This Geek Life

A 17 year old Fairfield Township Ohio boy was arrested after he told a WoW Game Master that he was “suicidal and the game is all that he has to live for.

Middletown Journal: “According to officials, the teen was arrested Monday, Dec. 29, for inducing panic after patrol officers and medics responded to the boy’s home in the 3000 block of Pimlico Court. The charge is a first-degree misdemeanor.

The teen was having an online conversation with a representative of Blizzard Entertainment, an online video game company, when he typed that ‘he was suicidal and that the game is the only thing he has to live for,’ according to the report.

The company representative called 911.

The juvenile told police it was a joke ‘to try to get what he wanted for the game,’ according to the report. He was then handcuffed and placed in a patrol car. The boy was released to his father.”

If you’re lucky enough to have been an SBC or Verizon internet subscriber who gets Flickr free then it’s time to dig out your wallet. Yahoo! (current owner of Flickr) has decided that one way out of it’s ailing monetary troubles is to begin charging people for Flickr who had previously been receiving it free as part of their higher-end internet service package.

Flickr: AT&T and Verizon Internet Services have reworked their broadband packages and will no longer be offering Flickr pro to subscribers after January 31, 2009.

Don’t panic! None of your photos or videos will be deleted, but if you have a free account you will be subject to a few limits. If you upgrade again, all of your photos will be waiting for you. Any of your sets that disappear will magically reappear when you renew or upgrade.

If you decide to upgrade to Flickr Pro at the regular price of $24.95, you’ll also get 2 more months at no cost.

Unfortunately I think this tactic is going to have the reverse effect on Yahoo! and we’re going to see a mass migration from Flickr as accounts begin to expire. I, myself have been worried about the state of Flickr and the fate of my photos should Yahoo! decide to pull the plug.

It happened on MySpace and now it’s happening on Facebook, watch what you say or it could cost you your job. An after school staffer in Charlotte North Carolina was fired and a teacher could face the same after they posted derogatory comments on their Facebook page.

CharlotteObserver.com: “A total of seven CMS faculty have now been disciplined in connection with pages that WCNC, a Charlotte TV station, found on the social networking site.

Jason Dozier, the after-school staffer, listed ‘Chillin wit my n—–’ as one of his activities; his page also featured a shirtless photo accompanied by a suggestive exchange with a female Facebook friend. Because his job is classified as ‘at will’ employment, he does not have the right to appeal his firing, CMS Chief Communication Officer Nora Carr said Monday.

A high-school special-education teacher has been suspended for using a Facebook ‘mood box’ to post ‘I’m feeling p—– because I hate my students!’ Carr said it is likely she will also lose her job; officials will decide today.”

Researchers at the Rand Corporation have found that adolescents with a high level of exposure to sex on TV are twice as likely to get pregnant or impregnate someone as those who watch fewer programs.

CNN.com: “A central message from the study is that there needs to be more dialogue about sex in the media, particularly among parents and their children, said Anita Chandra, the study’s lead author and a behavioral scientist at RAND.

‘We know that parents are busy, but sitting down and watching shows together with their teen, talking about the character portrayals, talking about what they just witnessed, and really using it as a teachable moment is really, I think, a good recommendation from this research,’ Chandra said.

To measure exposure, the researchers used a method developed by another research group evaluating 23 shows for sexual content. Then, they asked teenagers how frequently they watched each of those shows, and developed a score based on exposure to the shows. Watch the results of the study

‘We know that if a child is watching more than an hour of TV a day, we know there’s a sexual scene in [the] content every 10 minutes, then they’re getting a fair amount of sexual content,’ Chandra said.

Melody Monroe of Norfolk, Virginia, who had her first child when she was 17, said she agrees that sex on television contributes to teen pregnancy. Monroe, who shared some of her views on iReport.com, recalls watching shows on Lifetime Television with her mother that were ‘almost soft porn,’ with kissing and bedroom scenes.”

Personally I think the ones not getting in trouble are the geekier crowd who don’t watch those type of shows and have realistic views about their actions and their repercussions…that geeks don’t have sex for the first time until well in their 20s.

No matter who you are voting for or what your political affiliation is there are some lines you shouldn’t cross. One of those is to stage a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the website of the opposing viewpoint. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to the website of the group against California’s Proposition 8 that would ban same-sex marriage.

Wired: The Secret Service is now investigating the denial-of-service attack on NOonprop8.com, an attack that began Wednesday afternoon and eventually made the site unreachable that evening, according to spokeswoman Julia Spiess.

No on Prop 8 described the attack as “what appears to be a coordinated attack designed to bring the system down.”

Distributed Denial of Service attacks work by sending floods of fake requests to a website in order to prevent legitimate users from getting in. Attackers often use a network of compromised computers — known as a botnet — to send the traffic from multiple locations, which makes filtering more difficult. Motives for such attacks range from revenge to ransom.

As of Thursday morning, the site was back up and running normally after the site’s technicians made hardware and software changes, Spiess said.

The attack came right after the group issued a fund raising appeal ahead of the final weekend before Tuesday’s vote. The measure seeks to ban same-sex marriages in California, which became legal in June this year after the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s laws banning gay marriage, finding them unconstitutional.

I have a feeling this won’t be the last time we’ll see this strong-armed tactic used to silence people’s political opinion.

