May 16, 2008
In preparation for tackling Wazup, I started learning a little bit about Python (I know many people have said this already, but Dive Into Python is a really good book!) and I decided to try out a much smaller (and hopefully easier) app to begin with.
So I began coding a little toy that does some stuff with my twitter friends list.
I’m using python-twitter and the app is coming along nicely, except…
Well, like I said earlier, I’m something of an old-hand at programming and my first instinct when learning a new language or tackling a new kind of problem is to first get it working on the command-line and then get the code to work on the web (or whatever happens to be my intended platform). Yes, and my IDE is vim OK?
So what’s the big deal, you may ask?
When I ported my app, which was running perfectly on the command-line, into the App Engine development platform it started bombing, complaining about not being able to get the current user.
Say what?? Well, one thing I’m more than used to is to debug stuff, even in languages I don’t master. And this was very easy to do actually, so I got to the point really fast: python-twitter assumes you’re running on a real machine and implements a caching mechanism that assumes you have such things as a tmp dir where you can store your temporary files.
The code was trying to determine who I was in order to find out where it should store it’s temporary cache files.
Of course in a sandboxed environment such as the App Engine, there is no such thing as disk-based storage (or even system users for that matter), so it was failing miserably.
Turns out that someone else had already been there and the way to work around this is to modify python-twitter and make it use App Engine’s own datastore for the caching. That is if I do think it needs caching at all, I’m still not too sure about that.
Oh well, my first project to “ease” myself \into the language and already I’m making changes to other people’s code…
It’s been fun, though, I must admit to that!
Posted on: May 16, 2008 14:17
May 15, 2008
A good while back I picked up a copy of Office 2008 for the Mac and, like most people who had high expectations for it, went straight into Entourage and found it severely lacking.
Then a bunch of things happened – renovations, work, a kid, etc. But even after a couple of minor Office updates and getting it installed on the MacBook Pro at work, I found myself using it less and less.
Why? Well, I blame that solely on Entourage’s shortcomings, for relying as I do upon Outlook and with Citrix enabling ready access to the Windows suite, the natural thing was to use Office 2007 as a whole (plus, of course, all the benefits of having a “roaming” work environment I can access from anywhere).
But I never quite gave up on the idea of doing a complete Office review on an app-by-app basis, and I’ve had a few occasions to dip into the suite now and then – I’d find myself swamped with work and needing to tune out the corporate environment to finish a specific document, I’d be home and need to draw a quick diagram for some purpose or another knowing I’d have to share it with the Windows crowd, or I’d simply need to do some private stuff on my home MacBook.
And throughout the past few months, even before SP1 rolled in, I’ve come to the conclusion that despite quite a few flaws Office 2008 is still the best productivity suite for the Mac[1]. It is (now) fast, stable, very polished and much more powerful than iWork, and well worth having for anyone who has to live inside a Windows-centric organization during their entire workday.
I am one of those people whom Edward Tufte has so aptly criticized – I create nearly one presentation a day, although I strive to relegate the slides to the role of supporting material and do my best to avoid getting trapped in the quagmire of corporate form (since the slides themselves are often the only written record of decision processes, and hence fall easily into the trap of bullet-points and boilerplate text).
So PowerPoint was the first Office application I strived to use after Entourage, and it has worked out fairly well for me so far.
In terms of file format compatibility, besides a slew of my old files (which I regularly scavenge for slide re-use) I had no trouble checking out some PowerPoint 2007 samples on the Microsoft Office Online site (at least before they committed the utterly asinine atrocity of requiring ActiveX validation for downloads).
Compatibility-wise, there is only one major issue for me that SP1 didn’t fix: PowerPoint 2008 does not support saving embedded TrueType fonts in your documents, which can wreak no end of havoc when you’re picking up a presentation six months down the line (by which time I’m usually on another machine that lacks the original fonts).
