DeviantART Integration

Finally… finally (!!) managed to start getting some of my photography through here to my blog through the DeviantART pasties function.

One of the perks of being a beta tester for DeviantART is the use of the extra user functions, one of which allows you to thumbnail certain elements of your gallery and export them for integration on your own webpage, or anywhere else for that matter. So if you look down the left of the page you’ll find five of my most recent efforts.

At least now its a start. I’ll be looking at integrating both DA Pasties and images from my Flickr account to the blog, the latter of which has just recently been created.

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Google reader… eh?

Ever heard of Google Reader?

If not, you’re missing yet another one of Google’s beta releases as an online RSS aggregator. Anyone familiar with using gMail will be at great ease in using it as it carries some of the same functions - starred entries, all the usual search facilities etc.

Not only that, but they’ve lobbed in keyboard shortcuts, active on the website - pretty quirky function.

The real benefit for managing your feeds is that you can import them (and export them) from any OPML file (i mentioned OPML in this previous post). Adding a feed it a breeze, click ‘Add Feed’, enter the URL, preview and subscribe - nice and tidy.

If you’re away from your copy of Firefox or your desktop, its yet another handy tool to have on the road making sure you don’t miss any posts!

Microsoft Downgrading Spyware?

You might not know the name of Claria as a corporation or business in the US but for anyone who has ever had problems with adware/spyware, you will surely be familiar with names like ‘PrecisionTime’, ‘Weatherscope’ and any of the Gator products that you “have” to install in order to get your favourite freeware to work….

Anyway, we (we being Event Ireland) share our building with another Irish company, EMG Control Systems, who use a good number of PCs in their line of work, one of which houses a lot of important day-to-day items, one which must also be connected to the ‘net at all times.

So joy would have it this morning when it turned out that the machine was riddled with spyware, actually riddled to the stage where there are files everywhere and anywhere that simply don’t belong, running applications that do no good, causing all kinds of user discomforts.

Queue Microsoft AntiSpyware (still Beta as far as I know) which picks up the same 19/20 spyware changes every time, after it insists that it has cleaned them, removed them, deleted them, and rebooted…. yet they always come back! So it was no surprise to me that I read this only after I had gone through the emergency repair of Windows 2000 as the hard drive would no longer boot due to certain spyware activity…

Less than a week after published reports of acquisition talks between Microsoft Corp. and the Redwood City, Calif.-based distributor of the controversial Gator ad-serving software, security researchers have discovered that Microsoft has quietly downgraded its Claria detections.

Anti-spyware activist Eric L. Howes, who serves as a consultant to Sunbelt Software, discovered the default changes during a recent test that included four Claria applications: Dashbar, Gator, PrecisionTime and Weatherscope.

So Microsoft fancies itself buying out a company who knowingly serves up ads and “free” ad-based software which quietly gathers statistics on all your goings on, and then plays down the spyware threat in their own software, that was originally designed to wipe out the activity of the company that they’re buying….?

Oh please….

What is Creative Imagination?

So when it comes down to my blog, one question that has been asked of me is “why the title?”.

Surely, everyone has a little bit of a creative imagination? Wild stories? Design abilities? Something that makes you tick…?

Well, for anyone who is interested, please regard this quote from the man with all the brains…. Einstein himself.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

Food for thought….

BitTorrent Says No To Hollywood

Bram Cohen is saying “NO” to Hollywood. And by “NO” I mean an agreement has been reached between the seven major Hollywood studios and Cohen, the creator of popular P2P utility BitTorrent, to prevent popular Hollywood movies appearing on the Torrent search list.

The agreement represents the latest effort by the entertainment industry to discourage illegal internet downloads. It also demonstrates Cohen’s sensitivity toward Hollywood’s piracy problems, making him potentially more attractive to studios for future deals related to movie downloads.

Cohen revealed that back in September his company had raised US$8.75 million in venture funding to develop commercial distribution tools for media companies.

