Last week I attended the “computer security” conference HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth), held every two years in NYC. The title of this year’s event was “The Last Hope”, but it may not be the last. Unfortunately I had to work Friday and was not able to get to the convention until about 4pm, luckily it was being held only 2 avenues away from my workplace. I had never attended HOPE in the past, although I have gone to Las Vegas for DEFCON several times in the past 10 years. HOPE is organized by the crew over at 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.
I’ve made the last minute decision to attend HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC this weekend. I will post some photos and information about the convention sometime soon. To follow the action you can search twitter for #thelastHOPE . If you are at the event, you can track attendees via the RFID tags embedded in the badges. More to follow…
Unfortunately I was too late to get an RFID badge for The Last HOPE. Oh Well.
Besides more stability and uptime in the Twitter service, these are some of the features that I _REALLY_ need built into Twitter:
- Web interface to “track” option. This would make it much easier to manage sms notifications to my phone.
- Increased API access limit. 20 per hour is way too low. I would probably be satisfied with 30-60 per hour. 60 would be best.
- Ability to Mass-block people from the web interface.
- Historical Direct messages sent or threading of direct message conversations.
- Shorter URL service. TinyURL is great, but I’ve seen shorter.
I do not think the above requests would alter the way Twitter functions as a whole, but would enhance its overall functionality. What features or enhancements would you like to see added added to Twitter?
Many of you have developed a fondness for Twitter, myself included. I’ve found it to be an invaluable tool. I use twitter to keep in touch with friends both near and far, get the latest news and events, broadcast my existence and drive traffic to content that I publish. I find that many people don’t understand Twitter, or how it can be used for your benefit. It is tough to quantify how and why someone should use it, since everyone wants to get something different out of it. All I can say to that is that there is a place in your life for Twitter, and with a little experimentation you will find its benefits.
For this article I want to focus on “Advanced Twitter Techniques and Tools”. Once you’ve become familiar and comfortable with using Twitter, you may want to extend the functionality and get more out of it.
I’ve been wanting to test out Firefox 3 since it was released a short time ago. I have so many tweaks and plugins installed on my old Firefox 2 instance, that I am not ready to blow it away just yet. Also, over time I’ve been burned many times by becoming an early adopter that I’ve learned just because its new, does not necessarily mean its better. I decided it would probably be a good idea to install FF3 to my USB thumb drive instead of my main system for now. Luckily PortableApps has packaged and released Firefox3 portable for USB drives.
I know there are hundreds, if not thousands of list of Windows “free software” on the web. But every time I read one of those lists, I usually find one or two applications which I wasn’t aware of previously. So I figured that one more list couldn’t hurt. People like lists. There will obviously be a lot of things that you have seen before, but I’m sure some of you will find some new gems to try. This is by no means a complete list of Freeware. I am only adding software to this list that I’ve used and determined to be worthwhile. Many of these applications may fall on the “geeky” side, as I mainly do IT consulting.
I finally got my invite to the Skyfire Beta after a long wait for an invite. It was well worth the wait. Skyfire is a new web browser for the Windows Mobile platform that allows you to view “full” web pages. This includes the ability to watch streaming video, flash based content, and full Javascript support. All of the “Web 2.0″ style sites that I’ve tested Skyfire on have worked for the most part. This includes personal favorites such as Netvibes and Hulu. I was really surprised that Hulu works. A major feature of the browser is that you can watch Youtube videos, which is cool and all, but I’ve been able to do that for quite some time with the FlashVideoBundle “hack” for Windows Mobile. I was very surprised that Hulu works.
The streaming video portion of the browser is cool. Its a tad choppy on my Verizon EVDO setup, but the audio is clear. I hear it works better on a WIFI connection, but I don’t have WIFI to test it on at the moment. The current version of Skyfire is 0.6 Beta. I am treating this version as more “proof of concept” versus what the final product will look/function like. That may be wishful thinking, but I can’t pass final judgment yet.
UPDATE: I am testing video streaming via WIFI at the moment, and it is indeed much smoother over the WIFI versus EVDO.
Some of the navigation/zooming features are cool on Skyfire, some are not so cool. I believe they will work out some of the bugs in future releases. I think some of the limitations may just be due to the small screens on Windows Mobile based phones. Any of the performance related issues I’ve experienced with Skyfire are probably because of the limited processing power and memory available on Windows Mobile handsets.
Overall, Skyfire looks very promising and is worth signing up for the beta. It will not replace PocketIE for text browsing just yet, but has a lot of potential, especially on future mobile devices.
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