Up to now the computing experience has been divided into two - online and offline. Being online means using sites through a web browser, offline means working with different applications, mostly designed to work with documents not stored on the Internet, but instead on local file systems. However, changes changes in the way we communicate and work are starting to make this arrangement look creaky and old fashioned so thoughts have turned to how to integrate these two worlds.
web2.0
Something that has become vastly annoying recently about Facebook is the sheer number of invites to add applications to a profile. The invites mechanism used to be a handy way to let your friends know about an application they might like, but unfortunately some application developers decided to abuse this process and force you to invite friends before you could use it. Eventually this lead to a situation where you could log in to your account and find a large number of invites waiting for you, many of them generated by badly behaved applications.
The phenomenon that is Web2.0 has brought about many new opportunities to interact with websites. The downside of this so far has been the necessity to register for each site separately that creates the baggage of having to remember lots of user names and passwords. Help is at hand though with a new system called OpenID that might life easier for all of us in the future. The good news is that this can easily be integrated into Drupal to make your users' lives easier.
Drupal has been officially updated to version 6! An announcement detailing some of the new features is available at: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0. If you are unfamiliar with Drupal you can get a booklet that describes it at: http://drupal.org/node/10767.
Once you get yours hands on an Asus EEE PC (I've just taken delivery of a black one btw and am using it to write this!) you'll probably find it an incredibly useful tool for keeping up with your work, email and favourite websites.
Found this list of bad things people get up to in SecondLife:
Second Life | Community: Police Blotter
Offences like "illegal roulette table" and "illegal slot machines" make it on the list along with verbal abuse and harassment and "shooting a Linden". Interesting to see what sort of things go on in a virtual world and what penalties are handed out. Seeing some of the offences though makes me wonder, will you ever get run down no go areas in a virtual world?
[This method also works for Kubuntu 8.04 64 bit and Flock 1.1 - see the update at the end of this post]
This turned out to be easier than I thought! First you need to get the deb file from getdeb.net and install it manually it manually:
sudo dpkg -i flock_1.0-5~getdeb1_amd64.deb
There comes a time, probably when you have heard James Blunt for the thirteenth time in the space of a couple of hours, that you start wondering if there is a better way to discover new music that you might like. Fortunately there is an answer, an answer that has been around for some time now it is last.fm which offers you the chance to discover new artists that you might like based on your existing taste.
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