Eddie Awad's shared items in Google Reader

A bare-metal virtualization for free

2008-07-23T14:07:00Z

Yesterday, VMWare announced one of their products, VMWare ESXi, will be provide for free later next week.
Very interesting for whom want test, learn and work on a bare-metal virtualization software, hypervisor, for free.
This is a little bit different than VMWare Server, but also make a more robust and perfomant system. The main difference is about host OS, VMWare Server need one whereas VMWare ESXi don't need it - it's bootable -, however it required a dedicated machine.
A test should come soon here.

Enjoy,

Google Integrates Services Into the New iGoogle

2008-07-19T17:38:44Z

Users love it when products and services from one company are nicely integrated with one another. It helps to keep users from bouncing around services. Companies love it because it's a way to lock users in, while gaining their trust. Nevertheless, Google has me hooked on yet another product from their labs: iGoogle. While I may be late to joining the RSS dashboard game, here's a look at a few of iGoogle's new features that users will enjoy.

Gmail Integration

If you're using the Gmail widget in iGoogle, you can now maximize the widget box and get a full view of your Gmail account. Users can star messages, compose new eamils, and more. The only downside to this widget is that there is no access to your labels.

Google Reader Integration

Google Reader integration works a little differently from the Gmail integration. For feeds that you subscribe to in Google Reader, but also display in iGoogle as a separate widget, you can maximize the widget box for Google Reader style viewing. In this view you can also check your other feeds in Google Reader. This view seems to be only available for RSS subscriptions in both Google Reader and iGoogle.

Click to Enlarge

Gchat

You can now talk to your friends in iGoogle with the Gchat sidebar widget. Just be careful when refreshing the page because you may lose your ongoing conversations. Also, Firefox and Safari users will not have this feature at the moment. The chat widget will only display in Internet Explorer.

Click to Enlarge

Preview the New iGoogle

To preview the new iGoogle simply head to the iGoogle homepage and paste the following in the address bar:

javascript:_dlsetp('v2=1');

To revert back to the previous iGoogle simply paste the following:

javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

This is is by far one of the best integrations I've seen from Google and it looks as if it'll only get better as time goes on. I'd love to see the same integration style applied to other Google services such as Google Analytics and Picasa Photo Albums. For now, these new features and integrations have pulled me in as a new fan of iGoogle.

WordPress Tips + Things You Can Do After Installing Wordpress

2008-07-21T18:25:56Z

The WordPress tips and few hacks mentioned below may only apply to a self-hosted installation of WordPress version 2.6 or above.

*If your WordPress blog is hosted on wordpress.com, please skip this.

Tip 0: Change the Default Image Upload Folder

The default installation of WordPress will store all your images inside wp-content/uploads folder.

You can however use a different folder or even sub-domain on your web server for saving file uploads as in the setting screen above. This offers two advantages - your image URLs become relatively shorter and second, the size of your WordPress folder will always remain small and manageable.

Also deselect the option - "Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders."

Tip 1: Remove unnecessary code from your WordPress header.

WordPress by default adds a version number to the header of all your blog pages.

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5" />

This information may prove a goldmine for WordPress hackers as they can easily target blogs that are using the older and less secure versions of WordPress software. To completely remove the version number from WordPress header, add this line to your functions.php file in the WordPress themes folder.

<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); ?>

Tip 2: Prevent people from casually browsing your WordPress Folders

Since you definitely don’t want Peeping Toms to navigate your WordPress files and folders using the explorer view in web browsers, add the following link to your .htaccess file that exists in the main WordPress installation directory.

Options All -Indexes

Tip 3: Windows Live Writer Templates & WordPress

If you not blogging via the Windows Live Writer client, add the following line to your functions.php file.

<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); ?>

The WLW-Manifest function is used by Windows Live Writer to download the styles / themes used in your WordPress blog. Windows Live Writer users who do not use the live preview feature may also turn off this function.

Tip 4: Turn off Post Revisions in WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 introduced Wikipedia style document revisions where you have access to all previous version of the document making it easy to revert incase you make any mistakes.

This may be a great feature for blogs where multiple authors work on the same blog post but 99% of WordPress users don’t need it. Post revisions also increase the size of WordPress wp_posts table as each revision means an additional row.

To disable post revisions in WordPress 2.6, add this to your wp-config.php file.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Tip 5: Disable HTML in WordPress Comments

The comment box is WordPress is like a basic HTML editor - people can use HTML tags like <b>, <a>, <i>, etc to highlight certain words in their comment or add live links. If you like to disable HTML in WordPress comments, add this to your functions.php

add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_specialchars' );

Tip 6: Change location of the Plugins & WordPress Themes folder

With WordPress 2.6, you can place the wp-content folder anywhere on your web server. This may come handy when you are upgrading the WordPress installation because none of your existing themes and plug-ins will get overwritten even if you replace all the WordPress files with a tar downloaded from wordpress.org.

If you decide to move the wp-content folder to another location, specify the path in the wp-config.php file:

define(’WP_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘http://www.labnol.org/assets/wp-content’);

Tip 7: XML Sitemaps - Change the Building Mode

If you using XML Sitemaps plugin in WordPress, try changing the building mode to "manual."

When you publish (or delete) a blog post via the WordPress write panel, the entire XML sitemap is recreated from scratch and hence may increase the overall time it takes to publish a post as you’ll have to wait until the creation process is over.

Tip 8: Turn Off Image Thumbnails in WordPress (workaround)

When you upload an image to WordPress, it creates two additional thumbnail images in the uploads directory. I don’t know how to prevent WordPress from creating image thumbnails but there’s a workaround if you publish posts via Windows Live Writer.

Just use the FTP publishing option for images and this will automatically disable thumbnail creation because the upload happens through a different route.

Also see this tip on creating a mobile friendly WordPress blog using Google Reader. The upcoming article will be about XML-RPC support in WordPress 2.6. Stay tuned.

