42

Compuserve shuts down

Compuserve shuts down - Boing Boing.

Sad news. I was very active on Compuserve back in the mid 80's through to mid 90's.

The forums such as DACCESS (Data Access, developers of DataFlex) were the best support mechanism of the time and a real community.

We also used it as a way of getting email in the Bible Societies in remote parts of the former Soviet Union eg the Asian Republics. I had over a dozen accounts in my name at one time, used to get emails from people interested in family trees who were amazed that there were so many Dave Warnock's in the world.

There were a lot of 3rd party software applications to help minimise online time. eg they would connect, get a list of new messages and then allow you to tag the ones you were interested in offline before re-connecting to grab the actual messages.

In the early days we were using big chunky 2400 baud modems (240 characters per second). At times you could read as fast as the text came in (no error correction or compression built-in).

It took a long time for access to the internet to match Compuserve and the www seemed very poor for interactive support.

Netbook upgrades

Yesterday I upgraded two Netbook computers. The first is my Asus Eee PC 900 which I have had for about a year. The second is an HP 2133 Mini Note (KX872AA) which a good friend donated to us as they found they could not get on with the included Suse Enterprise Linux.

Our plan is to give one to our youngest son who has been told that due to dyslexia he will be able to use a laptop at school for some lessons.

After a spot of googling I was a bit worried about the HP, Ubuntu only offers tier 3 support for it. On the other hand there plenty of options for the Eee PC. In the end I decided to try The Ubuntu Netbook Remix (abbreviated to UNR). Second runner was EasyPeasy Linux, but as that is based on Ubuntu 8.04 rather than 9.04 I decided to try UNR first.

WOW!

An incredibly easy install. It is a while since I have installed a desktop operating system and so much has changed. It was incredibly easy and straightforward. Absolutely fantastic, almost no questions to ask and everything worked out of the box. I installed from a memory stick prepared on a windows XP laptop and it just worked.

On both Netbooks the screen was correctly identified and worked at full resolution from the start.

On both the wireless network adaptor was detedcted and worked immediately, the home wireless was found, I just had to type in the passphrase and I was away (well I did have to add the MAC address to the list of allowed computers on the firewall and WiFi hub, but that is true for any machine running any operating system).

Then I got another nice surprise when I plugged in my USB mobile internet dongle (from 3), it found it, asked if I wanted to connect and then got a connection first time. What is more I pulled it out and then put it back in and it worked again. No settings, no magic just worked.

However, I did find the fancy netbook desktop interface very sow on both machines but switching to the classic Ubuntu interface (which everyone here is used to) solved the speed problem completely.

I have also installed the just released FireFox 3.5 to benefit from the speed increase.

So if you have a netbook I personally recommend Ubuntu Netbook Remix - fantastic!!!

Looks like our son will have the Asus - no hard disk (more robust) and smaller/lighter (especially the power supply).

Meanwhile I am using the MiniNote to write this and it is very nice (like the keyboard and screen especially).

Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak

I said there were a lot of tweets on twitter about Iran (in 42: Reflections on Twitter part 1) but this Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak shows just how amazing the numbers of tweets, blog posts, videos etc are.

Approaching one million tweets! Wow!

Reflections on Twitter part 1

So I, @dave42w, am now a twitter old hand as I have now had my twitter stats counted for 5 days. I thought it would be good to reflect on it a little.

Size and Impact

It is hard to grasp the size of social networking sites. Last night I got a new understanding of just how big and busy twitter is. I have seen a number of tweets (the name for the short, maximum 140 character messages on twitter) mentioning the Iraq elections. People writing on a topic like this use hashtags to mark their tweets so that they can be tracked. Last night people were using #iranelection on all their tweets relating to the election.

Anyway one of the tweets also mentioned that people in Iran were using TwitterFall to get around attempts to restrict access to twitter. So I took a look. Incredible! You can select a popular tag of the moment and then the messages just appear continuously and scroll down the screen. There is a count of how many messages are queued for display. The messages appear faster than you can read them and yet after just a few seconds there were 800 queued for display. They are still coming in at about 2 per second and this is just one topic, although the hottest of the moment.

