For the second year in a row, the Southern Minnesota chapter of BDPA dominated in the annual HSCC computer competition and came 1st place baby! w00t! All that studying and practicing all over the town was worth something then ;)

Props to Zack and the whole team for making this a reality. You guys (and gals, Lauren :) really do rock. Proof is in the fact that no one came even close to our scores. Come check us out here and see how we’ve done in the past; inshallah, we’ll continue in our success.

Shout out to Ebrahim and my cuz in the pic. We really rocked that last night at the banquet! Unfortunately, we’ll be missing two integral parts of our team of the last few years; Lauren Pemberton and Kunle Roberts. I’ll really miss you guys and I hope you do well at Rice University. I’ll try to keep Ahmed under control and I’ll make sure to always invoke the 65% rule whenever the chance arises (2EZ), lol.

Final Salute, team:

Viewzi is unique because it lets you first of all choose from a variety of search views. These include and mp3 Search View, Celeb Photo View, TechCrunch Search View, Web ScreenShot View, as well as many others.

It get’s better though. For example, you can see in the Detailed Information View a general site information summary and traffic drawn from places like del.icio.us, Alexa PageRank, and Google. It also shows recently overheard search results from Twitter!

Because of it’s ease of use and great features, Viewzi will become a hit for anyone who wants a better searching experience. Of course, you might think there’s the factor of pages indexed and all, but that doesn’t really matter, because it’s all limited to a certain number of sites that Viewzi searches like TechCrunch, or major news sites. This might hamper it’s usability, but considering that many search results can be found at these sites, I say who cares.

You have to remember though for more and better search results, you’re going to have to stick with Google.

I first saw this on hiphopmusic.com from SocialBrowse. It was submitted by a commenter that goes by the name of “as” on July 31, 2008 at 2:20. Thought I might share it with you guys. Ludacris’ lyrics plus the video can be found above from the link to hiphopmusic.

I’m back on it like I just signed my record deal
Yeah the best is here, the Bentley Coup paint is dripping wet, it got sex appeal
Never should have hated, You never should’ve doubted him
With a slot in the president’s iPod Obama shouted ‘em

Said I handle my biz and I’m one of his favorite rappers
Well give Luda a job make me a special staffer
Better yet put me in office, make me your vice president
Hillary hated on you, but the Clintons are so irrelevant

Jesse talking slick and apologizing for what?
If you said it then you meant it no ifs ands or buts?
And all you other politicians trying to hate on my man,
watch us win majority vote in every state on my man

You can’t stop what’s bout to happen, we bout to make history
The first black president is destined and it’s meant to be
The threats ain’t fazing us, the nooses or the jokes
So get off your ass, black people, it’s time to get out and vote!

Black man in the White House, I’m sure that’s got ‘em terrified
McCain don’t belong in any chair unless his doctor verifies (he’s old)
Yeah I said it and Bush should have convulsions
Reading ‘My Pet Goat’ and STILL looking for weapons of mass destruction
When FOX is talking I hear nothing even relevant
Dubya is the worst of all 43 presidents

Get out and vote or the end’ll be near
The world is ready for change because Obama is here
’cause Obama is here
The world is ready for change because Obama is here, yeah
cuz Obama is here

Posted by email from genieyclo’s posterous

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed this startup by the name of Project Playlist, which calls itself a Social Music Experiment. It basically follows the whole music+social interface scheme alot of the music sites have adopted like imeem or last.fm. In playlist’s story, you signup and search for music. In the search results page, you see a listing of all the resulting songs with a little flash player by each song that plays the song when clicked on. Along with the usual stuff listed with each song is something that I personally was flabbergasted at first to see. They put the URL of each and every mp3 song they have on their listings. Note: the songs are not in like a database of their own, but picked from across the web. Picture what this has in store for record sellers. Yeah, FAIL. Take a look for yourself. Anyone can download as many songs as they want–and remember that they’re all in good mp3 quality.

Kinda hard to see where this goes though, seeing that soo much music is pirated these days. Bittorrent has made this especially easy, as has email and host of other technologies. Out of this whole affair, you either get some very happy social-media consumers and a very happy Project Playlist, or the gallows will be pulled out for the easier to take care of, which is ofcourse, the latter.

