I need people who would be interested in using browsercam.com to join my fundable campaign. Browsercam has this promotion going where if you get twenty people together you can all pile up and get a browsercam group account for $25, which is good for one year. Browsercam is a good tool for web designers that lets you make sure your web pages look good across multiple platforms. For example, using browsercam you can see how your pages will look on Linux or a Mac in various different browsers. If you’re building websites (especially with CSS) it’s very useful.
Technology
24
Feb 06
Time for more encrypted VOIP
From the NY Times: Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data:
Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.
“Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think,” he said.
He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.
24
Feb 06
Gmail for your domain
I got a beta invite for the “Gmail for your domain” program. Basically, the idea is that you let Gmail and Google host your email using one of your domains. So, if you register iamthecoolestguyintheworld.com, you can let Google / Gmail handle all the email and email accounts for that domain. All you have to do is point your MX records to Gmail. They provide a control panel interface for you to create and manage email accounts as well as a total of 2GB of server space. No doubt, they will offer this service paid for with Google ads. It’s a smart service to add as well as a no brainer. Why hasn’t anyone else done this yet?
Most of the web-based email services offered by small web hosts use installations of SquirrelMail, Horde, or NeoMail. If Google can provide a reliable service, I’m sure many people will gladly switch. I imagine many might buy domains just to have personalized Gmail.
Using Gmail for your domain, you get the great Gmail interface, of course. The only downside is that your email is stored with Google rather than on your server. That’s a dubious proposition. I wish you could just license the Gmail software to install on your webserver.
Here’s a quick run down of the features:
- Search accounts – This search allows you to find accounts by account name. If you create 300 email accounts and you need to find one with a specific name this is how you do it. I imagine this will be useful if Google allows you to host multiple domains in the future.
- User management – Create new users, change user passwords, etc. You can even force a user to choose a new password on their next login as well as set the user as an admin with admin privileges to manage email for the domain. There are also options to create multiple account aliases for the same user. For example, I could have an email box that collected anything sent to [email protected] or [email protected]. The only other thing I noticed here was the ability to add the user to a mailing list created on the domain.
- Create mailing list – This is pretty standard. Create a mailing list much like Mailman or other listserv apps, the only difference you can only add users on your domain. That will probably change in the future, which should be troubling to the various listserv companies out there like Lyris and Mailermailer.com.
- Domain settings – Here you can change the sign-in box color and add a special graphic for your sign-in page, so you can brand your webmail.
The features are limited right now, and match what you can do with any virtual hosting environment. The main benefit here is the Gmail interface as well as the 2GB of essentially free space. That allows you to use your virtual hosting space solely for storing files rather than constantly growing email boxes. I look forward to what they will include in the future. If they coupled this with a domain purchasing program it will be a success. Imagine, a user buys a domain at google.com, signs up for a blog hosted by Blogger, and email hosted by Gmail, all for free. They could even start offering free domain names supported by Adsense.
20
Feb 06
Get active in Wikipedia
While you’re using Wikipedia, you should keep an eye out for any errors you see. It’s easy to make changes and add content. I added a user template for Dallas wikipedians, but there’s still not one for Austin, I just noticed. I may have to add that unless someone gets to it before me.
27
Jan 06
More google.cn
The image search for “tiananmen square” on the left is from Google.cn, the image search on the right is from Google.com.
It’s almost so bad, it’s funny.
27
Jan 06
Google trades ideals for utilitarian cynicism
This wouldn’t be so disappointing if it weren’t for their oft-advertised ethos of “don’t be evil”:
Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn’t a step we took lightly. For several years, we’ve debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government’s policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people?
I don’t think anyone was shocked when Yahoo! kowtowed to China. They’ve always been business first, cool second, but Google was supposed to be better and different. But all the Google fanboys should remember, when the rubber met the road, and principle clashed with capital, Google got in line with everyone else, shriveling their ethos into a hollow marketing slogan.
