hot weather + Airco = No show :(
Jun 13Hot hotter .. Haaaatchoo !
Just great ! One day of hot and steamy weather and guess what ? I have a cold. A cold ? yep ! My voice sounds like Barry White the morning after his bachelor party. My throat feels like the inside of a death star trash compactor in full swing and my eyes feel like they can just about destroy a small passenger plane when they will pop out.
Yep , A combination of warm weather, happily switching between cold air conditioned rooms and hot sweaty NON air conditioned rooms and having an air conditioner in the car and not knowing how to deal with it … has left me in this petty full state. Just proves that too much integration of technology in your life (and poor climate control in using it) can be a bad thing. So unless you want a one hour podcast of the headless-hoarse man ( haha , get it ? Hoarse-man..) i am going to have to pass on doing a show this week. But no worries mate (as Dave sais)
There will be plenty to talk about on the next show as I'm momentarily preparing 2 more shows full off yummy good content. Meanwhile if I look at the over cluttered living room table ( Bless you for putting up with me Nyana) and the Satanic Six are staring back at me. Nono, I haven't gotten a devils spawn on the day of the beast. These are just 6 final essays that I have to rate and grade by next week Thursday. (i'm in the Jury). So I've been digging down in them pretty hard (lotsa pictures makes for fast reading) and understand why in MY college days jury’s where begging students to keep papers as light as possible .. And despise students who want to impress jury's with endless 'paper-filling'. ( Page size screenshots of error messages, useless banter etc).
Techroundtable and more.
On a Final note (and preview on the next show) I'm fighting with a Ubuntu 6.06 install and must say : "Aaaiii – Candeyyyy " (go suck on that). Surprise surprise it does need LESS mega’s of ram then the Vista beta two (hogging up to a gig for starters) but still looks pretty slick and pretty fine. After install Ubuntu looks like a beautiful Nigerian-exchange student girlfriend popped up on the edge of your bed. Indeed indeed : Dapper drake looks mighty fine.
BUT ! I have good news. Be sure to check out the techroundtable webcast next saturday on the "techpodcast network ' where you might just hear a very familiar voice.
Ok , its gulp-down coffee, dash off to work crunch time again… Darn.. its too darn hot.
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Yow Charlie ! Its your birthday.
Jun 10Happy Birthday Nyana !
On the edge of real and cyberspace, time is sometimes an issue. If we want it or not .. we all grow a day older every time the earth does its little pirouette. And everytime we make a homerun around the sun , another year goes by.
So too for our lovely Nyana , who is having her 29th birthday tomorrow. So if you wanna give her a shoutout , suck up to her .. or express your deepest condolences because she has to live with me 24 hours a day.. Let yoursellf go.
Shoot her an email via the 'CONTACT US form ' or call out a voicemessage trough the 'send a voicemail' link on the side. Meanwhile .. I just wanna say from all of us here : Happy Birthday Nyana.
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No propper MSN clone for the cross-platform community.
Jun 10A lot of Chitchat.
As a slider ( somebody who moves swiftly between operating systems like Windows, Mac and Linux ) I am often confronted with the question : What tool do I use for what ? There are of course plenty of ‘switcher tips” out there to help people out who decide to jump from one OS to the other. These ‘switch-lists’ are composed of tables representing a certain application in one operating system , and its counterpart on the other side of the fence. For example : Microsoft Office on Windows has Open-office as its counterpart in Linux (and also in Mac OS). Some applications are called cross-platform , these are of course the ideal ones. An exactly identical version exists in all operating systems. For example : Firefox , or Thunderbird. All versions look and feel exactly the same no matter what OS you are on.
But sometimes you have to look for stuff that “looks” or “behaves just like” the original version in one operating system. Classic example here is the Switchers nightmare MSN Messenger. Unfortunately insanely popular among Windows Users here in Europe. But : Microsoft clings to this little peace of software like there is no tomorrow. Deliberately setting back the versions that are brought out on other operating systems (like for example on Mac OSx) and not disclosing any code to the open source community so their IM clients would be able to interact with MSN Messenger. The result is the entire thing has to be reverse engineered to make it work.
What about MSN ?
A question often asked is : What do I use instead of MSN on other systems. Now there are some viable alternatives out there, but the one most commonly found on both Mac and Linux systems is AMSN . This noble attempt at Msn messenger ‘approximation’ has been running strong for quite some years now. Their main concern was to be able to crack the hard nut of enabling cross platform msn audio and video-chat. A noble cause since Microsoft does shield that box of tricks very well to the outside world. Now the AMSN people said they cracked it. They had gotten in working. Onto the labs dear friends ! My first test ( video chat between my powerbook and my girlfriends Ibook) worked just fine .. behind the firewall. But once I tried to talk or send files to the outside world ? No go.. Amsn does not deal with NAT translation very well. ( Well , it can’t cope with it at all). Making matters worse : Amsn runs on the Mac like a rhinoceros on a valiumtrip. Slow and jerky to respond and not at all reliable. So i’m back to my ‘non video chat’ enabled alternative ADIUM. A great, highly customizable, well supported alternative. The downside ? No video-chat (file transfer works excellent) AND only available on Mac. As for a Linux alternative to MSN i’ve stuck with GAIM for being the better product.
