Those pesky IT guys got you down? They been messin’ with the DNS again? Using Mac OS X?
Running the following command should clear your DNS cache, and is much easier that rebooting…
lookupd -flushcache
Failing that, if you’ve just got a host or two you can’t connect to, you can always just add the hostname with the correct IP address to your /etc/hosts file…
I’m back from DelMarVa, which is some sort of weird way the East-Coasters say “Delaware, Maryland, Virginia…”
There will be many photos, and most likely some video (and perhaps even some text) to follow…. Of course I still have zombies to deal with, so we’ll see how it goes…
If you need me, I’ll be over near the east coast… Just call me. If you don’t have the number, use AIM… or whatever…
In the meantime…
I had forgotten that long ago I heled beta test TypePad… When I recently tried to log in, it showed my account as suspended, but had an offer for some discount codes… Here’s the text I got:
As our thanks for taking the time to help beta test, we’re offering you the chance to share the savings of a 20% lifetime discount with twenty of your friends and family members. We really appreciate the community that has formed during testing and we hope that it continues to thrive as the service grows.
They gave me twenty keys to apply when signing up with TypePad, and since I don’t even know twenty people without weblogs, they are up for grabs… (I assume they are still good. I think TypePad came out of beta a few years ago!) Just reply in the comments or contact me and I’ll send you one. (Include your email address obviously!)
Well, I did learn that when digitizing video, do not create a file over 2 gigs in size, since that won’t import into iMovie (at least the version I have installed!)
Anyway, after much importing and compressing (and a little editing) we have the first video from the Madison Zombie Lurch 2005, which I last mentioned days ago…
I’ll get more footage online next week, and I’ll try to get it loaded at Ourmedia as well as at blip.tv…
I remember hearing about XAMPP a while back, but since I finally decided to do something about the old Fedora box at home with Apache, and an old MySQL, and no PHP, etc… I figured I’d give The Apache Friends’ XAMPP a try…
Can I say wow? After downloading, the install consisted of expanding the tarball into /opt, and then starting it up. So within minutes you’ve got Apache (with SSL!) MySQL, PHP, Perl, and other stuff that all works together!
Damn that’s cool… Thanks Apache Friends!
It started like any other day in Madison… until…
“What do we want?”
“Brains!”
“When do we want them?”
“Brains!”
As I mentioned in Shooting Zombies, I went to Madison, I saw the Zombies, they ate my brain… I’ve got a few photos on Flickr which aren’t that good, but that’s because I was also holding a video camera while trying to take pictures… (Video will be up soon.)
Zombies are everywhere:
I’ll add to this entry if I find more good links. I’m hoping to have some video online this week, it’ll be over at tinkernet. (I’ve got over 40 minutes to edit!)
Oh poor design (and usability) how you taunt me!
I keep finding that there are certain sites that I’d like to use, or sometimes have to use, but it just pains me to do so because the design is so bad! How bad? Sooooo bad! Often the usability is nowhere to be found either…
…and it hurts… Oh how it hurts!
1997: Blogging? Writing is best left to journalists, You need professional writing skills, the average joe can’t write…
2004: Podcasting? You need a radio voice and broadcasting experience, the average joe can’t talk the talk…
2005: Videoblogging? TV studios and Hollywood do video, the average joe doesn’t have what it takes…
Newflash: The average joes can sometimes kick the the big boys to the curb…
Remember del.icio.us? Of course you do! You probably use it daily… Don’t we all?
Heck, long ago I even proclaimed that del.icio.us is neat. gosh, I even wrote some nasty code named dir.licio.us, and some people even used it. dir.licio.us was a hack, and it’s got some problems, but with many things, it’s just a proof of concept to me. (Note: It’s a massive memory hog since it builds a lot of large hashes in memory while running.)
So what does this all have to do with Scuttle? See, Scuttle is neat. It’s bascially a GPL‘d del.icio.us clone written in PHP using MySQL. There is also de.lirio.us, which uses Rubric, which is written in Perl. Now, I’m a perl guy and installing Rubric was a royal PITA for me, so I gave up on it quickly. Scuttle on the other hand, was dead simple. (Grab the 0.5.0 version from cvs though.)
