I don’t think you quite realize how good University internet is until you have to go without it. The speeds are usually fast – or, the upload is, at least – and the campus is covered in a nice, wifi blanket. Whether the latter is actually a good thing, we probably won’t know until we all begin to drop dead from cancer. But for now, I’ll take as much cross-campus wifi as I can.

Yet, the most important aspect of University internet is that it is completely and totally unfiltered. Throttled, perhaps, to prevent heavy P2P users from clogging up the tubes, but totally devoid of censorship. Naturally, this is a must, considering the liberal nature of most Universities, and would probably prompt a firestorm of angry students if the Internet was anything else than what it currently is. There’s a certain degree of trust extended to students, in the hopes that they won’t surf anything rude or crude in places they shouldn’t be, and for the most part, that’s adhered to.

It's not a big truck. You can't just dump stuff on it, you know.

And then you have my hometown, beautiful Mississauga.

A suburb of Toronto, about a half-hour drive from the big city, Mississauga enjoys wireless access across most of its municipal and recreational facilities. This means that, when I go to guard the pool, and theoretically save lives for my job, I can wander back to the guard office and fire up my laptop while on break. In theory.

To most users, what’s offered by the City of Mississauga is considered the Internet; to myself, its a glorified web browsing experience, with a number of serious catches. Sure, I can access the internet – granted I don’t want to access any pages that have to do with the following…

• File-Download/sharing websites
• Porn
• Video games. Game-related websites and forums.
• Proxy websites
• A number of webcomics
• Chat websites and downloads

So I can access the internet, but only if I promise to do none of the above. Frankly, I despise any sort of censorship – particularly to this extent. But it might just be manageable if, in addition to blocking web-based content, they hadn’t decided to block every single port of consequence as well.

Of all the things I can do on the internet, I’m limited to HTTP port 80. I can’t FTP on port 21. I can’t launch Steam. I can’t launch AIM, MSN, IRC or web-based chat apps. Thunderbird, for fuck’s sake, doesn’t even work. I can’t access me email. Ugh.

So, in the interest of protecting the City of Mississauga’s users – or the children, or whatever crooked notion of protection they’re harbouring – the city has proven that they just don’t get the internet. I can understand putting such measures in place on their own machines, but subjecting external users, using their own laptops to the same treatment? It’s ludicrous, and, quite frankly, heavily affects the way I can use the internet the way I’d like – and the way that it was meant to be used in the first place.

It’s jarring, at first, seeing a room packed with twenty-year-olds and middle-aged developers, each with a Facebook page splashed across their screen. For a service initially intended for an American college crowd, to see such widespread adoption of the social networking juggernaut is astounding. Yet, it is this fevered interest that has made Toronto one of Facebook’s largest networks, and a prime location for those looking to develop for the site.

FacebookCamp Toronto held its fifth Facebook Developers Garage Tuesday night at the MaRS Collaboration Centre, on 101 College Street, the latest in a series of talks since developer group’s inception over two years ago. An “unconference for everyone with an interest in building on the Facebook Platform,” according to organizers, the evening brought together marketers, designers, students and developers from all over Toronto looking to create and integrate with the popular social network.

With over 400 attendees attending each of FacebookCamp Toronto’s scheduled events, its clear that Toronto has a thing for Facebook. In fact, of all Toronto’s active Internet users, it’s believed that around 70% are active users on the site.

“It’s taking real world connections, and solidifying them on Facebook,” explains Matt Wyndowe of the site’s popularity, a developer and engineer from Facebook in Paolo Alto, California. A Canadian native, Wyndowe traveled to Toronto to join other presenters in one of Facebook’s newest initiatives, Facebook Connect. Launched at the beginning of December, it’s a new platform that Wyndowe is particularly excited about, and feels could have a big impact upon users and developers in cities like Toronto.

Connect is all about taking the Facebook user base, and using it on the Internet in a more general capacity, he explains. The goal is to allow Facebook users to navigate the web in such a way that their Facebook information and profiles can be seamlessly integrated into some of the Internet’s most popular and high-traffic sites.

“Imagine you have a site with ‘most watched’, ‘most viewed’, and ‘most emailed’” says Wyndowe. “Imagine what you would get if you replaced that with ‘most watched by my friends’ or ‘most viewed by my friends’. More people will be interested in that.”

