Some of my digital words seem to have leaked into today’s newspaper! Go to Knoxnews and read Teach cell phones, don’t ban them. Comments are open on Knoxnews or commentary can be added at the School Matters website.
Category: Communications
We try
We try and sometimes we fail and we try again.
Ubuntu Accomplishments – Seesmic Desktop Install
The machine on which I do most of my work is not terribly robust. My work environment would make a good premise for a Disney movie..you know..old clunker equipment doesn’t look like it should be able to pull through manages to win the race. Anyway, Seesmic Desktop in all it’s glory was dragging this machine down. Everything would work fine but I needed one more reboot than normal throughout the day. On days like today, when the work was too intense, I just couldn’t run Seesmic Desktop (maybe not a bad thing). Now that I’ve successfully installed Seesmic Desktop on Ubuntu, it can run all the time and I can occasionally glance over at the streams to see what’s happening. Installing Seesmic Desktop on Ubuntu was incredibly easy. First install Adobe Air then install Seesmic Desktop:
- Open the Terminal
- Use wget to download http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/1.5/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
- Set the file to be executable: chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
- Run it: sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
- Accept any AIR updates
- Use wget to download Seesmic Desktop from http://d.seesmic.com/seesmic/SeesmicDesktop-0.2.1.air
- On the Ubuntu desktop, not terminal, look under Applications->Accessories or Applications->Other for Adobe AIR Application Installer and run it
- Select SeesmicDesktop-0.2.1.air and the normal Seesmic Desktop installer will run
That’s it! Frankly, I think Seesmic Desktop is performing much better on Ubuntu than Windows. My only complaint would be that it failed to put a shortcut in the Applications menu.
Update: I lamented that Seesmic Desktop needed an import/export feature to get userlists and data from one computer to another and @askseesmic responded with a document explaining now to move the xml file with the necessary data. It worked great! The userlists I had organized on Windows now are on Linux. Move the xml file from one machine to the other after backing up the original:
- Max OS X:
/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>/Local Store/config/xmlAdapter.xml- Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\com.seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>\Local Store\config\xmlAdapter.xml- Windows Vista & Windows 7:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\com.seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>\Local Store\config\xmlAdapter.xml- Ubuntu & most Linux distros:
/home/<user>/.appdata/com/seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>/Local Store/config/xmlAdapter.xml[Source, Seesmic Help Desk, Transferring Settings between Computers – workaround]
This just says so much!
It’s simply amazing a how you can derive about a person in 140 characters.
URL Shorteners Causing a Stir
The Internet is in an uproar this morning. This uproar will probably be done in the next couple of hours for all but a few select people like the programmers at Twitter and Delicious. The debate? Are URL shorteners good or evil?
URLURI shorteners take a long URL like http://realityme.net/2008/08/21/can-you-rely-on-twitter-for-breaking-news/ which search engines love for the embedded keywords and reduce them to as few characters as possible like http://tinyurl.com/43abj6 which search engines may or may not like. Joshua Schachter has posted about the evils of URL shorteners with a plethora of comment from people on both sides of the fence. Dave Winer, who pioneered RSS, says that URL shortners are risky. Basically the concern is that we are creating a situation where broken links may abound on the Internet. Since two URIs go to the same place, content is being duplicated in search engines and bookmarking services and since some of these services use 301 redirects while others use 302 redirect we have no good way of crediting the link to the source. (301 means the uri has been permanently moved to a new uri, ie. the original long uri, and 302 means that the uri has been temporarily moved meaning the search engine or bookmarking service should record the short uri as the permanent resource). Other concerns revolve around archiving and longevity of these shortening services. If Twurl goes out of business, most of my shortened uris will break. As an example of this, Twurl.nl is no longer Twurl.nl but is now Tweetburner. After reading this analysis of uri shortening services, I don’t think I will be using Twurl/Tweetburner anymore anyway; I love their stats but a 302 redirect is deplorable.
To shorten or not to shorten, that is the question. A proposed solution is that publishers should automatically offer their own shortened URLs which could hurt your searchengine-fu. Personally I am going to keep my long URIs but I think I’ll switch to bit.ly or tinyurl.com while they are using 301 redirects (that is until the day they decide not to use 301 redirects…letting other people control your data is confusing isn’t it?!).
