American Airlines now offering WiFi on flights

American is now offering WiFi on its 767-200's which fly domestic transcons. Specifically, the article mentions NYC-SFO/MIA/LAX. This is the same service Delta will be using, so it'll be a good barometer.

VMWare Date Bomb

This isn't really my usual fare, but I suppose it won't hurt to help get the word out. VMWare has a nasty bug in ESX 3.5 Update 2 that causes any power on, resume from suspend, or VMotion attempt to fail with the following error:

This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine's date and time are set correctly.
There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4.
--------------
Module License Power on failed.

VMWare has a KB article that it is updating with the latest info, and is promising updates by noon PST tomorrow (8/13). In the mean time, there are some suggested workarounds in the VMWare Communities.

This will totally nail you if you do maintenance on a VM. So if you have ESX in your business, this is very much worth noting.

Delta to offer WiFi on domestic flights

Big news for Atlanta travellers: Delta will soon offer WiFi Internet service on its entire domestic fleet. And sooner than you might expect!

Utilizing the GoGo service from Aircell, they'll offer WiFi beginning this fall on MD-88's and MD-90's (great choice, since the MD-88's currently offer ZERO entertainment), expanding to include the rest of the mainline domestic fleet by the end of 2009. The cost will be reasonable: $9.95 for flights less than three hours, $12.95 for more than three hours.

I'm pretty excited. I totally see myself using this on flights of 2 hours (wheels up to wheels down) or more. How cool will it be to track my own flight at FlightAware? Or listen to my ATC traffic at LiveATC.net? Or post photos of my flight on Flickr while I'm still on it? If there's a downside to this, it's that companies may begin to expect that employees be available and responding to email/IM/etc. during business travel...

Is cuil cool?

Word spread today about cuil, a new search engine founded by ex-Googlers that is supposed to be bigger, better, and badder than Google. Frankly, I'm not impressed.

First, it's slow as molasses. Now, I know it's day one, and everyone's trying it out, but it doesn't even come close to Google on response time.

Second, there's just not enough information on the first page of results. When I search, I want a clear, concise list of results with no more content than necessary to determine if the hit is relevant. Not only does cuil provide too much content in the results, but it's not often relevant.

Third, Google is a one-stop shop. I get web, news, images, video, etc.

Let's take an example. My search term is "Cobb County Police Scanner".

Result time:

• Google: Blink of an eye. To short to notice.
• cuil: 2.5sec for the page to finish rendering

First page of results:

• Google: 10 results, with all ten relating to either a Cobb County Police Scanner, or the Cobb County Police.
• cuil: 11 results. None were relevant. The first hit looked relevant, but was a keyword harvester and redirected me to an adult site (gives new meaning to Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky"). The rest of the hits were a mix of offline servers, keyword harvesters, and porn sites. cuil was totally useless.
  

Versatility:

• Google: After my web search, I clicked on over to images. About half of the first 21 hits had to do with Cobb County Police, and the first two hits were very relevant pictures of the Cobb 911 call center.
• cuil: No image search
• Google: Next, I headed over to news. The first hit was a dud, but about 3/4 of the remaining hits were relevant, and one even had to do with the City of Marietta's recent radio purchase - very relevant.
• cuil: Crickets
• Google: Shopping was a bust - no hits - but there were a bunch of ads on the far right that would have gotten what I wanted if I were in the market for a police scanner.
• cuil: Nada.

Bottom line? I'll stick with Google. And if Google is down, I'll go to Yahoo. And if Yahoo is down, I'll go to MS Live and if that's down, well, I'll find something else that's not so "cuil".