A loss.
Too bad actually , I mean , these guys over at msn have a quite good cross platform product and are able to crack a fantastic nut in getting video-chat to work .. But then they get stuck on this simple thing like Nat transgression. Perhaps its time for all these ‘alternative messenger clients” to start working together and produce one kick-ass open source Messenger alternative and overcome one of the final pitfalls for users switching to a non Microsoft OS.
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Google Sync: your bookmarks everywhere.
Jun 09Google Sync : Your house is my house.
Just got up and running this morning and only 5 seconds into my morning surf-wave when already found my little snippet of news that kind of makes my day. Google has just released a firefox extension called 'browsersync' that lets you synchronies your bookmarks between several different browsers (at work, at home etc). This is not such big news , cause services like this existed before ( you had the bookmarks in your google toolbar , you had del.icio.us ).. Plenty of places to store your bookmarks… but not very convenient. What if you already HAD an extensive list of bookmarks, you had to order them , categorize them and so on. Not a very easy thing to do. And I don’t really like third party places where you have to manage your bookmarks. All in the comfort of my own home please. Now Google has come up with a cool FIREFOX extension that lets you sync UP your websites tot the Google servers, and Sync them down again as you logon to a different computer. Meanwhile the bookmarks are stored localy on both computers… And a copy is stored on the Google servers.
Whats your flavor .. tell me whats your flavor.
What a great marketing trick. Google now exactly knows what your ‘favorites’ are and can use this to send you targeted adds and searches. Their motto is “ Do no Evil” and so far , Google has been a pretty good boy .. But what if all that information that Google has ( favourites, Gmail, search information) is ever put to “not so good use”. Google is sure as hell gaining a lot of information this way , and for convenience sake we are quite willing to give up some privacy. But on the other hand : What if this leeds to targeted adding ? It would be a bad thing , but also a good thing. What if the spam you get in your inbox anyway .. is more directed at your interests. Instead of college diploma”s and .. lets call them “ego-enlargements” … you would get spam about tech stuff, Barbie dolls, or when your favorite rerun of Family Ties is on TV. It just shows that information can be used in different ways and that good and bad … depends on where you stand. Before I start sounding like Obi One Kenoby .. I better sign off !
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Early Adopter syndrome.
Jun 08Early adopter syndrome.
If there is one thing that can really get under my skin, then its an end-user or cyber – illiterate waltzing up to me and lecturing me about a peace of technology that I have already filed under obsolete months ago. “ Hey dude “ he mumbles “ have you heard about this thing called ‘podcasting’ Its like the next big thing man. When I heard it, I thought of you right away .. You 
gotta try this out.” I sigh and roll my eyes as he tries to (inaccurately) explain the “new gig” he found out. When he is finally done I gently try do deflate his ego-balloon by pointing out that A : this new technology has been in existence for about five months, and B : I’ve been using it for a prolonged period of time in a more advanced way then his little brain can fathom and C : The next generation of this gadget is already out and i’ve been testing it for 2 weeks.
Whatever the next step is , its all a no-win scenario. Either you brake their little techno-spearheading soul (you can hear its little kernel crash right then and there) OR they insist on clinging to their ignorance and actually stick to their malformed arguments and delusions of knowledge.
Thank you captain obvious.
Its the curse of early adoptor syndrome. First you crawl the night night and day, beta test software untill you see as blue-screen in the face. Next you twist and turn to tune the tech into your way of life. Then, when you finally have it down and its becoming more of yesterdays news then a force of habit… te rest of the world catches up. Sigh… It just makes me want to scream ‘ I KNOW all this already ‘ and biting back “ And my information is a little more correct” .. And finally you have to sit through the weeks that everybody is clumsily adopting this new technology and is so exited about it you think your at the special olympics.
The new cosmopolitan.
For example, today : Skype + cellphone + Skype forwarding + conference call = Telling your girlfriend who is 20 km’s away , that you’ll be a tad later using your Australian friend as a relay. And afterwards , while driving the call calling in to a VOIP phone conference with you (on the cellphone), your girlfriend (behind her pc) and your thunder down under dude (on his pc). If you tell this to a “normal” person , they are about ready to put you in a mental institution. As my aunt thinks i’ve betrayed my roots just for moving 20 km’s away, she must think i’m the Omen for talking about friends in Chicago, Sacremento, Leeds, Australia and so forth like its the most normal think in the world. They always say : The internet is the death to distance, and the then the early adopter has surely become the cosmopolitan. So when the rest of the world finally catches up .. and starts calling us on skype too.. We are soooo gonna have a bad case of “early adopter syndrome”.
