Two Slashes

Through some useless late-night meandering, I managed to come across this snarky blog post from AOL mocking Gmail’s latest addition to their popular e-mail/instant messaging platform, the ability to send SMS messages to cell phones (which has since been redacted so they can fix a few lingering bugs).  While it’s not ordinarily a big deal, some people without the appropriate plan and/or equipment might find it useful, as might someone overseas who doesn’t want to pay the “long distance text messaging” fees some wireless carriers seem to find all too important nowadays.

I find it interesting that AOL would attempt to play a humor card while they tout their own rusty horn, especially when you consider this is the same AOL that uses Google to power their search engine. Excuse me a second while I point out that this makes everyone at AOL look like a pack of three-year-olds without a babysitter and add myself to the numerous people who agree.

As someone who’s had rather interesting personal experiences with AOL over the past decade or so, I find their behavior here fairly lame.  Given those same experiences, though, I guess I can’t be too surprised.

I do have some words of advice for AOL, though (and I can think of a few others who can take something away from this as well, in a more generalized form, of course):

• When you’re trying to mock a company who may be trailing you in one area, it might be wise to consider whether you’re partners with them or not in another.  Nobody wants to do business when the only words you can say are, “I’m better than you,” especially when you seem to have forgotten that you’re not.
• Just because you’ve managed to beat someone to market with something as silly as an IM to SMS bridge doesn’t make you better.  I can’t exactly call most of Google’s offerings bloated, but I do suggest you go take a look at the whale you call your Internet portal and see how much fat you can trim out.  If it can’t function, I don’t care that it looks all glossy and shiny and can make little noises to notify me that somebody’s picking their nose.
• Perhaps there’s more to the Google branding than meets the eye, especially in professional terms.  Before you make a snide comment about Google only allowing users a Gmail domain, perhaps consider that nobody is going to use an address such as nicktabick@crazyforemail.com to conduct professional business.  (I find that address too stupid for personal use, either.  I also believe I’ve seen that address in my Spam folder before, but I digress…)
• If Halloween is a grand occasion to make fun of one of your partner/competitors, I wonder what Christmas is going to be like at the AOL offices this year.  However, for everyone’s sake, it might be better to ensure that the liquor, sugar, caffeine, and everything else that might get one of the press writers giddy is safely locked up lest someone posts a follow-up entry making fun of Time Warner.

Perhaps someone at AOL had a few too many candy bars before they came in for work (or, from the look of the timestamp on their post, on their lunch break).  Nice try, but next time around, use the sugar rush on something more productive - like decent software.

Technological advancement is great, isn’t it?  After all, it paves the way for an easier, more-enjoyable life, and it often does so in comfort.  It’s not every day, though, that said advancements are labeled terrorist tools by the U.S. Army.

According to a draft of one of the Army’s latest reports, Twitter, GPS, and voice-changing software are among the newest and hippest tools in a terrorist’s arsenal.  Yes, that’s right, things you probably wouldn’t find your neighborhood technophile without.  (Alright, maybe the voice changer is a stretch…)  Given this, the typical “terrorist profile” must include compulsive tweeters who have a tendency to get lost and then use one of those toy voice-changing bullhorns to ask directions of random strangers.

Considering the ridicule the U.S. Armed Forces is probably facing for a lack of their common sense, I’ve decided to list off a few of my own believed “terrorist tools.”  These are things that probably should have made that list as well for the sake of completeness.

• Just as Twitter allows one to follow to-the-minute updates of what their friends are saying and doing, why couldn’t RSS FEEDS function in a similar manner?  After all, they’re more or less the same thing (without the social aspect).  Subscribed to a feed put forth by their superior, your terrorist can act on whatever orders he’s been sent in seconds.
• For things that aren’t text or would be better consumed client-side, BITTORRENT would be a plausible option.  WIth the BitTorrent protocol now featuring encryption, the ability to run through Tor (and other anonymous proxies), the infinite file size limit, and the lower distribution costs resulting from its use, it’s already a great method for distributing intelligence.  Combine that with the RSS feeds I mentioned above, and BitTorrent becomes the ultimate way to keep your undercover operatives fully informed.
• To prevent any information from being leaked to the world at large, a private virtual network would be a great way to make sure information stays “in the family.”  Therefore, tools like HAMACHI are terrorist tools as well.  In addition to allowing remote support or remote LAN matches in your favorite video game, Hamachi provides a great end-to-end encrypted virtual network perfect for those building blueprints.
• There’s nothing like immersive training to make sure the trainee knows what things are going to be like in the field.  The NINTENDO WII provides a reasonable platform for combat training, given that it’s a cheap motion-sensitive platform with plenty of combat-oriented accessories available from your local GameStop.  Who said the Wii was just for kids?