Aside: A URL is a subset of a URI. There is some debate about whether URL has be deprecated or not. See Yuri not Earl.
Need a Likaholix Invite?
I have a couple of invites to Likaholix for those who want to test it out. Likaholix is a new bookmarking service similar to Delicious but you enter why you liked the bookmark(url) and can add supporting images and videos to it. Basically, when searching for information, this lets you read other people’s positive reviews of a site before clicking through to the site. In theory, you can pick the ideal source of your needed information. Likaholix has a stronger social element than Delicious. I like Likaholix and although I do not foresee it replacing Delicious for me, it will certainly enhance my bookmarking.
On the Internet Nobody Knows I’m a Dog
I regularly talk to someone on Skype. He almost passes the Turing test. That second sentence should bother me.
Twitter Size Does(n’t) Matter
Twitter ranking and stat programs come and go. In Knoxville I’m not even on the charts but in Knoxville, TN I’m ranked #11 (falling fast! Was 5th not long ago.). It’s all non-sense. Twitter’s value has nothing to do with how large someone’s arbitrary algorithm chooses to inflate your ego. Twitter’s value comes from how you choose to use it. So why am I jealous that my wife’s e-penis is almost twice the size (26.35cm) of mine (14.32cm)?
Warning! Clicking through to e-penis is going to show a cartoonish picture of a man’s thang.
My wife has left me for Steve Jobs
At least today she’s Gone Gone Gone
Now, setting is important. The person discussing private business dealings at the topic of their lungs in a quiet restaurant draws attention to themselves and is far from invisible. The loud talking, me, me, me, attention gather is trying to draw eyes to themselves and is the opposite of invisible.
iPods, MP3 players of all types, and anything that requires we plug wires into our ears also make us invisible. Our body language says, "Don’t talk to me!" Speaking to a person with earphone plugged into their ears might be a waste of time. They may not hear you and the frustration of raising your voice, getting their attention, and repeating yourself multiple times just isn’t worth it. To simply avoid talking to them is less physically exerting and less stressful. So we avoid interrupting people listening to their music or podcasts and they too become invisible. Today my wife joins the invisible people as she listens to loud music and gets things done around the house.
Blog Fading
A favorite Knoxvillian of mine is fading from the social media spotlight. Russ McBee is ending his participating in the blogosphere, twittersphere, and socialsphere in general with the exception of the photosphere.
I’m ending this blog, effective immediately. It’s been fun (mostly), but I’m signing off, for personal reasons. I’m also deleting my accounts at Twitter and Utterli, but I’ll keep my PBase account active.
This site will remain live until either my hosting account expires or I decide to delete it on a whim, whichever comes first.
Goodbye.
I’ll preserve his final message for prosperity. And one day I want to know why PBase over Flickr.
I have enjoyed reading Russ’ blog and Tweets. His contributions shall be missed!
Latest Internet Nuisance
This morning I received an email from two people who don’t normally send me email. Both emails were almost identical and inexplicable. One was sent to me while the other revealed the 87 or so email addresses it was sent to and appears to have been sent through gmail. I presume a worm, trojan or virus is sending this message to people’s complete address books. If you get one of these, you may want to let the send (not the entire mailing list) know that they need to scan their computer. Click more to see the email. Continue reading Latest Internet Nuisance
SuperNews! Twouble with Twitters
Do the Twitter Dance
Got Twitter Mania?
iJustine wants to be on the Ellen Show.
iJustine’s squeaky voice inspired by Twitter Ruined My Life or vice versa.
Today’s Background Process
Today I am moving/archiving 10 years of email from Outlook to Gmail. Yes, I should probably just delete it but I still look stuff up on occasion and I am curious to see how this impact’s Gmail’s searching speed. See also: How to Import from Windows Mail, Live Mail or Outlook Express in Gmail and IMAP client configurations.
The New York Times is following me on Twitter!
So I’m 1 of 992 people that The New York Times is following on Twitter! Does that make me a new source? A lead generator? Am I newsworthy?! Oh wait a minute. 992 is just under 1000 followers. Did The Grey Lady just spam me?!
