More Light! More Light!

Hey there buddy. I want to talk to you about all these applications you’ve been making and putting on the Facebook. This is going to be a difficult conversation, so take a seat.

I know you want to go viral like that goddamn werewolf/ zombie/ vampire/ coprophage army thing. But please. You have to offer value to me first. Then I will recommend you to my friends.

My daddy taught me never to be held hostage. I know the type of person I attract. It appears to be blond Londoners named Sam.  Lucky me!  But shame on you for playing on people’s insecurities!

I’d love to find out what type of disaster I am, but apparently the “skip” button is broken and I can only find out by inviting my friends.

Also, how sad is this got love application? I have to invite folks before it will tell me that I am loved for some randomly generated reason.  Kids, do we trust programmers that can’t master subject-verb agreement?

It’s ridiculous.   Why do they not give you anything for free unless you install the application and invite your friends?  Because these applications get access to your personal information, your friendlist, etc.  And then they sell them.  Shocked?  Here’s the thing: Facebook doesn’t host these applications.  All the hard work gets done on outside servers - paid for by the guy who wrote the application.   So the guy who is displaying pieces of flair for your Facebook page is also scraping out your friendlist and your contact info, anything you’ve allowed him access to.  And he’s selling it to his pals.  Once the info is on the market, you can’t get it back.

Moral of the story?  I like Facebook so that I can find out you had a kid or that your car was stolen, but I don’t want it to lead to you getting your identity stolen.  Be good out there.

I’ve joined the travel site dopplr. It’s pretty simple. Put in trips, connect through them. Useful for the frequent flying types that I’m supposed to become soon. You can see the little badge over there on the left telling you that I’ll be in Mount Snow this weekend.

Except that it tells you West Rutland, because neither Mount Snow or West Dover are understood as places by Dopplr. I picked a town near Killington, but that seems a bit lame to me.

Ignore this, it is just a braindump from the train.  Unless you want to help out.

I’ve started working on a project called add-art.   The idea is to turn advertisements into beauty.  It is based on the popular ad-block-plus firefox extension, but instead of leaving holes where advertisements are removed, it would insert art.  Curators could book shows on add-art.org for artists.  When you go to a website with tons of ads, they would be replaced by art images.

Great stuff!   Once we get the plugin working with add-art.org, we should look at decentralizing it.  Let the extension communicate with multiple ad block lists and multiple replacement image servers.  Then package the add-art.org server as an installable package so anyone can run it.  Let users pick up the url of other servers as a way to get art from the artists they like on their browser…

Deviantart might run something like this.
Maybe flickr/explore/interesting could be a provider.
Hell, why not use atom/rss as the provider and let any rss list of images be the provider?
Image sizing becomes an issue.  You need to stick in appropriate sized images.  If they aren’t the right size you’ll need to slice them up on the client side.  Is that cheap?  Does the browser give you a way to not only decently resize, but also slice from an image?

Yesterday morning, the 7.10 version of Ubuntu was released. It’s supposed to be chock full of goodness, so my neighbor Lawyer Matt and I had an install party with Aaron and Ian.

I dug out an old IBM Thinkpad T20 laptop that had been lying around and we got to it. I’d tried various Linux installs before, including Ubuntu. It always got down to having to know far to much about the internals than I wanted to.

This was a huge difference. The basic install went very smooth. I hit one snag. This old laptop had a PCMCIA wifi card that wasn’t recognized. Aaron found the solution for my Linksys WPC54G on the Ubuntu forums. With that out of the way, it is working. I’m impressed by how simple and smooth the experience is so far. Of course, the experience so far is mainly checking gmail, playing a movie, and writing this post.

Just noticed on Techdirt.  Why does this matter?

More corporate environments might get to use enterprise IM.  Enterprise IM creates a whole new pattern of realtime communication apart from  email or phone.  It’s searchable, loggable, linkable, etc.   It’s a better path to voice communication with your systems.

As I commented over on techdirt, it worked really well when I was working at UBS.

Fascinating stuff - they manage to find a way to eliminate the least important, least noticeable pixels in a path from one edge of a picture to another.

via the always excellent alex barnett.

I’ve completed work on the pdf wallet generator and put up some notes on the work under projects.

So much happened this week, without even getting into the tornado that hit Bay Ridge.

On Saturday I met with my ex-neighbor Gina Mauro - she needs a better website for her art. I think Sam and I should be able to provide one. The big part of the project is taking her requirements and picking a Content Management System off the shelf that she can use. I was playing around with Drupal and Mambo, but I think she basically just needs a styled and themed version of Gallery2, plus a contact and about page. That’s it. My biggest worry is making sure that I don’t underestimate the work involved.

Started learning to use VIM again on Monday. I just think I can get more done with it. I need to get better at it. So I’ve started trying to use it for all my basic text editing needs. Within one week of use, I’m getting pretty decent at using VIM. It seems like it encourages you to write text like a programmer, thinking about how to minimize steps as you take them.

Sent out an improved ipc batch script to my coworkers and introduced them to the wonders of autohotkey. No one really seems all that enthused by the possibility of saving some time, but we’ll see if a little prodding helps it catch on. Next week I may tell them about launchy!

The big news is that I managed to reform Ryan Stewart’s PDF Wallet into a class and an edited version of ezpdf. I’ve got the first wallet from this new page in my pocket right now and I’ll be working to migrate Ryan’s stuff with him this weekend. Most of the work was done on the subway to and from my job. All of the work was done in Vim. More on that next week!

Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.

No progress on Spanish. I haven’t given up on it yet, but if I don’t do some more learning, I’ll start forgetting.

Sam and I took out the stitches in my foot together. I’m walking fine and everything seems to be working.

Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.

Work next week should be much quieter, one of the louder folks here has gone on to a new job. I wish him luck and more happiness!

I was very excited to see Ryan Stewart’s paper wallet pdf generator a while ago. Excited, but frustrated. It was good, but had some flaws. I got in contact with Ryan, and he invited me to help out with fixing the problems.

Some of the issues are in the underlying ezpdf code for PHP, so I thought I’d go over them. Ezpdf and the pdf class underlying it have some bugs with handling rotated text, which I think I’ve fixed. It’s rough, but I’ll be putting it up soon, and then I’ll submit the changes to R&OS for inclusion into ezpdf.

Should be going up sometime this week.

Sometimes the best way to say it is with a picture. My experience has been that a picture is worth 900 or so words.

For drawing work diagrams, Visio is typically the king.

1. It is made by Microsoft and big corporations typically have a volume license deal.
2. It is pretty decent desktop software and fits most uses.

I was frustrated at Visio diagrams in our wiki when I was doing some user experience articles and creating lots of wireframes. I’d have to make a change, export to jpg, upload to wiki, reference the picture.

I’m way too lazy for that. I just want to make the change one time, and see it everywhere. I don’t like to repeat myself.

Since our wiki at work is running off of the excellent (but not free) Confluence Wiki from Atlassian, I was able to convince our architecture group to buy us a license for the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. After some initial slowness issues, which the Gliffy folks fixed, it’s a dream.

You create a diagram, you reference it in the wiki - if you need to change it, it’s easy. Change it back - no problem. Gliffy has versioning.

All told, it took much longer to get through the paperwork to buy the software than to install the software, but it’s well worth it so far!