Another thing that I found profoundly annoying (and that happens throughout Office 2008) are the modal save dialog boxes, which prevent you from doing anything with the application while it saves. Which is fine when you ask it to save, but which I found tremendously annoying when auto-saving, since it would occasionally pop up in mid-sentence or while drawing (breaking more than just my train of thought).
In the end, I switched off auto-saving as the lesser evil between putting up with the interruptions and risking losing data with an application crash (of which, so far, there have been mercifully few).
That said, when exchanging files with Windows users there are always a few minor layout differences, most of which I have to attribute to different defaults and text metrics. They are annoying (and require some realignment of stuff on complex slides), but they’re the kind of stuff you’d get if you changed slide masters or sizes, and they’re nowhere near the kind of content mangling I would get from, say, trying to export from OpenOffice or Keynote.
One example of these issues that I found particularly annoying (since it caught me several times on one of the standard presentation templates I use) was that PowerPoint 2008 does not seem to respect the “all caps” text formatting style – i.e., when I started typing into a text block that I had formatted as being all caps in Office 2007, PowerPoint 2008 inserted lower-case letters…
Still, there are pluses. And one that I wasn’t counting on is diagramming – even though Microsoft will probably never port Visio to other platforms, the Office drawing tools are now good enough to draw fairly complex diagrams that I would ordinarily have created in, say, OmniGraffle or a similar application.
There was, however, a quirk that has kept me from doing large diagrams with it: every time I was drawing in zoomed mode and hit Cmd-D to duplicate an item, PowerPoint jumped to the top left corner of the slide (which is extremely annoying, to say the least).
This has been apparently fixed in SP1 (contrary to my initial appraisal), and I have been fooling around with it some more today to very good effect. Expect a few more diagrams to pop up here within a few weeks.
Oddly enough, I have yet to actually deliver a presentation using PowerPoint 2008 – I tend to avoid carting the Pro to meetings and prefer to dump the presentation to a PDF file and present using that instead (since I avoid animations and fancy transitions and prefer keeping the audience’s attention on what I’m saying instead of what’s happening up on screen, that suits me just fine).
But on a couple of dry runs I got the impression that the presenter tools were a lot snappier than the ones in Windows (and maybe even Keynote, which I used once or twice in the past). So the potential is there, and I’m sure it will happen some day.
Excel is one of those things you either love or hate, and although I tend to love its number-crunching features, I tend to loathe doing charts with it – at least under Windows.
But somehow I’ve grown to like the Excel 2008 charting workflow – maybe it’s just that the defaults are more tasteful than on Office 2007, but I have a feeling that there is more to it than that – like, for instance, the instant tooltip feedback I get regarding whether or not the chart axis is directly under my mouse cursor. It’s just better in terms of usability.
One thing I’d dearly love to see fixed is that for some reason the default in Mac OS X is for it to open in page layout view rather than the normal view, which I personally dislike. Sure, you can change that in the preferences, but it’s one of those attrition points that people who constantly switch between environments would rather do without – i.e., I’d rather have Excel behave as much as possible as it does on Windows, and niceties be buggered.
Page layout is pretty useless for me anyway, since most of the worksheets I work with or create are far too large to ever be printed in any useful fashion (which is, by the way, one of my main criticisms of Numbers – it feels more like a table-oriented DTP app than a spreadsheet).
One of the questions people asked me most often (especially people considering The Big Switch) was whether Excel used the same keyboard shortcuts (or at least similar ones) as the Windows version.
Since things like hitting F2 to edit a cell and F4 to toggle absolute references are an intrinsic part of the muscle memory of anyone who uses Excel to do serious work, allow me to tell you the harsh truth, straight up:
You will spend many frustrating moments hitting key combinations that Excel 2008 doesn’t care about for years to come.
Sure, it’s understandable that there ought to be quite a few differences due to the Mac environment, but the only reason I’m not having a pretty rough time getting used to Ctrl+U and Cmd+T instead of F2 and F4 is that I have been using Office on the Mac for many years, and as such I learned some of those key combos along the way.
