A Day in Paradise

It’s been a while since I have been in a blogging mood, but I want to discuss the bruhaha which “Anonymous” has made about the CoS and how they are using Digg as their HQ to get the word out.

Firstly, the Church of Scientology has been under fire for decades, a couple kids protesting outside the office does about as much good as a fart in a hurricane. Ffs, Scientology is banned in Germany that tells you something about the opposition that this group gets. This wannabe shit-storm that a couple of kids are starting will not do ANYTHING except piss of the rest of DIGG users.

Secondly, NOTHING that “Anonymous” has “dugg up” and placed on digg (pardon the pun) has been original. It has all been researched and published by people who really do have reasons to be angry at the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous, this is not your battle. If you want to be useful help the people who do have a reason to be angry and CoS and help promote their cause using them as the Spokespeople, not using them to promote your silly little group. Once you’ve lost interest and move on to other antics the real issues will still remain.

Digg, if you want to retain the attention of anyone who has a intelligence level higher than a bored 7-year-old, I would suggest you section this crap somewhere where we don’t have to be bothered with it.

So Gil Mayron is doing a bit of trash-talking in the article in the Sun Sentinal as well as Youtube.

So he spends “8 hours in his office”, I hadn’t touched the wii for weeks before I got into the “Finals” (which, lets be honest here Gil, involved beating 2 people and a 5-year-old), and haven’t played since. Wii tennis isn’t rocket science.

I know people who are substantially better than me, so for Gil’s sake I hope he beats me.

I was doing my daily godaddy run to reserve a domain name for a future project (which will probably never happen) when I realized that the godaddy front page had removed the godaddy girls and replaced them with godaddy dudes!

I may have to take my business elsewhere! Bring back Candice Michelle!!!!

Not sure if what I clicked through told me not to tell anyone about anything, but I just got my beta invite to Xcerion.

Xcerion is yet another OS-in-a-browser, although they prefer to call it “Cloud Computing” or “XML Internet OS”. I assume they say XML since that is probably the data transfer layer, as well as the file save format, regardless advertising an “XML OS” is totally 1997.

The interface only works in IE (Cross Browser compatibility is coming soon) and is pretty slow until everything loads up (see it’s just like a real OS). Once everything is going it seems to be pretty snappy.

I’m getting back to work

Oh yes, did I mention it was very pretty?

I am on hold with bellsouth, and the longer they keep me on hold the longer I am going to rant about them. The trouble started before I even got into work, I started getting reports of “flakey internet” so when I get in and do a quick diagnostic sweep and determine that it was our DSL connection was at fault (as opposed to the shitty DNS service that we get which I can get around) I call bellsouth tech support.

That was 4 hours ago.

The first half an hour was spent with them trying to figure out how to get into our account - even though I gave them our username and phone number. I was then put on hold for 5 minutes while they got someone from billing to take care of us. Billing pulled up my information right away (with the exact same information I gave to tech). They then put me back through to tech and I was on hold for another 20 minutes.

After ever 5 minutes or so, the billing person would pick up the line and apologize for the wait. Finally she said “I keep putting you through to a tech, but they just pick up the phone and don’t say anything and then hang up”. I told her to keep trying and 5 minutes later I was on with a tech.

This tech told me that for them to do anything I had to be directly connected to the DSL modem, not any routers. I asked for a direct number which I could call when I was directly connected and they said that they couldn’t give it to me, but I would have to go through the whole process again.

I hauled a computer to the router and plugged it all in… and then called again and spent another 10 minutes on hold before speaking to another tech. This time she asked me a bunch of (the same) questions before and then told me she had to put me through to a tech.

This is the good part - instead of putting me through to a tech, she put me through to her slightly confused hairdresser.

Once I disconnected with the salon, I had to call back into bellsouth and work my way back through to the tech. Once I finally got through to a tech, they said “we can’t run a line test because you’re having an ‘outage’ - if you still have trouble in 30 minutes call back”.

So apparently we have a couple clowns working on our DSL line, and the only site I can access is my blog… oh well, sucks being them!

At least we have our TVs up

I opened my google docs this morning (like I open it up every morning) and noticed that we now have the ability to create web based presentations from within google docs.

Not only did I find the interface fairly intuitive (after a 3 minute clicking session), but it comes with the functionality to actually present your presentation online, invite viewers etc.

There is currently no way to export as a powerpoint (although you can import) but it will give you a html version of the presentation for offline use.

Now I need to see what kind of API it gives for programmers. I can see this being LOTs of fun.

… of getting bought up by google?

If 100% of your revenue is through google adsense, and google is making 100% (or more) on your 100%, then wouldn’t your worth to google be cut by 50%?

This is disregarding my “community in a box” article.

Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.

I played with Joost way back in January when it was still called “The Venice Project” and beta testers had to sign NDAs (although that didn’t stop a lot of them). Back then while the technology was great, due to the number of users the quality was mediocre.

I got into Joost again at Stella’s request, when she met someone at the library who wanted an invitation.

I installed joost this evening on my 2.4ghz/1gig Vista Home Basic which is connected to my 32″ LG LCD TV and acts as our “Media Center” and not only is the quality great but the selection has grown to include some real shows (currently watching LEXX).

For those of you who haven’t heard about Joost, it is created by the same people who brought us Skype and works using a peer-to-peer model. Peer-to-pear media streaming is drastically different from the server-based media streaming which we are seeing from various news sites, as well as sites like youtube.com. Before YouTube’s acquisition by Google, they announced that they were spending $1 million on bandwidth alone.

