John Lamansky

I realize this news is a couple weeks old, but I just found out that you can now use Google to search for patents. Very cool!

Yep, now you can digg podcasts: Digg has released a new section of their site called Digg Podcasts, where you can vote for podcasts in a variety of categories, as well as the individual episodes. (Note: since it’s in beta, a Digg account is required to access Digg Podcasts.)

It’s a neat application of Digg’s methodology and member base, but isn’t this voting system already being done by the venerable Podcast Alley?

I’m just getting into .NET Framework 3.0 development (that is, I will be, as soon as I’m able to get the SDK to actually install ), and I found Microsoft’s “Ready for a New Day” page (intended to help developers get started with .NET Framework 3.0, Office 2007, and ASP.NET AJAX development) very helpful.

It includes links to, among other things, download the .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package (which is for running .NET Framework 3.0 applications), the Windows SDK (which is for developing them), and the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (which is for integrating .NET Framework 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005).

This .NET Framework 3.0 stuff is very exciting, especially the XAML stuff.

By the way, considering that this post contains 7 instances of “.NET Framework 3.0″, anyone know if there’s some sort of acronym that I can be using?

From a CNET News.com article:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers signed off on the .Asia Registry Agreement on Wednesday at its annual meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil, meaning that businesses in the Asia-Pacific region will soon have the option of registering an “.asia” domain. The top-level domain will be overseen by the DotAsia Organization. The “.asia” domain will be used as a supplement to country domains like “.jp” for Japan and “.cn” for China.

According to a post on the Official Google Blog:

Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here.

They don’t give a specific reason, but from what I’ve read across the Internet it seems to be at least in part because of the explosive popularity of Yahoo! Answers.

It’ll be somewhat sad to see this product go. But it’s kind of like a floppy drive: you have a peace of mind knowing you have one in case you really need it, but you almost never end up using it.

Longtime readers may know that in my bio in the sidebar I used to say that I “hope to start a podcast or two someday.” Well, that “someday” is here! I have a few podcast projects I’ve been working on lately that I’d like to share with you: the Catholic Geek Podcast and the Tech News Podcast.

Okay, so this first one isn’t “new” because I’ve been running it for some time. However, I’m just now starting to promote it now that I feel it is of high enough quality. It’s my personal podcast known as the Catholic Geek Podcast, with the subtitle “An Eclectic Podcast by a Catholic Teenage Programmer.”

Of course, when I said “high enough quality” in the above paragraph, I didn’t mean top-notch quality, but high enough to the point that it isn’t a pain to listen to (except for the first three episodes; those weren’t very good). In my opinion it isn’t as high-quality as this blog; I’m good at writing, but I don’t have a very good radio voice (I’m hoping it’ll come with practice).

Although this blog has my name as its title, it seems that the podcast is the more personal of the two; I suppose it’s the nature of the podcasting medium.

The second podcast just started; it’s so new, in fact, that there’s only one episode up (ooh, aah). It’s called the Tech News Podcast, and I co-host it along with a friend of mine named Paul. What makes it particularly interesting, in my opinion, is that I’m a Windows person, and Paul happens to be a Mac person. And as many of you may know, when you mix together Windows and Mac people you’ll get quite interesting results indeed.

The first episode went quite well. (Well, the first public episode, that is. We tried another episode some time ago but didn’t publish it because of audio quality issues.) Here’s the shownotes for episode one:

In the premiere episode, John and Paul discuss Microsoft’s Zune player vs. the iPod, Mac security vs. Windows security, Firefox vs. Internet Explorer 7, Firefox add-ons, webcams that track your sleep patterns, phishing as a job, paper-based storage systems, and Wingdings codes.

Anyone interested in technology is probably drooling by now. I mean, who can resist a podcast about Wingdings codes? Joking aside, I highly recommend that you check it out. We’re planning to do episode 2 tomorrow; I’ll let you know when that’s up.

And as a side note, I’d also recommend you check out Paul’s blog. Paul and I are alike in many areas (except operating system allegiance), so if you like my blog, you’ll probably like his too (though Paul tends to talk more about politics whereas I tend to talk more about technology).

Please let me know what you think of the Catholic Geek Podcast, and please let Paul and me know what you think about the Tech News Podcast. We’d love to hear your feedback!