Category: Internet

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Use new media for action, not just voice

I’m taking a cue from Adam Curry, and you can bet that he’s not the first person to be saying this. It’s just something that I heard recently on his podcast, and the sentiment is echoed in an article posted on MacNewsWorld recently.

Kenton Ngo is a policy wonk. He dissects election data using mapping software and reads transportation bills. He hosts a video podcast on his blog, one that draws as many as 2,000 readers a week.

Ngo is recognized at political rallies and has joined conference calls with Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, but he has never voted in a primary or general election. He has never paid property taxes. He is not registered for Selective Service.

Ngo is 15 years old, has a driver’s permit and braces, and is a member of the West Springfield High School debate team in Northern Virginia. [macnewsworld]

Blogs and podcasts are the new way for disseminating your thoughts and opinions about politics. I am all for that. Speak you mind, shout for the truth, and encourage people to bind together in an effort to change things.

I’m kind of sick of it. The reason being, nothing has really changed. We write away on the web only to see not much for results. This kid in Virginia has a great thing going, but there has to be more.

The methods are there. We have all sorts of ways to send out messages to the masses, so why not use it to actually do something? Less talking, more action, so to say. Use these technologies to make a run for public office. This is what I would like to see.

I admit to being a hypocrite with my own post here, but the idea is something I’m a fan of. I’m also far from being a good candidate for the effort. However, I’m all about new media and helping out.

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How small the new iPod Shuffle really is

PC World recently posted a story about getting their new iPod Shuffle that started shipping this week. About half the fun of getting a new product from Apple is the unpacking of your new toy. Harry MacCracken added this video on YouTube to the article. I was pretty amazed at just how small this thing is.

My favorite part is how he tries to stuff it into an empty box of nerds. And that’s nerds the candy, not a box full of people much like myself.

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Hackers got into MG.org

MG.org This pisses me off to no end. Being a recent victim of a hacker myself, I can totally sympathize to as to what happened to Matthew Good. In fact, there’s a little bit of my help that I gave him that was a victim of an attacker to his site as well. Good needed some help getting PodPress to work on his site, so I was more than happy to help him out. None of that seems to matter a whole hell of a lot now.

I’m not sure what the complete story is, but the hack seemed to go deeper than just getting into WordPress and making a stupid post, like what happened to me. According to a post by his friend Sonny, another person who has helped him on numerous aspects of his site, files were compromised and are missing. I really liked the recent design to his site, but all of that is lost.

I’ve always been one to proceed with restraint, but right now, lynch mob is the phrase that immediately comes to mind.

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WordPress 2.0.5 released

Version 2.0.5 of WordPress was released over the weekend.

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes. We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby) Ronan.

What’s new? We have about 50 or so bugfixes, which you can review on our dev tracker here, mostly minor bug fixes around feeds, custom fields, and internationalization. If you’d like a nitty-gritty view, check out Mark’s blog post on the changes.  [wordpress]

Especially after the problem I had a little over a month ago, I’m paying attention to these things.  I suggest that all WP users do the same as well.

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Noticing some slight bugs in Firefox 2

Firefox 2.0 Screen ShotIt seems that every time I launch Firefox 2.0 on my Powerbook, it never likes to load Google like a good browser should(click on the image to the left to see a screen shot). It takes the logo and positions it almost in the center of my screen rather than the center of the window. Usually resizing the window will solve this and everything goes back to normal. I’m making a post about this and then sending the link as feedback for Mozilla.

There are other issues creeping up with the latest release, but they seem to not be overly critical. They are worth reading up on because users are concerned about security problems, but Mozilla is saying that there is nothing threatening about any of the problems that are showing up. I would expect an update soon, but it’s interesting to note that they are hard at work on version 3.0.

Something else to pass on is this link that I got from BoingBoing about a series of tweaks that you can implement on Firefox. Granted that these are for the more geeky individuals, but it’s really not that hard to do. If those tweaks aren’t enough for you, check out the MozillaZine Wiki for a all sorts of geeky and nerdy stuff that you can do with Firefox.

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Increase of traffic in the spam department

Has anyone noticed a massive increase of internet spam[wiki] in the last few days? In my email and the comments on my sites, the numbers have spiked quite a bit. Some of the stuff got through, but even those numbers have been trailing off over the past 24 hours. Think the filters and blockers are catching on to whatever it is that is going on. I’d really like to knock down these people’s doors and throw a few haymakers.

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one who noticed this. Akismet made this recent post on their blog regarding amounts of spam lately. This is a WordPress must of a plugin to run on your site, and they processed three million pieces of spam in one day last week.

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Firefox 2.0 released today

I haven’t had much time to really put Firefox 2 through the test, but it is installed and running on my Powerbook. The main reason that I really wanted to make this post is the inline spell checking that now comes in this version. This is the thing that I have been wanting for a long time and, I finally have it. Hallelujah!

Firefox 2 is the next generation release of the award-winning Firefox web browser from Mozilla.

These Release Notes cover what’s new, download and installation instructions, known issues and frequently asked questions for Firefox 2. Please read these notes and the bug filing instructions before reporting any bugs to Bugzilla.

Give us your feedback through this feedback form.

[mozilla]

After painless installation, I checked to see if the speed up tweaks that I posted about a while back held, and they were all there. I only have two extensions that didn’t want to play nice, but they seem to have been built into the new release. All the additional search engines that I have added are there as well.

For the most part, what I’ve been able to read about this release is that the internal overhaul has been more than the external. There is some noticeable changes, but it’s looks and feels the same for the most part. Then again, I’ve been using a skin that made it appear more like Safari, so that might have something to do with it. Oddly enough, that was one of the extensions that didn’t want to work with this version. The other one was a tabbed browsing extension.