I guess it will be a while before we can really work out the impact of Twitter on the Iranian situation. Big claims are being made for the way it has allowed people to get news out and the way it's open architecture and numerous supporting sites have helped people avoid attempts to block communication. The fact the BBC are now reporting that there will be a recount may be down at least in part to twitter.

Following, followers and friends.

On twitter you follow people. When you follow people you see all the tweets they write. All the tweets from all the people you follow (including yourself) are then displayed on your home page in chronological order (most recent at the top).

So everyone gets a list of the people they follow (the list is called following) and the people who in turn follow them (followers). If someone is on both lists (you follow each other) then they are considered a friend (and then you can send them direct messages which are private to the two of you, I would not bet your job on that privacy though).

As with all these social networks there ends up being a competition to have more followers than anyone else. That results in a lot of "spam" where you find "people" following you simply in the hope you will follow them. I put people in quotes as many of these followers are actually automated software "bots".

I very quickly discovered that I wanted to keep an eye on who is following me. You can block anyone that you don't like so that they can no longer follow you. I have simple rules for this.

1. If the thumbnail image is of a pretty, semi naked young woman with a name like Monica1722 then you get blocked immediately.
2. If I click on your name to see your profile (which shows me your tweets and how many followers/following you have) and my internet firewall does not let me view the content then you get blocked immediately.
3. If when I view your profile you have no tweets, lots of following (1,000's) and only a few following then you get blocked immediately.
4. If all your tweets are advertising something then I will not block you (unless I particularly don't like what you are selling) but I won't follow you.

This means I have blocked about 1/2 of the people who started to follow me.

Ok that will do as a first set of reflections. Next will be some of the tools and websites that I have explored to make twitter eassier/more powerful/...

Tiscali 404 sucks

I hate what Tiscali do when I type an invalid domain name. 99.99999% of the time it is a simple, silly typo. But I get a useless error page back:

tiscali Sorry, the page you were looking for cannot be found The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Error: (DNS), click the back back button to try another link. Search the web for Suggested Searches Dating News Movies Ringtones Shopping Sport Chat Travel Finance Games Music Cars

OK it is formatted more nicely than that. But still useless.

What makes it worse is what they do to the url. I just typed

http://www.voteforachange.co.ukj

notice how my fat finger just added the j to the end. If the url stayed the same it would be nano seconds to correct. Instead the url changes to:

http://results.ispconnect.co.uk/main?AddInType=Bdns&Version=1.4.11&FailureMode=1&ParticipantID=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz&ClientLocation=uk&Referer=&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.voteforachange.co.ukj%2F&SearchQuery

Isn't that friendly! try finding and correcting that in your address bar.

Pledgie – Easy Way to Fundraise with Twitter-Integration! - ChurchCrunch

Now that I am getting started on twitter as @dave42w I will be trying Pledgie — Helping you help others which I found via Pledgie – Easy Way to Fundraise with Twitter-Integration! - ChurchCrunch.

Mind you I am noticing a lot of spam followers on Twitter, does everyone else get a lot of followers that are not real people?

dave42w is now on Twitter

Shock, horror I have joined Twitter.

It is all John Cooper's fault! I saw a tweet from John (via his facebook status which comes into Google Reader via the facebook RSS feed) that celebrated the exciting news that there will is a twitter stream for the 2009 Methodist Conference. As I am going to be there I thought "Wow what an opportunbity" and promptly joined up.

I have since discovered that my mobile phone network (3) charge 25pence for sending texts to twitter, so I won't be using that. On the otherhand I have installed the twitter application for facebook and I can text facebook within my free minutes. So I can now tweet from my mobile phone at a more reasonable rate - I think.

No promises as to how much I will use this.

10 ways to amuse a geek

10 ways to amuse a geek made me laugh.

Nice kit: Asus Eee PC 900

Read this detailed review of a very nice ultra portable computer: Asus Eee PC 900 - TrustedReviews.

Would be great for Church services with a projector.

Hat tip: Slashdot | First Full Review of New Asus Eee PC 900.

The Sun is going to shine on Python

Good news: The Sun is going to shine on Python at Ted Leung on the Air see also ongoing · Sssssssssssssssssssssssun.