WordPress Tips + Things You Can Do After Installing Wordpress - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

iPhone for WordPress Application Now Live on iPhone App Store

2008-07-20T04:44:00Z

Something for WordPress bloggers who also have an iPhone.

The WordPress App for iPhone is now live on the iPhone App store. Download it here for free (requires iTunes). This iPhone app supports WordPress.com hosted blogs as well as self-installed WordPress blogs (version 2.5.1 & above).

iPhone for WordPress Application Now Live on iPhone App Store - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Dealing with jerks at your gym - CNN.com

2008-07-11T20:18:26Z

Shared by Eddie Awad
This reminds me, I need to go back to the gym.

Every gym has its share of grunters, groaners, heavy sweaters and hygiene queens. And then there are the aerobics assailants.

Google Lively FAQ

2008-07-10T02:00:27Z

Here’s a list of questions with tips and tricks for Google’s 3D chat world, Lively. If you have a question that’s not answered here please ask in the comments, and if you have a tip, please post it too (this page will be updated as new information comes in).

What’s Google Lively?

Lively (apparently code named Fiji and Google Rooms, and previously nicknamed Google Metaverse by some outside Google) is a three-dimensional chat world by Google. You navigate your avatar to talk to others, show your emotions, and, if you want to, build your own rooms for your website. Lively runs inside the browser but needs a Windows installation first to work.

How do I start Google Lively?

After installing the download by Google – at the moment, you need Windows – you can go to the rooms directory. I would suggest to never enter your password into room widgets embedded on third-party websites at the moment, as you’re not seeing the google.com or lively.com URL in your original browser window’s adress bar; even when it says Google Lively in the popup, that can be easily faked, and it’s unwise for Google to train people to enter their Google Account credentials there (as the same credentials, once kidnapped, could be used to log-in to your Google Docs documents, Gmail emails, AdWords campaigns and so on).

Note that depending on your system, Lively may crash a lot... so before you start, make sure you don’t have anything important or unsaved opened in any other browser window.

How do I navigate?

Use your mouse to navigate; the left button zooms and rotates the camera; the right button allows you to pan the camera upwards and downwards; and clicking on your own avatar with the left mouse button and then moving the mouse will make you walk around. You can also double-click a spot near-by to directly move your avatar to it (even over obstacles like gaps).

Additionally, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the camera freely around the room, including away from your avatar. Note you can also use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out. To move the camera up and down, hold Ctrl and move the mouse up and down.

If you lost track of your avatar, click the top left eye icon and select “Avatar’s View”. If you don’t have an avatar because the room is full, you can also rotate the camera by using Ctrl + Down/ Up arrow.

Note some rooms have invisible limits; for instance, you can take a dive around the island room (or “shell”, as it’s called) but you won’t be able to walk very far.

How do I move an object?

Don’t be confused by the “move to” button of an object, as it will move yourself onto the object (and will not allow yo to move the object elsewhere). Rather, click the “four arrows” button on the right; once activated, you can now drag and drop stuff you see on the screen. Note however that the room owner might have disabled such dragging. The three options for room owners are public (everyone can add and move stuff), interactive (everyone can move stuff, but not add new stuff to the room, like furniture), and private (no one but you can add or move objects).

What are the available emotions, animations or sound bites of my character?

Click on your character and switch to the Animations tab to find an overview. Note that you can also trigger a command by typing e.g. /angry in the chat box. Some emotions are also triggered when you type something normally, like the words “LOL” appearing in a sentence. At the moment, the list (at least for character Logan) consists of:

Angry: Causes the avatar to make some sounds and point at something.
Applaud: Makes the avatar say “ah” and “yeah” and clap hands.
Bow: Bow down your body as a sign of respect or perhaps an apology.
BuzzOff: Makes the avatar use their hand to shoo someone away.
Cheer: Causes the avatar to make some silent cheerleader dance moves.
Confused: The character will strike a thinking pose with their arms and head.
Cry: The character briefly cries in anger and despair.
Dance1 and Dance2: The character dances around for some seconds, like striking a Pulp Fiction pose.
Doh: The character will slap their forehead, realizing something obvious in hindsight.
EvilLaugh
Fear: The avatar will shield their eyes.
Fidget: Another laughing variation, though Answers.com says to fidget means to “behave or move nervously or restlessly”.
Flirt: Some smiling and pointing.
FootTwirl: Strike a shy pose.
HairComb: Pretty up your hair (with no actual lasting effects).
Happy: This one will also be triggered when you use the emoticon “:)”.
Headphones: Move along to some imaginary music.
HearNoEvil, SeeNoEvil and SpeakNoEvil: Cover your ears, eyes and mouth, respectively.
Laugh: The basic laughter (which may sound kind of evil depending on your character type).
Love: When you like someone else.
No: Shake your head disapprovingly.
Peace: Raise your hand to make the peace sign.
Plead: Get down on the floor and fold your hands to beg for something.
Point: Points to yourself and around the room.
Puke: With some heavy sounds, this will make the character bow over to free the stomach or mind of something awful.
RaiseHand: Get some attention by raising your hand.
ROFL: Roll on the floor laughing... literally.
Sad
Shrug: Make the character performa a kind of “duh” pose.
Shy: Another shy pose, somewhat related to the FootTwirl emotion.
Sit: When there’s no chair around, this’ll make you sit on the floor.
Sleep: Fall asleep standing (this is accompanied by some snoring). Like sitting, this is a continuous animation so it won’t automatically end after some seconds.
StickOutTongue: Stick out your tongue.
Strut: The kind of “winner” movement you might want to perform after a successful bowling move. “Strut” means to “display in order to impress others,” as Answers.com explains.
Surprise: Make a surprise pose along with some sound.
Tada: A kind of “I’m here” pose.
Taunt: A sign of aggression towards someone else.
Walk: This makes your character walk on the spot.
Wave: Wave to someone to get noticed or to say hello. This is another of those more easily triggered emotions, e.g. you can type “I wave” to start waving.
What: A type of “so what” shrug.
Wink
Yawn: Show you’re physically tired, or bored.
Yeah: Jump around in excitement.
Yes: Nod your head in agreement. You can also trigger this by typing “yep” or “yup” (like “no” can also be triggered by “nope”).

