Gmail’s Black Dot

Originally uploaded by Gubatron.

On Both Firefox 3 and Safari, on 2 different GMail accounts I see a black/grayish dot on the top left corner.

Google only indexes Google groups talking about the subject as of today July 4th 2008

Do you get one too?

Please leave comments if you find out what this is about.

I’ve been trying Seeqpod (and learning from it’s UI), and I must say it’s a very nice service, specially for creating playlists in no time. Let’s hope we’ll have similar functionality in MyBloop.com during the following months to make playlist creation way faster.

Here’s a Smashing Pumpkins playlist I put together in less than 2 minutes (including sign up time)

SeeqPod - Playable Search

Samim’s Heater uses the Colombian accordeon tune “La Pollera Colorada” to make one hell of a dance floor hit.

Here’s the video on Joost, the sound quality is great.

Saimim shows how to heat things up a bit with their funky anthem, Heater. Taken from continent to continent, this is not one to miss out on.

I recently requested an upgrade on one of our dedicated server’s uplink speed, we only had a 10Mbps Uplink, we requested an upgrade to 100Mbps to serve a lot more.

How do you verify the upgrade has been done correctly?

As root, issue the following comand:

# mii-tool
eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD, link ok

If it doesn’t work (for debian or ubuntu), make sure you have installed the net-tools package (The NET-3 networking toolkit)

After Joost Support Team member under the name “Lodewijk” pretty much gave a response that told the Linux community to fsck themselves in regards to a Joost version for the Linux operating system, what could’ve been a regular Forum thread became mainstream today when it hit the digg.com homepage.

Read the response by the Joost Support Team:

Hi,

We’re currently working on improving the performance of the PC and Mac
versions available today.
Although there has been demand for a Linux version of Joost, we have to
prioritize our business objectives. As a result, we do not have plans to
release a Linux version at this time.

Kind regards,

Lodewijk
The Joost Support Team.

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but this has turned into a “I rather go to hulu.com” comment party on digg.com, and some users say one thing that is absolutely right:

dazparkourdazparkour

They use linux servers. They use free software.
If they wanted to, they could have drafted in volunteer programmers.
They take from FOSS with one hand and they give us the finger with the other.

Joost could have at least put a subversion repository for open source developers to mess around with the open part of the code and at least give some instructions to run from source in Linux. As a devil’s advocate, yes, they run on XUL, yes they run on FFMpeg (with lots of different codecs probably), but there are portions of their work that are propietary and probably not ported to Linux yet.

Maybe this part of their technology has to do with modified versions of their P2P technology. If you fiddle a little bit with their binaries you’ll see references to Skype libraries (which works in Linux), but they must have done lots of optimizations for video streaming (we’d hope)

In any case, as much as I love Linux, we’re still a “desktop minority” (probably thanks to this same stupid circle of companies not wanting to develop software since we’re a minority) in comparison to the universe of Windows PCs out there. Joost is a company on a tough market, they came in early and they may have a technological advantage over their competitors, they’ll be able to scale for being p2p based, their bandwidth costs will probably a third of hulu’s, for now it will be a game of waiting for their web based version and a much needed redesign on their content navigation and search.

We’ll see if they get another round of funding this year, it’s been over a year since they received $45MM, a hell of a lot more content is available now, there’s a limited number of ads, I certainly don’t hope they’ll pull the plug, p2p tv is one of the ways to go, the product just needs to evolve.

I can’t stop playing this remix, here’s the file page at mybloop.com