Blog Of The Day Award (The Medium has become the message)

Blog of The Day Award

I received a Blog Of The Day Award, all I can say is I feel honored. This Blog is not very old, and really is still in the process of evolving. I don't all ways write as often as I would like, but that's because I feel the act of writing should be inspired by a need to communicate an idea, not just for the sake of writing itself.

A Blog to me is a new type of media a melding of writing, editorials, photo's, and film the list could go on. All have the potential of being part of a Blog, This media I think requires one to attempt to think about what they are writing and why. A Blog also allows for you to attempt to engage readers in a way that other media can not. A blog allows for a two way conversation about the media, idea, and Medium.

Marshal McLuhan said "The Medium Is The Message" And Blogging is a New Medium where both the writer and the reader can decide together what the message is. Maybe now The Medium has become the message. Thank You and please feel free to leave your comment's and thoughts.

The Dangers of Becoming

This article I think shows how we must be careful that in our anger ,fear, acts of emotion, we create Laws where we become like those who did us harm. We are a Democracy not a police state, and rights should not be cast aside with ease.

On the Net:

The report is at: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/storytext/national_security_letters/22207893/SIG=11g7gvn4m/*http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/index.htm
Justice Department: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/storytext/national_security_letters/22207893/SIG=10m1k3jtt/*http://www.usdoj.gov
FBI: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/storytext/national_security_letters/22207893/SIG=10lo5b2hr/*http://www.fbi.gov/

E-Bay Article Senior Director of Disruptive Innovation

Don't let the title keep you from reading this article, but as titles go for company directors it is a bit weird when put into context of the story. I thought fellow Bloggers would be interested in it though ,as it talks about some idea's of where E-Bay maybe going in the future. The Talk as well of Third party APIs and Social Commerce is really interesting, just think of social Commerce as The six degrees of separation idea for sales and E-Commerce. I could see this having other uses as well depending on how creative a person can get. I hope you enjoy it. You can link to the full story below.

Video: eBay’s Chief Disruption Officer: UI to eBay’s “commerce operating system” could be left to others by ZDNet's David Berlind -- Meet Max Mancini. Although he's not a newcomer to the eBay family, he does have a new title at the commerce giant: Senior Director of Disruptive Innovation. It's the first time I've ever heard of such a title (although why not just make it CDO: Chief Disruption Officer?) and a couple of weeks ago, Mancini [...]

WordPress Hacked/Cracked

It seems that the servers for Wordpress a popular program for Blog Publishing was Cracked.

An unknown cracker broke into a server hosting downloads of the popular WordPress blogging software and rigged the file with a remotely exploitable code execution vulnerability.
News of the hack comes directly from WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg:
"If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately."

Mullenweg described the code planted into the download as "unusual and highly exploitable" and stressed that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched during the attack.
"This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we're dealing with it as best we can. Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, we're declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this can't happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so we'll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason, he added.
He did not say how the attacker was able to breach the server.
Now, WordPress is trying to get the word out to any user who may have downloaded the rigged version 2.1.1.

If your blog is running 2.1.1, please upgrade immediately and do a full overwrite of your old files, especially those in wp-includes. Check out your friends blogs and if any of them are running 2.1.1 drop them a note and, if you can, pitch in and help them with the upgrade.
If you are a web host or network administrator, block access to "theme.php" and "feed.php," and any query string with "ix=" or "iz=" in it.

WINDOWS THE TWILIGHT ZONE

I have thought about this for about a day, as I did not want this to be just another among endless Windows rants. I finally decided to write about it as some thoughts came to me that I hope people might like to add their opinion too.

I'm using Windows XP SP2, my problem developed yesterday, when I tried to play a game. I received an error message that the driver binkw32.dll could not be found. I thought to myself Ok this should be easy to fix as I had the driver. I put the driver in the locations I thought it should go, I'm no computer expert, though I can find my way around. This is where some fun began, I got an error message saying the driver was in the wrong location and that it had to be located in another location, I can not remember where now as it's probably a side effect of hours spent trouble shooting.

The funny thing is this would have been so simple if the error message said along with it being in the wrong folder the location and how to find the proper folder that it needed to be in. This to me is just common sense why can't Windows get it?

Needless to say I did get the problem fixed, though I had to do a complete system restore, as I could not find where to put the driver, that seemed to be the easiest fix. This though caused me to lose hours of time that I will never get back re-downloading all the security patches and re-installing anti-virus and so on. So I had a thought how many people have lost time and productivity to Windows bugs? This is where things get fun hopefully if you decide to participate in this informal survey. How many Hours Have you lost trying to fix Windows bugs? Please leave your estimate in the comments section.

Also, to get the ball rolling here is my estimate of lost time With Windows, I think I have lost about 400hrs of time to Windows probably more , but I'm trying to be conservative. I started out with Windows 98 SE so I'm including all the time spent with all versions of windows.

So please in ending let me know how much time have you lost to the twilight zone that is called Windows?