You can type several poses in succession to mix and merge emotions. Try typing /yeah, then /tada, then /strut, for instance. To immediately cancel an animation you started, you can briefly drag around your avatar with your mouse.

What actions or gestures can I perform on other characters?

There are special actions you can only use when there’s another avatar around. Click the other avatar and pick the Animations tab to choose from any of the following – note you can enter the first letter on the keyboard to select that part of the alphabet in the selection dialog:

Buddy: Put your arms around the other person.
Bodyslam, Kick, KungFu1, KungFu2, Punch and Slap: The various attack moves.
Choke: Performs the Jedi force choke move, this does. Wisely must use it.
CryOnShoulder: Your character starts crying and the other will pat your shoulder trying to comfort you.
PatOnBack: Comfort someone else who’s sad.
Dance1 and Dance2: You and the other avatar will start dancing.
Hi5: Clap your hands with the other person.
HoldHands and Hug: appreciation moves...
KissCheeks: In some countries, cheek-kissing is a form of greeting. (Side-note: depending where you’re at in Europe, the amount of kisses exchanged varies... Google went for 2 kisses.)
PattyCake: Play the kid’s game of hand-clapping.
Propose: Get down on your knees if you plan to marry someone.
Squash: This will trigger an iron to fall from the sky and onto your opposing avatar, unless they escape first (if they don’t, true to the laws of cartoon physics, the damage is also not permanently). Afterwards, a message from ... the Lively God? the game creators? ... may appear, reading “stop fighting down there”.
Tickle
Whisper: Shows a whispering animation. (Note this is separate from the “Whisper To” button you can click in someone else’s options, which sends a private message.)

If you don’t want to mouse-pick an action from the menu, you can also type e.g. /hi5 john or /bodyslam mary77.

Note that not all moves can be performed on all avatar types!

The images I’m adding to photo frames don’t fit, how can I solve this?

For some reason the picture frame does not auto-adjust your image. After some experimentation I came up with this base image you can use; just scale and rotate your image into the white box. Not sure if this is the best method...

Why doesn’t my photo frame image show?

The photo frame content seems to be globally disabled at the moment. Not sure why, but one explanation could be that Google is looking to get a grip on the many adult rooms that sprung up.

What’s the thought bubble over someone else’s head?

One theory is that it means they’re typing something at the moment.

What are object animations?

Some special objects can perform an action of their own. For instance, try clicking the magic cauldron object. In the dialog, hit Play Animation (or double-click the object)... the bubbling cauldron will now shriek and nervously move a circle.

How can I have my speech bubbles be seen only by one person?

What you’re looking for is to whisper. To do so, click someone else’s avatar and then click the “whisper to” button in the dialog... the message you’ll send now will appear in a speech bubble along with the word “[private]”.

How can I stop the program from crashing?

I’d like to know! Right now, you may experience a lot of crashing, depending on your system. If you’re experiencing crashes whenever you leave the program, on Vista, one solution that may work for you is to add Lively’s client.exe program to the list of exceptions to the data security prevention, a process which is described in Lively’s help group... but please use at your own risk, as I don’t know what side effects this may have.

What are those white-and-green cones on the floor?

Those cones are place holders for things that are still loading. You may also sometimes see skeleton avatars; those are other persons whose appearance didn’t fully load yet.

How do I delete my chat history?

Apparently, just leaving a room is enough for your speech bubbles to eventually evaporate. Google says “Chats in Lively are not saved, and will not be accessible once you leave a room. The chat history window logs what avatars have said and done within a room, but is not archived and will disappear when you leave ... Lively may temporarily keep snippets of chats to resolve abuse reports, but those snippets aren’t accessible to users.”

Are all objects free?

At the moment, Lively doesn’t have a currency, so all objects you’ll see are free, but in the future it may well have price tags on certain items. Take a look at the object developer screenshot Google printed in one of their help pages – it already contains a box for gadget developers to define a price in USD$.

My MP3 is too big for uploading, what can I do?

To upload your own background song for a room you created, click the rooms icon to the right, pick Edit, and switch to the Sounds tab. When you now pick a large MP3 from your hard disk, Google will however warn you that only up to 521 KB are allowed... perhaps they’re trying to prevent people uploading high-quality sounds with copyright issues.
What you can do now is decrease the file size of your song. For instance, you can download the free Audacity editor and load your file into it. Now set a lower MP3 rate in the settings by switching to Edit -> Preferences -> File Formats; from the Bit Rate box, pick something lower, like “48” or whichever lowest quality you think will still do. Additionally, you can mark only a smaller part of your song. Now click File -> “Export Selection As MP3” to save the song (ideally to another location than its origin), and if the file size is OK, load the result into Lively. Google notes that audio updates will be delayed a bit as there will be some conversion going on on their server.

Every time I tried uploading a song it caused Lively to hang here (then again, many different things crash Lively for me).

Lively crashed, how do I shut down my browser now?

Hit Ctrl + Alt + Del and select Firefox in the Applications tab, then kill it.

I closed Lively and my browser windows but the background music is still running. What to do?

In your Windows Task manager – access it via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Del –, switch to the Processes tab and look for the occurrence of a program called “client.exe”, which has the description “Lively Client”. That’s the one you want to kill now.

The program hangs when I try to log-in, what can I do?

If you already killed the “client.exe” process (as described in the question above) and restarted your browser, sometimes it helps to log out of Windows and then log-in again.

I noticed the word “confidential” softly appearing in some screenshots, what’s that?

