Recently in The Tech Talk column Category

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

In this week's print column, I begin my discussion of Twitter, the Web-based, super-hot service of the fortnight.

In the article, I make predictions about where Twitter will be in six months (owned by a huge company) and how much competition it will face in over the following months and year (much).

I try to make a case for Twitter as a new and useful underlying structure of the global network that is the Internet. Call it a new set of tubes.

Yes, I will be writing about Twitter in this week's print column, but I've been "tweeting" (I still hate to say "tweet") here for the past week and then some.

The Twitter feed goes to the right-hand side of this blog and is also hooked up to my Facebook page via a Twitter-Facebook widget (for me the best thing about Twitter thus far) that makes it easier than ever to update Facebook as well as promote my various blog entries and other super-exciting activities.

They say blogging "jumped the shark" long ago. Probably so. Twitter is seemingly at its apex at the moment, and that shark-jumping hasn't yet happened. For one thing, Twitter is way more flexible and malleable than you'd think, and that's probably the key to its success thus far. It has an open API (application programming interface) that allows just about anybody to incorporate Twitter content into their own framework (and it's easier for me to type this than to actually understand all of it).

To you, me and the rest of the unwashed masses, that means lots of applications big and small that feed into, draw on and otherwise make use of your Twitter feed in ways you probably don't yet know you need.

Or at least it seems that way.

Anyhow what this means to me at this very moment is that when I get a quick thought about something, or just want to share a link to another blog post or story, I tend to "tweet" it and not bother to start up, log in and write in the Movable Type software that powers this very blog.

There's a reason why SMS text messaging on cell phones is such a compelling (and wildly profitable) application, and Twitter realizes that big time. While the company itself is famed for having no business model and little revenue, you never know what will happen to it in even the next six months. I bet an acquisition is in the works.

I think this acquisition will happen chiefly because you'd be crazy not to think that two dozen other would-be entrepreneurs as well as full-on established companies are contemplating launching a Twitter-like service of their own.

It's going to happen. And happen.

But for now I'm going to be making a lot of use of Twitter just because it's so darn easy to do so. And effective.

With the recent redesign/reconfiguration of the Los Angeles Daily News, my weekly Tech Talk column has moved along with the Saturday Business page to the A section of the paper. Find it today on Page A12.

In the Saturday, Feb. 27 Tech Talk column, I overcome a false start and finally fix my ailing Maytag gas clothes dryer.

While Authorized Appliance of Reseda, Calif., was once again instrumental in helping me figure out how to complete the repair, I did find a new appliance-repair Web site, Fixitnow.com - Samurai Appliance Repair Man, that is better than anything I've seen up to now.

Aside from being a most excellent resource on how to fix your broken major appliances, Fixitnow.com is a great example of how to fully use WordPress as both a blogging platform AND general Web site using the Pages function. I'm very much interested in doing this. It's a great way to break out of the blog post, blog post, blog post mold and showcase some more "timeless" content on your site. Like I did here.

Image at right: This image comes from the very same kind of Maytag dryer that I have. (Thanks the Ask Me Help Desk for the image — and a very helpful forum.) The two white plugs with wires protruding from them are plugged into the dryer's two coils, which control the gas valve (the thing they're bolted onto). I replaced the coils (remove both plugs, unscrew bracket, lift coils, replace with new ones, replace bracket, replace plugs) and the dryer now works great.

This blog and my weekly print column don't cross paths much, but it's time to change that and help readers tap the resources I write about in the Saturday edition of the Daily News (Page 2 of the Faith section, where Business currently lives, as well as the aforementioned online home.)

The Saturday, Feb. 7 column is about self-publishing, ideally with no cost to you, both in traditional printed books as well as in electronic form on Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

Links mentioned in the column:

• "Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature," Time magazine, Jan. 21, 2009
• Self-publishing with Amazon.com
• CreateSpace — on-demand publishing (for free!!) through Amazon.com
• The definitely not-free BookSurge from Amazon
• Self-publishing company iUniverse
• Amazon's Kindle electronic reader