One example, which Wyndowe hopes will soon be implemented in cities like Toronto, is a website called CitySearch. While there are already hundreds of websites across Toronto that offer restaurant, theatre and other reviews, CitySearch’s goal is to bring all of those together into one central, user-driven platform. But what makes CitySearch unique is how it utilizes the Facebook Connect platform.

Friends already using the CitySearch service are added instantly, based on a user’s Facebook friends, while reviews and recommendations from these same friends are given a higher priority on CitySearch’s homepage. The result is a highly streamlined and more intimate system – one that recognizes a user will be far more likely to respond to the input of their friends, over a seemingly unknown critic in Toronto.

More so, it’s a system that makes the external web easier for users to navigate.
Dimi Paun, another developer also presenting at last night’s FacebookCamp, took the stage to describe how his travel photo website, Zipalong, has incorporated the Connect platform.

“Dealing with customers, you realize very quickly that nobody likes the signup process,” Paun explained, while presenting slides of Zipalong’s old registration process. “Everybody hates it. So we jumped on the opportunity to use Facebook Connect.”

Using Connect, users are presented with a one-click sign-in process that uses their existing Facebook profile – a far cry from the complicated, multi-form system of old. The result, according to Facebook, has been a 20-100% increase in registrations on some sites, with connected users creating between 25-60% more content. Already, sites like CNN, Gawker Media, and even Toronto-based BikingToronto have begun to adopt the simplified system, in attempt to attract more users to their sites.

But while Facebook Connect dominated most of the evening, developers also took the opportunity to discuss tips and challenges when developing for Facebook’s year-old application platform.

Roy Pereira of Toronto-based marketing agency Refresh Partners, explained the development process behind his company’s wildly successful “Whopper Sacrifice” application. What began as a modest Burger King advertising campaign grew into an American sensation, allowing Facebook users to sacrifice – or, delete – 10 of their friends, in exchange for a free Whopper coupon from Burger King. And while “Whopper Sacrifice” proved a novel idea, indeed, it presented some interesting problems for Pereira and his team.

“We discovered pretty early on that there wasn’t actually any Facebook API for deleting friends,” remarked Pereira with a laugh. For a website that pushes new social interactions and networking, it’s hardly surprising; Pereira’s team found they had to write their own system to allow the application to achieve its sacrificial goals.

But most importantly, Pereira remarks, is that unlike other applications which divert the attention of users away from Facebook, “Whopper Sacrifice” made users focus on the Facebook platform itself. Updates to the minifieed allowed friends to see exactly who had been sacrificed, while also generating increased interest, and higher traffic to the application.

The importance of making applications and websites take advantage of Facebook’s social capabilities as much as possible is incredibly important. “I can see what my friends are saying. That’s what makes this interesting and engaging,” says Wyndowe on the impact of applications like “Whopper Sacrifice”, and the Facebook Connect platform as whole.
And for a Facebook network as large and diverse as Toronto’s own, the number of people developers hope to engage is almost limitless.

In my continuous quest to eventually take over the world of Twitter, I’ve been looking over a number of different apps this week, in the hopes that I can find one that fits my Tweeting needs perfectly. Of course, once I’m succesful with this course of action, I’m hoping I can find an OS X app capable of world domination as well.

For the most part, most of my Twitter updates have been done either through web-based input, over the OS X dashboard widget, Twidget. While the web-based updater is nice, and the most accesible, things can get a little hectic, particularly when certain friends are engaged in mass retweets or liveblogging. These sort of issues carry over to Twidget, but are made even worse due to the widget’s incredibly small size. I understand it is a widget, afterall, and should have a relatively small footprint, but its simply too simplistic in its operation for my taste.

One of the things I love most about Twitter is that I can see exactly what method people are using to make their tweets. I’ve seen a number of mobile apps, spanning Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices, and even the odd firefox plugin. Yet, one of my favourite Twitter-centric apps thus far has to be TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is interesting for two main reasons – firstly, its highly customizable, and you can bend it to your will, based on how you’d like to recieve and organize your Tweets, direct messages and replies. Secondly, its based on the incredibly lightweight Adobe AIR. In my mind, Adobe AIR is the equivelant of Flash for the Web 2.0 crowd, and has made it possible to create some truly stunning web-integrated apps. Of course, one of the main benefits of developing on AIR is that it is entirely platform independant; almost all major OSs support the web framework right now, which allows those like TweetDeck’s developers incredibly high user penetration, without all the mess of porting.

