While I did not give 2007's Super Mario Galaxy much of a pass because it felt a little overly complicated at times, Super Mario Galaxy 2 came out today and so far it can be summed up in one word: perfect. My review of it will come later this week or next weekend.
In other non-gaming news, Yola is coming along at a nice clip. I am working this week to complete the friends functionality - adding, confirming, viewing, and deleting friends. Next week will be the addition of a browse feature to see all members on Yola, The week after that I will begin sprucing the site up to prepare for an early alpha build for my friends to begin trying out.
But in the meantime, this week is going to be a doozy...
B3 out.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The Beginnings of Yola
A project I started almost two weeks ago as an exercise in learning PHP has turned into quite a little adventure. I call this adventure "Yola."
First note: this is a codename. The name comes from the last four letters of the word "Crayola" - a box of crayons next to my laptop heavily influenced this on-the-fly codename. Also, Yola.com is an established website hosting company and I have no plans to compete with them by any means. I do, however, plan to bring this moonlighting project to my friends and family later this year or in early 2011. Around then, of course, the name will change.
In short, Yola is a small, private alternative to Facebook. Realizing that my private data really is not mine once it is on Facebook's servers, I decided that I should only put my full trust into a system that I write myself. Combined with my desire to learn new technologies, the birth of Yola came very naturally, which is why I am so excited by it.
Yola is built around my personal needs first and foremost, but it adheres to a strict design that encourages future expansion. I have a very short list of needs, and they are as follows:
I will be using Critically Correct to update everyone on the project's progress, so stay tuned if you want to keep up.
B3 out.
First note: this is a codename. The name comes from the last four letters of the word "Crayola" - a box of crayons next to my laptop heavily influenced this on-the-fly codename. Also, Yola.com is an established website hosting company and I have no plans to compete with them by any means. I do, however, plan to bring this moonlighting project to my friends and family later this year or in early 2011. Around then, of course, the name will change.
In short, Yola is a small, private alternative to Facebook. Realizing that my private data really is not mine once it is on Facebook's servers, I decided that I should only put my full trust into a system that I write myself. Combined with my desire to learn new technologies, the birth of Yola came very naturally, which is why I am so excited by it.
Yola is built around my personal needs first and foremost, but it adheres to a strict design that encourages future expansion. I have a very short list of needs, and they are as follows:
- K.I.S.S: (Keep It Simple, Stupid): I am not out to recreate every facet of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or LinkedIn. I am trying to host a version of my basic Facebook profile in a way that I can control without the constant changes that plague Facebook. My needs are few, so the design and ambition of the entire project should be modest as well.
- Status Updater: Provide a means to let me post status updates in real-time. A large character limit means I could potentially treat the status updates as a limited blogging platform.
- Image Gallery: This will provide a place to quickly upload images and share them. I do not want to be a photo hosting platform, merely a place for each profile to upload around 50 or so pictures for sharing at a time.
- Link Sharing: Similar to the Status Updater, this will be a place on my profile where I can quickly drop a URL and share my wonderful findings on the web. I will be able to order these items so my favorite links can standout on my profile.
- Privacy Comes First: Unlike the open nature of many other networking platforms, the focus of Yola is to be small, concise and local. By default everything in Yola will be private: only your Yola friends will be able to see your profile. As an option, each of the three core components (Status, Images, Links) will be sharable on the open web should you so choose, but this will always be a very explicit option. This will very much be a walled garden.
- Open It to Friends & Family: The modest uses of Yola means I do not mind letting a couple dozen of my friends and family try the service out. Should the unthinkable happen and I see thousands of users sign up, I would be screwed. This is a small, local service first and foremost.
I will be using Critically Correct to update everyone on the project's progress, so stay tuned if you want to keep up.
B3 out.
Where Did WoW Go?
I haven't sat down to play World of Warcraft in ages. Between work, personal projects, newer games, and a lack of interests, I am not sure I will be keeping my current subscription active. I might be putting WoW on hold until Cataclysm hits.
Et tu, WoW?
B3 out.
Et tu, WoW?
