Saturday, December 30, 2006

How fast is scoble?

P.P.P.S: Scoble’s now busy with a political campaign. Let’s see how long it takes till he finds this post by an almost unknown Z-lister (if he ever does!)


Well lets see. The post was made at:
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 4:49 am and is filed under Tech, StatBot.


It showed up on scobles blog at:
Filed under: blogging @ 10:08 am # Comments (3


on "December 30, 2006".

Damn that is fast!
I wonder if Yuvi is gonna release that software out in the open? I'd like to get some stats on my blog!

linux and live mail

Not sure whats going on here:
So, I go downstairs to my Linux PC later that night and log in again. The suckiness got turned up big time. Then I notice this:

"This version works better with your browser. The full version of Mail runs on Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher (make sure you check the system requirements before you install it). The full version also works on Firefox 1.5."

That's good to know, thanks for sharing. Too bad I'm using Firefox v1.5 in Linux and on my Mac, so what gives?


I thought I'd try this. On my kubuntu edgy with firefox 2.0 I get the full live mail experience. Perhaps its a problem with firefox 1.5, or one of the extensions he has installed.

Crimson Editor open sourced

I've used the Crimson editor at times, and I was pleased to find that its been open sourced.

Bad Software Design

I'm not sure whose fault this is. Whether its the installer, the WindowManager (or OS). I'm installing world of warcraft in the background. I'm writing a blog post in the web browser. The installation is now on its third disk. The third disk finishes install, the installer suddenly gains focus as I am typing, my key strokes are passed to the installer instead. Installation cancelled! I have to go through the whole damn install again!

Thursday, December 28, 2006

I wish...

I'd received one of these! I've been blogging about Vista for a while now! These are just posts in December. I don't think there would have been anything wrong with sending the laptops if the bloggers had to disclose the receipt of a laptop from Microsoft. And only if the blogger does blog about Vista.

Python 2.5 and MySQLdb on Win32

I installed Python2.5 from python.org, and went about looking for the MySQLdb for Python 2.5. No such luck. The module isn't ready yet.

Had to downgrade to 2.4.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Firefox 2.0 and backspace

Now here is an example of interesting search you can come across thanks to blogsearch. On my kubuntu install firefox 2.0 does not go back in history when you hit the backspace key. On my OS X box it does. I'm not sure how true the above article is, but it gives one explanation of why the backspace key doesn't work the same on Linux, and the politics behind it.

Monday, December 25, 2006

Blog search

I've been using blog search for a while but in a way thats different from normal searches. Blog search engines are good for an ongoing search. Take a topic you're interested in. I like reading about system administration or shell scripting for instance. Search on this topic on technorati.com, or google blog search. The results are available to you in RSS format. Subscribe to this feed. Now you have a way of going through the blogosphere and reading about topics that interest you.

Blogs generally don't stay on topic. One post might be interesting so you subscribe to the blog, but it turns out that the post was an anomaly. A topic not to be discussed again. In the mean time your RSS reader gets full of blogs whose content you don't really care for anymore. Through blog search you have content that is on topic.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Hak.5

I missed this, something new the Hak.5 guys were trying. Damn it. At least you can download the video, which I'm doing right now.

some simple XML (opml) parsing in Python

Say you have an opml file, whose filename is stored in the variable "filename":

from xml.dom import minidom
xmldoc = minidom.parse(filename)

"""
Print all the feed urls in the file
"""

for x in xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('outline'):
   if x.attribute.has_key('xmlUrl'):
      print(x.attributes["xmlUrl"].value)

Where your opml doc probably looks like:

<opml>
   <head>
      <title>Title for document</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <outline text="somerssfeedtext" title="somerssfeedtitle" htmlUrl="urltofeedssite" xmlUrl="urltofeed">
      ...
      ... (more outline elements)
   </body>
</opml>

For more xml/python goodness look here.

If you want to use xpath/xml/python, look here.

Photoshop


spy.modified
Originally uploaded by awasim.
When I went to CNN.com earlier this morning the headline was about the Italian person with his picture. Later I saw the picture had changed. Can you tell which one is the original? I pulled the original out of browser cache, so no screenshot.


orig
Originally uploaded by awasim.

OpenID

Here is a screencast on openid. I like the fact that you can use your own domain name as an OpenID. I doubt some of the main sites I visit (hotmail, gmail, blogger) will use OpenID, but it would make things so much easier.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Switching over to new blogger is complete. First post from new blogger. We have labels!

laughing on vidcasts

Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger:
"I hate my laugh. I’ve gotta stop laughing so much, it really is annoying."