Considering I use Twitter, RSS feeds, BitTorrent, Hamachi, I’ve messed with GPS systems, and I’ve played the Nintendo Wii, I should probably be looking behind my back everywhere I go at this point, as should at least three-quarters of the company I keep, lest we be mistaken for some terrorist cell and wake up in a detention center for questioning.

@bomb Countdown 5 minutes.

One of the side effects of the open-source movement is that it allows unprecedented access to what were once privately-used development builds and “test-level” software not traditionally fit for or distributed in hopes of public use.

I myself have taken advantage of this situation, adding the latest builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, Witty, and other products (some well-known, some off the beaten path) to my arsenal.  And I haven’t done this out of hopes that there won’t be problems, or simply because the new versions are “expected to fix outstanding bugs” (that’s a fringe benefit, people), but more so because the latest builds are increasingly and surprisingly mature and well-tested.  (And besides that, who could resist getting all of those new features ahead of the curve? )

At one point, the words “alpha”, “beta”, “testing”, and “development” (stop me anytime) scared people away from software and service simply because the connotation those words carried was one of buggy, incomplete, untested software.  While to some people, the meaning of these words has not changed (and I can think of “a few good reasons”™), these words are being turned into extraneous, meaningless descriptors of the applications everyone uses and loves, tacked into the name much in the same way Web 2.0 “dictates” misspelled words and dropped vowels.  (Flickr anyone?)

As Justin Cox so eagerly pointed out at the end of August, G-Mail has been in beta since it was announced, and Google doesn’t seem ready to remove the label just yet, either.  My point here is that even though the concept and implementation of G-Mail is littered with reminders of its perpetual development, it is still one of the most popular web-mail platforms available today in direct contradiction to the connotations of the “beta” label.

Google is not the only company riding the “always-in-development” bandwagon, either, but they’re definitely one of the most notable, given that they’ve taken beta software to an extreme.  According to this article, almost half of the projects they have their finger in are in some non-finalized state.

While many popular applications apply the “always-updating, always-improving” philosophy, it would be great to one day leave the computer running every night, and come back to find that my operating system has updated itself and made the experience better than it was the day before, with new features and bug fixes provided in a sort of seamless transition.  Unfortunately, I don’t think this is going to happen anytime soon because it doesn’t work too well with either of Microsoft or Apple’s business models, and I don’t see them changing their behavior anytime this decade.

Ah well, I can dream*, can’t I?

*Dreaming is in beta, with an anticipated final release date of <undetermined>.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too many Screen Savers clips on YouTube or I’m too tired to properly add up the consequences of what this might lead to, but I’ve got an idea.  A big one.  But if I’m even going to attempt it, I’m going to need your help.

First, of course, I need to explain the idea.  I’ve looked (albeit not as thoroughly as I probably should), and I don’t think I’ve found any IPTV show or podcast that centers around computer users and their questions.  Sure, shows like my own TechCentric, Hak.5, and even The Screen Savers took the occasional call-ins and e-mails, but ultimately they were airing pre-produced content that they had thought up on their own time.

I’m not as creative or well-funded as either of those latter two enterprises, but at the same time that also gives me the benefit of being able to say whatever I want to say without having to worry about losing sponsors or any of that other business-bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo any corporation or sponsored organization would be subjected to.

If you’ve skipped the previous two paragraphs, here’s the idea in short:  I’d like to start (”experiment with starting” might be a better term) a viewer-oriented vidcast answering a viewer question (or two) per episode.

This is where you come in.  Obviously, I can’t experiment with this without having questions, and in order to have questions I need to let everyone in on what I’m doing (or attempting to do).