MySQL is by far my favorite database and I use it for a ton of stuff. Web interfaces are clunky though and writing code can be time consuming. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just view all the info in your database in without the messy interface or having to write 60 lines of code? Well you can with Sequel Pro.

Sequel Pro is a Mac only program based on (the now dead) CocoaMySQL which allows you to easily and painlessly interact with your MySQL database. Just like CocoaMySQL, Sequel Pro is easy to use but that’s about where it ends. Sequel has been updated to use the new Leopard styling. You can save your connection information so you don’t have to worry about remembering usernames, passwords and i.p. addresses for multiple databases. Buttons at the bottom of the interface allow you to add/drop tables, rows and columns, duplicate columns and rows and refresh the database.

Sequel Pro is currently FREE but if you like the program you should consider donating to the developers.

So what do you get if you take one of the worlds premier cartoon artists and throw in a side of sci-fi writer/director/producer Joss Whedon? Why, you get a motion comic of one of the most popular selling comic book franchises of all time, the Xmen.

The video, being hosted on YouTube by Marvel Comics, places Cyclops, Wolverine, Kitty Pride, Beast (is that Kelsey Grammar?) and Emma Frost at the recently rebuilt school of Professor Xavier. The voice overs are good. The story is excellent. Not being able to embed it in my page to show you (thanks Marvel) sucks.

Here’s a link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1ynMkd_v1s

Enjoy!

If you’re looking for the perfect gift for your 5 year old niece or nephew this Christmas and don’t want to break the bank but still want to out-do your misbegotten brother get the kids one of the revamped iPod Shuffles.

Apple has released all new iPod Shuffles, the little clip on iPod that gives you hours of music enjoyment. The shuffles feature hot new colors. The Shuffle comes in either a 1gb (240 songs) or 2gb (500 songs) and start at just $49.

Apple Store

Although not as high as originally predicted, Apple released it’s Q4 results reporting over a whopping 2,611,000 Mac’s shipped and 11,052,00 iPods for a total of $7.9 billion in revenue.

Apple: “Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2008 fourth quarter ended September 27, 2008. The Company posted revenue of $7.9 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of $904 million, or $1.01 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 34.7 percent, up from 33.6 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 41 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

In accordance with the subscription accounting treatment required by GAAP, the Company recognizes revenue and cost of goods sold for iPhone™ and Apple TV® over their economic lives. Adjusting GAAP sales and product costs to eliminate the impact of subscription accounting, the corresponding non-GAAP measures* for the quarter are $11.68 billion of ‘Adjusted Sales’ and $2.44 billion of ‘Adjusted Net Income.’

Apple shipped 2,611,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth and 17 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 11,052,000 iPods during the quarter, representing eight percent unit growth and three percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 6,892,000 compared to 1,119,000 in the year-ago-quarter.

‘Apple just reported one of the best quarters in its history, with a spectacular performance by the iPhone—we sold more phones than RIM,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. ‘We don’t yet know how this economic downturn will affect Apple. But we’re armed with the strongest product line in our history, the most talented employees and the best customers in our industry. And $25 billion of cash safely in the bank with zero debt.’

‘We’re very pleased to have grown revenue 35 percent and to have generated $9.1 billion in cash in fiscal 2008,’ said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. ‘Looking ahead, visibility is low and forecasting is challenging, and as a result we are going to be prudent in predicting the December quarter. We are providing a wide range for our guidance, targeting revenue of $9.0 to $10.0 billion and earnings per diluted share between $1.06 and $1.35.’”

I’ve been a Bento user since it first came out almost a year ago and I must say, it’s awesome. For those who don’t know Bento is a simple, easy to use database with an easy to use interface. Bento makes keeping track of things like your old vinyl album collection, or your dvd library, or even your personal finances easy. A couple of swift clicks and you’ve got a database up and running. That’s why when I got the email from FileMaker, makers of Bento, that version 2 was out with bug and stability fixes, support for video and audio files in the database and the ability to work with Excel and Numbers I was stoked. There’s only one problem though, if you want to upgrade from Bento 1 to Bento 2 get out your wallet.

Pony Up
Bento 1 users wishing to upgrade to Bento 2 are being asked to pay full price of $49 for the upgrade. The Product Updates section of the FileMaker Bento website states:

“You will want to purchase a Bento 2 License Key through the FileMaker Store to continue using Bento 2 after the 30-day trial period has expired. (Bento)”

and even warns consumers to have their original Bento 1 .dmg file incase they want to downgrade again:

“This new version will overwrite and update necessary files automatically. (Please make sure you have your original Bento 1.0 installation .dmg file or CD if you choose to reinstall Bento 1.0) (Bento)”

No Service
I use many programs including Bento on a daily basis and it’s not unusual have have one or two programs update as I’m using them. But I’ve never had Bento update. That’s why I find it strange that the new version 2 of Bento:

“Resolves issues related to overall stability. (Bento)”

If the product is unstable shouldn’t these bug fixes have been pushed to consumers?

The End
I could see a brand new product being priced at full-price but since Bento 2 is obviously an upgrade to Bento 1 and contains crucial bug-fixes the logic behind asking consumers to pay full price seems strange and not a very profitable business model. I know I will not be purchasing Bento 2 anytime soon and, given their track record for charging for bug-fixes and not supporting their products, I would caution against anyone purchasing from FileMaker in general.