Do we really need a new HTML spec? What’s wrong with XHTML?
HTML 5 is on the horizon and may be showing up in a browser near you in a few years. I wrote up a piece on this over at GfG. I can’t say I’m looking forward to this.
Archive for Internet
Web 2.0 version of Visio
Yet another very cool, very online version of a traditionally desktop application is Gliffy. Gliffy is a very capable, although obviously not as feature-rich tool as its desktop counterpart, Visio. But who cares? Most of us really don’t. Using most of these tools, like Excel or Word or even Visio to its fullest extent requires a lot of time and experience. After all, games have been developed in Excel. Games! Your typical online spreadsheet doesn’t have that power, nor should it. I’m typically the first in line for more features, but not in this case. Let’s leave these online apps nice and small and quick, and they will serve the majority of users out there.
Mr. Alex over at Geekfoolery has covered some of the various other online, Web 2.0 versions of office productivity suites out there.
Viral Videos: Diet Coke + Mentos – Take 2, 3, 4…
I know that the ‘dedicated’ web surfers among you are already scoffing at how late I’ve found these latest viral videos, but the reason I decided to post them was because I was thinking of a comment that a comedian made about how the Internet is important: “there are people dying to see videos of Mentos mints turning Coke bottles into volcanoes.”
So these guys (EepyBird.com) took the whole Mentos in Diet Coke thing and ran with it. Very far. To the point of entertainment, 3 minutes at a time. They actually have quite a few videos of them conducting ‘experiments’ with Coke and Mentos mints. And while their source materials are free, courtesy of their manufacturers, the exposure they (both) gain is tremendous (wonder what kind of $ they make…).
So onto the important stuff, the videos! They’ve got more than this, but I liked the ones where they did a whole Bellagio water fountain thing and then a cascading dominoes show.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6005336023122536525
and the dominoes one… Read the rest of this entry »
Subscribing to My RSS Feed
In case you noticed that I posted a new article over at my Yahoo Groups mailing list, and then didn’t see anything since, it’s because I’ve completely moved over to my blog at kjh.com. If you know anything about RSS, subscribe to my feed!
For those of you used to seeing e-mails, you can do 1 of 2 things: you can enter your e-mail address into the box at the top right-hand corner of my blog, and you’ll get updates whenever I post something. OR… you can do the cool, new elegant thing and use an RSS reader to subscribe to my (and other people’s) blogs. BTW, not only blogs have RSS feeds. Oh yes, I guess I should describe what RSS is. But… I won’t reinvent the wheel. Here are a few definitions that you can chew on.
I’ll point out 3 Web-based RSS readers and how you can use them for free to access my feed, but there are many others. There are software-based RSS readers as well, but the cool thing about Web-based ones is that you can jump onto any computer, sign in, and there are all of your feeds.
China Moves to Discourage Teenage Net Gamers
Here’s another reason to be thankful I don’t live in a country with limited freedoms. While it’s not an outright ban, China recently moved to put discourage teenage online gamers from spending too much time online. ISPs and online Internet gaming companies need to install new software that would cut a player’s virtual points in half once they get to the 3 hour mark. After 5 hours of playing, they wouldn’t get any [points]. It’s not clear whether this is a per day/per week or other time window limitation.
Dang, how could we ever have played those all night Starcraft sessions? Granted, those were just for ladder rankings, and I wasn’t trying to build up enough loot to sell anything for real cash, but still. Isn’t game addiction among kids like anything else? Ever notice how no one talks about kids watching too much TV any more?
I Love Rhapsody
I love Rhapsody. I don’t know why I didn’t sign up for this the second it was available. If you don’t know anything about online music services, let me give you the nutshell version of why I now can not live without Rhapsody. BTW, Rhapsody is Real Networks entry into the online music biz, following iTunes, and Napster. Full history if you’re interested.
For $10/month, I can listen to almost all of the music they’ve got, and it’s pretty extensive (over 3 million tracks) due to their contracts with all of the major record labels. I can organize these tracks however I want (playlists, etc.), and seconds after selecting a track, it starts playing and the quality is surprisingly good. Their built-in “Music Guide” lets me read up on the artists, find similar artists, play albums in their entirety, or select tracks or add them to my library. They’ve got an interesting feature that plays a ‘radio station’ of an artist’s genre of music. It’s not perfect, but it helps you to find stuff that’s similar in nature.
Of course, I could buy these tracks as well, but I haven’t dug deeply enough into their DRM rules to figure out if I would be hosed if I lost or moved my data. For an additional $5/mo, I can get the “to go” plan which lets me put the music onto my portable MP3 player. I haven’t decided to try that out yet. Word of warning on that though – it doesn’t work with iPods due to DRM issues.
All in all, if you like music only just a little bit and have a high speed Internet connection, get Rhapsody!
Our Latest Website: MvixCommunity
Warning: Shameless plug! 
Doug and I have just launched our latest venture, MvixCommunity.com. At CES, we hooked up with a small but promising company called MvixUSA that sells a number of very cool products. The most notable line of products they sell are Media Players, which as a product class have been growing over the past few years. In fact, Apple just released their own such product, the Apple TV.
So what’s a Media Player? [There are other names, like Streaming Media device and Media Center. At any rate, Media Player is what Mvix chose to go with.] Let’s phrase the answer in a problem-and-solution format. Problem: you have media (music, video, photos) all over the place (computer, DVR, etc.), and want to get it all in one place so that you can watch it on your TV. Solution: an Mvix media player! With a hard drive at its heart, an Mvix media player stores all of this media and plays it back using a on-screen control menu.
Anyway, we agreed to start a forum site that caters exclusively to Mvix products. So if you’re at all interested in these types of products, or better yet, if you own one, please jump on, sign up and participate. Tell all of your friends too!