B3 out.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Week In Review: May 14th, 2010
This past week has been quite different from the normal drab of my routine, so here it is in a nutshell:
- Two weeks ago I began working on a website project with one primary goal: to teach myself PHP. While this has been a great learning experience, the project has spawned an idea, which grew into a concept, which is now something much greater. Codenamed "Yola," the website is a miniature version of Facebook: a private network where one can join and post status updates, pictures, create a small profile, and connect with friends. I plan to use Yola as a semi-replacement for my current Facebook profile since I am not very happy with the direction that Facebook privacy is heading. I plan on an early-beta version of the site to be available by the end of summer.
- This week I began writing features for an upcoming feature on Critically Correct: Bobby Gaylor Appreciation Week. Seriously. If you are not familiar with Bobby Gaylor's amazing album Fuzzatonic Scream, you soon will be.
- Work in the past week has been unusually stressful for me. Despite facing numerous challenges and causing a small problem or two with some of my previous work, I am doing my best to hang tight. I have definitely been using this stressful time to double-check the quality of my current work and re-code some of my past work with my improved skills. I hope to keep learning and improving at work as much as I possibly can.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
What Makes Facebook Scary
Is your privacy important to you?
A generation ago this question was answered with an unmistakable "Yes." Individual rights and freedoms were built on the basic idea that everyone is entitled to some degree of privacy.
Looking at my own generation, the same question seems to be "privacy is important - but it depends on how much free stuff I can get."
The rise of the Internet has seen the issue of privacy spring up again and again, namely due to the inherent risk of sending any kind of personal data over a public wire. Social networking via the Internet in the last five years has see a wider breadth of privacy issues crop up. No longer is just your banking information or social security number up for grabs, but your basic identity as a person. My bank account gives a person access to money. My Facebook page give a person access to my name, my likeness, my birthday, information about my friends and family, where I live, and what are my interests. This is information more valuable to me than money, yet I have it sitting on a massive server where millions of people can access it via my profile page.
Why throw all this information out there? It was neat at first. Facebook presented a wall-garden approach to its site when it launched in 2004: college-only access to a private network where I could interact with my peers. I loved the idea of having a private space on the web accessible only to like-minded people. Then came high schools in 2005. Then came a wider audience in 2006, when Facebook opened up to anyone in the world. I was not happy about this move, but I was able to keep my privacy settings fairly strict; only my friends could see my full profile.
Fast-forward to 2010. The sense of belonging to a tight-knit group of peers at or around BGSU is long gone - my friends come from all directions now. I get requests for friends who are obviously spammers in disguise. I have notifications every day from applications that I could care less about. My News Feed is filled with information on "friends" I have not talked to since high school and advertisements for things I would never buy.
Facebook is no longer my space. It is Facebook's space, and I knew it would come to this one day.
The big roll out for Facebook in 2010 is to add Internet-wide functionality to the site, allowing any website to integrate data into the Facebook News Feed. I would imagine that this will involve the use of Facebook Connect, a platform that allows third-party websites to use your Facebook credentials for authentication purposes. Also, in order to open the platform a bit more, Facebook is requiring users to expose certain parts of their profile to the full Internet and linking certain kinds of interests to public groups rather than just listing plain-text in profiles. The wall-garden crumbles a little bit more.
I am an active user of Facebook . However, I am not a happy Facebook user. The direction that Facebook has been going in the past four years has not always been in my interests, but this latest opening of information has forced me to strip my profile bare: it contains less than a quarter of the information it did in 2007.
Facebook is a company, and companies are about making money. So why does Facebook keep making changes that open users' data to the world? Because Internet advertisements are their business. Just like Google became rich and powerful by tying Internet ads to highly-accurate and refined search results, Facebook is positioning itself to serve ads to its users that are highly-accurate and refined - based on the very information that you share about yourself. This has always been the recipe for Facebook's success, but I only went along with it during the wall-garden days. Too much of my personal information is now required to be public on the site.
Finally, what makes Facebook scary?
Facebook may teach a whole generation that privacy is not important. I find this scary. In a world where monetary value is so important, why would trading something seemingly free (privacy) in order to get something for free (games, websites, videos, music, social networking, etc.) sound like a good idea? Facebook (along websites such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Bing) provides extensive free services that today's generation will come to expect from future websites and services. By providing private details about oneself, websites can afford to do this since your personal information is valuable to advertisers. The circle is complete.
