Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning - Something For All Of Us…
It sounds like Broken Social Scene. I think that’s all that needs to be said.

Spiritualized - Songs in A & E
Trade in the blue microdot for Valium. This a laid-back album about telling the Grim Reaper to shove his scythe up his ass sideways, accompanied by the sounds of a Baptist church revival somewhere in Louisiana in the background.

The Notwist - The Devil, You + Me
This is a great album to listen to while coding, thinking, or thinking about coding.

Cuil.com (the Gaelic spelling of the word “cool”) is a new search engine created by former Google employees and claims to index 120 billion Web pages. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that once people leave the Googleplex, they suddenly become incapable of creating useful new products (handy-dandy FriendFeed comes to mind). Cuil looks really nice and has some useful features that I’ve only previously seen in specialty search engines like Krugle (think tabs). But if Cuil’s primary feature is to be its search functionality, then I wonder if some tweaking is required.

Lots of new search engines have been trying to steal the crown from Google, many of them even promising “deep Web” results. I test these new engines with a simple narcissistic query…on my name Let’s see some queries from Cuil and “the big 3 search engines”:

• Cuil: http://www.cuil.com/search?q=”chris+bellini”
• Google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=”chris+bellini”
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=”chris+bellini”
• Microsoft Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=”chris+bellini”

Looking at each engines’ first page of results, Cuil’s are not at all close to what Google returns. Actually, Google and Yahoo are the only engines that return this very site of mine - you know, the one with the most content about me with my name all over it - as the top result. Cuil, along with Microsoft and Yahoo! seem to verge upon meta search, placing emphasis on my profile pages from social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Digg. So while Cuil claims to index 120,000,000,000 pages, Google seems grab everything from my decade-old Usenet posts to my friends’ websites.

That’s not to say there isn’t anything about Cuil that I like - nothing wrong with these snazzy features. So while it’s still early in the game and Cuil is in its infancy, I think its best feature right now is the fact that it’s yet another reason for Google to continue to improve its search product.

The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
I’ve never been disappointed by the Hold Steady’s previous albums and the trend continues. Stay Positive is chock full of the sordid tales from Craig Finn that we’ve come to know and love.

No Age - Nouns
If Jack White was weened on Sonic Youth instead of the blues, the White Stripes would be No Age.

The Verve - A Storm in Heaven
In anticipation of their new album, titled Forth, coming out next month, I’ve gone back to the Verve’s beginnings.

It turns out that Bell and Telus customers will be charged for all incoming text messages beginning next month. For a country that’s supposed to be so technologically progressive, this idea is completely ass-backwards.

The CBC article mentions the following example:

“A 14-year-old kid gets 30 Happy Birthday messages and gets saddled with the bill, for example.”

Let’s not forgot all of the promotional/informational text messages that the telcos send their customers. If customers will be forced to pay for incoming text messages, opting out of the telco’s marketing campaigns better be the default option. And imagine if the telcos actually used their infrastructures for something important, perhaps to mass broadcast amber alerts. Who would sleep comfortably at night knowing they’d charge for that? Not that it’s an issue now since most text messages are of the “omg u rawk” or “k” varieties, but still…

So if you are a mobile customer of Bell or Telus, what are your options? You could switch to another service from Rogers, Fido, or Virgin. Koodo’s out because they’re owned by Telus. Of course, these guys could just as easily implement a cost on incoming text messages. When in doubt, try an Internet petition. Whether it’ll help or not is up in the air, but at least the NPD are trying to nix the plan to charge Canadians for incoming text messages. So sign the petition and then spread the word.

Canada is a fairly laid-back country when it comes to almost everything, but if there’s anything that can be determined by the existence of RuinediPhone.com, it’s this: don’t fuck with our mobile data plans! MacLeans‘ latest issue contains a lengthy article comparing Canadians and Americans (aside: compare us to a different country like Denmark or Australia for a change please and thanks…sigh). It turns out that when compared to our US neighbours, we have greater wealth, carry less debt, are healthier, live longer, have more/better sex, enjoy better beer, blah blah blah. We’re still getting screwed on the cost of things other than greeting cards and books. Car and electronics companies have finally begun adjusting their pricing for the strengthening Loonie. Even Apple themselves, who I lambasted last year, have finally come around: base config on a MacBook Pro now only results in $100 difference between the US and Canadian online store - yay!

O2 in the UK and AT&T in the US both offer unlimited data plans. In fact, O2 offers nice ‘n’ short 18-month contracts and will even throw in the iPhone for free if you sign up for either the £45/month or £75/month plans. Rogers, on the other hand, give you fewer daytime minutes and the most data you can transfer in any given month is 2GB with their $115/month plan - no unlimited plans to be found. Go over your monthly data limit and you’re slapped with $0.50/MB for the first 60 MB, $.03/MB thereafter.

Time will tell if Apple will put the pressure on Rogers before the iPhone launches ten days from now.

This is for any ASP.NET coders out there Google-ing “There was an error processing the request”. I recently came across this issue, so I wanted to share what I’ve found to resolve it. You’ve probably written an awesome web service with public methods that do awesome things and are so meticulously coded so as to adhere to all the hip programming concepts and best practices. I’d bet that you’re doing the right thing in your web service’s public methods by capturing code that’s prone to throwing exceptions like this:

Perhaps you’re calling this web service method via AJAX on your presentation layer pages and expecting this to come back in get_message():

And it does in your development environment. Then you deploy this to production and your lovely and friendly “Something happened…no worries” message turns into the user-unfriendly “There was an error processing the request” message. What gives?

There’s a good chance that you’re using custom error pages in your project. Your Web.config might have something like this in it:

<customerrors mode="On">
      <error statusCode="403" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=403" />
      <error statusCode="500" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=500" />
      <error statusCode="501" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=501" />
      <error statusCode="502" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=502" />
</customerrors>

If you do, you’ve successfully determined that users should see friendly error pages rather than cryptic ones that only programmers would understand. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t figured this out yet and instead of allowing the user-friendly message in your exception to propagate back, they replace it with “There was an error processing the request”. There is a solution. You could set the customErrors mode to “Off”, but that would defeat the purpose. Instead, ensure that your web service ASMX files are in a folder of their own. Then, inside of that folder, create a basic Web.config that looks like this:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>

<configuration>
    <appsettings />
    <connectionstrings />
    <system .web>
      <customerrors mode="Off" />
    </system>
</configuration>

That’s all it takes to correct this oversight on Microsoft’s part.