I read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll at the beginning of the summer 1993. I had never read a book so quickly; four days’ worth of morning and evening commutes on the city bus (less than five hours) to and from my summer job at the Communications Research Centre. My job included an email [...]
ars technica reported, yesterday, that Bell Canada has come clean and announced that it has implemented traffic throttling technology across its DSL service and expects to complete the rollout by early April (Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada’s traffic throttling). And in the same way that it’s not much of a shock that Bell has [...]
For several months now I have struggled to get my Blackberry’s calendar to sync with iCal on my Mac. This is true with both Missing Sync and PocketMac for Blackberry. Today, my Blackberry started to chew up my address book — both in my computer and on the device. Hard to believe but it erased [...]
It’s a technological barn raising; an innovative idea called Web Weekend, modeled after something called Startup Weekend. The concept is simple. A group of people gather in one place for an entire weekend to conceive a web-based product. By the time everyone heads home on Sunday night, a new company will have been formed with [...]
Nora Young and the production team of CBC Radio’s Spark have published this video which explains the origins and inner workings of their fantastic radio show — with only a bit of humour.
By now, most Canadians have heard that US weapons manufacturer Alliant Systems has made on offer to purchase MDA (MacDonald, Detwiler and Associates) and, with it, Canada’s highly successful Radarsat, builders of the Canadarm. MDA was built largely with Canadian taxpayer money. You can find a great summary of the situation at The Council of [...]
Canadian podcaster and musician Sean McGaughey has launched an initiative call K7 Days (in Facebook) to increase voice feedback for fellow podcasters. The K7 reference is an acknowledgement that most podcasters use the free K7.net voice feedback service which provides a Seattle-based phone number and emails digital recordings of voice messages to the user of [...]
Following the Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa on Wednesday, Bob LeDrew and I chatted for quite a while about the privacy implications of social media. Specifically, we talked about services like Facebook and how they exploit trust and personal information for corporate gains — their own and their clients’. These [...]
Yesterday, after Bryan Person pointed out that there were some problems with it, I removed the FriendsRoll block from my site. Steve, one of the developers at 76design, whipped into action and released a corrected v1.2 beta. My FriendsRoll block is back online.
I attended the Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa, yesterday. It was a panel discussion with Law and Technology Faculty Professors Jeremy de Beer, Ian Kerr, Jane Bailey, Val Steeves and Michael Geist and it was moderated by Andy Kaplan-Myrth. The discussion was lively and informative and had a unique mix [...]
In the same way that Boston Red Sox First Baseman Bill Buckner is famous for having blown the 1986 World Series for his team and its legions of pennant-hungry fans, music talent scout Dick Rowe has long been famous as the man who passed on The Beatles. Yesterday, Reuters published an article (War against Web [...]
There has been a growing trend of online services designed to build social networks in centralized and sometimes closed environments. While there are merits to this approach, the abundance of options is crippling and confusing. Invariably, everyone must join every site and we’re left chasing each other around. This has created an artificial sense of [...]
The speaking program for Podcasters Across Borders 2008 has been announced on the PAB and Canadian Podcast Buffet websites. More announcements about additional speaking opportunities and social events will be made over the next few days.
The program for Podcasters Across Borders 2008 will be announced in two days. It’s been an exciting and difficult process to go through this time since we have received so many amazing submissions — more than we have available speaking slots. Bob and I never prepared ourselves for that possibility and I’ve been struggling with [...]
I am a huge fan of my Delta 1010 audio card (by M-Audio). I love the card and its driver so much that I’ve made sure to keep a PC with a PCI bus in my house and haven’t made the move to a Mac Pro because I’m concerned that the Mac driver isn’t as [...]
After shoveling something in the neighbourhood of 50 centimeters of snow from our walkway and a portion of a driveway we share, I discovered that my Google Reader link (which had disappeared over a week ago) is back in my Google account. It says something about either me or Google that I’m so attached to [...]
In the spirit of “a watched kettle never boils” and “ignore it and it will do better“, disciples of Neil Gorman‘s Your Podcast is Not a Fucking Toaster movement have been dealing with new possibilities as described in some recent marketing speak from toaster maker, Hamilton Beach. A recall announcement released by the company on [...]
A Ryerson University student is in danger of being expelled for his role in a study group organized in Facebook (see Ryerson student fighting cheating charges for Facebook study group). If there is any evidence that supports the professor’s claim that academic misconduct has taken place, the University isn’t being forthcoming with it — not [...]
Joel Mark Witt asked me to elaborate on my thoughts originally published in my post The future strength of PodCamp is in three verticals. Podcasting has been around for three-and-a-half years, PodCamp for one-and-a-half. Both have acheived a certain amount of recognition and the merits of both are consistently disected and debated. I believe that [...]
The University of Ottawa Law and Technology program hosts something called the Torys Speaker Series which features thought leaders and subject matter experts discussing issues related to law and technology. The next public session looks great! Facing up to Facebook A discussion panel on social media and social networking Please join the Law & Technology [...]
Jeff Healey who was most famous for being a blind guitarist died, yesterday, at age 41 after a long battle with Cancer. Jeff first became well known by his Blues-Rock stylings when he released his debut album See the Light in 1988. More recently, he took his love of Jazz to his fans and spent [...]
