Internet

Cardinal Pell on exciting technology in use at World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney, Australia

It’s a bit of a commercial for Telstra, the Australian government communications monopoly, but it’s still good information on the cool mobile phone and Web 2.0 social networking plans that the World Youth Day organizers in Sydney have planned for this July.

2001 called and wants its web site back

Went to this site today. It’s associated with my health insurance company, a major regional company with millions in revenues every year. They probably have dozens of people working on their web site.

And yet this is the warning message I get when going to their site using the latest version of Firefox, a browser used by millions of people every day.

Also note the browsers they do claim to support. You can’t even download Netscape Navigator anymore.

I wish I were in Steubie

Fr. Roderick Vonhogen, the Dutch priest of the Catholic podcasting network SQPN is going to be in Steubenville, Ohio, next week, along with other Catholic podcasters and media folk for a conference entitled “Media and Faith:Engaging the Culture.” It’s being sponsored by the Communications Arts department at Franciscan University.

I really wish I could go, not just to meet Fr. Roderick and the Willits and the other speakers and attendees, but also to go back to my alma mater. It’s been more than 10 years since my last trip to the Ohio Valley and — it surprises me to say this — I miss it. Something about that place gets under the skin (cue coal and steel pollution joke here).

One of the co-hosts of the conference is Dr. Wayne Lewis, who was the faculty advisor when I was editor of the student newspaper The Troubadour. We had a great time producing the paper and I’m proud to say we won “student organization of the year” the year I was editor. Our April Fool edition was a classic for the ages, especially since a mercifully unnamed board member almost called then-Cardinal Ratzinger because of it. Oops. I may have to find it to scan it and put it online for nostalgia’s sake.

Anyway,the conference sounds great and I would love to participate in many of the talks, especially the podcasting and Web 2.0 ones. I know I have plenty of opinions in those areas and would love to share ideas with the panelists and others on them.

But I will have to pine from afar, curb my jealousy, and hope that I can eventually hear audio or see video (streaming online, anyone?) at some point.

One request though: Please, someone take Fr. Roderick to Drover’s and have him sample the hot wings. And make sure he records the event. That would be worth listening to.

Synchronizing your Mac’s iCal with your Blackberry’s calendar

One feature I’ve wanted for some time is the ability to reliably and easily synchronize the calendars I keep on my Mac in iCal with the calendar in my Blackberry so that I have the information in my pocket when I need it. The problem is that Blackberry does a poor job of supporting Macs and even the third-party software, such as Mark/Space’s Missing Sync, is unreliable at best.

So I set out to find a better solution and I did, even if it’s not exactly a free solution. The key is to use Google Calendar (Gcal) as the intermediary. Gcal is free to use and it has the benefit of allowing you to share calendars with others (like your wife, so you always know when her appointments are or when the kids have things scheduled).

The first step—and the part that’s going to cost you—is to download and install Spanning Sync. This product is a Mac OS X Preference Pane which as 15-day demo period. If you decide to keep it, you can sign up for a one-year $25 subscription or buy it outright for $65. I opted for the latter, because I’m betting I’ll still be using it in three years.

Spanning Sync simply allows you to synchronize your iCal calendars with your Google Calendars. The interface is clear and you can synchronize any number of calendars on both sides. It’s best to set them up with the same names on both sides, but if you’ve already got a Google Calendar, you can choose to sync some or all of your calendars no matter what they’re called. Just follow the instruction included with the software and you’ll be good to go.

From this point, by default, your iCal and Google Calendar will synchronize every hour. Now to set up the other half of the equation.

Using your Blackberry’s web browser, go to mobile.google.com and then either click “Download All” if you’d like the other Google mobile products too, or just the “Sync” link. The program will download and install.

When it’s done, click on the “Sync” icon that should now be on your phone’s screen. Open up the menu, and chooe “Sync Now” to initiate the first synchronization. Thereafter, depending on how you set your options, it should sync every hour.

That’s it! From now on your Mac’s calendar will always be handy in your pocket and changes you make to your phone’s calendar will automatically appear in your iCal. Worst case if you set them to synch every hour is that your phone and iCal won’t be synchronized for a maximum of two hours. That’s not bad considering you don’t have to do anything else.

Commuter Feed: Good idea, not ready for prime time yet

At first glance Commuter Feed seems like a good idea. It harnesses the power of Twitter to get regular commuters to update traffic conditions in real-time as they travel from their mobile phones.

Big companies like Smartraveler have been doing this for a while using their own sensors and observers and police reports, but Commuter Feed is supposed to harness the power of “the social”, i.e. the great cloud of Web users.

Here’s the flaw though: It relies on people typing out messages on their phones while driving. This is a problem. There are enough inattentive drivers out there talking on their phones, we don’t need to add texting to the mix. Just recently we had a case locally of a guy who hit and killed a 12-year-old boy because the driver was texting on his phone.

Okay, if you’re stopped in traffic that’s not moving, it’s one thing, but if you’re moving even at a couple miles per hour, you’re too likely to be distracted enough to bump someone around you.

You could use a voice-to-text system like Jott, which I’ve used with success for note-taking and other application several times recently, but it’s not easy to follow the exact Twitter format that Commuter Feed demands from a voice prompt. I’ll have to experiment with it.

Commuter Feed is a good idea, but I would recommend that if you can’t use it with a voice-to-text system that you leave it your passengers or only send in the notice after you’re in the office. It’s too dangerous otherwise.

N.B. I have left feedback for the developers asking them to add integration with Jott.