Posts Tagged ‘ tech ’

Beginning of the begun

This marks the beginning of bqdc. Before this post you’ll have to go back to my myspace blog to see the wonder of my bloggin’. I have made moderate effort to turn this into the definitive version, but it didn’t pay off and there is still plenty there that isn’t here. But, now, here we are. Without further ado, the original post:

Why? you ask? Is it the fame, fortune, and the emminent respectability of blogging that draws me away from a myspace-centric blog? Well, yes. But also there are a variety of things about hosting my own blog that will make life easier for me and my readers, not least of which is wordpress’ ability to subscribe to a blog’s comments, so instead of having to visit my blog hundreds of times to see if anyone has said anything interesting, or if i have perhaps responded to your comment, you’ll be able to just subscribe to my comment feed and the information (and comments) will be delivered to you, as if by magic.

But what is this “subscribe” that i speak of? I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile, since it is the biggest thing to happen to the internet since http, so here we go.

I’m going to start with an excellent video that is slightly out of date. There are a couple things in the last 30 seconds or so that i’m going to correct, but you can take it as gospel until you start reading again:

Got that? OK, now for the correction: the video makes it look like you’ve got 4 steps that you have to go through to start subscribing to blogs:

  1. Sign up for or download a newsreader
  2. Find some content that you’d like to subscribe to
  3. Click on the orange “news” square
  4. Copy the uri for the crazy-looking code page into your newsreader of choice

Ok, well, you don’t have to do all that. You still have to have an account, but if you’ve got a gmail accound then you’ve already got a gReader account. And, if you use firefox, opera, safari or even ie7 your job will be even easier, certainly there won’t be any crazy copy/pasting of code.

All four of the major browsers have the feed icon located somewhere inside or just outside of the location bar. The three good browsers have it inside the location bar. Look up right now and you should see it just to the right of the URI.

Firefox has a unique system for dealing with feeds: it basically re-directs you to an external feed reader or one of the many reader add-ons. So when you click on the feed icon for the first time it will give you a preview of the feed and ask you what you want to do with it. Just click what service you want from the drop-down and you’re on your way.

Safari, Opera, and IE7 all use internal readers, so if you click on the icon the feeds should just show up in your favorites list or homologue. I personally don’t like their implementations nearly as much as google reader’s, and a cursory glance around the websphere hasn’t revealed any way to change the default action in any of them. So, like i always say: you should use firefox. Of course if anybody knows a good way to change these settings let me know and i’ll change this paragraph.

What are you doing? Go subscribe to my blog, or its comments.

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2007
09/18
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fiction
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A useful tool for researchers/students

“Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is generously funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services [etc.]”

Basically it’s a firefox extension that keeps track of projects, sources, notes, and documents. If you’re the kind of person that always ends a research project with a giant folder filled with information chaos, i imagine it will help you.

There is a short video of what it does and how it works here.

If you never do research on the internet, then i imagine it will be completely useless for you.

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2007
08/24
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fiction
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One of the problems with digg

If a really interesting story is submitted with a title that is both boring and inaccurate there is no way to go in and fix it, and it can’t be re-submitted, AFAIK. Check that one out, look at the title, maybe read it (or at least read my comment on it) and tell me if that is no a disservice to the digg community?

Have i stumbled across a new way of gaming digg? Sort of anti-gaming, really, since most attempts are to promote things. But if i was, say, a creationist, i could go and just title every good pro-science article that i find with a nondescript and wildly inaccurate title, and goodbye the digg science section.

Same principle applies to mac fanboys.

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2007
06/17
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Safari for windows!

OK, i’m a geek, i admit it. But yeah, apple finally released safari for windows. Only took them four years.

But brandon, you ask, why do you care? After all, you run firefox on linux. Well, yeah. And i do that because of the community(ies, really) and the fact that these companies exist primarily as promotions of social good. Heck, firefox even has a manifesto. (Thorough explanation here) And remember i said something about community? The web is their community: everyone, and that means you, can contribute to the conversation surrounding what their manifesto should be. Take that Mr. Marx.

