Protecting your Intellectual Property / Trademarks

The Internet has made it easy for us to get ahold of information. Information about history, from literature, movies, gossip...the list goes on. And as social networking becomes commonplace amoung the young the ease to find out personal information online has increased dramatically.

If you haven't heard, there have been cases where Facebook users have been caught out saying nasty things about their employers and in one case getting caught taking a sicky when they weren't really sick, costing the employee their job.

Evermore is your own trademark, your own intellectual property, your name and everything that goes with it, now something that can condemn you or make you shine. Once upon a time your name and your reputation made its way via word of mouth and if you ever stuffed up it'd be rare if your next employer would find out. How that contrasts with today. I can lookup my doctor/hair dresser/physio/massuse/whatever on Facebook and find out who his friends are, see the photos of his last birthday party, so on...

But how does this really affect you? If I was interviewing you tomorrow, prior to our appointment I would have Google'd you, Facebook'd you, and so on. If I was hiring you for web design, and I found a poor eye-sore of a personal home page, I'd probably discard you there and then. If I was hiring you for something else and found you bad-mouthing your last employer on Facebook, I'd probably discard you too.

So this lead myself to ask, what can I do to protect my online reputation and my name. The obvious thing is commonsense. Don't act online in anyway you wouldn't act offline. The second, and something I strongly encourage you to do is I registered [myname].com, i.e. leighmcculloch.com. With Google searches it's easy to get a domain in the top 10 if it exactly matches a search, so if you put up a web page stating who you are and your qualifications, you'll have a presentable online version of yourself for future employers to find. If you're not web-savvy, there are a few options online that make it very easy to get a website with little to no technical knowledge.

NSW Loses Public Holidays

It's only just come to my attention that New South Wales in Australia (where I reside) will likely be losing two public holidays this year.

• ANZAC Day (25th April 2009) - falling this year on a Saturday.
• Boxing Day (26th December 2009) - also falling on a Saturday.

As I crawl around online forums, reading peoples opinions, and seeing the email petitions, I can't help feel a nasty taste in the back of my throat. There is a real sense that we deserve these public holidays. On one side I love public holidays, as do most Australians, and while I stand undecided on Boxing Day, I have to highlight that ANZAC Day has nothing to do with having a day off. Technically ANZAC Day is still a public holiday, but it falls on a Saturday, as it should this year. The day is marked as a public holiday, which allows anyone who works on the 25th April, whether it be a week day or a Saturday, to remember and honor the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

The solidiers who fought at Gallipoli gave there lives for all Australians. They put their lives on the line, and you Australian's are bitching about working one extra day this year? Just because ANZAC Day doesn't fall on a day you work?!

Flash Webcam

Autocam in action. © 2009 Leigh McCulloch, All Rights Reserved.

If you have a computer on a secure network you'll understand the frustration in trying to access a webcam on the computer remotely. About the only way you can really monitor a room or desk when the computer is behind a NAT or firewall, is to have that computer upload to an FTP server. But what good is that? You then have to download the images individually, it's pretty painful. Plus most apps out there (free or paid) that do this, only allow uploading to a single file. So you'll only ever have the latest image.

That's why I wrote autocam. Autocam is programmed in Flash ActionScript 3, and basically sits there trying to load an image over and over. It correctly handles partial images, detecting if only part of an image has been uploaded onto the FTP server, as well as caches all the images it's currently loaded. On first load it automatically displays the latest picture uploaded, but dragging the slider at the bottom will disable the auto showing the latest, and will allow you to flip through all the previous files it has.

It's not ground breaking, and it isn't designed to solve all your problems. But it'll allow you to view a webcam, and then scroll back through frames you've downloaded. Use it for personal stuff, but © 2009 Leigh McCulloch, All Rights Reserved. If you use windows, you can use Fwink to upload from the webcam, and on Mac I think EvoCam does FTP too.

Download: autocam-1.1.zip

Update: A friend has written basically the same thing, but in Silverlight instead of Flash: autocam_silverlight.zip

Digital TV Australia

This is a JPEG 72dpi version of the poster freely available at scifi.com/battlestar.

Doomsday Labs has an article on Digital TV this morning, in the context of America. Well here in Australia the government has been pushing Digital TV as well, and I welcome it. Sometime in the near future we'll be losing Analog and Digital will be the only available medium for mainstream free TV.

Advantages like more channels, and the ability for stations to easily setup new channels is the main thing that interests me. For too long Australia has been limited to providing content for the main stereotype of TV watchers. Stations like TEN, Seven and Nine have only 24 hours a day to display content, and there is much more content available than what can fit into the primetime slots. For Australian's like myself that prefer TV shows that aren't the mainstream interest, like Battlestar Galactica, it means we don't really get to see our favourite TV shows, leaving us with no option to wait for DVD releases.

Oh Bugger (Photos)

Photo © 2009 David Douglas All Rights Reserved

This photo and video was taken today in Mona Vale, NSW, Australia. Looks like the guy forgot to put the rear leg out far enough, and the thing has tipped to the side. Photography by David Douglas.

Go here for all the photos: http://monkeycomputing.com.au/myphotos/?dir=Oh%20Bugger