Scoble interview on Google Docs Offline functionality

Video: Serious Design and Coding Advice from Rapper Poetic Prophet

via Wired

friendfeed and twitter

I login to friendfeed and I see this:

Thats 67 tweets from Scoble. When you click on the "65 more", it expands to about 25 of his tweets. I guess thats what friendfeed limits to. Its not like everybody is going to be replying to tweets from thousands of people, so they'll limit it to 25.

Update: Robert says he is following 16000 people on twitter. Insane!

Scoble video on new mozilla based AT&T browser

Browsers and Acid3

Two browsers are saying they have reached Acid3 100/100 today:

Webkit (the Safari browser engine)

WinGogi (Opera internal development build)

That is a screenshot of the webkit nightly running Acid3 on my machine.

Update: So far so good. The webkit nightly works fine on most of the common sites I visit. I tried it with hotmail, but it falls back to its lite version, which it did with the stable safari version as well. Gmail/Google docs work great so far on Safari, even the drop down menu's added recently to Google docs.

Authors@Google: Clay Shirky

Via youtube.com

GTAC 2007: Adam Porter & Atif Memon - Skoll DCQAS

via Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

Darren Kitchen (Hak5) interview by Austin blogger

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Via Austinblogger

Safari on Windows

Anybody else notice that the fonts in safari look really great on Windows Vista. Not sure if this is a change in Safari 3.1 or if it was their before, but I really like the display. Sometimes the fonts look better than they do in OS X!

The double click on tab bar to open a new tab feature doesn't seem that useful though. I usually have so many tabs open that their isn't any space where I could double click.

Update: Their is this brouhaha over Apple pushing Safari via Apple Updates. I think Tom Krazit says it best.

If you don't want Safari, don't click "install."

Please read before you click!

Asa Dotzler talks about trust:

It really is wrong to make cause for users to mistrust, or even worse, to distrust, software update systems.

I disagree. As a security conscious systems administrator, and X-files fan I say "Trust No One!".

Firefox 3 beta is stable

I had been holding out on installing Firefox 3 beta on any thing but a virtual machine for testing. In the past, with version 2, I had run beta's and it had been my experience that upgrading from beta to the actual releases left things a bit unstable. Perhaps the profile had changes that caused random crashes, but it was irritating enough that I stayed away. Reading crunchgear's article might just change my mind though:

Firefox 3 won’t be out of beta until the end of June but Mozilla told Reuters yesterday that anyone can go ahead and download the most recent version and run it without worrying too much. It’s now stable enough for everyone, not just developers.

And I really want to try out the new mac theme (windows/linux themes seem boring comparatively). And I don't think I can wait till the end of June!

The Codebreakers

A two-part documentary, The Codebreakers was aired on BBC World TV during May 2006. It investigates how poor countries are using FOSS applications for development, and includes stories and interviews from around the world. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. See http://www.apdip.net/news/fossdoc for more infomation

via Google Video

Get A Bigger Screen

Get A Bigger Screen : Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin:

"‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know that your web site doesn’t look right on an 800×600 screen.’

‘You should get a bigger screen,’ I reply."

I wonder if that is a valid reply what with the proliferation of the Asus EEE PC/Nokia N800/Samsung Q1 type systems that have 800×480 pixels.

friendfeed

Scoble asks if friendfeed is a techmeme killer or the google reader killer?

I still like techmeme, but I moved of google reader a while back... I like river of news style feed reading, and I can use a combination of http://planetplanet.org and friendfeed for that. It takes too long to read my feeds if I am using Google Reader. And then you can star items for later reading and all of a sudden its not fun anymore its a chore. Let the stuff flow in a river and you catch only part of the river when you have time.

The reason friendfeed got my attention is that I can follow all the various RSS feeds generated by people. For instance, Scoble posts in so many different places. He has his Google Reader Shared Items, his blog, twitter and flickr amongst others. It gives me one place where I can view all this content. And I can do this for a number of people. And they can do the same for me. I don't have to go hunting for all these various feeds that I want to read / follow.

The one change through friendfeed is that I'm not subscribed to anybodies twitter feed in my feed reader.

