Like most people, I use Instant Messenging (IM). I have accounts on all the main providers (MSN, Yahoo IM, AIM, ICQ and Jabber) but the one most of my friends use is MSN. It seems that MSN is the most popular IM service over here in the UK, but AIM is more popular in the US.

Anyway, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of my friends are using MSN, I’d ditch it (along with the other proprietary protocols) and move exclusively to using Jabber, as its a nice, open, documented protocol with a wide range of available clients. By design, it’s decentralised – there’s no one “central” server which controls the network, unlike MSN etc.

My friend Steve recently decided to drop MSN, and another friend, Tony, is starting to use Jabber too. Along with another friend James, who started to use Jabber quite a while ago, I think we have the start of a revolution :)

Continue reading Goodbye MSN Messenger, hello Jabber →

Tony Black made an interesting post on how USB is a nice little money-earner for the USB-IF (USB Implementors Forum).

Great post to start his new blog with (not counting the traditional “hey I have a new blog” initial post :)

Just read that a Colorado website owner is attempting to sue archive.org for accessing and making copy of her website.

Suzanne Shell attempted to sue on grounds of conversion, civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act.

The court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive’s motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim.  If this breach of contract claim was to succeed, it would have a massive, wide-ranging impact on the Internet.

Continue reading Archive.org sued for spidering a website →

Happy St Patrick’s Day everyone – time to grab a nice cold pint of Guiness :)

I’m half Irish myself, so I think that qualifies me to celebrate :) Continue reading Happy St Patrick’s Day →

Oh dear… after the wonderful exploding Dell laptops, it seems that Apple have decided to get in on the act, after a MacBook Pro exploded into flames.

Hot Apple pie anyone?

I use a Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop (a couple of years old, and not covered by the dodgy battery recalls) but I still will not leave it charging overnight or when unattended, just in case…

Not very new, but I came across these amazing pavement art pictures from http://www.enkidu.cx/stumble/beever/ Continue reading Amazing pavement art →

Trevor Baca asks: Doesn’t The Social Web Realize that People Talk?

From the linked page:

In the course of putting together the presentation I asked myself why much of the 2.0 hoopla isn’t about voice.

We’re telecom innovators. We think about people and communications and technology a lot. And we look at Myspace and can’t help but wonder how all that happened without us. Put another way, just how did social computing get so social without voice?

First, let’s check the observation. Tens of millions of messages, perhaps, pass through Myspace daily. Those messages are text, images, or both. But not voice. And yet voice seems so obvious. Friend online? Click here to ring both your phones. But no.

On flickr we find photos from everywhere in the world. And looking at everybody’s stuff even turns out to be fun and engaging. And we can see exactly who took what, and why. But click here to ring the photographer’s phone? Again, no. No voice.

Perhap’s it’s because voice communications are too real-time – you immediately demand the other party’s immediate and full attention.

Continue reading Doesn’t The Social Web Realize that People Talk? →

It appears that the SETI Project has finally found something!

Okay, it’s not proof of life on Mars, but at least it tracked down a stolen laptop :)

From the article on Slashdot:

 One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife’s stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, ‘I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.'”

OK, I’ve been considering blogging properly for a while, and sod it, I’m actually going to give it a go.

I had a very basic custom “blog” facility on my main website, but I managed a post about once every 6 months (if that).  I briefly considered writing my own blogging system in Perl, then I came to my senses and realised that wheel has been re-invented way, way too many times already.

Besides, we may be using WordPress at work soon, so becoming familiar with it would be pretty useful for me.

Right, now it’s time to set WordPress up just how I want it, and figure out how to add my “shared items” feed from the excellent Google Reader to the sidebar, and a blogroll of links to friends blogs.