Google has watermarked some versions of their program, perhaps to be able to identify those who send screenshots to the press. That’s why sometimes on older screenshots displayed on Lively.com (like on the one showing Lively manager Niniane Wang), you’ll see the “Confidential” watermark, or identification names like “lively.decorator”.

How do I add my own pictures to Lively?

You can load your own photos into a picture frame. First, search the Lively catalog for “picture frame”. Pick a style and click “Add to My Inventory”. In your room editor sidebar – make sure it’s your room, or that you have all necessary editing rights – select the new object to add it. Move the object with the Move tool to hang it onto a wall. Now click the object and switch to the Edit tab. Click the “gadget options” button, and in the new window, paste the image URLs you may have.

Note you may have to rotate the object as the result may be upside down. Also, your original image may be too large.

Another note: Google in their help pages states that they’ll “remove photos” if they’re “notified that they violate copyright restrictions”. They also warn you they may “remove your access to Lively” if you add such things.

How can I add a slideshow picture frame?

To display multiple photos in rotation, you can add a Picasa web albums RSS feed in the edit box, similar to adding a picture as described above. You’ll find the RSS link in your Picasa web album (if you have one) in the bottom right. Note adding the general non-album specific RSS feed did not work when I tried; you need to navigate to a specific album for this.

During my tests, other photo feeds outside of Picasa – like the ones by Yahoo – unfortunately didn’t work... it seems you are limited to use just Picasa right now. (Whenever nothing loads, the picture frame displays a couple of leaves as placeholder.)

How can I add videos?

Lively supports the playback of YouTube videos. Jump to the Lively catalog and search for “with video”. Select a TV object and add it to your inventory, then switch back to your room editor and put the TV into the room. Move the object and then click it to open its dialog; in the Edit tab, click “Gadget options”, and provide a YouTube URL. The video will then playback with sound.

The video playback including the sound will be in continuous repetition – be cautious, as this can be very annoying to your room visitors.

The Jumbotron; as its name suggests, it’s really huge.

Note that not all YouTube videos can be embedded like this though – check if the YouTube page has the words “Embedding disabled by request”.

To stop a video from playing, remove its URL in the editor similarly to how you added it.

It’s a YouTube video playing but I don’t see any “gadget options” button... what am I doing wrong?

You may not see the “gadget options” button because you’re not the owner of the object... so you can’t change the video URL.

How can I add my own custom objects for Lively?

Right now, Google say they are “working with a small number of trusted testers, vendors and creative agencies as part of a test for creating custom items”. They continue to say that they “hope to enable user-generated content” in the future.

And as far as gadgets are concerned (these special types of objects like the Jumbotron video player), the Google Desktop API blog remarks that you can email gd-developer at google dot com to request to be added as Lively gadget developer.

There’s something popping up when I hover over objects, what’s that?

Sometimes you’ll see a status information icon on top of things. The bumping ball means that you can play an animation with this object (open its options and click Play Animation). You can also make the status icon appear room-wide, for all objects, by hovering over the room info icon in the bottom left.

I seem to be stuck in-between objects, how can I move?

If panning around and moving in all directions doesn’t work, try e.g. clicking on another object in the vicinity and then choose “move to” to be teleported there. Double-clicking somewhere else may also work.

What’s the scrolling text on the wall? And that crowded whiteboard?

When you’re in the “Google” room, you’ll see (likely non-real time & fake) search queries projected on the wall, emulating what’s happening in the actual Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Here’s some of the queries displayed in Lively: money, poker games, Area 51, presidential 08, nirvana, teen stars, Ghengis, OPEC, Mayan calendar 2012, Charlie Brown X-Mas, faux finish, Perpetual Motion Machine, Daily Show, anti matter drive, ear ache remedy, chocolate salt, Pyramids, time travel, immortality...

Similarly, the Lively Google room also includes a whiteboard, which is reminiscent in spirit of a real life doodle-filled whiteboard people call the “Google masterplan,” and which Google often shows visitors and press. In Lively, the whiteboard reads things like “Faster Search”, “Invisibility is within reach”, “WoW” (perhaps “World of Warcraft”), “Google + YouTube = ?” and more. There’s also a “Kilroy” doodle.

Fiction and reality: The SpaceShipOne replica ...

... and the dinosaur skeleton at the Google headquarters (photos by Colin Colehour).

The tip messages within the Lively screen are annoying, I want to turn them off. Can I?

I’m not sure yet, but if you find a way let us know!

What kind of hardware do I need to run Lively?

Google suggests these specifications:

a video card made in the last 3 years, one with “at least 32 MB of video memory” (also see Google’s list of video cards that won’t run with Lively)
P3 800
512 MB RAM
DirectX 9
32MB GPU, like GeForce 2 or higher
Flash 9 upwards
a broadband net connection...

How can I get Lively to work on Mac?

Google says they “hope to support other platforms in the future” but right now, they only offer Windows support. Some dared to try Lively on a Mac by using Windows in VMWare Fusion; in this case, with bad results.

Does Lively run on Linux?

No, not yet anyway. However, here’s something DPic wrote in the forum: “[I] ran into some Googlers [Google employees] in one of the rooms. One was a contracted tester who had been working on Lively for 9 months and they said that the Linux version is almost ready, they just need the next version of flash (version 9 had issues). Flash 10 beta is out so hopefully i can use this on my own computer soon.” (Not sure if that guy DPic ran into is right.)

My avatar is supposed to sit on the chair but it looks weird. What’s up?

Note to sit on a chair, sofa and so on, you need to click the object and pick “Sit Here” (or double-click the seat when the seating icon appears)... don’t use your avatar’s sit animation, as that won’t quite work out.

I’m having problems entering e.g. Chinese characters, what to do?

When you try entering Chinese with an IME (method input converter), you may only see question marks displayed instead of Chinese. Apparently, Lively has some issues with handling this. As a workaround if you experience this problem, you can however type the Chinese text in some other text editor (or the browser address bar) first, and then copy & paste it into the Lively chat or comments box.

