Like many such apps, it’s an amalgam of other tools. del.icio.us meets digg meets google news meets weblog software. It’s got tagging, a user reward and moderation scheme, community interaction, rss feeds, and its own set of buzz words (you don’t post, you seed). It’s a solid, well designed app that’s going to grow fast. There are some issues with the interface and data organization, but those should be worked out during the beta.
The problem is that as more of such applications pop up, saturating the market, the less useful each individual one becomes. The more social services there are, the smaller the social network for each one gets; the more services that I use, the less control I have of my data.
I already use del.icio.us to bookmark and tag links. Some of those can be classified as “news.” Using newsvine would either segment those links between the two services or it would cause an overlap (cross posting). Either way, it means that more of my generated content is being seeded across the web across various services. I lose control of it. I lose the data. In the end, they lose their usefulness.
As I try it out, you can find me at n0wak.newsvine.com. I posted hockey stories there because I don’t post any of that elsewhere. More game commentary would border on redundant.
Regardless, if you want to try it out and want an invite, tell me.
Another month, another online map service. While Microsoft’s Local Live does have some very nice “bird’s eye view” shots, they don’t have any for this metropolis. But worry not. If you’re in Canada, you can still see some of it, so long as you don’t mind staring at Niagara Falls’ cheesy, slimey “strip”. Now there’s a way to get an impression of Canada.
The Falls is nice, though, even if it is poorly sliced in the other views (hit the cardinal direction buttons).
Holy shit, this piece of tripe from Forbes, Attack of the Blogs, is the most moronic “mainstream” article I’ve ever seen about weblogs — and I’ve seen many. There is so much ridiculousness in there. Sensationalist FUD. However, I can’t say such things because it would make me an evil, ranting and raving attack blogger! Jesus Christ.
I could break down every printed paragraph, but I do not have the patience. Instead, heed these lessons:
Microsoft and SCO are unfairly targetted by bloggers because they are such good and caring companies and have done nothing to warrant a geek backlash.
NO, wait, Microsoft is evil for supporting bloggers. How dare they give weblog scum exclusive interviews with Bill Gates?
If you make security devices that can be beaten by a simple pen and you get a lot of bad press because of it, it’s not because of your own incompetence it’s because of an evil bloggeratti conspiracy.
Google is evil because they advertise on the web and, *gasp*, sometimes these ads show up on vile blogger pages.
Anonymous attacks are a bad bad thing. Yes. However, abusing the DMCA to counter-attack with lame “copyright” excuses is good.
There are real concerns and serious issues that could have been properly raised in this article, but the fluff piece is so over the place, so unfocused and so sensationalist, it just comes off as a parody of itself. Yeah, there are problems with free speech on the web — all free things have their price (just look at the reader reviews at 1up.com) — but to spin it in such a pro-corporate way is just rediculous.
Halpern has had less luck getting anyone in Congress to listen to his plaint. He says that may change if a few politicians get a taste of what he has gone through. “Wait until the next election rolls around and these bloggers start smearing people who are up for reelection,”Halpern says. “Maybe then things will start to happen.”
Yeah, good luck with that, because in an election it’s the bloggers that do all the political smearing — never other politicians. No. Never. Nor do “pundits” with millions of viewers. They never lie or make any personal attacks (thanks to anonymous sources.) No. Joe Bob with the weblog, with two dozen readers, is the real evil menace.
I don’t want to come across as a defender of gutless, anonymous mucksters, however, I do want to come across as a critic of misguided and idiotic “news” articles. So it’s a toss up.
Edit: OMG, pile-on! Look at that evil lynch mob go: boingslash.
The Onion, America’s finest news source, redesigned recently. That’s nice. The big news, as far as I’m concerned, is that the archives are now fully viewable and searchable (I think they were “premium” before). Now you can see all the greatest fake online news of the past nine years.
I’m not sure what the origin of this… comic thing is, but it amused me greatly. Do not tell Jack Thompson of its existence, though.
On a similar level of stupid, I made my first second ytmnd, ff3battle.
Moving on to more technical matters, I really, really like the concept of the Greasemonkey extension, even though I do not have it currently installed (I have not bothered to reinstall after the, now resolved, security concern.) It gives the user power to access content how they like and it, effectively, can even fix web designer arrogance and misconception. It’s not without faults, obviously, as Greasemonkey can be horribly abused — generating extra, maybe even excessive, server load, or just generally mucking things up.
