Category: Uncategorized Page 56 of 76

Paul — This one’s for you. I’ve been playing a guitar, in one form or another, for over 40 years. But I have never seen or heard anything quite like this. Check out this video and prepare to be impressed.

Thanks to Eric for pointing me to Phil’s blog, who is pointing to the YouTube video. That’s how this “conversation” thing works.

If, like most of the world, you tend to do most of your document creation in Microsoft Word, here’s something you might be interested in.

AjaxWrite is a web-based word processing program that uses Ajax (a new “cool” language that’s pretty hip on the web these days.) This certainly isn’t the first, Web-based word processor out there. Writely was one of the first and it was bought out by Google a couple of weeks ago.

I particularly liked the FAQs on the site (which is still in Beta, but seems to work pretty well). Here’s an example:

I heard that Sun and Google are partnering to create Google Office. How does ajaxWrite compare?

Google Office is vaporware meaning people talk about it, but it exists only in the press’ imagination. People interested in a traditional office suite should absolutely try OpenOffice.org because it’s a capable office suite available at no charge. But not even Google’s engineers can turn the giant semi-truck like OpenOffice into a hybrid vehicle that can run over the net like ajaxWrite. The OpenOffice software suite is approximately 65,000kb in size while ajaxWrite is just 400kb or to put it another way 150 times smaller. Now it’s not an entirely fair comparison because OpenOffice.org is multiple programs, not only a word processor. But any way you measure it, it will not be possible to transform OpenOffice.org into a snappy web delivered software program like ajaxWrite.

Since I already own multiple copies of Word for all of my various computers, I didn’t think I’d have much use for an online version. But when I tried it, I was pleasantly surprised. It really does work much like the regular program. The people behind it claim that the on-line version has about 85% of the features of the real program, which should satisfy most users’ needs.

What is really interesting though is that you don’t have to sign in or offer up your email address or anything. You just open the page and start working. You can load up any document off your hard drive (or a USB drive, if you’re working somewhere else) and save it back when you’re done. It’s cool and kind of fun to play around with.

Ajax is a very neat application and is one of the “go-to” products of the new Web 2.0 world that everybody loves to talk about. Right now, I’m having trouble keeping up with a lot of this stuff. But this is a program I could find a use for.

There’s nothing to it. Just go to the website and try it for yourself. I’d be interested to hear what you think about this. And if you want, you can submit your feedback to the site’s owners. They’re looking for comments on what they’ve done.

UPDATE — I didn’t realize it, but AjaxWrite requires the Firefox browser to work properly. If you aren’t using Firefox, my apologies. On the other hand, you really owe it to yourself to download a free copy and give it a try.

I’m writing this while I’m taking a brief break from a very, very busy day. I’m being pulled in several directions at once and being forced to make decisions in a hurry. Of course, nothing special in that. That’s the way life goes for everyone these days, right? It means we’re all doing great things and getting a lot of stuff done, I’m sure.

So coming across Be smarter at work, slack off I couldn’t resist taking a peek.

It’s a great read, but I’ve got to run. I’ll talk about it later. Read it for yourself.

Hmmm…there may be something ironic happening right now, but I don’t have time to figure it out.

Thanks to Kathy at Creating Passionate Users for the link.

Here’s a few items, not necessarily related.

ITEM 1 — It looks like Canada has accepted Clara Hughes’ Olympic challenge. You’ll recall that after she won a gold medal in the 5,000 Metre long-track skating event, Clara Hughes pledged $10,000 of her own money to a charity called Right to Play. Well, as of today, Canadians have pledged more than $307,000. What a tribute in response to a selfless gesture. Kind of makes you proud, doesn’t it?

ITEM 2 — Have you ever wandered through a cemetary, just for the quiet beauty of it? I like to, from time to time. When I was a reporter back in Saskatchewan, I often visited cemetaries in small towns, where you could see the history of the community revealed in the stone markers. So A dream lies buried here, a wonderful article from the March 17 edition of the Globe and Mail’s Facts and Arguments page, is one of the nicest pieces I’ve seen on the beauty of cemetaries and well worth the read. (I’m not sure how long it will be up on the site.)

ITEM 3 — I was talking with a former reporter colleague yesterday and it brought back lots of memories of life as a reporter. But compared to this series of articles from Salon.com (Part 1 and Part 2) on the bleak life for reporters in Baghdad covering the Iraq war, my time covering politics in Saskatchewan was a walk in the park. Iraq is a mess, and this excellent series makes clear just how desperate things have become.

ITEM 4 — In a similar vein, I tracked down Christopher Allbritton’s fascinating blog, Back to Iraq 3.0. Allbritton now lives in Iraq, after making news back in March, 2003, when he raised enough money from readers of his blog to go to Iraq to cover the war. He’s now living in Iraq, working for Time magazine. He’s earned a reputation from people who seem to know as a determined and honest journalist, who delivers a view of Iraq that you don’t see as often as you used to.

