Continuing to read the book that inspired the Patriot Missile post, I looked up a YouTube video for the Challenger space shuttle explosion and found the above result. I know that this was a fairly significant moment in our space program and the collective conscious of the United States, but I’m not sure I had seen until this morning.
Tag Archive for 'Technology'
According to the FT, Google and Facebook are going to try and compete with one another more directly by making forays into one another’s core territories.
Google is planning to give Gmail users a way to aggregate the updates of their various contacts on the service, creating a stream of notifications that would echo the similar real-time streams from Facebook and Twitter, according to reports.
According to a report on the tech website TechCrunch, Facebook is planning to upgrade this messaging service to compete directly with Gmail and other internet-based mail systems.
For an Information Systems class I am reading a book that has a chapter on the debate about the effectiveness of the Patriot Missile system during the first Gulf War. The chapter is interesting and goes over how different groups presented the effectiveness of the system during and after the war.
After doing a little searching around Wikipedia and YouTube I found this video which shows CNN footage from early on in the Iraq War with a SCUD heading toward a major American base. The Patriot Missile having been improved since the 90’s, automatically recognizes the attack and takes out the SCUD. For something so hotly debated after it’s initial adaptation as a missile defense system, interested parties definitely responded to criticism and improved the system.
The video is about 6 minutes, but worth watching if you have any interest at all.
At points, any Zelda game can be painstaking to get through. Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks can be downright embarrassing. Sitting on the plane or train blowing into the spirit flute does not usually make you look particularly cool. But I fought through the temples, bosses, and annoying puzzles.
Two temples away from the end, I accidentally erased my saved game. All of the progress…gone. Not sure if I will play again. Definitely need some time away from that game now.
Apple announced this week a new device, the iPad. I have been reading reviews over at Engadget and around the web. This comment crystalizes what I think is the most meaningful insight regarding the iPad:
it’s hard not to see it as a pretty bold statement of what Apple thinks general-purpose computing should look like in the future
I’m starting with a positive comment about what I will mostly have critical things to say.
I have been using Google Voice since this summer and have been extremely happy with it so far. Several people have commented to me that they’ve used Google Voice, but don’t get why or how it is useful.
Living abroad, it has been an indispensable tool for me to keep in touch with everyone at home. So, let me lay it out.
Last spring, I made a recommendation about a service called Raptr. At the time, I thought it was an interesting way to combine social media with online gaming. I have not been doing much gaming recently, so the usefulness of the application was immediately reduced to near zero.
I think that we will see a continued integration of these two spheres of technology and social activities, but I’m not sure what form that will take. Services already often let you know whether your friends are playing when you are about to play. The question is whether knowing that your friend is playing via Twitter or Facebook, for instance, will that encourage people to turn on their console and make that connection.
Furthermore, there is a question about the capacity of social media applications to handle something like this. Currently, they don’t support that – instead posts take the form of micro-blogging or short status updates.
In the end, Raptr just took up resources on my computer and added very little.
Conclusion: Wait…I’m sure Microsoft and Sony will pull this off well through strong dashboard integration.
Raptr is a website and a program that integrates features of social networking sites and gaming. On the social networking front this includes Facebook and Twitter. On the gaming front, it can recognize any game (to my knowledge). Specifically, it can link to WoW characters, Steam IDs, Xbox Live, and Wii.
The obvious advantage to this is having information about what games your friends are playing and when. For instance, if I see someone logging onto play Halo, I could start up my Xbox and join the same game. Similarly, if someone was on Steam playing TF2, I could join the game. Raptr informs other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (if you enable them) that you are playing a game, so people who are your friends on those sites can see. Recently, Steam friends has been much improved, Raptr functions to act as a cross-platform integrator.
I’ve only been experimenting with it for a few days and have no friends on it yet, but I think it is worth checking out if you play any sort of video game. The disadvantage is having another app running on your computer.
Sometimes battling through a difficult problem it is easy to take success for granted. As everyone knows (and maybe tired of hearing), I’ve been working on the server. It has been frustrating at times, but recently I have two things to show for it.
First, the file server is up and running and working fantastically.
Second, after about an entire day’s work, I got the print server up and running.
Now, I have to work on getting the web page up and finally getting Synergy to work.
@Dan Even running the server as administrator (sudo), Synergy still lagged like hell. I’m going to be more experimental in the upcoming weeks and try different machines and running the server on windows to the Linux client.
Okay, I’m putting this question out to the web (mostly Dan).
I’m trying to run my Linux server as a Synergy server. If you’re not familiar with Synergy, then you probably cannot help me, but you should definitely check it out. Essentially, it allows you to use a keyboard and mouse connected to one computer on any other computer on your network. It is very easy to use from Windows computer to another. Running Synergy on Mac or Linux is a bit more difficult.
Quick overview…here is what I want to do:
Server: Ubuntu 8.10
Client: Windows XP
I have made a config file for Synergy on my Linux computer and started it, but it lags like hell when I move the mouse over to the Windows screen.
I have tried troubleshooting this via Google, with no luck.
After repeated failure, I tried two other things. One of them seems promising, the other seems out of my league.
The first thing I tried was running Synergy over SSH. The point of this was to make a more direct and secure connection via OpenSSH on Linux and Putty on Windows.
That failed for me.
The second and more promising thing I found is a program called QuickSynergy. This program brings the easy graphical interface of Windows-based Synergy to Linux and Mac. Again, I can get the server and client to connect, but the mouse lags reallllly bad.
Any help or experimentation with QuickSynergy would be appreciated.
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