Iraqis: the Journey Begins

Numbers: 60% of registered Iraqi voters did vote, amidst dire threats to their lives. 60% was also the U.S. turn-out of registered voters at the last presidential elections.

If you only read one blog entry this year, read this one, from Iraqi Men who live through the daily Iraqi struggle, and participated in the elections.

I couldn't think of a scene more beautiful than that. From the early hours of the morning, People filled the street to the voting center in my neighborhood; youths, elders, women and men. Women's turn out was higher by the way. And by 11 am the boxes where I live were almost full! Anyone watching that scene cannot but have tears of happiness, hope, pride and triumph.

Iraqi Elections coverage from French News Outlets:

• LCI
• Le Monde
• Libé

Here's to hopes of a free, independent, thriving, unified Muslim State. Through their struggle and accomplishments Iraqis have earned the right to be the proudest nation on the planet.

Ode to PowerBook

heh. ok. this is getting out of hand. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAH.

*tear*.

Address Book.app for Windows

Brilliant. Frickin' Brilliant. Windows users, check out this very nice little Address Book Application.

Then read this blog post about making the most out of managing your contacts in a connected world.

I'm hoping the author of the Address Book Application will one day offer 2 things:

1) an open API to offer a "live view" into the address book data, for both reading and writing
2) an open synchronization API

I'm assuming it already offers vCards ? is it able to recognize duplicate address book data and "merge" it if needed? Anyway, mad props to "Jib".

Best from Apple: Security

Yet another reason to switch.

EarthLink goes MVNO

EarthLink spawns wireless operations with Korea's SK-Telecom.

and then ...

Watch the NIFTY VIDEO

Then add your wish-list items to this post.

Spammers: Up Yours.

... and thanks for the dough.

VoIP Regulation, SIP Insurrection

As Voice communications are evolving beyond traditional phone systems and making better use of the Internet Protocol, Aswath Rao is offering regulation-advocating counterpoints to Dr. Daniel Ryan's original analysis of various VoIP industry players' arguments for deregulation.

Many of the above discussions revolve around closed, regulatory-scrutiny-fostering voice communications ecosystems reserved to a small, resourceful elite. Meanwhile, an open Internet protocol which provides support for all forms of real-time communications including Text, Voice and Video, with a few open-sourced server implementations and free client solutions is starting to gain serious ground: The Session Initiation Protocol enables just about anybody with little resources to become their own Real-Time Communications Giant.

Is Apple Working on a DVR/VOD Solution?

iRentals ... iBuster ... iFlix?

Jeff Jarvis Denounces New York Times Poor Journalism

Way to go, Sarah Boxer. Hint, CIA operatives don't ... typically ... blog ... about their daily lives or otherwise stand atop flagpoles. call me crazy.

GeekStuff: Google Fights Back Against Blog Spammers: rel="nofollow"

As spammers are dumping links on blog comments, Google is providing blog authors/administrators with a tool to prevent certain links to be used in its page ranking algorithm: the rel="nofollow" attribute to the anchor <a> tag. Simon Willison brought us the early scoop from his investigative research.

I agree with Brian Sweeting's take, this isn't a silver bullet, despite Steve Rubel and Scoble's very understandable enthusiasm.

I wouldn't be surprised to see blogger.com update its handling of links in comments to reflect this change. Another reason why I don't run my own blog server: let other people handle the nifty upgrades 8) I'm just here to write.

GeekStuff: Sarissa XML/HTTP Lib + ECMAUnit

A coworker just pointed me to Sarissa and ECMAUnit.

MMm. clean library. Leverages prototype-based inheritance. Nice. Abstracts cross-browser implementation differences. Not sure whether I'll be using it yet. Still a great proof-of-concept.

EarthLink Debuts Corporate Blog!

Steve Rubel's blog was the first among many sources to draw my attention to EarthLink's newly-launched corporate blog.

The RSS Feed is here.