Are there any laws in Lively?

Next to implicit social etiquette that may exist, Google has set up a couple of official community standards. These include:

Don’t put any nudity or porn into the world, or advertise porn sites
Don’t threaten, harass or bully other users (this is a rather fuzzy definition – the Kung Fu kick Google built into the system could be considered a form of harassment)
Don’t use scripted actions to attack others
Don’t use hate speech to attack e.g. someone’s religion
You must be 13 years or older, and if you’re under 18 you’re supposed to ask parents for permission
No misleading impersonation of others (another slightly fuzzy law)
Don’t “publish” (does Google mean: “talk about"?) confidential information, like someone else’s credit card number
Don’t infringe on copyright
Don’t spam, Google says, like by the use of self-replicating objects

Someone didn’t get the memo...

Google in their “Report abuse” dialog (which you can access for an object) disclaims the following, though: “Please note that Lively is a place for many different people to express themselves, and you may read or see things you don’t agree with ... Remember, you can always ignore users you don’t like or leave rooms you don’t feel comfortable in.”

What’s a Lively ID? And user name?

There are three things to separate here:

Your Google Account login, like john.doe@gmail.com. This is your Google account you will use to sign in to other Google services, too, like Gmail, Google Docs, or iGoogle. You don’t need to create a new one for Lively but you do need to have one to use Lively. (Note you may also log-in with your Facebook account, though it may cause bugs, like an initially empty avatar inventory.)
Your Lively ID, like JohnDoe75. During your first sign-up into a Lively room, you can determine your Lively ID. Later on you won’t be able to change it, Google says. Note Google also says, “It is not recommended to use your Google Account, Gmail, or other email username for your Lively ID” as it may make you vulnerable to spammers.
Your Lively user name, like John. This is the name you can give yourself in the chat world for others to see. You can pick anything, even names that are also taken by others – however, your Lively ID will still be visible to others (you can’t hide it by giving yourself a different user name).

(Oh, and then there are the avatar body names... like “Logan” or “Heather”, which is just a name given so you can differentiate the various base avatars to choose from.)

What does “lively” mean?

If you type define:lively into Google you get ...

<<... full of life and energy; “a lively discussion"; “lively and attractive parents"; “a lively party” (...)

Crisp, fresh, having vitality.>>

How come some normal objects are floating in the sky?

A room (or “shell”) may have an invisible outside wall... like the dome-shaped limits of the island room. This is where you can move up an object like a plant or a chair to make it apparently float in the sky.

I can hear the sound from what seems to be a YouTube video but I can’t locate the video. What’s happening?

People can hide objects, like a YouTube TV player, in the most unlikely places... like under the island, for instance. Pan outside and even under the floor to locate certain hidden items.

What are the different avatar body types?

Avatars can be fine-tuned in many ways – like their skin color, their hair, or their wardrobe – but each one is based on a main character. The currently available characters are:

Female:

Heather: A female cartoon body
Jane Doe: An average female body, less cartoon-style than Heather.
Vanessa: A female, cartoonish body. Vanessa “equal parts street and class,” Google writes.

Male:

Logan: An average male cartoon body, more skinny than muscular.
John Doe: An average male body, and like Jane Doe, less cartoony and more heroic than its male counterpart Logan.
Ty: A cartoonish character.
Hajime: Hajime represents “many anime avatars all rolled into one,” as Google explains. Hajime is appearing in the so-called superdeformed style.

Animals:

Hamlet: A piggy.
Matty Bear: Some furry creature.
Kitty: Another animal character.

During your character selection there’s also an I’m Feeling Lucky button, a hat tip to the feature of Google’s search homepage.

How does one disable or change sounds associated with words, e.g. the word “heh"?

Sometimes your own auto-triggered emotions and sounds may annoy you, as they don’t fit your intention. Not sure how to best solve this at the moment, though as a workaround you can enter special accentuated characters to prevent this... like “lôl” or “héh”.

What types of rooms are there?

A so-called “indoor room”...

... and a so-called “outdoor scene”, with no furniture added yet.

The base room types are called “shells” in Lively. At the time of this writing there are 69 different shells available, categorized into “indoor rooms” and “outdoor scenes”. Shells range from “Superhero Underwater Headquarters” to an island, a winter land, a high school, to a 3-room apartment and more. Some of these rooms have different sub-styles of their own, varying their wall and floor patterns.

For more, take a look at the gallery of Lively rooms.

Can I create multiple entry points to a room?

Yes. When you edit your room, you can make an object be the room entry, meaning new visitors to the room will land there at first. Defining multiple entry points on the other hand means that people may be forwarded to an entry point that is still unoccupied, as Google explains.

I’m getting a “no avatar – room is full to capacity” message... what’s happening?

The maximum number of visible avatars per room is 20, though up to 100 may join with “viewing status” (meaning they don’t appear and can’t interact and chat, but they’ll see what happens). If the room is already filled with 100 people when you’re trying to join, you’ll be rejected.

Also see more screenshots...

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Lively FAQ | Comments]

[Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.com

Firefox 3 features you may not know

2008-07-08T13:29:19Z

While the awesome bar, download pause and resume, malware protection, the new themes, and serious performance improvements are perhaps the most representative features introduced with Firefox 3, here are some other useful ones you may not be aware:

Duplicate tabs. Press Ctrl while dragging a tab to create a duplicate of the dragged tab including its history. Note that this feature doesn’t work on Mac.
Move tabs to another window. Just drag a tab and drop it on another window to move it. If the dragged tab is the last one in its window, it will be closed.
Resize the search bar. When the search bar is placed next to the location bar, you can drag the handler between them (invisible on Windows and Linux) to resize it.
Add keyword search. Select Manage Search Engines… in the search engines menu to open the Search Engines Manager, select a search engine, press Edit Keyword… and enter a few characters to define one. Now you can enter the keyword followed by your search terms in the location bar to search with that plugin.
Discontinuous selections. Make a selection with the mouse as you usually do. Then press and hold the Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) key to make additional selections and create a larger discontinuous one so you can copy or print just what you need.
Integrated add-ons. No need to visit Mozilla Add-ons because Firefox 3 brings it to you directly from the Add-ons Manager new Get Add-ons page: search, find and install with a single click.
Disable plugins. Crashing? It may be a plugin. To be sure, disable the suspect through the new Plugins page in the Add-ons Manager.
Check your crashes. Enter about:crashes in the location bar to get a list of crashes submitted by Breakpad (Mozilla’s crash reporter). Click on a crash report to get details provided by Socorro, Mozilla’s crash reports server.

