A Random Pattern

Google and Skype – interoperability a possibility?

Unfortunately, I share the concern of others that the wording is “explore”. I had hopes for a more aggressive position, but it’s too early in the relationship and the companies involved don’t want to ‘over-promise, under-deliver’.

Still, this means good things for all of us. For example, some of the IT folks in my company are quite hostile to Skype. I’m with them on this, as I don’t like all the resources it eats up, or other problems it causes. It’s not just my company that has a problem with this either.

On the other hand, I’m a big fan of Google Talk, and would like to see it used more. One really great way for it to grow is for it to inter-communicate with other IM clients / networks. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but think of it this way: I would like to use Google Talk instead of Gaim, Skype, etc. Unfortunately all my contacts are already on those other networks, so I either try to force them all to change (yeah right), run several clients (hello slow computer), or don’t get to use Google Talk because I don’t have friends on the network. If I could talk to the other networks through Google Talk, suddenly I can decide which client I prefer, and other people can choose something different that meets their needs, and we can still talk!

The other thing to note is that this announcement goes beyond the XMPP support Google already brought with GTalk’s introduction. Not only do they have a commitment to an open standard for IM (text chat), and not only are they helping define an open standard for voice / other interaction (Jingle), but now here’s another step towards real interoperability BETWEEN VOIP CLIENTS, WITHOUT THE ‘OLD’ PHONE NETWORK INVOLVED AT ALL.

Imagine a world where IM or VOIP is just like email or the telephone. It doesn’t matter if your friend uses Cingular or Verizon, you can still call her from your AT & T phone. It doesn’t matter if your business partner has an @comcast.com email, or an @mylastname.com email.

Speaking of which, along with my own domain, I have a new IM name: step@ransomedhome.com.  It’s mine, I own it, I can take it with me as long as I own my domain name.  So if you want to email or IM me, you can use the same contact information.  :)  See how great having an open IM network would be?!

The ever-useful Ubuntu blog led me to a top-10 list on Ubuntu apps, posted on the also always-useful Lifehacker site. There was also a link from the Ubuntu blog to a write-up on the Washington Post.

There are some different views on software philosophy presented in the articles. I often see GNU/Linux users expressing this philosophy of “the CLI (Command Line Interface) method is better because …”, the truth is not so simple. I guess it depends on where you want GNU/Linux to go, though. I’m coming from the Windows world, yet fairly familiar with command-line, since I use it regularly at work. So in one sense I appreciate the power and speed of just typing in what I need done so that I can move on. I also love that if someone knows how to fix your problem, or wants to share an app, they can just say “type ‘blah blah blah’ and tell me what you see”. It’s much more definitive, powerful, and effective, not to mention faster, than trying to talk through a GUI (Graphical User Interface, which is what you stare at every day on the computer screen). At the same time, perhaps 80% of the commands are worthless to me long-term. I do too many varied tasks with the computer, and I want to enjoy and be effective in certain of those things. The best way to enable that? Eliminate the memory issue, by providing a GUI.
GNU/Linux – if you’re involved in Linux, you ought to read the attached link. I’ve seen the term GNU many times, knew what it stood for (GNU’s Not Linux), had some vague idea what it was…. I didn’t realize that what we mistakenly call Linux is really just the kernel, just one part of the whole GNU/Linux package. One thing I haven’t done is verified the facts in the linked article, so let me know if it’s actually wrong. Seems hard to imagine someone fighting that battle without the facts behind them, though.

I’ve been thinking about one of the fun little extras Steve Jobs showed off at WWDC not too long ago: The ability to replace backgrounds in iChat video chats. Here are some ideas that I’m sure someone will play around with as soon as Leopard is available:

• Wear a t-shirt that matches the background. Presto, there’s a hole in your stomach! (Don’t know if this will work, depends on how they implemented the algorithm.
• Take a screenshot with your head in the picture. Does your head now disappear?
• Create a fake background with yourself, then “walk in” on yourself while chatting with someone else.

Remember, folks, you heard it here first. Here’s the site that gave me the idea, with a rundown on Leopard:

… In addition, a sophisticated chroma key algorithm was added so that a user can do a snapshot of the background he is chatting in front of, and it will remove the background and key in a background image or video of the user’s choice. For corporate presentations, podcasts or just plain having fun, this is a great feature. …

Update:  Links to WWDC, the Leopard sneek peek iChat page, and a picture from Apple showing the new backdrop effect:

With the fixes I implemented last night, careful inspection later (read: today) reveal that I partially broke my page in IE. Yet another reason that you should be browsing the web in style. A fix is in progress, and I’ll document it here when I get it actually working.

I also verified that the sidebar on single pages goes right over the footer. I found one suggestion for fixing it, but that didn’t seem to work. Anyone have any ideas?

My fix for navigation links on single posts didn’t fix anything. So back to the drawing board for that too…

Update:  The breakage on IE was worse than I thought, so I’ve moved the subscription block back to the bottom right for now.  Hopefully the fix for that is easy.

