Welcome to my weblog, which I use for keeping track of interesting stuff. It serves as my basecamp for the exploration of the Internet, the "Blogosphere" and life in general.
This morning I finally decided to give IE7 a go after being bugged by the Windows automated installer a for more than a year. But, it did not work out…
Something really seemed to go wrong with CPU usage at 100% all the time. An unworkable situation. Must have been my fault (on the laptop everything work find), but for me it was the tipping point to do what all of my blogger friends have done long ago: switch to Firefox.
I do not think I will ever look back: what a speed!
The only thing that puzzled me, and made my wife (a shared PC!) a bit worried, was the fact that our work webmail looked awfull in Firefox. Of course: do not blame Firefox! The issue is Microsoft Outlook Web Access, which obviously does not spit out compliant code.
The solution was not far away though via Google. The IE-tab plug-in came to the resque and makes it possible to show the webmail application in IE in a Firefox tab. Easy!
As you might now, I am very much trying to evangelise my collegues at work on the advantages of Enterprise 2.0. So I have been writing an internal weblog on the topic since August 2006. The point is that more and more interesting material pops up on the Internet I would really like to share. But also with colleagues without Internet acccess or without having to point collegues to a file that opens up in another application. Yes, I really like that embedded Slideshare format in the blog!
So I would like to use those nice Slideshare presentations, but I would want to preserve the flash format and navigation buttons. Is that possible somehow, via downloading some files (content + player)?
Yesterday night I visited (my) Second Life again for a special occasion: the launch party of Windows Vista. Although I made a promise to myself to stay out of SL for a while…I was in there before I knew it :).
The (European) Launch Party was held in the Atomium in Brussels (Belgium) in real life. But for the occasion Microsoft (or their PR agency) had arranged for around 8-10 locations in Second Life to stream the party on big video screens. I actually visited three of these locations, but spend most of my time on Crayonville Island.
There were not many people showing up at Crayonville Island, the Headquarter of Crayon the New Marketing company. I counted only about 10-15 visitors during my 50 minutes stay, but of course these numbers keep the infamous lag to a minimum. Earlier that night I was at two other locations where the party was screened and found much more people and…lag.
While in SL, I was nicely surprised to meet Neville Hobson of the For Immediate Release podcast and Phil Gomes of Edelman.
I also spoke to a guy who explained he actually was at the real life party in the Atomium in Brussels. Apparently Microsoft had equiped the party with a couple of Vista computers for people to check out Second Life.
The party itself was a 45-minutes concert from a guy by the name of Praga Kahn. It was nice for background music, but not really my style. I would have preferred to see something of Vista.
A couple of days ago I watched the recent famous Apple Product presentation, also called “One last thing…”, because of the surprises that often happen.
This one was over 1 hours and 15 minutes long, but again worth it all the way. I really love the smooth presentation style of Steve Jobs that perfectly fits with the Apple brand. And although I do not own one single Apple product, every time a watch such a presentation, I get very tempted.
Well, according to the experts, there were no real surprises this year, except maybe the ITV, a device to wirelessly stream content from a Mac or PC to a TV set. All very nice looking stuff of course but what is so new about this and why did Apple not go all the way towards a real Mediacenter product?
You see the convergence towards getting all media and even the Internet to the big TV’s in the livingroom, something Robert Scoble has also been noticing for a while. I really like this trend. Think about playing Second Life on the big screen or all that nice Internet video content that is so much better and personal then regular TV stations nowadays have to offer!
Apparently somebody has gained access to some of the servers where account and password data were available. Fortunately the credit card info has not been touched, they say.
This will be a big learning opportunity for the guys at Linden labs!
SL users will all need to ask for a new password (read the post).
This afternoon I ran into a nice list of top locations on Second Life (text in Dutch). Enough to give it another try.
By the way, the list is very helpful because it provides you with SLurl links, which, when Second Life is running on your PC, will automatically teleport you to the requested location.
Although I only went to a couple of places, it was a decent experience. There is so much yet to figure out in this world!
I even ran across this wall poster for Battlestar Galactica Avatars (see image). Would that mean I can dress up like a Cylon? Gotta try that when I can find some more time.
Some nice video’s from Second Life
This was rather new to me: video’s out of the Virtual World. As if somebody walked around with a Digicam. Very nice shot’s and places.
The Internet gets people to produce many nice things. Take for example those Mashups you see everywhere nowadays. I think the most famous are the ones built off of Google Maps. But there are many others. Take for example the two highlighted in this post that are built on top of the very popular photo sharing application Flickr.
The first picture presented here comes from Flickr Leech. It is an application that makes it much easier to view photo’s for a specific tag, username etc. I used the tag “sunset” for the picture presented here.
The second picture was made with Spell with Flickr. The concept is simple: just provide a word and the application searches the Flickr databases for single letter photo’s to present the requested word in pictures. And, if you are not happy with one of the photo’s presented, one click on that photo produces a new one for the same letter.
Ok, maybe nothing of real value, but a lot of fun!
In this post I already wrote about them as being “one of the most exiting Web2.0 secrets on Dutch soil”.
After delaying the beta testing of their secret product about a month ago, the people at Fleck today announced they are looking for “alpha testers”. The testing is to take place next week. To bad I am probably working at that time.
Although the product itself still remains a secret, they did give away the hint that it comes with a special Fleck extension for Firefox.
One of the most exiting Web2.0 secrets on Dutch soil, is about to reveal itself.
The people at Fleck certainly did their share of buzz marketing, creating a nice blog and doing all kinds of enticing announcements about what it is they are creating, using all Web2.0 buzzwords they could find.
And today I found their next step, right in my mailbox: an amusing survey for people having already signed up for the beta testing. After reading through the questions, your are (intentionally of course!) left with just one question: what information about the upcoming product are they revealing this time? For what it’s worth, it could have something to do with:
creating some kind of meta search engine?
aggregating information from other sites (like Wikipedia)?
adding some special feature providing answers even if you mistyped the search term?
But I could be totally wrong.
Judging from the questions, there might also be some pre-selection as for who will actually become a beta tester. I might not be one of them, not being a programmer or a very frequent blogger. Let’s wait and see.
The beta program will start near the end of March 2006. Well, they sure got their share of attention.
All content on this weblog is presented on my personal account, representing my own views, and as such does not necessarily reflect the views of my past, current or future employers.
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Comment [6] | 
posted Dec 23, 10:49 pm on Dec 23, 2007 |
category: Computer applications
/ Work
Yesterday night I visited (my) 
While in SL, I was nicely surprised to meet 
A couple of days ago I watched the recent famous 
This afternoon I ran into a 
The Internet gets people to produce many nice things. Take for example those 
In this 
One of the most exiting Web2.0 secrets on Dutch soil, is about to reveal itself.