All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I’m finally moving on from bryan (at) btvillarin.com and switching entirely to me (at) bryanvillarin.com. I’ve made a forwarder, but I’ll phase that out after a month. I just hope that I changed my email address from all the various online services.

As of today, Saturday, April 19th, 2008, I’ve stopped using bryan (at) btvillarin.com. That’s a relief.

Here are excerpts from Ars Technica (my emphasis added):

AT&T has announced that it will develop and deploy technology that will attempt to keep pirated content off its network.

Monitoring all the files sent through BitTorrent — which splits them into tiny pieces — could be even more difficult; doing it in real-time sounds both expensive and impossible.

“The only successful, robust way to address problems that involve personal responsibility and behavior is with social rather than technological tools,” [Dr. Greg Jackson, CIO of the University of Chicago], said in a hearing. “If we instead try and restrict behavior technologically… the only result will be an arms race that nobody wins.”

There’s a certain creepiness to having one of the country’s largest IP networks doing deep packet inspection and monitoring, but consumers who value their privacy can always go somewhere else, right? Not necessarily. In addition to running a massive network of its own, AT&T runs a good chunk of the backbone infrastructure in the US. It’s a rare bit of traffic that can make it to its destination without passing on to an AT&T-owned network. If the company deploys its anti-piracy technology to all data passing through its networks, AT&T’s “solution” could affect most US Internet users. In addition, many US residents have limited broadband choices.

We suspect that AT&T will start small, deploying some sort of P2P solution that looks for the transfer of unencrypted Hollywood blockbusters and major-label bands in complete form.

Only those using BitTorrent, FTP, or other targeted protocols would receive deeper scrutiny; e-mail and web requests should remain private in such a system.

If they hinder one type of file transfer technology, wouldn’t another one crop up? Are we screwed? I hope not.

Do you want to help fight against this? Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where they’ve been fighting this for awhile.

I’ve been using OpenOffice 1.1.5 since it’s been out, and I’m glad to see OpenOffice.org 2.0 is out.

Problem: People won’t adopt using it because they’ve been so used to Microsoft Office. I know, I’ve given it to people who don’t have MS Office, and they still wanted it anyway (read: they were going to go out and buy it). I do know that Publisher isn’t support in OpenOffice.

My take on the situation: If someone you know 1) needs an office suite, 2) won’t do anything outside Word or Excel, and 3) definitely doesn’t need publisher, then recommend them to OpenOffice. If they’re used to Microsoft’s office suite, let them know that they’d be saving over $100 on a small learning curve.

I’m definitely open for some ideas on how to help people be more open minded, especially if people are running anything older than Office 2000.

For additional reading, see the review “OpenOffice 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around the Block”

(Golf clap: Slashdot)

Along with the server move, I deemed it extraneous to keep the forum up. I haven’t seen activity in there in a long time, so I didn’t see the point in it. If I get a lot of requests to create some again, I’ll be more than happy to reinstall a forum script again. I have a feeling this won’t happen though. So, if you’ll direct your attention to my contact form, I’ve edited the text to state that I’ll be cool with it if you ask me about a computer problem.

Pingbacks didn’t seem to work with my previous host, but they are now! Thank you, AncientHosting! Shoot, I have to put a link to them here. *rushes off to find the image*

I’m on the new server. Reason: To reiterate, I’m getting hooked up with this. That’s all!

This is pretty huge. I’ll be moving hosts to my friend’s server, Eric, at Ancient Hosting. That’ll be in a few days. You shouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary - I hope. However, his server isn’t managed by cPanel, so things might a bit tough for me in the transition. We’ll see how it goes. Bryan Off Topic will be the place to head to if I mess up somewhere.

Whoa - Opera Software removed it’s ads and licensing fee for their browser. I need to find some commentary or reasoning behind this. In any case, that’s awesome! I think I’ll install Opera now and see how it bodes for a few weeks. It won’t kill me to try something new, especially if it’s better, right? If you didn’t like Firefox, how about Opera? (Golf clap: The Blog That Should Not Be)

I have a handful of people I know that use Xanga. I don’t like that their URLs were too long. A few days ago, I saw that they changed them from:

http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=username
to…
http://www.xanga.com/username

Yay. (If you wanna try blogging, try Blogsome - it seems to be pretty cool to start off.

I tried Konfabulator last November and really liked it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t free - until now.

Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo! Web site. In doing this, Widgets could be built without having to scrape sites in order to get information.

I’m definitely going to start using it again, because I can afford free. Also, let’s look at this a bit deeper: Yahoo acquired Flickr, and that service has only gotten better. I believe they’ll do the same with Konfabulator. Well done, Yahoo…well done.

Source: Macworld