Sixty Second Tech

Sixty Second Tech Episode 22
UTC

This is my first request from a reader, John, I hope you like it.

Coordinated Universal Time is one of the standards by which time is measured. Unless you are running a highly time sensitive application, UTC is the same things as Greenwich Mean Time, although there are subtle differences.

The abbreviation UTC stands for…compromise. The English name is Coordinated Universal Time whereas the French name is beyond my accurate pronunciation, but the abbreviation is TUC. Since both groups wanted the abbreviation to stand for their own version, a compromise was reached by using UTC, which technically stands for nothing.

Under UTC, most days contain 86400 seconds, however, to account for the slowing of the earth’s rotation, some days are given a leap second to keep UTC in sync with the solar time. (if you stand real still, you can feel it).

UTC notation is most often expressed using the Gregorian calendar. Time is expressed by not only the day, month, year, hours, minutes and seconds but also with a time zone. Times zones are expressed as a positive or negative number, at the end. A numeric time zone is the offset from UTC to derive local time. UTC is expressed as UTC+0, whereas US Central Time is UTC-6 or just -6.

UTC is also referred to as time zone Z or Zulu time.

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 UTC [1:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sixty Second Tech Episode 20
FireFox 3

The browser wars are long over but there’s a rebel force still fighting and winning. FireFox, has long been the favorite browser of geeks world wide is now making a serious dent into Microsoft’s usage numbers. The way they keep getting new users is by constantly pushing the envelope with new features. No, not “features” like smart tags or nonsense, real features.

The latest version of FireFox, Fire Fox 3 is out and there have been over 15,000 improvements made to the browser. It’s faster, more secure and even more customizable. The most visible change though is the “Awesome Bar”.

The Awesome Bar is FireFox’s new location bar. (the place where you type the URL) It now does more than just allow you to enter the URL, it now learns as you use it. It adapts to your preferences and offers you better fitting matches the more you use it. So if you don’t know exactly where you want to go, the Awesome Bar helps you figure that out.

So if you are using Fire Fox, you really want to download and install the latest version. If you are part of the 40% of the listeners of this podcast that don’t use FireFox, join us and see what you are missing.

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 FireFox 3 [1:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If you don’t subscribe to it, The NewMediology Podcast did their latest episode on twitter. Its a great listen for anyone looking for a more indepth discussion about twitter.

They also mention Twitter for Marketers as a resource for people looking for additional info.

=C=

Sixty Second Tech Episode 19
MobileMe

We’ve talked about the “Benevolent Triad” - Google, Amazon and Apple - and how they are changing how we use the web. Recently Apple kicked it up a notch with the announcement of their MobileMe service. If you are familiar with their .mac service, it’s like that, only a lot better. If you aren’t familiar with .mac then let me pull your head out from under the rock and show you MobileMe.

MobileMe has been called “Exchange in the cloud”. Microsoft has long had their Exchange server for businesses and offered things like email, contact and Calendar sync between laptops and mobile devices. However, up till now you had to pay big bucks for this functionality. MobileMe gives you all of that and more. Using your OSX mac, you can update your calendar, contacts, email, and photos and have it sync automagically to Apple’s MobileMe cloud and then back down to your iPhone. Unlike an Exchange server though, Apple’s MobileMe is cloud based, eliminating any single point of failure. The coolest feature of MobileMe though is the iDisk which has no comparable feature in Exchange, it’s just a freakin cool way to share large files without pissing off your email admin.

While MobileMe isn’t free, it’s $99/year single or $149/yr family plan are reasonably prices for the services provided. (iPhone not included)

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 MobileMe [1:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Amazon has earned its place next to Google and Apple in the “Benevolent Triad”, the three companies shaping how our future will look. I don’t like everything they do but two years ago they rolled out a service called S3 that is pretty good.

S3 or “Simple Storage Solution” is your hard drive on the Net. With it, you can quickly and cheaply store and share files on the web with anyone.

Companies like SmugMug uses it to store all of their users photos, companies like JungleDisk create easy to use, remote backup solutions for you, and companies like Sixty Second Tech use it to serve their podcasts.

Best of all, S3 is much less expensive than normal web hosting charges. Most hosts charge you when you go over your bandwidth limit. With S3, you pay for every gigabyte but at a greatly reduced price. Apparently running one of the largest sites on the net gets you a huge discount on bandwidth.

S3 is easy. Visit Amazon’s Web Services page and sign up for an account, then start uploading files. The best program I’ve found for managing my S3 account is S3Fox, a FireFox plugin that looks like a ftp program.

So go ahead, upload that video of cousin Carl’s wedding where Aunt Tilly was “over served” by the bartender, with Amazon S3 you can share the hour long ordeal with the entire family without emptying your wallet.

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

Ten-hut Minute Men!
Major PITA here with your marching orders for the week!

I know that most of you use iTunes to pull this podcast down to your iPods. I also know that to date there have been a grand total of two reviews posted on iTunes about this, your favorite of all tech podcasts. So, grab your mouse, fire up iTunes (or click here) and start writing! What are you waiting for, an invitation? Get out there and review, I wanna see five stars, right now! Go! Go! Go!

 

 Amazon's S3 [1:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sixty Second Tech Episode 16
Attention not SERP

For years SEO experts have been telling us that our website is only worth what search engines say its worth. That was true in the past but these days “attention” is more important than SERP, but it’s much harder to measure. Now there’s a tool to help you get a handle on your site and the posts that are getting attention, AideRSS.

