in related news, i’ve been looking into some fun technologies that you probably already use and don’t know or care how they work. well i do! i already implemented a URL shortener which was a fun little project. the one that i’m using right now uses the open source project yourls. it’s simple to install, easy and fun to use and has a great interface. since i’m using a blog structure that has really long titles and a complicated organization structure it’s been really handy for linking people quickly and easily to really long page names. plus it’s fun to keep track of just how many people actually click on the links i send out.

something else i’m looking into right now is an open source video conferencing software called big blue button. the guys who developed that are really amazing. if you’re not competent enough to install it yourself they actually have a virtual machine they put together that will do all the work for you and it’s ready to go. the interface is beautiful and friendly and i really enjoy the features while in chat such as uploading a presentation, chat and multiple video streams plus user rights management. I’m totally putting this software on my server for future video meeting use.

my latest project has been learning about microblogging services such as twitter. the difference here is that i’m using an open source project(do you see the trend yet?) called status.net. it’s really simple, really fun and they even developed an attractive desktop application. twitter is a nice service but there’s a couple problems with it. one, they don’t have the infrastructure to support a lot of their users which makes it hard to manage anything there. and two, they use windows servers which i’m guessing is the reason that they have half of the crashes they do, if not more.

windows servers break everything. the latest OS they realeased, windows 7, is a lot better than previous implementations so i’m less thoroughly opposed to running windows at home but if you want your business to stay up 100% of the time you shouldn’t run windows server. it’s poorly coded and needs to be restarted like every 5 minutes which kills your uptime.

in stupid news…
a recent study showed that teens who text more are better spellers and more linguistically apt because of the way in which they communicate and how the different styles (and frequent use of them) of communication train their brain. i think that’s a giant crock of shit. the kids i know that text frequently are godawful spellers, have limited vocabularies and a poor command of language in general. the researchers must have accidentally turned the data upsidedown or something.