Just another WordPress site

Tag: technology

  • Great Article on XFN Manipulation

    From Brian Suda’s “XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations“:

    In this article I will take a good look at XFN – the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think – there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I’ll show you below.

    Via a Microformat tweet.

  • How Not to End Up as an Anachronism

    From “GigaOM: How Not to End Up as an Anachronism“:

    There are always seemingly good reasons to continue doing things the way they were done in the past, and transition always presents challenges. As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves. They are two basic reasons for this situation: Change of existing operational services is hard. So is changing people behavior.

    One of the advantages of working for a startup is that there is no baggage to deal with, leaving you with great freedom of innovation.

    On the other hand, vendor and infrastructure lock-in is something that we, as technologists, have all had to deal with in one form or another. The challenge is to develop an ability to spot nascent trends and innovations early on, so as to gage and potentially leverage them as they emerge, rather than miss the boat and be left behind.

    I think I’m not too bad at what I do, but then again, there are people like Sylvain, Joe and Chris (to only name a few) who always help keeping me modest on this front.

  • Change o' Plans. Joining the Praized Team!

    Funny the pace plans can change at, isn’t it? I was all organized and looking forward to formally announce my return to the world of independent consulting when things started to take an even more interesting turn instead.

    I am in fact very happy to announce that I have now officially joined the ranks of the Praized Media team.

    Praized Media is a startup company working on a web-based application that will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can trust. It’s also a tool that will structure local conversations within blogs and a new platform for local search providers to generate leads from the untapped social media market.

    I’ve been following Praized since mid-2007, when they really started to show up on my radar as a serious[ly fun] and innovative venture, oozing with potential, and backed by a winning trio of entrepreneurs: Sebastien Provencher, Sylvain Carle and Harry Wakefield. A fact which was only reinforced when Garage Technology Ventures decided to fund the company last September.

    I’ve been given the opportunity to increasingly involve myself in the company as a consultant since last December. The way things were evolving, I could not longer deny the clear fact that this is a project I want to be an integral part of. Something I can unequivocally see myself focusing on, even providing segues into some of involvements in the web and open source communities.

    Luckily for me, the feeling seemed to be mutual and today marked my first day on staff. Suffice to say, I’m sporting a mile long smile about it all.

    Praized is currently in stealth-mode, so although I can’t say much more, I can definitely hint that great things are coming! And with the people already on board, I’m in for a fun ride, striving to keep up with and help them in their efforts.

    Thanks for the opportunity, team! But shame on you though. Now I’ll have to can that site I worked on for my consulting biz’… ;-p

  • Engineers Say the Darndest Things

    From: “Kodak: A Thousand Nerds – TechTalk”

    Compressed-graphite field plotter:
    This example of inscriptive technology is a dactylically manipulated lignin/cellulose-encased crystalline carbon allotrope allowing shear force deposition for semiotic and representational modification of planar compressed-cellulose substrates.

    I dare you to think of what the device might be before checking the answer out.

  • Facebook Internationalization for Developers

    From “Platform Internationalization“:

    … we have a quick way for applications to integrate with users in new locales. We are now sending a param “fb_sig_locale” to all canvas pages that signals the locale set for the visiting user. Feel free to use this to begin localizing.

    Good thing to know, since Facebook is now available in Spanish, with French and German to come shortly.

  • YDL and the Versatile Side of the PS3

    Although not yet available to the general public yet (<2weeks), Terra Soft has now released Yellow Dog Linux 6 to their YDL.net community.

    One of the most important improvement in this release is the fact that the distribution is now built upon CentOS, with select Fedora 7 components, making it a much more robust enterprise solution. YDL6 has support for the PS3, Apple G4/G5 and IBM System p.

    Don’t know why you would want to run Linux on your PS3? Just check Terra Soft’s projects/clients showcase to get an idea of how powerful the Cell-based console truly is. From driving a car to solving celestial mysteries, this sure is one versatile little black box.

  • The Future of XML

    From “The future of XML“:

    The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The crystal ball might be a little hazy, but the outline of XML’s future is becoming clear. The exact time line is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn’t. XML’s future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing. […] Word processors, spreadsheets, games, diagramming tools, and more are all migrating into the browser. This trend will only accelerate in the coming year as local storage in Web browsers makes it increasingly possible to work offline. But XML is still firmly grounded in Web 1.0 publishing, and that’s still very important.

