This post has been moved to the more appropriate section of my website, the Tech Knowledge Base Wiki.

Now that I am fully subscribed into the current online community craze, I thought I’d put some order around it. WordPress, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter could serve pretty much the same purpose in many aspects of social networking. Thus, the burden of making determination on how to use each one of them effectively falls on the user’s shoulders.

So far, it looks like the best way to use each is the following:

• WordPress (this blog) – short articles on technical and non-technical stuff I want to share with the whole world and get feedback.
• Facebook – a glorified mailing list for posting the things I want to share with my English speaking friends.
• Twitter – this place is for self-absorbed cool kids and PR machines. To use it as such, I advertise my blog entries on it with the ‘twitter tools’ plug-in for WordPress.
• LinkedIn – is for keeping track of the work contacts. So, only work-related status updates go there.

I’ve hacked the “Twitter Tools” plug-in for WordPress to append the #fb tag to tweets. This way all tweets from WordPress also show up in Facebook via the “Selective Twitter Status” facebook app. Hence, all three, WordPress, Twitter and Facebook are one-way connected, sending posts from public to private, but not the other way.

So far it covers all my social networking needs. I’ll revisit this post in a year or so to see where the reality went.

UPDATE: Well, I am back this fine 10th of March 2011, almost 17months after and I can say:

• WordPress -  I removed most of the straight technical stuff, but left personal rumblings on near-techno-sphere. Seems like a good fit.
• Facebook – A rare update, sharing something interesting with friends.
• Twitter – I skip this place now. To much unstructured information.
• LinkedIn – keeping it up opportunistically to store work-related status contacts.
• MediaWiki (this site) – new this year. this is where I store all the technical stuff now. It’s ok, not the best though.

This post has been moved to the more appropriate section of my website, the Tech Knowledge Base Wiki.

Ubuntu 9.10 is a bit of a disappointment.
I’ve upgraded one of my Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) installations to Karmic and am now experiencing a whole host of issues:

• slow boot times – It is twice as slow as jaunty
• ugly boot screens -  Why did change the boot progress bar into a windows style “i mean nothing” rolling indicator? Why did they take away all colors? Are they thinking everybody is colorblind?
• random kernel issues – Hey, at least I get a nice red exclamation mark in the top right corner, telling me not to rely on my system anymore and reboot. Back to the windows days?
• degraded performance – Can’t quite put my finger on where or why, but it feels sluggish.

And this is not just my experience, if you want to read what others are saying check out the register.

As much as I’d like to say otherwise, I advise against an upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10. Especially that the next version (Lusty Lemur Lucid Lynx 10.4) is going to be a Long Term Support release (LTS). Which hopefully means they are going to spend more effort making it release-ready before the release.

Too bad it happened right after the Windows 7 release, that has been winning praises (not without some caveats though)

This is the view from the highest point in Arizona, Humphrey peak near Flagstaff, AZ.
You can catch a glimpse of the Great Canyon in the background of the second picture.

Posted from my iPhone.

OpenID is an identity sharing and a single sign on protocol, that is becoming more and more popular on the net. OpenID allows us to use a single authenticating source (aka an identity provider) to login into any site that accepts OpenIDs (aka a service provider) without the need to create an account on that site. Yahoo!, Google, AOL, SourceForge, Facebook and many others now support it now. A great idea, but unfortunately it comes with some big holes. Read the rest of this entry »

I am a big proponent of usability. After all, regardless of how good something is, or how many cool features it has, if it is unusable – it is worthless. A hard to use application, website or in fact anything that interacts with a human, will not be popular, will lose out to competition or be ignored altogether. There are many articles on the web with examples and lists of usability principles, so I would not go into that here.

It seems, however, that many sites, like ss64.com or useit.com, suffer from a common pitfall in usability design, sacrificing design by going too far. They subscribe to the lowest common denominator in an effort to make it usable to the biggest possible crowd. This makes them very plain and downright ugly. Sure, they cover the 99% of the crowd out there, not the 95% a good design would cover, but in the push for these extra 4% they lose much in the beauty and attractiveness. Read the rest of this entry »