Together the two items above make me appreciate just how difficult life has become for journalists trying to do their job in Iraq. Their world is a dangerous grey area, where nothing is quite what it seems and disaster can strike at any time. They deserve our respect, no matter what we think of the war itself.

Do you know where your dog is right now? Or your cat?

Or, more to the point, where’s your car? Your laptop? Son? Wife? Husband?

Soon, (for some people, perhaps it’s already happening) you’ll be able to track virtually anything, anywhere, anytime.

Not sure what the heck I’m talking about? Consider this excerpt from UFOs (Ubiquitous Findable Objects) by Peter Morville, posted on the Oreilly Network:

The term ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. It’s not necessarily a goal, and we’ll never achieve perfect findability, but we’re surely headed in the right direction.

A clear sign of progress is the emergence of ubiquitous findable objects (UFOs). GPS, RFID, UWB, and cellular triangulation enable us, for the first time in history, to tag and track products, possessions, pets, and people as they wander through space and time.

Morville goes on to cite all kinds of examples of how the “brave new world of UFOs” is playing out. Of course, there are two sides to the issue, and not everyone thinks this kind of thing is a good thing.

The arguments for and against are thought-provoking and not nearly as clear-cut as we like to think. I tend to be a bit flippant in my comments about serious topics (oh really?) but this is pretty serious stuff. I recommend you read Morville’s whole article, and explore some of the links in it. He goes into a lot more detail than I do here.

Many of us are opposed to giving out personal information on principle, but we willingly relinquish it every day, through the use of cookies on our computer, loyalty programs, credit cars, ATM activity, security cards at work, applications for all kinds of thing, etc. There is a lot of information about all of us out there, and by and large, we enjoy the benefits that come with that.

But how far is too far? I carry a cell phone, which can be used to track my movements. That might be a good thing if I’m lost, but what if I’m playing hooky from work? Who decides which is which?

A while back, I posted an item on social bookmarking (for example, those tags at the end of this article) that is fast becoming a popular way for people to share interests with each other, as well as track down all kinds of information.

The success of social bookmarking depends on all of us giving up a certain amount of our privacy in exchange for the benefits of getting access to a wider community. I’m willing to let you see my photos on Flickr and I’m hoping that you won’t use them for a bad purpose.

I’m also willing to put you on my buddy list, so you can see whether I’m at my computer or not. But I think I’ll draw the line at letting you track my movements via my GPS collar, or something like that. At least, I will if I know about it. My point is that it’s starting to look more and more as though I won’t know about it. The RFID tag on the collar of my shirt might provide a signal that those who know what they’re doing can match to me and follow the shirt’s progress throughout the city. Sounds crazy, sure. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.

As with so much of today’s technology, we latch on to the cool stuff and all the neat things that we can do. But there’s always two sides to every story. And sometimes we get carried away before we’ve fully considered all the facts. By the time we do, it’s often too late to get the genie back into the bottle.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for putting the brakes on any of this new technology. I think it’s great stuff and I firmly believe it’s going to make the world more interesting for all of us. But we need to have free and open discussion about how we all benefit from this stuff, not just a few. And we have to make sure that we don’t cede control over our lives to some “Big Brother” type of group, or company, without ensuring we have the means to follow what they’re doing.

I know these issues will keep coming up. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what some of you think about UFOs. Or anything else I’ve touched on. While I like to hear myself type, I’d love to get a conversation going with a bunch of you. Feel free to comment anytime on anything.

Thanks to grockwel for pointing me to this topic

MediaChannel.org, which bills itself as “a media issues supersite, featuring criticism, breaking news, and investigative reporting from hundreds of organizations worldwide” is used to dealing with critics who denounce it for its decidedly left-wing slant on the world’s news.

But now, according to a post today on the front page, the site is facing a more insidious threat, as hackers are systematically trying to put the site out of business.

Perhaps it is a coincidence, perhaps not, but on the very week that MediaChannel is offering information on the protests against the media role in the Iraq War, (link added) and as our traffic grows, parties unknown are targeting the site with a flood of vicious technical attacks designed to bring our website down.

Fighting these attacks has taken up hours of time by our webmaster and hosting company. It is draining our already meager resources. We need help from internet security specialists we cannot afford. What started as sporadic denial of service attacks has mushroomed into ongoing multiple and coordinated attacks by people determined to destroy Mediachannel.org and deprive our readers from viewing the site and taking part in our community of concerned readers worldwide.

This attack on free speech is serious, potentially well-financed and beyond our ability to deal with. We will have to cut back on what we can offer until we are able to more effectively fight back.

If this is really an attack on a site by someone determined to shut it down for saying the wrong things, it marks a disturbing new direction for press freedoms. And coming just a week after the vicious crackdown on press freedoms in Kenya, one can’t help but be worried for the future.