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Nuclear seems to be the chosen theme
Friday, October 27, 2006

Remember how a few years ago the entertainment world was bombarded with movies about meteors crashing and posing a threat to the existence of Earth? Armageddon and Deep Impact are just two that come to mind right now but I know there’s been more. These movies had been inspired by recent scientific findings that suggested that the sun’s “sister”, a much bigger sun, was orbiting around our system with a huge asteroid belt following it and might, in the far future, get close enough to the Earth allowing some of those asteroids to hit and destroy the planet. (I remember this from a Chemistry class so don’t ask me for details). The point is, Hollywood used scientifically inspired ideas to tap into the fears of the mass audience in order to make one blockbuster hit after another.

This year has clearly marked the arrival of a new theme in the media: Nuclear. If you look at recent series such as Jericho or Heroes, it seems clear that the next big attention-grabber is the nuclear realm. To add to that effect are the real-world nuclear issues that have re-surfaced just this year: Iran continuing its nuclear development program and North Korea performing its first nuclear test. Once again, the entertainment medias are using real-world inspired events that preoccupy us and exaggerate the causes and consequences to keep us tuned in.

It might be worth investigating if such series that deal with current events but distort the veracity of them have any negative effects on the way we perceive the world? Robert Sylwester, Ed.D thinks so:

Emotional arousal drives attention, which drives learning and conscious behavior - so it’s important for mass media programmers to understand and present content that will emotionally arouse potential participants.

Our basic biological challenge is to survive and get into the gene pool, so avoiding danger and taking advantage of opportunities for eating/shelter/mating are cognitively important. Events related to these needs are inherently emotionally arousing, and successful mass media programmers understand this.
Source: BrainConnection.com

So, with elections just around the corner and security and safety being definite issues, politicians are going to be delighted at this season’s productions. But that, my friends, is another story…

Posted by: Nick in • Events • IT / Technology • Reviews • Movie Reviews • Series reviews
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Facebook - Becoming a blogging tool?

As I logged on to Facebook today, I, like everyone else I guess, got a little News that read:

Share Content through Facebook

Now you can share stuff like videos, photos, events and news articles on Facebook. You can publicly post items to your profile or privately send them to friends.


All your privacy settings still apply to anything that is shared. Start sharing.

This new feature allows you to share virtually anything you find of interest (or not!) on the net with all or selected friends from your profile. After the introduction of the “Notes” feature a few weeks back, it seems to me like Facebook is trying to make all its users who belong to other communities because of the tools that those communities offer merge over to their personal Facebook profile. After all, what’s the use of re-entering data about yourself if you already have it on the Facebook and if you know that most of your friends will check their Facebook accounts more than your blog? So… good move?

Posted by: Nick in • Blogging • IT / Technology
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IE7 - A mix of FireFox and OSX with a pinch of Microsoft Inefficiency
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

So Internet Explorer 7 is out and didn’t make that much noise. Most people have been steadily converting over to FireFox in the past few months and for good reasons too! But in all fairness, we should look at what IE7 has to offer.

Tabbed Windows
image
Tabbed windows is an idea that has existed for a long time. Safari, Firefox, and Opera have all had tabbed windows for a long time now and these have proved to be crucial tipping points to make people convert from IE to other browsers. In IE7, we find the same tabs with a slightly different design and two additional smaller tabs that appear by default: the “New Tab” tab and what I like to call the “Window Browser” tab. This tab allows you to see a mini-window of the sites you have open in tabs much like the F9 key in Mac OSX let you see all the windows you have open by scaling them down.

RSS Reader

RSS (Really Simple Sydication) is most awesome. Sites are starting to use this more and more and although the general public is still not using it enough, it seems like it was the next step in a logical transport of information on the web. Basically, sites can deliver RSS feeds to RSS readers that are either program based (run on the client’s computer) or web-based (run on web sites such as Google Reader). An RSS feed is a carefully parsed XML flow of data that can represent any data you would like. Most sites use it to send news to their viewers (CNN, BBC, etc) and others use it to send your personal email to you (Google). You can pretty much send anything you want through it. Back to IE7. IE7 comes with a built-in RSS reader much like Safari or Firefox (or Opera?) do. The RSS reader is simple but nothing to go wild about. Of course, Microsoft has planned on using this feature to “borrow” feeds from its users; if you read the fine print, just like Google, any RSS feed that you enter in IE will be stored on their servers and rendered available to the public by search or display.

Design

Visually, IE has done a good job at maximizing viewing space even when in standard mode. The menu bar has disappeared being mostly replaced by a Tools dropdown which renders common features accessable. The 15MB download (twice its predecessor I believe) does take up more memory than its previous versions but not to a dangerous extent - any machine will still run pretty smoothly.

What’s Next

This just covers the surface of what’s visible. What I’m really interested in is what the inner workings of IE have become. In IE6, we still had to code two different versions of our code for practically anything slightly fancy that we wanted to make. With the Web 2.0 coming up, I hope that IE will have finally gone towards meeting the W3C standards. In any case, with Internet Explorer losing ground every month, it won’t be long until they’re forced to either follow the standard or leave the market. They can no longer impose their will on users and programmers.

Posted by: Nick in • IT / Technology
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Windows Live Messenger + Orange
Saturday, October 21, 2006

Since July 2005, Orange (biggest French telecom) has allied itself with Microsoft to bring the first Orange Messenger product to the market. This is the first test Europe-wide as Spain and the UK should follow shortly depending on the outcome here in France. The idea is to allow Orange mobile clients to access an adapted version of Windows Live Messenger (ex-MSN Messenger) with their cellular phones. The idea is interesting and yet I don’t see any use for it or why people would want to use it. First, a break-down:

PROs
1) You can chat with your MSN buddies anytime, from anywhere at the cost of an internet connection to Orange’s Live Messenger server.
2) You can chat with people that don’t have cell phones (low probability)

CONs
1) You get charged per minute for this service vs. Free on a computer
2) Chatting on a cell phone is way more complicated because typing on a phone pad is 3 times longer than typing something on a keyboard
3) ...

Need I go on? Why oh why are they bringing a messenger to cell phones. If the price were low or even free, then there is a slight chance that the extreme geeks would use this. However, this is not the case as the per minute cost of WAP connection via most cell phone plans is still quite expensive. As for those who have unlimited/pro plans, even if they can get connected for free, they might want to use this service if they’re on the bus and have really nothing else to do. And even so, it is probably more efficient and effective to just call your friends up or SMS them.

Those are my two cents.

I am really curious to know if there are any other phone companies in other countries that have a similar offer and how that has worked out. Please leave a comment if you have some feedback. Thanks!

Posted by: Nick in • IT / Technology
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Photo Gallery Update
Friday, October 20, 2006

When I started making this web-blog, I had decided to use Gallery 2 as the image gallery as it is the most complete open-source application out there (in my opinion). However, I quickly found inconveniences, notably the fact that the members of this site could not use their login to view the image gallery. So… the image gallery has been reset and moved with the most recent pictures being those of Eurodisney. The image gallery is private as I like to know who’s viewing pictures on which not only I appear. So if you need an account, simply go to the login page.

Posted by: Nick in • Blogging • Personal
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