Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Found via Skype Journal, a view of the differences between the Yahoo! Hack day and eBay's DevCon approches. The Typical participant is interesting and I thought it was interesting they both had Musical entertainment. Hummmm, do you think this would go down well at a BarCamp?
Yahoo! are on a roll when it comes to events recently, BarCampLondon, Podcast Academy and now Hackday. Jeremy Zawodny covers the hackday event.
Its happening on October 17th in Leicester Square. You can find lots more information on the official site (needs text) or the weirdly titled upcoming event.
Its happening on October 17th in Leicester Square. You can find lots more information on the official site (needs text) or the weirdly titled upcoming event.
So I'm having a leaving do tomorrow night (29th Sept 2006). Its going to be at Souk Medina which is near Seven dials in Covert Garden. I have a space booked from 7pm, and expect to be there for most of the night. So feel free to come down and say hi or wave me off to my new position at backstage.bbc.co.uk. The lady holding the coffee tips will not be there, she had a leaving do there last year so it should be good fun. Hope to see you all there…
Found via Ben Hammersley's blog
Moo.com's Flickr Minicards service has launched and lordy is it good. Get up to a 100 of your Flickr images on the front of business cards, for $20? 10 free for all Flickr Pro users?
Free did you say? Yes and you know what its better that free? Free delivery to the UK too. I've already ordered my cards and if there any good I might just go for a 100. I've been looking for something different to my normal BBC business card for a while now. Oh they have a Flickr pool if your interested in seeing more.
Torrent freak has done some digging and found that the Torrent sites are becoming even more popular. Mininova.org is still the most popular (no suprise there), Torrentspy is 2nd and The PirateBay is 3rd. The freak have also followed up on Mininova and done a post about itsServer setup. When I first saw this graph of the Mininova server setup, my first thought was wow, that's really not a complex setup at all. I was expecting at least 5 webservers to deal with the daily load it must get hour. However the servers are pretty good spec 
ual AMD Operton's). Generally its not a complex setup and makes me wonder what software is running on each server.
Me and Sarah did a podcast last night about some comments on her blog recently.The post was about race and interracial stereotypes and centres around a piece in the guardian over a year ago (march 2005). Now someones called werdz has decided to write a comment and get back at Sarahs comments on the original guardian article. Sarah felt it best to reply by a podcast.
And people called it vapourware… well trust me its up and running. I'm on the beta and finding my way around. I'm not sure if I can post screenshots but I have seen others have done on Flickr already.
I wasn't sure if I should title this post with a ! or ? So I decided to leave it for now. Anyway with DRM getting worst than ever according to BoingBoing, I found this post about Bittorrent's future without DRM a breeze of air. If you don't know, Bittorrent made a deal with a few movie studios to distribute there content across the bit torrent network. Then everyone shouted fowl because its content included Windows DRM. Well Bittorrent Inc have come out and said they see DRM as a current solution but they expect Add supported content will eventually win over.
The reason its bad for content providers is because typically a DRM ties a user to one hardware platform, so if I buy my all my music on iTunes, I cant take that content to another hardware environment or another operating platform. There are a certain number of consumers who will be turned off by that, especially people who fear that they may invest in a lot of purchases on one platform today and be frustrated later when they try to switch to another platform, and be turned off with the whole experience. Or some users might not invest in any new content today because theyre not sure if they want to have an iPod for the rest of their life.
Found via BoingBoing
On February 15, 2006 I discovered that the photo sharing site Flickr had reached 100 million hosted photos. Today (September 22 2006) at 11.18 PM CET, only seven months later, Flickr passed the quarter billion mark – 250 million photos.
It maybe that Flickr is doesn't have the number of people that Yahoo Photos might do, but I very much douht that the quality and quanity of photos is anywhere near flickr. I do wonder the percentage which are creative commons licenced however.
If your in London today and would love to meet up for Dinner with Howard Rheingold of the SmartMobs and Virtual Community fame
This is very last minute and we are going to have a meal rather than the usual geekdinner. So expect to pay for a meal and drinks. The venue is undecided and will be decided on at some point during the evening. But I expect it will be near Victoria or Kensington.
Howard Rheingold is one of the world's foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. Over the past twenty years he has traveled around the world, observing and writing about emerging trends in computing, communications, and culture. One of the creators and former founding executive editor of HotWired, he has served as editor of The Whole Earth Review, editor-in-chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and on-line host for The Well. The author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Virtual Reality, and Tools for Thought, he lives in Mill Valley, California.
I should have a really good video for one web day (22nd September). Howard Rheingold talking to the BBC in a talk titled Co-operate or Die! Should have the video online sometime tonight, so keep an eye on a update soon.
I've added a couple of question and answer videos here. But i'm still processing the actual talk video, which will show up under the same url someday soon.
After listening to Security now Episode 58, I had write a quick blog post to warn people about this very (I would say) critical flaw in Windows XP and IE. I have temporarily patched my systems by unregistering the VGX DLL. I would highly suggest everyone do the same by copying the following code into your run dialog box and restarting your machine.
regsvr32 -u “%CommonProgramFiles%Microsoft SharedVGXvgx.dll”
Much more information and another flaw affecting only Windows 2000 users can be found at the security now notes page.
The venture which I should have got much more involved in has launched to the public.
Trustedplaces.com is open for business!
Yes, our dear friends we are now one letter up; have moved from alpha to beta and have opened up the site so that anyone can join. What a difference a letter makes. You’ll see a new home page, some very useful options for your reviews, favourites and friend’s favourites, quite a few design tweaks, but you’ll also be able to search for places that are near you.
Trusted places is simply a place to put all your favorate places and then tag them for other friends to find. You can write reviews and post pictures too but the most interesting thing is the friends aspect. Yes I'm thinking really long tail stuff here. The trustedplaces team haven't quite made a point of drumming that up yet but its in the pipeline I'm sure. There's also some really other things which are planned which make sense when your not at a computer.