26
Jan 06
Minutiae
1. Running on impulse. I broke down today and bought a black, 60gb iPod video. Right now, I have 20gb loaded, which is equivalent to 15 days of music. This is my one big gadget of the year, having resisted a new computer, a digital SLR, and many many other equally unnecessary purchases. Now my last remaining excuse for using the exercise facilities is gone. I still hate Apple and they’re effete hipster smugness. Fact is, the competition just plain sucks for portable digital media. The gadget industry is ceding the entire territory to Apple, when many people (like me) just want a good alternative. It’s not that difficult. The “iPod alternative” needs to have a spacious hard drive, some sort of display so I can tell what’s playing, and a head phone jack. It’s really that simple. Make it super cheap and the iPod has some serious competition. As it is, you can get an iPod or an incredibly lame alternative for the same price. What kind of choice is that? The main draws: I needed something with massive hard-drive space and small size, and nothing really comes close except the iPod. Add to that the video playback, simple interface, and iTunes mojo, and it’s a no brainer. By the way, the clerks at Best Buy are ridiculous. No, I don’t want a service plan for the 3rd time. No, I don’t care about the accessories or anything else you want to upsell me on. No, I don’t want to bond about having an iPod. It’s a consumer device, not an opportunity for group identity reinforcement.
2. While driving down the road during lunch, in front of a high school an inexplicable animated sign advertises: “Now presenting Urinetown.”
3. Tuesday at the apartment after work, while I wait for the elevator with the day’s mail I observe a large-nosed girl in a ponytail pass by in full workout gear complete with white iPod earbuds. I can hear her opening the door to the workout room, but then she’s back again walking angrily past in the reverse direction. “Full?” I ask. She keeps walking and yells, “I guess I’ll just be fat forever!” then slams the double doors. I couldn’t help laughing, but only because she was completely serious and not actually fat.
25
Jan 06
Get your album cover art straight
I’ve been using iTunes a lot more lately. I held out for a long as a champion of Winamp, but iTunes does a lot of nice stuff with podcasts and a few other features. One of the nice things about using iTunes is how it integrates your album art with your mp3 collections. If the album art is present on the hard drive you will see the album cover when you play the song on your iPod or in iTunes. That’s a great touch. Only problem is, since I’ve never bought a song off iTunes most of my mp3’s lack the accompanying album cover art. No problem! There are several cool solutions that have sprung up to help with this:
1. Artie by Patrick Moberg. Artie is a ajaxy website that finds the missing album cover art for your music library. All you do is upload your iTunes playlist XML file and it searches various online sources to find the missing album art, which you then drag into the art window in iTunes to add it to the associated mp3’s.
2. iTunes Companion by Knut August Johansen. This is probably the easiest way to update your cover art since once you set it up it automatically updates the album art as your music plays, by searching Amazon for the album listed in the ID3 tag of your mp3 files. iTunes Companion is a widget for Yahoo’s widget engine (formerly known as Konfabulator), and it works very well.
If you’re using iTunes you could also do all of this manually by searching for the album or single name in Google image search (GIS).
23
Jan 06
PHP Includes!
Have you ever found out about something that would have made your entire life so much easier? I had this experience recently with the concept of building websites using PHP includes.
In a nutshell, PHP includes allow you to build webpages using modular sections or code blocks.
PHP is, of course, a server-side scripting language, which means it can be used to create dynamic content for the web. With PHP you can interact with other applications on the server as well as do things like set cookies, process forms, store input in a database, etc. That’s great stuff, but most people may not need to take advantage of that. The thing most people need to know about is the use of PHP for creating multi-page websites using includes. One of the biggest problems (if you don’t use PHP) is making changes to an entire site. Let’s say for example you have a website with hundreds of individual pages. Without includes, you would have to download and edit each of those files to reflect the new changes. Even if you did some find-replace mojo, you’d still have to edit each of those pages and reupload them to the web server. But, if you use includes you could create a template that each page would use. When you needed to make changes you would simply change the content of the particular include. So, for example, any page on a site could be arranged like this:
header include (separate file like header.inc.php) content footer include (separate file like footer.inc.php)
To change the navigation in the header across the entire site, you would just alter the header.inc.php file instead of having to download and change each separate page.