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As promised, here is Part 2 of my article on adding domBulletin to your Intranet. Enjoy!

Over the last year I’ve become a really big fan of subscription music services. Basically, you pay a monthly fee to have access to millions of songs. You can stream or download the songs, and they can be transferred to compatible devices. The downside is once you stop paying, you can no longer access your music.

Now I use Yahoo Music Unlimited. I download tracks and can transfer them to my Creative Zen Vision. The songs can play on one of three authorized computers (using Yahoo Music Jukebox) and I can also stream the songs to my XBox 360. So I can listen to them on my stereo (through the xbox), on the go (with my Zen Vision), or on one of three different computers. The other nice thing about the computers is that if I bookmark or download a track on one machine, it bookmarks or downloads to all three machines. So that means all three machines keep in sync automatically which is very nice.

I’m really not a fan of DRM, but this subscription model is working very nicely for me. Last Wednesday I downloaded 15 albums. At least 10 of them were recent releases that I was interested in. In the past I would have to limit what I could buy, now it’s all I can eat.

Now, the reason this is really good in my opinion right now, is that if you subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited and pay the yearly fee up front with a Mastercard, they will give you the second year free. So, for $119.88, that is $4.99 a month for all that access! And if you don’t need to transfer to a portable device, you could get it for $59.88 (or $2.50 a month.) The promotion with Mastercard goes through October 4th, so to get this great price, sign up before then.

Part 1 of my latest article for Intranet Journal is up now! It details adding the open-source web discussion template, domBulletin to your intranet. I’ll finish up with Part 2 on Wednesday!

Since I’m an admin, I don’t dabble in development that often. But when I do, it’s normally making an app that needs to look good on the web. I’ve done it for a long time and I used to use certain conventions.

One of those was determining height and width on text fields to present them to the web. It was always fairly easy. I learned to enter the information in the field’s style field on the properties tab. So for example, if I wanted a text field to present itself as 700 pixels wide by 120 pixels tall, I would put the following in the style field.

width=700; height=120

It worked great, my field would look perfect…in Internet Explorer. As I’m now a Firefox user, it’s important to me that my presentation is the same in both browsers. Firefox ignored my entries though, so I had to figure out the RIGHT way to enter that info.

Well, it was so simple that I feel like a real “dummy.” In order to help some of you new developers avoid the dummy tag, I’m here to show you how to easily get it to work as well in Firefox. And trust me, it is easy. A colon instead of an equal sign.

width:700; height:120

Yup, that. is. it. Now I know that pretty much every developer worth their weight KNEW this, but hey, I’m an admin.

Now, I can hear the Mac faithful saying “WHAT ABOUT SAFARI?” Well guess what, the above technique doesn’t work. Safari looks for a “textarea” which is not what Notes serves up by default when it does a text field on the web. But, there is another workaround that’s kind of kludgy, but will work.

All you do is make the text field a multi-value field. Not elegant, I know. But once you make it a multi-value field it makes it a “textarea” on the web, and then the height and width attributes take hold. So, doing it that way allowed my form to look the same in IE, Firefox and Safari.

I also know that you can do this with real style sheets too, and that’s probably preferrable, but for those times you need to make a quick change, this will do it. Any real developers want to post a a preferred method of doing this on their own SnTT posts?

Congrats to Lukas Rossi, the new lead singer of Supernova! Man, did I call it or what 🙂

So when it comes to RockStar, I’m two for two on picking the winner. Contrast that to American Idol where I have picked the second place contestant EVERY SINGLE SEASON. Eeek… Anyway, I really look forward to the Supernova stuff. Should kick some major ass. Lukas was the right choice. Just look at him up there, he FITS!

Well Apple’s announcement’s yesterday were okay, but the one thing I’m really disappointed in is the iTV. All this is, is a set top box that can stream all of your iProducts to your TV. So it’ll have a nice media interface (natch) and can play your iTunes music as well as the TV shows and now Movies. That’s great and all, but it’s not innovative in the least. There are boxes that have been doing that type of media thing for years, those just can’t do the DRM tracks (because Apple won’t license the technology to anyone else.)

So I guess if you are one of the sheeple that blindly follow Apple, you’ll gobble this up like everything else. Now don’t get me wrong, I really love most Apple products (and desperately want a MacBook Pro) but all this product does is what your computer already does. It’s just a little box that allows you to do it from your TV. That’s a good thing, but it’s not worth $299, $199 maybe. For $299 I can buy an XBox 360 and get a DVD player and a game machine in addition to those other features.