Wanting to refresh my client side scripting skillzz, I decided to make my first Greasemonkey script (or plain old bookmarklet). Though minor, some abuse is being commited in the form of page preloading. The target of this javascript abuse is The Escapist. This is how it appears now:
It’s unnecessarily cramped, small text with a tiny, useless navigation (you can barely make it out). They’re trying to do the “magazine on the web” thing, but they’re going about it the wrong way. My script, while early, reformats the whole of the content into a two page spread (it preloads the content), enlarges the text, and big navigation buttons that dynamically load the next and previous pages without reloading the page. It needs formatting work and code clean up, but it’s getting there. Slowly.
I was thinking of setting up a wiki on my new ludologizer.com domain, because it seems like the cool thing to do. Then PBWiki launched. In an instant it ended my plan, thanks to its simplicity and easy set up. So I’m using that for my wiki now while the domain, once again, returns to a state of duh. Not sure what to do with it. Again.
The hassle-free set up reaffirmed in me the useful goodness that Wikis can provide. I then followed the links to see the source code that PBWiki is based off of, only to be reminded of the horrendous abuse that they can be subject to.
It’s no wonder that the pbwiki wikis are password protected.
The whole ravaged wiki thing reminded me of the good old days of MetaBaby. I remember when it was pure and innocent, before it succumbed to the inevitable internet flood of prolapsed anuses and crap-flooding. But even that sight was better than the modern spammer mess. Back in those idyllic days, spammers were limited to email and weren’t (actively) targetting HTTP posts (weblogs, comments, wikis, referer logs.) I miss those days.
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: free-online-poker
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: free-online-poker
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: free-online-poker MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem
This weekend has been the catch-up weekend. Today alone, I caught up with various online writings and news, got some neglected cleaning done, watched a pair of movies that I bought weeks ago but never even opened, reorganized my gaming set-up, got some badly needed groceries taken care of (no longer do I have fridge consisting of a jar of mayo, some old mustard, two onions, and some beer), rejigged n0wak.com, updated some minor things here and, somehow, even managed to replay some good ole Gradius V.
I tagged it with GamingSetup but, sadly, I am the first to do so. I browsed through other similar tags, but I couldn’t find any geektastic setups. Which is unfortunate as I find those interesting in a voyeuristic/geek sort of way.
What needs to be said is “I hate those shelves”. They’ve been with me since I was in grade-school. Seriously. I want to get rid of them. I will get rid of them. It’s just that on the furniture/decor priority list, “new shelving” is far below “counter table” (next week), “stools for said table”, “new couch”, “something to make the walls less boring”, “another DVD tower”, and possibly “new bed”. The need for some of these things is quite evident in the larger scale living room semi-panorama. Kinda bland, I know, but I’m slowly getting there. Give me another six months.
I don’t know where that black line on the left (in the living room shot) came from. Even with the Photoshop-like UI tweaks (WinXP port down in the comments), GIMP is still a mess to use.
Thankfully, I missed out on all the lame April 1st absurdity on the web on account of being *gasp* away from the computer and *double-gasp* out in meatspace. It was in this “real world” that I attended my first ever Toronto Rock lacrosse game and a (close to first ever) comedy show (for free, thanks to the connected comedy maven that is Jenn — I thanked you already but I’m going to do it publically as well). Two social outings in two days? That might just be a record for me.
You know how it goes by now: Thunderbird 0.5 is available, as is, er, the browser-formally-known-as-Firebird 0.8 (which was formerly known as Phoenix). Great browser and all, but this constant name changing is getting tiresome. Firefox? Bah. It ruins the whole “bird” connection with Thunderbird, which should have — logically, one would assume — been renamed Thunderfox anyway.
Large scale open source lesson: never leave naming and branding in a programmer’s hands!
That beef aside, the browser is still good and if you haven’t switched already, do so now. Especially if the manual installation scared you away before (it has a Windows installer now). Clean, free, standards, secure, yadda yadda, Internet Explorer sucks monkey shit… you should know the reasons for using it by now.
There is one negative, though. The newish download manager seemed excessively slow and buggy to me. While trying to download something, it would take three times as long for the manager to come up than to download the file. And trying to clear the history would cause the browser to hang or crash. So I checked my profile directory and noticed a downloads.rdf file there. It was over two megs in size! It had, in its contents, a record of every file I downloaded since the start of December! (such records could be quite incriminating.)
Thus, I pass along this information: if the download manager is slow, delete the downloads.rdf file, restart Firebird–er-fox, go to Options-> Privacy -> Download Manager History and set it to clear on exit or on download completion.
After doing that, everything will retorn to working order. Foxy.
The WayBackMachine now has a beta text search called Recall. It’s still very beta-ish, as the results aren’t that great, but the ability to search the archives by text content rather than URL is interesting. Personally, I like the little zeitgeist like graphs they provide, which show good historical trends.
The above search should be an obvious one: “y2k”. A sudden and massive upswell in “Y2K” related content just before January 2000, followed by a very quick decline upon the realization that fuck-all happened.
