Mindscape of Chris Judd

Here is a link to a decent article on ZD-Net about the death of optical media/drives, or at least the slowing acceptance and use compared to external hard drives and cheap thumb drives….

I stopped using CD/DVD media as a backup method many years ago when I attempted to actually USE them again and read data off, and couldn’t… Many many hours later and trying different drives and cleaning cloths, and tricks like putting a blank label to increase reflectivity, and even lightly ironing – got 90% of the data back…. Turns out the Library of Congress is discovering the same thing… it does not “last” as long as one might think, and certainly not as long as the manufacturers promised (10 years I think was one such “promise”) – this is all referring to the consumer “burned” kind versus the pressed commercial kinds… The reason has to do with the layers and the separation of the actual data layer from the plastic substrate…

Anyway, check out the post here

(nerd alert!)

Quick quiz- title of the post… Inspired by “Twitter”, or “Monty Python”?

I’ve been playing around with the twitter API to scrape the public time line for phrases, keywords, etc to build an auto responder back to the original poster… So if someone tweets “I just ate a French fry!” and I was looking for “fry or fries” as a key phrase, then the code could reply “wow really? I love fries”

Also digging into SMS (texting) more. I had created a prototype for church that we used during a recent event, and we got quite a few responses. Now looking at phase II of that, taking a data card into a computer, getting vanity short codes, possible business models, etc…

Also scoping out the “next twiiter” and so far < 15 second “vblurts” or video blurts [might have to be the one to coin that phrase] seem to be positioned as the next social media “thing”. Only real issue being 2-fold. One: you have to have a camera to record the video and two: content… I’m thinking “max headroom” characters would be fun…

There are some other “on the horizon” things buzzing in labs and such, as I can figure how to describe will do.

More updates as things progress…

I’ve redone some of the servers @ home while snowed in… Now have a Linux box running IPCop as the firewall, a Windows 2008 server running VMWare and a few XP and Gentoo VMs (seperating functions like Torrent server, email testing server, data backup servers, etc)… a Windows Media machine still tweaking it, and the newest member of the “rack” is a Mac OSX Server machine.

I still have a few legacy Linux boxes running email I need to virtualize and move on to one of the host servers.

With the exception of the firewall box, all are now 8Gig, QuadCore, multi-terabyte beasts… grunt grunt grunt!!!

I get asked a lot “What do I use to blog”, or variations on that… I’ve tried them all, including Drupal, Joomla, etc… Wordpress is to me started out a the “quick and dirty” way to throw up a site with blogging… the others required a steeper learning curve to get just right… Wordpress has since matured, and in my mind, is getting stronger all the time… more plugins being developed (that MATTER… not in sheer numbers – how many “RSS reader” addons can be THAT different). Themes are easier to develop for (to me) and the ability to change code IN the site… all are good points that keep it at the top of my list…