davidvoegtle.net » technology

Feminists cry foul over “Fat Princess” video game

dbvoegtle — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:35:22 +0000

Feminists cry foul over Fat Princess – Video Game Feature – Yahoo! Video Games: She’s Fat Princess, the star of Sony’s upcoming video game of the same name. Debuting at last week’s E3 expo, the colorful Fat Princess is a capture-the-flag game with a twist: you can thwart capture attempts by locking the once-thin princess in a dungeon and stuffing her full of cake, thereby increasing her girth and making her harder for your enemies to haul back to home base.

Somehow abusing women makes for a good video game? C’mon, Sony, you can do better.

Coca-Cola to begin using hybrid trucks in Florida

dbvoegtle — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:36:25 +0000

Coca-Cola to begin using hybrid trucks in Florida: While other companies are shying away from the considerable costs involved, Coca-Cola announced Monday it is rolling out 10 heavy-duty hybrid trucks in South Florida, part of a national campaign to put 142 of these so-called green trucks on the road in North America in the next several weeks.

(Via McClatchy.)

Now there’s no reason to hate Coca Cola for contributing to environmental devastation, just for contributing to obesity, tooth decay, and other associated health problems.

cuil.com and what it really gets wrong

dbvoegtle — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:48:58 +0000

A lot of people are noting the various issues with cuil.com’s design and server overload problems, but the main issue I see is that their page ranks suck. Much has been made of the fact that a search for “george washington” returns no results, but even a search for “sam adams” returns a full page of results of which almost all are related to the beer company and exactly *zero* are related to the patriot.

Until cuil.com can rank their results in a useful and consistent way, no x billion number of indexed pages will win out over Google.

Google Gmail Adds Secure Session Option

dbvoegtle — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:08:33 +0000

Google Gmail Adds Secure Session Option:
Google has plugged one of the biggest security risks associated with using its free hosted Gmail mail service, still in beta after four years. You can now select an option in your account preferences to make every session require an encrypted Web connection.

(Via TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us.)

This is really great news for those of us who are generally on the Richard Nixon side of the paranoia scale. Having just gone through a process of completely securing my on-line life, it’s nice to have one less thing to worry about.

Also, I hope to have a post up soon discussing some of the best-practice steps I took to increase my security on-line, including making sure to use encryption where available and password practices (including a look at password manager 1Password from Agile Web Solutions).

CalDAV support comes to Google Calendar

dbvoegtle — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:31:44 +0000

CalDAV support comes to Google Calendar: Well, fortunately, Google has just quietly introduced CalDAV support to Google Calendar. CalDAV is the protocol that iCal uses to transmit data over the web. Although some other mail and calendar programs support CalDAV, right now Google Calendar is only compatible with iCal. Finally, iCal and Google Calendar can sync without having to use third party programs!

(Via TUAW.)

Leah M @ Newsvine just recently posted about CalGoo going free, and I would highly recommend using it first to push your existing iCal updates to gCal. This is what I did:

Set up calendars on gCal matching my existing iCal structure (which is: Home, Personal, School, Work).

Set up CalGoo to create a separate link from each iCal calendar to the matching gCal calendar.

Sync gCal with iCal.

Add gCal calendars to iCal using the instructions linked from the TUAW post.

Double-check for missing entries.

Delete the local copies of the iCal calendars.

That should be it. You should now be able to make entries or edits in either iCal or gCal and have updates show up in both places (within 15 minutes). Since CalGoo is only needed one time, you can freely remove CalGoo at this point, as well.

High Court Justices Go Digital to Access Founding-Era Documents

dbvoegtle — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:36:51 +0000

Law.com – High Court Justices Go Digital to Access Founding-Era Documents: U.S. Supreme Court justices on both sides in the landmark D.C. v. Heller gun rights case resorted to original documents in making their case about the meaning of the Second Amendment. But they used a little-known digital resource to get there, a project whose mission is to digitize thousands of Founding-era documents that shed light on the original meaning of the Constitution.

The Constitutional Sources Project, which launched publicly last September, has digitized and made freely available online more than 11,000 historical documents relating to the Constitution and the amendments.

Definitely a neat resource, and it appears to be usefully organized. You better believe it’s been bookmarked.

Google to face charges over Down’s syndrome video

dbvoegtle — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:34:55 +0000

Google to face charges over Down’s syndrome video – Times Online: “Google is to face criminal charges in Italy over a video which appeared on one of its sites showing a disabled teenager being taunted by his peers.”

This is the part that seems odd to me:

Google is understood to have removed the clip from the Google Video site within hours of administrators being notified of its existence in September, 2006.

If Google did, in fact, take quick and appropriate action as soon as they were notified, exactly what is the basis for the charges against the Google executives? The only way to prevent any objectionable material ever being posted would be for Google to pre-approve all content, which is clearly impossible given the volume of material that makes it to Google sites.

Just another example of why I’m relatively glad I live in America, I guess, where our Constitutional protections for free speech are so much stronger than in most of Europe.

Esquire First to Newstands with E-Ink Battery-Powered Cover

dbvoegtle — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:35:30 +0000

Today @ PC World Esquire First to Newstands with E-Ink Battery-Powered Cover: “Newsstands across America will come to life this September when men’s magazine Esquire rolls out the first magazine cover ever to use E-ink.”

(Via JCAtom @ Newsvine.)

How cool is that (at least for the novelty)? However, I can’t see it lasting long-term. There’s just not much need for print magazines to go through the expense of e-ink in a printed magazine. The future is digital distribution, which will save time and production costs, and allow media organizations to devote more money to content creation.

Both Sharp and Fujitsu demoed color e-ink technology years ago. When mass production finally takes off, there will be very little reason to maintain traditional hardcopy subscriptions.

Crossing the line on Steve Jobs’ health

dbvoegtle — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:36:29 +0000

Crossing the line on Steve Jobs’ health | One More Thing – CNET News.com: “One clear sign that this is an unseemly exercise: if those who keep pushing the issue feel they have to repeatedly apologize for seeming insensitive, they’re probably being insensitive. Yes, Jobs is the CEO of a $135 billion company that has dramatically changed the world of technology and made countless people rich. And, as I wrote the last time we covered this, Apple’s board of directors has a clear duty to avoid falling into a situation resembling Woodrow Wilson’s final days in office.

However, the only responsibility that Apple’s board of directors has to its shareholders is to make sure that Steve Jobs’ health is not a liability, and disclosing anything beyond that would be a mistake.”

(Via c|net.)

Steve Jobs is not a public official, and as I see it hasn’t given up his right to privacy simply because he’s a CEO. Jobs has also done as much as one could ask to ensure that Apple has the talent in place to continue should anything happen to him, with a large stable of talented managers in every division of the business.

Vimeo lays down the law: no gaming videos

dbvoegtle — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:21:18 +0000

Staff Blog / New upload rules: “The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game.”

(Via Vimeo.)

I’m not a Vimeo user, although I’m going to look at it now. I’m not sure I agree with this policy unless the overhead from such videos really was causing backend system slowdowns for other users. The editorial decision to ban an entire class of videos which are not obscene seems harsh.