Lazycoder

Widgets or Won’tgets

The rise of the widget is upon us. Finally all of those OOP examples will be put to use. We’re building widgets/gadgets.

Given how many different startups and companies are jumping on the widget bandwagon, and it is a bandwagon make no mistake about that, you would think there would be a wide variety of widgets available.

Let’s look at Google’s gadgets. There’s a clock widget, nice round ‘analog’ dial. A Digg gadget so I can see the top 10 stories. Oooh, there’s a POP3 mail gadget. Ah, a weather gadget. Good, good.

Let’s check out Windows/MSN Live. Ahh, they have a clock gadget too. There’s a Digg gadget. POP3 gadget. hmmmmm

Yourminis.com – Another clock gadget, still round. Digg, Pop3. weather. Yawn.

Apple Dashboard – several POP3. Ahh, more clocks. Digg. weather.

Netvibes is just going to make it so you can use THIER clock widget on ANYONES portal.

All the widgets sets are the same. Games – Tetris and Sudoku. Delicious bookmarks.

Now some of them, yourminis for one, want you to be able to use the widget on your desktop OR in your browser. What’s the advantage to that? Flash is notorious for grabbing ahold of your CPU cycles and making them work mandatory overtime. I want that on my desktop too? Plus isn’t the whole point of widgets that they gather data from the web and you can use the from any computer? How does putting one on my desktop and better solution than having them in my browser?

The point of this post? There’s no point to this post. It’s just another widget.

In his rightful place

PIX18.jpg

Originally uploaded by SKoon.

Hmmmm,Darth Tater right next to the C/C++ books. Very Appropriate. The dark side indeed.

Dynamic DNS services I use

I’ve never liked the idea of my web hosting company providing my DNS resolution for my sites. It makes my sites less portable. When I want to change web hosts, I have to wait while the old host and the new host get together and transfer my hosting information. There are usually problems and both of them point the finger at the other one. So I took the leap a while back and signed up for a dynamic DNS provider.

A Dynamic DNS service allows you to have more control over where your domain names point. After you sign up, you enter your domain names and sub domain names then assign the IP addresses they should resolve to yourself. If you want to host your domain on your home PC or a friends server and your IP address changes from time to time, this makes it easy to update the IP address where your domain resides. Some services include a small client you can download and install that will update your dynamic DNS provider with your current IP address when it changes. Very useful for dial-up, cable-modem, and DSL users who don’t have a static IP address.

Other benefits of controlling your domains DNS include the ability to host sub-domains on different servers than your main web hosts server. I’ll often set up a sub-domain for an application that I want to try out and point it to my home server, where I have much faster access to settings, databases, and other resources, before I install it on my web hosts server.

To use a Dynamic DNS provider, sign up and point your web domains nameserver settings to the nameservers they provider tells you.

no-ip.com - I’ve used them for this domain for years. I’ve never had a change take more than a few minutes to take effect. They provide free domain hosting via several pre-set domains. Or you can pay something like $25/year and use your own domain. I primarily use their DNS hosting service, but they also include mail hosting, domain registration, monitoring, and SSL certificates.

EveryDNS.net – Free (as in beer) DNS hosting. They can handle sub-domains, MX records, CNAMES, everything related to DNS. I’m using them to provide DNS resolution for my scottkoon.org domain. Never had a problem. They don’t have as many services as no-ip.com; But if all you want is dynamic DNS hosting, they work great.

Digital Ethnography – wait..wha…?

The Machine is Us/ing Us Discussion

(Via new Uncle Brian.)

OK, so you may not understand the title. But the video makes some interesting points. I got 2/3rds of the way through it before YouTube stopped loading the video. Now it won’t come back up for me. It looks like it’s pretty popular right now so I’ll try back later. I wanted to touch on a couple of points that I did see in the video.

Web as a giant connected database

There are a lot of problems with this concept, well not with the concept but with some of the assumptions that go into the implementation.

1) Things that are related SHOULD be related to each other. – This is broken currently in the web. Spam links relate web logs and forums to non-related content. As long as non-moderated linking is allowed, this will always be broken. No search engine can get this right.

2) It’s easy to orphan records and hard to repair them. – links go dead (404), get renamed, and the content changes often (breaking rule #1). This lowers the reliability of the web as a whole. Lets use this video as an example. Right now, it won’t load for me. So it may not load for you. Which means you are relying on me to accurately relay the information in the video. I may misunderstand part of the video or may interpret it differently than you. Either way, if the video never comes back up, the context for comments and posts linking to it has changed.

We are in some way part of the new Web 2.0 machine

I think the social aspect of Web 2.0 has been overstated quite a bit. Sure there are thousands of blogs out there, but how many link to each other. Sadly, it’s a few high-traffic sites that get all the links. Which sites are on the A-List changes depending on your topic. Most of the time, we group together based on topic or based on who we know. So what you see when you look at graphs based on links and topics really look more like algae blooms. Big puffs with concentrations in the middle (high traffic sites that link a lot) with some crossover between topics. (e.g. sometimes political blogs link to tech stories and vice versa). Most of my social network contact lists consist of the same people. I go to a site, invite them, they link to me and I link to them but we never really find anyone new.

Hopefully I’ll be able to watch the rest of the video and then come back and add more (thus changing the context of anything linking to this post by changing the content).

Web Narcissism

Random Thought

Web 2.0 = Narcissism + HTML

Given enough time, all activities become an exercise in how much attention a human can draw to themselves.

Leatherman: Tough but not indestructible

PIX20.jpg

Originally uploaded by SKoon.

I was trying to pop a rivet back into my daughters overalls when the nose of my leathermans pliers sheared off. I’ve since replaced it with a Gerber pocket tool.