feedback87 @linuxchic lol oh man windows. you cant live with it but you cant live without it

zemote @linuxchic you can’t forget active X, that is the bain of my existance

beaker133 @linuxchic I work on a win98 box. enough said

beaker133 @linuxchic plus barracuda firewall, and in house test machines that i fix before fixing customers crap :)

Penguin @linuxchic Internet Explorer, and anyone who uses it as a primary browser.

techpickles @linuxchic Windows, and most things Java (I’m looking at you Eclipse!)

RaggedEdge @Linuxchic: Siemens APT, it’s a DOS program, it sucks, it runs in 640K low memory with a special graphics driver loaded high.

RaggedEdge @Linuxchic: Can only use the serial port to download programs to a special controller, takes 45 to 50 minutes for big programs.

RaggedEdge @Linuxchic: During about half of the downloads, it locks up, thus requiring to start over. Fun when a whole brewery is waiting on you.

btn @linuxchic – Anything that requires me to fire up Windows in VMware – even worse if it requires me to actually boot the machine into Windows

feedback87 @linuxchic got to be twitter so far lol you?

vgan @linuxchic I nominate Altiris and Iron Mountain Connected Backup (Server and Clients). Citrix Metaframe XP would be a runner up.

linuxchic My most hated? Windows is my default answer. Most hated software varies depending on the day. :P

nikolaidis @Linuxchic: Symantec Antivirus (now known as Endpoint Security).

HighDef @linuxchic No doubt about it; MS Windows is definitely both a standard AND the crappiest piece of crap hindering technological advancement!

danielho @linuxchic Are you goading me into saying that I hate Windows? OK OK, I do!!! Esp. Vista and MS’s idiotic server software. Go certify that!

PodCamp MidWest

• Flickr Photos
• SnapFoo Pics
• Twitter

Read the blog post covering all the sessions I attended at Alternageek.com.

Last.fm announced today

According to their announcement:

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

If this service does well it could help push the major labels into a new service model that serves the customers and the artists. Last.fm was acquired by CBS last spring.

It’s funny to say ouch when you get hit in a video game since it doesn’t really *hurt*
~and~
Show of hands, who else yells or such in the *heat* of video game play?

This is when you see how entertaining Twitter can be! Here are the replies those tweets generated:

ldmosquera: the measure to which you say “ouch” in a videogame, is the measure to which it successfully captures you. So it’s all good.
bblboy54: *raises hand*
miyako_houou: I will at times make some sort of weird vocalizations like a dying whale or somesuch if I’m really close to dying, rarely though
jeffisageek: i am raising my hand
linuxchic: Video game that made me yell the most: MicroMachines for NES…no brakes! :)
popefelix: You should hear how loud I get when I’m playing GTA
ldmosquera: I don’t yell, but I enjoy games which silently scare me to death. Also applies to movies. Immersion FTW!
warmaiden: I do. And my siblings. So far back as I can remember. Atari!!
dlpasco: Doom 2, followed by Half-Life
ldmosquera: Scariest games I’ve played: Undying, System Shock 2, Doom 3. The original Alone in the Dark was a living agony to play too.
sbspalding: what about Ecco the Dolphin. Most frustrating game ever programmed.
linuxchic: I have to say E.T for Atari 2600 wins most frustrating game ever programmed since it was *impossible* to win.
bblboy54: as a kid I still had hours of fun with ET for atari but I remember wondering what the point was :)

What about you?

If you would like to get an invite to SnapFoo.com’s early beta, send me an email or a direct message on Twitter with your email address and I will send one your way.

UPDATE:

I have gotten emails from both Jeremy Write of b5media and Rick Calvert of BlogWorld regarding this blog post and the issues I encountered prior to the conference. Both were very helpful and generous. It’s wonderful to know that people are listening and working to resolve the hiccups that occur when planning a conference. The conference is only four days away and I am still looking forward to it.

Now, if only my Moo stickers that I ordered over three weeks ago would arrive. ;)

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blogging on three blogs today means I need three topics since I would really rather not just repost the same snippet everywhere. Three blogs, three different focuses, one general idea. I came across an email from Eco-Libris about replanting trees for every book you read and immediately found my topic for Linuxchic.net.

