The idea is that after your death, you will donate all of your intellectual property
into the public domain, overriding the current 70 year copyright waiting period following
your death.
I’m not running out to carry around a card like this, I am already releasing much
of my work under Creative Commons, so I don’t see the need to have things change when
I die.
I will be attending the London
Geek Dinner next Wednesday, if you are in London and or nearby, come join us.
Here is the original post from Bill’s Blog
If you want to learn about Blogging, Podcasting, or anything else Media or just want
to hang out and chat with people involved with the community come on out. We can help
set up a blog or podcast or show you tips on how to improve. Any level of know how
or experience is welcome. Bring a laptop if you have one, Molly’s has FREE Wi-Fi!
.
Molly Blooms 700
Richmond St
Tomorrow
I will be headed to Toronto to take part in Podcamp
Toronto 2008. I am really excited for this event as I will be able to see lots
of the people that I met last year at Podcasters
Across Borders and also meet lots of people that I’ve been interacting with online
over the last year.
I’ll be leaving along with my wife, Laura-Lee at noon to spend the afternoon at the Canadian
International Autoshow and then will be heading to the Tweet
Up at the Bier Market in the evening. To many of my readers, I’ll see you
there.
I should be posting lots of photos to Flickr over
the weekend, and might even blog a couple of times over the weekend.
So I’ve spent 24 hours playing with the new beta
for Flock. This is impressive by itself as every other time I’ve tried to use
Flock it has been so horribly slow that I couldn’t stand to keep using it.
I’m glad to say that for the first time, Flock is actually better to use than vanilla
Firefox.
Flock is what they call “The Social Web Browser”. It essentially adds a number of
interesting features to Firefox. Many people say that Flock is basically Firefox with
extensions, but it is more than that, it is an integrated set of tools for the browser.
The main additions that Flock brings are: integration with online bookmarks, integration
with various social networks, built in webmail checker and built in blogging client.
The
online bookmark integration has always been my favorite feature. You can bookmark
any page by just pressing a big Star button. And if you double click it, you can specify
tags for del.icio.us (Or Magnolia, if that’s your site). Once you have bookmarked
a site, whenever you do a search, it does a live search of Yahoo, your History and
your Bookmarks. I am constantly amazed at how often I search for something, and find
that I have already seen what I am looking for.
The social network integration gives you a new sidebar called the “People sidebar”,
it lists the latest updates from your contacts at your various sites. It is a lot
like a built in twitter client, but it also works for Facebook, Flickr and Youtube.
The problem with this sidebar is that it doesn’t update nearly as often as a dedicated
Twitter client, so I always feel like I am missing updates. Also, its layout doesn’t
have room for an entire Tweet, so you have to hover over an update to see the whole
post in the tooltip. I’m told that they are working on fixing this, perhaps when the
final 1.1 update comes out, this will be fixed.
The webmail notifier is nice, but it also doesn’t seem to update often enough. It
takes a long time to notice that I have a new e-mail and that I have read the new
e-mails.
The blogging client is also handy to have, but I am much happier in Windows Live Writer,
as it feels like a much more fully featured client. I had too many weird HTML problems
when working with Flock’s editor.
To sum up: Flock adds a lot of nice features to Firefox. I wouldn’t recommend it to
the general public. But if you are a heavy social networking and blogging person,
I definitely think you should give it a try.
February 21st, 2008 by Will | Posted in code | Comments
Here is
a cool Yahoo Pipe that I just finished building. It loops trough all of your Twitter
friends, loads up their blogs and then returns the latest items from their blog’s
RSS feed.
Essentially this allows you to subscribe to all of your Twitter friend’s blogs without
actually adding all of their feeds to your reader. Just add the feed for this pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/spaetzel/twitterfriends
It does take a long time to run the first time, but the results are very useful.
I have been spending a lot of time playing with Yahoo Pipes, you can see some more
pipes that I have created here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/spaetzel/.
I’ll blog about more of them soon.
I just downloaded the new Flock 1.1 Beta and
thus far it looks pretty good. In the past, every time that I install Flock, I find
that the browser is horribly slow, making it unrealistic to use as my everyday browser.
But this time, it looks like they got it right. It doesn’t seem to be any slower than
Firefox. Now, I think the only complaint I have is that the People bar listing for
Twitter is pretty much useless because it doesn’t update often enough, and people’s
tweets are cut off, so I have to go to Twitter.com to see the whole post. I’ll post
more detailed impressions shortly.
The
news has been all over the net that Toshiba is finally throwing in the towel for HD-DVD.
This isn’t a terrible surprise given the number of studios that have jumped ship in
2008, and the cancellation of their CES press conference.
Personally, I was backing HD-DVD, yes I am an Xbox and Microsoft guy, so I am biased;
but, the HD-DVD spec was always much more laid out. The features that HD-DVD had that
Blu-ray didn’t were the requirement for a hard drive or flash drive to store updates
on, and an Ethernet connection allowing firmware updates and access to online content.
Both of those features really excited the Nerd within me. The idea of a DVD that isn’t
static and can be updated as new content becomes available was really amazing to me.
Blu-ray has struggled with comparability since its inception. There were several movies
that didn’t work on all players, and the PS3, with its hard drive and net connection
was always the only player that could always play all discs. There are rumours that
the Blu-ray spec is changing, making the Hard drive and net connection a requirement.
But, since it wasn’t always required from the start, these features won’t be widely
used be the discs.
However, I certainly am very glad that the world is moving towards a single format.
This certainly will hasten the price drop of the technology, and help ensure that
your Hi Def disc collection won’t be suddenly a pile of useless plastic. The issue
now is if people will bother upgrading at all, DVDs look quite good on most HD screens.
HD content does look better, but I doubt that the general public really cares about
having the best quality possible. DVD had lots of benefits over VHS, over and above
the picture quality, so it was an easy change to argue for. HD movies, are not as
easy to argue.
Personally, I think that downloadable content will be the winner. There are no stores
that make the argument easy that are around these days, too few people have Set top
boxes that can download content. And the boxes that people do have, only allow you
to rent HD movies, not buy. Once purchasing becomes available, and people have set
top boxes, like the Xbox 360 or Apple TV, I really think that the convenience of getting
movies instantly, and having all of your purchases readily available to you will be
an argument that is hard to pass up.
Only time will tell to see what truly comes out on top. But one thing is abundantly
clear. HD-DVD is definitely not the winner here.
Back in January, I switched this blog to run off of DasBlog,
switching away from the old Drupal based site. And
of course, my old theme style didn’t work any more. Since that time, I’ve been using
one of the default DasBlog themes, which, to put it frankly, was ugly. I just finally
uploaded the new theme that I had been working on for the last couple of weeks.
The two goals of the theme were to make the site easy to use, and to show new visitors
who I am and what I do. There are several new features that you’ll find with this
version.
The first, and most visible additions are my phone number and e-mail address front
and centre. I want to remove any barriers to people contacting me, so I put those
two pieces of information where they would be found right away. They are both in an
image, so spammers shouldn’t be able to contact me. And the number is my Grand Central
number, which lets me filter callers if necessary, right now it will ring my phones
directly.
Next, is the new about me section up at the top. There is both a “Twitter Style” quick
blurb, and for those who want to know more, a new About
Me page that should satisfy all but the most curious of visitors.
I’ve added the obligatory list of social networks - all coded directly in HTML, I
want to avoid any JavaScript includes as they slow down your browser and don’t always
look so nice.
Web developer, designer and enthusiast in Kitchener, Ontario Canada. I use the best of the web, and build my own tools when what I need doesn't exist. About me
