Tag: Internet

Google Reader Shares and Notes – Broke?

A couple of add-ons to Google Reader today. Firstly you can now add notes to content you share, or just plain notes. These are then added to your share stream which is something I’ve been meaning to add to the blog for a while. You should see my shared items to the right of this post unless you using, em, Google Reader.

Google Reader

The other addition is a bookmarklet for your browser which lets you swipe text in your browser, add an optional note to the text and then post that content to your shared items list. This sounded like an excellent addition except for one silly flaw. I can edit the swiped content before posting to my shared items but there’s no mention that the edit was done by me. Looking at my shared items I’ve linked twice to the Google post about these new features. However I edited the second posting adding in ‘crappy little’ – see screenshot above. The only way to see the difference would be to click on the link to the Google post and check for differences. Not hot. In the stream to the right of this post because only links are shown the issue is hidden. You would need to subscribe to my shared items for it rear it’s head but surely it’s easier to prohibit editing as the note feature is there if you want to add your own comment? Just need to remember to share more now that it’s added to the blog.

Virgin Nonsense

So more bad press from Virgin. Their new CEO has said that net neutrality is a load of bollocks. Nice. He then threatens the BBC, not directly, by saying that public sector broadcasters should pay for faster access to Virgin customers or find their content delivered at a lower speed.

He also indicates that discussions are underway with content providers to deliver their content at better speeds than others. So those with bigger pockets will get a pretty big advantage on Virgin. They’ll be on the fast lane while others are in a normal or slow lane. So what’s to stop people paying to have better speeds and throttle others? How can this be fair? How can startup’s hope to compete if an ISP has the power to kill their service overnight.

I’d love to see the BBC block all their content to Virgin customers if this starts to heat up. That would really show who has control in this situation. It won’t happen but it would be an interesting step. Or is it just posturing by Virgin as they are soon to launch iPlayer on their Cable boxes?

Giveth with one…taketh with the other

More Virgin Media news and this time you really do wonder what’s going on! The one that grabs most headlines is that they are to pilot a scheme working with the BPI to send letters to users downloading music illegally via P2P. The pilot is not up and running but according to the Telegraph is starting soon. In some ways it’s no big surprise as there’s been lot’s of talk about a proposed three strikes and your out system. Indeed some ISP’s have already sent letters to users warning them about the content or bandwidth they are using. As long as there are no false positives and the action they are taking is clear, transparent and applied to all users can anyone really complain? Not really, although I’m still surprised that they will act in cases of ‘suspected’ piracy. I would damn well hope they act when they have concrete evidence and it’s not just a way of targeting heavy downloaders and their Linux iso’s.

What makes this all a bit more odd is that Virgin Media are beta testing a new Usenet service. In conjuntion with Highwinds they are looking to improve their newsgroup offering. What are newsgroups – well according to Virgin they are:

…discussion forums (usually on a specific topic) but can also be used to download and upload files such as photos and videos.

No shit Sherlock. Their binary retention will be at least 7 days and text retention over 90 days. Not bad for a free service although nothing like the service you get from providers like Giganews. Notice also that newsgroups are great for photo’s and videos. No music to be found though. Or applications, games, books etc. Just photo’s and video’s.

This doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. What happens with one provider will eventually happen to all. What I want is a reliable fast connection at a reasonable price. On reflection this isn’t what Virgin are offering although I must admit to it being prety bullet proof compared to ADSL. Time to switch?

Cautionary Tale

You should always be careful when handing over usernames and passwords to programs downloaded from the internet. 99% of the time it will be fine but sometimes it could lead to ruin. Not true? Then visit Coding Horror and read about how a programmer was hiving users Google e-mail passwords. Now think how many people use the same password for everything. Scary.

If you fall into the group of one password for all sites, try 1Passwd (not trying to be ironic). Great product which should help protect your many online accounts.

Head in the Cloud…

…and other shorts. Been pretty busy since switching jobs. Enjoying getting my teeth into Oracle tools again although once thing that is VERY frustrating are Oracle application installers. Unless you have full admin rights to your Windows client then installation is a pain. In fact I’d go as far as saying installation is impossible. At our work our rights are pretty limited and even with what are called ‘developer rights’ you don’t have full client admin. It made installing Oracle, BI Publisher and a couple of other tools a nightmare last week.

To get round it I now use a VMWare image at work that I full rights over. Installations are now almost painless…although then you get caught up in some nasty bugs. Hey-ho. Performance isn’t ideal either but at the moment I don’t have much choice.

Anyway…head in the clouds. I’ve moved away from a couple of desktop tools to some hosted options. The first issue was tasks. I’ve been using iGTD for around a year now and it’s been great. A couple of time the syncing between machines got a bit screwy but it was easy to recover. There’s a big but though – I could never see my tasks at work as they were separate and in Outlook. Not ideal. So I tried Tracks and installed it on my domain. It was a lovely app, did most things I wanted but I couldn’t find a couple of key features and I had to hack in things like e-mail support. Then I remembered the milk.

So I know GTD using Remember the Milk. I can get access to my tasks and lists from Mac or PC and in future they look to have a fabby interface for iPhone users. I also like being able to subscribe to tasks in iCal and the Google Calendar plugin is excellent. Sorted. Just need to do the tasks now.

I’ve also got my own wiki installed now. Helps me have one area for notes, procedures etc. I tried a couple of hosted options but preferred my own MediaWiki install with plugins.

My final ‘find’ was Zoho. I can’t believe how feature rich this set of applications are. Very handy and they also have a wiki…I just don’t believe that my firm won’t ban access to these app’s eventually.

