Getting Gruntled

Just a little blast from the past here. Some of you were around back in the Hayes Volksmodem and BBS days, and will remember this as well as I do.

FYI - a “wahka” is the decidedly “proper” (by popular vote) name for
the characters “>” and “< ". This is in spite of INFOCUS readers of
Denver who still refer to them as "Norkies". The Michigan crowd
apparently has corrupted the spelling to "waka".

To wit, it is -
------------------------------------------------------------
"...a poem we think is about the lowly wahka. Maybe. Well,
perhaps---we're really not sure what the poem actually is
about. Here it goes:"

<>!*”#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED

Transliterated:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

original Leitner page
Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

I have been thinking back on this recently and was thinking that some new possibilities are possible nowadays with widespread PC usage, the internet, and all of our new web lingo. I’ll be posting a couple of attempts soon. If any of you want to take a whack, feel free to share.

We were talking earlier today on Pownce about a lot of the micro-blogging and social “heartbeat” networking sites having periods of downtime lately.

It’s probably just some growing pains as more people start to use them. And since they are all more of a “pulse” setup, they are using the networks differently than a page of information at a time.

I think it was Friday, Twitter was unresponsive, then yesterday, Pownce and then the early morning hours, the same thing happened with Jaiku. They all seem to working just fine now.

Does anyone remember a recent outage at Mahalo Follow? Anyone? Beuller?

There are a lot of different social networks out there, and I’m starting to see a lot of splintering. I hope that we start to see some integration tools soon to help us stay connected and also to not have a deluge of information. Everyone has their own personal limit for information dump, and these networks can certainly cause a flood. I’m supposing that with some open API’s, we would start to see a lot of cross-network functionality. updating your “status” in one place will update that status in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc etc at once, and people who are following you or on your friend list in more than one place would only get a single alert or, optionally, none at all. I’d like to see options for some of this integration, but not necessarily a snowballing effect on social networking as a whole. It’s important that the users are able to separate and maintain “public” and “private” identity as well.

A good example would be to never automatically update linkedin from anything added at facebook or myspace. At least until companies stop cyberstalking, and hire people based on their skills and experience. This might take another few years, and two or three more Petite Anglaise stories, but I definitely hope it comes soon. Not that I have anything to hide: I link everything together. I just know a lot of people who have the need to hide their personal lives from their employers, and I find that incomprehensible.

Then there’s another whole ball of wax when you start to think of integrating dating sites.

I found an article at LLRX that gives an intro to social networking sites and tiny bit of history, just in case you are one of my “less-than-technical” readers.

The 5.5 version of Winamp came out today, just in time to celebrate one decade of the music software. On Windows platforms, it has often been a favorite of mine. There were times when it fell from my personal spotlight, but through operability, perseverance, and the focus of the development team on great new feature sets that were not available elsewhere, they often saw me trudging back in their direction.

Way back in the early days of MP3 technology, Winamp was the easiest and best option, and besides that, it was the only decent one out at the time that was free of charge (for the basic verion). Yes, Virginia, Windows Media Player did live in the forest during these dark times, but she would not embrace the MP3 format for a few years, opting to push her own agendas, mainly being standard wav formats, as well as her own wma and wmv. Besides, she was highly inflexible, and very few features to speak of. I can’t think of a time when Winamp wasn’t flexible and friendly. It plays tons of audio and video formats, has visualizations, and completely customizable with plugins, skins, and assortments of software development kits if you REALLY want to tweak it, or can’t find someone else’s plugin that does what you want. and that’s been from the very beginning.

Nullsoft has always distributed a single MP3 file with every install. It plays as soon as you launch the player for the first time, so that you know that it is working, and DJ Mike Llama proclaims, “WINAMP! It really whips the llama’s ass!” The company’s name is sort of a jab at Microsoft. Micro-soft being “soft” as in software, and micro- as in the greek µ, meaning small. Null is the term for “empty or missing”, it was “smaller than micro($oft)”. Nullsoft is noted for inventing awesome things as Winamp, Gnutella, Beep, and SHOUTcast, among others, and these are almost all open source.

Winamp sold out to AOL back in ‘99, and really suffered for a while, then a couple of years later, lost more market share with the launch of iTunes.

If you have no idea what mp3, wma, wav, or any of this other stuff is about, or if you are just curious, links to increasingly geeky background info starts off by clicking here, by clicking here, or maybe even by clicking here, and continues until you have completely worn out your browser and search engine, of course! …but I got you started.

So it’s time to light ten candles on the Winamp cake, and then it’s ten lashes for the llama’s ass!

Some of the new features:

• single, unified window (though old school Photochop and GIMP geeks like me never mind grouping functionality and hiding what you won’t use for a while)
• dynamic sing recommendations(smells like Pandora?)
• surround sound support for mp3’s
• there’s a mass auto tagger (I’ve been using an external program for this for a while. awesome!)
• Podcast directory and auto-downloader(w00t!)
• even more portable devices supported(yeah. even ipods.), with seperate sync options for each(for those of us with different sizes and brands of portable players)

Stock trading is friendlier with two people. Or two hundred. Most of the time, when we get into something that has a high learning curve, the best way to dig in is to find a group of friends who already know the ropes, and who will help you out without taking advantage of you. The social aspect is very important because it keeps us from giving up. If you don’t feel like you are lost and completely alone in something–like a lost puppy in the middle lane of the freeway–, you will be more focused on the important bits that can make it all worthwhile.

