It turns out that what I was trying to do with my homepage now has a name: LifeStreaming. The Social Web blog has an overview of two services that are trying to make them easy to create. I like that one of them is called iStalkr.
Category Archives: techie
Ignite Seattle 3 tomorrow
The speakers were announced in batches. They start at 8:30.
GMail Tip
If you’re looking to find all unread messages in Gmail, it’s not obvious. It’s actually very easy though, as this tip reveals – just put “is:unread” in the search bar.
This is helpful if you pull in mail from a lot of different sources, or have done bulk imports in the past, and your unread mail doesn’t end up in the first few pages of your inbox. I have had some mail lingering there, and was thankful for this tip. I have a decent amount of past e-mail stored in the depths of gmail.
You are currently using 1705 MB (60%) of your 2832 MB.
Not that I actually look at 1.7 GB of mail very often, but it’s convenient to have a substantial archive that’s easily searchable. If you’re looking to bulk upload a ton of old mail into gmail, I have found Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader works well.
OpenID is not looking good.
I realize I’ve had a lot of anti-technology posts recently, but really they’re more like anti-hype posts. A lot of technologies are hyped like crazy and when you start working with them you realize that it’s a lot of crap. Today’s story is about OpenID, which I recently implemented (but we haven’t published yet) for wishlisting.
If you’ve never used it, the gist of it is that it’s going to give you the ability to log in to any site that supports it, and all you need is a single username and password. Makes sense and sounds compelling, although there was this thing called Passport which tried to do that too. It was never widely supported by websites, even though everyone with a Hotmail account had one. The big reason people point to with regard to Passport’s lack of adoption was that it was totally controlled by Microsoft, and people/companies had trust issues with them watching what sites you join and controlling all of your data.
So, the OpenID standard was created, and the big hype is around how it’s “decentralized” and no single entity controls all of your data, solving Passport’s biggest problem. Except, for most people, it doesn’t. And it introduces some problems Passport didn’t have. And no one seems to be doing anything about them.
The Myth of MythTV
After nearly 3 years of being a MythTV user, I have finally had to settle on the fact that it isn’t very good. Ironically, it was named “MythTV” because it was supposed to be the solution to the “mythical convergence box.” That box is still a myth.
I’ve been through painful upgrade after painful upgrade. I’ve rebuilt it a few times, and think I’m generally pretty good at troubleshooting it. At no point was I ever really happy with it. Even when it was working perfectly, I could never switch over to it and use it for primary TV viewing. One of it’s fatal flaws was that channel changing is too slow. But, I looked past that because it had so many other strengths.
Ignite was great again
I posted some photos of Ignite this time. I enjoyed it very much. I’d have to give the “best talk” award to Marcelo Calbucci who’s talk about getting error messages out of AJAX apps was both hilarious and informative. Hillel Cooperman’s talk (founder of tastingmenu.com) about How to Eat Out and Leo Dirac‘s talk about the future of humanity both deserve honorable mentions for being both funny and informative. Those were the three shining stars for me.
After having been to both Ignites, I’d offer the following suggestions to speakers:
- Be funny. The funnier the better.
- Keep in step with your slides. The 15 second thing is hard, but it’s intentional. Some speakers were too long-winded, missed slides, and didn’t seem to stick with the spirit of the presentations.
- Don’t come across as a corporate shill. If you’re hiring, say it only once, preferably at the end of an otherwise informative and entertaining presentation.
Ignite Tonight!
Macs suck at a lot of things.
Regretably, I use each of the 3 major operating systems every day (Windows, Mac, Linux). As a result, I’m not particularly expert in any of them. However, I can tell you that they all suck. Each one of them has things that drive me crazy.
Today’s story is about my Mac. Although the Apple commercials would have us believe that Macs are “really good at video” they don’t come with a decent video player. Apple really pushes Quicktime, and Quicktime is awful. It doesn’t come with any of the codecs you’d actually need to play videos on the net, and it doesn’t even try to help you find the codecs for them, like Windows Media Player does. So, many people (like myself) use VLC – a popular media player for Linux, on the Mac. VLC’s UI is terrible, but it can play damn near anything you throw at it.
Hopefully a fun trademark battle to watch
The SVP/General Counsel for Cisco blogged about the iPhone trademark. I love the fact that he brought up this point:
How would Apple react if someone launched a product called iPod but claimed it was ok to use the name because it used a different video format? Would that be ok? We know the answer – Apple is a very aggressive enforcer of their trademark rights. And that needs to be a two-way street.
Apple has been famously protective of their trademarks, which brings a sense of hypocracy to the whole issue. Leo Laporte often uses the term “Netcast” instead of “Podcast” for fear that Apple will one day try to go after that word.
It seems like most of the “experts” think this will get settled quickly, and out of court. Although then I read this from an Apple spokeswoman:
“There are already several companies using the iPhone name for VoIP (voice over IP) products,” Kerris said. “We’re the first company ever to use iPhone for a cell phone. If Cisco wants to challenge us on it, we’re confident we’ll prevail.”
That sounds like a fight to me. I hope it’s entertaining.
Maybe they were just trying to drum up more business?
(I think the “drum up business” joke was also used back in the day when Monster.com laid off a bunch of people. I’m glad the current bubble is able to breathe new life into old jokes.)