So why even talk about safari? Apple is, after all, a radically closed organization. That’s why their products are so expensive, why they work so well, and why they have a less than 6% market share. In america; never mind the rest of the world. And they seem to be wholely driven by His Steveness’ drive for beauty and total world domination. Allow me to illustrate with pictures from the recent WWDC unveiling of safari.
This is the world right now:

And this is what the world will look like in two months, after safari gets a fair chance to in the fight:

What do you notice? Is it the fact that Ie is pretty much unchanged? How about the complete dissappearance of Firefox and “Other”? (Which, i assume, includes the wonderful flock and opera browsers.) Is this the future that Steve would have, one without choice? Last time that happened we got five years of Ie6. How innovative do you think the web will continue to be if there is a duopoly instead of a monopoly? Will it be any different at all?

Steve’s charisma is well documented. But at this years WWDC, with the introduction of safari to windows, he plunged himself into the harsh light of the windowed world. First off, he claimed that safari for windows is faster than IE7 (not hard), Firefox (unlikely), and Opera (Even more unlikely). Well, just like the rest of the world, Wired said “Wuh?” and went out and tested the three big ones (Opera has a less than 1% marketshare in any market) in a couple google applications. (Which are all very heavy in the html and javascript departments.) Their results? Well, they didn’t match apple’s. They also weren’t very comprehensive; pretty much all that they really say is don’t trust apple’s benchmarks blindly, your results may vary, etc. etc. But you already knew not to trust the vendor’s statistics, right?

People have also always thought of safari as one of the most secure options in existence. Well, a large part of that comes from the fact that it has always run exclusively on OSX. But, well, now it’s on windows. Guess how long it took to find a remote code execution exploit? That’s a browser weakness that means that someone can run any command on your computer if you even just visit their website. No downloads, no nothing, just all of a sudden “hey why is my computer not booting and someone’s charging stuff to my credit card in lithuania?” Go on, guess how long it took. Less than two hours.

And, last but not least, let’s talk about features. The new safari is going to come with a few fairly cool features. (Items 7-11 on the left. Just, ignore number 12 :-) And heck, some of them might even be enough to convince you to switch. Or, if they’re not quite cool enough to make you willing to ignore the massive security vulnerabities so far discovered (yes, there are more) they are maybe cool enough for you to say  “Hey that would be neat if i had that.” Well, don’t worry, firefox has got you covered. Lifehacker’s got you covered with a round-up of extensions that provide features that are equivalent to those provided by safari. One could (but wouldn’t) say that apple was inspired by one of the browsers it seems to want to crush? And don’t forget that there are over 2,500 add-ons available at AMO, to make your firefox behave exactly like you want it to, not exactly the way His Steveness wants it to. Although, if you wanted to, you could.

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2007
06/14
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fiction
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Remember Captain EO?

It‘s new, it‘s improved, it‘s on your computer screen, it doesn’t use any fucking glasses. How in god’s name did i miss this? This is not the 3-d technology of yore, it doesn’t give headaches like the blue/red stupid-head glasses do. It uses the parrallax effect to create real 3-d. By all accounts the effect is as amazing as captain eo was, with fully-grown men (magazine editors!) reaching out to touch the images that were floating in mid-air. And ducking the bullets that were flying around in quake. Can you imagine playing quake in true 3-d? Holy fucking shit.

In related news, Chicken Little is going to be the first movie released with some new 3-d technology, too. But that one needs glasses. Apparently 3-d is the next big thing in cinema, and steven spielberg said that he has got “a big surprise” in store for movie-going audiences… apparently bigger than the fact that they expect us to go in and pay to wear glasses (similar to, but more advanced than the captain eo kind. the image should be even more realistically 3-d than that movie was. Do you remember how realistic captain eo was?) for a crappy children’s cgi movie. Apparently there are two movies per year planned for 3d animation, though. Really brings a new meaning to 3d animation, if you ask me.

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2005
10/13
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