You could use either the del.icio.us or Scuttle web sites, where you get to leverage the social aspect of these apps, but are at the mercy of things you don’t control, or you could install Scuttle on your own server and control it, but lose the social aspect… What do to? Behold! Scuttle supports the del.icio.us API! This opens up a world of possibilities…
Ok, that last one is (sort of ) a joke, but the point is, for most of the complaints I’ve heard about del.icio.us, you can probably solve them with some combination of all of these things. del.icio.us servers down, or too slow, or doesn’t support private bookmarks? Scuttle not social enough, not enough users, lacking features? Fix, fix, fix…. (Need more ideas? See How to Make Delicious Not Suck.)
Code? Yes, I have some code… Right now my code pulls the entries from my del.icio.us account and syncs them to my Scuttle account, as well as a local install of Scuttle. I should get around to cleaning it up and releasing it, I just want to run it for a bit first to see if it behaves well…
Open-source, and just as important, open API’s make it all possible. It’s exciting stuff!
Long ago I started using Feed on Feeds, and I hacked the heck out of it do make it do just what I wanted, but of course as new versions of FoF came out, I never quite managed to upgrade an re-apply my hacks.
There’s been much talk lately about forking FoF, since Steve (the original developer) isn’t quite keeping pace with user’s requests, and people are wanting to see their changes fed back into the codebase. I can’t wait to see what happens with this, since it’s a piece of software I use on a daily basis. I just hope it all turns out good. I really should get the most recent FoF running and see how much I need to hack at it to get my hacks applied, and heck, maybe even make real patches…
I’m also considering moving it from my server out on the web to my server at home, since one is often overwhelmed while the other sits underutilized much of the time… red is due for an overhaul and install of all the latest and greatest from the LAMP world anyway…
Remember last week when I asked you to vote for tinkernet?
Well this time I’m asking you to vote for ocono.com at mkeonline. This time you’ve got a full week to do it… I know it’s all meaningless and pointless, but dammit! I’m this close to being the guy behind an award winning blog. (Maybe “award” is too strong a word.)
(Don’t worry, I think that after this one I’m all out of sites to ask you to vote for…)
It was weird to read two posts from Russell Beattie that I was able to tie together and relate to myself…
Mobdex in 1984 talks about an idea he had, that others he showed it to later implemented and thought was teh cool, while AvantGo Goes RSS! talks about how AvantGo finally has some RSS action…
Here’s a bit I wrote in September of 2002 about rsshh:
…an abandonded project of mine, an RSS aggregator that produces an AvantGo channel for syncing with my Palm.
rsshh stood for “RSS Handheld” and basically it was some code that pulled in RSS feeds, and would then output simple HTML pages which I would then sync with my Palm III via AvantGo. I don’t claim to be the person who came up with the idea, or who implemented it first, or whatever, I’m just glad to help.
(Note: I was really confused when I went to Russell’s site, as I thought he switched to just publishing advertisements instead of weblog posts…)
I’m very tempted to go to Madison on Saturday to shoot zombies…
With my video camera, that is…
(See: Zombie flash mob to descend on Madison for more info…)
The big question is, should I dress up as a robot, a pirate, or a ninja?
This weekend we saw Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit at the Fox Bay Cinema Grill.
It was a great movie, I laughed and laughed and laughed… If you like Wallace & Gromit, you’ll love it. It’s got the two-levels of comedy thing going on, where kids can enjoy it, but there’s enough there for the adults as well.
I don’t think I liked the Fox Bay Cinema Grill as much as I liked te Rosebud, probably due to their not being any comfy couches, it was all sit-at-a-table style seating. My other complaint was that there were probably over 100 middle school aged kids there. I don’t know if it was a school thing or what. (It was a Saturday night 8:00 PM showing.) The early teens set made things just a bit loud an chaotic, but besides that, it was pretty nice…
