3) remains to be decided. I have re-written almost all of the backend code but significant amount of work remains. One option would to open source the project for version 3 so hopefully more people can contribute to the development effort, instead of just little old me. (Open sourcing version 2.x is not possible currently as it contains a commercial component unless a replacement is found) Another option would be to find another developer to take over the project. But finding this some one may be difficult.

If you are the few people who follow this blog, you will noticed that lately I’ve been doing most of my blogging on Vox and cross-post them here on TypePad. The social networking and QotD aspects of Vox have rekindled my interest in blogging in recent weeks. The Flickr and Amazon integration also make linking to media much easier than on TypePad.

There is no definitely plan for me to abandon TypePad in the foreseeable future (Leah’s blog will still be on TypePad and Vox at the same time. Somehow she likes double posting. Not to mention all the old posts that I have here on TypePad) but I think eventually I would just blog from Vox and redirect the mineblogging.com domain to my Vox blog.

Technorati Tags: TypePad, Vox

So what have we learnt from spending three days in Colorado? Well, first it is bloody hot there! At least it is dry heat and not humid like here in Manhattan, and I got a decent tan from playing a round of golf on Saturday under the blazing sun. Thank you, factor 10 sun tan lotion…

On Saturday after golf, Leah and I had dinner in the Chautauqua park with another couple. Food was great and eating outdoor underneath the mountain was quite novel. We even saw couple of deers. When desert time came, we declined the offer and instead drove to Boulder downtown. After having a strode around Pearl St. Mall, we got ice cream from the Haagen-Dazs shop and consumed them (I had the Belgium Chocolate Shake) outside while people watching. With both of our friends, TJ and Jeronimo, moving out of Manhattan to Portland, Oregon, Leah and I were giving Boulder/Denver a once-over, completely hypothetical of course! The mall area is definitely quite cool, trendy, and full of youthful enery, but the rest of Boulder seems to be just another ‘generica’ with the same old grid road system and pre-fabricated houses and lawns. Our suspicion was confirmed when we drove to Boulder again on Sunday after the wedding. Seeing Boulder in the daytime also show us that it is not racially diversify. In fact, I was the one of the very few non-white people on the street and that’s pretty worrying. I dare think what racial stereotypes all those nice middle class white kids have stored in their heads. This extends to the less diversify culture. Everything is middle America, catering for white middle class family. May be we visited the wrong place but it is nothing like in New York City where every walk of life surrounds us.

Boulder was not the only place we visited, of course. After the wedding on Sunday afternoon we drove to downtown Denver, hoping to spend some time there to get a feel of the city. But when we got there, we realized everything was closed since it was Sunday and there won’t be much for us to see. So we spent about 30 minutes driving around the city, admiring the sights from the comfort of the air-conditioned interior of our rental car. The Art Museum is particularly interesting architecturally from the outside, but alas Boulder was more interesting so we drove all the way back there and stopped for a coffee and browsed the bookstore. I bought the An Convenient Truth which I devoured on the flight back.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the Rockies near Boulder, the rest of Colorado that we saw are vast expanse of bland and featureless land. Because of the heat and dryness, all the vegetations are the same colour of light green/brown. And I think that sums up our experience in Colorado thus far (though we realized that it is not wholly representative but nonetheless a hint of typical Colorado life), which is the blandness of the area. The blandness of population, the blandness of culture, the blandness of the environment, so on and so on. This just reinforces in our mind how interesting New York City really is and why we would probably never find another place quite like it.

Don’t get me wrong though, Colorado is great for visits and I will definitely visit again if only just for some great golf for reasonable price. But I won’t uproot ourselves from Manhattan and move there for good, that’s for sure.

Technorati Tags: Colorado, Diversity, NYC

Microsoft has been selected to be the official ECU supplier for next season. This give BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) a whole new meaning…

Technorati Tags: Formula 1, Microsoft

Leah and I watched the An Inconvenient Truth this afternoon. It was both nothing new and revelation to me. Nothing new because all the facts Al Gore presents in the movie, I’ve previously read in New Scientist over the course of perhaps a decade. Revelation because having Al Gore summarised all the facts and evidences in a coherent argument brings a much greater impact than each individual items.

Definitely a must see movie of this decade, along side Syriana, and Fahrenheit 9/11.

As for how carbon neutral we are, using the Carbon Calculator, Leah and I are both emitting less than the national average (9900 for me, 13000 for Leah, US national average is 15000 pound/year). This is still much higher than I thought we are emitting, taking into account of us not owning a car and having a very small electricity bills. The majority of our emission is from the trans-Atlantic flights that we take to UK every year. I guess we just have to cut down our European visit in the name of saving the planet!

Technorati Tags: Climate Crisis, Education

NASA Chief: Risk Inherent in Shuttle Flight.

Right on! For Michael Griffin.

DUH! To the people who think space flight is routine and safe, and need to be reminded that these brave astronauts know and accept the risk for the betterment of humankind.

Technorati Tags: NASA, Space Shuttle

Wow, the favourites are out before the tour is even started.

Technorati Tags: Cycling, Tour de France

I am the first one to admit it, I am an information junkie. I read everything in front of me, even if it has no relevant to my work, my hobbies, etc. The problem is that there are only so many hours in a day for reading, after taking time to sleep, eat, commute, and work.

I frequent two cell phone forums (HowardForums and My-Symbian.com), one home theater forum (AVS Forum), two news sites (CNN and BBC), and numerious other sites that have no RSS feeds to read. At last count I have 100+ feeds in endo, I am subscribed to three *active* mailing list (6A ProNet, XP Programming, Agile Testing), and regular emails.

And that is just electronics infomation. For paper-based information, I have two weekly magazines (New Scientist and Autosport), one monthly (Home Theater Magazine), and at least one book to read.

Some people (Ok, most) will consider this information overloading. For me, I don’t think I have enough! Given more hours in a day, I’ll gladly read more in-depth news stories, analysis, commentaries, financial information, sports, etc. The list goes on. The more I read the less I feel I know enough. So I get very frustrated when talking to friends who have to inclination to discover what is happening around them, let alone sit down and read. How can they hold an even semi-intelligent conversation, or make informed decision about the environment, personal finance, or the direction the country should take?

Am I the minority who feel this way about the general population?

First it was the NBA Finals between the Heats and the Mavericks earlier in the week. Then there was the Canadian F1 Grand Prix this weekend. And of course the World Cup matches have been on this last week and continue to the next. It’s heaven!

Both the NBA and the World Cup are on HDTV with the NBA having much better sounds. Come on FOM, bring HDTV to F1! I want to be able to see every bit of decals on the car, every bit of debries on the track. What are you waiting for?

Technorati Tags: Formula 1, HDTV, NBA, World Cup, TV

One of the great thing about my new E61 is that the built-in music player supports AAC files. So I can play all of my tracks encoded in iTunes. But the one thing the music player can’t do is to read the tags information in the m4a files. It only reads ID3 tags. After some googling, I’ve found this Windows app called mp3tags that copies the tags info in the m4a files into the ID3 tag fields, thus allowing the music player to read and displays them on the screen. But I can’t find any equivalent on the Mac. That sucks! May be it is time for me to dive into XCode and write a tag converter myself!

Technorati Tags: E61, Nokia, iTunes, Smartphone