I'm trying out Unison File Synchronizer as a way to keep my two machines at work in sync. Unison inherits many concepts from source code management tools like CVS and SVN, and can manage bidirectional updates (even merges). I've done a test sync, firing the contents of my Powerbook over on top of my deskop's home directory. It took only about 20 minutes or so to copy stuff over, but a long, tedious process of approving or reconciling conflicts made the process last many times longer than that.

The Mavericks project is scheduled to wrap up in the next week (officially, but there will be some straggling updates over the next few weeks, I'd guess). We've been using the latest beta of Pachyderm to author the online version of the Glenbow Museum's Mavericks exhibit. It's a huuuuuge project. I just did a screen count, and while it's lower than I estimated, it's still a behemoth. 1254 screens are currently authored, with another 150+ coming online tonight (once Shawn finishes up).

I finally made time to install Rails, planning on taking it for a test drive by making a Ruby on Rails version of the lightweight asset manager database we put together to store assets for Pachyderm.

Initially, I guess my install of Rails didn't have MySQL support (why on earth wouldn't that be included right out of the box?), and it kept barfing when it tried to connect. So, I installed or updated my MySQL kit via gem install mysql and it was able to build a simple scaffolded app to let me create a single record via the dynamically generated interface. That was pretty cool - automatically figuring out which widgets should be used, etc... Very WebObjects D2W.

Update: Added "Radio Memories"

On the way into the office this morning, I realized that something had changed about the way I'm listening to podcasts. When my iPod is fired up (which is every day), I find I still listen to podcasts about 90% of the time - the remaining 10% is spent in Shuffle mode randomly bopping around my various playlists of actual music.

What changed was the type of podcasts that I find myself listening to. Initially, I was 100% ITConversations. Drinking from the firehose of conferencecasts, and deep interviews, and whatnot.

After a few month rest period, it feels like the "multiuser weblog software" arena is heating up again. Drupal keeps chugging along. ELGG is looking really sweet, and now WordPress Multiuser (WPMU) is firing back into the competition.

Might be time to take a step back and re-evaluate multiuser software platform before weblogs.ucalgary.ca hits the big time. It's currently running as what might be described as a "limited test pool", with several users dipping their toes, but no hardcore users piping up.

I just took the drastic step of turning off the "autorenew" setting on my .Mac account.

The last 2 reasons I had for keeping it were iSync, and my Dad's email account. He just emailed everyone saying he's going to be using the account from his ISP, so that leaves iSync. Can't justify the cost to keep my Safari bookmarks synced between 2 machines.

Why isn't iSync capable of working without a mediating server? It'd be cool if I could set up one machine as "master" and the others would sync to/through it. But, that could cut into .Mac subscriptions...

Dear Safari RSS team,

Updated 2005/08/01 with thoughts on Flagged vs. Star Ratings

I've been using your cool RSS aggregator for a while now, and while it's really quite good, there are a couple of things you could do to make it really kick ass.

1. Have a "new items only" view - rather than just sorting by New, or sorting by Date, or filtering by "last 7 days" - just show me the new stuff. I've got like 15,000 items that appear to get loaded every time I check my feeds. That would drop down to just a hundred or two if I could limit to "New only". The "Today" filter doesn't cut it - what if I miss a day? What about Monday mornings? Vacation days? "Last 7 Days" isn't granular enough. A "New Items" filter should be possible, with the SQL Lite engine storing the feeds and items...
2. Let me collapse/expand entries - sure, the slider dealie to set displayed article length is nice, but what if I could set items to show title only by default, and just twiddle a little knob on the items that I want to read more about to view the full content - without having to affect the displayed article length of every other item on the page
3. Make Safari's scheduled RSS updates actually, you know, run on a schedule. Often I find that Safari's forgotten to update for a couple of hours (or it refuses to update after launching, even if it's the first run of the day). Seems like clicking on my "feeds" folder in the Bookmarks Bar and causing it to start loading the feeds seems to trigger an update. It'd be nice if I didn't have to babysit an automated update though.
4. It'd be really nice if I could override the default "Remove Articles" setting - so I could set it to automagically purge items after a couple of months, but I could set a feed (or folder of feeds, or whatever) to keep items for a different period (shorter, longer, infinite, whatever). I know it'd be a bit more confusing for the UI, but if I could "Get Info" on a feed, and have access to the settings there, it wouldn't be in any newbies' faces...
5. While I'm at it, why can't I "Get Info" on any bookmark and add additional information? Have it capture the text of the page for searching by Spotlight? Add additional keywords/tags to a bookmark (you know, like the Finder's "Spotlight Keywords" field) - personal folksonomies in my Bookmarks...
6. How about a "Flagged" bit on a blog entry? With a corresponding "Flagged Items" filter view? Makes it much easier to find stuff that I've found interesting before, and kinda makes the persistent store of feeds and items, you know, useful...

OK. That's it for now. Keep up the great work. If there's anything I can do to help out, just give me a shout.

Keeping the "too hot to go outside, so getting trivial tasks cleaned up" theme for today, I finally got around to updating the iPodder.org Educational Directory - adding 18 new feeds.

Sorry for the delay - a couple months on some of them - and I'm hoping most/all will find their ways into the iTunes podcasting directory...

It's supposed to hit 36˙C today and tomorrow - that's darned near 100˙F, which is waaaay hotter than we're used to in Calgary. Heck, it's even hotter than Honolulu or the Caribbean right now. At least it's a dry heat :-) We're roughly on par with Las Vegas or Phoenix for the next couple of days... Melting...

The tabs in the header of this site have been bugging me for months - just never enough to prompt me to do anything about it. For now, I've just moved them to the top of the banner, so they don't fight with the image description on the right side.

I've also added 8 more images to the banner image rotation. Several from the summer trip to Hawaii (including my new personal fave, from Hanauma Bay on Oahu), and a couple from around town. If you don't want to keep hitting Command+R to see them all, just view the image list.

For the Mavericks project, I get to manually "fix" several large xml documents that are spit out of a couple of piped legacy databases and content management systems. Each time a file is exported, it is slightly different, and after the file is handed off to me I get to go in and manually massage the distressed bits so I can use it in a meaningful way.

Until now, that meant going in and doing the tweaks by hand - fixing stupid MS Word quotes and dashes and stuff, and replacing some crazy legacy-induced formatting tags etc... I'd occasionally miss something, or do what comes naturally to a mundane repetitive manual process - screw it up.

I just went to the Technorati page for Merlot2005, hoping to get a big heaping spoonful of Merlot conference blogging.

Instead, I was greeted by this:

WTF? So, if Alan doesn't go to a conference, nobody knows to use a shared tag to blog about it? Why wouldn't the Merlot conference organizers be pimping the tag "merlot2005" on the conference page?

If you're running WordPress, run - don't walk - and install Spam Karma 2. Best spam killer I've ever seen. And it's transparent - no Captchas or false-turing-test-attempts involved at all. It's a work of art. Shared blacklists. Regular expression matching for blocked comments/trackbacks. And way more.

And, if you're running any PHP website (including WordPress), run - don't walk - and install Spam Karma's cousin: Referrer Karma. It works on any PHP-based website, and can share the blacklist with Spam Karma 2 for a nice integrated spamroach killing machine.