http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress Ian MacDonald's Positive Vibes Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:11:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I read an interesting article in The Economist that describes the relationship between sleep and retaining information and new memories. It basically adds new momentum to believers of the power-snooze, something I practice on busy weekends. The research was presented in this article from the Feb 25th edition. ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/03/07/improving-mental-performance-with-a-nap Recently I received a forward citing a recent "John Hopkins update" on cancer. It turns out it is a Hoax (per the link below), in that it supposedly comes from Johns Hopkins, a well respected US health institution and it also contains non-factual statements mixed with some facts. I ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/03/04/cancer-facts I had checked out the version of Novell's moonlight linked through Microsoft from CTV's site, in order to try to get some Olympic coverage on my PC. I obviously did not look hard enough. I stumbled upon the pre-release version just in time for the Super Sunday gold ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/02/21/watching-ctv-olympics-on-ubuntu There is now a Ubuntu packaged 64bit version of Flash. This is something that any user running Ubuntu Linux on current hardware (P4/Athlon64 or newer) should be pleased to hear (just skip on over this post if you are running a 32bit OS on your 64bit hardware). For quite some ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/02/19/install-64bit-flash-on-ubuntu Nearly a week into the Olympics, CTV unveiled their Olympic widget. The widget is put together by ClearSpring and can be embedded just about anywhere easily, including any Wordpress-based blog. Check out the left pane of http://www.theupsons.net for a peek at what the finished product looks like. The ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/02/18/olympic-medal-count-on-wordpress Looks like embedding 3GP video from the Wordpress Blackberry application (or any other source) is fairly trivial once you have completed a few configuration steps. One option is to modify the supported MIME types right in the code. Rather than change code I prefer to stay within the boundaries ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/02/11/3gp-on-wordpress Some registered users may have received email notifications with a new temporary password. This is because until just a few minutes ago, many emails from this site were being blocked by our upstream ISP (Rogers) due to some issues with the headers in those emails. Likely ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/02/07/wordpress-email-configuration In anticipation of the big Superbowl XLIV game this Sunday, there is a lot of banter in the social channels. It might not be an original idea, but I found this DC vs Marvel mock match-up hilarious. Although I seem to be familiar with more of the DC team ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/02/06/superbowl-hero At the January Toronto Product Manager Association meeting I had an opportunity to listen to Alfred Tan, a Senior Director in Sales at Facebook, lead a discussion on Marketing in Social Media. I was a great presentation; Delivered on a Mac using a Rogers Rocket Stick, it had lots ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/02/05/social-media-identity A few nights ago I watched Avatar for the second time in 3-D, in an effort to qualify the difference between regular 3D and IMAX 3D. The difference was astounding, both in the picture quality due to the 10x resolution jump IMAX frames provide, the super-sound and the fact ... http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/2010/01/30/avatar-powered-by-debian-based-linux