Rant: Share The Web
June 18, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: OSX, PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Read These, Web Design & Dev, gnash-teeth
It seems everywhere I turn someone is writing, talking or funding another “share the web” “social networking” site. Almost all of them have the same recipe.
- Build a site using LAMP or Ruby On Rails
- Provide free registration - possibly an upgrade path.
- Ajax/Flash - Upload photos, videos, music, misc data files and other content.
- Bookmark, rate, tag, comment on third party web pages.
- Offer various feeds of points 3,4
- profit. ok maybe not.
So basically that’s exactly the same thing the web already was/is before the new buzz words, each website is a collection of files and links. Sometimes these websites are a collection of users, for example Slashdot. It existed long before the buzz and granted it’s mostly a troll haven of thrice posted news from the month before it’s still an example of online social behavior on a large scale - pre-blog era (PBE). Of course in the PBE we also had web-rings, the sort of primordial slime of social networking.
So blogging software (ie CMS) made it more accessible for users that found Front Page and MS Word too difficult to create a crappy web site and couldn’t figure out the shareware FTP software to upload to their 3rd rate ISP’s IIS server. Suddenly we have a lot more content online and everyone is happy from the guy with the crappy content and site to the ISP. I’m okay with that, people should feel like they can express themselves. I remember how I felt when I first learned HTML and put up my very own completely pointless website. (Actually several of the commercial ones I’ve done are equally pointless but it was a paycheck.)
I’m also okay with sites like delicious (despite it’s horrible name), same with digg. I don’t regularly use them but they were good ideas initially that seem to have reached their full potential. The number of copycat sites may now cease.
Tagging in general just seems like a general good way at categorization of existing content and many sites that have nothing to do with socializing are making use of it.
Audio and video casting have their places.
What do I have against sharing the web and social networking? I love the idea of sharing, in fact my favorite tool is StumbleUpon. I simply adore it and can’t imagine the Internet without it. It’s simply the gold rush mentality and the ‘drive by media‘ both on and offline which are fueling it. The sheer number of sites trying to combine all of this using my above non-patented recipe is absurd and is beginning to annoy me with all the attention they are getting. Same with the clones of digg, flickr, et al.
What’s worse is the old school businesses that slap a delicious logo on their website and say they are embracing social networking. Having news releases put out and charging customers more for the logo. Let it go, lets continue to innovate and can people stop using 2.0 after every silly thing.
What are you working on Senior Castle you may ask? Well I can’t tell you, binding contracts and all that, but pay you no mind what I’m doing. And as to PRWeb we’re using social networking concepts where they make sense. Most of which are just various ways to interact with our existing data and are not the core of our business model, something we’ve always done and embraced during the PBE.
What’s out there? What’s next? I’m ready to move on. Too many people are on this bus, riding this wave. The more I ponder it the more I see what’s going on the less excited I am. The next thing, in my mind, requires new interfaces, which means new OS’s and protocols. Maybe I’ve watched too many Japanese cyborg-mech cartoons and read all of Gibsons books (even the really bad Idura one) more than once. But for what I want to do it doesn’t exist yet and frankly I’m not smart enough to create these new standards so I have to wait for the rest of you to catch up and build the damn thing for me.
I’m an armchair visionary, my mutant gene gives me the ability complain and whine without shame. Surely somewhere, in some government lab of DARPA, the DOD or the MASAD someone is working on the future. Are you?
Unlit Anger
June 17, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: OSX, TimeWaster, gnash-teeth
For Fathers Day, on a whim I bought myself some movies. Including a DVD of The Matrix (my VHS copy is horribly worn), Invader Zim ‘Complete Invasion’, and the Riddick Trilogy. I’ve seen Pitch Black which was rated ‘meh’ and The Chronicles of Riddick I thought was pretty sweet, the third in the set is called The Chronicles of Riddick ‘Dark Fury’. It is this which I shall complain about (and my post title mocks).
So I spent quite a bit of time and energy syncing my movies onto my AppleTV, all excited I set down to watch this new movie. Instead of something akin to The Chronicles it’s a cartoon. Si. The art and dialog is something along the lines of Aeon Flux, the plot takes place between the two “real” movies (an annoying trait that the Matrix series shares). I did give it a chance, watched the whole thing, but was left disgusted. I really don’t want to waste anymore energy on this horrible toon, let my post serve as a warning to those that follow.
Blessed Is My Mac
June 17, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
1 comment so far Categories: Insider, OSX, Puter Stuff
As many of you know, I come from a nix background, primarily those of the RedHat base, and Gnome flavor. Having access to the command line interface is actually where I spend most of my time no matter what platform I’m on, since the two tools I use primarily are ssh and Vim. With windows I alternate between Putty/PSCP and Cygwin, sometimes I’d start a remote Xsession and fire up Gnome Terminal, but it doesn’t work well with multiple monitors and doesn’t provide access to my local system.
OSX comes with a Terminal application which has many features and settings, that I’m pretty happy with. It does not however, support tabs like Gnome Terminal or saved sessions like Putty. So last night I’m minding my own business, tra la la around the net and I discover iTerm.
iTerm is written in Cocoa the native language of OSX, and it supports the few extras I wanted very well.
- Bookmarks - or saved session, with custom shortcut launch keys.
- Tabs - which can be rearranged and even dragged between windows or into its own window.
- Hot Keys - Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+# do exactly what you’d expect, including being able to cycle through tabs.
It also supports a few extra features I wasn’t looking for, but could come in handy.
- The ability to send a single command to all open terminals.
- Create many saved profiles for keyboard, display, and terminal.
- Supports AppleScript for automation.
- Supports Bonjour protocol.
