Tech for Lunch!

Well, unless you are using a blogging software or looking to start using one, this article may not be very useful to you, but it is still interesting to hear about a great piece of software when it comes along. Techforlunch uses Wordpress, so everything you see is managed and/or generated by wordpress. Wordpress 2.5 was released on March 29th and if you are waiting to upgrade, you shouldn’t…

I ran the upgrade procedure on techforlunch.com following the documentation and it was flawless. The steps are pretty straight-forward and basic:

1. Backup your database and current site files
2. Disable all your plugins
3. Upload the new files to your site (making sure not to overwrite the plugins and themes folders.)
4. Update the database schema (http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php)
5. Enable all your plugins one by one
6. Enjoy!

The improvements are not as visible on the user’s side so that is why practically no one will notice the version upgrade on the frontend. For the administrators though, it’s a different story. The interface is much cleaner, faster and less cluttered than before and adds many new features.

I strongly recommend this upgrade and can vouch for its ease of installation. The one click plugin upgrade feature is worth the upgrade by itself!

The internet is certainly not what it used to be and that’s a good thing. It’s not just a geeky network that uses obscure Unix commands to function. The internet is getting to a point where it is as diversified as the world we live in. Poetic, isn’t it? Women represent a very large portion of the online presence and it is no surprise that there are more and more sites tailored to their needs and interests.

Here comes Yahoo! Shine. After introducing Yahoo! Tech and Yahoo! Food in 2006, the company is now adding a new site aimed primarily at women 25 to 54. There are roughly 40 million women in that age demographic surfing the web and that is a category that is very appealing to advertisers. Yahoo! has hired a team of publishers to write fresh content and articles everyday on topics including fashion, beauty, gossip and parenting. You can also find items from other Yahoo sites such as Food or Health.

I think we will see more and more sites aimed at specific demographics like this one because they are a great way of getting a huge audience and sell advertising. This is a part of Yahoo’s Media Strategy. Even though the targeted audience is women, I bet we can still find something interesting to read on there too ;-)

Techforlunch is pretty far from reaching that many articles, but Wikipedia has reached this incredible number this wednesday.  This is my second post on Wikipedia in a very short while and it’s no surprise because it is one of the most visited sites on the internet these days.  I find that Wikipedia is just like Youtube in the sense that there are so many links that it gets addictive - You just can’t stop reading once you start.

The 10 millionth article is a short biography of 16th century English goldsmith and painter Nicholas Hilliard and was created by a user called Pataki Marta.  Of course the article is in hungarian and so, the 10 million count is only because it takes into account all the available languages of Wikipedia.

English is the most popular and largest language for the articles found on the site with 2.3 million entries.  German and French come in second and third place in importance, but neither has reached one million articles yet.  You can see all the available languages and their numbers directly on the site.

Perhaps, one day, Tech for Lunch! will have its own entry on Wikipedia but, until then, we’ll just have to keep reading about Nicholas Hilliard and everything else we can find on there!

These days, I’m wasting/spending a lot of time looking around for a bunch of applications and components built with Adobe Flex. I have been reading up quite a bit on this very promising framework and talked about the release of the most recent version of the builder. It’s not very surprising to find some of the most amazing applications built by the company who created the framework, Adobe Inc.

Adobe Photoshop Express has now entered the public beta phase which means anyone can go ahead and give it a try to see what this application is all about. “Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook.“

Although Photoshop Express is marketed towards the “photoshop impaired”, it still has much to offer for experienced users as well. It’s a great way to share photos without using your own bandwidth and enables advanced effects in just a few clicks. I like the interface but I did hit a couple of bugs(keep in mind this is still in beta) and the application and the effects respond well and pretty quickly.

I have not had time to give this a complete look, such as uploading many pictures to manage an album, but what I was able to do with the sample albums is a good indication that Photoshop Express might be a neat application for many users to enjoy. Give it a try!

Recently the company SlySoft, based in Antigua, claims to have succeeded in breaking all barriers of protection of the new Blu-ray which, originally designers deemed as unbreakable for the next 10 years. SlySoft has issued a press release to this effect. If a new technology promises to be impenetrable; someone, somewhere will take on the challenge of trying to prove otherwise. This is simply history repeating itself.

SlySoft is recognized as being part of rebellious programmers or hackers. The company has put on the market many programs, such as “cloneCD” and “cloneDVD” programs capable of copying protected programs. The latest copy software of the company is called “Any HD DVD”.

In its press release, the company says: “Any HD DVD 6.4.0.0 is now able to circumvent the protection BD+ of the latest Blu-ray marketed, thus paving the way for many possibilities: Backup marketed movies on hard drives, making private copies. A practice that should terrify major studios. “

SlySoft stresses however that its victory is not complete: “However, we must also admit that the Blu-ray titles released up to now have not fully exploited the possibilities of BD+. Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this and await the coming developments rather relaxed” , said one of the directors of the company, Peer van Heuen.

Some will probably be offended of such daring and such contempt for copyrighted works. The sale of these copying programs is banned in several countries.

Others will see a victory for the consumer. Many argue that once a film is purchased, it is normal to want to make a protection copy or a copy to view on a mobile device.

I don’t usually cover the gaming industry because that would require an entire blog dedicated to that subject, but sometimes an interesting tidbit comes along that is worth deviating for. I know quite a few people who will be interested by this news: Harmonix has announced that the very anticipated game Rock Band, will finally be available for the Wii on June 22th 2008.

