RasterWeb!

I’ve been using Sunbird for a long time. I like it. It’s nice. It’s got bugs, but that’s ok, they get fixed, it works good enough, and it’s open-source.

I’ve been a fan of Upcoming.org for a while now. they got bought by Yahoo! and I hoped it would go well. I still hope it will go well. Still, I’ll spill what the last week has brought.

I installed Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 last week. Unfortunately, all my Upcoming.org calendars broke. Ugh… I dig around, check release notes, try a few things, and… nothing. Am I the only one who uses Upcoming.org and Sunbird together?

Anyway, I don’t give up. I start hacking away at the calendars that are output from Upcoming.org, and I have a few ideas on what is going wrong. I first think it’s a Sunbird thing, since everything worked fine until I upgraded to the latest version. I figure I’ll submit a bug, I mean edit the Bug_Reports wiki page at Upcoming.org (Note: A wiki might not be the best thing for tracking bugs) but get no response. I end up adding to the wiki everytime I learn something. Oh, and it’s a good thing the Sunbird folks do use a real bugtracker, as the bug I submitted to Bugzilla clued me in on the problem.

Of course I figured out a workaround. I mean, I didn’t want to wait for a new release of Sunbird, or wait for the Upcoming.org folks to fix things on their end, so I wrote a cgi on my own server that fetches the Upcoming.org calendar, and re-writes it so it works in Sunbird. Problem (somewhat/temporarily) solved.

I just sent a feedback email to Upcoming.org today. Let’s see what happens next. (I’m also wondering if this blog post will have any effect.)

Ok, it may not be the end of funky, but I’m one of those people who consider the W3C as sort of the stewards of the web and the standards used upon it, so it’s nice to see they’re getting involved with the Feed Validator:

W3C is pleased to launch the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free online tool open to creators of syndication feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. Based on ‘feedvalidator’, and adding a SOAP Web service interface for interactive programming, the tool is useful for automatic or batch syntax checking. This service joins the existing pool of free, open source tools offered by W3C to the Web development community to help build a better World Wide Web. Learn more in the announcement.

Who knows? Maybe someday that RSS thing will even be a standard?

Many videoblogs use visuals with a musical soundtrack, and while there are already a few known Free Music Sources for Soundtracks, there’s now one more, Magnatune.

See their Podcasts and Video Blogs page, which outlines how you can use their music in your creation. they use the Creative Commons by-nc-sa license but they ask for attribution in a specific way that works for podcasts, but might not for some videoblogs, so I asked for a slight change, and got it. It now says the following under Attribution:

Video blogs can put a credit at the end of their video of the form “The song ‘song name’ by ‘artist name’ used by permission from www.magnatune.com”

Awesome! Thanks to John at Magnatune… I’ll be digging through the catalog to see what might fit with some of my videos…

You can get your Flickr photos printed through QOOP, and one of the options is for a poster with all your photos, which is cool. Now, if you test out QOOP, and choose the poster option, you can choose to have them generate a thumbnail of what the poster will look like and email you when it’s ready. So I did…

Neat! Of course you’ll then want to upload the results to Flickr…

Apple cracked the whip and those iPodder Lemon guys changed the name to Juice. (Perhaps they should do a tie-in with those Mattel Juiceboxes.)

Of course I was smart enough to avoid name problems with renko, but if I were the iPodder Lemon, er, I mean Juice guys, I would have changed the name to ipLemon, which works on two levels…

But that’s just me…