The concept from Eco-Libris is simple; books are made of paper, paper comes from trees, trees must be replanted to be able to continue enjoying books. Their service is like buying green credits. If you read ten books, you can plant ten trees for ten dollars. The more trees you plant, the bigger the discount (kind of like buying trees in bulk). Can’t beat that with a stick.

Eco-Libris plants the trees you purchase in developing countries. Local residents play a part in the planting and the trees are located in areas that need them. Planting new trees provide benefits such as carbon dioxide absorption, soil and water conservation, avalanche control, and desertification prevention. Besides the warm fuzzies you get inside by participating in the cause, Eco-Libris also gives you a sticker made from recycled paper to place on each book you balance out.

As an avid reader my favorite way to recycle books has been to leave them in the wild after registering them with BookCrossing.com. BookCrossing is like social networking for books. Once you have registered your book, it receives a unique ID. You can buy or print labels that include instructions for the finder of you book so that they may return to the site and leave a message about your book. It has been a load of fun to tag my books then leave them  at malls, libraries, stores and colleges. The most satisfying part of recycling this way has been when someone logs into BookCrossing.com and reports that they found the book. Sharing the love of reading couldn’t get much more fun.

Use it if you like, but please, don’t hotlink to the image, save it on your own disk space.

I hear about their daily adventures, emotions, thoughts and frustrations on Twitter. I see little moments of their lives thanks to the photos they share on Flickr. I read more detailed posts about interests, causes and hobbies on their blogposts at Vox, Virb and privately owned domains. I know what music moves them thanks to their Last.fm streams. They share small excerpts of things the find on the web through the Tumblr and Pownce shares and del.icio.us tags. With Facebook apps I can even find out that they too are members of LibraryThing and some of their books are pretty darn interesting so I might add their selections to my library as well.

It was these total “strangers” on the internet that clicked on my Scrapblog and graciously put up with my cheesy slideshow and listened to the silly (and some thought more than slightly annoying) music repeatedly in order to help me earn entries into a competition (thank you!!). It is these people who let me know when my website has taken a crap or give me tips on improving my podcast. It is these total strangers, many of whom I share my life with in 140 characters or less and that for the large part have never met, that I can now consider friends all over the US and even the world.

These were more than random pageviews, these were clicks from people I have gotten to know and that I communicate with everyday. I must come to the conclusion that my life has been enriched by social networking because of the positive impact these “strangers” have had on my life already.

I think my toddler’s upset stomach has subsided enough that we can safely return to bed and dreamland with minimal discomfort and I can stop writing posts at 3 am. Please excuse the podcast release delay for Alternageek.com; the podcast is recorded but I have some editing to do and being in VMware training this week has slowed me down a bit.

For women that have taken time off of work, often to raise children, many find that coming back to the work world is difficult, and is often hard to find companies that are family-friendly, and equally as difficult to find a balance between work and family. YourOnRamp is looking to be an online resource for these women, offering news articles and other editorial content, along with a career coach and a social network for the purpose of getting women back on track. Most of the basics are present for typical social network functionality, including personal profiles, blogs and forums.

Read more about this at Mashable

Twitter is gloriously simple and that is what makes it so beautiful. What are you doing in 140 characters or less. Do you really need to say more than that to tell people what you are doing? If you do, that is what blogs are for. I send all tweets (with the exceptions of feeds) straight to my phone and should one contain a link to something that looks better on the computer when followed I check it out when I get back to a desk.

The TwitterGrams became quite popular especially with Robert Scoble this week. They were driving me bonkers because I HAD to follow a link to find out what the tweet was about. Do I really want to do this from my phone? No. Do I want to save more than a dozen tweets to lookup when I get back to my desk? No. Twitter gives me all I need to know in 140 characters or less and should I want to know more I have the option of following links. TwitterGrams give me no info other than a TwitterGram has been sent. I have NO inkling what it is about. I compare them to partial RSS feeds; the title of the post and a sentence doesn’t tell me enough about the post itself to warrant a click through when I am trying to parse through thousands of feeds every week. Half the time I feel duped after clicking through only to find out it is something I didn’t want to read or that the title had nothing to do with the post. I still click through with full RSS feeds; feeds are not a substitute for site visits, just a way for me to get through more info in less time. I am anti-click. ;)

Back to the topic of TwitterGrams… I think they have a place after listening to one finally. They are actually really nifty but I am not convinced they are a replacement for a text post to Twitter. If Twitter is micro-blogging, then TwitterGrams are micro-podcasting. Do I have an idea of where they belong? Not yet.