Anyways, when you see a track you like, you can add it to a playlist of yours. Playlists are in flash format, but you can also get them as .m3u and standalone flash or .ram

What I’m wondering is, however, how they managed to catalog so much music like this. idk, but it must be pretty ingenious.

There’s a new file sharing service that essentially functions something like a socially-interactive p2p program called Wuala. It’s a startup developed by Dominik Grolimund and a team of developers under the sponsorship of Caleido Inc.

It’s pretty interesting because it’s quite different from it’s competitors like Bittorent. It’s a Windows program that you can use to upload any type of file you want, and there’s a huge amount of space you can have (of course, huge is a relative term depending on how big a file your uploading). You get 1 G free when you start up, and get an additional 1 G for every friend you add.

One of the strangest things about it that sets apart from all the rest is that it encrypts all your files (128-bit AES) locally and saves them on others’ hardrives around the world who are also using Wuala. Of course, you can still see your own files any time you want, even if your offline. The thing about the encryption though is that since it’s all done locally…if you for some reason forget your password..you’re pretty much screwed..Unless you open a new account and reupload all of your private files.

That brings us to another feature of the file uploading of Wuala; you can set it’s level of “sociability”. Any file can either by deemed Public, Shared-with certain friends you explicitly choose, or Private as long as it doesn’t overide the settings set for the folder it’s in. Like if a file is in a folder you’ve designated as private, you can’t designate one of the pictures as public.

There’s groups you can join and create and friends that you can befriend, so there’s the social aspect to it. Like I said in a past post, I found out about Ubuntu Muslim Edition in a group created for it in Wuala.

TechCruch UK did a piece on how similiar Wuala seemed to Bittorrent, at least in concept. This is true to a point. The whole upload, and download huge files for mass consumption. After that, they’re nothing alike. Bittorrent has a way that a torrent is uploaded to it’s server and after that it’s broken up into something like pieces of puzzle as MujahideenRyder described. Wuala is doesn’t do this and furthermore, it has a much more interactive and dynamic interface than any Bittorrent client.

I personally think it’s pretty sound in all fields, with good aesthetics, clean code (I haven’t seen any glitches yet), it’s still in a invitational alpha right now (I got one a while back), but they’re going to unveil the official beta in 2 weeks on the 14th of August from their offices in Zurich, Switzerland.

SocialBrowse is a new Firefox extension built by Zack Garbow and Dave Fowler, 2 participants in the last spring Y Combinator session. This xpi is pretty amazing. It’s an unobtrusive, intuitive, easy to use web app that sits on your sidebar in Firefox. You can submit pages that you find interesting using a little button at the top of your browser and further categorize your submission under a number of groupings. No page to go to, nothing. All smooth. Want to comment on a page using the SocialBrowse interface? A little dialog box comes up in the top right of your page. Message, comment, and submission notifications come up on your sidebar and in real time with no browser reloading. You can add someone as a friend to follow what they comment on and what they submit. You can comment on any page by using another little button adjacent to the first. When you submit any page, you will ever be in it’s SocialBrowse history and get credit for posting it, for there will be a little icon on the top of the page with your name and avatar on it with info on you that expands once your cursor hovers over it.

The importance of SocialBrowse is how it’ll revolutionize Social Media in the internet. Everything will be drastically different now with this new and very-easy-to-use tool. A simple click of the button is all you need. With more features to it than the StumbleUpon toolbar and more aesthetically pleasing as well as the simple and user-friendly interface everyone’s so used to with sites like Twitter, I think that SocialBrowse will come out as a hugely popular tool for rating pages and following up on what your friends are doing.

