The QuitFaceBookDay group isn’t alone in leaving Facebook. Many high profile Internet leaders have also left (More Web Industry Leaders Quit Facebook, Call For Open Alternative). Facebook is fighting an uphill battle in keeping their users satisfied. Many people will stay on because there simply isn’t an alternative and equal site to use instead.

The Return of BBS’s

Hardly any of the new computer users today knows what a BBS is. In the 1980’s and mid 1990’s, they were doing what the Internet does today, but mainly on a local scale. People set up computers at home (or in a business) and attached a modem, phone line, and ran BBS software which allowed other people to phone their computer and run applications, which included e-mail, playing games, and downloading applications.

BBS’s connected to each other which allowed them to send e-mail between them and run newsgroups. Many BBS’s were on networks which allowed them to send mail to other systems, but this was costly because you had to pay long distance phone charges to connect to a computer in another city.

The Internet changed all of this and did everything that a BBS could do at a lower cost. There were BBS’s that charged annual fees for usage and I never subscribed to them because I thought that they were too expensive and not worth it. Today, I spend more than what they charged on Internet access, but with all of the activity that I do it would have cost me more paying for services on a BBS than what I would get from the Internet.

There are very few BBS’s running on phone lines today. Most of them can be accessed only through Telnet. The Internet has replaced the old BBS technology, but BBS’s will be returning soon in a different way.

Diaspora: Social Networking for the Masses

Wikipedia defines a diaspora as “any movement of a population sharing common national and/or ethnic identity”. Diaspora is the latest threat to modern social networks and likely the one to make the most impact on the Internet. Its developers define it as "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”.

Diaspora is an application that turns your computer into a node on part of a larger, connected social network. Your computer stores all of your private or public information and you have control over it, as opposed to giving control to it by another organization like Facebook. Your data is secure and you decide whether you want to share with other nodes on the Diaspora network. In other words, your computer becomes a BBS, or more accurately, a web server.

Project Diaspora’s goal was to raise $10 000 by June 1, 2010 to continue their software development. They raised $200 642 from 6479 supporters. Clearly, there is a great demand for an alternate, secure social networking application. The software hasn’t been released yet and their target date is the end of summer, or some time in September.

This is an interesting project and I’m curious what kind of web server they will use for running on Windows, Macs, and Linux computers. I would guess that its Apache since this software is open source and free, but hopefully it will also run on IIS in Windows.

Diaspora may start BBS-like activity which the Internet eliminated. It all depends on how easy the setup will be for it. Most computer users have very limited knowledge in computing so it will be a real challenge getting them to create and administer a web server.

Setting Up WordPress

The installation process went smoothly. It seemed like a typical WordPress install, except you had the option of specifying a password which will be used for your admin account. Earlier versions of WordPress gave you a random password which you used to login, and then change to a password of your choice.

The only problem with the password entry textbox is that characters are displayed in plain text, which is a security problem. This textbox should be set for password entry, i.e. <input type=password … > which would hide the characters that are being entered here.

New Themes for the New Version

The default theme has been replaced by the Twenty Ten theme. The new theme looks better than old Kubrick one and it gives a blog a more professional appearance.

Create a Blogging Community

WordPress 3.0 has merged with WordPress-MU so that it can host multiple blogs. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to get this functionality working. You need to manually make modifications to configuration files before you can start adding blogs.

The first step is to add the following line to wp-config.php,

     define (‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

Then you need to create a blogs.dir folder in the /wp-content/ folder.

If you are already logged in the backend, press F5 to refresh the page and you will see a Network menu item in the Tools menu. When I clicked on this, I was given an error message that I couldn’t install a network of sites on my server address, which it claimed was 127.0.0.1. Here is a bug for the WordPress team to fix.

General Usage of the Beta

I tried using some of the features, such as adding a new post and commenting on it. These worked correctly except that I couldn’t add a new category for a blog post.

I also tried creating a menu with the new feature they added. It wouldn’t allow me to create custom links and I wasn’t able to activate the menu in the widgets area. This feature needs a little work but it does seem interesting.