If my generation and future generations grow up in a world where privacy is so easily traded, what will our future look like? Perhaps it will be heavily materialistic and affordable, yet we will know everyone's business. Perhaps future citizens will be more apt to let the government pry into their private lives in the name of national security. This is a far cry from Nineteen-Eighty-Four - I am not trying to get political or philosophical on this topic - but the seeds towards a less-private future may just have been planted by the huge success that is Facebook.
To me, it is just a little too scary.
For a graphical representation of Facebook's default privacy changes in the past five years, visit this link:
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
B3 out.
A generation ago this question was answered with an unmistakable "Yes." Individual rights and freedoms were built on the basic idea that everyone is entitled to some degree of privacy.
Looking at my own generation, the same question seems to be "privacy is important - but it depends on how much free stuff I can get."
The rise of the Internet has seen the issue of privacy spring up again and again, namely due to the inherent risk of sending any kind of personal data over a public wire. Social networking via the Internet in the last five years has see a wider breadth of privacy issues crop up. No longer is just your banking information or social security number up for grabs, but your basic identity as a person. My bank account gives a person access to money. My Facebook page give a person access to my name, my likeness, my birthday, information about my friends and family, where I live, and what are my interests. This is information more valuable to me than money, yet I have it sitting on a massive server where millions of people can access it via my profile page.
Why throw all this information out there? It was neat at first. Facebook presented a wall-garden approach to its site when it launched in 2004: college-only access to a private network where I could interact with my peers. I loved the idea of having a private space on the web accessible only to like-minded people. Then came high schools in 2005. Then came a wider audience in 2006, when Facebook opened up to anyone in the world. I was not happy about this move, but I was able to keep my privacy settings fairly strict; only my friends could see my full profile.
Fast-forward to 2010. The sense of belonging to a tight-knit group of peers at or around BGSU is long gone - my friends come from all directions now. I get requests for friends who are obviously spammers in disguise. I have notifications every day from applications that I could care less about. My News Feed is filled with information on "friends" I have not talked to since high school and advertisements for things I would never buy.
Facebook is no longer my space. It is Facebook's space, and I knew it would come to this one day.
The big roll out for Facebook in 2010 is to add Internet-wide functionality to the site, allowing any website to integrate data into the Facebook News Feed. I would imagine that this will involve the use of Facebook Connect, a platform that allows third-party websites to use your Facebook credentials for authentication purposes. Also, in order to open the platform a bit more, Facebook is requiring users to expose certain parts of their profile to the full Internet and linking certain kinds of interests to public groups rather than just listing plain-text in profiles. The wall-garden crumbles a little bit more.
I am an active user of Facebook . However, I am not a happy Facebook user. The direction that Facebook has been going in the past four years has not always been in my interests, but this latest opening of information has forced me to strip my profile bare: it contains less than a quarter of the information it did in 2007.
Facebook is a company, and companies are about making money. So why does Facebook keep making changes that open users' data to the world? Because Internet advertisements are their business. Just like Google became rich and powerful by tying Internet ads to highly-accurate and refined search results, Facebook is positioning itself to serve ads to its users that are highly-accurate and refined - based on the very information that you share about yourself. This has always been the recipe for Facebook's success, but I only went along with it during the wall-garden days. Too much of my personal information is now required to be public on the site.
Finally, what makes Facebook scary?
Facebook may teach a whole generation that privacy is not important. I find this scary. In a world where monetary value is so important, why would trading something seemingly free (privacy) in order to get something for free (games, websites, videos, music, social networking, etc.) sound like a good idea? Facebook (along websites such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Bing) provides extensive free services that today's generation will come to expect from future websites and services. By providing private details about oneself, websites can afford to do this since your personal information is valuable to advertisers. The circle is complete.