Before I go any further, I’m going to try and lay down the following ground rules:

1. I’m not discussing religion. If you don’t get what that means, I’ll boil it down to mean that I’m not comparing X to Y and telling anyone that Y is better than X for reasons theta, beta, and alpha.  In popular usage, this would usually be referring to things like which browser/operating system/Linux distro is the best to use, but considering these are more opinion than technical, I’m not going to even put my toes in the water.
2. Be appropriate. I’m not interested in what porn sites you visited to cause whatever problem you’re having, and I’m sure nobody watching (my prediction is that this doesn’t even reach 3 people) is yearning to hear about what fetishes you have.  Keep it discrete or take it to someone with a privacy policy.
3. I am not your employer’s IT department. If you’re going to ask me questions about your work PC, you probably should be asking the friendly face on the fourth floor, not a kid with a video camera and no free time at school.  Not only will my tips possibly not work for you due to any settings your department has set you up with, but they may not be happy to hear of you tinkering with their carefully-controlled setup.  Which brings me to my next point…
4. Don’t expect episodes (if I decide to continue this experiment) to magically appear every few hours or days. As a college student, I’m already swamped in work, and add to that the content development for TechCentric, my fledgling attempt at a social life, and all the little other odds and ends I have in my daily routine, and you’ll notice that the free time left after all of the above (in which I would need to film, edit, and upload episodes) is actually negative.
5. I am not responsible if my tips result in more harm than good. I’m going to say what works for me (and should, theoretically, work for you).  However, I cannot be responsible for human error or the inevitable stupidity.  (And actually, if you toss me an e-mail full of blame, I might use it to publicly humiliate you.  Alright, maybe I wouldn’t…but you don’t know if I would make an exception… )
6. I have no budget. If your question is about something that requires me to pay $3,000 for product T, you’ll disturb fragile college budget U and cause me to fail to make my insurance payments V.  If the cost is somewhere in the ballpark of $10, I might go out and acquire whatever it is you’re asking about, but that will most likely be only if I get a decent viewer base and people decide that donations would be cool.
7. I reserve the right to filter questions. This one’s more to cover my behind than anything else, but I would rather pick questions that I can answer knowledgeably, that I have the resources to answer (i.e. Mac OS questions might be a little more difficult for me seeing as I don’t have a Mac on  hand) and that I feel might benefit a multitude of people.  If your question’s so detailed that the answer’s only going to apply to you, I’m going to skip it.  If I don’t pick you, I’m sorry.

For now, I have to figure out a distribution medium (either post videos to YouTube/Vimeo/insert-video-sharing-service-here, or go the full and involved way and put up a site with RSS feeds).  The first video or two will probably be posted here, however.  If you’d like to express your opinion or suggest something I’m overlooking on the matter, e-mail me.  I’ll also need a name (sorry, but I won’t be using Two Slashes for it no matter how many votes I get) and some cool graphics (i.e. logo for whatever name I end up with, lower thirds, and the like - I’m looking for at least some professionalism here).

For anyone worried about what’s happening with TechCentric, this is officially unrelated to and detached from TechCentric and I’m not looking to detract at all from the TC base we have going.  In fact, I hold TechCentric at a higher priority than this simply because it’s been the TechCentric crew’s ongoing pet project for the past several years in all of its forms.

Of course, I think that leaves me with one last loose end.  For now, go ahead and e-mail questions to the G-Mail account listed on the Contact page, but there’s a special requirement:  subject lines must start with “[question]” (exactly as written, but without the quotes).  This is more so I can set up a filter to set them aside in their own special pile, but it also means that the person asking the question isn’t as brain-dead as some of the people I’ve talked to in my life.  (Yes, I’d prefer if you had a head.)

I think that just about sums it up.  Let’s break the bottle and see where this goes.

And a special thanks to Calais for suggesting that the ideal tag for this post was “insurance payment.”  I kept it simply out of humor.

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of geekdom’s most famous titles.  If you don’t already know where I’m going with this either by the date (and time) or the title quote, I’m referring to the original Wargames.  (Notice I say ‘original,’ as Hollywood saw fit to retrofit a sequel this year as well.  Perhaps in celebration, perhaps simply because they’re running out of material and saw a chance to recycle.  Any guess at the reason is as good as mine.)

