Vitor Rodrigues

Originally uploaded by Telzey.

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When even the banks have no money to buy Windows licenses, something must be wrong with its price…

via digg

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After Digg had to deal with its users response to deleted entries from the system regarding the HD-DVD cracking key, not it is the time for Flickr to deal with a similar issue.

The summary: Rebecca found out that some of her work was being sold without her authorization and posted it on Flickr. Later, Flickr staff deleted her post and all the associated comments, and now the community is striking back, creating even more discussion topics about it. As an update, the “thieves” claimed that they were fooled to and didn’t know they were selling copyrighted work.

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No, I didn’t get any tokens yet, but check this post at joost.com:

“The good news is, that everyone who applies before we close will get access to try out Joost within the next couple of weeks – how is that for a treat? )”

Joost.com is closing Beta registrations next Thursday, but they guarantee that everyone who registers for the demo by then will receive an invitation in the next couple of weeks. If you are looking forward to participate in the beta program, this is your chance to get in.

Apply here for Joost Beta!

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Following up on Pedro’s post about some curious search keywords that led to his site, here is the list of the most common keywords that led to my blog during March:

As for the curious search keywords, I don’t really have them. Probably because my blog is in english and there are better positioned sites for every possible keyword. The only strange keyword I have is “assuntos 5 a 8 serei”. But I do admin a website in portuguese, about my village, that used to have lots of strange keywords but over the last month about 90% of the keywords are related with the site content.

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flickr just introduced email notifications for recent activity and contact’s uploaded photos. This notifications have been available in RSS format for longer than I remember, and now they implemented email notification. This may sound so Web1.0, but Flickr is no longer a service just for geeks and I believe that most of people using it have no idea of what RSS means. I say this because most of the photography people I know either have a flickr account or visit flickr regularly, while most of my teammates at work have no idea of what flickr is.

The notification works just like forums or mailing lists notifications, with the option of receiving a new email per new event, or receiving batch emails, either in a daily or weekly basis.

To configure your email notifications just go to your recent activity or account pages. 

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Thank god Akismet exists and it has a WordPress plugin! Every day I have quite a few spam comments about viagra, casinos and sex. From the 2000+ spam comments in the last months, I found 2 that weren’t spam, so now I quickly look at the akismet page to see if there is any innocent comment in there. Usually there isn’t any, but there are some comments that make me laugh sometimes. One of those examples is this one: 

“More or less nothing seems important. I’ve just been letting everything happen without me recently. I can’t be bothered with anything recently, but such is life. My life’s been generally bland today. Not much on my mind these days, but eh.”

The attempt to fool akismet (or other spam detection systems) is such that spammers avoid the link dump type of comments and even write a normal comment that wouldn’t look like spam to the common user. And the goal is just one: to leave the url to their website (that almost for sure is about viagra, casinos or sex ) so their rank on search engines goes up.

 

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Some of us have been using opensource software for a long time, but how many times have we contributed back to the community? Indeed, it looks much simpler to use a product than to help developing it. However, sometimes this is not the case. There are a lot of projects out there waiting for our help. So, if you feel it’s time to give it back to the community, here are some ways to do it:

• open bugs when the software doesn’t work. Don’t just quit using the software because it doesn’t work properly. Open a bug and you will see that eventually it will be fixed.
• if you have the know-how or the will to do it, fix the bug by yourself and submit your patch, either to the mailing lists or attach it to the bug report.
• subscribe to the mailing lists of the projects you are interested. Soon you will find yourself giving your opinion and suggestion and thus contributing to the project.
• if stability is not a major concern for you, keep updating your software to the latest version and give your input back to the developers.
• help developing new features. Often opensource projects lack new features because the lack o resources to develop them.
  

So, you still think you cannot help because you are not a developer, or you don’t know the programming language being used by the project you want to help? Projects need help in many other ways other than developing code:

•  you can help with translations. Translate it to your own language, or if a translation already exists, review it to ensure accuracy.
• help writing and reviewing the docs.
• you can help by just being a test user and reporting back the problems.
• help maintaining website, moderating forums, etc..
  

Do you feel the urge to help? A good place to start is sourceforge.net. Besides the thousands (or even millions?) of projects that you can browse trough, there is a “Help Wanted” section, where you can see all the requests for help from projects being hosted at sourcefourge. From help with design, to development and documentation, I’m sure you will find something that interests you. 

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Aqui: O JOGO

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