Haiku OS makes it as a Google Summer of Code project

Haiku OS is a rewrite of BeOS R5 as an open source project. I've been watching the project for years as it evolves. They are now participating in Google Summer of Code. If you are a student you might be able to help the Haiku guys out. You can check out the List of GSoC Ideas here.

Cloning Virtualbox VM in OS X

It seems cloning a virtual machine is not as simple as copying the .vdi (virtual disk). Once I had an OS installed, I wanted to create duplicate VMs without actually having to install the OS again. Virtualbox specifies a unique identifier to each virtual disk so you have to use their command line cloning tool to create a clone.

Go to the directory where you virtual disk resides. In my case it was $HOME/Library/VirtualBox/VDI.
Once their you can clone the vdi by issuing the command VBoxManage clonevdi original.vdi clone.vdi. You should see output similar to this:

[ 12:18 PM Sun Mar 16 ] [Session: ttys001 VDI]
==> VBoxManage clonevdi Vista.vdi Vista-Clone-1.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.51
(C) 2005-2008 innotek GmbH
All rights reserved.

0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

Once the disk clone is made, create a new virtual machine, and assign it the cloned image.

Scoble with Gabe (of techmeme)

I love techmeme! :)

how I use py2exe

Just documenting this for myself to use later.

I have activestate activepython 2.5.1 installed. Copy the setup.py to the folder with the .py file. The contents of the setup.py are simply:

1 from distutils.core import setup
2 import py2exe
3
4 setup(console=['yourfile.py'])

Run "python setup.py py2exe". Two folders will be created:
1. Build
2. dist

dist should have your .exe and all the required dlls.

Update: Forgot to mention that this is after you download and install py2exe.

Todays Links

JScript Debugger in Internet Explorer 8

The Best Tools for Visualization

Interesting Game

"You know what I really want? I want a web experience like the soon-to-launch game Fez. Check out this video, it gets particularly interesting at :30."

via RWW

Codepad

Codepad is an interesting site. It gives you the ability to post code in a text box, have the code run, and displays the code/output in return. It gives you a convenient URL you can point to later.

Here is a hello world program I wrote in C.

Here is a Python helloworld.

I found out about codepad from the authors post where he mentions how he was having problems scaling the site, and how he solved it using Amazon EC2.

Browsers

Their are a bunch of new/beta web browsers out that I wanted to try. I setup a virtual machine to test these out. I've just installed them so these are just things I noticed starting out.

IE8beta  is out and it looks just like IE7. Their is a button that allows you to emulate IE7 mode. Also while downloading the firefox 3 beta 3 I noticed that the download dialog had an additional note that the download was checked by the Microsoft Safety Filter.  Their were some rendering problems with one of the large pages I viewed but I guess that is to be expected with beta software.

I also downloaded and installed Firefox 3 beta3 which has a new theme for windows that I noticed.  Not sure if I care too much for the new theme. It will be interesting to see the firefox theme for OS X though. One cool feature that I can already appreciate with firefox is the ability to save open tabs when you quit. Their were extensions that let you do that, but this is built in functionality so one less extension to go searching for. 

Flock has released version 1.1 that I downloaded though the initial interface is the same. I've only just installed these browsers, and still have to use them to tell if their are any major differences.

Update: Mozilla labs also has some new Prism stuff that I've installed on Firefox3 beta. I like prism because it lets you isolate some websites as certain applications. Gmail, Facebook amongst others are good examples of sites that I'd like to run with prism rather than as a tab in a browser. The new Firefox3 extension makes it really easy to create an application out of GMail and facebook.

Vista x64

I installed Windows Vista x64 on my XPS 1330 and the install went well. I see their are no drivers for the finger print reader, or for the touchpad. The touchpad is a little hyper sensitive and the only difference from my previous Vista x86 install is the missing synaptic touchpad software. Its quite irritating when typing, focus shifts to different points when you are typing.

IPhone SDK

Just started downloading the iPhone SDK. I don't have an iPhone, but just thought it might be fun to play around with the SDK since its free. Surprised by the size of the download which is 2.10 GB in size. Apple seems to have a lot of documentation and videos to get you started when you first register for the SDK.