Here are a few links on getting Ubuntu up and running with all the little goodies you might want:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-14062.html This is a forum where airtonix has a post (near the bottom) on getting WordPress up and running on Ubuntu. I’m still struggling with this, but realized I went about it the wrong way. There’s an option when you first install Ubuntu to install a “LAMP” stack. Choose this if you want to use your installation as a server for WP publishing, even privately.

http://torrez.us/myubuntu/ Someone writes on going “cold turkey” Ubuntu. Interesting, if a bit scary at first, with a ton of CLI (command line interface) stuff. My recommendations: 1. Don’t read this unless you’re a big geek. 2. Just install Ubuntu, and do things the nice easy graphical way. When you run into a problem, then worry about solving it. It’s much easier to take things one challenge at a time, and every issue you face is solvable one way or another.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=186792 Similar to above, but a little more friendly. This is an Ubuntu “customization guide”, and the idea is to make sure you can use all the proprietary stuff that you also used on Windows or Mac, probably without realizing it. Stuff like Adobe reader, Flash, mp3s, all those are licensed and somebody has to pay for you to use a copy. Luckily there are easy ways to get this set up on Ubuntu. Again, my recommendations: Try easyUbuntu and automatix first.

Could it be what I’ve been hoping and looking for? A collaborative whiteboard-type environment with IM, and it’s open-source to boot?! Of course, it looks like it has some, ahem, rough edges…

Performancing adds a MySpace Blog Editor – Who’da’thunk’it? On one hand, I’m thinking “yay Performancing“, great plugin, want to see them get more traction. On the other hand I’m seriously not too pleased with MySpace, and don’t want to see them get any bigger than they already are. On the third hand, this plugin may be one step needed to break the MySpace dominance…

Let me explain a little:

1. I didn’t understand MySpace at all, but I got a page anyways because two of my favorite bands were on there, Unsed and .heretoday.

2. I discovered there was no way to remove the ‘astrological sign’ junk on my main MySpace page. That’s just plain lousy and lame. On top of that, “TrueLuv” ads with scantily-clad women pulling at their skirts shows up every time I log in. You have no idea how much that ticks me off.
3. I discovered a few other people in my circle of friends, and since I had moved MySpace is the only way I would be able to keep in touch with them.

4. We had the neighbors over for dinner, and their son has a MySpace page. We discussed MySpace, because I still wasn’t getting why it was popular. Then it hit me as we talked – kids don’t care about any of the stuff I complain about. They just want to keep in touch with people, be cool, have friends.

The more I think about it, the more MySpace’s success makes sense. And it’s a little scary, because I don’t think the site is healthy – I think it’s a trap for our kids. Not that good can’t come of it, just that it facilitates evil far too easily.

But MySpace’s lead won’t be easily overcome. There’s no easy way to catch up with a friend network like that…

Just some quick links for bloggers and tech hounds out there:

-Plogger, a photo gallery tool. I may experiment with it here on my blog, though it doesn’t sound like it has the ability to add other users who can upload photos / media.
-Zapr is still in beta, but looks like a nice tool if you need to send large files to other people. I often do, so I will probably review this app sometime soon.

-The review actually gives Windows Live Writer (also in beta) surprisingly good marks. It’s a tool for posting to blogs, and sounds like it’s got a lot of the features missing from everything else.

-Interested in Content Management Systems? Here are some guidelines on how to pick a CMS.

-As I’ve become more interested in Design, I’ve noticed the difficulty in getting my company to acknowledge the need for this type of role. The problem, at least with the people I work closest with, is that this type of role is still not well enough known or valued. Here’s an article on how design is becoming part of some company strategies.

-Ok, this software virtualization thing will be a little hard to describe unless you’re pretty hardcore geek. Here’s the basic idea: if you download and try lots of windows software, only to end up not using 2/3 of it and having problems with finding the other 1/3, this is one tool to help. It DOES NOT GUARANTEE PROTECTION from spyware, but for regular apps it will let you install them, and later remove them, without your Windows PC (registry, et all) getting bloated, slow, and troublesome. Cool, huh?

Interested in getting a Remote-Desktop-type setup to work?  I’m overdue for another post on the Ubuntu and Kubuntu methods of doing this, but in the meantime here’s a good link for setting up between a Mac and a Windows PC.  It uses rdesktop, as the Microsoft client for Mac is apparently not very good.

As you can see by my last test post, I do have the arc90 lab javascript code working. Now I just need to clean it up (it’s a mess!) There are several things I want it to do differently, but hopefully you’ll just notice the improvements and not all the work (frustration) going on behind the scenes.

I’ve just been looking through some buttonsnap and moresmilies php code, and it looks like it might take me a little longer than I hoped to make my first plugin. So for now I’m going to manually insert my sidenotes by hand-coding.

While I’m on the subject, I’ll list the other things I want to accomplish with this plugin. But first, I’d really love your feedback on whether these sidenotes are useful or distracting, and what could be done to improve them.

1. Change the colors. I want to tone them down quite a bit. The free colorpix tool will help tremendously here.
2. Make them behave more like the other hyperlinks on this page. That is, red text until you move the mouse near them, at which point the sidenote shows up.

3. Behind the scenes, I want to make it easier to create sidenotes. Instead of manually typing a bunch (ok, a little) code, I just want to click a button and type in the sidenote. Even better, I hope to have it handle urls (web addresses) and perhaps images gracefully. Cross your fingers.

4. Finally, I’d like to clean it all up into one or two nice little plugins, then yank it out of my code and use it properly as a plugin. This is probably me dreaming, because I doubt I really have the know-how to finish this. Hey, if anyone wants to mentor, answer questions, or even just help out a little….

Last thing on WP plugins. Here are a few of the articles that helped me get started.

Good recommendations on software tools to use

How to write a simple WordPress plugin

Tons of useful WP articles. Tips, tricks, you name it she’s got it.

The codex (official WP documentation) on plugins. It’s all greek to me. :p