Long, long ago at the dawn of the public use of the internet, I convinced my employer to let me play with community building tools. One of the ones we brought online was ThePalace, a cross platform graphical chatroom with avatars, audio, an emote system, and simple games like chess and checkers. We brought it online in an attempt to interest the local community in the kinds of resources we were building (I worked for a family owned regional media company), and to a small extent we succeeded in getting local community participation, but for a complex set of reasons we mostly ended up overun with sometimes rowdy Australians. In a great example of what a small world we live in, several years after this one of them ended up in my office looking for work. He’d met his wife online and emigrated to the US, and this all came out during the interview process.

Anyway I mention all of this because today I happened across Hive7, and immediately thought ‘wow, it’s The Palace all over again!’ It’s worth checking out even if you have no real need for a browser based graphical chat system, just so you can admire what they’ve accomplished with a shedload of javascript. One word of advice though – bail on the first room as soon as you can. The number of people that tend to be congregated there will bring your browser to its knees, but there are several rooms and the interior tends to be less crowded.

Also note you may need to use Firefox to check this out – safari may choke on the javascript and opera definitely does.

I’ve talked now and then about how poor the broadband offerings are in the US compared to overseas. Check out this brief news item on betanews covering Comcast’s rollout of 16Mbit service in select markets in the US. Markets which just happen to be locations where Verizon is rolling out their high speed FIOS service. By way of comparison, in most markets cable companies are offering at best 5Mbit and in many markets they are still only offering 2 or 3Mbit service. What’s driven Comcast to offer 16Mbit? COMPETITION. Local communities should stop offering monopolies to the cable companies because lacking competition, they’re not going to provide better services. The lack of ubiquitous symetrical high speed broadband in the US is leaving us at a competitive disadavantage compared to asia especially, a competitive disadvantage that will reveal itself over the next decade or so as they become the innovators in the network space we invented. You can see tangible evidence of this stuff already happening in places like South Korea.

This stuff really really pisses me off. Republican leadership in Washington has only been hurting things since the FCC has been bending over backwards to give the network providers what they ask for, even letting them sneak out of prexisting arrangements. (anyone remember that the FCC declared that AOL had to open its IM networks more than 5 years ago, for example?). Meanwhile I can only push things back up my pipe at 20k/sec, which is 20% of what I used to get from Time Warner back when they first rolled out broadband service in Portland, Maine in the mid 90’s. So in 10 years or so, my upstream is actually an order of magnitude lower than it used to be. Meanwhile my cable company is running tv ads promoting the use of my cable modem as a video phone to chat with my grandmother. Right. In the parallel universe where the south korean telco is providing me unfettered bandwidth and not playing at being a media congolmerate. Fuckers.

Anyway, that’s a bit of an angry ramble, but I’ll close with the observation that there is hope for us, at least on the east coast in Verizon territory where I am, since Verizon intends to push FIOS out to all customers eventually. (though at a guess it will take them forever to reach me in western MA. Good thing we’re bringing in Internet 2 to my place of work).

Check out the Pasteboard Recorder, a great little free utility for those using OSX. It stores a configurable number of the last things you copied to your clipboard and can handle many data types, not just text. I’ve been using it quite a bit since I got my new laptop, and it makes a handy blogging tool for when you’re working to collect a set of links that will be used in your weblog post.

(Pasteboard Recorder is a universal binary for those of you who’ve made the transition to Macintel)

If you’re a heavy web user, chances are high that you have a gazillion and one accounts and logins to various web services. Unless you’re a system admin or have training in computing security, chances are you’re also only using a couple of passwords across all of those services. Chances are also fairly good you’ve never had an account hacked and so you’re going to ignore what I’m about to say, but trust me: this is a bad thing. Here’s a model for you to consider using instead of just recycling the same old passwords over and over again. If you’re on a mac, go grab ciphsafe, and if you’re on a pc, go grab keepass. Each contains tools for automatically generating passwords of configurable levels of security, each endeavors to make it easy for you to copy and paste said passwords into whatever form you need to dump the credentials into, each is tiny and uses almost no system resources, and they’re both free. Now start using it. If you’re like me and use many different computers, go one step further. If you don’t already have one, buy yourself a cheap thumb drive and attach it to your keyring. Store the data file for the app on the thumb drive, and use file encryption if you’re on the mac to protect that file (keepass on the pc provides tools for protecting the data file in the application). Make sure to also make a backup of the data file on your primary computer periodically as well.

And if like me you have logins to sensitive stuff you really don’t want folks to be able to get into, use the ultra high security password generator. (yeah, I really use that for some stuff, and yeah I know it’s basically overkill but what they hey, I’m copying and pasting).

[update]

Discovered that there’s a linux/mac port effort underway for Keepass which you can scope out on the project page. It’s not quite ready for non-geeks yet (you have to grab the source from their subversion repository and compile it) but if you understand what I just wrote by all means go for it.