Category: Geek

I just noticed that they finally posted the schedule of events for the Mesh Conference (which takes place on May 30th and 31st, smack in the middle of Toronto Tech Week).

Each of the conference’s days has a theme:

• Day 1, Wednesday, May 30th, is Media and Society day.
• Day 2, Thursday, May 31st, is Marketing and Business day.

Last year’s always-on-TechMeme opening keynote pundit was Om “GigaOm” Malik; this year’s is none other than Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington. Day 2’s opening keynote will feature the world’s most powerful PR guy, Richard Edelman.

There are lots of interesting names and presentation topics — go check out the schedule.

I suspect that a number of us from Tucows will be attendance — I plan to be there.

If you haven’t been following the tech news in the past 24 hours, you might not be aware of News Corporation and NBC Universal’s joint project to create a “YouTube killer” online video service where they will showcase their programming. The announcement seems like so much bluster and so little substance, especially when they haven’t even given the project a name — not an interim code name. The word on the ‘net is that Google has their own internal codename for the joint venture: “Clown Co.”.

The other tech sites are a bit too high-minded and not pop culture-savvy enough to crack wise about the name “Clown Co.”, but over at Global Nerdy (a tech news blog that I share with my good buddy George), we’re willing to go where they fear to tread. That, and we were just dying to use a reference to the band “Insane Clown Posse”:

(Hey! Other tech new sites! Feel free to use this image — just credit “Global Nerdy”.)

We’ll be commenting all day on Clown Co. over at Global Nerdy. So far, here are our posts on the topic:

• Quick, send in the clowns*
• Arrington Lists Clown Co.’s Red Flags

Meanwhile, on Global Nerdy, the tech blog:

• The latest “iPod killer:” mobile subscription music services. “I have my doubts. If subscription was such a winner, surely we’d see some pretty impressive numbers for the Windows Media-based subscription services that already exist, and target the much more mature digital audio player market? Yes, I know subscription has its fans, but the dollars don’t lie—people prefer iPods, downloads, and ripping.”
• AOL screen name owners now have OpenIDs, too. “That’s 60MM or so newly-active OpenIDs in one fell swoop. Granted, most AOL and AIM users wouldn’t know what to do with their newly-minted OpenIDs, but it’s nice to see the infrastructure there for when the concept’s mature enough to start to take popular root.”
• 200 Megabytes of RAM Ought to be Enough for Anybody. “Here’s something from Reddit that shoud make you snicker: it’s a thread from the comp.is.ms-windows.misc newsgroup from February 1997 in which the posters discuss whether or not computers will someday need gigabytes of RAM.”
• Apple’s “Spring Forward” Update. “With the US Congress’ 2005 ruling that daylight savings time should start three weeks earlier and end one week later taking place this year, DST has become the new Y2K. Apple just pushed out a system update that includes adjustments for these changes.”
• Joel on Software’s 7 Steps (plus a bonus one) to Remarkable Customer Service. “Joel Spolsky’s latest article on Joel on Software not only follows one of the “How to write headlines that get attention” rules that have been making the rounds at Techmeme these days, but it lists some lessons that he says he learned during the early days of Fog Creek Software, when he did tech support.”
• Vista’s Dates Keep Talking About Their “Ex” — Mac OS X, That Is. “According to Iljitsch van Beijnum over at Infinite Loop, a large number of people writing reviews of Vista keep bringing up Mac OS X. Worse still, some of these review are rather akin to your date saying ‘You’re not as handsome/pretty/smart/cool/charming as my ex was’.”
• Ballmer Blames BRIC Pirates for Vista’s Slow Sales. “Never mind all the reviews that tell readers not to upgrade to Vista unless it comes bundled with a new computer, all the write-ups that say that it’s only incrementally better than XP or the recommendations to go with the two-year-old Mac OS X 10.4 over the brand-new Vista. Vista’s slow sales, according to Steve Ballmer, are the fault of pirates in the “BRIC Countries” (Brazil, Russia, India and China, all of which are emerging markets for the high-tech sector).”
• Trulia Announces Their API for Creating Real Estate Mashups. “According to the announcement in the Trulia blog, the practical upshot of having access to their API will mean that you can write applications to answer questions such as: “What was the average price of a 2-bedroom home in ZIP 94002 on the week of 11/27/2006?” (The answer is $809,533) or “Which neighborhood was the biggest winner/loser in Manhattan over the past 6 months in terms of search traffic?” (The biggest winner was the Flatiron District, the biggest loser was Battery Park City).”
• Now You’ll Know Which Idiot is Filling Your Comments Section with Pointless, Puerile Drivel. “Pardon me if I don’t get too terribly excited about Om Malik’s news that Digg, the new Slashdot — and no, that’s not a compliment — is going to adopt the OpenID standard.”
• “Windows Vista’s User Account Control is leading you to make a security choice based on a false sense of trust. Cancel or allow?” “If you’re already using Vista, you’ve probably run into at least one of those annoying “Cancel or Allow?” dialog boxes lampooned in the Mac ad above. Now it turns out that you can’t always trust them. The Symantec Security Response weblog has an article in which they say that in some cases, Vista’s UAC approach ‘becomes a chicken and egg situation when the user is making a decision based on a false sense of trust.'”

I explain technical hoo-hah for a living, so if you’re a mite confused by Yahoo! Pipes (which the tech world is currently going on and on about), go take a peek at the article I just wrote — Pipes Explained — on Global Nerdy.

This one’s for the programmers: I’ve started a one-man project to write libraries of PHP wrapper functions for the Tucows APIs called “Project Ash”. It’s named after “Ash” from the Evil Dead series of movies; he was one guy with a chainsaw trying to make a difference. If your eyes haven’t yet glazed over, go check out this article on the blog I’m paid to write for: the Tucows Blog.

In case you were wondering, the tech news blog that I share with my buddy George, Global Nerdy is still an ongoing concern. Current stories include:

• “Computer, run exploit!” If you record a sound file containing spoken commands, you might be able to con a Vista user with speech recognition enabled into playing it, after which hilarity will ensue.
• The Truth (and Lies) About Online Dating. “Internet dating is a web of lies and obesity,” said a cynical programmer friend of mine, and he wasn’t that far off from the truth.
• Tech’s Environmental Footprint. iTunes and the environment — are we filling less landfills with old CD packages, or using more electricity because we’re playing music on power-hungry computers versus CD players, which consume less power?
• BBSpot’s Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart. Although meant to be a humour piece, the flowchart’s a pretty guide as to whether you should upgrade to Vista or not.
• Flickr’s Dirty Little Secret: You Suck at Taking Photos. A report that flickr automatically sharpens images you upload to it to make them look better.
• It’s Vista Day! The official comic of the Windows Vista release.
• iPhone Shuffle? If these exists an iPhone, it stands to reason that there must also exist an iPhone Shuffle.

The comic panel on the right (taken from this Achewood comic) summarizes what I want to say to the folks behind Windows Vista. Yes, I think that it’s got some improvements on Windows XP, but the annoyances I’ve had have eclipsed the steps forward. In the second installment of The Tainted Vista Review — my review of the controversial Acer Ferrari Laptop that Microsoft sent me — I write about my experiences trying to get the laptop to recognize its own Bluetooth mouse.