Science & Technology Shows

Aussie Geek Podcast – Bloody Awesome Tech. Two Aussies (Dave and Cait) and a Canadian (that’s me!) put their unique slants on the technology news, applications sites and services each week (or so).

CommandN – Amber Macarthur and friends bring you a weekly dose of tech news.

Digital Planet (BBC) – The BBC’s weekly technology show looking at trends in tech and how they affect your daily life, hosted by Gareth Mitchell.

Discovery (BBC) – A weekly science documentary examining hot trends and profound topics in the world of science.

Knightcast – Tuning tech into your way of life, Knightwise offers a look at ways to make technology work for you, instead of the other way around.

Mac OS Ken – A daily dose of Mac (and iPhone) news delivered by the sarcastic, funny and insightful Ken Ray.

One Minute Tip (TP) – Byte-sized pieces of knowledge to help you be just a bit more productive with your everyday tech.

Podcasters’ Emporium (LPN) – James Williams and Dave Gray cover all the topics you need to know to become a better podcaster.

Quirks and Quarks (CBC) – Bob MacDonald’s weekly look at science and technology from the CBC mothership.  The show looks at new and emerging sciences and technologies, often with an eye towards how they affect our environment.

Run As Radio (PWOP) – Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes provide a weekly batch of insightful trends and topics for the IT pro.

Security Now (TWiT) – Steve Gibson’s weekly dose of security news and security-related topics is very insigtful  (even better if you skip over Leo Laporte’s TWiT ads).

Search Engine (TVO) – Jesse Brown’s brutally honest opinions and reviews of life in the Internet age.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe – Members of the New England Skeptical Society debunk the myths and frauds of the scientific age.

The Skeptic’s Guide 5×5 – A shorter companion podcast for the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.

Spark (CBC) – Focusing on the softer side of tech, trends and how these things work their way into our day-to-day lives.

Software Development Shows

Hanselminutes (PWOP) – Scott Hanselman’s weekly look at software and technology topics with his inside the MS machine take on things.

Herding Code – A group of “real-world” developers discussing topics and technology that affect code-slingers everywhere.

.NET Rocks! (PWOP) – .NET Rocks brings together the incomparable Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell who interview cool and interesting people in the Microsoft developer space.

Polymorphic Podcast – Craig Shoemaker’s periodic exploration of software and best practices for .NET developers was one of the first software podcasts I started listening to.

Stack Overflow – Jeff atwood and Joel Spolsky’s companion podcast to the Stack Overflow Q&A site project.  A weekly chat about the project, interesting Stack Overflow questions and other software topics.

Humour & Entertainment Shows

Mondays (PWOP) – Mondays is a comedy show from the crew at PWOP that’s released on a somewhat sporadic basis.  This one’s definitely NSFW — unless you have headphones. =)

Star Trek: Defiant – A fan-fiction podcast set a number of years after the events in Star Trek: Nemesis. Produced by the crew at Pendant Audio with a fairly talented voice crew.  It’s a good listen.

Two Schooners (LPN) – Dave Gray and James Williams get together again for a somewhat less serious show covering the weird and hilarious stories of the week over a schooner of their favourite brew.

Business / News Shows

Campbell’s Comment (CKNW) – Michael Campbell’s daily business comment.

Get It Done Guy (QD Tips) – Sever Robins provides great productivity tips, business tips and general “how-to-cope-with-life-after-college” tips.

Modern Manners Guy (QD Tips) – The Modern Manners Guy’s advice on how not to inconvenience those around you.

Nutrition Diva (QD Tips) – Eat better, and learn about food myths that’ll keep you on the healthy track.

Reality Check (CKNW) – Bruce Allen’s pull-no-punches daily comment about social issues and pop culture.

Sports Comment (CKNW) – Neil McRae and others provide a comment on the sports world from a Vancouver perspective.

Grammar / Language Shows

Grammar Girl (QD Tips) – Mignon Fogarty’s weekly language show will help you tackle the tricky issues of trying to write successfully in the English language.

Kalye Speak – Learn tagalog as filipino’s actually speak it.  By far the most successful podcast of its kind.

Podictionary – Charles Hodgeson gives great background on the etymology of words that we use every day. The show is insightful, fun and concise.

