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This morning I woke up to find a pair of interesting Facebook messages from a friend of mine. After a while I came to realize they were spam, but there’s three things I found interesting:

1. Use of Digg links

The spam link itself appears to be the link to a digg entry. I immediately assumed it would be a digg article page, but was actually a redirect service digg offers, similar to http://bit.ly and the like. Above, the link took me to a berry diet site of some kind. Obviously these links are simple to make by just submitting a story to digg, and they immediately look credible. It’s weird how as the web becomes more and more share-y and more susceptible to spam, we’ve somehow managed to make it MORE dangerous with all these redirection services that can fool even the most savvy users. 

2. Mutual friend names

You’ll notice that the message from Mitchell includes a reference to “Alana,” which might be simply a random name, but more likely the spambot looked up the mutual friends between Mitchell and I and found the first one (A) and included it in the message going out to his address book. This provides another level of authenticity to the message, and further convinces the user that it isn’t spam.

3. Facebook deleted the messages

So this is all fine and dandy, but what I find especially disconcerting is that, while I had seen the two messages this morning, they had disappeared from my Facebook Inbox by tonight. I didn’t touch them, and was going to ask Mitch about them later, but found them gone online. The above image was from my iPod which I snapped before turning my WiFi on. Obviously it’s no big surprise that Facebook, as the totalitarian messenger service, Facebook has the power to wipe out any spam they see cropping up on their network, with or without your consent. This probably isn’t a big deal to most users, but make no mistake that Facebook is by no means a replacement for email, because email by definition works in an adhoc manner. Mail jumps from one server to the next to get delivered, and there is very little one single provider can to to stop the flow of that email, which is not the case with Facebook messages.

I’m no one for huge conspiracy theories, but I haven’t been a huge fan of Facebook’s invasion on my life, despite by habits of using it excessively. Remember that Facebook can screw with your mind more than you think. Stay aware folks!

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This photo is one of my favourites  

I realize that I’m not posting enough to the good old jole gallery, which, after all has been the cornerstone of jole.ca since the very beginning and the “jolephoto” monicker. It occurred to me today that there are a fair amount of people who come to my site to look around, but will just go straight to the gallery out of fear of my technical bloggy goodness, so I might as well keep it fresh for them. 

Often I have photos that I’m quite proud of but that simply don’t have enough energy to go through and name and describe. While names and descriptions would be nice, I’m pretty sure it’s the photo that counts. So moving forward, I’ll be just uploading the pictures as-is with just the plain-jane DSC-o-rama title and (no description). I may however provide a brief update such as this one that describes some of the photos in the upload.

• The ones from February 2010 are mostly of Snow Valley which lights up overcast skies beautifully with its bright white light. I’m not sure the photos I took did it justice, but I found it pretty neat.
• Some are from Vancouver such as the one in the post and the trees by the ocean. 
• The sepia-looking shots are in fact not sepia-adjusted but actually the true colour with all the sodium lights illuminating the night at that time of day. I could adjust them to look white but then they simply look like day shots, so enjoy the feeling of a chilly Edmonton at 7pm. 

I’ve been having urges to rework flickrer a bit, which I may or may not do at some point in the future, but for now just enjoy the photos I’ve dug up from 2009 and a few fresh ones from this month, and look forward to more frequent (albeit less descriptive) photo updates.

Finally, a shout out to the Edmonton Journal Student Photo Contest. Submit one photo from 2009 to the journal for a chance to win some cool prizes! (Students Only). I’ve already submitted mine!

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Um. Not quite what I meant Google.

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The iPad is finally here, in all its glory.

To my surprise, I don’t feel too phased by the RDF this time around, and still remain quite certain that the iPad does not (yet) have any role in my computing workflow and environment. My MacBook is without a doubt my sidekick, but for all those out there that get cranky about the 5 lbs in their backpack or hot and bothered by their poor battery life of their laptops, I can see this product really catching on. The general sense from the tech community is that this product is quite niche, and yet I think it is quite the opposite. We, the technologists, are the anti-niche. We have our bases covered for the most part, but it’s the regular consumer who would need a device like this.

I could see the iPad taking the spot of my laptop day-to-day quite easily, but it’s lacking some functionality that I would need to get my work done, and thus I will wait and look forward to the day it will undoubtedly come. 

