Alice Pretchet

Slate features one of my favorite authors / books

Alice Pretchet — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:22:25 +0000

I hardly ever get a chance to catch up with Slate, but I was on some website that had a one liner about patterns in architecture, and I have always been a big fan of patterns and architecture, so I clicked over and found an article talking about e of my favorite books and authors. A book called a pattern language describes outside the box ways to look at neighborhoods, houses, rooms, designs, all kinds of things to consider when building a house, an addition, a community – it is one my all time favorites.

That book changed the way I look at houses and streets, and it definitely gave me insight when looking into code and how to setup coding projects – and that is actually mentioned in the slate article – check it out to learn more.

Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising

Alice Pretchet — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:10:42 +0000

Read a very interesting article today at the gaurdian, I had no idea that facebook now has more than 350 million users. I was also quite surprised to read the information about about profits (or lack thereof) with facebook and twitter. It seems that very few people click banner ads, and that is a way that many online social networks intended to make money.

facebook

Personally I think the little branded apps like the games on facebook and taking them to mobile phones with embedded adverting, like the farmville game using purity milk or the cafe game having decorations with pepsi or coke may be a much better way to monetize these networks.

Forbes lists best bang for your dollar cities

Alice Pretchet — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:23:32 +0000

Well I have been thinking about moving, but the economy and everything has been so shaky, its a nerve racking experience to think about moving only to end up in a place that has worse job opportunities. If I can keep the cost of living down and make sure that crime is not crazy, I am still thinking about moving, just to get the cost of living down. Today I read an article at Forbes that describes some of the best bang for your buck cities to consider.

I surprised to see some places I had never heard of, soI did some google image searches to get a glimpse, but geeze – there are a lot of images to search through in the image results – and I was really not sure if what I was seeing actually was from the various places I was looking for. So off to find another travel search – perhaps flikr geo tagging would be better?

Americas National text alert system

Alice Pretchet — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:37:40 +0000

Was reading off a blog that America is launching a National alert text messaging system that alerts people in a certain areas or the entire country of severe weather, terrorists attacks or other major emergencies. And although I think this is a great step in the right direction, it does have me wondering wheather or not something more is coming with this next type of text messaging alert system such as, being located via GPS on the phone or being told you have a warrant and to come turn your self in, or other Governemt related things that can be done that might be considered BIG brother type activity.

Of course I am happy that such a system is in place to help alert the people of this great country of emergencies but I think it needs to be watched after carefully because I can see where this could be a serious problem with privacy issues. Was wondering what everyone else thought about this new alert system and future possibilities.

Wuawee connecting mobile phones with social networks

Alice Pretchet — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:22:27 +0000

I am wondering how they got myspace on board with this, it’s certainly a step in the right direction for me and many others to be able to more easily connect to the myspace silo. It’s a great idea, but it’s not free. A desktop widget and a cell phone app that lets you upload photos to myspace and facebook (among others) – and chat. I do not use the myspace IM client, but I do have some friends that do, so perhaps they will test this out. Not sure how many people will try it, but if the payments are cheap enough the cost may just be forgotten. We’ll see.

It’s called Wuawee – info found at Techcrunch.

nokia opens ngage – what’s up with ovi?

Alice Pretchet — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:16:04 +0000

There have been a few reports in the news talking about nokia quietly opening n-gage for game downloads on the nokia smart phones, but I still have not gotten my invite for the nokia ovi service. Perhaps they are testing things with the ngage to see how that goes, but I much more interested int he social, photo and music features that are supposed to be packed witht he ovi deal. I am in need of a new cell phone, so I have been waiting to see what happens with ovi to see if I should go for another nokia device or just go with one of the microsoft enabled smart phones instead. I heard that microsoft is licensing the flash lite player, so perhaps they will be able to play youtube videos on the smart phone os?

Exclusive games on mobile networks

Alice Pretchet — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:15:05 +0000

Could exclusive games on mobile networks influence a persons decision to buy a contract? I think this question is being answered now and the results are something I am looking forward to seeing in the coming quarters of profits and new customers for various mobile networks. Of course content will always be a deciding factor for most people when they choose a cell phone and a service provider but games could have a huge impact.

Getting songs is something any phone can do even trailers and videos but games that only play on certain phone networks is sure to have a big impact on which new customers decide buying because they are the teenage and youth market and they play video games more than you average Joe who is in his 40s compared to a 16 year getting there first cellular phone.

Should be interesting to see is Microsoft one day releases Halo on a certain network or if Nintendo does the same with its big hit games, like Sony did recently with Verizon Wireless and its blockbuster game Metal Gear Solid which is exculsive to the Verizon customers only.

Started my pre update

Alice Pretchet — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:55:32 +0000

I have been tinkering around with my blog for the last couple of hours doing a pre-update check to ensure my Wordpress blog will be ready for a update when the new 2.5 is released sometime this week. I am hoping for a smooth transition from my old version to my new version. The last time I did an update a whole bunch of funny symbols showed up in the comments and posts and I had to go thru and manually remove all the symbols which took a couple of hours each day for about a week.

I have also added a couple more friends to my blog roll and hope that all my readers go over and check out what they are writing about in there blogs because they would not be there if they were not good, I promise.

Zotero – save and organize pages and notes from the web quickly

Alice Pretchet — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:39:49 +0000

This may be the best firefox plugin ever. Zotero lets you save web pages, or portions of pages and organizes them in a folder tree. You can put pages or notes into several categories, add notes to piecs of web info and more! This great plugin even auto detects information from several sources online and can propagate important info for you. There is a way to run it from a usb flash drive, a portable firefox research tool, zotero.

I am now testing this handy web saver and comparing it with yoono – they both are plugins that help me save info from the web, and I am so glad these are available today!

ip addresses – yours, theirs, locations

Alice Pretchet — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:45:30 +0000

I had known for some time that ip addresses were one way for people to find out who you are, online. I knew that each computer had to access the internet through a gateway that has it’s own ip address, what I hadn’t known years ago, is that there are many ways to get someone’s ip address, and how easy it is to locate someone on a map, even from the other side of country, with just an ip number.

A few years ago I was chatting with someone using the instant messenger that came with another program, while talking with this gentlemen, he asked me how the weather is today in Lebanon TN. This shocked me, I had just met this guy online, how did he know where I worked? Was it someone I knew, but didn’t know I was talking to him? I had to chat with this guy for an hour to get him to divulge how he knew where I was.

He explained that his firewall program showed the ip address of incoming connections, and my chat window was just that, an incoming connection, so he took the ip address number and popped it into a free online tool, ip location, and had my whereabouts pinpointed in about 30 seconds. If that sounds complicated, believe me, it is not. Just about everyone has a firewall program running on their computer, it may take some tinkering to find connected ips, but that is the only hard part. Once you have someone’s ip addy, simply put it into one of the free online ip address tools and it will show you a map of where they are connecting from the internet.

Don’t worry, these tools don’t give you the actual street address of the person you are connecting with,just the connecting node from the net. So Jack was able to find that I was accessing the internet through comcast in Lebanon TN, he knew the area that I was in, but not my actual, exact location. Of course a subpoena to comcast could them to divulge the address wince they have the exact records of where each ip resolves to.

There are also cool tools for checking the email headers someone sent you, and getting their ip and it’s originating address on a map as well.

There are ways to mask these things, proxies, remailers, and other programs to hide ip’s from email and while surfing the net, but most people do not use them.