Monthly Archives: December 2007

Announcing Zemobo3

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This is for the more technically minded of you, because Zemobo3 is in a very very early stage.

There a quite a few web sites that I contribute content to. There’s my blog, Facebook and Flickr. I sometimes sell things on Trade Me. I’ve just started looking at Twitter. That’s a lot of places about me. Oh, I’m on Bebo and I have a MySpace too, but I hardly ever go there.

This is where Zemobo3 comes in. It’s a way for you to put all the information that you’ve put on the web at various sites in one place. Once Zemobo3 has gathered all that information, it can spit it back out to other sites. So your Facebook profile can also have your latest Flickr photos and blog posts. And your MySpace can have your Facebook photos and status updates.

There is a very ugly pre-release version at http://3.zemobo.com/. Please check it out and let me know what you think. My page is at http://3.zemobo.com/user.aspx?user=arun. If you see my page and can see through the ugliness of it all, I think you’ll get a fair idea of where this project is going. I think it’s a great idea and solves a problem that a lot of people online have (even if they didn’t notice it).

And sure, some might think there’s an identity theft risk, having all your information in one place, but even without Zemobo3, Google is an identity thief’s best friend.

What’s up with Journeyman?

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I seem to be getting a few hits about Journeyman (the show that is under threat of cancellation!) so I thought I’d write a bit more.

The people over at savejourneyman.net and the other Save Journeyman sites have decided upon sending Rice-A-Roni to the NBC offices. Originally it was going to be aspirin, because Dan gets headaches before he goes back in time, but they realised that charities wouldn’t be likely to accept a whole bunch of medicine. Instead they stuck to foodstuffs. Rice-A-Roni, originally from San Francisco, is known as “The San Francisco Treat”. (This is all new to me!)

Last week a new episode of Life aired in Journeyman‘s regular time slot. I think it rated slightly better than Journeyman has in the past few weeks, but not by much. It was also helped by CSI: Miami repeats being shown on CBS and I can’t remember what was on ABC. I also don’t know how heavily the timeslot change was promoted. Fans of Life would have followed it to Monday if they knew about it, but people who had never watched Journeyman aren’t likely to want to watch it if they didn’t know about.

Tonight it airs at its regular timeslot, after two hours of Deal or No Deal. I’m not sure whether that’s popular over there in the States. And if it, are Deal or No Deal viewers likely to stick around to watch a pretty much sci-fi show, at 10PM? I doubt it.

I think, unfortunately, that unless NBC moves it to a different timeslot, Journeyman‘s days are numbered.

IE compatibility (again!)

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I have just installed the Tiger administration plugin for WordPress. It’s quite nice. But the one thing that annoys me about it is that it doesn’t support Internet Explorer. If you have IE, it will revert to the old ugly admin style. Lack of IE support is very common in the open source arena. The usual excuse is that IE should be standards compliant and if it was then developers wouldn’t need to spend extra time making sure their sites work with it. But in reality I believe it’s an idelogical thing. WordPress itself tells me I am an idiot for using IE, with a link to a web site trying to present the virtues of Opera, Safari and Firefox. It’s actually very annoying.But Internet Explorer is a standard. Just like Windows and Office are standards. IE is not sanctioned by any official body, but it’s still the most used browser. As long as it has a significant market share, it seems stupid not to spend the time making sure your web sites work with it.Now, in the Tiger admin plugin’s case, the whole theme is based on CSS2, which IE doesn’t appear to support. There wasn’t a conscious decision to disable IE support, it just so happens that the stylesheet won’t be recognised by IE. Clever way to do it, but I’d like to be able to use this theme in my normal browser. So I might play around with it to get it to work, or I might just find one that does work.