Archive for internet
In a move that is a win for the end user, Sensis and Google have signed a commercial agreement to allow users to find Yellow (previously known as Yellow Pages) business listings on Google Maps.
“The agreement means Yellow™ advertisers can now potentially be found by more customers than ever before. They can be found in our print and online directories, over the phone, in a growing range of satellite navigation devices, on mobile phones, on search engines and on online mapping sites, which now includes the popular Google Maps”
Currently Google Maps in Australia uses the True Local business listings. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this, it misses out on the businesses who traditionally list on Yellow Pages.
In Australia it is considered a must to list your business using Yellow Pages since these are printed yearly and a copy delivered to every household (being regionally specific). The businesses who already list will automatically gain the benefit and not be charged any additional fees to appear on Google maps. With the rise of mobile devices using Google maps, such as the iPhone, the end user and the business both benefit from on the spot, realtime, and often locational based business searches.
The use of the business listings commences in the first Quarter of 2009.
A big surprise is an announcement today that Bigpond Music (A Telstra owned service) has from today started offering tracks in MP3 format. This is a move away from the DRM windows media format that all their songs were sold as.
When Bigpond started offering music sales a few years ago I was an early adopter and purchased music from their offerings. However it soon became obvious that the windows media DRM was a difficult beast to deal with. Windows users know only too well the pain of having to rebuild/reinstall a bloated operating system; the licensing for the Bigpond music files where often lost if you rebuilt windows and did NOT backup your DRM licences.
So I took the lesser of two evils and signed up to the Apple iTunes Music Store (iTMS), where although under a DRM system the licencing was more relaxed (5 Computers, unlimited iPods, burn to CD). Apple, specifically Steve Jobs, wrote about the restrictiveness that is Digital Rights Management, and soon thereafter started offering MP3 downloads. It took the music studios to start understanding the whole premise that DRM was not where the future lay.
Fast forward to August 2008, and today Telstra’s Now We Are Talking site has announced that MP3s are now on offer from Bigpond Music. Not only are they now DRM free, but they encode at a minimum of 256Kbps and up to 320Kbps for their audio tracks. For the end user this means close to if not indistinguishable from CD audio quality. The procrastinators I know who have shunned digital music no longer have an excuse to legally purchase their music.
Pricing is the same as the iTMS being AUD$1.69 per track and a similar price for albums. Downloads for Bigpond internet customers are also uncharged for data usage. A double bonus for some.
While I think purchasing music in this fashion is a good thing for the end user; if you care about the artists you should consider Magnatune. You wont find the latest top 10 tracks there but you will find fantastic music where the artist gets a large amount of the purchase price. They also allow you to pay an amount you choose for an album, or sign up for monthly unlimited downloads and streaming.
You can start purchasing MP3 music from Bigpond Music right away. Although it is not the entire catalogue for now, this is a correct step for Telstra in the right direction. Music sales figures do not lie!
Logging into Gmail today and I note: You are currently using 885 MB (12%) of your 7005 MB. 7GB is a massive amount of email to offer for free, and it is only the next point in their ever growing offering.
In comparison, Windows live (aka hotmail) currently offers 5GB when you login into their product.
The counter on the gmail login page shows Over 7005.197177 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message. Well they are right there….. I don’t need to delete anything at this time – and probably never will.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders what it means to have your entire archive of communications stored in one place. Who can really access that 7 GigaBytes of mail, on US based servers in the current world climate.
The geek in me says “Its not really 7GB yet! GibiBytes people – Base-2!!!”
A Podiobook is an Audiobook delivered via a podcast. Evo Terra coined the phrase back in 2005 when podcasting was in its infancy. 2005 you say? Well sometimes I take a bit of time to come around to something good.
I’ve started listening to my first one. Descent – Book one of the 7th Son series by J.C. Hutchins (click through on that link to start listening to it as well).
The cool thing about this is when you sign up (instead of just subscribing to the feed I linked above) you can actually set how often the audio chapters get released to you. One a day or longer – and best of all it is Free!!! Well if you like the book you can and should donate an amount to podiobooks, and the author will get 75% of your donation.
Stuck on a train 3 hours a day? Run out of podcasts? Sick of your Music? Try a Podiobook.
I’ve had an on/off outage for most of the past 4 days, so to avoid hassles I put the site into maintenance mode.
I’ve actually had to decommission my 19″ server rack and the multiple servers I had for Tech Debug. There was a DNS server, kerberos, Database and web server. All the separate functions are now hosted on one OpenBSD VM that I’ve built recently. It’s running on the only remaining “non-laptop” left in my residence, which runs 24×7.
The only delay in getting back online in the last 48 hours was the MySQL data export and import. It’s a bit convoluted, and not documented in entirely one place on the MySQL documentation site (backup here, restore here), however once done once it will be easy to repeat. I still like the simplicity of PostgreSQL administration. Specifically the backup and restore:
Backup:
pg_dumpall > savefile.dump
Restore:
psql -f savefile.dump postgres
Well, there are some prep steps you should do; but it is all in one place on their documentation page.
Let me know how the site performs on the VM.
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