Live election night coverage online (Canadian Election)

Another Canadian election has come and gone. Programmed mainstream media coverage was again, less than inspiring. I found that to truly enjoy this national exercise, you have to watch it in the company of friends, as you would a Saturday afternoon hockey game.

I spent election night online. Using a variety of free sources, I was able to watch the results as they came in. Using Twitter, it was possible to know results in eastern Canada before the blackout lifted here in Alberta.

Here are some of the tools I used to monitor the 40th Canadian Election:

• Twitter — dedicated default communication channel. CB Radio. Fun. By using Hashtags, you can focus your discussion to others who monitor the same Hashtag (Channel). The best election Hashtag was #CanadaVotes. Oh, and yes, please do follow me on Twitter 🙂
• TweetDeck — Twitter application that allows you to group, sort, filter, slice and dice your incoming Twitter flow. In the screenshot of my election night desktop, it took up my left-hand 22″ monitor.
• Google Chrome — having multiple browser windows open at once would prove challenging to Firefox. I have 20+ plugins so I run a Fat Firefox. Chrome is lightweight and each instance runs independently; if one window crashes, the others stay running. I had four instances of Google Chrome running in my second monitor (17″) on the right.

Ok, that’s the tools, now what was I doing with them?
I’ve already mentioned that TweetDeck was my main communications medium for the evening. The back-and-forth discussion amongst people monitoring the #CanadaVotes channel was insiteful and entertaining. It was great engaging with other Canadians in a national discussion.

On my other monitor, I had Google Chrome running (in clockwise order):

• CBC Website – live results map of my ridings of interest
• CBC Website – live national results map
• CBC Website – live streaming TV coverage (sorry, it doesn’t show)
• Globe & Mail website – Live national results chart broken down by party

At one point, I did have another two windows onscreen containing Global and CTV coverage, but frankly, there wasn not enough new or insiteful commentary, so I reduced the redundancy and dumped them.

Overall, watching the various media sources and participating in the Twitter traffic was the best way to engage in, what many believe to be, a somewhat mundane national exercise.

Your turn, what did you use to monitor the results? Traditional media? New media? Comments are open!

Technorati Tags: Canada, Election, 2008, Canadian, PC, Liberal, Twitter, Social Media, Monitoring, Results, Election Results

Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)

The online world was in a tizzy this afternoon as Google’s Gmail application crashed and burned.

Gmail and Google Apps for domains all seem impacted.

This is a breaking event so I’ll update this post when more is known. Gmail’s Blog has nothing on it, currently.

*** UPDATE ***
It looks like the big brains at Gmail have fixed the issue.

The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

And indeed it does seem to be back to normal. Excellent.

Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?

photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

One little secret that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) has likely been involved with is the Internet-wide patching of the Multi-vendor DNS Issue.

Simply, this issue could allow malicious evil-doers to redirect your surfing to websites that they control, intercepting important and private information (such as passwords, banking info, etc).

Frequent Black Hat Speaker Dan Kaminsky today announced a massive, multi-vendor issue with DNS that could allow attackers to compromise any name server – clients, too. Kaminsky also announced that he had been working for months with a large number of major vendors to create and coordinate today’s release of a patch to deal with the vulnerability.

News of this industry-wide vulnerability and the collaboration (to fix the flaw) was originally scheduled to be announced at the Black Hat Security Conference in August, but due to the vulnerability being published elsewhere, the presenter thought it best to release the information so that people can take the appropriate actions.

What can you do?
Basically, this is a complex issue, but it boils down to a simple test and a very simple fix.

The test:
To find out if you are vulnerable to this issue, you can use the DNS checker link on Kaminsky’s webpage here (in the upper right corner).

The fix:
If you are vulnurable, then you can either A) wait until your ISP fixes their DNS servers, or B) set your own computer’s DNS strings to point to OpenDNS servers.

I highly recommend option B.

The OpenDNS website has friendly, easy to implement instructions on converting your DNS settings and also offer a whole host of additional features your current ISP may not have:

Features

• Features Overview
• Content Filtering
• Adult Site Blocking
• Domain Blocking
• Domain Whitelist
• Phishing Protection
• Statistics
• OpenDNS Guide
• Customization
• Large Cache
• Ultra-Reliable Network
• Shortcuts

I’ve written about OpenDNS before, so feel free to check out these previous articles and then help save the Internet.

• OpenDNS: Safer, smarter, speedier surfing
• One year of OpenDNS

And if you do test your ISP using Dan’s web page, please post your results in the comment section! I’ll start things off by adding mine.

Technorati Tags: Black Hat, DNS, OpenDNS, Security, Flaw, Vulnurability, Privacy

WordPress 2.6 is out — and you’re using it now.

photo credit: purplelime

It was a fairly painless update (thanks to the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin), but there were a few quirks I’ve had to address:

• Avatars. WP 2.6 has much better support for Avatars (images used to identify authors of comments). But, my theme doesn’t natively support them so I’ve had to maintain use of the Easy Gravatars plugin.
• Turbo mode. This is an admin. function, but basically it lets you
  speed up some admin functions with Google Gears integration. Gears behind my firewall is messy, but I will be trying this from more open connections in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing more of the WordPress 2.6 features in action, check out this video.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, blogging, blog, blogger, upgrade, easy

Canadian weather station on Mars brings you daily weather updates

One of the ‘cooler’ pieces of science being done on Mars by NASA’s Phoenix lander is the study of Martian weather patterns, courtesy of a ‘built-in-Canada’ weather station. A daily spinoff of this is the daily Martian weather report. Due to a communications glitch, the reporting should begin tomorrow.

On a local note, the Canadian Science Team at the University of Alberta have a significant stake in the Phoenix Mission:

When the originally planned anemometer for Phoenix was descoped,
Professor Carlos Lange and his students demonstrated that a telltale
could be used to indicate wind speed and direction with help of the
onboard camera. He then helped researchers at the University of Aarhus,
Denmark, develop and test the telltale wind sensor that is now mounted
on top of the Canadian MET mast on Phoenix. For Phoenix, Dr. Lange uses
advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools to simulate the
Martian environment.