Only when its too loud. Otherwise it gives the videos a nice humorous atmosphere which otherwise might be a little boring.

kubuntu, wpa and...

knetworkmanager rocks!

I didn't have to do anything. Just apt-get install knetworkmanager, start knetworkmanager, and enter the WPA password. Nice.

Python-mode

I came across this guide today on how to install python-mode, which is very similar to the steps I was taking. I was interested in the byte-compile section which was the only thing different. Since my installation steps are without byte compilation, I was just curious to see if it would add anything significant other than a speed increase via compiled code. Didn't get too far though because it wouldn't byte-compile for me giving me an error. An included library (are they called something else in elisp or is library good enough?) ansi-color was missing. Commenting the offending line:

require 'ansi-color

seemed to fix the problem. And I didn't notice any real difference after the byte-compilation, as expected.

Vista Experience

I'm beginning to get a little disappointed with Vista. It was working quite well for me the past few days, but I've been having application issues as days go by. First vlc-0.8.6 wouldn't play properly, it gives me a black screen instead of video. Switching back to 0.8.5 works, but then it disables aero. Then I had the problems with IE7 crashing yesterday. And today while doing video chat on Skype, I got a bluescreen, and the system rebooted. Now all of this could be a result of third party software, but thats my point. If an application misbehaves, the OS shouldn't crash.

While transferring data via scp, my wireless connection died. All other machines worked without any problems. I had to plug in a network cable.

World of Warcraft keeps crashing on me, a few minutes after I'd start it up.

Plus, a 40 gig harddrive is no where near a decent amount of disk space for Vista. Granted I have quite a bit installed (Office 2007, Visual Studio 2007, world of warcraft, warcraft3 being the heavy hitters) I still should have had more than a gig left at least!

Oh well, I guess the honey moon with Vista is over, and all the little problems are cropping up now! :)

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

javascript toolkit screencasts

Jon Udell linked to some screencasts by Peter Wayner, and their are a couple of toolkits reviewed that I had not looked into yet. Their is rico that I had never heard of before, the zimbra kabuki toolkit, which I didn't know existed, even though I know and have seen zimbra in action. And Google web toolkit, which I had heard of but never seen in action (not really a java fan, so never bothered to look). Anyways, here is a cool way to learn about more javascript toolkits!

kubuntu experiences

Their have been small glitches as I use kubuntu day to day, but none of them have been show stoppers, and I continue to use the system pretty often.

The first glitch was when I installed Kubuntu on my desktop. The CD I have burned is dapper. Edgy is the latest version of the distro, and since I'm lazy, I just install dapper, and let update me to edgy. The process I roughly follow is install dapper, edit /etc/apt/sources.list, and replace all entries for dapper with edgy (in VI:%s/dapper/edgy/g) , sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. This worked fine for me on the desktop.

The desktop however started having problems with X11/kdm. The first time X11/kdm wouldn't start. Logging in on the console, and starting X manually worked. The second time, kdm wouldn't start, and the console was messed up too. Rebooting the machine seems to have fixed everything. I havent' had to mess with the config files yet.

Installing dapper on another machine gave me a new kind of problem. This machine needed LaTeX. I installed dapper, and this time I was so lazy, I figured I'd just use dapper. So, I did "sudo apt-get install latex". Problems. I did all sorts of stuff (must start taking notes), yet latex would'nt install due to broken dependencies. After some futzing, I gave up. Reinstalled dapper, upgraded to edgy, and low and behold, latex installed!

And we need better WPA2 support in Linux!

Vista, JDK and crash!

I've been using Vista RTM consecutively for a few days, and its been very stable. The font display is amazing.

However, today I experienced my first problem with the system. I've been watching a couple of screencasts in quicktime, and IE7 stoped responding. The only new thing that I've done is install the latest version of JDK from java.sun.com. I don't know if its related, or its something else, such as quicktime, but its happened twice in an hour or so.

I've noticed when you visit different sites using IE7, they sometimes ask for various different versions of msxml. A popup appears on the top of the window. Similar to the popup when you try to download a file. The web page itself seems to display properly.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Google Apps for adnanwasim.com

I've begun using Google Apps for my domain, adnanwasim.com. Its amazingly easy to setup. The two big things I guess are gmail for your domain, and calender integration.

Searching...

