Thomas Hawk has posted part 4 of his interview with Microsoft’s Media Center Bloggers.
It’s a bit of an anticlimax, because the talk is mostly about future development plans, and the answers are (predictably), “Sorry, we can’t talk about that yet.”
But the whole package is still worh reading.
Omar Shahine’s Creative Zen Micro vs iPod review is excellent, and his conclusion (“Kick Ass – better than iPod”) matches with mine. I only wish that Creative would make this device in a 20GB or larger format.
Dear Firefox developers:
When you need to publish a 12-step instruction sheet for the “Automatic Update” to version 1.0.1 (with one step further broken down into three additional steps to be used if the little red Check Now icon is missing), it’s not an automatic update.
I’m just sayin’…
Prof. Froomkin passes along the link to a fascinating little applet that lets you fill in a form containing all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The result is an HTML-formatted list of states using the following key: bold for states you’ve been to, underline for states you’ve lived in, and italics for the state you’re in now…
Here’s my list (I don’t count a state if I’ve only changed planes there):
Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /
If you’re the visual sort, you might prefer to create a map like this one (red for states I’ve visited):
I haven’t spent much time in the South or the Midwest, have I? And I was really surprised to see I’ve never been to Michigan or Ohio.
Here’s a similar tool to create a map of countries you’ve visited:
I suspect my older brother’s map would look very different from this one.
I need some recommendations. I have a retired friend who is about as non-technical as a person can get. He loves his digital camera, though, and he’s a social animal. Every time he goes to a party or on a trip with his many friends he snaps a lot of photos. For the past few years, he’s been creating photo albums with PrintMaster, printing them out using his high-end inkjet printer, and giving them away.
But now he wants to take those phot albums online instead. He has an account with a very good Web hosting company and he owns his own domain. What he’d like to do is:
Ideally, he wants something that can handle all these tasks from a single place. He doesn’t want to learn HTML (and I don’t want to answer the 10,000 questions he would have if he tried). He can handle FTP if it’s automated but please – no command lines. Being able to put the pictures on his own domain is important, so forget about any of the commercial photo-hosting services.
What would you recommend?
A random selection from my music collection. (If you don’t know the rules, read this. Inspired by Thomas Hawk, I’ve kicked the number up to 20.)
List is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in parentheses):
A fine selection, but only one woman in the list (Cowboy Junkies vocalist Margo Timmins). Gotta do something about that…
Two oddly related bits of news landed in my RSS reader this week.
First comes the news that at least one high-ranking Senator thinks HBO, Comedy Central, and other cable networks should live by the same rules as over-the-air broadcasters. Paul McLeary writes in the Columbia Journalism Review:
At a meeting of state broadcasters gathered in Washington by the National Broadcasters Association on Tuesday, [the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)] dropped the bomb that he, along with several other senators, are looking into extending “to cable and satellite TV and satellite radio the same indecency regulations faced by broadcast radio and TV,” according to Mediaweek.
This proposal to expand the FCC jurisdiction to include the hundreds of paid cable television and satellite radio stations comes on the heels of the House of Representatives passing the “Broadcast Decency Act” in February — a bill calling for an increase of the basic FCC fine for “indecent” content from $32,500 to $500,000. The Senate is currently working on its own version of the bill, which calls for a minimum fine of $325,000.
Either way, if Stevens’ plan becomes law, cable channels like HBO and Comedy Central would either have to completely alter their programming or be fined into oblivion. If they chose to succumb and live, their appeal as edgy, mature, alternative programming would be tossed out the window, in effect giving rise to a couple hundred more versions of ABC, CBS and NBC.
The MediaWeek story quotes Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) as approving of the idea.
This is simply absurd. I can somewhat understand the desire to regulate content that is broadcast over the airwaves, which are a scarce commodity and are available to anyone. But HBO? For heaven’s sake, if you don’t want to watch The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, just don’t watch. But don’t stop me from doing so. What’s next? Imposing decency controls on content delivered via the Web?
Meanwhile, Bradley Smith, chair of the Federal Election Commission, is quoted in a News.com interview as suggesting that the Federal government might decide to regulate blogging by defining each blog post in support of a candidate as a political contribution. Sounds absurd? The blogosphere is up in arms over the idea. Fortunately, one of the smartest political commentators around, Mark Schmitt, has deftly analyzed the controversy and concludes that this idea is a non-starter. Thank goodness.
