Blog Title: tekArtist

Making Ubuntu Server Work in Sun’s VirtualBox

Here’s a quick fix if you’re interested in installing a VM running Ubuntu Server in Sun’s OSS virtualization tool, VirtualBox. After installing the 32bit version of Ubuntu Server 8.10 in VirtualBox 2.0.4 on my MacBook Pro (OSX), I was faced with the following error message when starting the VM, which I found also happens on other read more..

WordCamp Toronto 2008

Better late than never, this is to announce that some of the Praized crew and I will be attending WordCamp Toronto 2008 this weekend. The event takes place at the Progress Campus Student Centre of the Centennial College, in Scarborough. Looking forward to it!

Praized is Now Live!

Yes! Praized Media, our Hub, Facebook application and other current integration options (API, plugins, etc) are now all live to the public and in full production gears. :) Now Web publishers can easily write about local places while growing traffic and ad revenue. Praized is the first free local search platform designed specifically for social media read more..

SSH Setup for EC2 UI on Mac OS X

If you are using Amazon’s EC2 as a cloud hosting solution, you owe it to yourself to install the most excellent EC2 UI Firefox extension (source) to manage your server instances (note: not yet compatible with Firefox 3). Now, if you also happen to be on Mac OS X, one annoying thing is that EC2 UI read more..

WordPress 2.5 is officially out!

From the WordPress Blog: WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess read more..

UN Data: the Ultimate Research Tool

From “UN Data: the Ultimate Research Tool - ReadWriteWeb“: The new site at UN Data allows anyone to access the United Nations Data Access System. This online, easy-to-use database was created by the UN in order to provide current, relevant, and reliable statistics to the whole world, for free. Using UN Data, you can access statistical read more..

Blitzweekend 2008 Demos and Extras

The Blitzweekend was a success! You’ll soon be able to read more on their blog and Montreal Tech Watch, but in the meantime, here are the videos I shot of the demos that were given on day three (March 2nd). Introduction Noogl: WINNERS: Panel’s Choice A2B SneakSend BlitzDirectory: WINNERS: People’s Choice Reverse Payment system Heron Mandelbrot: 2nd most popular choice; my vote. GoalR Microfinancing for read more..

Blitzweekend 2008 Kickstart Videos

I went to film the Blitzweekend Kickstart event tonight (well, yesterday, technically). It’s now 4:15 AM and I am done cutting, converting and uploading the footage for your geeky and entrepreneurial viewing pleasure. Blitzweekend is an unique experience where designers, developers, and entrepreneurs are challenged to create a working product in 48 hours read more.. Find read more..

Google Announces Lunar X Prize

From: “Google Shoots For The Moon - Forbes.com“: The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy. More info is available on the Google Lunar X read more..

SXSW 2008, [DRM-]Free Music and BitTorrent

From “SXSW 2008 on BitTorrent: 3.5 GB of Free Music“: The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that - thanks to Greg Hewgill - can now be downloaded for read more..

Great Article on XFN Manipulation

From Brian Suda’s “XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations“: In this article I will take a good look at XFN - the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits read more..

How Not to End Up as an Anachronism

From “GigaOM: How Not to End Up as an Anachronism“: There are always seemingly good reasons to continue doing things the way they were done in the past, and transition always presents challenges. As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based read more..

Change o’ Plans. Joining the Praized Team!

Funny the pace plans can change at, isn’t it? I was all organized and looking forward to formally announce my return to the world of independent consulting when things started to take an even more interesting turn instead. I am in fact very happy to announce that I have now officially joined the ranks of the read more..

Engineers Say the Darndest Things

From: “Kodak: A Thousand Nerds - TechTalk” Compressed-graphite field plotter: This example of inscriptive technology is a dactylically manipulated lignin/cellulose-encased crystalline carbon allotrope allowing shear force deposition for semiotic and representational modification of planar compressed-cellulose substrates. I dare you to think of what the device might be before checking the answer out.

Corey Martinez: Federal Session

See “BMX Corey Martinez Session Federal“. Note: The whole video is great, but the amazing stuff starts about half-way into it (~2 min.). I’ve been stopping myself from buying another BMX for years, thinking “bald dude + trick bike = not so cool”, but seeing stuff like this just makes me think “Hey, I’ve got kids, don’t read more..

Facebook Internationalization for Developers

From “Platform Internationalization“: … we have a quick way for applications to integrate with users in new locales. We are now sending a param “fb_sig_locale” to all canvas pages that signals the locale set for the visiting user. Feel free to use this to begin localizing. Good thing to know, since Facebook is now available in Spanish, read more..

YDL and the Versatile Side of the PS3

Although not yet available to the general public yet (<2weeks), Terra Soft has now released Yellow Dog Linux 6 to their YDL.net community. One of the most important improvement in this release is the fact that the distribution is now built upon CentOS, with select Fedora 7 components, making it a much more robust enterprise read more..

The Future of XML

From “The future of XML“: The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The crystal ball might be a little hazy, but the outline of XML’s future is becoming clear. The exact time line is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn’t. XML’s future lies with the Web, and more specifically with read more..

Rogers Canada Wireless Data Plan Update: Good vs. Bad

It’s no secret that I have one of the infamous 1.3 million missing iPhones with me, here in Montreal. I only recently activated the phone features though, then found out that it took special (though widly published) credentials to be able to use Rogers’ EDGE network from the device. So I tried the latter a few days read more..

Cybercluster: Synchronous Multimaster Replication for PostgreSQL

From “Cybercluster - Cybertec Schönig & Schönig GmbH” Cybertec is a PostgreSQL replication solution which makes sure that the database cluster is consistent at every point in time. We rely on a shared-nothing architecture which is perfectly suitable for synchronous multimaster replication. I had somehow missed this newly open sourced (BSD license) solution from the list of read more..

PostgreSQL 8.3 is Out and Kickin’

From “PostgreSQL 8.3 Press Kit“: The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of version 8.3 of the high-performance object-relational database management system. This release includes a record number of new and improved features which will greatly enhance PostgreSQL for application designers, database administrators, and users, with more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL read more..

The Blitzweekeend is Coming!

From the Blitzweekeend web site: Blitzweekend is an unique experience where designers, developers, and entrepreneurs are challenged to create a working product in 48 hours. Find a solution to a current problem, meet and innovate with bright creatives, work in an environment built for rapid development, and get feedback from experienced entrepreneurs. There are a lot read more..

OpenSocial or OpenGadget?

From “OpenSocial or OpenGadget? - ReadWriteWeb“: Steve O’Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google’s OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O’Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who read more..

An Aboriginal Take on Social Networking

From “Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive :: An Indigenous Archive Tool“: The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a browser-based digital archive created by the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek, N.T. Australia in collaboration with researchers Kimberly Christen, Craig Dietrich, Chris Cooney, and Tim Dietrich. Doesn’t read more..

TechnicaLee Speaking: Why SPARQL?

From Lee Feigenbaum’s “TechnicaLee Speaking: Why SPARQL?“: I’m quite pleased to have played a part in helping SPARQL become a W3C Recommendation. As we were putting together the press release that accompanied the publication of the SPARQL recommendations, Ian Jacobs, Ivan Herman, Tim Berners-Lee, and myself put together some comments (in bullet point form) explaining some read more..