AideRSS analyzes the posts in your feed and ranks them based on it’s own secret sauce called PostRank. Nobody is really sure how PostRank is calculated but we know a few of the factors. They combine things like how many people have bookmarked it in del.icio.us, the number of comments, the digg score and other factors to rank it between 1 and 10.

Because each post’s rank is relative to the other posts in your feed, you can use it to figure out what topics are working for you.

AidRSS won’t help you build the most popular blog on the earth, but it is an important tool in your tool box. It helps you measure “attention”, and attention is more important than keywords, title tags or where you rank in any given engine. Given that all of the current features are free, it manages to give you something else most SEO experts can’t, bang for your buck.

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 Attention, not SERP! [1:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

IWantSandy is something totally different than you’ve ever seen before. She is a calendar program, todo list keeper, goals reminder and everything you would want in a virtual assistant except for the paycheck.

I know, I know, you’ve seen calendar programs before and you’re just not impressed. Well I’m here to tell you that Sandy is not just another calendar program, if anything she’s Calendar 2.0! (yea, uh-huh, I went there!)

The thing that sets Sandy apart is the fact that once you have logged in and setup your account; you never have to visit the website again. Sandy is fully versed in such new media tools as twitter, jott and Google Calendar. You can email Sandy, Direct Message her via twitter, and even jott to her. She recognizes plain English command like
Remember meeting tomorrow at 9:00 AM with the lovely and talented Kathy
Or
Remember I want to lose 10lb @goal

She can even decipher to-do lists.

I’ve used a lot of calendar programs, PDAs and “dashboards” (that kiddies, what we used to call them back in the days before Internet) and none of them allowed me the freedom to communicate with them in ways that are natural to me.

So the next time you don’t want to forget a special date, tell Sandy, just don’t forget to tell your significant other that she’s just a program.

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 I Want Sandy [1:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In a previous episode we talked about RSS feeds and I could hear you screaming at your iPod “Yes Cal but what do I do with it?” Thankfully, our benevolent overlords at Yahoo! have answered that for us with a sing word, Pipes.

Pipes is a web based application that provides a graphical user interface for building mashups. It allows the user to easily aggregate RSS feeds, web pages, and APIs to create Web-based applications.

Many times the feed you want to use only provides part of the picture, to get everything you need to add or subtract information from it. A good example is the “GeoAnnotated Reuters News” pipe. It takes the news feed from Reuters, runs it through the geonames.org RSS-geoRSS service to give each entry a latitude and longitude. The resulting feed is then plotted on a Yahoo map to show you where in the world the news is coming from. Normally a mashup like this takes a programmer, a case of Jolt Cola and a weekend to hammer out but thanks to Pipes, anyone with the imagination and a case of Jolt Cola can do it.

So if you’ve been looking for a way to mash up your company newsletter and your secret stash of pictures of the office Christmas party, Pipes is the answer you are looking for.

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 Pipes! [1:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sixty Second Tech Episode 13
Cloud Computing

First there was the desktop, and Boca Raton smiled and said “this is good”. As time went on we needed more power though, so servers were invented. Now we need even more power, super-computer power without the price tag; enter the Cloud computing revolution.

Instead of building one huge computer that is smart enough to model the atmosphere or nuclear explosions, just link together many smaller computers. Specially designed software and networks allow scientists to link them to compute extraordinary results.

Cloud computing is, however, more than just a research tool. Thanks to companies like Amazon and their Elastic Compute Cloud, you can move your website to the cloud.

If your web site’s traffic fluctuates seasonally, expand into the cloud! With EC2 and other systems like it, you can setup a second, third or ninth server for a short time. They will get you over the hump and then spin it down until you needed again.

New management tools are coming online that allow you to automate the entire process so if your site gets popular on digg.com, you can handle the load, serve the pages, spread your message and make the sale. Then when the load dies, the virtual servers pack themselves away for another day.

So the next time that overpriced consultant you keep around because he’s your brother-in-law shouts “capacity planning” at you, tell him to go stick his head in the Cloud!

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 Get Your Head in the Cloud! [1:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the beginning there was the browser, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee said “It is good.” Now fast forward fifteen years and we are all tired of just surfing, we want to actually do things. It’s the new millennium and we are ready for a paradigm shift!

Thankfully one has been brewing all along. Back in the early days of the web a company named Macromedia released this toy called “Flash”, and sowed the seeds of the next revolution that we now call Rich Internet Applications.

Rich Internet Applications are applications that run mainly on a server on the Internet but pieces of it run on your local computer. Usually the server does all the heavy lifting while your computer only has to run the user interface.

Our overlords at Adobe have embraced RIAs and given us tools like Flash, its cousin Flex and its other cousin AIR with which to build them. AIR is the real gem as it allows web developers to build desktop applications.

For web programmers this means that they can now write applications that run outside of the browser. (Technically AIR has an integrated browser but let’s not spoil the fun.)

To get you started, try downloading a program called Spaz. It’s a twitter client written in HTML that runs on your desktop. Compare that to the traditional experience of going to twitter.com and you will begin to see what all the excitement is about.

My name is Cal Evans and I am your sixty second tech.

 

 Rich Internet Applications [1:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download