Just like on the other consoles, Rock Band will ship as a special edition set which includes the game, drums, a microphone and a wireless guitar for $169.99. You can then add another guitar if you want to complete the band and… NO!, Guitar Hero III hardware will not work with this game.

Music rhythm games are the fastest growing genre of video games right now and Rock Band has been the best selling game for February of this year. I have played both Rock band and Guitar Hero III on the xbox 360 and both have a little something that the other one doesn’t. If it’s a party music game that you’re looking for though, Rock Band is definitely the way to go because you can get up to 4 players at once rippin’ through some tunes ;-) The Wii version will be a little bit different from other consoles because there will be no online playing and no downloadable songs because the Wii does not have a mass storage solution like the PS3 or Xbox 360.

Still, if the Wii is your console of choice - or the only one you have - you will be able to get your hands on Rock Band and have some fun.

Ever since the internet became a part of the mainstream, there have been people buying a whole bunch of domain names and holding on to them in the hopes of selling them for a profit. If you have ever tried to get a domain name, you already know that there’s a pretty good chance it’s already reserved. This is mostly true for dot coms, but it’s also increasingly true for .net, .org etc… If you’ve ever wondered why most startups on the internet have weird made-up names, you have your answer.

Systematic.com was sold this week for a tiny $400,000! In this case, it’s a company that held the name and ran two separate websites on their domains. They decided to sell that one to eliminate confusion for users. You can find the press release on their new site.

A domain name’s price is based on traffic, popularity and just plain “how cool” it is. The Alexa ranking is usually a good indication of this because most of the domains that are bought for resale have nothing on them except ads, so if it still generates traffic, it means people are actually landing there for different reasons.

This is not really “news” but I though it’s a pretty cool thing (or just insane, perhaps) that a domain gets sold for a good price once in a while.

By now, most of you probably know that all TV broadcasters will have to switch to digital signals instead of analog by 2009. This means that all of this broadcasting space would become available to use by other services. Until now, regulations prevented anyone else than broadcasters to use this so-called “white-space”. By February 2009, this broadcasting space would be available for other kinds of service providers and Google and Microsoft have their eyes on it.

The idea is to use these networks for Wireless broadcasting of all sorts, including Internet-ready mobile phones and many devices which can benefit from constant internet connections. Dell, HP, Intel, Google, Microsoft and Philips are part of a group which has been working on getting the approval to use the airwaves.

I think this could be a good thing in terms of user experience since internet availability isn’t always as fast as we’d like or costs too much for data transfers. An opportunity like this would certainly open up the way and get more and more applications to use these services. Google currently has the most complete, open and free mobile platform, called Android,  being developed by the Open Handset Alliance. This is a big part of their interest in the use of these airwaves. Google has dubbed this as Wi-Fi 2.0 because it would mark the start of a new era in accessibility and convenience.

I am an absolute music lover, and since music and technology very often go hand in hand, the Internet is an excellent source of information and new music. I read a quick article that shows which sites are the destinations most often visited to get band information. The order usually goes something like this:

1. The band’s official website
2. Wikipedia entry
3. Myspace profile

This isn’t very surprising to anyone who has visited wikipedia pages looking for information on a specific band or style of music. Since the information on Wikipedia is generated by users, the level of detail is usually far superior to any reviews site you’ll find online. The band’s official website usually gives a good biography and discography, but sometimes getting the entire band history, bands of the same style, and even anecdotes on a band will get you much further.

Although there are currently many more artist pages on Myspace than on Wikipedia, this could be something to start looking into for them. the recent statistics show that users are more interested in getting accurate and detailed information on the bands they love than just the surface/marketing information. I am most certainly in that boat. Myspace pages are not my first destination when I look for band information and Wikipedia has so far been an excellent source of information to find related genres and bands.

You should probably add Wikipedia to your list of destinations if it isn’t on there already - Even for music information!

When it comes to browsers, I’m sort of split between the two sides: Internet Explorer or Firefox. I think Internet Explorer 6 was a pretty decent browser because it’s fast and doesn’t use too much system resources, but it’s certainly not the most compliant out there. This is probably the reason why so many people have stuck to it and decided not to upgrade to the dreaded Internet Explorer 7. That IE7 is a real mess of a browser and, although it may do the job for regular home browsing, it’s definitely not compliant and has the highest crash and bug causing record of them all. So the best browser, if I stick only to the major players, would have to be Firefox 2. FF2 is a stable, robust and 100% compliant browser and has the “plugins” capability which allows it to add any of the features that competitors can come up with in a matter of days.

Firefox 3 has been in the works for a while now and the company openly discouraged regular users from trying it stating that it was a beta that should be tested only by developers. This week however, that speech has changed and you can now give this version a try if you can’t wait for the final build which should become publicly available sometime later this year. Mozilla said that their website should be updated very soon to reflect this information and perhaps give some more details about the release dates.

Firefox 3 is now in it’s 4th round of beta testing and the fifth (and possibly final) round is due to begin in the coming weeks. This round is mostly for aesthetics, visuals and minor bugs, but all the features should remain as they are now. The most interesting improvement to this version for me will definitely be the memory management. Firefox 3 is supposed to use less memory than the previous version - a much needed improvement.

I will certainly give Firefox 3 a go and let you know what I find very soon. I can never wait for final versions before I try something!