If my generation and future generations grow up in a world where privacy is so easily traded, what will our future look like? Perhaps it will be heavily materialistic and affordable, yet we will know everyone's business. Perhaps future citizens will be more apt to let the government pry into their private lives in the name of national security. This is a far cry from Nineteen-Eighty-Four - I am not trying to get political or philosophical on this topic - but the seeds towards a less-private future may just have been planted by the huge success that is Facebook.
To me, it is just a little too scary.
For a graphical representation of Facebook's default privacy changes in the past five years, visit this link:
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
B3 out.
Friday, May 07, 2010
"Trust And Harmony"
May 7th, 2010 might go down as the day I finally learned what trust and respect really mean to me. And once again, I can say Lacey was right.
It is going to be a beautiful day.
It is going to be a beautiful day.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Ann Arbor Day of .NET
This past Saturday (and the weekend in general, actually) was a unique experience for me, and I loved every minute of it. Case in point: the Ann Arbor Day of .NET was held at Washtenaw Community College on Saturday from 9am to 5pm. It was my first tech conference since college.
I covered a wide range of topics throughout the five one-hour sessions. My day in brief looked like this (these are not the actual titles of the sessions):
I covered a wide range of topics throughout the five one-hour sessions. My day in brief looked like this (these are not the actual titles of the sessions):
- Wii Remote: This session covered the basics of the WiimoteLib C# and VB.NET library. This open-source library interfaces with a Wii Remote via bluetooth and exposes all kinds of functionality. We saw several real-world examples of the Wii Remote being used in C# applications. This was my personal favorite session.
- Javascript with Test Driven Development: We saw examples of why JavaScript should be treated like a true programming language and not the sometimes-throwaway tool that it can be on the client. I just about fell asleep during this session, not because it was sometimes a bit slow of a presentation, but because the room was packed with people and the heat of the day was getting to me. I did come away with new knowledge of JavaScript (closure, anyone?)
- Lunch: Dominoes pizza was fantastic, as was catching up with two of my co-workers.
- MVC and jQuery: By 1pm, the muggy, 80-degree heat began to pile on like crazy, so my session with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery was a bit hard to sit through, but I did learn the basics of MVC, which I feel is crucial since it seems to be a growing alternative to Web Forms-based websites. jQuery is always neat, and I saw a few solid examples that helped me grasp the amazing JavaScript library.
- The State of Mono: Mono, the open-source implementation of the Microsoft CLI for .NET applications, was discussed in-length. I found this session very interesting, as I would definitely like my C# desktop applications to run on Linux or Mac whenever possible, so I will be looking to support Mono in my future applications. The presenter was highly knowledgeable and passionate about this work, which was very apparent due to the breadth and depth of his lecture.
- HTML 5 and CSS3: A super-short presentation on new tags and elements supported in HTML 5 and new properties in CSS3. This presentation was short (20 minutes), and did not go nearly as deep into the technologies as I hoped. In fact, I was rather disappointed by this lecture overall. The lecturer did not seem super-knowledgeable on the topic, or at least in a way that translated well to my geek-oriented programming mind.
All-in-all, the day was a success, and I look forward to upcoming Day of .NET events. The Ann Arbor event was a perfect mix of location (close to home), sessions (an interesting topic in every timeslot), price (cheap!), and length (one-hour sessions were pretty tolerable). Sometimes I question if my interests in programming are enough to maintain a full, life-long career. Events such as Day of .NET certainly boost my morale on that front.
B3 out.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
7 Days, 7 Games: Number One
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
You probably expected to see Ocarina of Time as my number one favorite video game. Why should it not be my favorite? It is a damn near perfect game, and while some parts of it have trouble gelling with my increasingly-sporadic attention span as of late, I still sit down with the game at least once a year to experience 1998 all over again. This is the game that defines video games for me, period.
I will keep my words short and instead point you to this classic article for all the reading on Ocarina of Time.
B3 out.
You probably expected to see Ocarina of Time as my number one favorite video game. Why should it not be my favorite? It is a damn near perfect game, and while some parts of it have trouble gelling with my increasingly-sporadic attention span as of late, I still sit down with the game at least once a year to experience 1998 all over again. This is the game that defines video games for me, period.
I will keep my words short and instead point you to this classic article for all the reading on Ocarina of Time.
B3 out.
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