A few months back, Google bought the office complex that become.com, the shopping search engine leases space in. Today they finally started to move in to the complex so become.com thought they’d throw up a sign to welcome Google to the building.
 
 It looks like Google didn’t see the funny side and removed the poster with 30 minutes!
Freevo is an open source multimedia platform written in Python, which allows you to easily turn your Linux based PC into a jukebox, VCR, PVR and HTPC. This latest release includes lots of new features including a web interface for remote administration, PS3 support under Yellow Dog Linux, an RSS server for fetching podcasts, an encoding server and lots more.
Setup of Freevo was straight forward enough once the required modules were installed. The only problem I ran across was the need to install Kaa from SVN. To install Kaa, simply check out the latest revision and install the kaa.base and kaa.metadata packages as so:
svn co svn://svn.freevo.org/kaa/trunk kaa cd kaa/base sudo python setup.py install ... cd ../metadata sudo python setup.py install ...
Configuration of Freevo can be a bit of a pain as you have to edit the configuration by hand but it’s all clearly documented. You can also head over to the Freevo Help website if you do have any issues. Once everything is setup, Freevo is simple to use. From the main menu, you can select to watch tv, watch a movie, listen to music, look at pictures, view the weather or read some RSS headlines.
While the guys at Rubyred Labs are not busy developing web and mobile applications they’re out scouring Silicon Valley to find schwag, the t-shirts, ballcaps, notepads, stickers, keychains, and other booty blaring the slogans that define Valley tech companies. For US$30 (including shipping) they’ll send you a Valley Schwag care package packed with different stuff, including a t-shirt, stickers and other interesting stuff.
After pestering them to support shipping to Ireland, they finally gave in and agreed to ship here! My package arrived a few weeks back and contained a minglenow.com t-shirt, some stickers from Webshots, Mashery, RooftopComedy and Compete, a Turistas shot syringe, a set of Perplex City puzzle cards and a copy of The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Now all of us outside of the Valley can get in on the schwag action too!
This is the third release of my Social Bookmark Widget for Wordpress. This release sees a major re-write of the code and the addition of BlogMemes, Blue Dot, BuddyMarks, Bumpzee, Diigo, DotNetKicks, DZone, Earthlink, givealink.org, igooi, kick.ie, Lilisto, LookLater, Mr Wong, Netscape, Onlywire, PlugIM, PopCurrent, PPNow, Recruiting.com, Rojo, Scoopeo, Slashdot, SphereIt, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Taggly, Tagtooga, TalkDigger, ThisNext, Webride and Wists bringing the number of supported sites to 59.
To install the widget, simply download the widget from below, and upload the contents (bookmark-widget.php and the bookmark directory containing the images and the bookmark-sites.php configuration file) of the archive to <your wordpress install>/wp-content/plugins/widgets/ folder. Next you need to activate the “Social Bookmark Widget†under your plugin settings. You should then be able to drag and drop the widget to your sidebar and select which bookmarking sites you wish to display from the “Sidebar Widgets†menu under “Presentationâ€.
You can see the plugin in action on my own sidebar to the left and you can download either the .zip or the .tar.gz archive.
A colleague of mine recently asked me to have a look at a laptop they had purchased in one of the large computer stores over Christmas complaining of all the usual symptoms of a virus/trojan/spyware infection. I agreed to have a look at it and clean it up.
After clearing down the most obvious pieces of malware, I set about running Windows update. To my amazement, not one single patch had been applied to the machine, nor even automatic updates enabled. Remember, this machine, a brand name laptop, was just purchased in late December of 2006 from a large computer store. In this day and age, selling a laptop with a fresh install of Windows XP without any patches applied is akin to selling a car without any seat-belts, lights or brakes!
While the laptop is “usable”, as the car would be, it is most certainly not safe for use in any way. I have no doubt that the machine was compromised within minutes of it being connected to the Internet. Within less than two months, 19 pieces of malware had made their way onto the system, all the usual suspects were there including Blaster, NetSky, MyDoom and even ProAgent.
The person in question had made quite a few purchases on-line, including one for WinAntiVirus2006, which did nothing but add more malware to the system and certainly didn’t remove any infections! I told them it would probably be a good idea to contact their bank and have their credit card cancelled as I’m pretty sure something or someone had got a hold of it and it was just a matter of time before it was used.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s time for a license to sell computers, or at least a basic set of standards a retailer must adhere to before being allowed to sell computers. It doesn’t need to be anything draconian, just some simple rules that ensure that the computers being sold are not putting people at unnecessary risk of on-line fraud, spyware infestation and possibly identity theft.
While I strongly feel that users in general need to be better educated about the need for applying updates, using good anti-virus software and so on, I feel the retailers also need to take some responsibility for the products they sell. Getting back to the car analagy, it’s like the car-dealer telling you after buy the car you need to fit the brakes and the seat-belts yourself.
I’ve just finished upgrading darxr.net to Wordpress 2.1. Everything went very smoothly, all my existing plugins and my own Social Bookmarks Widget are working fine with 2.1.
Some new features in 2.1 include the ability to save pages as drafts, up till now only posts could be saved as drafts along with the ability to set a page as the front page of the site rather than the actual blog itself. There is also a new “Visual” WYSIWYG editor, which is enabled by default, but the older “Code” editor is still available at the click of a mouse.
Another much welcomed feature of the new editor is the Autosave feature. There’s nothing worse than spending hours on a post and then losing everything when your browser crashes or the power cuts out.
There is improved Import/Export functionality making it easier to move to Wordpress, or away from it as the case may be, but with all these new features, who’d want to?