Word is kind of the grey horse of the suite if you ignore its fancier 2008-era enhancements, and although I decided to draft this review in Word, I must say that my initial impression of it (despite years of using Word on Macs since System 6 was all the rage) was not very good.
Initial performance was sluggish (although it was markedly improved after installing SP1), I had trouble formatting a couple of tables on another document, and when I tried saving this draft as HTML to see whether it would be suitable for direct publishing, I ran across something that I personally found somewhat irksome and which pretty much set the tone from there on:
For some reason, the default encoding with which Office exports to web formats is (wait for it…)
MacRoman.
Yes, you read that right. In this day and age of Unicode and UTF-8, saving something to HTML format from within Word will result into a content-type of text/html; charset=“macintosh”.
This can (and should) be changed in the Preferences dialog or in Web Options when saving, but I found it an unforgivable anachronism, a leftover from bygone years when generating platform-agnostic output was needlessly complicated.
The HTML itself is moderately clean – which is to say that it uses CSS rather than the hideous FrontPage-isms of yesteryear and can be tweaked with relative ease, but I can see no real reason (no, not even backwards compatibility) for anyone to have that as a default encoding when exporting to HTML these days.
That said, Word is… well, Word. I have the good fortune to not have to write very extensive documents too often these days, but the bane of having to review mammoth specifications sent by other people and copiously annotate them using Track Changes – which I was able to do without much trouble, except that at least on one occasion things went a bit awry and some of the formatting I included was detrimental to the end result (something I could attribute to minor glitches in font selections or idiosyncrasies of the .doc format).
There are some things I’m starting to like, though, like the new, clean notebook view, which actually think is a better way to go about taking notes than OneNote – I find that feels too freeform to be of any practical use.
I like my notes to be directly transferable to a “proper” format instead of being squirreled away somewhere, and it’s trivial to take meeting notes in notebook view, switch to print layout and instantly have a presentable document to send around.
Stuff I’ve yet to explore includes the Publishing Layout view (where I think Word starts trying to be all things to all people) and digging up some truly ancient documents and seeing what Word can do with them.
I’m especially concerned (and this is something I think applies to all Office apps) about old images, Windows metafiles (especially “enhanced” ones directly pasted in to docs) and, of course, OLE-embedded stuff – a mainstay of fundamentally computer-illiterate IT staffers who think the best way to give you the full spec is to drag and drop the old specs into a new document.
But I digress. There is surely a lot more that could be written about Office 2008, and I’m pretty sure that I will eventually squirrel in further notes during the next few months. But it is, without any question, far better than iWork and OpenOffice put together.
It’s a shame about Entourage, though – it sticks out like a sore thumb, and is the only thing keeping Office from being a truly 5-star package.
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@ (comments allowed)
Posted on: May 15, 2008 23:20
Já me tinha ocorrido escrever sobre este tema, mas por alguma razão esta foi uma daquelas coisas que ficou sempre para trás, sempre esquecida. Por vezes as coisas que nos são mais familiares, ainda que as apreciemos bastante, acabam por perder protagonismo face à novidade…
Vou então deixar aqui umas notas sobre a rádio.
Mas não é da rádio da manhã, com os locutores frenéticos a tentar manter os condutores acordados enquanto conduzem para o emprego, tentando enfiar um máximo de piadas pelo meio da miríade de spots publicitários, indicações de trânsito, previsões do tempo, resumos das não-notícias dos jornais da manhã e músicas das playlists gastas que nos fazem ficar enjoados de tanto as ouvir.
Nem tão pouco da rádio da tarde, com menos interrupções de trânsito e de previsões do tempo, mas mais cheias ainda das playlists, a esta hora ainda menos ousadas, mais gastas e mais chatas.
A rádio de que eu quero falar brevemente é a rádio da boa!
