MaisonBisson

Ryan tried to tell me about it a month ago, Jessamyn gets the idea but uses Facebook instead, DeWitt fell for it, Ross said it tipped the tuna, and now I’m finally checking Twitter out. I signed up yesterday and immediately went looking for ways to connect Twitter, Plazes, and iChat.

Tweet is an AppleScript that works with Quicksilver (a launcher) and Twitterrific (a desktop Twitter client) to make updating even easier. Matt Matteson updated it to set iChat status, and Ruben Broman added Plazes integration.

What’s it good for? Think of it like a snack-sized micro mini blog if you want. Or think of it like chatting with your 500 (or 5 million) closest friends. Or think of it as another way of extending personal presence in the electronic age, little bits of information that exist in the environment.

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS

In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That doesn’t work.”

“Open source enables people to reach all those customers. It’s a distribution model. The people who create great software can now reach the rest of the world.”

Businesses get the most protection from the GPL, he insisted. “They get protection from competition.” The license’s insistence on reciprocity means no one can take the code you wrote, tweak it, then compete with you.

delicious = Endoeavor’s course content integrator

OpenSearch = metasearch

Flickr = digital collections management

So, is 300 really the “torrent of blood and awesomeness” that Matt says it is (and the preview supports), or does it run out of steam as NPR’s film critic, Kenneth Turan, suggests?

Unless you love violence as much as a spartan, Quentin Tarantino, or a video game playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated. The problem is that the visual panache that made Snyder an acclaimed director of commercials works better for 30 second spots than two hour features.

Snyder explained his work to Wired Magazine a few weeks ago.

For now I’m stuck reading up on the Battle of Thermopylae and generally being amused at all the derivative layers in this story: Snyder’s movie, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel, based on a 1962 movie, based on Herodutus’ telling of a 2500 year old event.

In early 2002 the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) set royalty rates for webcasters that were twice as high as for regular radio broadcasts. The Library of Congress reset those rates in late summer (yes, the LoC oversees those things).

Now it’s 2007, and the RIAA is at it again. Techdirt reports the Copyright Royalty Board is adopting royalty rates the RIAA has been asking for, “and making them effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006 — meaning that many small independent webcasters are now facing a tremendous royalty bill they’re unlikely to be able to afford.” Here, listen to the story on PRI’s Marketplace.

Save the Streams is following the issue, and Kurt Hanson tells us Congress is paying attention.

Lars Wirzenius’ Linux Anecdotes:

In January, Linus bought a PC. He’d been using a Sinclair QL before that, which, like much British computer stuff, was ingenious and almost unusably different from everything else.

Holy smokes. As Dell’s sales slump and stock remains flat, the famously unimaginative company is trying to tap into the Mob for ideas about what new shade of grey to deliver its hardware in next. And what did the Dell IdeaStorm mob say?

“Give us Linux!”

“Give Us OpenOffice.”

And how did Dell respond?

“No. No. And, No.”

John Naughton reports on the story for The Guardian, explaining:

more than 85,000 people took the trouble to register with IdeaStorm in order to tell Mr Dell that they wanted him to ship his computers with Linux pre-installed. Moreover, 55,000 revealed that they would like the free open-source office software suite, OpenOffice, pre-installed on their shiny new Dell machines.

And all Michael Dell could say was that there are too many variants of Linux. Of course that doesn’t explain why the company, who’s biggest contribution to the technology world was an online store that allowed customers to chose computer configurations from a dizzying array of options, doesn’t simply allow customers to buy their PCs with no software at all.

Found at Baekdal.com, where the author expresses some amount of whiteboard-skills envy.

The video shows Alex Overwijk, head of Glebe Collegiate high school‘s math department (more trivia: Alanis Morrisette went there) drawing what appears to be a perfect circle.

This is something I do in my spare time. I draw freehand circles and then I found out there was a world championship…It’s like winning the Masters. Once you win, you automatically get invited back every year.

You won’t hear Overwijk claim it, but the video is often suggested to show the world freehand circle drawing champion at work. The Ottawa Citizen reports, however, that no such competition exists.

“It’s my schtick with my kids. I’ve been telling them this story for 10 years,” the Citizen quotes Overwijk, who later revealed that he’s thinking about starting a competition.

“We’ll do it for real. Yeah, why not?” he asked. “It’s pretty popular, apparently.”

And, if we remember our history, circle drawing and similar feats have been used to impress people for years.

Encyclopodia – the encyclopedia on your iPod

GeoCool! – Rasmus’ Toys Page

IE7 and OpenSearch Autodiscovery

Information Management Now: Social Tagging For The Enterprise

“I’m Bruce Pechman, the muscleman of technology, let me show you my credentials.”

This is the instructional video that comes with the DynaFlex Powerball Gyro.

The fan videos on YouTube have got nothing on this. Just click play and prepare to laugh. Will and I have been asking to see people credentials since he shared this with me a week ago.

Middlebury College is proud to have taken a stand against Wikipedia this year:

Members of the Vermont institution’s history department voted unanimously in January to adopt the statement, which bans students from citing the open-source encyclopedia in essays and examinations.

Without entirely dismissing Wikipedia — “whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful…” — the decision paints it with a broad brush — “as educators, we are in the business of reducing the dissemination of misinformation.” (Though a site search reveals it’s frequently cited there.)

Chandler Koglmeier’s op-ed response in the student newspaper, however, was rather pointed:

[Professor Waters’ states that] “the articles can improve over time, but there’s always an [emphasis on] change rather than something finalized.” I wasn’t aware that knowledge was a static thing. […] I think you should talk to our nation’s medical schools. They seem to have advanced beyond the world of Hippocrates and the Greek doctors in the past few years and might be teaching something that is dangerous.

Intrigue, indeed. My question is how will Middlebury students be taught to evaluate their information sources after they leave college? Who will tell them what to trust then?

Apple’s WWAN Support Update 1.0 brings support for the following new cell carrier-based based networking cards (WWAN = wireless wide-area networking):

• Available on the Cingular network
  • Novatel Merlin XU870 ExpressCard (HSDPA)
• Available on the Sprint network
  • Novatel Wireless Merlin EX720 Express Card (EVDO Rev. A)
  • Novatel Wireless Ovation U720 USB Modem (USB Adapter, EVDO Rev. A)
• Available on the Verizon network
  • Novatel XV620 ExpressCard (EVDO Rev. 0)
  • Novatel V740 ExpressCard (EVDO Rev. A)
  • Novatel Wireless Ovation U720 (USB Adapter, EVDO Rev. A)

I’m only about six months in to a 2 year contract for Verizon V640 EVDO Card, so I’ll have to wait to take advantage of the Rev A speeds. I could buy a shiny new card for a few hundred bucks, but I’m saving it for an iPhone, of course. Besides, My little old V640 still rocks on the train and is often faster than a hotel’s service in some cities (though the capped upload speeds are frustrating).

Back in August Educated Nation offered the following top ten list of web tools for college students:

• Writely
• Soundslides
• Bluedot.Us
• eFax
• PDF Online
• Google Calendar
• Google Spreadsheets
• Bloglines
• Technorati
• mynoteIT

Not to be outdone, an anonymous-but-first-person story at Nextstudent identifies their top ten:

• Book Finder
• MynoteIT
• Ottobib
• Google Docs
• Tada List
• Meebo
• Wikipedia
• Zoho Show
• Google Reader
• Del.icio.us