Sony learned a lesson from the PS3. Don’t make a console so powerful that is too expensive for normal gamers to afford. I look forward to E3 where Sony actually reveals the hardware look — it matters more than you might think. Spiderman lettering was just as much at fault as the absurd launch price of the PS3.
Euphonia∝
At Paul Miller’s recomendation (since he’s been offline for a year), Euphonia is about obsession with technology. For me, it hits even closer to home since I’m a programmacaster and I record things all the time.
The movie is about an hour long and at points it feels longer, but it’s generally well made and it has its moments. I lost interest towards the end when the recording hits the quicktime but overall, I liked it.
YouTube’s paid channels∝
Did I ever mention I really hate YouTube? I love watching some of the videos on it, but unlike a lot of Internet goers, I don’t spend literally hours. I spend a few minutes. I don’t look around YouTube, I don’t follow videos. Until Google recently made it mandatory to be logged into YouTube when logged into your regular Google account, I was adamant about staying logged out so YouTube could not track the videos I liked and suggest more. I hate YouTube as a place to go. For me, it’s just a thing to use.
For me, like other things on the Internet, YouTube is needs to function as a dumb pipe of videos. Overlaying that with structure, like channels, and followers, and I don’t even know what else because it’s insane, well, scares me.
I doubt paid channels will have much support initially if all there is Revision 3 style shows. It really depends on the content. It’ll be tough.
Oh. Did I mention I hate YouTube. That makes me a horrible person, right?
Interplanetary Internet∝
Three years ago when I was a junior in high school, I explained my ideas for an Interplanetary Internet to a bunch of people in small groups in my AP Government class. They absolutely did not believe me when I explained how it might work. No one had an understanding of the terrestrial Internet or what “latency” even was.
Why did I bring that up in a high school AP Government class? Our teacher wanted us to write subset-style Constitution of settles of Mars. You can’t build a futuristic Constitution without mass communication and technology.
Setup samba folder shares
I feel like I have done this way too many times this week, but here I am again setting up folder sharing on Ubuntu.
Installing the packages is easy enough: sudo apt-get install cifs-utils samba
After running that, you’ll need to make a user for Samba share access. Yes, I understand, you already have a user account that’s perfectly valid. In order to use it though, you’ll need to make a Samba account too. Because one wasn’t good enough. Run sudo smpasswd -a username where username is your user account’s name. So for instance, I would run sudo smbpasswd -a ryan because that’s my account. Then you can either add the same password (my suggestion) or be crazy and pick a different one.
From there, you’ll need to Ubuntu UI (and whatever they call Nautilus these days) to make the share. I haven’t figured out the method for making shares the terminal. Right click on any folder and go to properties, share and then: share this folder and allow others to create and delete files in this folder. Finally, create share.
You’re all set.
Posterous is going down∝
That day is here. The site will shut down sometime today, after which time blogs will no longer be accessible. If you haven’t moved your blog off Posterous yet, you’ll have an additional 30 days to access your data after the shutdown. After that, all blogs will be permanently erased.
I never used Posterous. I’ve been aligned with WordPress from the beginning. I do, however, support Post Haven, in all aspects except its name, but that’s another story. Post Haven, being built by previous founders of Posterous, Garry Tan and Brett Gibson, definitely know what they’re doing. WordPress suffers from having to support the oldest legacy code in the world and maintaining support for garbage shared hosting. Post Haven, after the four year beta period of Posterous between launch and acquisition, should be well built and among other things, great for people just wanting to write long form on their own paid for plan.
And if Post Haven for some reason doesn’t work out (and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, you’re doing it wrong, most likely, in that case), there’s always WordPress and soon, Ghost.
Kickstarter: Ghost∝
Ghost, the future of blogging platforms, is finally on the move again. For two days in November, the world was buzzing about Ghost. Yesterday, the Ghost Kickstarter launched. It is already well over its initial goal of $25,000. If you like blogging, if you like open source, if you love and hate PHP, WordPress and all the frameworks under the sun among other things, then please, consider Ghost as an alternative.
I’ll be talking about this in depth on Friday on my weekly podcast, At The Nexus.
Google Now on iOS and Android∝
Owen Williams:
This morning, an update for the Google Search application on iOS was released by Google and along with it came Google Now. The predictive search feature has been available on Android for just under a year, but in that time, it’s only been able to reach a peak of 25% of all Android devices.
