web

MXPlay mashes up with Firefox

Today, MXPlay--the digital-music player that focuses on customizing and enhancing your playback sound, while also letting you mash up streaming audio with Web videos (covered previously)--launched a Windows-only add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Called MXPlay Web, the Firefox add-on part is a simple orange MXPlay button that sits in your toolbar. Whenever you navigate to a Web page that includes MP3 files, the button transforms into a musical note. Click that note, and you can "play" that Web page in a pop-up music player.

After you select "Play this page," MXPlay Web will list all of the available MP3 songs on that Web page. You can then mark any of your favorites and save them to a personal playlist. Unfortunately, once you create that playlist, MXPlay Web somewhat randomly puts them into an order that you cannot change manually.

Just like the full app, MXPlay Web lets you customize the sound of the music using the same unique graphic interface. Drag and drop the head icon (the listener) and each of your available speakers to a specific location on the screen, which affects sound levels and direction. A blue circle in the upper left lets you control the size of your virtual room, and the bars in the upper right offer three levels of reverb.… Read more

Microsoft to get early Silverlight, Web tools out the door

Microsoft is readying releases of its Web development tools as it looks to replace Adobe's Flash platform with Microsoft's own Web browser plug-in Silverlight.

Later this week, Microsoft is set to release a string of a tools, including Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate and a second beta of Visual Studio 2008.

It said that Silverlight 1.0 is scheduled for final release in the fall, which should automatically be updated to users who download the Release Candidate. Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 are set for release by the end of the year.

Silverlight is … Read more

Cheap hosting and free speech

If you visit www.vivoleum.com today you'll find nothing, but last month the site was the home of the Yes Men's latest experiment in political theater and a protest against Exxon Mobil. Apparently Exxon Mobil was not amused, and as The Inquirer reports, the Yes Men soon found themselves without a Web site and their e-mail access severed. Broadview Networks, the group's Web host, refused to restore their e-mail until they had removed all mention of the oil company.

Sadly, the Yes Men's story is not unique, and Jimmy Atkinson of The Dedicated Hosting Guide … Read more

Amazon luring new customers with Web Services business

After Amazon.com reported a 250 percent leap in second-quarter profits on Tuesday, CEO Jeff Bezos plugged its Amazon Web Services business and shined some light on the company's rationale for continued investment in it.

In response to a question from a financial analyst about the traction on the company's hosted computing and e-commerce Web services, Bezos argued for Amazon's long-term commitment to the nascent business.

"So we're very optimistic about the long-term potential. It's still very early, but we're working very hard on this, and we think it's, in the long-term, … Read more

Microsoft releases initial code for IronRuby

Continuing to warm up to Web developers, Microsoft released an early version of IronRuby that will let programmers write .Net applications with the Ruby language.

In tandem with the "first code drop" of IronRuby, Microsoft will be taking code contributions from outsiders, John Lam, program manager on the Common Language Runtime team at Microsoft, wrote in his blog on Monday.

Lam said that the company intends to fully release IronRuby on RubyForge and take a wider range of contributions by the end of August. The software is available under the open-source style Microsoft Permissive License.

IronRuby uses the … Read more

Tim O'Reilly and I at Ubuntu Live: Be different

PORTLAND, Ore.--Tim O'Reilly is giving a keynote speech at the Ubuntu Live conference, even as I type. I spoke just before him, and he's now throwing out much of what I said. :-) (I argued that we need to be more religious about open source, not less, by which I meant "filled with passion," not "filled with fury toward unbelievers," which is not a religion that I've seen much of here.)

O'Reilly is talking about the rising tide of Ubuntu, using book data, search data and other things (see right) that lead him to believe that Ubuntu is clearly growing in popularity. Tim warns, however, that we need to not get infatuated with open source qua licensing but rather need to think about how it (and, in this case, Ubuntu) fits into the larger technology conversation.

For instance, what would happen if Ubuntu succeeded in becoming the dominant "L" in the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack?… Read more

Minisodes: For those who find 30-minute sitcoms too deep and drawn out

The average half hour sitcom runs about 22 minutes, but for some people that's simply too long. Most successful web videos average between 2 and 5 minutes, and the folks at Sony Pictures Television have found a new way to deliver classic television to this shortened-attention-span set. As highlighted in a recent story by CNN, The The Minisode Network is presented on Myspace and offers a swath of retro television episodes that have been carefully edited down to five minutes in an effort to update the old shows for the post millennium web format.

The network offers a variety of programming from Dilbert to Diff'rent Strokes, but is something lost in translation as the video editors slice and dice everything from the original that is considered not essential? Are these mostly ancient sitcoms even worth watching today in either form? While I can't be certain whether it's a result of the hack jobs or the dated material, most of the mini-episodes I watched felt incomplete and not really worth watching. The editing was clean and seamless, but the stories lacked any real development (something that's already a problem with the sitcom genre). The jokes were still there and the punchlines were also kept intact, but the timing was wrong and the humor was all but lost on me.

… Read more

YouTube users take on the Democratic presidential candidates

The questions in presidential debates have traditionally been determined by whatever media outlet happened to be running the show. CNN and YouTube are looking to change that tonight. As you may know, YouTube is working with CNN to hold a presidential debate where all of the questions will asked through YouTube videos that have been submitted since early June.

Even though users can submit their own questions, CNN is ultimately in charge of picking the questions that are going to be asked. Still, this is a promising development. According to an article on CNN.com, there is a small committee … Read more

Power Downloader makes a capture

Recently Power Downloader was working on a top-secret project, which required him to grab screenshots of Internet criminals off the Web. Some pages had individual shots of the criminal in question, while other sites showed multiple photos on a page. As he slogged through the Web pages, Power quickly began to realize that the method of pressing the Print Screen key to capture what's on the screen was pretty inefficient. Once you have the screenshot in the clipboard, you still have to paste it into another program, and then name it and save it. Power realized that, when you have a lot of images to deal with, using the Print Screen process can be downright frustrating.… Read more