Rock-on! :)

A Mac User Switches to PC

... well, constructive criticism can only improve Mac OS X, and I must say she does bring-up interesting points.

via Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog.

GeekStuff: Good Read: STUN RFC

I've just verified this:

STUN requires no changes to NATs, and works with an arbitrary number of NATs in tandem between the application entity and the public Internet.

I haven't been blogging much because Brandy and I have been busy moving-in together. Things are going well. I'm catching-up on nerdly stuff, like reading-up on STUN. Back at her apartment, she had a Wireless G Linksys broadband router. To make things fun and see how well STUN and SIP work together, I've plugged her router with its own 192.168.1.* network onto my existing router onto my current 10.0.0.* network which is hooked to my EarthLink DSL (powered by Verizon) connection.

Anyway. I've verified I was able to do SIP calls from the 192.168.1.* network.

Go STUN :)

Introducing Google Mini

Google's latest Search Appliance.

If You Only Watch One Movie This Year ...

... Watch this one.

Sunshine, at last! :-D

Heading Over to City Council Meeting

Tonight, Tuesday January 11th, the City of Hermosa Beach, will again vote on extending coverage of our free WiFi Network. I'm about to head there to show my support in hopes the city will, this time, vote YES. The city is already covered at 30%. My house is too far still. I really would love this thing to pass.

Apple's Rocking Tuesday

Check out The Apple Blog for highlights of today.

Om Malik is at Mac World San Francisco, and has been covering various aspects of the event. A lot of good stuff.

People from Indiana: SAVE YOURSELVES!

Senators from various states are introducing local bills to prevent local municipalities from setting-up their own WiFi broadband internet access.

This is BAD. It's already happened in a couple of states such as Pennsylvania. If this shit ever hits California, expect an army of really really angry geeks.

What's all this? Pan-Am vs TWA all over again?

Please read Om Malik's round-up of issues at hand, be sure to drill down to Esme Vos' thorough analyses, and write your representatives, today.

EarthLink PC Users Rejoice! X1 Rocks Email Search

Here's more fun for PC users. It would appear EarthLink has integrated X1 technology in their PC mail software! (spotted via Search Engine Lowdown)

Mac OS X's Mail.app has similar features, I can see updated search results as I type, but what's really going to kick serious butt for us mac users, will be Spotlight, in Tiger.

Om Malik Interviews Videora Creator

About a week ago, Om Malik introduced many of us to a very cool new piece of aggregation software, which aims to direct those who seek Video Content to those who offer it: Videora. Imagine creating a wishlist of stuff you want to watch and letting the software do the hard work for you: seek out and download. Motivated by readers' interest, Om Malik just completed a very informative interview with Sajeeth Cherian, the creator of Videora.

Microsoft Mac Business Unit Tour - by Scoble

An irrational part of me wishes Apple's rumored office suite to not be true. These cool folks have for years kept us interoperable in the business world. Watch the video courtesy of Robert Scoble.

Let's see what Mac World unveils. And here's to healthy competition keeping Mac BU on its toes :)

Ximeta Netdisk Info and Reviews

I'm helping a friend with his connected lifestyle, and he mentioned to me he has a Ximeta Netdisk Wireless, which I had never heard of until now. I like the premise. His wireless drive reportedly does show-up on his "network", even though it isn't technically meant to be a network device, but should instead be "seen as a local hard drive" by networked machines, a technology they've named NDAS. He hasn't done anything with it quite yet.

I'm also interested in such a device. I need a convenient, reliable backup solution for our Mac laptops. My current plan was to look into repurposing some old computer hardware I have into a linux file server, and see about attaching external firewire drives. If I can buy something off-the-shelf at a reasonable price, that'd be interesting.

Ars Technica has a brief review of it. For some reason, I can't find a date on that article. I'd like to know whether they've fixed multi-user, OSX and Linux support. The issues they've mentioned are big show-stoppers to me.

