technology post – del.icio.us

Browsing through Wired.com tonight, I found this article (worth checking out) which lead me to del.icio.us. Already, we have our online wordprocessor (Writely) and our online picture editor (Snipshot). Enter our online bookmark manager.

del.icio.us describes itself as a “social bookmarking website.” What is social bookmarking, you ask? It’s a fancy, somewhat pompous-sounding way of saying what I said before: it’s an online bookmark manager.  With del.icio.us (ooh, typing that irritates me), you can also publish your bookmarks for others. Handy!

To use del.icio.us, you must first register.  The log-in page says, “Don’t have an account? Get one!” Crisis diverted. Sigh of relief.

Upon registering, del.icio.us tries to convince you to download an extension for firefox so that you may update de.icio.us with the click of a button. You don’t need to do this. The website itself does everything you need it to.

This is what your main area looks like:

Watch as I add a URL:

And this is your bookmark manager. Clicky, clicky.

Now, many of you might point out that this is similar to Blogrolling, and it is. It’s easier to use, however – AND it has a nifty feature called Tagging. I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept – basically, you’re allowed to assign a keyword (or multiple keywords) to a link for easy searching.

Viola! It’s pretty basic.  I intend to use del.icio.us to bookmark the blogs of my wonderful CIS111 classmates so that I may read them from work. BRILLIANT!

Thank you, and tune in next week.

Technology Post, week 2

Note: When I found this article on The New York Times yesterday, I decided immediately to blog about it this week. However, since then, similar articles have exploded all over the news. However, nobody else has posted a technology blog for this week yet, so I’m going to take my chances and write about it anyway.

Researchers at Intel and the University of California announced a breakthrough in Photonic Technology on Monday. They have found a way to make “laser chips” that are both significantly faster and less expensive to build than comparable technology (IE optical transcievers).

The previously mentioned article in The New Times states that the laser-silicon chip was created by “bonding a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide onto the surface of a standard silicon chip etched with special channels that act as light-wave guides. The resulting sandwich has the potential to create on a computer chip hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny, bright lasers that can be switched on and off billions of times a second” (NY TIMES 9/19/06)

I see this as a huge development in terms of the future of technology. Though Intel and UCSB have said that it will be years before the product is available commercially, once that happens it will enhance computing as a whole. The researchers plan to be able to put as many as several hundred lasers on a single chip, which will enable data to be transferred at much higher speeds than our current interconnects. 

For more info, see the article I’ve linked above as well as these two:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/teehlThuBr6R9W/Intel-UCSB-Partner-for-Photonics-Breakthrough.xhtml

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127163-page,1-c,topics/article.html

Technology Post – Pandora

A couple of friends have been talking about their new love, Pandora , and I figured this technology assignment was the perfect excuse to check it out.
What is it?
Pandora’s FAQ states, “Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love… Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we’ll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.” (9/12/06)

To establish a “station”, you just type in the name of an artist or a song on the starting screen. For instance, I typed in Sufjan Stevens.

Pandora then searched for songs and artists with qualities similar to that of Sufjan Stevens. The first result was… Sufjan Stevens. Okay, fair enough. That’s logical, in a slightly twisted way.

The song shows up within the player pictured above. The ‘next’ button at the top of the player allows you to scroll between songs. I noticed very little lag time, even on measly DSL connection.

When you mouseover the song, you are given an options tab. Here, you can give the song the thumbs up or down, or open the option menu. On the menu tab, you can ask the service why it chose to play that particular song, tell it to create a new station based on that song or artist, bookmark the song or artist, go “backstage” to find out more information, or purchase the music through itunes or amazon.

In short, I think this is a great service — and it’s free. Who couldn’t use more free music listening? I’ve been using Yahoo! Launchcast for awhile – for $5/month – and, after a few more days of acquainting myself with Pandora, I just may cancel that account. (Bonus: With that $5 I will save, I can increase my monthly Starbuck’s latte consumption to one.)

Why I Chose WordPress

(AKA Leah is a total nerd.) Honestly, first and foremost, I chose WordPress because the name is familiar to me.  I have minimal experience with the system, but I’ve always wanted to broaden my experience.

I’ve been a blogger for the majority of the past seven years, and have seen the “rise and fall” of several trends in content management systems. In my circle of the blogosphere, my friends and I started out with blogger.com, typically hosted at Blogspot. Eventually, having a domain name and a hosting account was The Cool Thing to Do, and we migrated to Noah Grey’s Greymatter. GM had a lot of kinks back then, and many of our hosting services banned the software. I remember there being a split here – some of us switched to a service called B2,which was fairly simple to set up, and others (myself included) moved to Six Apart’s Moveable Type.

To quote Wikipedia, “After Six Apart altered Movable Type’s licensing structure in 2004, many users of that publishing system migrated to WordPress, marking the tipping point of WordPress’ popularity curve.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress, 9/12/06)

The change Wikipedia refers to – going purely from memory - was that Six Apart changed MT so that it made little sense for the average, every day blogger to use the system, due to what most of us considered outrageous costs.

Around this time, I stopped keeping a CMS on my own domain, for the most part. It stopped making sense as I had less and less time to devote to online journaling. I was no longer interested in designing layouts and templates or “keeping up with the Joneses” of the blogosphere. (I think we’d secretly hoped we’d all someday earn Heather Armstrong’s level of celebrity — yes, she does, indeed, make her living blogging.)

Prior to Ray’s plug on his blog, I didn’t know that WordPress had developed WordPress.com – their web-based blog service.  This is a no-fuss approach to becoming familiar with a service that I’ve been meaning to broaden my knowledge of anyway. So far it’s pretty easy – I haven’t messed around with any of the templates or customization, but I hope to get the chance to play with them eventually.

first post

Fun Facts:

 + I grew up in Michigan and randomly moved to the East Coast when I was seventeen – back when I knew everything about everything. (all 17-year-olds do.)

+ I have four younger siblings; the youngest is only ten.

+ I’m an artist and a writer. and yes, I do I hug trees, thank you very much.

+ People are always surprised when they find out I am getting my degree in computer science… I guess my artsy side is more apparent than my geeky side. (When I am making the big bucks in bioinformatics, my next goal will be to put myself through art school.)

+ … and the super interesting stuff: I have one roommate who has two cats.  My full-time, Monday-Friday gig is at Seacoast Mazda in Portsmouth; I am the Assistant Office Manager. I work Sundays as a shift supervisor at Me & Ollie’s cafe in Hampton. I am also enrolled at NHCTC full-time, so basically my free time consists of showering and occasionally cutting my toenails.

initial post

hello. this is my blog for CIS 111. it is going to be extremely exhilarating. refresh often.