Archive for Internet
March 3, 2008 at 22:27 · Filed under Internet
I’ve been using Pobox’s mail forwarding service for a couple of days in an attempt to wrestle my e-mail situation to the ground. The basic idea is that I’m going to eventually only publish my pobox.com address as a primary mail address and other than personal contacts I will deprecate my other e-mail accounts.
The reasons are twofold. First I am subscribed to a large number of fairly active mailing lists which I find beneficial in both my private and professional life, rather than maintain multiple accounts on each mailing list service I find it easier to simply send this mail to one address and then filter and munge it there as appropriate. The second reason is that I don’t need to expose my “real” identity anywhere and if I ultimately need to move to a new final delivery address this simplifies the situation. I know I can deal with this 10 ways from Sunday using procmail or crazy MTA-fu (which are still in place) but for various reasons I find that less than optimal.
In any event I am posting this simply to let people know about pobox.com which is a reasonably high quality service at a reasonably good price.
February 2, 2008 at 15:56 · Filed under Internet, Technology
There’s an interesting read on MS’s hostile takeover attempt on Y! over on Salon.com. I’d characterize what Microsoft is up to as more of a race not to be last rather than a move against Google of any real import, but it is to some degree based on my own views of the various technologies. I was once upon a time a Yahoo! regular, but completely replaced it with the early iterations of Google in my own life.
Despite the fact that I have very serious ideological and technical reservations about Google’s collection of information and ad-driven revenue model, I continue to be a very heavy Google user because the service is just that good. The idea that Microsoft who has missed web technology several times and really only has a market share due to non-technical users, bundling and vendor lock-in can somehow salvage itself just by buying Yahoo! runs in the face of my personal impressions of their corporate culture and strategy. It’s too bad really, Google needs competition not somebody to dismantle their only real competitor.
Here’s a Slashdot article on the topic just for good measure.
January 26, 2008 at 22:52 · Filed under Culture, Internet
Thought I’d point out that I just added a link to MIT World. It’s an excellent site with quite a bit of video content and excellent lectures from various MIT courses and campus events.
January 25, 2008 at 23:17 · Filed under Entertainment, Humour, Internet
In case you don’t know about it, you can watch a number of The Comedy Network’s top programmes online by visiting: broadband.thecomedynetwork.ca. I don’t watch TV much these days but it’s nice to know I can find stuff like The A Daily Show and The Colbert Report without having to subscribe to cable.
I especially recommend January 22nd’s Daily Show sketch on Iceland pulling out of the Iraq War.
January 21, 2008 at 20:30 · Filed under Culture, Internet
Just thought I’d post a note about timeshifting for CBC Radio 1. I wanted to listen to tonight’s episode of Dispatches but for reasons beyond my control I wasn’t near a radio at 7:29 EST. The good news is that Dispatches is a carried nationally, so all you have to do is dig up a western audio stream (such as Calgary) at the appropriate time and bingo, you have radio timeshifting! Nothing very complicated, but for those of you who listen to the radio a lot or, like me, miss a lot of radio programmes this is pretty nifty. Of course in many cases you can just download an MP3 or Real Audio version of the show these days and the penetration of these formats are growing.
The only downside to the streaming option is that you have to use Windows Media, but I’ve heard some rumblings that this may be changing in the not too distant future…
January 20, 2008 at 14:59 · Filed under Internet
Over the past several months I’ve become a bit more of an iTunes guy, I actually use it to surf for music online and I bought my first iTunes albums over the recent holiday season. So I came across iTunes U the other day (i.e.: I opened my eyes and noticed the link) and it’s kind of cool. Basically it contains free podcasts of university lectures from a number of leading American universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, MIT and I just noticed that Queen’s is there as well. Obviously it’s no substitute for actually being in the classes but there are a number of good entry level lectures on topics that I would have loved to study in school but just never got around to or didn’t take because they conflicted with something else. Looks like the series of tubes is finally getting connected to something more than porn and warez.
You do need iTunes to play though.
January 20, 2008 at 14:38 · Filed under Internet, Technology
As you can tell I’ve been in the process of migrating to a new site design and toolset over the past few days. I’m trying to avoid too much custom code but I did make a slight modification to the plugin that renders the quotes feed on the rightmost column. In the process of troubleshooting the problem I discovered the Firebug plugin for Firefox. It’s most a most excellent debugger for walking through the code when there are issues (as well as flagging that there is a problem in the first place). In addition it can provide some useful profiling information regarding how your page loads, etc. In any event it was very helpful getting the page to render valid XHTML and JavaScript.
January 19, 2008 at 14:28 · Filed under Humour, Internet
Ha! I just stumbled across the Upside-Down-Ternet in a post to the sage-members list. I love it when sick minds and technology meet to screw with the masses!