Has anybody tried any of the Ximeta devices? any thoughts?

update:

Past coverage from Engadget (read all comments)
Past coverage from DesignTechnica
CNET Editorial and User Reviews
Interesting Amazon Listmania overviews competition

I'm seeing various complaints about their drivers.

Mac World San Francisco 2005 Rumors Round-Up

I just posted a round-up of all Mac World San Francisco 2005 Rumors I'm aware of, over at The Apple Blog.

Oh, and more thing ...

*melt*.

iPhone!!!

The Apple Blog is covering Business Week's tease-peak of the oft-rumored Apple Motorolla phone. Here's a quote i'm liking from the article:

While mobile devices already are allowing consumers to communicate multiple ways and to take digital media with them, the next-generation products will bridge gaps between networks and devices so consumers can access their digital content anywhere and without interruptions.

"You'll know we hit 2.0 when the Internet is no longer visible … and the PC is a peripheral," Garriques said.

Boingo for Mac! At Last!

Boingo Wireless has finally released a Mac version of their software. w00t!

Musicplasma: Great Flash-Powered Music Tool

It's always refreshing when industrious developers use technologies the way they were meant to be, and build a compelling application: Say hello to Musicplasma.

The flash front-end appears to be served by and communicating with a PHP-based web application, which I suspect uses the Amazon Web Services in very creative ways to give us information about songs and authors. This is an awesome way to discover new music. I love it. I frickin' love it. Great use of Vector Graphics.

Found them via Fred Wilson's blog.

Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal

This is about as big as news gets. Well. not really. but kinda.

Om Malik has the exclusive scoop on Six Apart's alleged plan to purchase Live Journal, in a deal that would be officially announced some time later this month.

Become your own SIP Provider: iptel.org

SIP is arguably the biggest thing since e-mail. It defines an open protocol for real-time communications. Forget phone numbers. Forget AOL Instant Messaging. Imagine all forms of real-time communications federated under a single, open protocol: Instant Text Messaging, Voice, Video Conferencing. Read more.

All this time i've been looking for free software to create SIP infrastructures by googling for "open-source SIP software" and coming out mostly dissatisfied until i finally thought to look at my Xten client connection logs to see what EarthLink was using, and googling it: SIP EXPress router from iptel.org.

We've got open protocols. We've got free, open-sourced GPL software. Let the SIP insurrection begin.

Six Years :)

January 4th, 1999 was a good day for me.

On an unrelated note, as I'm in a celebratory, sharing, do-some-good mood, here are a few tools I use daily, which my fellow earthlink members might find useful:

• Search Favelet: Search
• Save to Favorites Favelet: Save to Favorites
• View Favorites Favelet: View Favorites

None of the above will work correctly unless we first log-in to our start page.

I find EarthLink's Search feature arguably more convenient than going straight to Google because it displays a "Save this Search" link next to the input box on a search results page, and each search result has an "Add to Favorites" link, both of which use the same interface I've tapped into to generate the above two "Save to" and "View" Favorites Favelets.

What's a Favelet? It's something you put below the URL Bar, where you type-in web addresses. On most browsers, you can drag the above links right there. You might be prompted to type-in a name and/or get a warning that they may be unsafe. That's OK.

Say Hello to iPhone

Why hello, my precious.

Joel on Software: Advice for Computer Science College Students

Joel says:

Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now."

SBC going all Triple-Play on us ... ooOoooh.

While Triple-Play is typically seen as Voice, Video and Data delivered over the Internet Protocol, through the same connectivity, SBC is launching an aggressive move to compete in this field by tapping 2Wire to launch a Satellite TV + Broadband service powered by their TiVo-like PVR set-top box. Om Malik is covering the 2Wire / SBC deal.

Is the U.S. slowly catching-up to countries such as France, who's had true IP-based Triple-Play for a couple of years already, most notably via Free.fr and their FreeBox?

Great, now can we all move away from phone numbers?

linux car MP3 player from old powerbook

Phillip Torrone is a mad scientist :) His latest creation.