February 28, 2006

Yet Another Place to Spout My Views - Newsvine

I've signed onto the beta for a service called Newsvine. It's a contributory online newspaper that is composed of postings from people and comments, pointers to online articles (like Digg or Fark) and other combinatory threads. So far, I've written three op-ed pieces (which you'll see if you click on the link), along the same lines as the crap that I usually post on here, but with less personal of a slant. I think I'm going to like the service, and perhaps it will intrigue me enough to keep me writing. At the moment, the service seems to be invite-only, but I have a bunch of invites if you want one. Just let me know and I'll hook you up!

February 27, 2006

Will Virtual War bleed over into reality?

Virtual Chinese warlords? Are Chinese warlords at it again, invading Korea and stealing their goods? This news article discusses how Chinese hackers are capturing the Lineage accounts from infected web-site trojans, and are alleged to be using that information to log into the user's accounts and steal (and sell) their online goods for real cash.

This activity seems to be leading to virtual war, with South Korean players attacking Chinese players on sight in the online game, identifying them by their inability to speak Korean. It was not stated whether other international Lineage players were also being slaughtered. With real-world cash on the line, could this virtual war lead to real-world war? Certainly the players behind the attacks on both sides may take the fight offline, at least psychologically.

Stay tuned to the battle, keep your eyes open, and your browser safe (stay off those hacker web sites, update your machines, yada, yada...).
*Thanks belong to The Raw Feed for bringing this to Rich's attention.

February 26, 2006

Changing Web Hosts

I'm changing web hosts to Lunar Pages. I was with Go Daddy for a year, and had problems with their customer service not knowing how to do things, and had problems with their control panel not having adequate control over the website files (like file-level permissions, for example). Now that my term is up with Go Daddy, I'm switching to Lunar Pages, and so far their technical support has been very good. The person on the end of the phone knows exactly what I'm trying to do, and can actually help me with it.

I had a few hiccups with repointing Blogger to the new ftp site, because there are three different places you have to set up the ftp path to your blog files, and it wasn't immediately obvious where the errors were occurring. The blog seems to be publishing fine now (although republishing the whole blog is still taking a while - not sure what the problem is, but 6 years worth of Blog entries could indeed take a while....)

I'll let you know how it turns out....so far I think I'm happier.

February 01, 2006

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview

What I like about the Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview:

Better Printing - about time - printing a page won't overrun the margins any longer and you can size output intelligently. This has long been a pain in the butt in IE6.

Zoom Feature - an easy accessible Zoom feature on the status bar lets you blow up that picture of Pam Anderson (or whomever) quickly and easily. Great for hard-to-read web pages! It zooms the whole client window, text and pics, and looks like a great feature.

What I DONT like about it:

Whose dumb-ass idea was it to put a non-movable address bar ABOVE the File/Edit/View menu bar? When designing Windows applications, we are instructed OVER and OVER by Microsoft to keep the user interface consistent. That means Application Title Bar, Menu Bar, then anything application specific. What the hell is this crap? I used to be able to turn off the address bar, and now I can't? AND it has to stay on top of everything else?

The irremovable Search box - AND I have to have an extra input box to tab through to get to where I want to be when I'm in keyboard-only mode? Wasn't there ALREADY a search box in IE6 that would safely tuck away if you DIDN'T want to use it? YUCH!