On the topic of Jaiku (which is all I could seem to tweet about on Thursday):

I signed up for a Jaiku account on the sly when the whole Leo Laporte and TWiT v. Twitter thing went down so I could see what was going on over there. I never really used it alot for several reasons:

1. No US SMS
2. All my friends were at Twitter
3. No US SMS

On the other hand, there are a lot of neat things that Jaiku does that Twitter doesn’t. Jaiku links to the thread of replies (not just the last reply) so you can see everything that is being said if you don’t have friends in common with everyone replying. Jaiku has built in feed support so that you can use it to update everyone on everything you have all over the internet. Jaiku allows pictures and icons in your posts as well. which makes things pretty. And lastly, Jaiku has channels which allow you to post to everyone in a group that might have something in common with you but that aren’t on your friends list. Truly fancy.

Because of these fancy features I headed over to Jaiku for a day. I added some more contacts including some friends from Twitter. I created a channel. I wrote some updates. Then I pretty much stopped using it again. It is cluttered. All these feeds coming from people fill up my screen and frankly, I just don’t want to see that much crap in my stream. I am just as guilty as others on this as I have every feed from every where including my Wakoopa feed updating to Jaiku. Do you think my contacts really give a rats ass when I start using Firefox or switch over to check my email in Outlook? I don’t think so. Some networks don’t need to be running as a lifestream and should be checked manually if you want an update. (Note: I was reminded through a comment on Jaiku that users do have the ability to unsubscribe from contacts feeds without removing the contact.)

That said, I also started using Pownce. I felt special when I got hooked up with an invite last weekend and I signed up for the “exclusive” (*cough *cough) network, posted that I had invites available then gave them all out in a matter of hours. Pownce is nice, but I haven’t gotten good use out of it yet although I would LOVE to have something like that at work so I am not plagued with regular IMs. On Pownce I feel like I need to post something with quality content then I wind up frustrated and don’t post at all. Some of the finest tweets at Twitter (not saying my own) are random thoughts. I have writers block at Pownce.

To sum it up, this week I walked a mile in someone else’s 2.0 shoes and found myself coming back home to Twitter. There are a few features I would like to see added, but at the same time the simplicity is what makes it so great. Honestly, I hope the fine people at Twitter never get too development happy and just continue to work to make the backend application strong.

A trend: sometime every Saturday afternoon Eastern Time (now), tech bloggers run low on real news, and a story about bloggers themselves gets an unnecessary amount of airtime. On Sunday, it rises to a rabble before dying down as the Monday news starts coming in – call it Navel Gaze Sunday if you like (or circlejerk Sunday if you don’t). A brief history of the past 3 Navel Gaze Sundays:

Read the post in it’s entirety at Mashable. Hope we get some more tech news soon to blog real posts again… ;)

I don’t know now long I will use it since there is no SMS capabilities or a Linux client but if you are already using it, feel free to add me to your friends: http://pownce.com/linuxchic/

While podcasting and video blogging are all the rage, many people still prefer the simplicity of the typed word for expressing themselves online — that is, a blog. However, popular blogging platforms like WordPress and Movable Type can be tough to configure and maintain. On the other hand, you might not want to use an online service like Blogger or TypePad because you want complete control over your blog. If you’re not afraid of the command line, take a peek at Bash Blogger. As its name implies, this application is a bash script that automates all of your blogging tasks (aside from writing, of course).

Bash Blogger’s shell scripts come in a 36KB archive. After you download it, extract the archive somewhere in your path, then run the script bblog_setup, which will create a directory containing Bash Blogger’s configuration file and a bunch of supporting files. If all goes well, the installation should take only a few seconds.

Read the rest of the feature…

So you’re planning to launch a new blog but don’t want to reveal it to anyone quite yet, for a variety of reasons. You want to be able to view individual posts as they would normally appear, but neither want them indexed nor visible to anyone. Or you want to test some themes on an existing blog without your visitors having to see.