- Allows select to copy (like Putty), whereas in Terminal you have to explicitly Ctrl+c
- Tabs change color to indicate activity.
- Print Screen or Buffer
- Logging
- Saving buffer to local text file.
If you’re an OSX user who needs a proper CLI application, I recommend downloading iTerm.
Green Lantern Corps
June 15, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
3comments Categories: Picture of the Day, Squirrels, TimeWaster
Inspired by Littlehands I decided to take the super hero personality quiz, low and behold one of my childhood favorites comes up. Not just any Lantern, but the Silver Age of comics Hal Jordan. Muy cool. Seriously I have nice legs, I’d made those tights look cool.
You are Green Lantern
|
Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.  |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz
Oops I’ve Done It Again - PRWeb Feature Video
June 11, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: Castle, Insider, PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Web Design & Dev, gnash-teeth
This week you’ll see a lot of buzz going on about the latest deployment of one of my creations - PRWeb Feature Video.
Awhile back before PRWeb sold to Vocus, one of PRWebs power users Lee Odden asked PRWeb Founder and then CEO, David McInnis if we could support embedded video and I took the lead to develop it. After much thought and prodding from David, I defined some simple requirements for myself.
- Provide for the embedding of multimedia within the release in the easiest way possible.
- I did this by creating a widget within the Advanced Features of the PRWeb News Management console which allows a customer to paste in just about anything from the HTML code most sites offer for embedding into a blog to the URL for the video itself. Customers need only know how to copy and paste, I do the rest.
- Allow for customers to use all of the embedded features - Quotables and the News Image without over crowding the textual element of the release.
- I accomplish this by standardizing the height and width of the Feature Video in addition and merge it with the Quotables I developed if the customer has enabled this option. The placement is predefined allowing for ideal readability at 1024×760 resolution if all options are enabled.
- Allow for the usage of existing media already shared online.
- I started with supporting three of the most popular video sharing sites online - Youtube, Google Video, and Yahoo Video.
- Not increase the bandwidth, server space, and most importantly sidestep the legal ramifications of a video sharing site.
- By making use of existing content on other video sharing sites a customer must only upload the video once, in this way I do not need to provide for storage of video and its conversion to flash. PRWeb incurs no additional bandwidth load. Additionally we rely on these third party video sharing sites and their terms of service to perform the bulk of the policing of copyright infringement and other legal issues.
Why did you call it “Feature Video” you may ask? I named it that because of the end result I envisioned. I did not want the video to be included as a file attachment to the release, it should be fairly prominent on the order of the News Image, and therefore must occur within the body of the release. In this way the naming was descriptive, intuitive and simple.
Several customers have participated with a beta test of the initial incarnation of Feature Video, including one of my favorite networks - the Discovery press release for TLC. They seem to be pretty happy with the service and tools my team has created and David originally built by the looks of their Feature Video.
Updated: At the request of a co-worker I have removed some commentary which could effect stock prices, birth rates, and crop yields. The commentary is merely on a hiatus and will be released in a future follow-up post.
Clams Don’t Have Teeth
June 10, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Insider, Science, Squirrels
Oh my goodness, I’m still crying as I type this. Below is letter I originally found here, it is a response written to a gentleman who apparently keeps sending items he digs up to the Smithsonian.
The response is written much in the same good natured tone that my colleague Kevin responds to help desk tickets. I can imagine that had Kevin and I never met the way we did, well I could be Mr. Williams and he could be Mr. Rowe.
Update: Poem points out that this is an urban legend. I still think it’s hilarious tho.
Dear Mr. Williams:
Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post…Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago. Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be “Malibu Barbie.”
It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:
1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-homonids.
3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.
This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution,
but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:
A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.
B. Clams don’t have teeth.
It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.
Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiff-arino.
Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.
However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a Hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly.
You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your Newport back yard. We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.
Yours in Science,
Harvey Rowe
Chief Curator- Antiquities
Big Business Crushes Creativity
June 7, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Insider, PRWeb, Squirrels, gnash-teeth
A friend of mine works for a large banking corporation in the tech sector and had this choice quote which adequately describes rather well what most of my other friends and colleagues have to say about similar big business and government jobs.
“I am going to go hire a mentally handicapped bum with schizophrenia to replace me.”
I on the other hand am fortunate enough to have worked for PRWeb where creativity is nurtured.
New Technology Rattles Lilliput
June 7, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Insider, PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Squirrels, gnash-teeth
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about all the people out there who are using marketing buzzwords likes it’s fat free margarine. Obviously we’re just having fun at the expense of everyone else. It goes a little something like this:
Friend: have you heard about this new technology called Ajax?
Me: no! what is it? sounds very web 2.0 ish
Friend: okay, it is a “Web 2.0″ technology are you familiar with ‘Web 2.0?”
Me: isn’t that something to do with windows vista?
Friend: Yes, I think so , it is like a new technology on the Internet
Me: you mean the tubes?
Friend: no silly the InterWEb. it is like a network
Me: like my supply chain network. so its a series of trucks?
Friend: basically its similar how can I explain this…. it is like a bunch of phones but there are buttons on the phones and you can write stuff so that is like a network
Me: so i can write to my mom on my new truck powered phone?
Friend: pretty complicated stuff basically but she needs a phone too. i mean, a typewriter phone. basically the InterWeb is going to take over faxing and you can just ajax
Me: sweet. i’m going to start telling people i’ll ajax them instead of faxing
Friend: yes exactly also say WEb 2.0 - say you are going to ajax them web 2.0 style. i think you can use WEb 2.0 and ajax in your programming
Me: no way!
Friend: yeah
Me: windows vista is going to change the world. i better buy some microsoft stock
The Kittyzach Haderach
June 4, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Picture of the Day, Religion
