Welcome to Smuggle Me

Google finally integrated previously acquired JotSpot into my beloved Google Apps under the name of Google Sites. Scott Johnston announced the launch on the Official Google Blog. Techcrunch describes the 16 month wait is over.

It took an extra day for Google Apps to propagate it to my Google Apps accounts, but I’m very happy with it. Having a simple to set up wiki is a great addition for a business and something I’d been wanting recently.

I’ve copied the email that Google sent out to Google Apps users, but it seems like they’re selling the wrong thing. Are there really that many people with Google Accounts that are going to want to use this as their main website? I wouldn’t guess that many. Not to mention those people that do want that feature will already have Google Pages doing that for them.

The neat feature of Google Sites for me is that I can have a company wiki at something like w.crashutah.com Easy to remember and easy to access, but not my main site. I’m surprised that the email from google didn’t talk about pointing a subdomain to this type of site. It’s definitely a welcome addition to me. Remember how many things you can do with a wiki? Now you can do it for free on your own domain using Google Sites.

Letter from Google Apps about Google Sites:
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Is this the open source way to create a social network? I wonder what the downside of running a social network off an open source product would be long term.

I had a simple looking file conversion tool shown to me. I’ve used a number of different ones around the web, but this one seems to cover pretty much every file type I can imagine.

Here’s the incredibly long list of formats that it can convert:

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I love the idea of having all my videos on my computer so that they are easily accessed. I hate getting off my butt. This looks like a pretty simple process to convert DVDs to videos that you can watch on your PC. I’m sure there are more, but this looks very promising.

I think you all know that I’m totally in love with the Asus eee that my wife gave me for Christmas. It’s a sweet little machine to use in front of the TV. However, sometimes I just find it necessary to have access to some of the things on my windows machine (bookmarks, word documents, visio documents, etc) Today I was happy to find instructions to do remote desktop from my Asus eee to my windows xp machine.

Here they are as much for my reference as yours:

CTRL-ALT-T to get a terminal window

Full screen remote desktop
rdesktop -f 192.168.15.100

Remote Desktop in a window
rdesktop -g 800×420 192.168.15.100
(Of course replace it with your IP address)

Add -u username to avoid having to enter the user. I still wish I could add a launcher so I didn’t have to do it command line, but I haven’t taken the time to figure that out yet.

How much downtime is acceptable is a question that must be answered. Some people think that you should never have down time, but they just don’t understand technology. There’s always a certain percentage chance that something unexpected could happen and bring you down. A quick look at this list of social network downtime shows this reality. I can’t believe that bebo was down for 12 hours. That’s an eternity in social network time. The most impressive stat on the list is MySpace only being down 25 minutes this year. That’s very impressive considering the volume of traffic they have.

It’s an interesting and compelling idea to think about an airline flight that is free. Of course, many would argue that the flight isn’t free, because they’re charging for all the extras. The key question is, how many extras do you need? If you are someone who likes all the extras, then you’re subsidizing the flight cost for someone like me who doesn’t mind going without some of the things like airline food.

Of course, the advertising and hotel and rental car affiliates can make the price reasonable for the passenger who wants all the extras and free for the few of us that don’t really need much. Sounds like a great idea to me. Now if we only lived in London.

If you like free, then you should also read this article on the economy of free.

I’ve been working the past couple evenings to get a Wordpress blog to integrate with a bbPress forum. They’re both from Automattic so I thought that it would be a no brainer. Turns out it should have been, but I just missed one link. I’m putting them here for those looking for a reference on integrating Wordpress with bbPress.

Here’s the Wordpress plugin that you need to integrate it. I didn’t activate it until after I had created both the Wordpress install and the bbPress install. This plugin also requires you to set the prefix for your bbPress database name. Simple enough to do on the tab that’s created for bbPress once the plugin’s activated.

This is the bbPress Wordpress Integration plugin that is used in bbPress to do the integration. Of course this is activated after installing bbPress. Just make sure when you install bbPress that you set all the right information in config.php I won’t detail that out since the documentation is good for that and is really very straightforward.

A lot of the documentation points to a Display Name plugin to show the Wordpress display name in bbPress rather than the login. It’s a great idea and would be great if it worked. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work, but the comments made on the plugin have a better workable method to make this happen in the bbPress template which in reality is probably where it should be anyway. Although I would shy away from loading all of Wordpress on the bbPress pages if possible. I can imagine that it will slow things down.

The Spaces and special character in login name Plugin isn’t even an official plugin and I haven’t tested it myself, but it loads well and seems like a simple enough plugin that I added it in to prevent errors in the future. Let’s hope now that they’re putting some resources towards bbPress we’ll get some things like this in the core.

I haven’t added the Human Test Plugin yet, but I expect that I’ll probably need to do that sooner or later or we’ll be swimming in fake accounts before we know it.

There are a bunch of other plugins that would be cool, but we’ll see what the manager of Crowdsource This wants to do. A signature plugin might be cool. The Private Message plugin might be useful. Probably a few more I haven’t looked at yet.

Well, hopefully this helps some people trying to integrate Wordpress with bbPress. Next up is to find a good theme. Possibly a look and feel designed for Wordpress and bbPress would be best. I’ve read that there are a few out there. If someone knows where they are, please let me know.

Today I came across this new website. They sell VC shirts like this one:

I saw it and thought about Mark from YouBeTheVC since his focus has been nanotech.

On the YouBeTheVC note, I’m happy to say that I made it into the Top 100 semifinal round. Now I just need to clean up my business plan.

I’d been looking around for a while for something that I could use to help create some relatively cool looking Logo or button generators that I could just use as a simple landing page for my site. Today in a search I found this site which had a bunch of good resources for doing just that. You can check out what I did with it on Fantasy High.