Wednesday, February 28, 2007

purchased video?


purchased_video
Originally uploaded by awasim.
Anybody notice the purchased video link on Google video. I hadn't, and I haven't read anything about it either. The last I heard, Google video had gone search for video, leaving the rest to youtube. Where did the purchase thing come in?

web traffic


traffic
Originally uploaded by awasim.
Their is tons of traffic coming in via google. And not just through the search engine. Their is google reader their too. But where are the other search engines? Their isn't any Yahoo, MSN or Askcity? What gives?

embedding video...

I'll have to keep this in mind next time I post a youtube video or some other form of media.
clipped from nick.typepad.com

If nothing else, simply add a <noembed> section which links to the actual video, as this example demonstrates: 

<noembed><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkj4Wm6INFY">Click here to view video</a></noembed>]]>

A more user-friendly solution would be to include a <noembed> section that contains a thumbnail image of the video which links to the actual video.

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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

high post day...

Just look at Dave Winers blog.

Python 3000 - Google Video

Python 3000 road map, status, and what this means for the average Python user.

Source: Python 3000 - Google Video

Guido, creator of Python talks about what is going to be included in Python 3000. For instance, right now in Python 2.4 if you have a list such as:

>>> a_list = [2, 1, ""]

>>> a_list.sort()

You get back a sorted list:

>>> a_list

[1, 2, '']

In Python 3000 you should get a TypeError. 

One of the many items that might be useful to Python programmers coding future proof code, is covered by this talk. 

Austin is being scobleized!

Who is scoble? He is the guy who interviews geek godess CEO's! :)
clipped from scobleizer.com

No, I’m not going to Microsoft’s MVP Summit. Instead SXSW in Austin is calling my name. Anyone want to meet up?

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Dojo offline...

or I'm having too much fun with clipmarks!
clipped from www.sitepen.com

Screencast of Dojo Offline + Demo + Release Download

Thumbnail of beginning of Dojo Offline screencast for 02-20-2007

Watch the Dojo Offline Screencast

First, we have put up a screencast that shows a demo of Dojo Offline named Moxie. Moxie is an example application bundled with Dojo Offline that shows how to use the Dojo Offline framework. It is a web-based word processor that features local storage and offline access. Moxie is now finished for Dojo Offline.

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Trying out clipmarks!

Amazing tool called clipmarks, a demo of which can be seen on the scobleshow. I'm using clips marks to clip entries from scobles blog and post them here.
clipped from scobleizer.com

It’s not usual when I can get videos up of two companies breaking news (Ning and ClipMarks) all in the same night, but here’s the videos of ClipMarks: interview with Eric Goldstein, co-founder, and demo of ClipMarks by Eric.

I’m off to the Adobe Engage event, more later.

UPDATE: Rafe Needleman has more on ClipMarks here. TechMeme has more about ClipMarks 2.0 here.

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Monday, February 26, 2007

No smoking...

I've been cigarette free for a month! :)

On Basant...

Sigh! How can such a simple and fun sport as kite flying (basant) turn deadly? I don't think banning the sport makes sense. Educating the people on *not* firing in the air, and parental supervision should be required instead.

kwrite, kate, and kedit

I never quite understood why their were so many editors in KDE. From the interface one could tell kate was meant for programmers. Now it seems their shall be only one editor to rule them all:
the base kde installation of libs+base now includes exactly one text editor application application, kwrite.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

On Blogging...

As more of my friends find out I have a blog, they ask me how much I earn from it. To clarify, this blog is a hobby. It was never meant to be about money. I learnt the concept of a blog from Dave Winer around the year 2001. He is considered a proto-blogger. I've had a blog in some shape and form since 2001 thanks to him. Having a blog turned out to be the perfect outlet for me to write down my experience of working with computers.

This blog is a hobby. It does three things for me. First, its a way for me to write, which I love. Second, it lets me have a voice, as small as it may be. Third, I get to log my daily technical learnings. Its not about money! I hope we are clear about that.

Now read and have fun. Best part of the blogosphere is that if you don't like what you read, or if it isn't any fun, you can always unsubscribe.

