Microblogs Need GUIDs

I’m listening to the 8/2/2008 episode of the Gillmor Gang where Steve is talking with Dustin Sailings of Twitterspy. As they are talking about Twitter and Identi.ca and such, a realization hit me. Because I know nothing about how any of these microblogs are implemented this might be naive and redundant but let me throw [...]

Popularity: 34% [?]

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Statistically Indistinguishable from Perfect

Here’s a summary of why the Amazon S3 service went down last week. The title of this post comes from a statement at the end of their goals for their own service level. I really like that turn of a phrase. The takeaway lessons from this are 1) engineering services at this scale is always [...]

Popularity: 40% [?]

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Firebug Works with Firefox 3!

For those of you like me who have upgraded to the Firefox 3 betas but were taking a big hit because of the loss of Firebug functionality, there is hope! Although it appears that Firebug 1.0.5 doesn’t automatically upgrade to 1.1, but 1.1 does in fact work with Firefox 3. I found this out by [...]

Popularity: 62% [?]

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Tag, You’re It

Over on AmigoFish, this week I implemented tagging. Last night I got autocompletion working. This is not just autocompletion, but the ability to type in a list of values, separated by commas or spaces, and to get the autocompletion on just the last tag in the list. It took a little trickery but I’m really [...]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Pretty Print RSS Feeds in Mozilla Again

A while back, I railed about how Mozilla intercepts RSS feeds. Now some guy has created a web service that will inject some stuff into the RSS to make Mozilla treat it like XML again. I’ve tested this out and it works great. One thing to watch out for is that when you do this, [...]

Popularity: 19% [?]

The Big Rewrite

A few years ago, Derek Sivers announced a plan to rewrite CD Baby’s web interface in Ruby on Rails, and he had a blog for his progress. That blog went dark a while ago, and recently he announced his plan to abandon that project. His insights are interesting, and I in general would agree with [...]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Need Fortran Help

I have a lazy web request. Can anyone point me to an example Makefile for the Lahey LF95 compiler? I’m helping someone out with a Fortran project but I know nothing about it. I can’t figure out what bits to flip to have GNU make build the objects and link them together and for the [...]

Popularity: 22% [?]

Firebug

A tool I’ve found useful at both work and home is the Mozilla plugin Firebug. At work, since it gives you a JavaScript debugging environment that is far superior to the built in we use it to figure out how things are working. Being able to examine variables and call functions from the console command [...]

Popularity: 17% [?]

RIP, “Digital Bill” Douthett

I didn’t see Digital Bill of the Wizards of Technology this year at PME and sadly I never will again because he died on Wednesday. I found out from this cartoon which is an odd way to learn but Bill to the core. I didn’t know him well, but I did know him enough that [...]

Popularity: 22% [?]

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PJ in Rails Day

EGC friend PJ Cabrera is competing in Rails Day 2006. Good luck PJ! The prizes are nice, including a MacBook Pro, but I wasn’t going to do it. The funny thing is that pretty much everyone in the contest, if they did 24 hours of paying work for a customer, could buy themselves a MacBook [...]

Popularity: 21% [?]

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RailsConf

I’m thinking seriously about going to RailsConf in Chicago (announcement here). I’m getting more into Rails all the time, and really enjoying it. It’s predominantly what I use for my fun-time programming nowadays. I’d like to be there with a lot of the game-stepper-uppers and hear about the intermediate to advanced topics, and meet some [...]

Popularity: 18% [?]

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Ruby on Rails Scaffolding Hint

For those of you who ever have to do Rails work with an older database that was not created according to RoR naming specs and to which other things have been coded such that you can’t just rename everything, here’s something I found out the hard way. I created my model and used set_table_name to [...]

Popularity: 36% [?]

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What Happened to Crawler Etiquette?

Looking at the server logs for this weblog a few minutes ago, I noticed the Everest crawler from Vulcan (which namechecks owner Paul Allen on that page) downloading pages. I also notice that they were distressingly frequent, fetching pages 30K and larger every few seconds. I filled out their feedback form, letting them know that [...]

Popularity: 23% [?]

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Ruby on Rails Thoughts

I have been interested in Ruby on Rails for a while, and been fiddling with it in the nights and weekends. I like to stay up on new technologies and frameworks, partly because it is fun and partly because that’s some of the value I bring to the folks I work for. The more I [...]

Popularity: 20% [?]

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Enclosures plugin

For those of you who have been looking for the Blosxom enclosures plugin that I use to drive my audioblog, it has now been cleaned up and released by Keith Irwin. He’s submitted it to the Blosxom plugin registry, so it should be there soon. Thanks, Keith!
Popularity: 24% [?]

Popularity: 24% [?]

Bug in 0.3

Several people have pointed out to me that there is a bug in get_enclosures 0.3 where you can get a divide by zero error on a download that happens fast enough that will come down in the same second. People are getting this running get_enclosures against my bittorrent RSS feed. I’ll release an update to [...]

Popularity: 24% [?]

Release Management

I can see that I need to do something about the get_enclosures release management. Yesterday the 0.2 version was downloaded 50 times, while the 0.3 was downloaded 11 times. That’s not good, so I really need to do something ASAP. I guess in the short term, I’ll just remove the links to old versions and [...]

Popularity: 22% [?]

get_enclosures 0.3

Here is an updated release of get_enclosures. I have freely stolen AppleScript snippets from Ray Slakinski’s pyPodder to improve my iTunes integration. Now, iTunes will stay in the back if it is being newly started or will stay where it is if it is already running. Also, the feeds.txt file is no longer in the [...]

Popularity: 23% [?]

I Hate Applescript, I Need Help

I love most things about Macs, but I completely freaking hate Applescript. I’ve been trying to add to get_enclosures functionality someone had suggested, the ability to add the URLs from an RSS enclosure feed to a playlist as something to stream rather than download. That sounds simple enough, but after 30 minutes of farting around [...]

Popularity: 30% [?]

Attention (and XML)

Dag, I was mentioned by name in this article in The Inquirer. Let me state one more time for the record how incredibly ironic I find it that after years and years of working for startups that I thought would change the world, of delivering systems that I thought were marvels, the most attention I [...]

Popularity: 15% [?]

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