Tom Mollerus' Weblog

I can't believe that Microsoft, which is laying off 5,000 members of its workforce this year, is still spending money during this poor economy on the development of their Songsmith software and on the production of this promotional video for it. The New York Times describes the video as "getting more attention than the software because it’s awful, in unintentional ways". Well, it may not be good software but at least it's laughably entertaining.

My wife was ready to swear that the video was a spoof until I told her otherwise: this is Genuine Microsoft.

I want to say thanks to Nitai of SixSigns for giving a great presentation to the Boston CFUG tonight on his company's digital asset management system, Razuna. Razuna is an amazing application that lets you store, browse, search, and even reformat images, videos, and other files.

Brian Rinaldi and I are planning the next few month's worth of meetings soon, so if you have any ideas make sure to get them to us. I'm also considering another Open Mic night, so if you have a personal project you'd like to show off to the community, this would be your chance.

Our next meeting is only a week away, so I'm sorry that I'm not giving you more notice.  Chalk it up to  my scramble to get back to business after a busy holiday season and a first-week-in-January business trip. ;)

We're going to be the hosts to a virtual guest from SixSigns, Nitai Aventaggiato, who will be presenting his company's CFML-based digital asset management system, Razuna.  Razuna not only helps you store, search, and retrieve your assets, but it stores meta-data and helps transform and transcode your assets to other formats on demand (think photos and videos delivered in whatever format you need).

Meeting date: 1/21/09 6:00 PM, Sun Life Financial

You can find out more information about our meeting at the following URL:
http://bostoncfug.org/index.cfm?event=showMeeting&meetingID=D01A22D8-D61B-FA8C-8922DD6FC690A7EA

Please RSVP at the following URL:
http://bostoncfug.org/index.cfm?event=showRSVPForm&meetingID=D01A22D8-D61B-FA8C-8922DD6FC690A7EA

While conversing with a colleague today about the unusually cold temperatures we're having today, he mentioned that it was too bad that the United States hadn't pulled the trigger on a conversion to metric measurements when the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 was passed in the legislature. I started to wonder just when someone, probably a president, would get around to pushing the country from the centuries-abandonded Imperial system into the modern age of metric measurement. I keep hoping Obama will be that president.

And wouldn't now be an excellent time to start the conversion? People associate Obama with change; he has excellent approval ratings; and perhaps the conversion could come in the form of a government stimulus to help the economy, where the government would help fund the purchase and renovation of product labelling, signage, packaging, and production machinery. I think all of the upgrades could provide a kick to the economy. Think about it: it's laughable, frankly, that the government has mandated a switch to digital television but is afraid of switching to metric. We're more intent on providing crystal-clear entertainment than we are in modernizing our businesses and helping our children's math skills.

I just checked off one of the requirements for one of my projects at work: protect from cross-site request forgeries, or CSRF. It was much easier to accomplish than I expected-- here are the details.