Thursday, January 26, 2006

Franchising legislation being debated in Congress

The Federal Communications Commission is seeking comment on this issue. Click Here. I am not sure what comments they want apart from it is a bad idea that was paid for by companies and not citizens. If only they would conduct some independant research rather than rely on what the lobby groups provide :(

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Cash is king - not miles

I have to disagree with a recent WSJ article "When It Still Makes Sense
To Take the Miles
". I agree that their might be some point when it makes sense to use miles over cash back, but not based on the numbers they present.
I am not sure their "discounted" trans-atlantic flight is that discounted. The table gives an example of $900 as a discounted fare. I have personally never paid that much and am pretty picky when I fly. I like the morning flight out of Boston on BA so that I avoid the night flights that give you 3 hours sleep (maybe) and get you there at 5am in the morning.
Also, the example for a business class ticket from AA, at $6700 does not factor in two real points.
1. AA does not really have a proper business class (no bed), and
2. It is not too hard these days to get a decent discounted business class or economy plus flight.
In fact, recently, BA had a $199 each way economy plus ticket available. That is a discounted seat that is 7" longer.
The other missing point with points tickets is that you still have to pay for taxes and fees. Once you factor this into the table, I think you will find cash is king and I will stick to my Blue Cash card from AMEX.
Sorry WSJ, but I suspect you have written about this without asking the real question you need to ask and that is for the amount you pay (not the price advertised).

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Inline HTML editors

Just found a neat HTML editor that I will try out at the concordtv web site. Seems really neat: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
It was mention in the comparison chart at: http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors

Sunday, January 01, 2006

Concord TV Grand Opening is on Thursday

The renovations have been completed and the TV Station is about to be opened.

The Grand Opening: Reception & Open House
Thursday, January 5, 2006
5:00-7:00 PM
ALL WELCOME!

The Open House is followed by the Annual Meeting of the Corporation.

http://www.concordtv.org (or 978-369-5038)

Helped create tomcat Realm for QuickPlace

Tomcat authenticates with Realms. These are nothing more than a class that will return a Principal object that contains a username, password and list of roles.
For QuickPlace there are no roles as such but there is ACL level. So, I mapped the role to the ACL entry (manager, author, reader). This will allow admins to extend QuickPlace into the J2EE world without needing to creating yet another directory.
To me, one of the really nice parts of QuickPlace is the user management. Adding, removing, editing users is really well thought out and it would be silly to have to re-work that with some complicated LDAP setup when you can use the domino backed classes to hook into the QuickPlace contacts1.nsf.
It is now up and published under GPL and hope it helps people extend QuickPlace functionality with Tomcat.
QuickPlace Realm for Tomcat