Posts published in “Internet”

Bear Turns Open Source Shark in Deep Water

By Christine Hall on June 30, 2011 |

Storm Bear Williams comes into the the FOSS Force office and plops onto one of two big, overstuffed chairs in our conversation pit. After a howdy, he says “I couldn’t find any microcassettes, so I got this.” He hands me a new, still in the box, Sony hand held digital audio recorder with a built-in microphone, good for 500 minutes.

stormweb — Storm Bear Williams relaxing in San Francisco Bay.

He’s come for an interview. When I’d set up the appointment, I told him I was running low on microcassettes and asked if he could pick up a couple, just in case I needed them. When he discovered microcassettes are now obsolete and pretty much unavailable, he went ahead and sprang for something to get the job done.

A cynic might think this was only to curry favor, but I’ve known Storm for over twenty years, so I know better. For one thing, he doesn’t like to disappoint. For another, he’s pragmatic and always the businessman. He didn’t want the interview to go south just because it couldn’t be recorded.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com

WordPress Plugins for Usability & Traffic

By Christine Hall on June 27, 2011 |

Internet, Media, Mobile and Social Networks

After you’ve installed plugins to configure your WordPress site for your server and protect your site from spam, it’s time to get your site up to speed. You may have guessed this will partly require more plugins. Some will be for the purpose of visibility, to help people find you. Others will enable you to offer different kinds of content. For example, a music site would probably install a plugin to work with YouTube videos; a photography site would want to make sure to have an effective way to offer slide shows. At this point, every site’s needs are unique.

Before you get started, you might want to go through the WordPress repository to get a gander of what’s available. You probably have an idea of some functions you’d like to add to your plain vanilla install. Start your search there. It also might be useful to check out sites you like for features you think are cool and look to see if there’s a plugin for that feature on WordPress. Don’t install a plugin until you’re ready to use it, as it’s easy to install too many plugins and have a lot of dead weight hanging on your site. Remember, every new function adds some new security risk, however small, so there’s good reason not to install a function if you’re not using it.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

WordPress Plugins for Security & Robustness

By Christine Hall on June 23, 2011 |

Internet, Security and Software

Yesterday I wrote about how WordPress has evolved into a first rate platform that can be easily customized. One of the ways that WordPress is customized to meet the unique needs of a site is through the use of plugins that add functionality. Most of these functions are visual and offer visitors a richer experience while on your site. Others are never even seen by the visitor and only indirectly affect his or her experience.

During site design, it can be easy to become so blinded by the the former group, the plugins that add lots of gee-whiz bells-and-whistles, that we ignore the later group that does the grunt work to increase our site’s performance. However, judicious use of these behind-the-scenes plugins can make our WordPress sites more secure and help reduce server loads, making for a safer and quicker site and a better experience for our visitors.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

WordPress: Not a Toy Anymore

By Christine Hall on June 22, 2011 |

Internet, Social Networks and Web Apps

About five years ago I was publishing a content site running on PostNuke when I inherited a political blog with a killer name and a decently designed theme from a friend who had lost interest. There was one little problem, however. The site was running on WordPress, a platform that didn’t impress me in the least.

In hindsight, this may have been partly due to the fact that WordPress made many tasks too easy. In those days, the concept of blogging was fairly new and I didn’t like bloggers, who I saw as amateurs who hadn’t paid their dues. Blogging platforms like WordPress made running a website too easy, I thought. I had learned to be proficient on PostNuke through lots of sweat, work and mistakes, and I thought this new breed of web writers/publishers should have to work, learn and sweat like I had. In other words, I’d become a cranky old fart opposed to change.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Evil Empire Buys Skype

By Christine Hall on May 11, 2011 |

Business, Internet and News

Hmm…. I never had a chance to use Skype.

All of my friends are using it; talking to lovers in Europe, or to spouses in other states, or to FB “friends” who are who-knows-where. It sounds so cool, so romantic, sitting in the familiar confines of one’s living room in front of a laptop webcam, conversing with a friend across the continent or across the ocean as if they were right there in the same room. Until now it seemed so cool that I just knew I’d have to be a Skyper soon.

