Web

Say No to Flickr Video

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As you probably know, Flickr introduced their video feature earlier this week. Unfortunately their effort is half-assed and only detracts from the site. They only allow videos of 90 seconds or less, which isn’t really useful. It’s obviously meant for the short videos you can take with many point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones, but there are plenty of other sites which do it much better.
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Flickr can already be slow at times, and I’m afraid they won’t have the bandwidth to support video without making it even slower. They should keep doing what they excel at, which is being the best photo sharing site, and not try to do something where their effort is only mediocre.

There’s already a no video group and petitions. While most Flickr petitions have been pretty stupid, this is one I agree with.

Google App Engine

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I signed up for Google’s new App Engine beta and I’ve already started looking at the APIs. It looks very clean and well-designed. I’m not too familiar with Python, but it looks like it’s fairly simple to pick up. The language itself is easy and has some nice Lisp-like features that I really like. The hard part is getting familiar with the huge library of extension modules.

I’m thinking of possibly rewriting my2unz.com with App Engine, since Drupal can be really ugly when trying to integrate several third party modules with my own code.

Net4Mac

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I joined net4mac a few days ago, but so far I don’t see much point to it. This is a new “social network for Mac users”, but it’s severely limited by requiring their proprietary software. You can view public pages from a web browser, but to write anything or contact anyone, you need to use their software. This means you can’t access it from an iPhone (unless they release iPhone software).

If anyone’s interested, here’s my member profile.

Socialthing vs. FriendFeed

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I’m now using both Socialthing and FriendFeed. Although both have some similarities, there are some big differences in their functionality. Socialthing is more attractive, although it supports fewer services than FriendFeed.

Socialthing automatically gets your friends and contacts from the supported services and doesn’t seem to let you add other contacts. It also doesn’t provide an RSS feed of your lifestream or allow you to subscribe to other members lifestreams.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, lets you subscribe to anyone’s updates as well as share a combined feed of all of your activities.

If anyone is interested, I have two invites to Socialthing. Leave a comment if you want one.

You can also subscribe to my FriendFeed updates at http://friendfeed.com/mike3k.

socialthing!
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FriendFeed
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Drupal 6 disappointment

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I’m starting to get pretty disgusted with Drupal 6. I took another look at it today and the module compatibility situation is still dismal. Common modules like CCK and Views still aren’t fully compatible with Drupal 6. For MacMegasite, I would lose the buddy lists, user points, and custom home pages. The situation is even worse for WorldBeatPlanet and my2unz, where I depend on media support and custom node types.

I realize most of the Drupal modules aren’t developed by the core team, but they should make an effort to work with module contributors to ensure compatibility and officially support some of the more critical modules such as CCK & Views.

WordPress 2.5

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A friend asked me to upgrade his blog to WordPress 2.5 RC1, which I had decided to avoid until it’s actually released, so I tried it out on a local copy of this site running on my MacBook Pro. Unlike Drupal 6, I found the update was completely painless and didn’t break any of my plugins or themes.

I’m very cautious about upgrades. I always try it first with a local copy of my website running on my Mac. I don’t use MAMP; I use the built-in version of Apache with PHP5 enabled and MySQL installed.

After I verify that it works on my Mac, I try a test site. I create a subdomain like test.mysite.com, copy my files to the test directory, and make a copy of the database. I then try the upgrade on the test site. When I’m satisfied that it works, I simply swap the test & main site directories. I usually turn off the ability to post while I’m doing the update, to avoid having any stories or comments posted to the old site.

/dev/random 203A Dashboard 2014 WordPress
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Twitter Spam

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Today I got 15 follow requests on Twitter from political campaigns, all seem to be unofficial. I’ve blocked all of them. If this continues, I may protect updates to prevent those unsolicited requests. I do NOT support ANY of those candidates who requested to follow me and I dislike most of them. The only candidate I follow on Twitter is Barack Obama and I want to keep it that way.