I had made my original prototype of the library 2.0 website, however I had not made most of the widgets that I wanted to make.

I also had not implemented any of the login functions. Granted, this is just a proof of concept (PoC) for a library 2.0 website, however I do want to get as much functionality as I can into my PoC as possible before the end of the semester because a better PoC means the end user, investor, director, provost (or whoever) that sees it, gets a better idea of what the system is intended to do...

Currently I am working on this week's homework - that hopefully will help with some of the PoC problems I am facing.

On with the battle

agnotology n. The study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.
—agnotological adj.

Example Citation:
The leaders of corporations and other institutions, it turns out, are not always hungry for more information.

Investigations can be costly. They can assign blame. They can uncover things that might give ammunition for lawsuits.

They may delve deep into assumptions made when a system was put together, which may be outdated or expensive to change.

Some technology watchers, such as Robert Proctor, a Stanford professor who specializes in the history of science and technology, said there is increasing resistance to investigating, even as instances that warrant digging seem to be climbing.

"There is a lot more protectiveness than there used to be," said Proctor, who is shaping a new field, the study of ignorance, which he calls agnotology. "It is often safer not to know."
—"What you don't want to know can hurt," Grand Rapids Press, August 27, 2006


Via: wordspy


All I can say is.... WOW!

March 25th, 1821 - the day the enslaved Greeks rose against their Ottoman oppressors!
Today we honor their commitment and bravery, for without them, there would not no modern Greek nation.

My university has a Microsoft license, so I jumped at the opportunity to be a beta tester...err...I mean a pioneer!

I took that Vista DVD and installed it on my Dell GX280. Some apps are not working, but that's OK, I'll find out why and make them run. I was browsing some vista related news recently and I discovered that Windows now features language packs, just like the MacOS! I can now localize my OS without needing to reinstall the OS in another language! Hallelujah! OK, so I go the control panel, where one would be able to find this wonderful ability - after all, I don't want my co-workers to even understand what is on my screen.

I saw the button to install a language...I clicked on it, and it was asking me where the LIP files are. Huh? You mean language files are not included on the Vista (enterprise) DVD?. Ok then, let's click on help. Help says go online to download MUI packs. OK...off to microsoft.com/downloads to get those coveted LIPs...but again, nothing for Vista. What the heck?!

So...Microsoft is advertising functionality that vista does not have yet - so what else is new? I've found a few torrents around that supposedly have a MUI DVD...but I have not tried it yet, and besides, none of those MUI packs includes Greek, which is what I want anyway!

Oh well...I guess we are still at Apple [1] - Microsoft [0] since they really ship a multilingual OS.

I was reading an article on OSNews recently on Zeta 1.5.

For those who don't know, Zeta is one of the many 'continuations' of the BeOS, and it is the only commercial BeOS distribution.

Since it is commercial, you would think that you would get top notch support, and the ability to get upgrades without many hurdles. This however has not been the case with Zeta (formerly known at YelloTab Zeta). The company that developed it before (YellowTab) went belly up and they sold things off to Magnussoft. Again, for those who don't know, if you needed to update (and you did need to update because releases were buggy), you needed to send in your original purchased disc back to Germany, and they would send you back another disc with the updated OS - what a pain! This is an inconvenience you don't have with other commercial operating systems.

The recent review was not a stellar review of the OS, as far as I am concerned. So the real question here is: "is zeta still relevant?"

We've got Haiku, PhOS, and BeOS Max available. BeOS Max is a working BeOS r5 distribution that works rather well. PhOS is based on unreleased BeOS r6 (Dan0) code making it illegal...but the website and ISOs are still up, so I guess you could conceivably install it on your PC. Finally, Haiku is making great strides at rebuilding BeOS from scratch, making an OS that is both backward compatible with the original BeOS, and fix the problems inherent in the original BeOS. The two things that these three projects have in common are that they all aim to continue the legacy of the BeOS and they are all Free! Yes, you read right, Free - you can go download and install right now, it will only cost you a CD-R and approximately 600 downloaded megabytes.

From this perspective, Zeta, for what it offers, is over priced, cumbersome to upgrade and highly irrelevant in today's world!

If it wowed the crowds with it's amazing stability, features, and comparable built-in apps I would not be here commenting on it, however it amazes me that money is still poured into this project and people are still buying it! I suppose there are enough geeks like me that would buy it just to try it out, but the business model is obviously a failed one.

What do you think? Is it still relevant? Should it close it's doors down?

I've been wanting to join mixi (a japanese social networking group) since I heard about it on JapanesePod101.com last November - but I never got around to it.
It's one of those 'you need to know someone in order to get in' deals.
Well...I joined, it's all in Japanese, and reading through Kana and Kanji is a slow process...but I am learning!

10 years ago I got my first paying job.
Oddly enough, it was as an IT consultant - I guess some things are meant to be

I was thinking recently that it's been a long time since I heard of someone actually using a 56k Modem!

My first computer did come with a modem...a 9.6 kbps modem. I think that I would much rather beat myself with a Klingon pain stick than use that today, although I suspect that even then, the modem was just a gateway to use Apple's eWorld service considering that modems were not typically bundled with PCs back in1994 - but I regress.