Aquela que nos faz ter vontade de ouvir rádio. Que nos faz ter vontade de reservar um pouco do nosso tempo para simplesmente prestarmos atenção ao que estamos a ouvir. Aquela que nos obriga a fazer o esforço para estar disponível àquela hora para ouvir aquele programa. Ou então a arranjar alternativas… Mas já lá vamos. ;-)
Quem ler este artigo e tiver idade para tal, talvez se recorde de um conceito antigo —e já (quase) esquecido— da rádio chamado “programas de autor” (musicais, claro). Pois é, aqueles programas que passavam músicas escolhidas a dedo pelo seu autor. Músicas que de alguma forma encaixavam umas com as outras, de acordo com uma sensibilidade muito própria de quem fazia a selecção. Podiam ser novas ou muito antigas, podiam ser êxitos de vendas ou lados B de cassetes (lembram-se?) promocionais, mas de alguma forma, se o dito autor fosse bom no que fazia, o conjunto de todas essas músicas valia muitíssimo mais do que as músicas todas, individualmente.
Tempos houve em que este tipo de programa era bastante apreciado e eram produzidos vários deles em várias rádios nacionais.
Assim de repente vem-me à memória a “Hora do Lobo”, do António Sérgio (que foi retirado do ar, pela Comercial, há coisa de meses), as “Noites Longas do Fm Estéreo”, do António Santos (cujo livro de pequenos textos o meu pai comprou e me lembro perfeitamente de andar lá por casa), o mais popular “Oceano Pacífico”, do João Chaves (que nunca apreciei tanto como os outros que mencionei e que penso que talvez ainda seja emitido)…
Penso que hoje ainda temos alguns programas de autor, sobretudo na Antena1 e Antena2, mas estes são de cariz muito específico, com géneros definidos. Os grandes programas de autor de música pop/rock/folk, esses, na prática, acabaram…
Ou pelo menos eu pensei que sim durante bastante tempo.
Talvez fruto de ter sempre vivido (e estudado) na zona de Lisboa, nunca entrei em contacto com essa mina de pequenas jóias que dá pelo nome de RUC (a Rádio Universitária de Coimbra).
Já se percebe pelo discurso que entretanto esse mal foi sanado e, há uns meses (coisa de dois anos, talvez), deparei com um programa que dá pelo nome de “Íntima Fracção”, que era distribuído, na altura em formato podcast, pela própria RUC.
Quando ouvi pela primeira vez a Íntima nem queria acreditar!
Não queria acreditar que ainda havia programas destes e, sobretudo, não queria acreditar que eu me tinha esquecido que, em tempos, uma grande parte das minhas noites era passada a ouvir, precisamente, coisas assim. (Aqui convém explicar que, felizmente nunca fui muito de me colar à televisão, hábito que hoje se tornou ainda mais vincado).
Bom, fui acompanhando a Íntima Fracção como podia, inicialmente via podcast da RUC, depois via podcast GavezDois, até que a Íntima “saiu do ar”.
Foi triste, mas o Francisco Amaral sempre disse que a coisa não se ficava por aí.
E as boas notícias estouraram há umas (poucas) semanas —as tais de que quero, enfim, falar: a Íntima está agora a ser distribuída pelo Expresso On-Line e o último programa, de seu nome “Sonhos e realidade” é, na minha opinião, dos melhores que foram produzidos desde há bastante tempo.
Já tinha saudades da Íntima. Já tinha muitas saudades. Ainda bem que ela voltou!
Entretanto e para não dar a ideia de que este é o início e o final da coisa, existem mais alguns programas de rádio que consumo —geralmente em formato podcast— e que posso recomendar vivamente.
Temos, por exemplo, o “lado B” do Pedro Esteves, que passa em algumas rádios que muito poucos têm a sorte de conseguir recepcionar (Miróbriga fica longe para quem mora em Cascais e já terminei o meu curso no IST há mais anos do que quero admitir) :-)
E não posso deixar de referir o fabuloso “Vidro Azul”, do Ricardo Mariano, que recentemente ganhou honras de emissão na Rádio Radar, de noite, bem de noite, como cabe a um programa deste género.