Regardless, Wargames still stands as one of the required movies on any techno-buff’s watchlist, and for good reason.  While we may not be headed into nuclear war anytime soon (Requisite “In Soviet Russia…” joke here), the movie packs several remnants of geek culture of the time up in a family-friendly (it’s not often I can genuinely use that) but reasonably accurate(-for-Hollywood) bundle.

I really don’t have too much to say at the moment, so I’ll make it brief.  Here’s to simulated nuclear holocaust.  And hoping that any of Joshua’s siblings don’t have that level of control over the United States.  Joshua - would you like to play a nice game of chess?

In accordance with my parents’ work, they often get recommendations for this service or that to make the redundant tasks a lot easier, or the company as a whole decides that everyone should be using this or that, and guides everyone into transitioning.  Such is any business, really, but for the sake of my post, I digress.

It was with one of these recommendations that I was stopped this morning by my mother asking me if their business PC had IE 5 or greater and “something called JavaScrip” (yes, she missed the ‘T’) installed.  This being a crappy XP rig running (and forever to my shame) AOL 9.1, naturally, it did.  She proceeded to go through a few more steps before the site decided she needed to install several random ActiveX controls to continue - something that never happened.

Running any of these sites through Firefox, or any other alternative browser, you’ll quickly find that they’re not particularly keen on you even visiting them with the “filth that isn’t IE.”  At times, they’ll even make up excuses (like the one displayed here about how JavaScript is a requirement, even though the error message is being displayed using a short user-agent-checking script) just to make sure you turn around, fire up Internet Exploder, and come back riding a piece of Swiss cheese.

You see, at least from my experiences playing with and setting up all of these services for my parents, I’ve found that there’s one thing they all have in common:  They all require Internet Explorer for “compatibility reasons” and each site comes with more effluent to install than AOL itself.  To be honest, it’s quite irritating having to diagnose issues with these, because they have a tendency to go AWOL (not to be confused with the ISP?) all the time.

Let’s take that “compatibility” notion for a moment, mix in the required ActiveX, and analyze it further.  Do you really want to know what a bunch of these controls are for?  Image uploading (and resizing), mere basic text editing…I could go on forever listing this stuff, but essentially it’s all things that could be taken care of in any other manner of more portable, usable manner…and without all of the bloat.  Heck, some of these are even uglier than Windows ME!

It’s pitiful that everyone needs to resort to some client-side browser helper to provide functionality that has long since been capable by more portable methods, such as the use of a Flash or Java applet.  With either of those, there’s plenty of room and cross-platform compatibility to spare, and it wouldn’t tax anything more than it already is.  Flickr, for example, has an excellent upload and management system; while I’m not expecting every little feature of Flickr to show up on in a business tool, it’s at least worth pointing out that there are working, real-life examples with the kind of portability and scalability that these costly services should be striving for.

One would think that, with the growing market share of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and increasing presence of nearly-fully-capable devices like the iPhone and other smartphones, businesses aimed at enterprises and the employees of those corporations would be falling head over heels to make sure that their platforms worked on as many devices and from as many points of accessibility as possible.  But apparently I’m thinking wrong.  Web 2.0?  Maybe for the personal side of life…but as far as I’m concerned, work is still a version behind.

I remember a little more than a year ago; Digg, chatrooms, and the blogosphere in general were all abuzz with what sounded like one of the biggest undertakings ever, a cool achievement of the same caliber as Dana Hanna’s ‘An App A Day’.  The entries were in, the votes were counted, and development was starting out…

If you know what I’m talking about already (perhaps from my description, or obvious title), then kudos to you.  But for the uninitiated and clueless, I’m referring to My Dream App.  Essentially, the premise was that a group of well known (OS X) developers got together and took requests for applications common users had that they would like to see commercialized…with the expectation that the winning ideas would get a portion of the proceeds.  When everything was said and done, the apps to be developed included a cookbook/meal-planning application, a weather applet for the desktop, and (most useful) a simple way to synchronize files between multiple machines.

