I’ve got a few different blogs out there and they should all be syncing the same posts.  The reasoning behind that is if my own site (scotttopic.com) goes down some day, my posts (although perhaps not all of my images) would be stored somewhere at least.  This is a post to test this stuff out.  And perhaps my favorite GIF of all time.

But it's those who have embraced it that truly understand its potential. Sure, there's plenty of meaningless crap (eg. anything i post, hehe), but the true power lies with two features: search, and trending topics.

Search, as it pertains to Twitter, doesn't give you results that you could compare with, say Google. While the twitter search page [http://search.twitter.com] may vaguely resemble Google's simple interface, a search won't link you to sites about your topic, or the wikipedia entry. Instead, you find what human beings are thinking about that topic. Even the mundane details of everyday life, when organized through search, can give insight into what people are thinking. The Trending Topics (shown on the main search page) show you the most talked about topics across the system right then. Click on the links and you have instant response and commentary.

Twitter search gives you organic search. But it also gives you only a snapshot, and the most recent snapshot at that. While I'm sure there are ways out there to search through older moments in time, twitter's search by default is telling you the results that are happening right now. It is instant, unfiltered, unedited content from regular people (with it's own fair amount of spam included, of course).

This has become threatening to those who would like to control the flow of information. During terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Indian government plead to its people to stop posting to twitter. In the past few days, with Iran expelling many foreign press with their election coming, people have turned to Twitter to communicate and organize their outrage at the perceived corrupt election. Twitter founder Biz Stone posted today that they will reschedule planned maintenance on the site because of the importance the site has in Iran right now.

Twitter gives people a platform to speak on. While individually it might seem small and meaningless, collectively it gives people a voice.

Take today's release of Ubuntu 9.04 - Jaunty Jackelope.  I've been using it since beta, and it's got a lot of good stuff going for it.  Boot time is excellent... around 26 seconds on my desktop.  After installing a few fonts from other sources (such as my beloved Futura, and my new favorite coding font, Droid Sans Mono from Google's Android platform), it is simply gorgeous to look at.  Ubuntu has finally learned exactly how to properly display fonts.

But apart from the shiny exterior, and the admitedly stable structure that frames any UNIX based OS, is a slew of problems that prevent Ubuntu from taking over my desktop.  Multimedia support is a big problem.  After a few commands, I had all the gstreamer codecs installed from Medibuntu, vlc player and skype.  But everything is still such a cobbled-together mess.

Xvid files drop frames in vlc, even though I've got a system that should easily handle this type of stuff.  I can double-click the vlc window to make it full screen... but I must wait for 5-10 seconds as it slowly chugs away at this simple procedure.  (Simple in terms of how Windows and osx86 handle it the exact same procedure, on the exact same hardware, with the exact same version of VLC.)  If I open the same files in Totem, it's hit or miss whether it will display anything at all, or will just be a black window.  I once full-screened the Totem window to have my entire X session hang.

Support for things such as webcams is also dreadfuly inept.  My Logitech webcam was detected immediately and "worked" to some extent.  Skype recongized a generic usb camera, and was able to display video.  However it only displayed a fraction of the actual camera image, a zoomed in corner of the view.  Skype, nor cheese, nor camorama, nor any other camera app I could find have any actual settings for this.    So unless I only wish to show a corner of my head, or mount my webcam 10 feet behind my monitor, this webcam is useless.

Media streaming?  Sorry there's no orb support, nor any built-in media streaming ala Windows Media Center.  You can try Jinzora (which requires you to run a web server with MySQL databases on your PC [no thanks, I deal with that enough at work]) or open up the troubled VLC to stream.

I really want to love Ubuntu.  And I do have it installed on two old laptops here where I fuck around with perl and c++.  But as it stands, unfortunately it just does not meet my needs.  It's sad that XP is still the best OS option I have.

So I have changed up the photo gallery to use a new format using Jalbum. I think it looks alright. I've had a stressful week, I'll post about it soon.

So now I'm chilling at home and watching some really bad movies. Not going out tonight.. maybe tomorrow.

In other news, I got a new phone on eBay. Unsurprisingly, when it arrived it had neither a battery or a functional keyboard, even though the listing was that it was in Mint condition. The guy seems to be handling this decently though, he should be sending me a replacement phone shortly. My current phone still works fine, but I'm just looking to upgrade to something with a bit more in the way of internet capabilities.