No Pants Friday!

OK, this friday is No Pants Day and also the cable guy is coming to juice me up. I'm having a No-Pants Party at my place, from morning until night (depending on the timing of the cable guy) to celebrate the installation of the Internet. More news will follow as I know more; RSVP while you can!

Rest assured this still fits into my "don't trust a computer" philosophy; I see a future where we are heavily dependent on social networking sites to organize and communicate, which paints a pretty grim picture for security professionals in small business! Nobody seems to get the group administration thing quite right; Facebook has it down pretty well, but the utility of a facebook group is heavily dependent on the personality of the members. Every groupware system should be as flexible to administer as an IRC channel, and no more complicated to manipulate than an Explorer or Finder window.

I would say the next runner up behind Facebook is Google Groups and Google's beta Domain Hosting services. This is certainly more focused on providing infrastructure for an organization as opposed to informal or ad-hoc groups. Either way, I like nailing things down; the goal for Friday is a multi-point no pants video conference that you can visit through a simple web interface. It would be nice to integrate a jabber server so we can keep notes (?) but any sort of text chat interface will be plenty good for the purposes I have in mind.

Working with Windows machines and TinCam software (~$30), and so far not having very much luck. TinCam sends an .html and a .wvx file over ftp to my web server no problem. The website is accessible at http://nerdland.org/~kingdon/cam/webcam.html, but so far no dice receiving from the two computers I'm using to test. I've left this up streaming and I'm going to go grab my laptop, maybe I'll have more luck working on a machine with a publicly addressible IP. If the webcam works for you or if you have experience with what I'm trying to do, please do leave a note.

Tchues for now!