And now, I can just point my friends to this post every time they ask why I blog!

django stuff

(Mind you I'm just starting with django, so correct me if I'm wrong. Heck, if I'm wrong, correct me anyways :)

I was working on an app of mine on a new machine, and installed django-0.95.1. Pulling my code of subversion, I ran into a problem. In urls.py, I would do something like this:
from myapp.views import some_func

Within urlpatterns I'd have something like this:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
   (r'^$', some_func)
)


Which worked fine, until today. Now I'd get:
'function' object has no attribute 'rindex'

I finally figured out the problem was in the way I was calling some_func.

The way I fixed it was removing the line that imported some_func, and reworking the urlpatterns entry to read:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
   (r'^$', 'myapp.views.some_func')
)

Saturday, February 24, 2007

worldofwarcraft, vista and intel 945GM

I've had the problem on Vista ultimate where running burning crusade would cause the screen to go black, come back, and a message to appear in the task bar saying that the driver stopped responding, and has been restarted. This was distracting and the more you played, the faster the driver would stop responding.

According to this forum thread, installing the latest drivers fixed the problem. The only problem was that each time I tried to run the installer, it would say that the driver has not been verified and would not be installed.

To get it to work, I ended up downloading the zipped driver, going to start (or that icon thing in vista), right click on computer, and go to manage. Click on device manager, display adapters, and right click on the Intel 945GM adaptor. Choose Update Driver Software, Browse My computer for driver software, let me pick from a list of device driver drivers on my computer, have disk, and browse to where you unpacked the zip file, and go into the graphics directory. Choose igdlh and then open. The driver should install, and hopefully you won't have the "driver not responding again".

Happy warcrafting!

Friday, February 23, 2007

Installing multiple OS's in a unique way...

So the idea is that here is a student who can't shell out for CD's to burn, but would like to install multiple operating systems on a machine. When I read the title of the article I assumed that he would be using parallels, virtualpc or vmware and mounting the iso within that particle virtual machine. Not so.

Read on to find out how he did it.

Getting your RSS reader to open articles in a new tab...

Here is someone who has hacked a solution for a problem I've noticed.

I wanted to be able to let Akregator open the links I click in tabs instead of scattering windows all over the desktop.


RSS readers and web browsers are intertwined. The way I read RSS feeds is scanning through google reader, and middle clicking to have the article open in a tab in the background, so that I can read it later. I like using an external web browser. Sometimes I like to try other RSS readers, and usually on Linux, I've had the problem that the article opens up in a new browser window. True to open source style, the author above hacks a solution to this problem for Akregator+Konqueror combo.

YUI hosting

YUI or Yahoo UI library is now freely hosted by Yahoo. I think this is a good idea, and I would personaly use the service myself. But this brings up one problem that I've been noticing why my blog itself.

Having too many components of a web page placed on a separate server slows the loading of the page. Further, if a third party service goes down, your page goes into an endless loading cycle, or is not displayed properly. Just the other day, delicious was having problems, and the recent links section in the sidebar was not loading. It was a problem.

Here is why I've been thinking about this problem.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

soundsource

Here is a useful utility thats free for the mac. I have USB headphones that have a mic, and putting them in and switching the sound source from the system preferences was a little bit of inconvenience that should be solved with this utility.

Number of subscribers to a feed equals...

a variable to be used in assessing a sites pagerank? Just a thought.

powershell

I am just getting started with Powershell, and I found that you can "cat", "clear", and "ls" just like in a Unix shell. You can pipe stuff (from here):

ls | out-file "dir-listing.txt" (where out-file is a cmdlet)

The above will output a file listing, and the out-file cmdlet will write that to a file called "dir-listing.txt" in the current directory.

"cat dir-listing.txt" to check file contents.

You can download powershell from here.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Visual Basic for Linux?

slashdot thread.

From the why can't we all just get along dept

This makes me want to stop using Windows.

Here is something that makes me want to use Vista amongst other OS's.

Komodo Edit

I had heard of Komodo IDE which was a pretty good IDE, but it wasn't free. Now their is also Komodo Edit, which is a free editor. Downloading it right now.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

kubuntu on e1405

You might have some problems getting X to start during installation. You can follow the instructions here to get going.

Promote please!

