Sunday, December 31, 2006
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
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
Bad Software Design
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
Monday, December 25, 2006
Blog search
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
some simple XML (opml) parsing in Python
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
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Thursday, December 21, 2006
laughing on vidcasts
"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...
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
Monday, December 11, 2006
Firefox on Google
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
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
Monday, December 04, 2006
Too much reading, too little creativity
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
Friday, December 01, 2006
emacs syntax highlighting
(global-font-lock-mode t)
For Xemacs on Windows:
(require 'font-lock)
(setq-default font-lock-maximum-decoration t)
Mozilla and hypocrisy
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