I guess what I’m realising is that putting more info on the cloud rather than on the desktop is a reality, is pretty easy for all and that it’s no longer a pipe dream. Not a startling conclusion but it’s been good to take more advantage of some of the web 2.0 app’s than normal.

Anyway, other stuff. Burnout Paradise is a cracking game and one that shouldn’t really be missed. I haven’t played as much as I would want to over the last couple of weeks but the few sessions I’ve played have been great. It does the online side of things really well.

Sold my old amp on eBay. Quite pleased getting £150 for it. Still to post up some thoughts on the Onkyo 705 which will probably take another couple of weeks but so far it’s been excellent, especially Blu-Ray. Thank goodness one of these formats has emerged on top. Hopefully that will lead to better hardware and cheaper prices.

Apple updates – there’s been something new in the store every Tuesday this year. The Macbook Pro updates today were pretty small – increases to processor speeds, hard disk sizes, graphics card’s and the addition of multi touch which I guess is more extensive than the current model’s use of two fingers on the touchpad. I’m pretty pleased as the laptop I bought 15 months ago hasn’t really changed much apart from the expected speed increases. I still have no regrets with the hardware…touch wood.

Finally, a rant. I do wish Virgin Media would piss off and stop calling me about their inferior TV service. While I’m happy with their broadband reliability (although not always with speed which can be pathetic sometimes) I really hate when they try and sell me TV and even maintain they have a better HD service than Sky. Liars. Better package – don’t make me laugh. Well, they eventually do but only after annoying me. I’ve asked a few times now never to call again but they still do. Time to take the matter further.

when I am through with you there won’t be anything left

Did I say finally? If you recognise the quote you’ll have been watching Damages. If not, then try and catch up with it via downloads as it’s the bet thing on TV at the moment.

Three Strikes

The Times this morning is leading with a story that the UK Government is to propose banning UK net users who download illegal material. It looks like under the scheme the ISP will be responsible for identifying and banning users using a three strikes and your out principal. Caught once and you get a warning. Caught a second time and your temporarily banned. Caught a third time and your banned by that service provider. What the article doesn’t discuss is whether the ban would apply to all service providers or whether your banning would be passed among other ISP’s.

This is a pretty tough stance and at the moment I don’t know what to think of it. How will the ISP’s identify users? What about falsely accusing a user? Will there be a way of appealing a ban? Will we create a large number of users who won’t be able to use broadband in the UK due to bans? How much information is currently being tracked and how much is readily available to government now? Will media companies make content available at more reasonable prices i.e. at least the same as US is paying? Will the hardcore pirates always be one step ahead of ISP’s so making the system redundant apart from stopping the casual downloaders?

If this does become law and the system is reliable (big if’s at the moment for me) then there’s at least one positive. Broadband speeds will be a lot more reliable and the high end speeds will be dropped by a high percentage of users. Still can’t see this becoming law, or at least one that’s reliably enforceable any time soon.

Blog Comments

Looks like there is some competition for your blog comments. Disqus and Intense Debate are both offering plug-in’s which really will change how your blog comments look and feel. User profiles, threaded comments, comment rating and even a forum for your comments are offered by both. I’ve not tried either as I would have two main worries.

1) Where are the comments held and could I move to another service with ease or just back to WordPress?

2) Spam!

Ultimately one of these (there are other services too) will start to dominate and maybe then I’ll take a look. It would be great if some of the bigger sites like Digg or BBC supported one of these services so you could have a standardised commenting system to use on any site. Certainly Intense Debate seems to have the most features, including OpenID support but their name is really bad. One to keep an eye on.

Falling Behind

Looking at these two graphs for broadband speed and price, the UK is falling behind not only world but European nations when it comes to overall connection speeds and how much broadband costs.

With more services moving to digital distribution and our ever increasing dependence on internet connections and services it’s critical that the UK’s infrastructure is improved over the next few years to give us a fast and reliable broadband service with a greater choice for the consumer.

Flock Update

Updated to new version of Flock which is based on the latest and greatest Firefox 1.5.0.6. Working well and this time I also sorted my bookmarks out removing redundant or easy to Google links and reducing their number by half – used Gordon’s post as a guide.

This cleanup has lead to making Flock my default browser – it really is that good and can’t be more highly recomended as it does everything that Firefox does but more. I also found a solution to getting my back button working in Flock:

Hi,

Just wanted to add that I recently purchased a Logitech MX610, and likewise the default mapped “back and forward” buttons (via Logitech’s SetPoint) do not work.

Temporarily, to get the “back” button to work, I mapped it to keystroke ‘BACKSPACE’.

Thanks,

Phil..
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Hard Yards

Yesterday was the first round of Christmas shopping. Jenny & Rasool were visiting so to the shops we went. Ouch – feet still sore from the 8 hours of shopping that we did. The main point is that we were pretty successful so only another couple of small trips are required.

I know folk think I’m mad doing real life shopping when Amazon can make it so much easier but it is so impersonal to order Christmas gifts that way. I hate to think of presents arriving at the house like that when I can easily pop into town and make an effort to buy them – makes it feel more like a gift. Also allows you to browse and see things you just wouldn’t see online.

Online I tend to go to certain sites, search for specific items – I find it hard to just browse. Shopping in the real world….things catch my eye, idea’s pop into my head, apple cake tastes really nice. Today was also another task that I HATE doing. Wrapping presents. It’s such a pointless exercise but we all still do it. Better watch – ghost of Christmas past will be visiting if I keep this up.