Posted by email from genieyclo’s posterous

Well, I will do my version of it all:

The Basics

• As anyone does (or should if they don’t), I use Firefox, mine being particularly loaded up with different addons.
• Anything Google; it’s like my primary center for everything online, and quite a few things off.
• SUPER Encoder/Decoder is a must for me. This baby encodes and decodes basically any multimedia format to any other that you want it to. Waayy better than the trashy stuff you find as webapps. Of course, one of the things that makes it soo nice besides its performance is that it’s free.
• uTorrent. Let’s see..I get games, movies, whole seasons of shows, software, Quran..basically anything I want and that’s usable on a computer from there. It’s indispensable for me. Reliable interface that’s easy to use. Not malware or adware like Limewire or other Bittorrent clients..so yeah. It’s great. I use it alot.
• PowerISO is an awesome archiving/unarchiving, mounting, and CD/DVD image processing program essential for any major software that’s in ISO form for quick download and unarchival, like your normal .uif and .daa that’s so common in torrents nowadays.
• CCleaner is a great cleaning tool to run at the end of the day when it’s finally time to let the computer sleep and your body as well. It also has a great registry feature I’ve heard-much better than the notorious RegistryCleaner. idk, I’ve never used that function; cleaning my computer up every night in a very efficient and easy-to-use way is enough for me.
• Notepad2 is the main text editor I use for coding, although I just got Dreamweaver and I’ve been trying out Notepad++ since some of the LifeHacker editors recommended it. It seems to me though, that I’m just way more used to Notepad2, and that I’ll probably stick with it for awhile.
• iTunes and WMPlayer are what I use for media. Never really went with any of the series of Windows Media Centers after they all decided to crash on me repeatedly.
• I’m a Windows guy, so I use the Office 2003 set when I need to.
• Adobe CS3 Design Premium for graphic design as well as some fun time.
• I’m also testing out a new file sharing service that essentially functions something like a socially-interactive p2p program called Wuala.

Primary OS

• Windows XP on my desktop, working on Ubuntu Hardy Heron still with that one, and Vista on my notebook, and again, getting Hardy Heron Desktop Version downloaded onto that also.
• The reason I’m getting Ubuntu is because of it’s great usability and access, and also to convert it later to Muslim Edition.
• And yes, Vista does suck. My philosophy on this is that Vista, like it’s forerunner a little back Windows Millennium Edition, is just a transition Operating System..and that’s why it’s so glitchy and slowish for some. Some includes me. On the transition topic though, if you look at the Operating Systems right before and after Windows Millennium as well as Vista that were developed by Microsoft, you’ll notice they were good and stable receiving good ratings (i.e. Windows 98, 2000, and XP). For Vista, if you try to look ahead, look ahead to the next in-line in the Windows family, Windows Vienna, due to come out in ‘10. Of course, when I say this, I blatantly ignore the server editions that have just come out from Windows after Vista that are reportedly very stable and functional. Reason: most people don’t use them and have never heard of them. The ones I’m talking about are Windows Home Server and Windows Server 2008.

Hardware

• I currently share with my family the family desktop (which I’ve “majorly boosted up” as my friend Rashid likes to say). It’s a Compaq 5000 that’s served us faithfully unlike many others of it’s brethren. It’s the one with XP.
• I own a Sony Vaio NR Series with Vista which is starting to get screwy (I got 3 Blue Screens of Death just last week, yikes!). Visuals are great, esp for games, but I’m going to reconfigure the whole thing and download a Hardy Heron Desktop and convert it to Muslim Edition.
• I still own a Compaq notebook that was doomed from the start when my sister first laid her hands on it somehow managed to burn the battery and make the keyboard type all backwards and weird. Once the screen bailed out, I ripped it off and just hooked up the main base to another monitor. Works :)
• A very old Dell Latitude that works when it feels like it, I just use it for low-key Sega games.

Peripherals

• I’ve got a mouse on my desktop..standard Microsoft optical with the 3 buttons.
• 2 speakers with my desktop. Nothing fancy, just speakers.
• A HP Deskjet printer. Ancient but very efficient.
• A scanner that doesn’t work anymore.
• Qwest LAN thingeemajig and Netgear router.
• 2 extra monitors hooked up with my Desktop that I sometimes connect to the notebook.
• A crap load of CDS. Like a ton. Literally. 99% empty of them are empty because I don’t know what to do with them. Gift from my aunt who moved away. Don’t ask.
• That’s all the stuff on my “desktop” (like the pun ;) ?, I kno it’s bad :)..but besides that nothing special for my laptops/notebooks except one of those mini mice that my dad got from his work.

Webapps

Whoopee! My favorite part!