The above search is for “al-Qaeda”; the graph shows related terms. There is an obviously massive increase in activity after September 2001, but what’s interesting is the “al-qaeda” spike in late 2000 (USS Cole Attack) and the late-2000, early-2001 increase in the term “holy war”.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find trends, patterns, and memetics like this really fascinating.
Kinda useful, especially if you have a Google search bar embeded in your browser. However, if you’re using Mozilla/Firebird this is negated by Quick Search Keywords. Just type “webster whatever” in your address bar and you get a superior definition to the ones google provides.
Next, Google should find a way to exploit Diebold’s voting machines so that you can vote for your favourite candidate from the comfort of your browser! vote:Candidate.
My kind of luck. Just as soon as I get started on my own RSS reader, I find Firebird Ext. – RSS Reader Panel. An RSS reader that very easily and very seamlessly integrates into Firebird’s sidebar. It’s nice and small, and I had it working almost instantly. There are a few problems, though. For one, it’s not very lax on the RSS validation. A malformed feed will generate errors, and you’ll end up getting nothing out of the feed. While this really isn’t a problem with the Reader Panel as much as a problem with the actual feeds that are provided (garbage in, garbage out!), some element of flexibility would be nice.
It would also be swell if the feeds could be sorted by thelatest items, rather than having them grouped under each individual channels. Minor complaints, really, as Reader Panel is quite good overall. The “keep it simple, stupid” philosophy works in its favour, and that’s something I like.
Here’s a pretty good list of RSS readers. I think I’ve tried about five of them, and none of themleft me satisfied. They were either too bulky, or too buggy, or too slow. The stand-alone desktop application factor was annoying as well, as I wanted something far more transparent.
Earlier this month, I came across Feed on Feeds. Milov was using it and I liked what I saw. It was simple, clean, web based, and it used the very familiar PHP/MySQL combo — so it was open to customization. It seemed nice, but I didn’t bother because of server restraints, and because I didn’t have a real need at that point.
Then came del.icio.us. That gave me a bunch of ideas. Then I was told I might have access to a new server, for free. Several possible future job leads followed (though nothing definite :\) Then some more ideas. Then, all of a sudden, I had rediscovered my coder curiosity. It’s been dormant for months, but it seems to be waking again. Thus, using magpie, I’ve decided to roll my own feed reader.
Got nothing better to do. Well, I do — but nothing as productive.
Also, the backyard is covered by some strange, white, powdery substance. It is, quite possibly, anthrax. More on this news as it develops…
Having just watched Demolition Man for the nth time, I have just realized that one aspect of the movie is turning out damn-right prophetic. It was once a slight jab at the other action star. Now, the “Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library” doesn’t seem so improbable.
Another fun little trivia fact is that the movie Predator featured two future state governors — Arnold Schwatzawhatever and Jesse Ventura. According to this trend, the guy that played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, Carl Weathers, is going to be governor within the next four years. Or perhaps the guy that played Dick Tracy’s “Pruneface”, R.G. Armstrong.
I just found out that CBC has organized all of their online Flash games on a single page. All those games (except for that “Naughty Pig” thing) are 10Plus1′s babies, all made during my time there. Four of those are mine. The crappiest four, eh.
All of those, however, can’t hold a candle to the glory that is Robotron — very accurately ported to Shockwave. The best part of it? You get the same great taste without any of that MAME guilt. Not that I have any.
Other than saying “I’ve commented on it at three places already”, I will make no mention of that Paris Hilton video. It’s pointless anyway, as everyone has seen it before already. If you haven’t, then you might want to see this, as it is undoubtedly new to you as well.
Finally, don’t forget, it’s Leonid time. The peak is on the 19th. Hope the skies will be clear, because November is almost always overcast. I can’t remember the last time that the Leonids had a clear sky (and I’ve been checking for years).
Hah. The Liberal party of Ontario is claiming endorsement from the Canadian Idol winner (I’m sold!) However, more importantly, Dalton has a blog. Now we can hear the leader of the provincial Liberals talk about his love for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and we can finally get an answer to the all important question: “boxers or briefs?” I bet you never imagined boxers! … Seriously. This important message brought to you by a posting on Freddie.ca
Interested by this, I decided to check the sites for the other two parties.
Considering the amount of money the PCs have, you’d think that they’d have a better site. Pretty poor showing. Even the mediocre Liberal Party site is better than this.
Strangely, the one party that no one cares about is the one with the best designed site: the NDP. Nice, clean, crisp, though, based on the site, fuck if I know what they’re campaigning for.
So, if the election were to be decided by their web presence, the NDP would win a majority, though nobody would know why.
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