Wow. I love this built-in inline spell checking. Oh how I have missed this.

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Skype 2.0 goes gold for the Mac

Video panel in the preferences of Skype 2.0Skype is the staple of The Crazy Canucks podcast. I got it downloaded and tinkered with it just a little bit(the image posted here is a quick screenshot of the video panel in the preferences, which has similarity to iChat). We’re actually looking to record another episode this evening, but I doubt this will really effect anything involving VoIP. The major addition to this version is video support being added for Mac users, making video chatting available between PC users of Skype.

Posted on their blog yesterday:

Skype for Mac 2.0 goes gold today, which means that we’ve tested it, you’ve tested it and we all agree that it does a pretty good job. Download it now and video call your friends, family, colleagues or anyone else you’d like to see face to face. Remember not only does it work with other Mac users but it also works with Windows users too. That means even more people for you to video call with.

We’ve improved the video quality and made changes so that video calling can now work on older systems allowing more of our Mac community can use it.

Thanks for all your feedback and help to improve the quality of video throughout the beta. A lot of you have sent in your stories on how you’re using Mac 2.0 to get face to face with far flung friends and relatives and we’re delighted we can help to bring you all closer together. Many of you also told us that you’re using video calls with business colleagues across the globe or to see your family back home when you’re away with work. If you have any more stories you’d like to share with us please email them to stories@skype.net. [skype]

The question will be about quality when you make your video calls across platform. The quality of your video card combined with the quality of your webcam will offer mixed results, more so when it comes to the world of PCs. Regardless, you’ll still be able to see grandma wave to you over the internet, no matter how blurry or pixelated she might look. You’ll just never know if she’s giving you the finger or not.

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The vowels of the internet

I’ve been going to the last few Metroblogging Vancouver meetups, and there are usually a lot of interesting conversations. Some of them, as you can probably imagine, stem into the realms of being slightly geeky.

For instance, the point was brought up that there has been a natural progression of using vowels as a prefix to a website domain, company, or product name. For the life of me, I’m not sure where the letter “A” fits into all of this, but “E” and “I” have been front and center for nearly two decades now. Email, iTunes, iPod, and so on. Keep going down the line and one starts to wonder about “O”, “U”, and (some times) “Y”. What’s the next, new, hot thing going to be? What way will these letters be used and abused?

Of course, how can you not talk about YouTube? Everyone is now that Google just picked it up for a pretty penny. Someone brought up the idea that it should have been “uTube” and not “YouTube”. This would have fit into that natural progression in the world of Web 2.0. I’m not sold on it, but the thought made for some good laughs.

However, utube.com does exist. Thing is, they don’t do anything with video.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Utube.com, a Web site owned by a supplier of used tubes and pipes, has been swamped with visitors confusing it with online video service YouTube Inc. and has been barely operational since Google Inc. said on Monday it would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion.

“I’m at a point now, all I want to do is to make the site work,” Ralph Girkins, owner of the site belonging to Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., told Reuters on Thursday.

“Today, it’s been up the longest it’s been up for a week — an hour and a half,” said Ohio-based Girkins.

utube.com is the sixth most popular U.S. manufacturing Web site, ahead of Whirlpool Corp., according to data provided by HitWise.

On Monday, Girkins told Reuters an intermediary who said he was acting on behalf of YouTube had offered $1 million to buy the Internet address, but he turned down the offer and was holding out for $2.5 million to $3 million.

A YouTube spokesman said it had not made an offer and had no plans to do so.

On Thursday, Girkins said he had received about 20 phone calls from people who offered to sell his site for him. He has not been in contact with Google or YouTube, he said. [reuters]

Now it could be that this guy was thinking way ahead when he registered this domain, but he's certainly sitting on a gold mine. I find it fascinating that there is nothing Web 2.0 to the site itself. It makes complete sense that people would think that when they hear people talking about YouTube, they would think "utube" when they sat down at a browser.

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There’s no smell or taste in Second Life

To be honest, I’ve never tried Second Life. I did think about it. Even got as far as downloading it for the Mac and installed it. For months it sat on my hard drive, and I finally deleted it.

Create an avatar, a new identity, and a whole other life in Second Life. It’s Sims meets MySpace meets social networking on steroids. That is to say, it’s yet another way for people to sit behind a terminal and communicate with each other from all over the world. Except in the real world, you just sit in front of your computer. In this virtual world, you walk around, teleport, go to parties, meet people, and whatever else some one dreams up. Yes, there is, of course, cybersex as well.

Ok, I don’t know everything that goes on in Second Life, but there is a lot out there to give me insight. When I first heard about it, I was curious and found the idea kinda cool. The fact that this really isn’t a game is where I started to rethink it. Podshow has its own island, Duran Duran is doing something in there, and now Sun Microsystems has joined in the party.

Sun Microsystems knows all four million Java developers worldwide can’t attend its popular JavaOne trade show, but it thinks it might have found the next best thing.

Tuesday, Sun became the first Fortune 500 company to hold an ‘in-world’ press conference to show off its new pavilion in Second Life, the popular 3D online world. Sun said it plans to invest in the Sun Pavilion as a place for developers to try out code, share ideas and receive training.

“Our problem is that every year our largest developer conference (JavaOne) attracts about 22,000 people and we get to meet with them face-to-face for a week,” said Sun’s chief researcher John Gage during the virtual event. He said Sun hopes to reach millions of Java developers in Second Life with training and other support features. [internetnews]

I’ve never been one to be overly concerned if I am missing the boat with all the cool kids, and this is no exception. Sun has done something a little more remarkable with this, but if you really want to get all that you can out of Second Life, then you have to give them your credit card. I guess I’m just the type of person who prefers going out into the real world rather than virtually walking out my front door.