For the past 355 days (maybe more), we’ve all heard people talking about “social media” and “social marketing,” and blah blah blah. My New Year’s resolution is to totally avoid the term, and the lunatic consulting practices that surround this. To any of my clients (real, perspective, imagined): you do not need a social media strategy.
Allow me to repeat that. YOU DO NOT NEED A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY. Ask yourself this, though: What’s the last thing you bought from a link in Twitter?
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OK, ok, ok. It’s been done and said before, but since I’m a die hard iPhone user/(nascent) developer with a still-active Verizon line, I thought I’d drop my own 2¢ into the well.
Anyway, we picked up a couple HTC Droid Eris phones yesterday, and I spent a considerable amount of time tinkering with them (maybe not enough, given that they went to the lovelies: Jacque and Jeanie). I am struck by one thing, however, since both Andriod and iPhone seem to be hitting the same functionality.
The iPhone seems parallel to the Gnome windowing system, while Android seems to follow the design guidelines of KDE. I’ll explain for those of you who don’t use Linux. Both Gnome and KDE are windowing systems built atop of X-Windows (the Graphical User Environment used in UNIX and Linux). The differences between the two systems, and their virtues and failings have been endlessly debated by all the significant figures in Linux and OpenSource development, including Linus, himself.
Basically, it comes down to this. KDE’s philosophy has been to provide the user with all the options available, allowing a plethora of customizable behaviors and themes — have an extra button on your mouse? KDE can assign an action to it. Gnome on the other hand attempts to anticipate the needs of the common user, and limits the opportunity for customization (maybe limit is the wrong word…) to the things that “most” people will need or use, attempting to keep the desktop metaphor consistent and clean across the board.
Having an argument ab0ut which is better is silly. The Droid Eris is a nice looking phone that seems to do its job well. I found the interface a bit confusing, in terms of understanding the various desktops which are sometimes app icons and sometimes full applications, but I expect that I would be comfortable in a couple hours of real use. The iPhone’s UI, in my mind is still the benchmark, though: smooth and consistent (except in terms of settings screens, but I’ll blame developers there). But Android is pretty cool.
Alright. So I discovered that it’s really a pain in the butt when you discover that you’re trying to use Drupal 6 with CiviCRM, and discover that PHP 5.3 has deprecated some features, breaking the software. Obnoxious, but really, that’s kinda the whole game when you use open-source software. Goes with the territory, so I had to fix my environment, downgrading PHP from 5.3.0 to 5.2.10. This is what I did:
sudo port deactivate php5
sudo port install php52 +mysql5 +gd
apachectl restart
Totally simple and easy. No messing with MacPorts sources or anything. Thanks to the MacPorts team for taking care of this one!
Long ago, back in the days before Gentoo had a binary distribution, when you had to compile everything, I made the switch to Linux. From Windows. This was in 2002, and since then I have spent a significant amount of time using both Debian/Ubuntu Linux and Windows, and I would have gone totally Linux but for 1) the lack of a decent peer for Adobe Creative Suite, and 2) because GIMP sucks. But a couple years ago, I bought a MacBook Pro 15″ and I found the best of both worlds – Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and a BASH shell.
But, this is not about a Mac vs. PC argument. Use what you like. What this is about is using a Ubuntu server (Intrepid) to act as an AppleShare file server and Time Machine backup volume. It was not nearly as tricky as I expected it to be, and in a couple ways it was down-right easy.
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Obviously, I am looking forward to next month’s release of Apple’s new OS version, 10.6 (Snow Leopard). What do you expect from a company which has taken almost 2 years to, not develop new features, but to optimize its code – making the OS run faster with a smaller disk footprint. Oh, and I’m psyched to see the finder run optimized to take advantage of the GPU on the video chips (which reminds me: the MythBusters describe what a GPU).
Anyway, someone appears to have leaked the wallpaper packaged with Snow Leopard: to Mac Armour. Nice!!!
As someone who loves both sharks and “geek-TV” (my girlfriend’s term for History, NatGeo, and Discovery), I wait all year for Discovery’s Shark Week. But, this year’s Shark Week truly sucks.
The week began with a very poorly done, 2-hour docu-drama, Blood in the Water, about the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks that became the inspiration for Peter Benchley’s Jaws. After last year’s program about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, I figured it’d be great. Not so. Blood in the Water was repetitive (annoyingly repetitive coming back from commercial), and the historic drama/interview style of the show was badly done, bordering on gratuitous gore. The shark action footage was unoriginal, most of it coming from previous Shark Week.
The rest of the week has not been much better, featuring old programs, or new shows which simply go over ground (sea) that has been covered in previous year’s programming. I’m hoping tonight is better.
Oh, and one last thought. I never thought I would say this, but the airborne Great White film is really becoming cliched. It was cool in Air Jaws (and Air Jaws II), but when every show has footage from False Bay in South Africa sprinkled throughout, it gets kinda old.
I don’t know about you, but if you’re out surfing the web, looking to kill a bit of time, there is a wonderful class of website to help. Let’s call them headline aggregators, or news aggregators, or whatever. Guy Kawasaki, who you may recognize, not from motorcycles, but as one of the most prominent and successful Macintosh evangelists every, has launched AllTop.
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I made the move from Windows to MacOS about a year ago, after spending a long time as a corporate IT puke. In the corporate world, I got paid to know how Windows worked, but a bit of tinkering with Linux (early Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu) let me in on just how useful a robust command line is. I would have made the switch to Linux and been happy, but for the fact that I do a significant amount of graphic/design work and I needed a couple Adobe products. Enter MacOS, the right blend of Linux and Adobe.
But because I’ve been working as the lead (only for the first year) technologist for a startup, I need a reasonable facsimille of my production server environment running on my laptop and desktop. The Mac is perfect for this, and with about 30 minutes setup time, I managed to get the MAMP (MacOS – Apache – MySQL – PHP) environment set up and running.
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I’ve had this domain for something like 5 years, and I have been generally happy with Yahoo!, first for their webhosting and later for their domain registration services. But this year, they suddenly (well, not so suddenly) decided to change the price for registering a domain name from $9.95/yr to $34.95/yr. Huh? Are you serious? Nearly quadruple the price?
I suspect the price increase is to help Yahoo! rid themselves of the business. I can think of no other reason for that kind of huge price increase. Especially, when you can move to GoDaddy and keep the registration under $10/yr.
Anyway. What the hell, Yahoo!