My logs show a lot of people visiting this site looking for advice on how to stop Firefox pop-ups and pop-unders, which seem to have increased in frequency lately. Here’s an interesting bit of inside information from Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Organization:
A number of pundits and bloggers have been wondering aloud whether or not we’ll be able to keep up with the pop-up spammers now that more of them are focused on us. Well, we shipped 1.0 with the capability to block these pop-ups and pop-unders but we didn’t enable it because we were concerned about breaking legitimate uses. If you’d like to turn it on, it’s a fairly simple change — and would be absolutely trivial for us to enable once we determine whether or not lots of websites are depending on the feature.
Here are the specific configuration steps to take to turn on the capability to block pop-ups from plug-ins, according to Asa:
- Open your Firefox 1.0 or 1.0.1 browser.
- Type about:config in the address field and press Enter.
- Right-click in the resulting config page somewhere and click New, Integer.
- Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins in the New Integer Value dialog box and click OK.
- Type 2 in the Enter Integer Value dialog box and click OK.
That’s all you need to do. Note that there are three possible values allowed in this dialog box:
- 0: open allowed
- 1: the opened windows are treated as popups, but they’re allowed to open (Firefox limits the number of these types of popups)
- 2: the window is a popup, block it
If you try this and encounter problems, be sure to let Asa know.
An email security scanning company has accidentally deleted thousands of its customers’ emails.
GFI, a Microsoft “gold certified partner”, is now offering free upgrades to all its customers after it trashed their emails by sending out incorrect update information.
According to GFI, the problem occurred because of a change in BitDefender’s technology, one of the products that GFI uses for its email scanning. When the GFI MailSecurity update mechanism tried to install BitDefender updates on customer networks, the service started to delete all emails by default. BitDefender and GFI then rolled back the updates.
A BitDefender spokesman said: “We’ve learned our lesson. From now on we’ll try to give more support to our integration partners. The other companies that integrate our scanning engine did not have the same problem.”
Ouch!
Readers with a keen memory may recall that BitDefender also licenses its personal antivirus software to the sleazy iDownload.com, which sells it at an inflated price under the name Virus Hunter. Sounds like the company needs to pay a lot more attention to its partners.
The J-Walk Blog is still off-line. (“Maintenance,” he claimed yesterday before the site went completely dark today. Problems with MySQL? Maybe. I think a team of RIAA commandos parachuted in and took him prisoner until he agrees to join the BMC Music Club and buy at least two copy-protected CDs in the next year.)
But anyway, to pick up the slack, I present these links for your amusement:
George W. Bush’s Gettysburg Address:
A score of years ago–forty years ago, it’s forty, I know that–Americans gave the world democracy. And because of that we’re free. The world knows that. And equal. No matter who you are in America, you’re an equal American. [Applause]
And now we’re in a war. And this war is a lot like a test you have to take. It’d be a test for anybody, a test of their leadership. I’m a war leader, and I know it’s hard. You have to endure. But we’re going to see it through because, see, in a democracy that’s what you do. See through things. And I’m going to do that. It’s the right thing to do.
Go read the rest. I can actually hear the President saying these words. (Via World O’Crap)
“The first-ever cellular telephone for pets”
The PetsCell™ will allow pet owners to talk to their pets as well as allowing owners to request assistance should they become incapacitated and require help. In addition, and perhaps more valuable, pet owners will have a peace of mind that if their pet is lost and someone finds their pet wandering the streets, with a simple press of a button on the PetsCell™, the auto dial function will dial the owners home alerting the owner to retrieve their pet.
While on vacation, at work, or on the road, pets can be contacted by that friendly recognizable voice of their owners.
I know people who will seriously consider buying this. (Via Doug Klippert)
Tolkien in leet-speak:
[Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas are running across Rohan]
Gimli: “FFS speed hax!”
Legolas: “LOL, N00b!”
**Aragorn spots the fallen broach
Aragorn: “Sif teh leaves of Lorien fall. They give +2!”[At Isengard, Saruman is with a group of Wildmen of Dunland]
Saruman: “Teh Rohirrim are tards!”
Dunlander: “Sif leet! Damn retards!”
Saruman: “Joo bring teh pwn. Go and pwn those n00bs!”
Crowd of Dunlanders: “WOOT!”
It may not make sense unless you’ve read F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng first.
(Via Boing Boing)