There are a few ways to accomplish either, and it’s relatively easy. Just make sure you take precautions to back up your existing blog and database. (I’ve wiped out a few sites. Fortunately, they never had more than about 9 posts, and could be fixed manually.)

Read more

Found this list via the Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs) group over at Facebook – an amazingly well connected group. As an aside, they also have a Join a Startup group for people wanting to join or recruit into startups, and a brand new sub-group, Web T.e, for experienced programmers, founders, developers & designers.

Anyhow, the call was for a list of female founders of web2 companies – it’s a respectable list but considering the number of 2.0 startups around there must be a few more to add. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, women

There is also another debate on that front;I don’t want my posts confused with paid advertisements. Bloggers are making money and that is really awesome however, some of them probably shouldn’t be managing their own business. I choose blogs to read for their integrity. I want to be sure that what I am reading is not a biased post because of the paycheck they are getting for clicks or views or links or whatever. If I can’t be sure that what they write is unbiased when they say it is, then I will most likely stop reading it. I read some fanboy blogs even though I KNOW they are pimping out the devil because they are pretty upfront about it. They are biased but I know that going into it. What gets my goat are bloggers who are claiming to be non discriminate then selling their words to the devil. Embedding words into a post that you have sold is even more fly by night than the pay to post type deals. I don’t care if it is a stupid slogan or the a single word, if you got paid to stick that into your post, you have sold your soul to the dark lord if you don’t tell your readers that you got paid to stick that crap in there. A simple disclaimer somewhere in crazy small print would satisfy me. Just tell me. If I am too stupid to see the small print then that is my problem.

The pay for post is not as sneaky as slipping a few words in here and there, but in my opinion it’s more deceiving. We have all seen these types of “fake” articles in print magazines. Usually in print the “article” in question looks like an ad. It is typically printed with a different weight paper or glossier paper or something telltale not to mention the “Paid Advertisement” print somewhere on it. The problem with these types of advertisements on blogs is there is nothing physical about it. There are no paper types to distinguish it and I have yet to see “Paid Advertisement” in bold print anywhere in the article. If the writer is getting paid to review a product by a manufacturer then there had better be a disclaimer even if that review is honest and discusses pros and cons otherwise that writer is risking having their integrity called into question for not only that review, but any other opinion stated in the future. How can I trust them?

It’s really just a matter of principal so I don’t want to hear any whining about how anyone has to make a living. We ALL have to make a living unless we are blessed enough to be independently wealthy from birth, it is just a matter of how you choose to make your living. Advertisers aren’t holding a gun to your head. If you love what you write about THAT much, you could bag groceries for a living and still write. This “good vs. evil” conversation has been going on since the World Wide Web was born. Dot-Com? Commercialize the information I love? That’s crazy talk?! Oh wait, yeah, it is still going on just tell me it is a commercial because I really don’t want to be duped. Don’t cop out either claiming your banners and ads are enough to clue readers in that your “words” are paid for too. There is a HUGE difference to putting a column of ads on your site and selling words in your posts. If you call yourself a “professional blogger” you had best behave like one and take some responsibility for your business because that is what you site becomes the moment you put ads on it no matter what the profit or loss margin is for it.

If everyone else jumped off the cliff, would you be a lemming too?

At DevChix, Gloria has a thought-provoking article about the barriers that women face in technology fields and the role of women-only and women-friendly groups can play in building community. She points out that interactions in women-friendly groups is different than in male-dominated spaces.

Destructive criticism is the best way to keep a site predominantly male. It implies that there is no concern about whether a person can learn from a response or not, or whether they would find offense. It is an outward display of ego, a territorial “pissing rite” in which most women do not and will not participate.

Of course many men are also put off by that kind of behavior and are often welcomed into women’s groups, as long as they don’t appear to be there for the “wrong reasons.” The wrong reasons (discussed in more detail in the article) being thouse that conflict with the groups’ primary function as a safe space for women to exchange ideas.

Awareness of and accountability for behavior in women’s groups means a lot more than just safety from sexual harassment, or discrimination. It means that if one is treated unfairly or harshly in any manner that a person finds offensive, the entire community will hear your claim. They will give you advice, opinions, and will collectively decide if action should be taken.

Read more…