Blog Posts

Flickr Faves 2006/12/09

Dreamtube

Dreamhost rocks. I mean, they just keep piling on awesome new features into their hosting package. Recently, it was essentially infinite bandwidth and storage. Yesterday, they added an automatic Flash video transcoder and presenter, ala YouTube. But, within any Dreamhost site.

All I have to do is upload a video file (.avi, .mov, .mp4) to my site, tell Dreamhost I want it converted to Flash video (using the panel.dreamhost.com site that’s used for managing everything else as well), and their magic elves do their work and email me a javascript snippet to embed a flash player in any web page (or blog post). Like, for instance, this one:

EduGlu = Drupal + Leech.module?

Thanks to a tip from Bill Fitzgerald, I checked out a copy of the Leech module for Drupal. Despite the rather bad name, it sounds like it is (or eventually will be) perfect for what I need.

It lets users add their own feeds, and can associate said feeds and subsequently aggregated items wit any of the user’s Organic Groups. That takes care of the Class/Cohort/etc… concepts. Users just create or join the appropriate Organic Groups within the Drupal site, and add whatever feeds they want to whatever Organic Groups they want. They could add subfeeds of a blog to different OGs (say myfancyblog.com/tags/bio680/feed to the Biology 680 OG, and myfancyblog.com/tags/poli544 to the Political Science 544 OG…)

BlogBridge Screencast

I recorded my morning RSS checkin with BlogBridge 4.1 (well, I recorded it with iShowU, but the checkin was done using BlogBridge). The power of the feed star rating feature is really hard to describe - it’s much easier to just show it.

I wound up with a 16 minute recording, which is about how long it takes for me to check in on 443 feeds first thing in the morning. I took some time to describe the BlogBridge interface, but skimmed slightly more than usual so it probably worked out about the same duration.

Eduglu reloaded

I’ve been meaning to get off my butt and finish mocking up an Eduglu prototype. I’ve been dabbling with a Drupal site, powered by Organic Groups and Aggregator2. I had it basically working on my desktop box, and just tried reproducing the basic pattern here on my Dreamhost server. The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes to set up. Except that it doesn’t work. Dreamhost has disabled the curl in PHP, so the Aggregator2 feed update functions just fail silently. curl, foiled again! (it borked the del.icio.us plugin as well). Instead of spending my time fighting with Dreamhost and porting modules to not use curl, I’ll just finish mocking things up on my desktop or another server.

Sketch Fighter 4000

TUAW linked to a new game by Ambrosia Software. I’ve had a soft spot for Ambrosia since way back in the pre-MacOSX days when I was hooked on Maelstrom.

Sketch Fighter 4000 is a strange hybrid game. It’s basically an old-school game, a combination of Asteroids, Space Castle, Defender, etc… But, it’s rendered as if it’s being sketched in ink on paper. When you shoot things, they blow up, leaving scorch marks on the paper. Or are they eraser smudge marks?

Banff Timelapse

There’s a webcam on the top of Sulphur Mountain in Banff. It’s an HD webcam - the first I’ve seen - and it’s running 24/7/365. I’ve been running a script to grab every image for the last week (they only update every 5 minutes, so it’s not that much data), and I periodically convert the stills into a timelapse movie.

I just took a look at the timelapse for November 29, which was a pretty nice day here in Calgary. Turns out it was nice and clear in Banff as well. One thing that keeps surprising me (even though I’ve lived here all my life) is just how much darkness we get. I’ve trimmed the timelapse to just contain daylight hours, since well over half of the movie would have been black. Come ON Dec. 21…

Flickr Faves 2006/11/30

The cold snap meant I accumulated faves of tropical places even faster over the last couple of weeks. Some other cool photos in there, too. But mostly tropical stuff.

The Moose is On

Registration for Northern Voice 2007 just opened up. The speaker list and schedule hasn’t been announced yet, but if it’s anything like the first two NV events, it’s going to be absofrigging great. I’m not sure how I’m getting there yet, but I’ll be there. I may have bandages on my back where my kidneys were, but it’ll be worth it. I just registered for both days.

Northern Voice website

Photography Trends in my iPhoto Library

I was just messing around with smart albums in iPhoto, and found that I can create albums based on camera model. So, I created a set of smart albums showing all photos taken with each of the 3 digital cameras I’ve owned. I then created additional smart albums to show just photos taken with a particular camera that have been rated 1 star or more (which I add to any photo that’s worth showing anyone else). The results were a bit surprising (and completely unscientific).

On Solving Spam

Spam is the scourge of the internets. It clogs Internet Tubes all over the globe, overloading the trucks that take internets around the world.

And it is directly caused by Google’s PageRank and Adsense systems. They (as well as others, but primarily Google - take a look at any spam farm, and you’ll see prominent Adsense ad blocks) created this mess by enabling individuals to cash in on hijacking innocent websites that have enabled anonymous commenting.

Justin Trudeau Speaking at the U of C

I just checked in on weblogs.ucalgary.ca, and was greeted by a wonderful surprise. Justin Trudeau was on campus on Friday November 24, and the full audio of his talk was posted to weblogs.ucalgary.ca as a podcast. I’ve grabbed the file, and have listened to the first couple of minutes, but this should be a great talk.

For anyone who doesn’t recognize the name Justin Trudeau, he is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and is making quite a name for himself as both a public speaker and leader of youth activism.