Pictures from Prague are up in the gallery. I filtered down the 290 or so that I took to what you can see there, I may add more later. They’re all taken with my Kodak CX7430 Easy Share which is just great, I’ll probably do a post about the camera one day.
A few words about these two pictures are after the jump …
Well I’ve had comments from three separate people, which means my readership is at least double what I might have expected.
Anyroads I’ve changed the comments so that they’ll post without requiring me to authorise them unless they look particularly spammy. So it should no longer look like your comments lurk in the ether for a random amount of time.
Just to prove I do listen to the comments I’ve added a contact form to the About page. I’m not going to post an e-mail address as I get enough spam to various UnorthodoxY addresses already, and that’s without any of them published on the web.
I was reading a post on Wil Wheaton’s blog (always a good read) about AIM bots which reminds me once again that I just don’t get it when it comes to IM bots.
The idea is you have a little program at the other end of an instant message service that responds to queries of some form and, maybe, also contacts you with some useful bit of information. I’m sorry, but that’s not what I want instant messaging to do. I don’t need the feeling I’m talking to some pseudo-person to find out something, I have more powerful tools for that. I certainly don’t want to be interrupted with some new update or other I’ll check my feed reader for that, thank you very much.
Isn’t this just a ‘cute’ use of the technology, repacking information in yet another way? Is there any real use for it aside from the cool factor? If you’re always on IM (and I admit that I’m not) perhaps it’s just merging all the information into one place. Or perhaps it’s a hangover from the days when that sort of text messaging was the best way. It seems a bit of a shame to downshift everything to a format suitable for IMing when you’ve more than likely got a fully featured web browser sitting just beside it. I guess that people on mobile devices might benefit but nowadays they’re just as likely to have a browser and other software anyway.
I don’t think we should clutter different communication mediums just because we can, and if we are converging things don’t filter down to the simpler methods of communication. Why not converge them up into the richer methods, IM conversations in your feed reader and e-mail app (pretty much where GMail is heading).
The trick is to get more new information out in the ways that are already there, and not so much delivering the same information in new ways. If people really want IM bots they’ll find something the translates search results / RSS feeds into IM responses, it shouldn’t be the job of the content provider to do that.
Or maybe I just don’t get it. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I may as well shill for StopTicketTouts.co.uk which is an online petition to, eh, stop ticket touts. It’s a good idea, and worth signing for the time it’ll take you, but most online petitions are pretty worthless and I’m not sure this one’ll be any different.
Further to my recent rambling on RSS feeds for upcoming events I’ve remembered a site that did repackage ticket information scraped from the Ripping Records site. It was called Ripped Tickets but sadly seems to be no more. The magic of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine reveals a page from 2005 that shows what they were up to.
The question there is: what happened? Did they get cease&desisted by one of the sites they were scraping? Are they gearing for a relaunch? Too much traffic not enough revenue? Was the site enough for them to sell the idea to someone else and it’s just taking a while? They seem to have been going recently enough that it’s perhaps just down for a server swap/revamp but who knows.
I’ve discovered that you can embedded your current bloglines subscription into a page so it’s always up to date. No idea how I missed that when I first looked.
I’ve rejigged the links page to use that, so you can now see exactly what sites are distracting me from work.
Hmm, postings dropped off a bit I see, I’ll post a link to a pretty good joke and hope that suffices.
I see, via slashdot, that VMware are holding the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge where people are invited to create an appliance that runs inside a VMware virtual machine. Interesting, particularly with the $200,000 worth of prizes they’ve put up.
I’ll take this opportunity to state here that virtual machine technology will be the next big thing in computing. Mark my words, it’ll be what people talk about more and more over the next few years.
There’s potential for a lot of good here. Worried about viruses and spyware? Do your browsing in a virtual machine and you can always nuke it if it goes bad (you can already do this with VMwares Browser Appliance and I’m sure there are others.) Sensitive documents to work on? Do it all in a VM hopefully protected from anything running inside other VMs. Any no need to dual boot to switch OSes for just one app, have as many OSes as you like.
There is another side too. Copy protected CD? Play it inside the VM and grab the digital output from the machine. Time locked software? Install it in a VM and just go back to a saved state every few days. Your particular views on the whole digital rights management issue will dictate whether you think that’s a bad thing or not.
There are many more desktop applications, good and bad, for VMs but that’s not even scraping the surface of what they can do in the server area. One of VMwares products can move a virtual machine between two physical machines while it’s running.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see people in the internet telephony business starting to look seriously at running soft switches under virtual machines for just that sort of advantage. In fact I think I’ll go off and see if I can come up with a nice telecoms appliance to enter the challenge with …
Powered by WordPress