Through using Peer-to-peer technology Joost allows the its software to communicate with other copies of Joost software and distribute the media between themselves. Using traditional file serving each additional user viewing a file creates a larger burden on the server, using P2P each additional user becomes another server in the “swam” and shares that file with other peers the initial seed server load is lightened.

I had an interesting discussion with Stella about how the technology behind Joost would handle streaming live content. Because of the P2P nature of Joost, it would be fairly difficult to distribute truly live content without reverting back to the original server based media serving. That is assuming that Joost is only sending data to my computer which I request and am watching.

If my Joost client can receive data that I am not watching, it would allow the main Joost servers to ensure that all the shows that they are streaming can be delivered in real-time and equal quality and if Joost wants to deliver live events this would probably be the only way that this would be possible.

Anyway… I am VERY happy with the progress that Joost has made, and am looking forward to see how it will move forward.

Oh yeah, and the DRM issue isn’t an issue.

This blog entry is an extension of an IRC discussion and email conversation that took place regarding the #phpc channel on Freenode.

Back in “the day” #phpc consisted of between 5 and 10 people, and as IRC channels go it was only us in there for about 2 years. This resulted in everyone getting to know each other well. As time passed the community grew organically, we had the regulars and then people who drifted in and out either asking PHP questions or just coming in to chat for a bit.

In April 2005 Davey set up the #php.thinktank channel, and the additional attention add more regulars to #phpc. By the end of 2006 #phpc participants hovered around 50.

The interaction between #php.thinktank and #phpc was good and many of the same people lurked in both groups. #php.thinktank was designed for more technical discussion, and several organized discussions took place on various technical topics. #phpc on the other hand was simply a place to hang out amongst friends.

Sometime in the beginning of 2007 the community size started to grow quickly, however the number of active participants remained roughly the same. Basically the lurkers were growing, the channel is currently about to break 100 users.

This situation brings up some special concerns.

1. is it reasonable to expect that a public IRC channel can afford you any privacy.
2. does a community that was built around “just farting around” have the right to be exclusive when they think that too many people are involved?
3. is there any reasonable way to limit the number of lurkers?

Note that when I say lurkers, I just mean people who park themselves in an IRC channel and don’t contribute to the channel. People who contribute and then go dormant for weeks/months are a different story.

I have had an active account at backpackit for the last 2 years, I used it for a lot of different collaborative writing I was doing until Google Docs started kicking ass google style and I decided to move to that.

Now that I have several hundred documents in google docs, I am wondering how I can get my old stuff off of backpackit, and preferably into google docs. Backpackit advertises an XML exports, but it only gets a handful of titles and none of the several hundred articles that I have up there.

I found this, a bit crude but I guess it will do the trick.

http://bayimg.com/jadhAAABp
http://harrypotter7spoilers.blogspot.com/

This is something that really bothers people in the business world when switching to Thunderbird from Outlook. In my opinion Thunderbird should make the dash-dash-space sigblock separator optional, or at least have a config option to turn it off.

The reason is that many people do not use a “signature” as a random block of information meant for the bottom of the page, but rather a real “signature”, something like.

Yours truly,

John Doe
CEO, ACME INC

This obviously looks very bad when it has — before it.

There are a couple plugins that allow you to drop arbitrary text into your document, but none that do this automatically when starting a new email message.

What you have to do is:

• Install TemplateLoader
• Follow the steps to create the template which includes your sigblock
• Choose that template as the default for your identity

And you are good to go. You will notice that there is a slight lag when starting a new email, but that is the price you pay

Some other links on the topic.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signatures_(Thunderbird)
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=535118#535118
http://mailformat.dan.info/trailers/sigblocks.html

Here’s a Forum Post about IRC

Long before the days of the web and instant messaging as we knew it, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat, was created in the late 80s but gained notoriety during the invasion of Kuwait and subsequent gulf war. Through IRC people who were lucky enough to have access to the then rare internet, were able to engage in real-time chat with others around the world. While the technology itself was not new or revolutionary the rapid growth quickly grew IRC into the standard for internet based chatting.

IRC works exactly like the many different independent “chat rooms” which you will find scattered amongst various websites. The difference is the fact that in IRC all the channels (chat rooms) are connected on servers, and servers are connected using specific networks. This way I can log into a server in my country and have access to all the channels on all the other servers on the network.

So what does this have to do with the podcast pickle chatroom? Well, the podcast pickle chatroom is simply a web based client which connects to the “Afternet” IRC network, so if you want to get connected and wield the full power of IRC, just follow the following steps.

1. Get an IRC client
Using IRC without a good IRC client is like surfing the web without a good web browser. Following is a list of good IRC clients for various platforms

Windows
xchat - http://www.silverex.info/news/
mIRC - http://mirc.com/

Linux/Unix
xchat – http://www.xchat.org
plenty of others

Mac
Colloquy - http://colloquy.info/

2. Join a Channel and Network
Before you connect to your network is to come up with a “nick” which you will be identified as. Choose something that is unique, by default IRC does not “reserve” nicks you want something that someone else isn’t interested in. You also want to think of an alternative nick which the system will use if the nick you want is not available.

I use “awormus” for my nick and “awormus_” for my alternative nick.

Once you have installed your client fire it up. You will be prompted to choose a server and enter your nicks and “real name”. Some IRC clients allow you to choose the default channel, use the following information to connect to the “phpc” IRC channel.

Server: irc.freenode.org
Channel: #phpc

I’m in, now what?
IRC has a whole sub-culture which has been built around it. There are commands, bots, moderated/invite-only channels, ops, kicks, k-lines and much, much more. Thankfully these days the modern graphical clients, provide an easy learning curve for beginners.