É bom ter rádio assim. Mesmo que não a oiça via éter, como o fazia há muitos anos, mesmo assim costumo guardar estes programas para a noite, quando eles sabem melhor, quando eles foram feitos para ser apreciados.
Para mim é totalmente verdade que o vídeo não matou as estrelas da rádio.
Posted on: May 15, 2008 19:43
I've visited a lot of places around the world, but I've only really lived in a few places. I grew up in Redmond, Washington, the Redmond before Microsoft. The little town with one stop light on Leary Way and fields next to the Library where I would ride my BMX bike. I grew to love the green, tall trees, massive amounts of rain and the feeling of misty mornings and amazing sunsets. Rivers were all around me and the ocean never far away. The mountains either the Olympics to the west or the Cascades to the east were ever present. I honestly couldn't imagine a better place to grow up.
I have also lived in Northeast Brazil for 2 years. There is some desert there, but mostly verdant forests, jungles, farm land and grass lands. There, it seemed like you couldn't drop anything on the ground but that it would grow. Again I was close the the ocean and while I didn't spend much time there, I got to know fishers and farmers and cattle ranchers all of whom helped me to see life more clearly. The green you experience in the equatorial areas in Brazil is a different green than I experienced back home in the Northwest. It was a brighter and more vivid green, not the dark, wet mossy green of the Pacific rain forests. It also amazed me how on the equator, there is no dusk. The sun sets so fast, you can turn your head and miss it. But with all the sun and rain and rivers, the tall trees of the jungle were always close buy. The Mango trees and the huge Jaca trees seemed to always provide shade and something to look up to.
Imagine my surprise to move to southeastern Idaho, in the high desert plains. Comparatively few rivers, though there are lots of irrigation canals. Flat land, most of it lava rock. Harsh winters and an overall color I'd describe as, well, brown. Trees here are a green color, but with a muted brown to them. The ocean seems a distant dream and large bodies of water few and far between. While we drove to our new home for the first time, I commented to my wife, "Man, this is ugly!" Now, least I offend my fellow Idahoans, we are learning more about this new climate and the wonderful things to explore here, and I'm sure those of you who have braved the high desert plains will have much advice to add, but it's still a shock and the contrast is very real.
Contrast often allows you to see things more clearly, and today, I saw very real beauty in this area, for the first time. And I saw it in the trees. What struck me is how solid, sturdy and unyielding these trees are. There are trees planted and nurtured by those living around houses or in the city, but the trees that captured my mind are those out on the plains. These trees are growing up amidst the driving sub-zero wind and snow of winter and withering heat of summer, from a bed of lava rock! It's as if these trees are saying to Mother Nature, "Sure, I'll grow here, right where you planted me." And they do grow. Against all the odds for survival, they survive! They take in carbon dioxide, unusable by most around them and exhale precious oxygen into the high altitude air. In the search for water, they break up the rock and begin to make dirt for other, less sturdy plants who will benefit years after they have died. They bear the weight of heavy snows and heavier ice. They just seem to "take it" and keep living, untiringly and unheralded, these miracles of nature do their part to grow.
Perhaps my love of trees comes from my childhood growing up around them. Perhaps I took for granted the trees, water and green always around me. What ever it might be, for me, these lonely, windswept, dust covered but undaunted trees are inspiring.
Posted on: May 15, 2008 16:42
Mark Pilgrim:
In its current (beta) form, Google Doctype contains dozens of articles written by top Googlers on topics important to all Web developers: security, performance, caching, DOM manipulation, CSS styling, and more. It contains over 8,000 lines of JavaScript code: Google’s own battle-tested JavaScript library, released today under a liberal open source license. And it contains the beginnings of a test-driven reference of the open Web: a reference of every element, every attribute, every DOM method, every CSS property, all backed up by test cases.