In Conclusion …

Other than then the integration with WordPress-MU, there doesn’t seem to be a significant difference from the previous version of WordPress. It still is, however, in an early beta stage so there may be more added later.

I couldn’t find any references on the Moonlight web site for which version of Silverlight it supports. I would think that it would be at least version 2, but hopefully it supports the latest software at version 3.

Silverlight is gaining momentum in the web and is becoming a serious competitor and alternative to Flash. Competition between the two will force each one to create innovative solutions and in the end, the consumers (or users) will be the one who will benefit the most.

Download and Install Eclipse

The first thing you need to do is download Eclipse Classic 3.5.0 from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. Its a quick download at 162 MB. There is no installation program so you will need to uncompress Eclipse into a folder that you will be running it from. This would typically be the Program Files folder in Windows on Drive C:.

After Eclipse is installed, make a shortcut to eclipse.exe so that you can run it from the desktop.

Install Components

At this point, Eclipse is equipped to create Java applications. We want to add components for creating PHP, Javascript, web projects, and a remote system explorer to connect to FTP and SSH sites.

Open the Help menu and select Install New Software. Click the Available Software Sites link, and add the following sites:

• PDT Update Site

  http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/2.0/

• DLTK Update Site

  http://download.eclipse.org/technology/dltk/updates-dev/1.0/

• Web Tools (WTP) Update Site

  http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates

Press the OK button to return to Install dialog. Select –All Available Sites– in the Work with combobox.

Scroll down the list to Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK) and General Purpose Tools and select the following components. Press Next to install.

Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK)

• Dynamic Languages Toolkit – Core Frameworks
• Dynamic Languages Toolkit – Core Frameworks SDK
• Dynamic Languages Toolkit – Javascript IDE
• Dynamic Languages Toolkit – Javascript IDE SDK

General Purpose Tools

• Remote System Explorer End-User Runtime
• Remote System Explorer User Actions

PDT SDK 2.1.1

• select all applications

Configure Eclipse to Read .htaccess

After all the components are installed, hidden files needs to be enable in Eclipse so that you can edit .htaccess. A previous blog post, Viewing .htaccess in Remote Connections in Eclipse, describes how to do this.

Your now ready to build PHP and Java web projects.

The bug isn’t critical and its unlikely that most blogs would have problems with it, but its always a good idea to patch security holes as they are found.

I updated this blog through the automated update feature in WordPress. This is the best way to update software and more CMS’ should have similar functionality. Its always a good idea to backup your blog before performing an update. There is a possibility that a plugin or theme being used could fail in a new version of WordPress, so you should always have a way to go back to a previous version in case anything goes wrong.

Highlights

• improved drag and drop widgets
• theme browser and installer
• dashboard widgets can be displayed in 1 to 4 columns
• support for IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module – this important because I’m planning on switching to an IIS web hosting package soon

There were many more updates but these ones are the more significant. The following video gives a quick overview of the new version.

While the free alternatives tend to lack features the commercial programs have, the average user would find them useful enough. There is also no risk in trying free programs. If you don’t like them, then uninstall it.

You can’t delete files in Windows when their file handle is still open in the operating system. This can still occur even after you closed the document and the application that was used to display it.

One solution is to reboot the computer which may release the file handles, but this doesn’t always work. Unlocker is a system tray application for Windows that can force file handles to close and delete processes. Unfortunately, it won’t delete locks over networks, but there are other ways to do it manually.

The application is free and it uses very little memory when running. You don’t need to run it all the time, though. I just use it when I have file problems and then close the application afterwards. This is a must have application for Windows users.

In this update, 66 bugs are fixed. An XSS exploit was repaired in com_content (see low priority fix) and fixes were made in the administrator application that had a series of XSS and CSRF exploits (see moderate priority fix).

I’ve updated all of my Joomla sites to version 1.5.10 and everything seems to be working ok.

Credits:

Photo courtesy of ekkoj’s photostream.

The new installation method will be very helpful for WordPress users with less technical knowledge, or those who lack the confidence to do their own upgrades.

Its always important to keep your user in mind when building software. Computers are becoming more and more like appliances and we need to make software easy to use and upgrade.