Day: October 27, 2008

Social Web CMS

The other day I wanted to install a Digg clone. There are a number of different such open source clones out there, including Pligg and the Drupal-based Drigg, but I ended up going with Social Web CMS which conveniently had just released their 1.0 version in early October.

The software was a breeze to install and configure, and had pretty much everything I was looking for. SWCMS is a fork from Pligg and the developers seem committed to longterm development and support for the system, which was also a plus.

Anyway, if you’re curious check out my Animal Rights News SWCMS install.

iScript.com

iScript.com is a service that will take your script (everyone’s got a script in a drawer somewhere, right?) and have an actor do a reading of it onto CD or mp3. Turnaround time can take as little as two business days,

Cost is $225 for up to 1-50 pages, $275 for 51 to 90 pages, and $325 for 111-200 pages — but the site seems to constantly be running one sale or another.

MobiPocket Has Problems . . . Again

Although not as severe for end users as its last major outage, Mobipocket’s servers have apparently been offline. Just like its last major outage, there’s been little (as in no) communication from Mobipocket even to retailers that to a large extent depend on it such as Fictionwise.

Because many Mobipocket books are all DRMed to hell, the outage would prevent, for example, someone from reading DRMed ebooks on any new devices until the server outage are restored. And, of course, forget about buying any new DRMed books from Fictionwise until the outage is restored.

Just say no to DRM — it’s too risky. A server here goes down or a company there goes out of business and suddenly you find out just how little access you have to the files you paid to download (while the folks who get them from Torrents or other file sharing sites and didn’t pay a damn thing won’t even notice a problem — it’s only the paying suckers who are inconvenienced).

Software for My New Computer

Just a list of software that needs to be installed on my new computer:

Firefox 3
KeePass
AkelPad
Filezilla
VLC
Directory Opus
Thunderbird
World of Warcraft
Out of the Park Baseball
TrueCrypt
GPSDatalog
OpenOffice
Spybot
TimeSnapper
Campaign Cartographer
ActiveWords
Zscreen (screenshots)
PyKeylogger
BattlePlanner 5
Spore Creature Creator
ScanSnap Manager
WinRAR
TextPipe
Kaspersky Anti-Virus