For my last post, when I remembered about the levelator, I didn't remember the name of the software. I just remembered that Jon Udell had talked about some software that might help with fixing audio levels in a podcast. So I started searching for what it could be.

I refined my search to look something like the following:

"site:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell Jon Udell audio podcast edit"

It just so happened that I was using IE7 with live search as the default. In this case, the results returned were relevant, but the post I had been looking for wasn't their. However, results on google had the relevant post as the second result. Just for the sake of this post, I thought I'd try out Yahoo, which returned no results. Not too interested in finding out why, but I assume its because Yahoo doesn't understand the "site:" keyword? Perhaps this is why Google is still the preferred search engine rather than the others. Still returns far more relevant search results.

Scobleshow needs the levelator!

Just got done watching another most informative scoble show interview, this time of Mark Lucovsky, but the sound on the show needs work. Scoble does'nt have a second mic, so his voice comes in slightly lower than the person being interviewed. And then their is the change in the pitch of the person being interviewed.

This reminded me of something that Jon Udell wrote about a while back, called Levelator.

"In a talk given at the Podcast Academy, Daniel Steinberg noted that the normalization function in audio editors like Audacity and Audition "doesn't do what you think it does." I guess I'm not the only one who assumed, incorrectly, that normalization's job was even out loudness variation. But apparently it doesn't. It levels off peaks, but doesn't raise up valleys.

Levelator does do what many people expect normalization to do. It brings the valleys up close to the peaks."

And Roberts camera needs to be able to talk to his cell phone.

Hey, Roberts filming, turn yourself off! :)

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

TailRank.com vs. Techmeme.com

I like both sites after having used them each day. But I find I keep going back to Techmeme.com more often. And it most definitely has to do with design. I like the Techmeme design. Where the page isn't too big so I don't have to keep scrolling like I do on TailRank. On techmeme, their is two screenfuls of data usually, or three, and the stories are clearly visible. The discussions around that story are usually grouped in much smaller text, but you can clearly tell what the story is. I just like that view a lot compared to TailRank. Its easier to see the difference. Perhaps I need to get used to staring at the small screenshots in TailRank.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Firefox on Google

Google Advertises Firefox on Homepage
The Firefox 2.0 browser already comes with Google as its default search, but this advertisement implies there are more default Google services integrated into Firefox. Is it just Google Toolbar, or does it include other things?


You can choose Google Reader as your default Feed Reader in Firefox. On my Linux box, I would go to Edit->Preferences->Feeds, and choose Google Reader in the listbox titled "Subscribe to the feed using:". Now everytime an orange icon comes up in Locator box to the right, it will take you to Google Reader where you can subscribe to that feed.

Be warned though, this makes it so easy to subscribe to feeds, you might subscribe to too many, and then end up doing this. :)

Firefox2, Google Toolbar and Ubuntu

Some extension on Firefox2 on Ubuntu causes the browser to die. No error messages, it just dies. I am pretty sure it is some extension that causes the problem.

I was trying to install the Google Toolbar on Firefox2 on my Ubuntu box, and for some reason it says Google Toolbar is not compatible with my Firefox build type (linux-gnu_x86-gcc3). That seems like a pretty common build type to me.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

TailRank and nonUS blogs

Parallels Desktop - Coherence %u529F%u80FD: "Parallels Desktop - Coherence %u529F%u80FD"



I was wondering if TailRank covered non-US blogs. I guess it does cover some of them. I haven't seen a non-US story on techmeme.com yet.

Jon Udell joins Microsoft


Jon Udell has joined Microsoft.

Its good to see Jon get so much recognition. The content he has been generating for the past few years has been amazing, screencasts, mashups and so forth. He is the one who coined the term screencast! :)

I just hope the content on his blog doesn't change.

Update: And Jon says he will continue writing here.

Companies are now based on the blogosphere

Conversation with Memetracker developer Kevin Burton



Here is something that I hadn't thought about before. Companies such as techmeme, or tailrank are solely based on blogs as input. This made me realize the importance of individual blogs. Even if a blog doesn't have many readers, if it gets indexed by one of these services, its a valuable contributor. Its helping these services identify conversations and rank it. Makes me feel their is value for my blog! :)

There is technorati.com that is centered around the blogosphere, and now their is TailRank.com, and techmeme.com amongst others. I was surprised that digg.com was mentioned in this category. I always thought about digg.com and reddit.com as different. I know digg.com stories are based on peoples direct input, and I think reddit.com works the same way. Which is different from TailRank and techmeme.com which are based on input from blogs they index. Human vs. Machine.