To go on a tangent for a moment, even though MDA was Mac-only, I still believe that the concept for MDA was excellent, and it really highlighted some of the community’s issues with Apple’s operating system (or the people using it…yeah, I’m evil).  Of course, there were the ideas that would have required a lot of development and research (research that I know for a fact is underway at several different unnamed universities simultaneously), but quite a few things that would have brought OS X more even with Windows came up just the same.

Now, fast-forward a little while to give the developers some time to get well into their projects, with the usual little bloggy updates to keep people interested in the applications informed of their progress.  The sad part is…it’ll be one year next month since the last update was posted.  And none of those apps have moved (at least, to public knowledge) from the position indicated by the latest posts for them on the development blog.  Add this to the fact that there were even brief hints at a second contest being run, and it seems as though what once was a thriving project is now collecting dust in the corner.

WWDC was earlier this week; and sure, there were a few announcements in the form of the iPhone 3G and confirmation of OS X 10.6 being named “Snow Leopard”, but it lacked any real innovation.  10.6 is a security release, the only real updates for the iPhone are upgraded connectivity and the iTunes App Store, and the quote I can’t get out of my head about how iTunes is the next ‘killer enterprise app.’  (Thanks, Justin, by the way, for making me sit through it. )  While I suppose it’s not always up to Apple to be the primary innovator, if the people commisioned to do the job can’t, it certainly seems like the entire gig has lost some of its luster.

Generally I’d let bygones be bygones and let the curtains close on something that so obviously won’t be collecting too much more attention.  But for some reason, I feel like the entire experience was just the result of me falling asleep in my swivel chair.  And now it’s time to wake up from My Dream Nap.

I’ve been a longtime user and fan of GrandCentral.  Being me, the ability to make sure that one phone number means near-constant contact is a very enticing one.  And the way Grand Central’s set up, it also works well as a privacy-protection number - you can let people reach you if you want, or forward them somewhere else if you don’t.

However, GrandCentral has one inherent flaw that I’m consistently running into when I hand the number out to people I know:  It only handles phone communication.  For a number that you’re supposed to hand out instead of your cell phone number (or any other number), it’s rather difficult to use that number for anything that isn’t strictly voice-based communications.  In other words…you can’t send or receive text messages with it.  In this day and age of people text-messaging and e-mailing each other from mobile devices left and right, it really kills the whole point of a forwarding number if it doesn’t forward everything with it - therefore leaving people like myself having to hand out the numbers we are “wrapping” with the GrandCentral number out to the people who need to get in touch with other ways.

GrandCentral has also been stagnant over the past few months following their acquisition by Google.  There are no invitations, so the only way to get an account is to reserve a number and pray that they admit you at some point.  Again, this is a bit of a deal-killer; for someone attempting to promote an open and free service, it’s really difficult for me to believe that without seeing any form of action taken.

I hate to be so negative, because from the inside, the service has been great (other than that “completeness” thing).  But if they really hope to get users, they need to start moving, open up to new users, and bring something new to the table.  Otherwise, they’ll get swallowed up in the vast sea of web services waiting to help people keep in touch.

If last week was the ‘Week of Problems’, this week is the ‘Week of New Things.’  And it has good reason to earn such a name, given all of the things going on this week:

(Technically, it’s last Friday, but I think it counts since I’m still having to deal with it…)  I’ve got a new hard drive in my dedicated server (see previous post) after the previous one failed suddenly, and everything seems to be working out so far.  Everything except TechCentric has found its way back up already, and I’m working to get the show back as soon as I can.  (And of course, the obvious side effect is that everything is reinstalled from scratch once again.)

Also, earlier this week, as the result of my newfound photographic habits and my recent camera purchase, I ran out of space on my Picasa account. (As a quick aside, why can we have 6GB+ for e-mail, and just a single gigabyte of photo storage?)  After looking into a couple of different solutions, I ultimately decided that sticking with Picasa was my best choice, and sank $20 into some additional space.  Hopefully I should be set for a while (and hopefully by the time I need to get more, they lower their prices a bit… ).

If you haven’t been keeping track, Canonical has released the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron”.  This is their next long-term support release, which means that Hardy will get updates for three years on typical desktop installations, and five years for server installations.  This is also the first time I’ve been able to successfully use the automated upgrader without major issues (and a corresponding reinstallation from CD).  Of course, there are a few quirks I’m tending to, but it’s running happily for me on my crapified laptop.