It’s been fun putting this list together.  I’d love to hear your comments on these shows, or others that you listen to regularly.

This is stunning news particularly when thinking back to the release of Windows Vista 18 months ago. Vista was pushed back a number of times and the delays caused the operating system no end of grief when the OS failed to meet the expectations of consumers when it hit the street in 2007.

A Windows 7 RTM in July would mean that desktops and laptops enabled with Windows 7 may be ready for consumers in time for the key back-to-school buying season.  Add to this that PC vendors like Alienware are already selling Windows Vista licenses with a Windows 7 upgrade offer; and that Microsoft is taking pre-orders for the OS, and it really smells like Windows 7 is not far off.

Sources: Ars Technica, Geeksmack, @Codinghorror

This past week I’ve gone back to the ASP.NET website and discovered that there is now a long list of tutorials which have been put in an order to help make the major features of the MVC framework more learnable, particularly for those of us who haven’t had that MVC-heavy comp-sci education.  The tutorials come in either written or video form (there is some overlap) and do provide some good step-by-step instructions for exploring the new methodology.

Expect me to get into more detail about the ins-and-outs of the MVC framework in upcoming editions of the new podcast (more details soon, I promise!!)

You can, of course, download and use the MVC framework with Visual Studio 2009 without the tutorials, but I would highly recommend giving the first few a once-over.  Have a look at the tutorial site and see what you think.

Twitter has snapped up the IP behind a couple of popular Web 2.0 services.  I Want Sandy and Stikkit were both acquired by Twitter a few weeks ago.  The services were originally scheduled to go offline last week, but this window has been extended until the end of business (17:00 PT) this Friday, December 19th.

Check out the original post over on the AGP blog.

Time will tell…

• Matt’s official post on the WordPress development blog
• WordPress weekly Podcast which will spend some time talking about the release on Friday (5pm PT, 8pm ET (noon in Sydney))
• Lorelle on WordPress with some additional release info

If you’ve not tried 2.7 yet, read over the new info then give it a shot.  The super-new-and-improved admin interface is well worth the upgrade!

I’ve just run the 2.7 update myself tonight (I swore I’d wait until the full release before putting it on the main blog… but I couldn’t wait anymore) and I’m really liking the changes so far. The fact that I can quickly look at the dashboard and see comment stats, recent everything and pen a draft all at the same time is great.

So far everything looks good, though I did have to deactivate a couple of plugins to make things work as expected.  TinyMCE Advanced was causing some CSS issues (I could fix it I’m sure but… meh).  In addition I had a plugin to replace the category box in the sidebar when posting which isn’t required anymore with 2.7.

Stay tuned here for more of the pros, cons and otherwise of the newest member of the WordPress family.

The long awaited seventh installment of the Aussie Geek Podcast is released.  This should be the last time I edit and post-produce a show for a while.  I have enjoyed it, and learned a whole lot about podcast post-production, and even about this show that I’ve been a part of for the last 18 months.

This week on the show we covered some economics including Yahoo! layoffs, iPhone sales and the effects of the tech slowdown on startups in Europe.

We also touched on an app to moderate WordPress comments from your desktop and a graphics package to create stunning high dynamic range (HDR) images which works on all platforms.

At the end of the show we’ve got the first in a series of musical appearances by the Lizards from Afar, and the show closes out with a blooper segment that’s sure to make Dave retalliate in episode 8.

Go have a listen to the Aussie Geek Podcast #007 :: Armchair Economists.  Better yet subscribe to the show in iTunes or directly via the show feed.

If you’re interested in the offer, visit the CodeWeavers website to sign up.

If you want to read more about the background of this story, check out Michael Rose’s post on TUAW.

The long and the short of it: You have George W. Bush to thank (sorta) for your opportunity to buy free software.

After notifying TPN that they intended to leave the network, the show’s hosts Scott & Michael were locked out of the website and TPN refused to post their final show because it didn’t meet “quality standards”.  I find it hard to believe that a show’s quality would suddenly tank on the very last episode.

It’s sad to see such behaviour from TPN’s CEO Cameron Reilly. Things like this don’t make other shows want to help promote TPN’s content, and certainly don’t win many friends in the podcasting community at large.

