lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Alternative expansions for IRC (as seen in the #phpc@irc.freenode.net)

Tetraboy :  Internet Relax Chat
lig           : Instant Resource chat 

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .

I have been playing with s9y's cml-rpc interface for a few days now. Here is a small article on how you can post to your s9y blog using the command line.

If you have not yet read the book iWoz, you have to go out and get this book and read it cover to cover. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. Woz is an excellent storyteller and his tone of writing is conversational. Every engineer should read this book. It tells the stories of sleepless nights and how much they are worth. It talks about persistence and passion and how they really make a difference. One of the profound statements that Woz makes is " I chose to be happy ". The book ends with Woz's thoughts on being a great engineer:

• Don’t waver.
• See things in gray-scale.
• Work alone.
• Trust your instincts.

One surprising thing in the book is the absence of any mention of the EFF, of which Woz was one of the founders.

Test post to see if BloGTK can post to LJ and use tags too.

Update: As expected, that did not work

This is a dummy post to claim my blog on bloglines.com .

This is a dummy post to claim my blog on bloglines.com .