• Google, Google, and more Google. I use it for everything. gChat for IM, Gmail for email, GoogleReader for my RSS feeds (including my own, yes I’m that conceited :), Google Pages for free web hosting on plain HTML uploads, basically all their services minus a dear few like Orkut and Jotspot. That list for the ones that I don’t use might be growing considering how many companies big, veracious old Google is rumored to buying these days..
• SocialBrowse, which is a Firefox extension made by my friend Zack Garbow and his partner Dave Fowler up in Silicon Valley. Cheers to Zack and Dave!
• There’s so many sites I have an account at, it would be futile to try to name them all. Besides Google, other ones I use quite a bit are Wikipedia, Facebook, any OpenID site, Stumbleupon, and Ning.
• Glubble is a family filtering site which I’ve been using for my sisters. It’s Firefox extension that you as an admin can certain pages for your kids to go on. Kids can request to view a site and it’s in your jurisdiction to choose to let them. Very useful for little kids, but once they hit 7~8, I think it’s high time to welcome them to the real Internet world with a good in your face of what you can encounter and how to avoid it. Protectionism is only good for so long.
• Another app that Zack made is 8aweek, which is a sortof time saver utility that runs as a toolbar in your browser. He designed this before SocialBrowse, but it’s still pretty sweet. I don’t use it anymore.
• There’s a startup that I worked on with a friend of mine, Adwait, called SocialDecks. It’s basically a way to learn with flash cards online, except socially. The whole social part is still being developed, however, and we’re still in beta.

Self Assessment

• I think that I’m someone who likes to check new things out alot, but I’m wary of course, and I see what others say about it first, some times waiting for a TechCrunch or Technorati review first. Still, I think I get to see quite a few new things ahead of others which is always fun *_^
• If I like something that’s new, and I think I’ll actually use it for awhile and I don’t have anything else alot like it that I’m already good with..then I’ll usually adopt it. Some times some things are just so tantalizing I have to test them out even if I have some thing kinda like it; like the whole Wuala vs uTorrent thing. I’m sticking with both in this case though, because they’re not that similiar, each has alot to offer that the other doesn’t.

Wowzers. That’s what I thought when I bumped into Ubuntu Muslim Edition on Wuala; a p2p/storage program. It’s basically a distro on Ubuntu which you can install from 2 cds as a Desktop version (I haven’t seen a Server version yet) on another OS like XP, a computer that doesn’t have any OS, or you can convert it from another version of Ubuntu like Hardy Heron. It features certain programs written for an OS with an “Islamic” environment. Some of them include a program for online Quran recition from versebyversequran.com, alot of nice quality Islamic/Ubuntu artwork, a Quran study tool, a program called Monajat that acts as a popup that alerts you to when it’s prayer time, a firefox addon that shows the prayer times and also alerts you to them (I haven’t installed it yet, so I don’t know if it’s the fzami prayer time addon which lots of people use), lots of multimedia support, quite a few educational games for the kids, the usual goodies that come with every nice Ubuntu; Java, an archiver/unarchiver for zip files, skype, Ubuntu Tweak, Glub and Splash screen utility programs and host of other useful things. It also has a web content control tool to filter out inappropriate sites. Also, it includes an Arabic translation of the whole OS in Arabic with other features such as an Arabic Firefox.

All in all, two thumbs up to the Ubuntu Muslim Edition team. You can visit them at their site. They also have a Google Group for updates and support, although there seems to be a little spam. I also noticed that brother Chaidir did a peice in Malaya-I think-on integrating Ubuntu ME with Mac4Linux. Jun Auza also did a review on Ubuntu ME, except from a Christian’s perspective.

In the meanwhile, check out some of the screenshots:

More can be found here.

The real reason is that this web app was built in 4 days. Yeah. Wowzers. Congrats to the Carsonified team which according to TechCrunch was composed of two developers, one designer / front-end developer, two bloggers, one copywriter, and three PR folks. They did it as a challenge to themselves, and recommended working on any app even if it’s not going to become like big, well-known brand just to build the whole team feeling and ethic.

This app is one of many new ones that I’ve seen come out built in Django. They all seem to be saying the same thing; that Django is a much more flexible framework to work with than others like Rails. A friend of mine was recently working on a new Firefox web app called SocialBrowse which he recently put out in beta with Dave Fowler. It too was built in a Django framework. So I guess the idea is expect more of them to be coming out soon.