Scott tells us why you’ll never hear the farewell episode of the Digital Photography Show on his blog, and subscribe there to keep current on the next incarnation of the DPS.

Good luck guys!

New iPod Nanos — No surprise here, at all.  Announced today, shipping sometime between now and Christmas, a return to the slimmer, sleeker design of the iPod nano.  The screen is much larger than the Gen 1 and Gen 2 nanos, and the ipod is now oval shaped (read: won’t sit flat on a table).  It also comes in about a dozen different colours.

“New” iPod Touches — Though not receiving anywere near the revision that the nanos did, the iPod touch now sports new side-mounted volume controls and a small external speaker.  Both of these will make the App-store games much more fun to play.  I’m sad that they’ve chosen not to integrate a microphone (though the exclusion was one of my predictions), the external volume controls will be a very handy new feature.  I wonder how hard they had to convince Jobs to abandon his “no buttons” policy?

Apple & NBC Kiss & Make up — Again, not a big surprise, NBC is returning to the iTunes store.  All your favourite syndicated NBC crap will once again be available in iTunes.  Meh…

iTunes 8 — The next version of iTunes is out, and it sports a fancy new “genius” feature whereby Apple takes a look at your listening habits and makes recommendations.  It’ll also build playlists for you.

iPod Touch / iPhone Software 2.1 — A revision of the software for the two fanciest iThings to hopefully fix the bugs and constant crashing that have plagued the devices (even 1st Gen iPhones / iPod Touches) since the 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases.  I sure as hell hope it’s stable ’cause I’m planning to get a new iPod touch to replace the one that “disappeared” somewhere in the Minneapolis airport.

So there you have it.  5 things that actually did happen, to go along with the 5 that didn’t.

There’s been lots of ideas floated around, so I figured I should jump into the mix now before the news so I can call these predictions of things you definitely WON’T see

The iPod Touch with a built-in microphone and bluetooth — This would harshly cannibalize iPhone sales, particularly given the cost of iPhone data plans.

iTunes Music Subscriptions — People like to own their music. ’nuff said.

iPhone Revisions — Not a chance, with the 3G iPhone barely 3 months old, there’s no way that Apple can justify a revision already.  The backlash from iPhone early adopters last year will be a lesson.

The “MacBook Touch” — Even though a niche of Apple fans would love to see a Mac tablet to compete with all of the Windows based tablets out there, it just doesn’t make up a large enough piece of the overall computer market for Apple to try to carve out a piece.

Beatles Music in the iTunes Catalogue — Despite recent notions from some pundits that the Fab Four’s music will be part of the “Let’s Rock” announcement, there have been far too many false alarms for this to be the case.  Besides, the music is being remastered right now and will probably go through some kind of digital release next year once that’s done.

So there you have it, the five things you definitely won’t see at the Let’s Rock announcement.  Now we can sit back and see what the all things “i” maker will announce later today.

With a vulnerability so wide-reaching, security researchers decided it would be wise to keep the exact nature of the vulnerability something of a secret until the patches were ready.  They did however announce that a vulnerability had been found.

This announcement was all it took for security-savvy netizens (the ones who know just enough to be dangerous) to start speculating and researching the nature of the DNS defect.  The good thing?  They figured it out.  The bad thing?  They publicized it.

As a keen observer of the whole mess, security expert and blogger Chris Hoff decided to dedicate a poem to the DNS Debacle.  I’ve included a short excerpt:

A bunch of big egos called Dan on a bluff said his vuln was a copy of 10 year old stuff So Dan swore them on handshakes and details were provided and those same cocky claims soon all but subsided

Go and check the poem out.  It’s extremely creative, and as far as I can tell factually accurate to the events that took place.  My hat’s off to Chris Hoff for providing the prose, now we’ll all cross our fingers and see how it goes… 

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.

The post does not provide any real detail as to the source of the problem, only an acknowledgment and an apology for the inconvenience.

The outage provided people with extra free time on their hands to try out their artistic abilities in describing the problem.  This was my favourite of the GMail Fail Whales:

Image Credit: Todd Garland of HubSpot, this copy from YoavShapira’s photostream.

So yea, apparently email is critical to most people’s regular day.  Whoda thunk it?