But then Skype went and got sold to the Evil Empire for $8.5 billion, which seems to be an awful lot to pay just to keep me from becoming a Skyper.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Facebook’s Open Source Green Machines

By Christine Hall on April 11, 2011 |

Business, Hardware, Internet, Media and Social Networks

Wow! Can it be? Has Zuckerberg and Facebook actually done something ethical, on their own, without any pressure from outside forces? For the moment the answer would seem to be affirmative, but I’m not quite willing to trust this one yet. Experience teaches me that Zuckerberg’s moral compass sometimes turns north into south.

What I’m talking about is the new 150,000 square foot server farm that Facebook has opened in Prineville, Oregon. It seems that in building this facility, Facebook’s developers have tweeked, tweeked, and tweeked again to come up with a data center that’s extremely green, as in environment not as in golf course.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Mum’s the Word at “Linux Today”

By Christine Hall on March 24, 2011 |

Internet, Media and News

There seems to be trouble in the works over at Linux Today, and everybody’s keeping damn quiet about it.

The first hint that something was wrong came on Saturday when the site posted no new content. This seemed odd, but not too unusual since weekend postings are often slim on the site. But when usually busy Monday came and went with still no new posts, the “what’s-up-with-that” factor was raised. Things started to get back to normal on Tuesday, however, when new posts began showing-up on the site again, though the pickings were slim, only six posts on a day when normally there would be four times as many.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Feds Want to Crack Your Blackberry

By Christine Hall on September 29, 2010 |

Internet, Mobile, Politics and Social Networks

If you’re wondering why Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the Blackberry, was loathe to cooperate with the authorities in Dubai and India when they demanded access to encrypted Blackberry calls, it’s because they knew no matter how little they cracked that door, it would eventually open wide. Need proof? Take a look at Monday’s New York Times in which we learn that the Feds want new regulations to force companies like RIM to design back doors into their offerings to allow easy wiretap access by law enforcement. It’ll be hard for RIM to say “no” to the U.S. when they’ve already said “yes” to other countries.

“Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging like Skype – to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.”

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Friday FOSS Week in Review: Apple Bigger than Microsoft

By Christine Hall on May 28, 2010 |

Business, Internet and News

It’s been a relatively slow week in the FOSS world. The good news is we’ve got our monitor trouble solved for now, in a way. The ancient monitor we installed runs great in Windows, but isn’t configured properly to work in our Linux install. Anybody want to tell us how to configure our install of Linux from the command line to get our monitor working properly in X? There’s something definitely wrong about a FOSS site writer working in Windows…

And now the news…

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

World to Zuckerberg: Opt-in Not Opt-out

By Christine Hall on May 27, 2010 |

Business and Internet

I have a friend who thinks Facebook’s child star Mark Zuckerberg knows exactly what he’s doing. He despises Mr. Zuckerberg and thinks the best use for him would be as a plug to stop-up the hole on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico that’s spewing oil at the rate of ten gallons every two seconds or so. Maybe he’s right about the latter, at least he’d be useful. I’m not so sure about the former though, as I really suspect Zuckerberg just doesn’t get it. I think he really doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about and why almost all Facebook users don’t want their personal information handed over to the top thousand highest bidders.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe Facebook’s Shirley Temple twin is innocent. Indeed, playing fast and loose with our private information isn’t the first time he’s betrayed those who’ve trusted him. Heck, the way I understand it, there wouldn’t even be a Facebook if he hadn’t cheated and stolen to get it. But I don’t think he thinks he did anything wrong there either. He was just being smart. Just like his idol Bill Gates was being smart when he stole his GUI from Apple. Kind of like in that movie Catch Me If You Can.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Google Offers New Open Source Video Standard

By Christine Hall on May 20, 2010 |

Yesterday was a great day for open source at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

At the I/O developers’ conference, host Google finally announced they are open sourcing the VP8 video codec they acquired with their purchase of On2 Technologies back in February. Google is packaging VP8 as part of a format they’re calling WebM, which will include Ogg Vorbis for audio playback. WebM is being released royalty free under a BSD-style license.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com