Viking Smackdown: The Motion Sensing iPhone Game That’s Already Out

2008-07-08T02:35:25Z

With only four days to go until the launch of Apple’s App Store, which will feature 3D games that push the iPhone to its limits, most developers would consider releasing a browser-based iPhone game a bad idea. Throwing common sense to the wind, ad agency Hello Viking has just released Viking Smackdown, a Safari-based iPhone game that manages to take advantage of the phone’s built-in accelerometer. You can access the game by visiting VikingSmackdown.com from your iPhone’s browser.

The game itself is very simple: your goal is to make a cartoony-looking viking throw his axe as far as possible. Tilt your phone to the side and you are presented with a meter that indicates how forcefully you’ll throw your mighty blade. Then, once the meter is full, tilt the phone right-side up to send the axe flying. The farther it goes, the better.

While there have been a number of motion-sensing apps made for “jailbroken” (i.e. hacked) iPhones, few Apple sanctioned web-apps can make use of the phone’s accelerometer. Using some clever scripting, Viking Smackdown takes advantage of the web browser’s orientation detection to create this simple (but surprisingly fun) game. It’s a shame it will be totally obsolete in less than a week.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Chat on your iPhone

2008-07-03T00:02:00Z

Attention iPhone owners! You can now chat with all your Google Talk buddies while on the go. Our new version of Google Talk is designed specifically for the iPhone and runs in the iPhone's browser, so you don't need to download or install anything. Just visit http://www.google.com/talk on your iPhone, sign in, and start chatting. And because it is built for the browser, it will work on today's iPhones as well as on tomorrow's 3G iPhones.

If your businesses, school or organization uses Google Apps, you can instant message using your Google Apps account on your iPhone. From your iPhone's browser, visit http://talkgadget.google.com/a/your-domain.com/talkgadget/m, but be sure to replace 'your-domain.com' with your actual domain name.

Happy mobile chatting!

Leo Dirac,
Product Manager

We Love Architects: New Architecture Centers

2008-07-18T17:35:44Z

OTN is adding an "Architect" focus to the community, with new centers covering expanded SOA (including governance), Extreme Transaction Processing, Virtualization (Oracle VM + JRockit VM), and Enterprise 2.0.

Common Craft Video: LinkedIn in Simple English

2008-06-30T06:18:00Z

Another good Common Craft video that explains (in simple English) the advantages of LinkedIn and how you can leverage the power of your LinkedIn connections to get things done. Thanks Mario.

Common Craft Video: LinkedIn in Simple English - Digital Inspiration | FAQ | RSS

Weave 0.2 Ready to Sync You Up!

2008-07-01T11:35:21Z

Along with a fresh design, Mozilla Labs has also release Weave Prototype 0.2. What is Weave, you say? It is Mozilla’s answer to the problem of keeping all your bookmarks, history, passwords and more in sync across multiple computers.

So what is new in this 0.2 version of Weave?

Intelligent scheduler for synchronization to improve performance.
Expanded set of supported browser settings and metadata, including: Bookmarks, Browsing History, Cookies, Saved Passwords, Saved Form Data, and Tabs.
Support for retrying failed network operations.
New server format performs better when there are frequent changes (e.g., for history sync).
Significant reworking of the startup experience, including a new Setup Wizard that performs account creation in chrome and allows for customization of settings.
Improved error detection and handling.
Notification dialog added to the status bar for displaying error, status and asynchronous events with or without required actions, e.g. authentication errors, notification of shares, etc.

Might be worth mentioning that they are still saying this version is for testing purposes only, so if Firefox later on kicks you in the head, points its browsing finger and laughs while your down, you were warned.

Ready to test it out? Then download Weave 0.2 here!

Here recently, I just switched from Google Browser Sync to Foxmarks. Once Weave gets all the kinks out though, I’ll probably be switching again because I really like the idea of having everything accessible no matter which PC I might be at. Check out the Weave 0.2 Release Notes for more information.

Free Download: Download Your Free Copy of My Best of the Web Hosting Show Guides eBook!

PhoneFactor 1.0

2008-06-27T23:13:22Z

PhoneFactor is a WordPress plugin that provides an additional layer of security when logging in to your WordPress site.

It’s a pretty cool system. When you log in to your WordPress blog with PhoneFactor enabled, you receive a phone call asking you to press # to authorize. When you do so, you are logged in. If you do not, then the login attempt fails.

Basically, this means someone needs to get your username, password and phone in order to log in to your WordPress site as you.

Crowd Favorite worked with the PhoneFactor team to build this integration on their API layer. This was a fun project for us - it’s always nice to enhance WordPress by integrating features from another service.

Besides building the integration with the API to authenticate via phone, we also built the PhoneFactor registration step right into the WordPress admin so that the user wouldn’t have to leave the WordPress admin when activating the plugin and getting it set up. I think it’s a much better user experience.

We integrated some instructional banners into the WordPress admin pages to let people know the next steps to getting things set up after activating the plugin. We also built in some more advanced user features like whitelisting IP addresses so that you don’t have to use PhoneFactor authentication if you’re logging in from your home machine.

The download and more information are available at the WordPress Plugin repository on wordpress.org.

