Archive for the 'Techie Rants' Category

Singapore Seeds Weather for F1

In a country that can and has changed the actual timezone it exists in to make it more competitive with its Asian neighbors, I have often joked that Singapore’s next big project should be to control the weather. If you can control the time, why not bend the forces of nature to your will. There are indeed rumours circulating that the Singapore government has seeded the weather to ensure that today and tomorrow are not spoiled by a petulant Mother Nature spitting out some rain on F1 payday.

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Netvibes Deleting Feed Info

Netvibes, for all its greatness, is at it again with my account and this time some of my modules are not saving their stored information.

Looks like this feed is not valid or currently not responding

This is mostly affecting my Gmail modules but it is affecting some of the pure feed modules. I have sent an email to the netvibes folks asking what’s up but if it is a widespread problem, I guess they will have their hands full. Right now it is a minor problem as it is affecting feeds I know where to find back the URL (or even what that empty module box was) but it will be a major hassle if it start affecting the majority of my feed modules.

Right now, I have tried my previous researched solutions1 (including various cache resets) and just re-entered the feeds. This is a workaround though and not a solution if I have to keep repeating this.

  1. See Blank Netvibes Screen. []

New Facebook Revolution

What went wrong with Facebook? It grew rapidly as a popular site with fun features and cute little widgets that everyone seemed to like1. I, for one, advocated it to as many folks as I could find just short of becoming a Friend Whore2. With the redesign of Facebook (which incidentally, I do actually like), and with no way of going back to the old version, a lot of people are in uproar about the next generation FB.

I think this is symbolic of what Mark Zuckerberg is getting wrong with Facebook. Here’s are three reasons why Facebook is getting it wrong.

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  1. Although how useful some of them were is questionable. No, I don’t want a pet egg. []
  2. Friend Whore - To link excessively to people you have the briefest of contacts []

Sociable Face Recognition

Here is a scary and cool thought depending on how you look at it - sociable face recognition. Imagine taking a photo of someone on your mobile phone and then some nifty bit of software was able to link it up to the right person on a sociable site like Facebook.

The technology is there and I am sure that it’s is just a matter of time before it becomes affordable and accurate. In fact Google have already set the ball in motion with face recognition in their latest version of Picasa.

Lacklustre Google Chrome

I tried Google Chrome this week and was distinctly unimpressed. Firstly, I wasn’t too impressed that there wasn’t a version for the Mac but then perhaps Google didn’t think it’s browser was ready for an audience already satisfied with its access to the web through Safari or Firefox. It definitely smacks of going after Internet Explorer rather than Firefox.

On the whole, what I saw was at best a beta release of the Chrome software. Faster loading? None noticeable without benchmarking tests. Ability to customize look and feel? Nope, Google has pretty much forced its happy view of what the Internet should look like to you and I, which is blue and white.

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