Posted on: May 15, 2008 14:54
gitshelve is a Python module that follows the shelve interface but stores the data in a Git repository, providing efficient storage and snapshots.
Posted on: May 15, 2008 14:49
The Webby Awards winners list of honorees, winners and nominees for this year is out! What a huge source of inspiration.
Posted on: May 15, 2008 14:08
not yet on the cpan, but up on
github. from the pod:
File::Find::Rule::Age makes it easy to search for files based on their mtime.
DateTime and File::stat are used to do the behind the scenes work, with
File::Find::Rule doing the Heavy Lifting.
many thanks to richard clamp, for file::find::rule and also for clearing some doubts.
Posted on: May 15, 2008 13:43
Intel’s managing director responsible for Germany has apparently revealed that there will be 2 iPhones, one based on an ARM processor and the other on Intel’s Atom processor.
Perhaps this explains this WWDC picture:
(image courtesy of computer world)
Posted on: May 15, 2008 04:25
No posts seem to be related
Posted on: May 15, 2008 01:30
As you may know, Find It! Keep It! is not yet self-supporting, so I also work part-time on a 3D geo-browser called earthscape. Its outing party was yesterday (video)
One of the applications is to help helicopter pilots (e.g. search and rescue) figure out where they are.
There’s also a desktop version which should be available real-soon-now ™. Unlike competing products, it is highly programmable in Javascript. Although there’s no Mac port yet, there is an early iPhone port.
Posted on: May 15, 2008 00:42
May 14, 2008
After reading Tarus's post, I couldn't help posting my own response to Matt Asay's CNET blog. I know I shouldn't rise to the bait, but sometimes, you just have to get it out. I was as frustrated as Tarus after reading it... Feel free to read it yourself, but don't click the ads, click mine instead! (cough, sorry)
Anyways, CNET's lovely comment system apparently doesn't believe in carriage returns, you're only supposed to post in sound-bites I guess. ;) So, I'm going to repost my response here, in a form that looks less like a Giant Blob o' Text (and with a few changes for emphasis). Also, in my original comment I accidentally wrote "free-loaders" once instead of "free-riders."
I have read a few of your previous blog posts with interest, but I can only assume that this time you've gone the way of Dvorak and are posting sensational ideas for the purposes of ad revenue for CNET. It's the only explanation that makes sense.
You posit that because communities don't grow on software that gets "open-sourced", software doesn't grow on communities. You couldn't be more mistaken. Nearly every open-source project started as a few people and grew into a community, and then grew more software as a direct result of that community. Or, as you call them, "free-riders."
Now, you are correct that communities don't magically form when a closed-source company says, "Ahh, look! We are such benevolent and wonderful people that we are opening our software upon you plebes. Flock to us!" that does not mean that software can't be born the other way around. There are many many examples that prove the point. Heck, open-source software was not even on any business radar until the "free-riders" made it what it is today.
The "free-riders" are the ones who turned an open-source project with one guy scratching an itch into a project with multiple contributors because they said "hey, this is cool, I wonder if I can help out?"
The "free-riders" are the ones who ran the bleeding edge version first and found (and sometimes fixed themselves!) bugs so your Enterprise customers could take advantage of the rock-solid reliability of open-source software when those bugs got fixed.
The "free-riders" are the ones who helped other "free-riders" on the project's discussion list when they were trying to install the software, so the user-base grew, even though they couldn't contribute code.
In other words, the "free-riders" are not just some abstract pool of people from which you extract cash. In a true open-source project, they are the foundation that makes the project something great. Everyone who is a contributing part of an open-source project was once a "free-rider" who just wanted to try it out. Every person involved in any way at all adds momentum, even if it's just by asking a question and being answered on the list. That answer goes into the global pool of knowledge (which maybe a future user will find, while googling, and won't have to ask himself).
