de.lirio.us is a new clone of del.icio.us. I’m stymied. I understand that the intention is to make an open source clone, so that others can innovate at the API level. But I still don’t get it.
First, what you need here is open APIs – something delicious has been quite good at – not open source. Open source is useful for running another instance, something you don’t want to do with a social service. The power comes from many people using the same instance.
But more important, it’s disappointing to see an exact replica of delicious. There’s zero innovation, even though there is plenty of innovation to be done. In fact, delirious is even uglier than delicious, which certainly wasn’t a beauty to begin with.
Plagiarism like this isn’t going to get me to switch.
Joel Spolsky: The screenshot-to-bug-report feature is a really good idea. Of course, it is trivial to implement with FlySketch, an altogether fabulous screen grabbing tool for the Mac.
I replaced my TV with a
Mac Mini, an EyeTV 200, and a 20” LCD, and it’s working just great.
One of the unanticipated surprises was that it runs out photo collection as a screen saver. I used to never look at old photos, but now they’re just there in my living room, it’s really really cool. It’s much more useful than having them in either a physical photo album or on my normal computer. This way they’re part of my life, and when we have friends over, they see them and comment on them, too. It’s a real conversation piece. Fantastic!
Now the next step, of course, is to get other people’s photos on there. From Flickr. Specifically, I want it to automatically show new photos from my Flickr friends, so I can see what they’re up to. Or show pictures from conferences like the SXSW, when I can’t go, so it’s almost as if I’m there. Again, the great thing is that it’s unintrusive yet right there.
Alas, even though it seems like a simple task, I haven’t been able to find such a screensaver. I’ve played with 1001, but it just keeps showing the same 2 or 3 pictures over and over, even though I’ve set it to buffer up 50. And the way it is rendering the photos is very ugly, compared with the built-in screensaver from Apple.
So I’m still waiting for that, and have to get by on my own photographic skills for now. Dang!
Faxes are really arcane, but every once in a while, when dealing with arcane companies, like airlines, it seems you have to send or receive the odd fax.
The receiving part is not a problem. Getting a free fax number to receive faxes on is pretty easy. It’s the sending.
I used to have an efax account, but for maybe 5 faxes a year, the $13/month subscription fee is pretty steep, so I’m looking for something else.
I’ve found FaxAway, which say they only charge $1/month, which is more reasonable.
What service do you use, if any? Can you recommend any? I guess I could use my Mac’s built-in modem and my land line to send faxes, but it’s been a while since I last plugged in a modem!
It seems like those of us who rarely send faxes, who don’t want to bother with a physical fax machine, and who finds i degrading to go to 7/11 to fax, is an underserved, if financially completely uninteresting, market :)
TextMate truly rocks. Just wrote another neat command in no time: Invoke in OpenACS.
One really great Rails feature that OpenACS lacks is the ability to run the interactive irb shell right inside the Rails environment, with all your models and helpers available, so you can poke around and try things out easily.
Well, now OpenACS has something that comes fairly close:
echo "proc textmate {} {" > $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
echo "$TM_SELECTED_TEXT" >> $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
echo "}" >> $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
echo "ns_return 200 text/html [textmate]" >> $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
curl -s $OACS_URL/textmate
UPDATE: Improved error-handling:
echo "proc textmate {} { " > $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
echo "$TM_SELECTED_TEXT" >> $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
echo "}" >> $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
echo "catch { set result [textmate] } result" >> $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
echo "ns_return 200 text/html \$result" >> $OACS_PAGEROOT/textmate.tcl
curl -s $OACS_URL/textmate
I keep learning ways in which
TextMate enhance my productivity. It wasn’t until recently that I learned from Yon about the Shift-Apple-F search and replace in the whole project, and now I’m using it tens of times every day.
And today I created a command that executes the selection as a command in PostgreSQL in the database that I develop in, and shows the output as a tooltip. Extremely for executing a small query, CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, or something like that.
The command goes like this:
psql -c "$TM_SELECTED_TEXT" --help $PG_DBNAME
(Actually, this is the slightly enhanced version after I discovered that TextMate already ships with one for MySQL.)
I also finally took the time to learn how snippets work, and start to get them integrated into my work routine. And I wrote one that’s quite handy for OpenACS work, triggered by redir TAB:
ad_returnredirect -message "$1" [export_vars -base "$2" { $3 }]
ad_script_abort
... smell like dog poop. Don’t ask me how I know.
This is my evening-workplace in Amsterdam. I’m trying to make up my mind on whether the
Okura is a scam, or pretty cool.
I picked it because I got sick of cheap hotels in Amsterdam, and I wanted a place with wi-fi. and though the last place I stayed at did have for-pay wi-fi, it was also so crummy I wanted to try something else. And so this place was recommended by Mr. Curry (although he does mention that he got a deal from the PR manager, who probably saw an idea in Mr. Curry advertising the place for him).
In any event, now that I’m there, I find that same wi-fi from the same damn provider, only this time it’s EUR29/day instead of EUR12/day at the other place. Oh, but then the room is only EUR215/day compared to EUR50/day at the other place (Hotel Maas). Oh, and Hotel Maas was located on the 2 line, which goes to the Greenpeace office.
So for the 29 EUR I save on not using the wi-fi at the hotel, I can easily pay for food, beer, free wi-fi, and a cab home from De Balie instead.
Add to that the EUR 12 pool/sauna/gym charge and the EUR 26 breakfast charge, and the Okura feels a bit like a scam. But then, it definitely is very nice, and I sleep well there. Ah, whatever!
PS! Only now that I’m writing this do I realize that the hotel I meant to try out was Lloyd Hotel, which actually looks really cool, and makes Okura look pretty dated in comparison, and is located near the central station where my 2 tram stops. Gonna try that next time.
UPDATE: The cab driver that took me home from De Balie told me about Okura that “only Chinese stay there, it’s way overpriced.” That would explain why this sign is only in English and what I take to be chinese.
Lars Pind: “I think an iPod Shuffle really does make you a happier person.”
Programming is easy, it’s figuring out what it needs to do that’s hard.
Understanding the requirements, the working life of the people who are going to use it, and the simplest design we can come up with that makes their work easier and more fun.
I’ve spent the past 2 months on my current project with the LOC count hovering just around 10K – in the past week, it’s actually gone down by about a thousand.
Most of my time has been spent tweaking the user interface, trying something, then trying something else, until we couldn’t think of ways to make it simpler.
It’s an enjoyable process.