It took a while to arrive, but today also marks the day my Pinnacle PCTV Remote Kit for Vista arrived from Woot.  It performs remarkably better than I anticipated, especially when you consider the one quirk that Pinnacle never did - using it on Windows XP.  Thanks to Paul Alger of Ironclad.net, you too can use it on Windows XP with the implementation of a hacked-up driver.  For those of you freaking out, the install is painless, and the remote is detected as a USB HID device.  The only issue I have is that not all the buttons work (and I’m currently looking for something that can pick them up so that I can remap them).  But nevertheless, it kills the basics of distant (I’d say remote, but that would be clichéd) media control.

Perhaps the most exciting (for me, anyway) of this week so far is my finally giving in and signing up with Twitter.  For those not in the know, Twitter is a service that enables you to share what you’re doing (though the people I’ve seen also tend to post random thoughts or occurances, which is also fun) via the web, SMS, or IM to make sure you’ve got a way to keep your “followers” updated.  It also appears that Twitter’s managed to grow themselves a cult, as there are several third-party applications and resources to make your Twitter experience all the more flexible.

I’ve only been using it a few days, but I’m rather enjoying it.  If you’ve got an account, feel free to follow me (see the sidebar on the homepage).

I hate to be all about me, me, me…but I guess I’ll let it go this once.

(Finally…a post worthy of avoiding the ‘Geeky’ label. At least, I think so…)

There have been plenty of ways in which people have been able to filter out their communications. For example, e-mail allows you to read any message you want, whenever you want, without having to read the others first. Voicemail has gotten to the point where you can do the same, a la iPhone (I say “Blech!” at the iPhone, but to be honest this is a very useful feature, one that should have been implemented ages ago).

But while these are useful, you still have to deal with the notifications (in most cases) that someone’s even trying to get in touch with you. Most cell phones beep (by default) when you’ve got voicemail or a new text message (of course, this can be disabled), and you can hide yourself on most instant messaging services by marking yourself as Away and setting your client to not harass you. And let’s not even get into the spam circles of junk mail/e-mail/phone calls…

But while you can do all of that with the “current-generation” of communications, what about some of the older things…things that haven’t changed much in years. Yes, I’m talking about your standard hardwired telephone.

While some people find that simply having a single cell phone and dropping the house phone in favor of giving everyone their cell phone number is a way to reduce bills, the typical household still has at least one landline running to their home. It’s great as a communications device; it’s simple and it works, and you don’t have to worry about recharging it (short of a cordless handset…but since you generally don’t put those in a purse or pocket and forget about them for a week, they still follow my point). But where’s the ability to screen calls, or filter out the obvious junk.

If there’s one thing I believe the typical phone service needs to stay in the game at this point, it’s the ability to allow their users to filter their callers. Sure, there’s a Do Not Call list, but has anyone actually followed that, and how many people can actually be bothered to notify the FCC (or whoever the heck deals with the violations) that someone has indeed violated it.

At this point in the game, I would have envisioned a web-based and phone-based system for setting up call screening. Nothing overly elaborate, but perhaps a list of recent calls with the option to block them always or at a certain time (useful for neighbors with no sense of night and day ), a la this s***ty mock-up. Believe me, people will take advatange of something that they can make as routine as their e-mail, without having to jump through hoops.

Now obviously, with such blocking power, there would have to be a way to get around this. So for that, I figure some of the more important government numbers would not be subjected to such blocking, as would important divisions of corporate agencies, such as a debt collector notifying a resident that they’re a few months…the list is endless, but no doubt it would help.

Of course, what to do with the screened calls? That could be another option; for some, the voicemail would probably be an ideal place, like your nightowl neighbor, but for others, what about playing the phone-disconnected three-tone “whistle” and message? And all the while…no phone ringing at 3 AM, or because of some quirky insurance salesman interrupting your dinner trying to sell you condoms because of a new “per-child insurance tax” your policy is being subject to.

I think it’s about time the tried-and-true methods got a bit of a revamp. Change is good…especially change that doesn’t interfere unless it’s specifically set up to. Come on…this shouldn’t be something that people need to install a phone company’s worth of equipment in their home for some peace of mind…but what do you think?