While still in Beta – which is the amusing norm nowadays, when it comes to the world of Web2.o – the app is incredibly robust. Download it from the TweetDeck website, and see what you think!

Today I finally managed to check out one of Toronto’s most beloved and well-known comic book stores, the Silver Snail. Located on Queen Street West, just before Spadina Avenue, it was high time I finally decided to wander inside, considering I’ve passed it by quite often over these past couple months. At the very least, a quick venture inside would perhaps serve to increase my “geek cred” – a term which my good friend Emily never quite lets me forget.

First and foremost, there’s a reason the Silver Snail is one of Toronto’s most respected comic book shops – it has everything. Even for someone like myself, who’s a relative newbie to the world of graphic novels, could appreciate a great deal of what was held inside. Numerous issues of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman were off to a corner, albeit, out of order, while the latest issue of DMZ sat alongside Action Comics and other contemporaries. Both are graphic novels that I’m itching to start, having heard nothing but great things. This is assuming I don’t die before finishing Transmetropolitan – long, fevered reading sessions usually mean I forget to eat sleep, and perhaps even breath when it comes to Warren Ellis’ impressive creation. I’m sure I’ve skipped a few heartbeats as well, the byproduct of fierce concentration.

Yet, when it comes to comics and graphic novels, the one thing that appears to set the Silver Snail apart is its huge back catalog of issues. Practically any comic you can think of, from almost any time period, is probably in stock. Of course, some of these issues, both vintage and rare, can fetch quite a commanding price; the thirty-second issue of Adventure Comics, apparently dating back to the mid-thirties, was prices at $5400.

What amused me most about the Silver Snail is that, despite what the name might imply, it is not simply a comic shop. In fact, the shop has what is probably the largest collection of old, obscure, and geeky action figures I have ever seen. It’s jarring, at first, to see $400 busts of Yoda, or Ridley Scott’s Alien adorning the top of the comic-filled shelves. Yet, a little closer to the ground, within reach of us mere mortals, are the real gems – 12” poseable figures from Stargate SG-1, a Wesley Crusher action figure, of ST:TNG fame, and even obscure, import Japanese transformers. It’s all a little overwhelming, but really makes me wish I was a kid again, an arsenal of action figures at my disposal.

While my first trip was a relatively short one, it was a treat to see everything the store had to offer. Make no mistake – as soon as I’m finished with Transmet, I’ll probably be headed right back to the Silver Snail to see what else I can dig up for my comic-reading pleasure. Though, be forewarned; I might even come back with a Richard Dean Anderson action figure of my own.

After the machine refused to boot late last night, I figured it was finally time to put my old computer out of its misery. The ASUS motherboard, which had served me well for almost three years, finally died, and ceased to POST. While I did get the board to run not even an hour later, it was clear that any hope for stability was out the window.

I came home this morning with the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P, an excellent board powered by the Intel P45 + ICH10R chipset. Not only would it handle my Core2Quad processor, but it also had the necessary RAM slots and heat dissipation to match my previous board, but at a fraction of the cost. Seeing as many of the problems with the old board became painfully clear when I attempted to overclock, I was pleased to see the wealth of options the board has when it comes to pushing the system to its limit.

The Arctic 7 CPU Heatsink, which now dominates the upper half of my case.

After a couple hours of cleaning and installation, it was clear that the old ASUS board had some serious problems, many of which I failed to pick up on. The very first thing I noticed was the drastic difference in hard drive speeds – I could actually achieve drive-to-drive copy speeds of over 60mb/s. That’s almost double what the old ASUS board would give me, and explains why I had so many storage related errors during the old board’s last week. More so, overclocking actually works this time, and I didn’t encounter a single issue or BSOD running with a full 4gb of RAM. Honestly, there’s no better feeling than knowing I wasn’t truly crazy all these years when suspecting something was wrong.

One thing I found amusing was the presence of an Infineon TPM chip on the board. While these were introduced a couple years ago, they were intended mainly as a tool for DRM – and in Apple’s case, to lock their operating system and their hardware to one another. Yet, they’ve slowly been making their way into consumer motherboards, as a new form of encryption and file security. It’s an interesting move, and an option I’m sure many paranoid users will appreciate, though one I’m not particularly interested in.

I always love putting together a new PC, or, in this case, breathing life into an old one. Being the shutterbug I am, I took the opportunity to snag a couple pictures of the build process, which you can find on Flickr if you’re interested.