All Posts by Paul

More Color Scheme Control with Agave

Paul

agave_screen3.png
Linux only: Webapps like colr.org are great for exploring color theme ideas, but some users might require a little more fine-tuning. Enter Agave, a program for GNOME-based Linux systems that gives you more than enough color information to plan your web site, desktop theme or design projects. Choose from standard palettes, use a Photoshop-like selection tool to grab any color on your screen or manually set color, saturation and brightness levels to save in a list of favorites. Agave is a free download for Linux systems only, available as a source download and in many standard repositories.

Agave [via FOSSwire]

Nice little program for linux, I’ll have to try it out on Kubuntu and see how well it works!!

Hulu Launches Private Beta, Makes Very Good First Impressions

Paul

Last March NBC Universal and News Corporation announced a joint venture that we initially thought would result in a direct competitor to YouTube. As details emerged, it became clear that the two media conglomerates were not planning a video sharing website for user generated content but rather an online distribution channel for premium video content, including TV shows, movies, and short clips.

In the months following the companies’ initial press release, we gave the joint venture a lot of grief for failing to pick a name for the project, eventually settling on a name – Hulu – that meant “cease” and “desist” in Swahili, copying Google’s mission statement, and receiving not the greatest vote of confidence from NBC Universal’s own chief digital officer.

Behind all of this criticism was a high degree of doubt that NBC and News Corp. were ever going to get Hulu out the door before the joint venture became irrelevant. In September, NBC had even announced a video downloading service that appeared to cannibalize its own joint venture with News Corp. However, this past week Hulu confirmed that it would indeed hit its self-imposed October deadline by launching in private beta on Monday, October 29th. And this past Friday, CEO Jason Kilar and other Hulu representatives demonstrated the new service to us.

While we have not been able to try out the private beta ourselves yet, I was very impressed by the preview of Hulu’s interface and the bulk of its features. Before going into my thoughts about the website, however, I should get some of the many details about Hulu on the table, especially since it’s been months since the original announcement.

Hulu is still a joint venture exclusively between NBC Universal and News Corporation. It exists as a website through which users can stream a collection of TV shows, movies, and short clips on-demand for free without any limits on how many times you can view each video. Hulu also exists as a distribution network of premium content for several partner websites – AOL, MSN, MySpace, Comcast, and Yahoo – that will display Hulu’s videos for free but in their own branded players. In addition to these partnerships, users themselves form a viral distribution network of sorts since Hulu allows its videos to be embedded in any website and shared via email. Hulu makes money in all cases from advertising, which it displays in and around the videos it serves. I’ll go more into the details of embedding and advertising later on.

The only problem that I see is that you can’t expand the picture it’s in a window with other stuff!!

MTS Round Table Show 152

Paul

Topic Was “Web Hosting 101“


Links for the show:

  1. ColoStore
  2. GoDaddy
  3. Brinkster
  4. CentOS
  5. Blogger
  6. eth0.us
  7. cPanel
  8. H-Sphere
  9. Plesk
  10. ensim
  11. Mosso
  12. LibSyn
  13. Name Server
  14. MX Record
  15. ICANN-Accredited Registrars
  16. phpMyAdmin
  17. The Planet
  18. Google Apps

Web Site Monitoring –

  1. UpPanel
  2. SiteUpTime
  3. pingdom
  4. Active Server Watcxher
  5. Bello Network Monitoring WinGUI
  6. PCheck Server Monitor
  7. Karens Net Monitor
  8. URL Monitoring Tool
  9. Web Check 24×7

Webhosting Resources / Forums –

We also talked about addressability of websites, and storage space. This was an awesome round table discussion if you would like to participate in the round table discussion with questions please either:

Manage Your Tasks with Leopard’s To Dos

Paul

to-do 1.png

One thing that Windows and Outlook have always had up on the Mac’s default email and calendar apps, Mail and iCal, is Outlook’s integrated to-do manager. Today the game changes. Leopard’s new Mail and iCal applications introduce their own take on the email- and calendar-integrated to-do list. So now the question is: Is it any good? The answer: Yes. And no. But probably yes. The To Do manager, at the moment, is a bit of a mishmash of some very good and a few bad—or at least unrealized—features.

The Mail.app To Do feature resides in the Reminders panel of the Mail sidebar below Notes. Mail to-dos can be organized by due date, priority (high, medium, low, or none), title, and calendar (that’s right, they also integrate with iCal). You can create a new to-do in a couple of ways.

A good article for the Mac users!! Go check out the full article!!