Jared W. Smith

I’m determined to one day provide my own forecasts for @chswx on Twitter. Mississippi State professor Jeff Haby’s site has been a great guide in helping me get started with real forecasting (beyond just looking at the forecast discussion and model runs quickly). It’s a ton of information to wrap around the head, but it’s very useful stuff.

I’ve been fortunate enough to test the TweetDeck User Streams Preview in a private beta over the last month, which enables TweetDeck to display a constant flow of Tweets, unencumbered by API rate limiting, in true real time. Last week User Streams entered public beta, and if you haven’t tried it, do it. Real-time Twitter is something Twitter veterans haven’t seen since May of 2008, and a vast majority of Twitter users have never really experienced it (unless they were among the few to turn on SMS updates for everybody). While this isn’t honest-to-God Twitter over XMPP (though the Streaming API will make such an application possible once more), this isn’t a bad alternative. Give it a try and let me know if you are overwhelmed — I know I was at first (I follow over 1700 people and bots on Twitter).

A little over four years after its initial launch, it’s interesting to read Paul Thurrott’s initial impressions of the original iPhone. Some reservations, like the virtual keyboard, in the end weren’t a hindrance. AT&T most definitely is, though. Fun read.

Apparently I should be thankful that I should have to worry about supporting Internet Explorer 6, because unless this is a forgery (and I have reason to believe it isn’t), Internet Explorer 2 is alive and well. My question is: Who in their right mind is running a so-horribly-unpatched version of Windows NT on the live Internet?

I’m doing periodic updates on Hurricane Earl over at the underutilized Charleston Weather blog. It looks less and less likely that Earl is going to be an issue for South Carolina (possibly a different story for the Outer Banks), but it will be cool to see how the P2 WordPress theme — which updates in real-time — responds if/when something does bear down on the Lowcountry.

The other day, neighbors (and eventually my girlfriend) noticed that my brake lights were on, despite my headlights being off and the car powered down. At first I suspected an electrical short, but I also noticed a strange blue piece in my floorboard. After pulling the fuse to save my battery, I took to The Google where I found a blog post from another Escort owner with the same issue — brake lights and a blue piece in the floorboard. As it turned out, that blue piece was intended to help the brake lights deactivate, and is prone to dry rot and eventual failure. The part was $4, can be found at a dealership, and can be installed in five minutes. My brake lights work properly again and I am once again able to terrorize Hilton Head Island with my absurdly loud muffler. I hope this post can help other ZX2 owners down the road and save them $100+ in labor costs.

Could OpenOffice.org be in trouble at the hands of Oracle? I’m willing to bet they probably won’t put as many resources behind it as Sun once did, but I also don’t count out the open source community in keeping up maintenance of a very widely-used package. In open source, where there’s a will, there’s at least five open ways (and vigorous debate about which one is best). While Google Docs is my daily driver as far as word processing and spreadsheets go (primarily because Gmail makes it effortless to go between the two), OpenOffice has proven to be a solid complement, especially for presentations.

I’m not quite sure how advantageous the new Gmail push notifications are for iPhone given just how lousy iPhone notifications are, not to mention that Google Sync via Exchange is a more complete experience. The only potential advantage to the push notification method is better battery life, though given the volume of e-mail I receive in a day, push anything usually takes a pretty quick toll. And, frankly, I only want notifications for high-priority events; a selective implementation would make more sense, not one that blasts every single message at me.

Great news for the Lowcountry tech/creative community: BarCampCHS 2 is officially in the planning stages. There isn’t a firm date yet but I’m sure the Twitters will be ablaze with that news when it comes down. It’ll happen on November 13.

Google Wave proper may be dying, but I’m fully convinced that the tech will live on, both in the open source community and in other Google products. I’ll miss Wave — while it indeed wasn’t something I used often, my ReadWriteWeb colleagues and I thought it had a bright future as a collaborative live-blogging platform (and there may be some wisdom in speculating it could resurface as such a tool in the future). In the end, Wave failed to quickly answer the question “what is this for and why should I use it?” which unfortunately in an era of social service glut is a question it needed to answer to have any hope of mainstream adoption. Its poor performance (you really needed to use bleeding-edge builds of Chrome to get the most fluid experience — IE? Forget it) sealed the deal.