• Flash: Despite being rather loathsome of this nightmare, the fact remains that half of my online course material in University is in Flash-powered eLearning sites. This varies from semester to semester of course, but as the perfect homework companion, I’d need something that can…well….get my homework done with.
• Multitask: My fingers are glued to Command-Tab. Not much more to say to that. 
• Dev Environments: If I’m taking a CS degree, clearly I’ll be doing a compilation here and there. I can always whip out a VNC client, or more likely an SSH client, but until those tools are proven to be efficient alternatives, it’s pretty tough to bring it to CMPUT class.

Those are the three big ones for me. I would certainly spring for a hard keyboard and expect things like proper file management to be integrated in future versions of iPhone/iPad OS, but those are relatively minor issues. Flash I predict will come very soon. Flash 10.1 is coming down the pipe, and I figure Apple simply didn’t want to share their plans with Adobe in the development of this product. Flash is a power hog, but 10.1 is supposed to improve that. Multitask will come in time. If it’s been hacked on the iPhone it will be hacked or introduced on the iPad. As for development environments, I cannot wait to see a spinoff of JollyFastVNC in the App Store so that all the power of my desktop can come straight to my tablet.

The iPad, I would say, is almost evolutionary. It’s the natural progression from the multitouch devices Apple has been churning out. As we all know, 6 months from now iPad Plus will show up with a camera and double the pixel count (jk) and everything else that was on our wish lists, so for me I’ll be holding off until then.

As for the name, I’m positive that in a few months iPad will remind us more of the Apple product than what it does now.

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On the eve of another exciting announcement from everybody’s favorite Cupertino company, I felt it was necessary to chime in on my predictions for what the Apple tablet will look like, how it will work, and what kind of experience we can expect from this supposedly revolutionary device, and why I still seem somewhat skeptical over the idea of an iTablet.

There is no Gap

There’s no end to the amount of coverage and speculation about this product, which can be found here, and here most notably. But my anticipation is mostly in the “surprise” to come since at the moment I’m not excited for this product really. Current offerings out there have some problems with input methods, power, and well… functionality. It seems to me that the gap that the Kindle, eReaders, and these proposed media tablets are trying to fill does not really exist.
I would describe my day as having three “levels of mobility.”

• Home: At my desk with a 23″ display or two, running a Quad core processor. My computer keeps up with my workflow, it never lags behind. Video is large, clear, and stutter-free, and since I’m at my desk, that’s the only thing I would tolerate.
• Portable: I have my MacBook with me, and I’m setup somewhere other than my desk. Perhaps I’m on my bed, downstairs, outside, or in the library. I’m in class or at work somewhere, but I’m still computing. In this case, I tolerate some mild lag in my computing environment, since there isn’t really a laptop that is as powerful as my desktop and still within budget both money-wise and battery-life wise.
• Mobile: I am likely physically moving, whether on the bus, in the car, or simply walking around. I can still receive content and view it, although I don’t expect to perform a lot of input, it still is effective when it needs to happen. Loading times are much slower (or not available at all on my iPod Touch), but I can look out the window of the train or put it in my pocket for a few moments while it does its thing, and I’m not irritated.

At each of these stages, I feel that all my needs are fulfilled despite having limitations at each of these mobility levels. Most of my tasks can be performed at all levels.

So at which point would the tablet enter my workflow? Naturally it would be somewhere in between Portable and Mobile. I’m lying down or on the bus for more than a minute or two, and I’d like to read a book, watch a video, or take a note. Yet, a tablet would not fit in any pocket, and would likely need to be extracted from a bag, and thus somewhat of a hassle for that extra few inches of reading room. Why not hit up the iPhone/iPod Touch? Assuming that this Apple Tablet would be equipped with a nearly identical Operating System to that of my iPhone/iPod, what advantage in terms of functionality would really be present?

(The HP slate, a lamefest. Probably the closest thing to the iTablet that I can imagine, but maybe my imagination is simply too small for the likes of Steve.)

Put simply, the Apple Tablet seems to be far too close in functionality to the iPhone/iPod to be advantageous over it, and yet remains less pocketable and more of a pain to whip out, so any advantage is nullified.

An Industry Shift

Despite all this, and the terrible mystery of input method which I won’t address except to predict: there won’t be any, I still think that tomorrow will be revolutionary in a market sense, and here’s why.
Read more…

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CBC’s Media “camp” inside the Canadian embassy in Haiti. http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/blog/2010/01/haiti-field-notes-aftershock.html

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