The Phoenix rover uncovered ice crystals and after NASA officials discovered that the crystals had sublimated in a matter of a few days, they decided to run more detailed tests on them — mainly to try melting the ice.

The University of Arizona also put up a good piece on their involvement with the project.

This means that there could, potentially, be organisms in that water if it can stay in liquid form long enough… really that’s the biggest barrier to life on Mars, the water ice sublimates so quickly in the direct heat of Martian daylight that organisms don’t have much chance to develop.

NASA’s official Mars Phoenix mission website has even stated that the mission will be extended by about a month due to the discovery.  It’s now slated to complete at the end of September.

The news is indeed exciting.  It wasn’t a complete surprise to find the ice on Mars as there had been previous evidence from satellite flybys of the Martian arctic.  Space.com has a more complete article on this story including quotes from officials involved in the project.

In a short post titled “Thanks for waiting ” released yesterday, the iPhone Dev Team released Pwnage 2.0 for jailbreaking iPhones running the iPhone firmware version 2.0.

It should be noted that this doesn’t unlock your iPhone, it only opens up all the things that the old Jailbreak used to do.  With the advent of the app store, this is now more of a “hardcore” change than ever before… but nonetheless, Kudos to the iPhone Dev team!

Update #1: I also meant to note that un the first day since this was released, the blog entry received over 2800 comments.  Thats one way to get traffic. 

Go download it!  I’ll wait….

There now… doesn’t that feel better?

Many of the extensions have already been upgraded to work with the new version, and others are sure to follow soon.  I’ll keep an eye on things and try to let you know when PortableApps releases Firefox3.

Also, if you download today (or by 10:00am PT tomorrow), you can be among those participating in Mozilla’s Guinness World-Record attempt.

Photo Credit: xtianyves on Flickr

I’m not the only excited local blogger.  See some posts today from DuaneStory and Miss604 (via the twittersphere of course).

The Apple Store announcement on the Apple website provides all the necessary details for the grand opening and even provides links to start booking your “genius bar” appointments.  Time to get my MacBook case fixed again, the timing is wonderful.

Download FF3Rc1 today!

Image Credit: nitot on Flickr

I have installed it on the sandbox where I’m playing around with the Options theme and won’t be applying the upgrade here until I’m ready to move everything over, including the theme.

The biggest complaint from most is the redesign of the admin pages.  People don’t like change.  There is added functionality and a brand new layout to the admin screens.  After having played with it for only a couple of days, I find myself fumbling around a bit still… but overall the new look isn’t too bad.

Many of the links I used most often are now displayed in the main admin toolbar (blue links) while the less often used links are in the grey bar at the top of the page.  These are the high-level nav buttons like the dashboard.  I think this design will indeed prove effective for people who spend quite a bit of time in the admin console, but will be more difficult for casual users to adopt.

I’ll be posting updates to both the Random Image Selector plugin and the Admin Links Widget in the near future to ensure compliance with the WP 2.5 code.

I performed a series of software updates on my computer today.  Apple has learned that some of us would like to know what our update contains, beyond the simple “bug fixes” or “compatibility fixes” that it typically lists with each update.

My ask is simple, whenever there’s a software update, tell us what’s in it.  This way we can assess how important it is to us, and how soon we need to apply it.  If I find out that the Finder has a bug in it which will allow a malicious web-page to access my hard drive when I use Safari… I don’t care.  I don’t use Safari.  But if I did, I’d apply that a lot more quickly than I would an update to add the latest HP printer drivers.

Here are examples of two recent Apple updates.  One is done correctly.  The other is not.  See if you can spot the difference.

BAD!  Why? “Compatibility Improvements” isn’t very damned descriptive.

Good!  Link is provided to give those who actually want to know, the information they need.

Apple has long been seen as a very easy platform for the non-geeks among us to learn quickly and easily without the configuration and security nightmares that plague the Windows world on occasion (though that’s usually due to market share… but that’s a rant for another day).  Constantly focused on ease-of-use and design Apple makes beautiful and elegant products which are easy to understand, and for the most part to intuit.  A little consistency in documenting things wouldn’t kill them.

Providing people with the information they need to make an informed choice and just maybe understand their computing experience a little bit more is something that all software developers should consider.  It’s nice to have the option to know what people are telling me is a “critical update” so that I can decide for myself.