I just created an item on ideastorm. The one thing I hate about Linux on Dell is that the mic doesn't work, or is a pain to get working on some of the recent systems with the sigmatel audio. So please promote the issue, so that we can do proper VOIP on Dell/Linux laptops!

http://www.dellideastorm.com/article/show/62636/Builtin_mic_should_work_with_Linux

Saturday, February 17, 2007

how hard is it to "press n"?

with Vista speech recognition!

Find out here.

On Dell...

Wow... look at the thread on Dell at techmeme. Nice.

Here is Micheal on what ideaStorm is.

Man I wish my Dell I ordered yesterday would get here. I might have an ideastorm or two. It shipped yesterday.

I found this on dmwmedia.com
TechCrunch points out, however, that IdeaStorm does not arrive without a question mark. Marshall Kirkpatrick, the article’s author, writes, “the second most popular submission as I write this is a call for a separate, internal IdeaStorm site for Dell employees. That makes me question how enthusiastic Dell’s employees will be about IdeaStorm.”


And my question is, as a Dell employee why would I want a separate site? I'm a customer too! Maybe I'm missing something.

And I found this interesting as well:
Update 2: I find is disappointing that after months (or is it years now) that the blogosphere has criticized Dell to listen and join the conversation that when Dell does something potentially amazing that folks miss the whole point and make it a Dell copies Digg meme rather than focusing on what’s really important –Dell is opening up to build better products.

Friends, please see the forest, not the branches on the trees.


Now if only we could get Robert Scoble hooked up with Lionel Menchaca for an interview!

GNOME wars?!?

This is weird! Perhaps the GNOME guys will include Linus patches, but the fact that he chose to submit patches seems really weird to me. Constructive as it may be, Linus obviously knows that people can't just include patches. They're probably reviewed by dozens of people before inclusion. How can you base the conclusion of your argument on the inclusion of some patches?

Personally I am a KDE fan. knetworkmanager is the killer app that makes Linux on a laptop possible for average users. Now if only we could get Laptops with Linux to do better power management.

IT in the middle ages



:)

(found via reddit.com)

Friday, February 16, 2007

Read/Write web popping up again and again

Their have been a couple of interesting stories on read/write web lately.

This story on Offline app support in Firefox 3.

This story of Yahoo! Pipes and the web as a database.

The above story even got a Dave Winer post.

And then today was a story on Dell. (Ok, maybe this one is really interesting just to me! :)

outlet.dell.com

Did you know about outlet.dell.com where you can buy refurbished dell machines? I didn't until a week ago.

Channel 9

Perhaps its Scoble's enthusiasm or passion, or his really loud and excited laugh. But ever since Scoble left channel 9, I haven't been able to watch more than five minutes of a channel 9 video. Perhaps it was how the camera was always moving, looking at the screen, following the conversation. I keep clicking on the channel9 videos, as they show up on techmeme, but it just isn't fun any more.

On the other hand, every scobleshow video is watched completely. Take this scobleshow video for instance.

Blogger, the forgotten child

Google releases a new feature, and wouldn't you know it. Blogger users are left out in the cold watching others have all the fun.

Servers at home

The cost of leaving your PC on

Am I glad that my electricity bill is included in apartment rent. What with having at least three machines on at all times.

Friday, February 02, 2007

beryl

I tried getting AIGLX and beryl working on my ubuntu box yesterday, but it seems that the graphics card on the machine isn't strong enough. I think its a really old ATI card, I don't even remember. Any case, when beryl starts up it complains about the texture size, and 25% of the screen is black. And I really wanted to try out the new dock.

And my friends wonder why in the world I would need a couple of more systems to play around with! :D

Vista Upgrade

I have an XP installation that I thought I'd try to upgrade. All versions of Vista are on the same DVD. I had previously installed Ultimate, and I thought I'd try premium to see the differences first hand. Turns out you can't upgrade XP to Premium from the DVD I had. You could only do a clean install. You could upgrade to Business, Ultimate and I think Enterprise. I restarted the install this time putting in the key for business. The installer has the option of going online to see if their are any updates to the installer. This is new. Turns out I had to uninstall the Bluetooth Stack for Windows by Toshiba. I'm going to restart the installation now.

Its upgrading right now, and the installation dialog says at the bottom:
"Your upgrade may take several hours to complete"!

Thankfully it didn't take several hours, just one, and the install was pretty normal after that.

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 ...