Man, they have some really good stuff in this interview, can't talk about all of it. Too much to cover. Its good to hear scobleshow.com is doing well though.

The demo had some more interesting stuff, such as Tailranks "My Tail" feature. Its a little more customization around tracking memes, but not as much as I would like. A really cool feature for me would be to check what blogs I want to see conversations around. For instance, what if I wanted to track conversations around Tim Brays or Dave Winers blog.
(Hmm... looks like their might be just such a feature. I'll have to experiment more)

By the way, I think Scobles idea of doing a demo of a companies product together with the interview is really cool and useful. It gives more value to what the interviewer is talking about.

Friday, December 08, 2006

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

kghostview and kpdf

kghostview was the default application set to handle pdf files when downloaded via firefox on Kubuntu edgy. But the software was acting weird, cutting of slides, and showing some horrible fonts. kpdf is far better at displaying pdf files. Perhaps kghostview should stick to displaying postscript (.ps) files only.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Too much reading, too little creativity


0 subscriptions.png
Originally uploaded by awasim.
Too much of my time is spent reading my feeds. Its too easy to add stuff to Google Reader, and their is too little time spent on working on what I read. Too little creativity. And an RSS Aggregator is addictive. So from 156 subscriptions, I went to 0.

I think it might be better to restrict reading on the weekends, and I can do it Netnewswire, with a restricted set of feeds. I'm going to see how that goes.

I removed the subscriptions from Google Reader as I might feel like checking Google Reader. Now their isn't anything to check.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Document Revision and RSS



Koral, content collaboration for enterprises, demonstrated | Scobleshow



Here is a really cool use of RSS. A way of subscribing to a documents revision history, so you can keep track of document revisions! Nice!

Now if only I could get embedded quicktime to show my an time related info, I could tell you where in that video they mention the above feature!

Update: Its about 4:30 into the video.

Super cool Firefox commercial.

digg - Super cool Firefox commercial.:

"Check out this funny Firefox commercial. Very impressive animation"



(Via digg.)

IE7, Safari, Opera and Google Reader


This problem with IE7 and Google Reader I'd been having seems to have been fixed now.

With Safari, I noticed two things, when the page loads new items, the browser locks up and the beach ball, or whatever that mouse pointer to show busy on the mac is, comes up. When you reach the end of the feed, and you still scroll down, the web page itself scrolls down. It should do nothing.

I noticed the scrolling down problem first in Opera on Windows.

Python Environment for Windows

Dan McKinley : Setting up a Python Development Environment for the Ignorant Windows Programmer:

"This assumes very little knowledge and hopefully this will be helpful to somebody. You will need:
Python - http://python.org/
Emacs - http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/
python-mode: http://sourceforge.net/projects/python-mode/

Yes, tragically, you will have to learn emacs if you have managed to resist it up to this point. Luckily, it turns out to be worth the trouble."



Its funny, but I've been doing the almost exact same thing in terms of setting up a Python environment for Windows. Though I don't see anything tragic about having to learn how to use Emacs, I think emacs rocks! In any case, you can also download XEmacs from here:

XEmacs http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32/

I use ActiveStates activepython:

ActivePython: http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePython/?mp=1

If you are using XEmacs instead of Emacs, in your .emacs file replace the following line:
(global-font-lock-mode t)
with:
(require 'font-lock)

I like using the command line a lot. Activestate adds python to the command line when you install. Adding xemacs directory to the PATH environment variable helps to launch emacs from the command line.

I too really do like the Consolas font in Windows. If for some reason you don't have it installed, you can download it from here:

Consolas font pack

So their you go, a slightly alternate path to take if you are an "Ignorant Windows Programmer". :)

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Safari render problems


Safari render problems
Originally uploaded by awasim.
My Powerbook has been working nice and stable since I got it. However, I got bored with the install, and it felt cluttered. I had compiled some stuff without specifying the prefix during configure, and it had installed in the wrong places. So I blew away the old install, and started fresh. I figured I'd use Safari for a while, and so far the only problem I've had can be seen with ongoing.com in the picture.

Friday, December 01, 2006

emacs syntax highlighting

set this in your init file (usually .emacs):
(global-font-lock-mode t)

For Xemacs on Windows:
(require 'font-lock)
(setq-default font-lock-maximum-decoration t)

Mozilla and hypocrisy

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to  Yahoo and making that the default upon ...