The BitTorrent technology pioneered by Cohen - used by an estimated 45 million people - assembles digital movies and other computer files from separate bits (hence the name) of data downloaded from other computer users across the internet. Its decentralized nature makes downloading more efficient but also frustrates the entertainment industry’s efforts to find and identify movie pirates.

Winter sickness?

The joys of winter sickness…

Hot during the night..

Cold during the day…

Can’t breathe….

Constant sniffing, sneezing, coughing…

You just know December is around the corner!

Thought For The Day

More indepth reading and programming at 2:30am makes for a great night I tell you! But it has its rewards when you get it right.

Reading back over some notes and bundled material, I came across this little quote, never having seen it or heard it before, and so I present my thought for the day…. stolen from someone else, of course

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results

If thats the case, I think I broke the insanity barrier safely last night. Frustration is the number one single cause of programmer blindness! Get around that frustration, you’re rockin!

Cheers to Kerry Watson for that….

And Writely So

Word processing, preparing documents etc. was, and is, something you do on your PC, from the comfort of your own computer. You’ve got everything around you, your copy of Word or Works - whatever tickles your fancy.

This site was brought to my attention this morning, having launched privately back in August of this year. The reason is came to my attention is that they just announced support for the OpenOffice format. I’m big on OpenSource software and all the things ‘it’ can do for the greater good.

Writely is a web word processor that provides simple and secure document collaboration and publishing on the web using only the browser.

What exactly does Writely do?

• Upload Word documents, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
• Use our simple WSIWYG editor to format your documents, spell-check them, etc.
• Invite others to share your documents (by e-mail address).
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• View your documents’ complete revision history and roll back to any version.
• Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
• Download documents to your desktop as Word, HTML or zip.
• Post your documents to your blog.

It’s best feature has to be the collaboration factor, which is done in almost realtime. You can share any documents that you like with your friends, you are sent a notice online when someone is editing one of your documents and the changes are reflected every few seconds in front of your eyes.

While its in beta, its free. There is a 500k limit per document which is pretty good, and you’re allowed up to 2mb per embedded image, outside of the document size.

Anyway, if you’re interested, it doesn’t hurt to click and visit Writely!

Old Technology Dies Hard

I consider 3.5″ Floppy Drives old technology. The disks for them are majorly small in capacity, they are suspect irrepairable damage if you leave them in the drive too long, or accidentally snap the top off them, or leave them sitting on your speakers…..

They have been replaced over the years by flash drives, usb memory sticks, portable hard drives, firewire drives - hell, even your iPod and other MP3 players can store whatever data you need.

I’ve been building computers for myself and friends over the past 2 years and never once added a floppy drive to a machine. I order laptops for people regularly, never one adding a floppy drive. I’ve got a drive installed on a machine at home for the past 4 years and can proudly say that its never been used, and never will.

So I find myself in disgust yesterday that I was forced into buying a portable floppy drive in order to get a license for an application. Sure, you pay loads of money to get the cds, and you pay out more money to get the support. But when you want to move the application to a new machine, you have to send the license to floppy disk using a special license-moving facility, and the disk acts as a key to install your new application.

Of course when your new machine doesn’t have a floppy drive, your fancy expensive application has nowhere to go and nowhere around it.

Considering the last company I worked for has drawers and drawers and drawers of floppy disks archiving their material I guess it can’t be written off just yet!

No more blurry photos!

Reading this article on Wired News, it has been revealed that a Ph.D. student in the US has modified a 16MP camera, fitting it with a number of micro lenses allowing users to take photographs, and refocus them at a later date using software he wrote.

Many a time have I myself, and millions of others like me, fallen victim to an out-of-focus shot, or slight camera shake resulting in a ruined image - but now, no more!

From the article…

“We just think it’ll lead to better cameras that make it easier to take pictures that are in focus and look good,” said Ng’s adviser, Stanford computer science professor Pat Hanrahan.

For all you photo heads out there, and anyone with a 16mp camera…. read on!

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