stuart test blog

In a previous post I mentioned that I setup WPA2 wireless security on my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. I didn’t mention though that you need Windows XP SP2 and an update from the Microsoft Support site to get it working from the client-side.

The update and related article can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/893357

I’ve been getting a few comments on the site recently which I always enjoy. Not all the comments have been positive, but that’s OK – it’s all about engaging conversation.

I highly recommend to anyone commenting on this site or any other blogging system to use coComment. It’s a free service that you can use to track your all the comments that you leave on blogs in one central place.

As with all good Web 2.0 services, it has RSS and social capabilities – you can subscribe to a feed of all your comments, and can also share them with others. You can see all my comments (not many actually) here: http://www.cocomment.com/comments/amanzi. You can also get a fancy comments box which you can place on your site like this:

Just read about another new Technorati feature on Robert Scoble’s blog. It’s called Technorati Favourites and it allows you to upload your blogroll into the site and keep tabs on your feeds from there.

I’ve added mine already and you can find them here: http://technorati.com/faves/amanzi

To add my site to your favourites, just click on the button below (assuming you already have a Technorati profile of course.)

Sad news today… The Ricky Gervais Show just released the last episode in the first series. This extremely popular podcast had been at the number 1 spot on the Apple Podcast directory for the last couple of months boasting over 2 million downloads per month.

What’s even more sad is that they are now pulling the free podcast and replacing it with a paid version that needs to be downloaded through the Audible website. This really annoys me – a typical example of greed taking over. I’m sure that many people will pay money to download it but nowhere near 2 million per month – I’ll be surprised if they get a 10th of that.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why it was so popular:

• It’s funny. Yes, no doubting the comical genius here. Adward-winning Ricky and Stephen compliment each other well while Karl provides the dim-witted humour which has now made him into a cult on the net.
• It’s easy to download. Apple’s iTunes software makes subscribing and downloading to the podcast incredibly easy. The show was listed as the no. 1 podcast in the directory and a single click later and it’s on your iPod. Not everyone would have used iTunes to download it but I’m betting it would have been more than 95%.
• It’s free. Need we say more? Just like public television, or radio, or any other podcast, it didn’t cost a cent to download. In the last couple of episodes the adverts were becoming slightly more prominent, but they were funny themselves and didn’t ruin the show.

Now about to head into the second season of the show, two out of the three reasons for downloading it are gone. You now have to register with the Audible site, hand over credit card details and pay money to download the half hour episodes. Also, you’ll need to install seperate software from the Audible site to be able to download the episodes and synchronise them with the iPod.

It was looking like The Ricky Gervais Show was heading towards becoming a cult classic, like The Office, but now it may end up being remembered as the show that shot itself in the foot by letting greed take over. I hope this commercial ‘experiment’ fails.

I’ve been playing around with a lot of beta software recently – this also includes beta services that are popping up all the time from the new “Web 2.0” companies. I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen so much beta stuff around at once.

The word beta used to be reserved for pre-release software that had limited distribution to a select group of qualified testers. Today, it’s cool to release beta software and make it available for wide spread use. Google probably started the trend with their various offerings and now everyone has jumped on the band-wagon too.

I guess the appeal to end-users is that they are getting their hands on ‘state of the art’ software, so new it’s not even fully released yet. I’m one of these users too – I love playing around with new software. For the developers of the software, there’s many benefits to releasing beta software – you can test it, break it, spread the word, and take it away again and if anyone complains, just point them back at the Beta disclaimer and say “I told you so.”

Some of the best beta software that I’m using at the moment are all web-based applications. News Alloy is my choice of online RSS/Feed reader at the moment. Flickr is another service that I couldn’t live without – this is also a classic case of an application which really shouldn’t be labelled as Beta.

There’s also a whole heap of other beta stuff that I’m using currently that I’ve yet to make up mind about. I’m testing a bunch of the Windows Live services – Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Windows One Care Live.

I’m thinking about starting up a new blog dedicated to the beta software around at the moment. If I get time over the next couple of weeks, I’ll put one together – stay tuned…

News just in… Measure Map has been purchased by Google for an (as yet) unknown price. This will be a nice addtion to the Google Analytics software that Google also purchased recently. Measure Map, however, is more focused on bloggers – providing the essential stats that bloggers are after.

The interesting thing about this purchase, is that the Measure Map software is not even in beta testing yet, and there is still no wide-spread public test available. Not sure if this is a first, but it’s definitely worth a congratulation to Jeffrey Veen who now joins Google on the Google Measure Map team.

Major server crash – two weeks of email/web/etc lost…

More details later.

Ars Technica have just released their latest system guide for January 2006. I’ve been waiting for this one to come out as I’m currently looking at building up a new 64-bit system, and their advice is always invaluable!

Ars System Guide: January 2006 edition : Page 1

Google have just released an update to their Google Toolbar bringing the version number up to version 4 (Beta). Unfortunately this is only available for Internet Explorer at the moment, which is a shame. However, I’ve just installed and tested it and it definitely gets two thumbs up for me!

The coolest feature is that you can add custom bustons to the toolbar – all you need to do is browse to web site that has a search function, then right click in the search field and choose “Generate custom search.” A dialog box appears so you can change the label and description for the button, but you just need to click on the Add button and you’re done. I used the Answers.com website for my test and it worked perfectly.

This is definitely worth checking out for those unfortunate times when you need to use Internet Explorer.

Google Toolbar Beta

Someone has managed to get Windows XP dual booting on one of the new Intel Macs. The article below describes how to do it on a MacBook, but this is really only for the geeks out there as there’s a lot of tricky work involved.

Windows XP on Mac? at Ramblings of a Computer Guru