This past Thursday Google made public the source code to its new operating system, Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based on Linux, and based on some poking around under the hood, that flavor of Linux seems to be a mix of Debian's unstable and testing versions "squeeze" and "sid". But more on that in a little bit. All of Chrome OS runs in the Chrome web browser, with everything being web based. Even the contents of USB drives show up in a new Chrome Tab at the top of the page. The purpose of using Chrome and opening everything in a new tab is to maximize your desktop real-estate. Putting everything in tabs keeps everything organized. In the top left corner, you'll find the Chrome logo which brings you to the "apps panel" where you'll find links to web apps like Google Docs, Gmail, Hulu,... [More]

Being that I am always looking for projects to do and looking for things to improve (even for my own enjoyment), the other day I was looking at the current BarCamp Rochester website and thought, "how could this be improved?", and immediately opened up Photoshop and started to map out a new layout. Little did I know, some of my friends who are on the planning committee would get wind of my design and actually want to use my new implementation. See the current BarCamp website is in a wiki format, which fits the nature of BarCamp perfectly, but for the majority of us who have no clue how to work a wiki, we find it utterly confusing and tend to get a little lost. For example, one of the main problems from last year was that it wasn't 100% clear that to get on the list of attendees, you had to sign up and then edit yourself into the list of already existing participants. So here's some features that Im going ... [More]

So this week kicked off the first of the (hopefully) many installments of the CSH Seminar Series. This week we were gracious enough to have Kevin Purdy one of the senior editors of Lifehacker.com give us a talk on comments on the internet and how sites like Lifehacker and other blogs and social bookmaking sites deal with user comments, especially the really bad ones. We even got into a little bit of a discussion of "if you had a dream commenting system, how would you implement it?" and got some interesting responses from the audience.