Politics are not something I generally post about here, and I probably won’t do much in the future. But in this case I’m making an exception because this is important. In next week’s election, California voters will vote on Proposition 8, which will amend the California Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman, effectively a ban on gay marriage. Not only do I stand against this proposition, but so do dozens of leaders in the tech industry. Tomorrow morning, the San Jose Mercury news will run a full-page ad that these leaders created. The proposition is pure discrimination, and cannot be allowed to pass. So if you live in California and are able to vote, please vote No on Prop 8.
AOL has been working hard lately to bring the internet to it’s new homepage. First they started with Yahoo and Gmail widgets that let you browse your inbox (you need to click through to each service to actually read anything). Now they’ve thrown social networks into the mix. They allow you to signin to Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo at launch and each widget shows your latest updates, clicking anything will direct you to the network’s website. Both Hotmail and Twitter have icons in their respective widget boxes, but as of right now neither are supported, but are ‘coming soon’.
The New AOL.com
This is a very interesting proposal by the researchers at Boston University, using visible light to transmit wireless data. While this is a great idea in theory, in practice it could be a disaster. What happens if you need to turn the lights off for some reason? There’s goes your internet. Or what if you have a device on a shelf and direct light to it is blocked? No internet. Although it is a great security feature for this system to not work through walls (reduces ‘eavesdropping’) it can be a big hassle in the long run.
This coupled with the recent announcement of Windows Live accounts becoming OpenID as well as Yahoo accounts already being OpenID is a huge bonus for the project. While none of the big three are allowing users to sign-in to their services using other OpenID accounts, you can use your Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live account to sign-in elsewhere.
Google accounts are now OpenID
Simple Goods – CSS
Absolutely one of the best resources for any design or development books. Along with some other fun tidbits.
This is a huge deal because there are plenty of countries out there (I’m looking at China mainly, and I’m sure that a lot of people will think of them immediately as well) that do all they can to control the free speech their people have while using the internet. Yahoo has already gotten into some trouble with human rights activists when they released personal information on a Chinese blogger. While this is really nothing more than a broad agreement to do better, it’s at least a start in the right direction.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Put Their Weight Behind Global Plan Against Online Speech Restriction
A Broadband Bill of Rights is important because as consumers and increasingly active internet users, we need to have fair and reasonably unrestricted access to everything on the internet, especially since we’re paying for our access.
It’s important that every part of the devices that we utilize and begin to rely on more and more are as energy efficient as possible, even if the batteries get longer lasting. Wi-Fi has historically been a boon to such energy efficiency because the chips are made to be able to be used in smartphones and such that need high rendering capabilities, power that is simply overkill in things like digital picture frames.
Over the past week or so I’ve been playing around with a few ideas of some small design and cosmetic changes on ryanboswell.com. For now I’ve just settled on consolidating the two sidebar columns into one big column that’s about 75% as wide as the two separate, as well as widening the main content column to fill in that other 25%. I’ve also gotten rid of the individual Flickr and Twitter update sections in lieu of trying to put together a consolidated Action Stream of everything. Unfortunately I’ve run into a few problems with that.
Usernamecheck is quite useful to see if your ‘standard’ username is already taken at one of dozens of web2.0 websites. For those of you who like to have the same username across multiple services (easier on your memory and easier for people to find you) it’s a great way to plan things out. Then again if you’re like most people you’ve already got accounts at half of these places and you’ve got 3-4 different usernames between them since your ‘favorite’ was already taken.