Art & Photography
Fred has announced BarCampRDU 2007 will be August 11. Go over to his blog post to learn more. Registration will happen soon on the wiki. It’ll be held at Red Hat in Raleigh again. I hope Ruby and I can go this year. Last years event was held on our wedding day! 🙂
UpdateThis event will not be on Aug. 11. Some sorta conflict…. Will blog new date when I know it.
Update 2August 2, 2007 is the new date. That’s a Thursday…
This pre-cookie monster computer eater vid by Henson and Oz is really funny…. for luddite humor. 🙂
via boing boing
Now that I’m doing a lot more web dev I feel the pain of this poor animal. For goodness sakes… stop the suffering use open standards!
Desktop images of various sizes available here.
I just purchased my dream machine. A MacBook Pro, 15.4″ wide matte LCD, 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB Ram, 150GB HD. Plus I got a Microsoft bluetooth mouse that works on the mac very well. My old ibook is still around but happily resting.
One of the best parts is running Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine. I’m as big of a Windoze hater as the next mac zelot but… I use Windows for work. Testing web designs in different browsers mainly. Windows actually does somethings a bit better. (blasphemy!) So I use both.
I set up Windows XP SP2 with Apple’s Boot Camp. It can resize hard drive partitions without destroying the data you already have. (not many mac apps can do this) This enabled me to dual boot. In order to use Windows I had to restart the machine and hold down the Option key. This gave me ability to select the OS I wanted to boot too. But only one OS at a time…
Because my work requires me to go back and forth testing on different browsers I needed to do something a bit quicker. (Despite the fact this is the fastest booting machine I’ve ever owned) Plus what follows is just cool as hell.
The solution was to use Parallels to run a real Windows install virtually. You might ask why did I create a whole new partition to install Windows on when I could have just created a virtual machine?
Parallels Desktop for Mac will boot a Windows install on a partition just like it’ll boot the OS in a file. This way I can boot into the Mac OS then start the Windows OS with Parallels then use Apple + Tab keys to switch back and forth between different applications in different operating systems. Parallels even shares out a Mac directory so you can read and write to it from Windows.
This setup is much quicker than using Alt + control or Alt + Enter to leave the Parallels virtual machine. Its so quick it actually keeps up pretty well with the speed of my work.
A big leap forward in productivity and power IMHO.
end geek transmission… thank you ruby!
Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion blog tips us to the new NBA social network site FanVoice (beta). The folks over at the ACC should hire some local talent to create a social networking site for ACC fans. Especially for college basketball and college football. I’m not a big sports fan but I would use the hell outa’ such a website to keep up with UNC basketball. It would kick ass! Especially if fans could submit pictures and videos. Ed Cone and I have mentioned the importance of fan participation. Capitalize on it ACC.
Some people the ACC should contact about this ASAP. Ruby Sinreich [social network guru], Fred Stutzman [social network scientist], and Brian Russell (me) [social web site designer]. 🙂
See also my post Creativity + Fans x Love = Money for more ideas.
Update: Ed Cone asks, “Why wait for the league? An exogenous effort might work as well or better. I’d be interested in helping to create one.” Sean Coon responds, “you already have one at flickr… pimp it.”
Big props to Fiona Morgan for writing about all the work people are doing in the Triangle to bridge the digital divide. The Independent has the following stories:
The future of individual empowerment is dependent on information access. For people young and old to create the good life they want they must have knowledge. That knowledge is increasingly obtained digitally.
Hat tip to Paul Jones.
This new online software creation app by Yahoo called Pipes could be a big deal. (requires Yahoo login) I’m going to play with it this weekend and report back here.
It seems to me much more than a way to mash up different web services. Its a visual programing tool. Non-techie people programing could cause a radical transformation on the web.
Tim O’Reilly has some good thoughts about Pipes.
…to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.
The Trojan Room Coffee cam was the first web cam. It was set up to see if coffee was ready in another room. Geeks are lazy by nature. Laziness inspires all kinds of great innovation!
Don Sizemore has set up a web cam to see how long a line is at an outside coffee stand. (The camera isn’t pointed there yet. But soon… hopefully.) Our beloved Daily Grind Coffee is in a temporary trailer home. Its cold out right now so why not find out what’s up before you get in line? Fortunately or unfortunately for me I get to work early enough to beat the lines. 🙂
Thanks for telling me about this Paul!
A new social networking site for non-profits and causes called Change.org has launched. It uses Web 2.0 stuff (tag clouds, groups, blogs, etc.) to help people organize around issues and create… Change. (I hope)
Its a beautiful idea that lots of smart people have been thinking about and working on. Nice to see something like this implemented. This could be some really powerful stuff.
On first glance it looks good. I’ll be using it for sure. Ruby is bound to have more to say about it soon. Until then here is a review on Read/WriteWeb that Rabble pointed me to.
John Joseph Bachir adds this bit of advice for the mainstream media. See his post, Television talking to bloggers (and: I was on TV!!!!!!!!1111111one), for full context.
WNBC wants to take advantage of a more distributed information collection model. Fine. But this does not bridge the gap between old media (TV) and current media (blogging/internet). The internet is about conversation, removing degrees of separation between people, feedback…. I could go on. If WNBC is serious about participating in our world, they need to make their content accessible and usable after it has aired, allow feedback on their stories either via direct comment threads or forums on the website, and PARTICIPATE in these new tools. Have a presence on their forums. Adapt programming to the feedback… I know, I’m dreaming.
And dream on we will…
If TV stations allowed their video content to be shared, reused, and remixed that would be an excellent offering to their communities. A serious first step towards fair partnerships with bloggers and other content creators.
Put permanent links on your websites to copies of YOUR audio and video files. Encourage people to download the content and make something new with it. We’re already sharing our content. Not its your turn.
I know copyright is complicated. Creative Commons is the answer. It doesn’t circumvent the rights of Copyright holders it augments it.
Video: Building on the Past by Justin Coen
Brian C. Russell 