    Passthru from Slashdot. Great read from IBM.

  • Rogers Canada Wireless Data Plan Update: Good vs. Bad

    It’s no secret that I have one of the infamous 1.3 million missing iPhones with me, here in Montreal.

    I only recently activated the phone features though, then found out that it took special (though widly published) credentials to be able to use Rogers’ EDGE network from the device.

    So I tried the latter a few days ago, and got somewhat of a nasty surprise after trying to load one (yes, only one) Facebook page through Mobile Safari: it ended up costing me around $8.00… Ooops, I guess I won’t be doing that under my pay-as-you-go account…

    I did find this a bit dishonest puzzling, since the same account (and SIM) allowed me to browse the mobile web for $0.05 per page from my older Motorola phone. Of course, there’s a difference between quasi-text-only pages vs. a standard page and all the attached media elements, but still…

    The obvious conclusion was that I’d wait to use EDGE until I could score a decent data plan, since gaining the voice and SMS features was really what I was looking for when unlocking my device.

    Looking for signs of such a plan, I found out that Rogers in fact recently released an unlimited data plan, without much fanfare, now matching Bell Canada’s $7.00/month offering. Details are very scarce and I’m not entirely sure this truly applies to my needs or if some types of weird partnership-based limitations are involved, but it’s definitely worth looking into. Unfortunately, the plan excludes anything but what Rogers wants to peddle, which still makes Bell’s offer a much better choice, but is unfortunately incompatible with the iPhone GSM capabilities (vs. CDMA)…

    Now to top it all off, here is what happened to me this morning and what every iPhone-totting Canadian must be aware of: I was waiting for the bus, browsing the web from my iPhone while connected to a public hotspot (hence why I’m not really in a rush to get EDGE browsing activated). Reception wasn’t great though, being a bit far from the source, and what ensued led me to find out that Rogers has indeed tweaked/opened their network for increased and simplified data access: even though I had cleared out the credentials previously required to access the web through EDGE, it turns out that my iPhone did switch from wifi to EDGE in the middle of my session.

    Of course, the reason I realized the latter fact was that my account quickly went from $7.00 left to $0.00… So unless you do have a ([un]limited) data plan, be very careful if you run an unlocked iPhone in Canada: the usual trick to disable EDGE (ie: not entering the special credentials) will not work anymore, and you might end up with a pretty bad surprise on your bill. Turning off Data Roaming (Settings -> General -> Network -> Data Roaming = off) won’t help either, since Rogers is my carrier. Just be sure that Mail.app doesn’t automatically checks for new messages (Settings -> Mail -> Auto-Check = manual), and avoid using network-based apps unless you have a good wifi connection.

    We’re getting We’ll hopefully get there… At a somewhat totally depressing rate, given countries like Iran and Estonia have better data rates and networks than we do…

  • Cybercluster: Synchronous Multimaster Replication for PostgreSQL

    From “Cybercluster – Cybertec Schönig & Schönig GmbH”

    Cybertec is a PostgreSQL replication solution which makes sure that the database cluster is consistent at every point in time. We rely on a shared-nothing architecture which is perfectly suitable for synchronous multimaster replication.

    I had somehow missed this newly open sourced (BSD license) solution from the list of accessories in the PostgreSQL 8.3 press release… That sounds like a great multimaster solution. Woohoo, one more tool!

    Edit: Actually, that’s two more tools, since Mr. Icon also recommended me first hand to look into the wonders of using pgpool-II for persistent connections today, a product which also has a few replication and load balancing tricks of its own.

  • PostgreSQL 8.3 is Out and Kickin'

    From “PostgreSQL 8.3 Press Kit“:

    The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of version 8.3 of the high-performance object-relational database management system. This release includes a record number of new and improved features which will greatly enhance PostgreSQL for application designers, database administrators, and users, with more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL contributors from 18 countries.

    Please forgive me as I bathe in my own drool after reading the detailed features list and feature matrix.

    Still have to rely on Slony-I for master-to-slave replication though…I also have to check into Postgres-R as a multimaster replication engine.