Enjoy!

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Goodbye, Bill Gates!

2008-06-27T18:57:45Z

Today is Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft as a full-time employee. Goodbye and good luck.

This video has Steve Ballmer saying goodbye to Bill Gates on his last day at work.

What would Bill do ..

Become a rock star ..

Goodbye, Bill Gates! - Digital Inspiration | FAQ | RSS

Mixx Wants You to Build a Community

2008-06-25T18:10:33Z

Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Building a Community

Setting up a Mixx community is very straightforward. Besides deciding on obvious things like a name, color scheme, and categories, users can chose to pre-populate their community with content already available in Mixx by importing items tagged with up to ten different keywords.

The communities also feature their own message boards and the ability to add polls. There is also a 'member lounge', where the recent activities of group members are displayed. Karma points a user earns in one of the communities are added to the 'general Mixx karma pool', an important feature for many power-users who tend to jealously guard their status on the site.

Mixx communities are somewhat similar to Reddit's sub-reddit feature, which also allows users to create their own hosted communities. Reddit, however, does not allow for any degree of customization, but it does have more granular access controls than Mixx. ~~All Mixx communities are open to all users, while Reddit has public, restricted, and private modes.~~ Update: Mixx does actually have very similar access controls to Reddit's - but they are not part of the set-up procedure like Reddit's are and have to be set after the community is created.

Now that Reddit has open-sourced its code, anybody can of course create any kind of reddit-clone, but the communities on Mixx cater to a different audience.

Making Money

The 5th step in the set-up process is probably the most interesting one for publishers: Set Up Advertising & Revenue Share. Mixx allows publishers to link their Google AdSense account to their Mixx Community page and then shares 50% of the revenue with the publisher.

This will probably help Mixx to gain a larger following among small to mid-sized blogs and maybe even some larger publishers who will create their own communities on the site. Still, social news sites are notoriously hard to monetize through pay-per-click ads and I wouldn't expect most community owners to make a lot of money from this.

Making Users Happy

Allowing users to take greater control of their experience seems to be a trend among social news sites lately. As these communities grow, some users often start to feel alienated. Allowing for the creation of more formalized sub-groups most likely helps to retain a lot of these users who still feel very attached to the service.

It will be interesting to see if Mixx's competitors like Digg, Newsvine, and Propeller are going to follow suit here anytime soon. Digg especially, because of the sheer size and diversity within its community would probably benefit from allowing users to create smaller Diggs on its site, too.

Writing Email That Gets Answered

2008-06-25T10:55:49Z

Writing email seems to be a recurring topic of mine. I receive about 400 messages a day at present, and most of these require an answer. There are mails that get a faster response, and some that take days. Here’s the difference, plus a few more ideas.

One Decision Per Email

It seems counter to cutting down on email to ask you to limit the decisions required in a message to one per email, but I’ve seen it have the opposite effect. Think about choosing to go out to eat: if the first message is, “what day is good for you?”, the second message is, “what type of food do you like?”, and the third message is, “should we invite Jay, even though he laughs a lot and makes it hard to concentrate?”, you’ll see my point. These three questions all have a certain level of decision making to them. The mail on which day (better solved by a phone call) is different from the mail on what type of food, and both are different than whether or not to invite Jay (also probably better solved by a phone call).

Don’t Ever Say “Quick Question.”

I say this because what almost inevitably follows are five to nine paragraphs explaining WHY the question will be asked. It’s as if there’s lots of context needed. It’s almost always not. I’ve written complete strangers and used under 200 words to convey my needs and interests. In fact, I do that often.

Here’s a quick question:

From: Chris Brogan
To: You
Subject: Will you register for PodCamp Boston 3?

I’d like for you to register for PodCamp Boston3. It takes place July 19th-20th at the Harvard Medical School. I feel it will be the most powerful and transformative experience you’ve had with media in a long time.

Please consider it: http://podcampboston3.eventbrite.com
Main PodCamp Boston site: http://podcampboston.org
Let me know if you have any questions,

–Chris…

Your Signature File

I’m in between signature files. When I rebuilt my hard drive, my tools for writing a signature with formatting seem to have broken. So, I’m using a plain text one at present. Let’s just say I’m looking at all of your signature files closely.

Good: ways to contact you online and off (never presume your email address is obvious, especially if your email has been forwarded by others).
Good: very brief descriptor of your title and company (if it’s a business email).
Good: link to your primary blog or website
Bad: all kinds of marketing at the bottom
Bad: links to every social network where you belong

That’s my opinion, but if you want to form your own, pay attention to signature files over the next several days. See what you pay attention to, and what gets overlooked.

Following Up

With the volume of email I receive, some messages get overlooked for a duration of time. Some people follow up perfectly, and others do something that will nearly guarantee that I don’t respond to the second email as well. Here’s what’s useful in a follow-up message:

Brevity. I probably know I haven’t responded to you, but your message might not be top of mind. Just seeing your name and the words “following up” in the body of the message over a forwarded copy of the last one you sent me will usually jar me into action.
Simple summary. Maybe your last email was huge and had lots of requirements to it. If you sum these into a few short sentences, it might get me to complete the work.
Reminder of deadlines. Lots of us work on all kinds of things at the same time. My job alone is challenging, so when you’ve asked me for help with an interview or the like, a little reminder of when you need it (especially if I get two days or three days before the deadline) usually can get me back on track.

Not Just Me

With more and more people overwhelmed, I’m not writing these suggestions and advice to help myself, except insofar as I’m saying that I have the same problems as other people. You might see some advice in here that you wish others would do on YOUR behalf. If so, great. Feel free to forward a link to your friends who need to follow this advice the most, with a loving and courteous message before the link, naturally.

What About You?

What are your ideas for how to improve the state of your inbox? How might you convince people to write emails that get answered faster? Where do you want to correct me?