Unfortunately for Google they’ve had a fragmentation problem since the beginning of time with Android, making it hard to reach users when a new service is only available for Jellybean (4.1+). By releasing on iOS, they’ve effectively made the service available for up to 500 Million devices on day one.
My mom asked me yesterday if her phone (my hand-me-down Evo V 4G on Virgin Mobile) could ask Google questions like I can on my phone (Nexus 4). I had to explain that Google Now was not available on phones running 4.0 and earlier. She wasn’t that disapointed, but she really likes just asking questions instead of having to use the crappy stock HTC keyboard. It’s neat and it’s fast. But she can’t use it.
Google really needs to mandate updates. If Apple can do it, Google can do it too, surely.
Linux Kernel 3.9∝
Ars Technica:
Linux creator Linus Torvalds last night announced the release of version 3.9 of the kernel. Available for download at kernel.org, Linux 3.9 brings a long list of improvements to storage, networking, file systems, drivers, virtualization, and power management.
What will that 4.0 milestone bring us? The Year of Linux?
Crockford’s Top Down Parser∝
Because I’m a sick person sitting in the computer science building’s lounge, I took the time to read (and sorta-understand) Douglas Crockford’s Top Down Operator Precedence.
It’s basically writing a parser with operator precedence built in. It’s written in JavaScript, so some familiarity there helps, but for the most part, it’s pretty simple. And it’s quite fascinating.
A prosperous homework assignment on Twitter∝
The goal of the homework assignment was to design a system that would create a behavior change in a group of test subjects. The behavior change that I picked was getting people to follow me on Twitter.
I guessed that if I programatically favorited people’s tweets, they would get a notification about it, and might decide to follow me. It worked, and it worked well.
Myles Recny is pretty impressive. Favorites are fare game if you ask me (read the comments if you want an insider look on Hacker News’ vitriol and anger on spam favorites, which literally makes no sense). If I had this as an assignment, I would be pretty lost.
error: expected unqualified-id before ‘<<’ token
While developing my class project, I came across this error without finding a solution on StackOverflow.
RunTime.cpp: In member function ‘void IntegerComputer::set_output(int)’:
RunTime.cpp:22:14: error: expected unqualified-id before ‘<<’ token
The code that caused this error:
void IntegerComputer::set_output(int n) {
this->output = n;
std::string << "hi" << std::endl;
}
Can you spot the error? I used std::string instead of the usual stream std::cout. Maybe I’m just getting old.
Against DRM in HTML5∝
The web would certainly be better off without Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash Player, but the idea that putting DRM into HTML itself to make them obsolete is absurd. The EME proposal would not make proprietary, platform-specific plugins disappear; in fact it makes a new space for them as Content Decryption Modules (CDMs). These would be no less of a problem for Web users, especially those using free/libre and open source browsers and operating systems. The fact that they would gain legitimacy as a Web standard would make them a much bigger problem.
Just one of two other great points about DRM in HTML5. Want to watch Netflix? Well, your browser provider will need to sell their soul (and you can buy it back provided you download this CDM and pay $9/mo for the rest of your life).
Office’s new release cycle∝
Microsoft’s Office team has an ambitious roadmap ahead of it. But can a team of 5,000 engineers move from delivering product releases every 2 to 3 years, to every quarter or even faster?
Yes. It can. If the Office team releases features that are small and useful occasionally, every ninety days is completely possible. Chrome decided the long form release cycle was not going to work for a browser. Imagine what it could do for Office. Alienating users that are used to the slow cycle? Well, those users don’t mind their Chrome updates, their Firefox updates and their Windows updates that are pushed them literally all the time — because those updates don’t break their workflow and the changes are actually gradual.
Get Lucky∝
I like Daft Punk. I heard it first on Toonami back when I was a kid in elementary school sneaking to stay up past midnight. Get Lucky is their latest single from their soon to be released album in May. Sadly, their single, released last Friday, Get Lucky, is a ruined Radio Edit. Maybe I like commercials better than actual song implementations.
It’s been three days since Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” was first unleashed, it’s already hit number one on iTunes in both France and the UK, and number three in the US. And on Spotify? It set a record for “biggest streaming day for a single track” in both the US and UK, writes The Hollywood Reporter.
I wonder if the geeks and nerds among the iTunes and Spotify regulars helped Get Lucky to such high positions.