On the Movies side of things, downloading at “near DVD” quality isn’t good enough for me. And if I buy a movie, I should be able to burn it to a DVD since it’s MINE. But no, this can only play on one of five activated (Apple only) devices.

Once again, people are going to settle for less quality than we have now with more restrictions. Because it’s Apple, it’ll sell a ton and become the de facto standard. Well, I’m not jumping aboard that train. Hope you don’t either.

Now all this being said, Apple NEVER preannounces anything. So I think they did this to gauge the feedback from the community. I hope there’s a lot of feedback like mine out there so Apple will make some decent changes.

I couldn’t find an official posting anywhere other than comments over at Rock’s place, but it looks like the CLP Discount is definitely not going to happen. I’ve had several little birds telling me this for the past couple weeks, but I was kinda waiting for an official response that hasn’t really come.

So, I thought I would let you guys all know. There will be no CLP Discount.

I wanted to say thanks to both Ed and Rocky for their help in trying to get this going.

For those of you still trying to take advantage of some sort of discount, there is discussion over on LotusUserGroup.org about signing up as a LotusUserGroup.org member for the group discount rate. Head on over and throw your thoughts into the ring.

Saw The Illusionist this past weekend, and I just wanted to let you know that it’s really good. You get Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti together and you know it’s going to be some awesome acting. Jessica Biel did a really good job as well. It’s a period piece about a magician (Norton) his childhood love (Biel), and Chief of Police (Giamatti.) The prince that Biel is to marry is not the greatest of guys, and he wants Norton shut down as a magician. That is Giamatti’s job. Anyway, there were some good twists and turns and I happen to think Norton is one of the best actors of our generation. So, yeah, I’m a fanboy 🙂

Anyway, if you head to the theater and don’t know what to see, I highly recommend The Illusionist.

This week, we got a hot tub hand-me-down from my in-laws. We installed it on our deck on Saturday and Sunday and filled it up, waiting for Monday morning (a holiday here in the States) to try it out. So Sunday night I go to bed and wake up a half an hour later with a horrible sore throat and completely dry throat and mouth. I was really sick.

Turns out I had strep throat. So from bedtime Sunday night, until 5:30 on Tuesday I never got more than an hour of sleep without waking up with a knife in my closing throat. I had fevers well over 100, off and on violent shaking chills, couldn’t really eat anything non-liquid and felt like crap. I sat on the couch with no TV and no XBox 360 on at all. I had no want or need other than to stop the pain. I got into the doctors office at 3 PM on Tuesday and by 5 I had my antibiotics and painkillers and was at home. I ate what little soup I could manage to choke down, took my drugs and laid down. I woke up 8 hours later at 1 AM Wednesday morning. Still felt like crap, but the swelling had gone down some and the pain was dimmed a bit.

Well this whole situation really sucked, because on Wed. I was supposed to fly to Pittsburgh to catch opening night of the NFL on Thursday. My Miami Dolphins vs. the Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers. My buddies Declan and Terri had hooked me up. Well because I was sick, I really couldn’t go. I had already taken two personal days from being sick, and couldn’t afford to really miss more time…and besides, I still felt pretty crappy most of the day on Wed. and was probably still contagious at that point. No need to add that to an airplane.

So tonight was the game. The spectacle of opening night was amazing and I was incredibly bummed that I was not there. But, I really felt like the Dolphins had a chance to beat the Steelers, even if no one BUT Dolphin fans felt that way. And you know what, we COULD have, but a couple big plays and a couple huge mistakes cost us. Steelers 28 – Dolphins 17. Michael Lehan, you suck. Just thought you should know. I attribute his one stupid penalty to turning the tide. What the fuck are we doing with a Cleveland Brown cast off anyway… gah.

Anyway, I’ve also lost a bet to Mr. Lynch, and as soon as I get my hands on a Steelers jersey, I will be posting a pic of myself wearing said finery. The Steelers are a good team, and I’ll give them their props. But we could have, and should have, beaten them.

So to recap, 3 days of mind-numbing sickness ruining a holiday and causing me to take off 2 work days. The sickness causing me to NOT travel to Pittsburgh for opening night (5 rows from the field to be precise) I lose my non-refundable airfare, and the Dolphins lose. To top it all off…

I still haven’t been able to get in the damn hot tub.