In the post about the Google stock, I explained that I have never done any trading in the stocks and bonds arena, but have known people who were very much into it, and I went into some detail there about the information available freely on websites, making some observations on how user-friendly they are/aren’t, and could be.

There is a site called MyWallSt.net where you can set up an account and meet other investors, both hobbyist and professional. You can learn the ropes of stock trading, create and track a portfolio (using pretend dollars, but you could also win real dollars), and get into the game with all of the members who are already there. This is one of the best ways of etching out a good strategy, and testing it before doing anything with real money, and even after you start investing.

You also get a profile page, like any other social network, and you can view weekly standings. Another cool thing is that you are able to view the picks of other members in the “Rookie Challenge”. So if someone is doing a spectacular job in the rankings, you can see what stocks they have chosen, which might help you to build your portfolio as well.

The fantasy trading on this site is based on the real markets, plus a short delay.

If you think you can pick stocks well enough to make money, you should get a profile at mywallst and meet others who do!

Google stock hits 600 USD

I don’t do any sort of stock investing, but this is really big news. I knew that it would happen, but just seeing the numbers seems surreal. Heavy investing in Google ads have sent Googles’ stock roaring through the roof.

I’ve always been impressed with Google as a company. Their out-of-the box management model should be the one that all companies use for their knowledge staff.

How they get the best and brightest to work for them here

If you haven’t seen google finance before, it’s really neat, by the way. Click Here to open the page for jsut the “GOOG” stock. it’s interesting how the value graph is zoomable, and there are marked points on that graph, showing news stories to the right that may have had a bearing on the stock rising or falling. The related blog posts and enough stats to choke your average accountant, and you have lots to look at for any sort of casual, fantasy, or serious investing you might be doing.

The same info page at Yahoo shows a good graph and the headlines, and of course, a lot of the same information, but it just doesn’t seem to be cross referenced in one view the way that the Google page is. I did notice that there is a beta graph on Yahoo that is much more robust and AJAXed out, and I really like some of the features, lik having the main competition for whatever company you are looking at listed just to the left, as well as benchmark indexes.

Of course, I’m looking at these without any background in investing, and knowing only the bare basics of what the stats on these pages mean.
They both are much nicer, friendlier, and approachable than what you see on the “serious” investing sites. I mean, look at this one… …sheesh!

Yesterday, the Wordpress group released an update to the butt-kicking blog software I’ve been using for years now. I did the upgrade in about 10 minutes total, then found a couple of spots where some old plugin code that’s outdated now (read: UTW) was mangling a page here and there, and I think it’s all Kosher now, easily fixed by editing the templates.

There are a ton of bugfixes, and some really groovy enhancements. The main enhancement is that tagging is handled by WP rather than by any number of plugins. I’m still roaming through, noticing the updates, but I can say after a short while using it that the admin area is responding a lot faster for me, and it’s not my connection. I’ve noticed the speed using three different internet connections.

Mouseclone Did the upgrade, though, and something went awry… I’m not sure of the details, because I had to run off for a bit, and when I’d returned, it looked like a tornado had passed through his database. Word to the wise: backups. Backups BACKUPS!
The mantra is and has always been:

“If you don’t have at least three copies of a piece of data on different media, the data does not exist.”

I say this, knowing full well that I didn’t make a new, full backup before doing the update to the WP bits, but here’s the cool part of the story: he made a backup, and looking at it right now, everything is back up and rocking out.

In the 1989 Tim Burton rendition of the Batman story, we see the cast of characters evolve into the colorful, larger-than-life, dysfunctional and diabolical characters we all remembered from the comic books of many years before.  As The Joker makes his first public appearance, accompanied by a recording of Prince singing:

Systematic overthrow of the underclass
Hollywood conjures images of the past
New world needs spiritually
That will last
Ive seen the future and it will be

Ive seen the future and it will be
Ive seen the future and it works

When you were young, you could see the future.  You had a plan, a view, you had a calendar in mind of the ages you would be doing certain things, and had an idea of what your daily life would be like as an adult.

how close did you get? 

By the time I was around nine or ten, I had pegged my age at things like changing jobs, getting married, buying a house… 

But I have been way off on things like flying cars (age 31) among other things. I suppose overall, my 10-year-old self was batting at around .450 or so.

How about you?

Just like we read about in the comic books when we were young, everyone is looking forward to having Jetsons-style flying cars within our lifetime. NASA wants to nudge things along:

NASA Sponsoring Flying Car Contest

But what’s this? There a company out there that has been designing and building these for a long time. Check out the video on this page: Click here. It shows a test flight of the vehicle, and states that the company is ready to go into full production soon. How exciting is that? You don’t have to worry about constructing roads. Just set up some balloon-cones or something. The company that is making these is named after Dr Moller. All of their models and a series of videos are available at their website.