—

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

Photo Credit, juan23for

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A Desktop Based RSS Reader For Your Google Reader Feeds

2008-06-23T16:43:02Z

RSS Bandit is a free desktop based feed reader for Windows that may find appeal among Google Reader users.

That’s because you can use RSS Bandit as a desktop client for reading Google Reader feeds outside the web browser even in offline mode.

RSS Bandit will automatically synchronize the status of your feed items with Google Reader the next time you update your feed or go online. Thus the stories you’ve read in RSS Bandit will show the same status in Google Reader as well.

While die-hard FeedDemon fans are unlikely to make a switch, RSS Bandit does offer some unique features like an Outlook style tri-pane interface, an integrated newsgroups reader and a ‘Download Manager’ for fetching feed enclosures.

Overall, this application is still in an early alpha stage (and there are bugs) but it still solves an interesting problem – that of reading Google Reader feeds in an airplane where you have no Internet connection.

RSS Bandit is open-source and developed by Dare Obasanjo.

A Desktop Based RSS Reader For Your Google Reader Feeds - Digital Inspiration | FAQ | RSS

5 Excellent Productivity Tips For Google Reader

2008-06-18T13:46:42Z

There are no doubts about the fact that Google Reader is the best browser based RSS reader available. It has some excellent features and helps you to easily deal with a large number of RSS feeds.

Today I decided to mention few productivity tips for this app, which will help you manage your RSS feeds better. These are very simple but useful tips.

1. Master the Google Reader Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Reader provides some awesome keyboard shortcuts which let you save a lot of time while reading feeds. If you are able to learn and master them then you can easily navigate through hundreds of feeds in less time. If you forget a keyboard shortcut, just press Shift + ‘ ? ‘ and it immediately shows you the shortcuts.

2. Use the List View

There are two ways in which you can view the feeds in Google Reader - Expanded view and List View. I have personally found that List view is a better and more productive way to navigate through the feeds.

3. Use the Trends Feature

Google Reader has an impressive feature to help you manage your RSS reading habits. You can use it to trim your RSS feeds and analyze your RSS feeds effectively. Here is an article which tells you how to manage RSS overload using trends in Reader.

4. Separate Tags and Folders

Although Google Reader only provides ‘ Tags ‘, if you add more then one complete website feed to a tag, it automatically becomes a folder. Now everyday when you read feeds, there might be many articles which you’d like to tag separately. You can do that but make sure you do not mix the tags and the folder names.

You should have folders for website feeds and tags for particular articles. That way you can effectively manage and search through feeds later.

5. Use Star / Email to Read Later

When you are in a hurry and want to read an article later, don’t just mark it as unread. Instead star it or email it (yes, you can easily email a feed by pressing ‘ e’ ) . If you just mark it as unread then next day you’ll have more unread feeds and you might not be able to get back to that particular article.

I hope the above tips help you in using Google Reader more effectively. I’d love to know what other ways you manage your RSS feeds, in comments.

::::: I read BlogStorm daily do you?

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Studies Confirm That Bad Boys Get More Girls

2008-06-21T17:32:00Z

seattlle foodie sends along a New Scientist article outlining two recent studies that confirm what many have long suspected: bad boys get the most girls. "The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the 'dark triad' persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs. The traits are: the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking, and callous behavior of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators."

Create useful timelines with Timetoast

2008-06-22T10:04:16Z

If you like to organize your information, how about giving a timeline a try? I don’t think many of us use this for personal productivity, although it’s a great way to showcase information, and even share it if you want to. I haven’t actually done this myself, but after getting to know Timetoast, I might just get into this myself.

Why use timelines?

In short, timelines can put information into context (using a visual representation of time), therefore give you added information and increase your productivity. You can use it to show data that is in very close relation to time very effectively, giving you a visual aid when glancing over your data.

In addition, it is also a fun way of sharing information, you can document long trips, relationships, important stops in your life, historical data for students and so on and so forth.

Using Timetoast

Timetoast is a cinch to use, when you sign up you can start creating timelines right away. All it takes is clicking on the add event button, setting the date, adding and optional image and giving it a title and an optional longer description.

Your data will automatically be shown on the timeline in an easy to digest fashion, allowing you to edit and modify everything later. When viewing the timeline you can click on the events to bring up the longer description and a larger version of the photo attached.

Using Timetoast for productivity

To use Timetoast for productivity it is best if you can combine data from multiple sources into one timeline. A great example is blog statistical data for example. Every day you can visit Alexa, Google Analytics, Feedburner, Technorati and various other sites and record the rating they give you. You can enter them into the timeline and you will have a database of easily readable data from multiple sources.

You can modify this a bit and set a % change where you record the data. For example, you only add an event for Google Analytics when your visitor count increases by 10%. This is useful for recording and visualizing your growth patterns, if there’s a longer time between some of your increases, you may want to find the problem. This becomes increasingly complex and informative once you add all the other data.

Timetoast shortcomings

Timetoast was founded in 2007, so it is still relatively new and will probably undergo changes, but I will nevertheless share some things I missed in there. Timetoast would be a great way for me to share all my posts with my readers. Since I post to about 5 other sites, I could enter each post and put the timeline on my site. However, Timetoast can only narrow down to a day base, not an hourly or minute based timeframe, therefore I could only list posts for a day. I’d much rather have detail down to the minute, which would allow me much more control over everything I input.

Formating is another big issue for me. In my example I explained adding website statistics to the timeline. It would be great if you could format the even boxes, change there color, font etc because this would allow me to highlight some important points in my statistics. I could indicate in red when I first went under 100,000 in Alexa, and so on. You could also record data every day instead after every 10% increase and indicate every 10% increase with red, giving you full, but still clear data.

Point and click event adding would be nice using a double click for example, but this is just a minor point, adding an event with the add event button is still pretty easy.

All in all Timetoast is a great application if you’d like to create some simple timelines, if you have any ideas for using them with advanced productivity please let us know in the comments!