Of course, if you're an Enterprise-with-a-capital-E company that "value-adds" on top of open-source code, you see them as "free-riders" because you don't really have a community in the first place, you just have users. The users of the open-source part of your software are only there at the whim of the proprietary side of the business. There's too much risk the community will do something at odds with the direction you want to take the proprietary parts of the system for them to be able to form a true community in the sense "real" open-source projects can.
In the end, the "free-riders" are only a negative if you aren't truly an open-source company. They are an adversary that could cut away at the functionality you charge for, rather than users who are empowered and have the right to contribute and make stronger something larger than themselves.
I just really have a hard time believing that someone who is writing in the technology industry specifically on issues of open-source software and business could truly believe that the communities are not an integral part of what makes open-source software good, much less that they're "free-loaders." It boggles the mind.
He implies that open-source software is only created by taking a closed-source company and opening the code, when in fact, that is the rare, degenerate case. Most successful open-source software comes from a good idea, some hard work, and the "marketing" of that software by "free-loaders" to their friends, associates, and employers.
Some companies can be successful by doing it the other way around, but except for some of the counterexamples like Mozilla, the most likely outcome is being bought and then being closed-source'd by your new investors, or failing just like most other startups, "open-source" or not. True open-source software has legs commercial software doesn't specifically because it can keep going long after any commercial interest fails or wanes, as long as the community still wants it around.
Posted on: May 14, 2008 20:20
Inside the "Keyboard & Mouse" preference pane of Mac OS X, you'll find a tab named "Keyboard Shortcuts". This is one of my first stops after any nuke and pave setup of my Macs.
I don't have many shortcuts:
The Take Rich Note and Append Rich Note integrate all applications with DevonThink. I select what I want to keep, and hit the proper sequence to save it in my default database.
The Quit Safari shortcut prevents me from closing Safari by accident. Its specially useful if you have a lot of tabs open. Recently Safari gained options, like the Reopen All Windows From Last Session, that make this less useful but I still use this.
The Select Next Tab and Select Previous Tab work around the fact that the default shortcuts in Safari for those options just don't work with some international keyboards (like my own, PT-layout).
The final shortcut is something new, that I'm trying out. It gives you a global shortcut to Zoom any window. Not sure if it's a keeper.
Posted on: May 14, 2008 16:49
Sticky notes of 21st Century:
RSS readers should click here to watch the video.
Posted on: May 14, 2008 14:25
Came across this just now: Using Facebook Chat via Jabber
Thats a lot of new victim^H^H^H^H^H^Husers to the XMPP network.
This, and the fact that my Google Alerts on XMPP is now showing about 10 hits per day (from less than 10 per week just 18 months ago), and I would say that XMPP is turning out to be one hot technology at the moment.
Update: given that the news came up via the official Facebook developers site, some people have IM'ed me asking why the question mark in the subject. Well, I'm waiting to see if they will open federation or not. Using XMPP is more than allowing Facebook users to use their favorite XMPP client to chat with the other Facebook users. Without open federation, this is just another private IM network and I think we have enough of those.
So the question mark is there until a answer is found for "Will Facebook enable open-federation over XMPP?"
Posted on: May 14, 2008 10:35
- Platial
- The Politics of Public Behaviour
The personal has become political. Increasingly, governments find themselves drawn into questions about how children are parented, how household waste is disposed of, how people travel, how much they save for later in life, and how much they eat, drink, s
Posted on: May 14, 2008 05:00
May 13, 2008
For quicker referral skimming, Daniel Jalkut uses FastScripts to run an AppleScript that runs a JavaScript that tells Safari to highlight links in the current window that point to his Web site.
Posted on: May 13, 2008 18:30
I think that for any business with an internet presence, an important part of running and growing that business is being astutely aware of your surroundings. In particular, that means recognizing when people on the internet are talking about you, and responding to or engaging them when it’s appropriate.
