I just joined FriendFeed, which is like a Facebook News feed created by pulling your friends’ Flickr/Twitter/etc. feeds all into once place. I love it already.
I almost joined one of their competitors, Spokeo, but 30 minutes after the Spokeo email address verification, they sent a spam email titled, I kid you not, “Why don’t you want to see your friends?” WTF? And another today. They should change their name to Spookeo.
Today Wine 1.0 and Firefox 3 were released, which will probably be remembered as a milestone in the open source software movement.
Wine is a Windows emulator for Linux, in the colloquial sense of the term – that is, it allows you to run many Windows applications straight from Linux. This because there are probably many people interested in Linux who can’t switch because of a few Windows applications they need. This allows them to switch, assuming those programs work in Wine.
(More technically, I think I understand that Wine is not an emulator – which is actually what the acronym stands for – because it just reproduces the API without mucking about with more basic levels of Windows. Right?)
And Firefox I suppose needs no introduction. I’ll just say I rather like the new and improved location bar.
I want to futz with my Pipes, but last time I tried I couldn’t find anything terribly user friendly, and ended up resorting to guess-and-check.
The “web as platform” concept — the increasing ability to do everything via a web browser — started with easy applications like word processing, but as time passes more complex programs are going online. Adobe recently put a stripped-down version of Photoshop online for example, probably to preempt competition.
Thing is, I haven’t come across any other online photo editors I’ve been crazy about. I do use Snipshot for cropping and resizing sometimes, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.
But I’m excited about Aviary — the photo editor looks decent, and they’re promising a long list of other useful tools. I has five three private beta invites for anyone that wants one…
Really this is more about viral marketing than beta testing I’m sure, but I’ll bite
Just sent someone the following:
Hey [Person I Don't Really Know],
Have you been sending me application invitations? If so, could you stop? :)If not (and I suspect this is the case), you might want to look into the apps you have installed — I think some of them send your friends invites without your permission.
Peace!
Zach.
If you have Firefox and Greasemonkey (and if you’re an elite ’pooter user, you should), you might try these scripts for blocking them.
(Yes, by this point I’ve spent more time on this blog post than I have on getting rid of invitations — consider it a selfless service for my readers…)
The hosting coop I host my websites at upgraded its servers last year (over a decent stretch of time, to put it mildly), and it’s past time that I take the final steps of migrating my stuff to the new servers. Technically the deadline was December 31, but they’re keeping the old servers online for various reasons, and I’ve been too busy to migrate until now.
I’ve put in at least 4 hours today, and so far I’ve only got Quakerpedia migrated. And the feature that rewrites the URLs to be prettier — John Woolman instead of index.php?title=John Woolman — isn’t working. But I did get www.quakerpedia.org to work without messing up the preexisting en.quakerpedia.org, so I feel a little bit of pride in my humble geek skills.
Next is Opensolo, the online portion of a friend of mine’s dance thesis, and then the quakerism.net blogs. I did If I told you earlier, since it was so easy. (On that subject, sadly, the Bay Windows article is gone due to their restructuring their site… here are the first few paragraphs.)
'If you're a believer ... the most dubious thing becomes possible. Your faith and your aggression should be limitless.' (Josh Axelrad)
This work by Zach Alexander is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.