Web work

Foundation – new podcast by Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose, who you probably know as the founder of Digg and co-host of the popular podcast Diggnation, has started a new podcast – Foundation. In this one, he interviews famous and not so much founders of web services, entrepreneurs, and other creative people. The show is free. It’s also ad-free, but there is some sort of subscription for those who want to get it one week earlier. The first episode is out and it’s a half an hour interview with Jack Dorsey – inventor of Twitter and co-founder of Square. Watch it at Revision3 and subscribe.

Blogging milestone : 5,000+ posts

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you post number 5,005. I nearly missed it altogether, so please excuse a not exactly a round number. And now, before you throw things at me, let me highlight some disclaimer points:

I’ve written more than 5,000 blog posts in my life. But quite a few of them went down, disappeared, or are blocked behind corporate firewalls. Today’s celebration is only about my personal blog.
Not all of these blog posts were written by hand. Some are aggregates from Twitter, Delicious, or some other third-party service that I used. But I count them anyway, because they compensate for those lost posts, and because the spirit of sharing even via a third-party is too similar to blogging. I found something worth sharing, I shared it, and it ended up on my blog in one form or the other.
Most of these posts are utter crap that nobody will ever read or use. But I still celebrate them, because I took the effort to write them, and because they were important to me at some point in time.
On top of that, I celebrate all these posts that survived over multiple blog software migrations, hosting changes, restructuring and reorganizations. While they are a huge mess that many of you would be glad to throw away, they constantly remind me of all those transformations that I went through. And if nothing else, they provide me with an extra leverage in any data organization argument. After all, thousands of posts and comments over 10 years of blogging should count for some experience.

Let the celebrations begin!

Good news from PrimeTel

Yes, I know, I am biased when I talk about PrimeTel, since I used to work there and still have a lot of friends there. But even with that, how can one not be happy about great news that came in via SMS today:

Your Internet speed will double as of 1/1/2011 with no additional charge. Happy New Year from PrimeTel!

I am getting 4.5 – 5.5 Mbps on my 4 Mbps PrimeTel subscription. With this new upgrade it seems I’ll be getting somewhere around 10 Mbps. Excellent present – thank you PrimeTel!

Updated: You might also want to read this article in Cyprus Mail.

Adding Google Apps GTalk account to Pidgin

Google Apps help page is a little bit outdated and I had to spend a few minutes working out the solution, hence this post. Here is how you add your Google Apps GTalk account to Pidgin.

In Pidgin, click on the Accounts menu.
Select Manage Accounts.
Click ‘Add…‘ button.
Select XMPP protocol.
Specify account’s local part in the Username field. For [email protected] that would be joe.
Specify account’s domain in the Domain field. For [email protected] that would be examle.com.
You can ignore the Resource field and leave it empty.
Specify account’s password in the Password field.
Switch to Advanced tab.
Change Connection security to ‘Use old-style SSL’.
Change Connect port to 443.
Change Connect server to talk.google.com.
Press Save. You are done.