Typically when a person on the web is kind enough to link to one of my sites, I learn about it quickly. Those of you who are not familiar with the way the web works might be surprised to know that whenever you click a link in a browser, the browser is typically kind enough to also tell the link’s target server where the link was clicked from. This is called the “referrer” and helps a great deal in tabulating statistics about web site visitors.
What’s really interesting about this referral reporting is that statistics software such as Mint can make it exceedingly easy to keep tabs on who is linking to you. Additionally, services such as Technorati and Google Blog Search attempt to keep tabs on where particular pages on the web are linking to, and offer RSS feeds so that you can keep tabs on any new links that might be pointing your way.
Suffice to say, if you are interested in doing so, it’s possible to keep a broad, open eye on what people on the internet are saying about you, provided they include a link to you among their thoughts.
Cutting To The Chase
I tend to skim every referral that looks like it might be from a legitimate source (not link spam). For instance, sometimes I’ll find a blog post where somebody reveals a problem they’re having with MarsEdit or another of my applications. If it’s possible for me to chime in with proactive customer support, I figure the user will be more overjoyed than creeped out by my “stalking” their blog post.
If you’re lucky enough to start getting linked a great deal, it can start to become a burden to evaluate all those links and decide whether any of them require (or would benefit from) your attention. Typically for me this has involved opening every such link in Safari, and then proceeding to glance at it to see where they are linking to me, and what the context is. This can be difficult on a long page, or when the person has attached the link to an unlikely phrase, such as “this guy says.”
What we need here is a computer. Something that can perform the painstaking task of looking at a web page and deciding where the important parts are. Once these important parts are brought to my attention, I can quickly evaluate and decide whether to quietly take in the referral, or whether to engage in some way with the author.
A Scripted Solution
Safari Link Exposer is a small script I wrote to facilitate this task. Let’s take a look at a sample web page I might encounter in my referral following. See how it’s possible to scan for the links to me, but they don’t exactly jump out from the page:
Now keep in mind this is an arbitrarily simple test case. Normally the web page might be pages long or a lot more complex. Even still, a significant amount of time is spent parsing the “unimportant” information to get to the all-important references to me. Now let’s look what happens when I run my keyboard-activated script in Safari:
Ouch! My eyes, they bleed! Help! But see, that’s the point. There’s no missing the links to me (in red with white text). The first-level container of said links are brightly lit in yellow to accommodate easily tracking to them, and the second-level container is lit in a more subdued yellow to broadly attract your eye’s attention.
Free Download: Safari Link Exposer
I used my shortcuts utility, FastScripts, to attach a Safari-specific keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-Cmd-F to the script. Now when I’m browsing my referrals I can zoom in on the nitty gritty with a single keystroke.
Hope this is helpful to somebody. The basic script needs to be edited to be useful to you, but it’s set up so that you can easily replace the “red-sweater” search term with a term of your choice. You could also use this script as the basis for other types of “smart scanning” scripts that expose elements based on other criteria.
It’s also worth noting that the bulk of the script is JavaScript and should be easily adaptable to other web browsers. I use Safari and I trust its AppleScript-based “do javascript” command, so naturally that is the approach I took in writing this.
Please let me know if you have any improvements for the script or other ideas for how to streamline this process.
Posted on: May 13, 2008 17:41
É o primeiro de vários eventos que o SAPO irá organizar fora de ‘casa’ e abertos a todos os que desejem participar, que é o mesmo que dizer que a entrada é gratuita.
O primeiro SAPO Unplugged é já na próxima semana em na Reitoria da Universidade de Aveiro e o tema escolhido foi Usabilidade, um tema que consideramos ser hoje um dos mais importantes para o nosso trabalho enquanto portal web.
Por isso convido todos os interessados a juntarem-se a nós, e aproveito para vos deixar algumas referências sobre os respectivos oradores:
Vemo-nos por lá 
Posted on: May 13, 2008 16:20
