babbling blue

I reluctantly admit it, Twitter is good for something. I was having gmail problems and wanted to find out if it was localized or if gmail was–as it appeared–down. I searched “gmail is down” (in google, of course) and the top result said “Is gmail down? Ask Twitter!”

Huh…well yeah I guess that’s good advice, thought I. So I went to Twitter.com only to be told that Twitter was busy, as there were too many tweets! Uh oh! Internet meltdown! But I hit refresh about 30 seconds later and I was able to search for “gmail”. I was greeted with a great many tweets indicating that gmail was down. Shortly thereafter a nifty Web 2.0-y notice appeared on the page telling me that there were 633 new results matching my query since I searched…and this was in less than a minute. That’s pretty impressive.

So yeah, gmail is down. And Twitter–a site I don’t really give a damn about–is good for telling me that gmail–a site I’m glued to all day–is down. Thanks for the tweets!

Fifteen years after Jupiter was first struck by pieces of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, it was again hit by “another object”. Unlike SL 9, this impact was not expected and in fact was spotted by an amateur astronomer in Australia. Astronomers don’t yet know what hit the planet.

Following up on a tip by an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley of Australia, that a new dark “scar” had suddenly appeared on Jupiter, this morning between 3 and 9 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. and noon EDT) scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact.

See here for the full story and an infrared image.

I don’t know how reputable this source is, so take it with a grain of salt, but:

Over the last few days, I have received communication from people inside Google regarding layoffs, deep staff cuts and harsh working conditions.
…
Apparently, Google is laying off a large number of sub-contracted employees and full-time employees that manage those contractors. The layoffs are taking place in Seattle, WA and Kirkland, WA. Further, entire offices are being closed in Michigan and Texas with all employees getting laid off.

If this is true, it’s interesting. From here.

More funny from Savage Chickens.

It’s good because it appeals to multiple kinds of geeks.

Study: PowerPoint animations are comprehension killers – Ars Technica.

So, for example, on a slide dedicated to discussing four aspects of a given topic, the relevant text and images can be made to appear gradually, so that each aspect is discussed thoroughly before the next even appears. The alternative, dumping all the information to the screen at once, and then working through it verbally, would seem to have the potential to distract and overwhelm the audience. So, this seems to be a situation where animation should clearly help.

Not so, as it turns out. At least in this study. Students watched identical lectures. The only difference was one had PowerPoint animations and the other didn’t. Both sets increased their scores from the baseline (around 40%) but the non-animated group went up to 82% while the animated group only went up to 71%.

Of course this is just one study, so take it with a grain of salt. But it’s something to keep in mind next time you’re putting a presentation together and have the itch to make it fancy. I know I’ve given in to that temptation myself in the past.

Dueling technology bloggers! I don’t know if one of these was written in response to the other, or if this was coincidental, but it’s kind of amusing either way.

David Coursey from PCWorld.com weighs in with “Five Reasons the Palm Pre Won’t Prevail” (see what he did there? clever, eh?). Unfortunately he doesn’t really have simple one-sentence summaries for each of the 5, so I’ll let you go to the site and read them yourself.

Then we have Jason Hiner over at ZDNet.com giving us “Palm Pre: Five reasons to expect a homerun“. He was considerate enough to give us short versions for each of his points, so I’ll include them here.

5. Palm knows how to build an ecosystem
4. The carriers want an iPhone competitor
3. The webOS will be a strong development platform
2. Touchscreen + Qwerty
1. It is the first true multi-tasking smartphone

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Who can say? Not I. The naysayer has a bit of an odor of iPhanboy about him. An “If it ain’t iPhone, it ain’t worth it” sort of mentality. One commenter had an excellent response, but to keep this brief I’ll quote it in a separate post. Either way, the fact that the Palm Pre is stirring some debate is a good thing for Palm and Sprint, because it means people are talking about it.

Transfer Jet

Interesting new wireless technology, with a stupid name. It’s a very high speed wireless protocol (375 megabits per second) with very limited range (one inch or less). Link is to a video demo from CES. From David Pogue.

If you use gmail (if not, why not?) and Firefox 3 (If you use Firefox, you should upgrade. If you use IE you should use Firefox! Why, because I freakin’ said so! Plus, it’s better.) you can set up Firefox so that mailto: links will open in Gmail, rather than Outlook Express or whatever stupid email client you probably don’t use.

To see how, go to this post on the Gmail Blog. It’s easy!

This took me several minutes to figure out this morning, and it was frustrating me to no end. I figure as a technology person, this should have been easy, but it was not.

So you want to send an SMS text to a recipient not in your address book on your Blackberry Pearl 8100. Maybe you’re texting in a vote for some reality show or you see some SMS number on a billboard or whatever. What do you do? Here it is! (Note BB Pearl software versions may vary. This works for me today on my T-Mobile 8100.)

1. From Messages, click the Blackberry softkey and select Compose SMS Text.
2. You will be taken to an instance of your Address Book. (Depending on what is in focus in your Address Book, this step may or may not seem obvious.) Scroll all the way to the top, and select the “[Use Once]” entry.
3. Type in a phone number on the One Time SMS Text screen.
4. Click the trackball.
5. Enter your text message and send as usual.

The problem is in step 2, it’s not obvious what to do. I had some entry halfway down the Address Book in focus at the time. Trying to type in a number results in doing an Address Book search. Only if you’re already at the top of the A.B. does the “[Use Once]” jump out at you. I did a google search on this and didn’t come up with any clear instructions, though a couple people asked the question. So I’m providing this in hopes that it helps someone else figure this out. I wish Blackberry would have made this a bit more intuitive.

In a frenzy of updating, I decided to update the photo gallery software I use as well. The new software is more powerful and the results are more modern-looking. However, the configuration is much more complex, and I’m still figuring it out. This blog software integrates with the gallery software rather nicely, but I’m still figuring that out as well. I can’t imagine someone who’s not computer savvy getting this stuff to work. I guess that’s why it’s good sites like blogger and flickr are in existence.

I did not yet upload my European vacation pictures, but I’m getting there. I did upload the pictures from my trip to Mexico for Thanksgiving. Clicking the image to the left will take you there.

Note: The gallery/blog integration keeps breaking the gallery links, so if you find one that doesn’t work it’s not a dead link, just a dormant one. It’s easy to fix the links once I discover they’re broken. The real challenge will be finding out how not to break them in the first place!

You may also notice the “Random Photo” to the left (unless I’ve moved it since this posting). It is just what the name implies. . . a random photo from my gallery. You can click on it to see the full image.

Disclaimer: Some images may be rated “PG” but I don’t believe there is anything blatantly NSFW.

You can visit the gallery by clicking here.