It got me thinking - in the age of the podcast, the downloable content, the flash-based sites, and all other content that requires so much more throughput than what 56k can muster - how many 56k modem users are there out there? Apple, about a year ago I think, got rid of the modem as a standard on their machines. Sure, you can still buy a USB modem, but it's not bundled and it's a dongle. So is the 56k modem dead? - just a thought

... "that is Fcuking bizarre" in Klingon?
Maybe I should ask Jyrki Kasvi, a Finnish politician that aims to gain re-election by campaigning in, among other language, Klingon!
Maybe we should make Klingon the new Esperanto hehehe

Sources: yahoo! article, wiki entry Jyrki, Campaing website (appears to be dugg already - unresponsive)

Quite honestly, thinking back, I never really had one of those 'When I grow up, I want to be...' kind of moments.
We never really discussed it in school (in Greece), I guess that's because your test scores determined what school you would go into, and consequently what you would study as a major, thus what your would do when you grew up. For those in the group that did not like what they tested into, there are always careers in sales and customer service. So I am sitting here today (doing homework) and I get this thought in my head...'when I grow up, I want to be a...' and I am trying to fill in the blank. It's really quite difficult to pick actually! I like many things, I can't just pick one, and if I were to pick one, chances are that I would get bored after a while, wanting to change gears into something else.

Any jobs out there fore someone that loves technology, blogging, gadgets, foreign languages and video games (among other things)? that will pay so that I can live above poverty level? There probably are - just need to look closed, eh?

I've been using 'widgets' for a while now. in QNX, I had the sidebar, which I disabled because I really hated the fact that it took up so much real-estate!

When MacOS X 10.3 came out with dashboard, I really liked it and I started using widgets again - especially mail notifiers, adsense, analytics and machine stats. On windows, there was no equivalent (built-in) until Vista came out with the sidebar. I updated to vista on my work machine a few weeks ago, and gave the sidebar a whirl - and ever since I have not been able to being myself to turn it off! I really hated the taking up of space on QNX many moons ago, but now with the ability to see what's in my gmail-box, and what's new in my RSS aggregator, I think it's really useful.

Now I am a bit torn. I like the ability to put away my widgets when I am not using them, like the MacOS' dashboard, but I also like having some widgets visible, sort of like Classic's Desktop Accessories (DAs). I downloaded Yahoo! Widgets and I find it interesting that there is an HUD (Heads up Display) mode, but there is also the ability to have them floating around. I find, though, that I quickly get fed up with the floaters and I just shut down Yahoo! Widgets.

Now the main reason I got Yahoo! Widgets, was to get a Y! mail widget that told me not only how many messages I have, but also what the subject and sender of those messages are! Something that did not come with any such widget...


eh... this was a pointless post...(did it make sense?)

...well in my case it really depends on what the meaning of 'urgent' is.

I did not know that the meaning of a word could be debated, after all I thought that the OED (that's oxford english dictionary for anyone who doesn't know the lingo) was the definitive source for word definitions for the English Language. Let's see what it says, shall we?

Urgent (adverb): Pressing, impelling; demanding or calling for prompt action; marked or characterized by urgency.

OK, now that we've cleared that up, my department had a meeting, about a month and a half ago to determine the escalation levels of our ticketing system. We determined that an 'enhancement' was something that people wanted, but we would get to it whenever we had the resources to get to it. The next step up was 'normal' which means essentially that your problem is in queue with the other problems that are of category normal and it is first-come first-serve. Finally we have 'urgent' which meant something to the effect "there is no other possible way to go about my job, please drop everything and help me".

OK then, so people, being who they are, started classifying things that aren't real urgent (in the grand scheme of things anyway) as urgent. After solving people's issues and giving them detailed directions on how to deal with their issue at hand, I kindly requested that they don't mark something as urgent if it is indeed not urgent! After all, we don't have that many employees to take care of issues in the 'drop everything and help everyone right now' kind of way. Well this person was annoyed that I asked them to not do this, and they talked to my boss who in turned talked to me - and this is the fun part: You see, it really depends on what the meaning of 'is' is...errr..sorry, I mean "what the meaning of 'urgent' is. Apparently, if something comes from the "Administration office" - it is urgent, no matter what. If they dropped an erased - go get it for them if they ask you to (even if it isn't your job). If they have no pencils and they crackberry you to get some - go get them, even though pencils are right next to them. I know, these are ridiculous examples, but this is what I was told!

And so we (not so merrily) debated the meaning of the word 'Urgent' for about five minutes at which point I lost interest in the conversation as it appeared that it was really a fruitless endeavor.

Looking at my boss's work queue, I noticed a number of open tickets from last July (July 06) - six moths ago that were marked urgent, but they weren't closed. My work queue was only 3 open tickets as I had resolved all previous issues. So, what is the meaning of Urgent? I prefer the OED definition, something that demands attention right now, and have it fixed immediately. I really do not want to be debating the meaning of words in the english language. I just want to call something the way it is - so if it is urgent, it's urgent. If it's not, then it's not - so don't call it urgent!

I installed Vista on my Dell GX280 (3.2Ghz Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM) two weeks ago at work.
My version of Vista is of the enterprise variety (none of that home stuff). It felt remarkably speedy! I really expected it to crawl! It was running about the same speed as my Windows XP installation that I upgraded. All my pre-installed applications worked without major issues. I did notice that I had no printers though! How weird...my network settings, my personal preferences, everything was carried over when I upgraded - just not my printers. Never fear! I'll just go to 'add printer' - did a 'windows update' to get all the latest printer drivers, scrolled down to the letter H, and lo-and-behold! No HP! No Hewlett-Packard!
Now I know that I could probably go to HP's support site and get those drivers, but is this really necessary? If I had paid to get vista I would be a bit bummed that I would need to go through more hoops to get my peripherals working,