Much Ado About Blogging » The Internet

The communicative potential of Twitter

B. Terhechte — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:42:22 +0000

I’m currently investigating, by means of current theories of communication, how to locate Twitter between other forms of social and mass communication. There’re some specifics which evolve Twitter (or in general Microblogging, for that matter) into an interesting and unusual new breed of interpersonal and mass communication at once.
Microblogging hasn’t reached a tipping point yet. It’s still mostly an early adopters technology, but fairly recent Nielsen Media numbers (1) suggest that it’s growing rapidly. I’d guess that the ongoing releases of new twitter-based software tools (i.e. Twitterrank) in line with the steep growth of the community will soon burst in an online phenomenon not unlike blogging, but bigger.
Since I plan to build on these thoughts, I decided to present parts of my argumentation here, in order to force myself to critically and elaborately write all these things down which just exist in my head right now.
Thus in my next post, I’ll try to explain why I think that microblogging has more potential than blogging.

(1) Nielsen Media Alert: Fastest Growing Social Networks for September 2008.

New X-Server for Linux

B. Terhechte — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:26:18 +0000

X specifies what the end results of a series of rendering requests must look like, but how the display looks while it’s in progress is not discussed. GTK+ and Qt works around this to some extent by using double buffering, but we still see lag between window decorations and window contents while resizing etc. The wayland tag line is “every frame is perfect”, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we’ll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker.”

A step in the right direction.
In the past years, Linux has considerably matured as a Desktop Operating System. Not only the innovation from Ubuntu, but also new technologies (i.e. Compiz) developed by Red Hat, SuSE, or others, helped Linux to gain awareness of Linux as desktop. One of the fundamental flaws, however, has always been the X-Server. It starts with the incredibly ugly mode-switches during the system boot (vga, text-mode, svga, text-mode, native solution) continues along the lines of dual monitor setup problems, and culminates in ugly redrawing/flicker problems with most window operations.

I do believe, that one of the key problems, holding Linux back from gaining a wider audience, lies (next to the casual users’ stumbling block of not being able to install standard Windows software) in the feeling of a buggy system determined by the visualy visible fragments of on-screen operations.
Think about it: People don’t see the modern 2.6.x Kernel with all of it’s glory, people aren’t able to see the power that is a new O1 scheduler (or whatever), they can’t see the brilliance of the filesystem and neither the flexibility of all those new KDE4 / Qt4 API / technology layers.
However, what they can see is a desktop that leaves ugly fragments and feels immature.

So, although the new Wayland kernel won’t suddenly bring Linux on par with Windows Vista or OS X it should tremendously help in achieving a higher state of satisfaction with the whole Desktop Experience. Often, it’s the little things, that can make a big difference.

I got my iPhone

B. Terhechte — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:56:44 +0000

As you can see, I just got my iPhone today. Software version is, due to Carrier-Reasons still at 1.0.2, and I plan to keep it that way for some time.
First impression is: Awesome. Absolutely awesome and amazing.
Although it lacks some of the features which I would take for granted in modern Mobile Phones, it shines on many other feature-comparisons.
I’ll write more soon.

Another new project: virenfrei-surfen

B. Terhechte — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 10:59:31 +0000

I thought I’d join the google adsense $1 bandwagon too, and created a
small page which stands to help in the war of Firefox versus Internet
Explorer.
So, next time you try to explain a friend of yours (or a family member)
why Firefox is better, you could just as well link him up to the
virenfrei-surfen page, and hope that it’ll convince him to switch.

Here’s the page:
www.virenfrei-surfen.de

Thinking about the future.

B. Terhechte — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 20:56:43 +0000

Whats gonna happen to the internet, google, future media.. This is an interesting glance into the future, maybe a bit left-minded and maybe a bit too naive, but still nice to watch.

http://atog.ch/stuff/new_york_times_offline.swf

Stolen from Ambroggio

B. Terhechte — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 13:14:44 +0000

Nintendo Revolution to offer free classic downloads

B. Terhechte — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 09:44:19 +0000

Now this is cool, seems as if the Nintendo Revolution will allow you to play all the old classics Snes, Nes and N64 games for free..
Maybe they'll even include some gfx-enhancement-technologies like in ZSnes (or even better stuff who knows).
That sounds awesome as I'm all retro when it comes to games (Still playing doom1 from time to time)
Link

This is so sad. Flame war turns deadly

B. Terhechte — Fri, 27 May 2005 09:58:10 +0000

This is so sad. And it frightens me, sad day for the internet, sad day
for humanity, and for sure another indication that being human isn’t
but a mere glorification of something we simply don’t want to admit
ourselves:
Arguments
on Internet message boards are nothing new, and often are a central
component. But in San Diego, California an argument turned deadly on 25
May 2005, resulting in two murders, and two other attempted
homicides.

What’s worse, is that the killer has returned to the board to taunt the remaining members.

via linkfilter

that fuck was only 17. I hope they find him and some of those cops die for tripple fisting anal penetration.

Firefox Promo Videos

B. Terhechte — Thu, 12 May 2005 20:53:32 +0000

Those Firefox-Guys created some funny Promo Videos for their Browser. Go watch them while they're not slashdotted yet:
http://funnyfox.org/thenotebook.htm

The Commonly Confused Word Test

B. Terhechte — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 08:12:44 +0000

Advanced
You scored 92% Beginner, 92% Intermediate, 93%
Advanced, and 46% Expert!

You have an extremely good understanding of
beginner, intermediate, and advanced level
commonly confused English words, getting at
least 75% of each of these three levels’
questions correct. This is an
exceptional score. Remember, these are
commonly confused English words, which
means most people don’t use them properly. You
got an extremely respectable score.

Thank you so much for taking my test. I hope
you enjoyed it!

For the complete Answer Key, visit my blog:
http://shortredhead78.blogspot.com/.

Link:

The Commonly Confused Words Test written by

shortredhead78 on
OkCupid Online
Dating