Blog Posts

Locomotive Ruby on Rails Distro for MacOSX

I just grabbed the Locomotive distro of Ruby on Rails for MacOSX - what a nice package! Includes the latest build of Rails, a fresh copy of Ruby, all of the database connectors, RMagick and ImageMagick, some AJAX libraries, and a bunch of other stuff to play with. Best part is - it’s all self-contained in the Locomotive application, so it won’t affect any of the other bits installed on my system.

A few days with OmniWeb 5.1.2

I’m really digging OmniWeb. It’s got lots of cool stuff that work as I would expect them to, not as if they were ported from some other source. It behaves as a great MacOSX app should.

Over the weekend, I was writing up a blog post, and when I got to about 75% done, I opened a new tab to get a link. OmniWeb crashed. Crap! OmniCrashCatcher pops up, and I filed what would perhaps be described as a more-colourful-than-necessary bug report. The next morning, however, I fired up OmniWeb again, and all of the tabs that I had opened were restored for me - and, get this - the contents of the WordPress blog post entry form were also resurrected for me, right at the point OmniWeb had crashed! I didn’t lose a thing! That’s just plain awesome. It never occurred to me to even check to see if the form values would be resurrected after a crash, so I assumed the post was gone. Of course, it wasn’t Shakespeare or anything, but still - that’s just cool.

Attention is about more than advertising

One of the things that Blogbridge has allowed me to do is rather dramatically increase the number of feeds I actively track. That includes re-subscribing to Scoble’s new Wordpress.com blog.

Yesterday, something came through Scoble’s feed that sent a chill through me. He was talking about how he finally understands “Attention” as described by Steve Gillmor. He proceeds to outline what can only be described as Big Brother, watching everything you do online, for the sole purpose of placing better advertising to beg you to click on links.

Calgary Peacetime Disaster Plan

I’d emailed my alderman this summer to ask for a copy of the disaster response plan for Calgary, in light of recent events. I figured it would be a Good Idea™ to give the plan a once-over before a disaster struck, since by then we’d be too busy feasting on the goo in each other’s skulls to read the instructions about how to evacuate a city of 1 million people.

Superballs in San Francisco

Oh, man! I want to do this. Somehow, I think I’d get a citation or something. Sony dropped a bajillion superballs down the hilly streets of San Francisco to film an ad for their new Bravia line. Not in the market for a new TV, but the ad sure looks hella fun.

I’m sure glad I wasn’t on the cleanup crew for this shoot. First, The City has the roving bands of parrots on Telegraph Hill, now it will have mysterious roving bands of bouncing superballs for years to come…

Akismet: Wordpress Antispam

I just installed Akismet - the “official” antispam solution for WordPress. Ok. It’s not really official, but it’s written by PhotoMatt - the lead of WordPress - which makes it official enough.

I’m a bit nervous about deactivating Spam Karma 2 - which has performed absolutely flawlessly (and silently), but am curious about the distributed spamblocking approach used by Akismet, as opposed to a personal blacklist used by SK2.

And, if Akismet fails miserably, it’s just a matter of clicking two links in the Plugin Manager to go back to SK2. One caveat to Akismet: you need a Wordpress.com API key to activate it. Download a copy of Flock to get one if you don’t have one already.

Browsers (again)

I’ve been playing with different browsers for the last couple of weeks (Safari, Flock, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, iCab), and kept coming back to Safari because it just plain “feels” right. The other apps feel ported, in some parts poorly. Then, Les Orchard reminded me of OmniWeb. I’ve always loved OmniWeb, but the rendering engine was lacking in older versions, and the recent version switched to a custom WebKit framework which works quite well.

Experimenting with Flickr for a family event

My mom is turning 65 on Sunday, and we’re throwing a big bash at the Tuscany Club - about 75 of her closest friends will be there, and we’re going way over the top with a chocolate-themed party.

I was initially going to attempt to document the event myself, and then it hit me - I use Flickr and the like for collaborative documenting of events/conferences. This isn’t any different, except that many of the people attending may have never heard of Flickr, etc…

Elluminate for online presentations/sessions

I just tested Elluminate, which will be used during next week’s “Podcasting in Education” session I’m doing for ADETA next week. We did a session using a Windows machine, which I reserved for the test because I just assumed it wouldn’t work properly for hosting the session via a Mac. It ran flawlessly on Windows, even sharing the microphone from the headset with both Elluminate and Audacity.

We ran through a quick sample of what the session will involve. Another Lambian wiki-powered by-the-seat-of-the-pants-if-they’re-available session, which will likely start in iTunes to show the Podcasting directory, then jump to Audacity to show recording, then to weblogs.ucalgary.ca to show uploading (and then listening directly on the website), then back to iTunes to show subscribing and listening there (and potentially on a portable device).

WOFileUpload may be broken.

Update: Nope it ain’t broken. It was purely operator error on my part - I missed an “=” sign in the .html for a component, and that was borking file uploads. It was weird, because Safari and IE would upload just fine, but Firefox would barf.

Josh just discovered a weird behaviour in Pachyderm, where uploading files was breaking. But only on Firefox. WTF?

A quick google brought up this post on NSLog.org, via ryfar.com:

Sonnet iPod Battery

I was just about to finalize the purchase of a shiny new battery for my 3G iPod, when I noticed the shipping charges listed on the Sonnet online store.

I’ll gladly pay for the battery, but paying $40 US ($10 US more than the cost of the battery in the first place) to have the thing mailed to me is a bit extreme. I’m going to hold off for now, to see if any Canadian stores or companies will be distributing the battery.

Brian Lamb podcast interview from EDUCAUSE 2005

I finally got a chance to listen to Matt Pasiewicz’ interview with Brian Lamb during EDUCAUSE 2005. What a great discussion. Always fun to listen to Brian talk about subversive activities in the Academy :-)

Main points I took away from it:

• I owe Brian a few bucks for mentioning me so positively - perhaps a round of brews during Northern Voice 2006 will suffice? :-)
• I have to check out AGGRSSive - sounds very cool for an rss aggregator and tagger. I saw a preview of it a while back after stumbling across it in my referrer logs, and it was very cool. It’s kind of like an RSS rip-mix-burn-omatic.
• “Mass amateurization” - the concept that social software is at the point where it gets amateurs to 80% of the output quality that a professional would produce, with only modest technical skills and effort required. I’ve used the term myself a few times, and love what it implies about the read-write web.
• Blogging as “narrating your work” - Brian mentions (almost apologetically) that his blogging has shifted with the advent of tools like del.icio.us - less impetus to “link blog” new finds, as they just get hurled into the social bookmark bucket. His blogging has shifted to be much more personal in nature - more in tune with his daily activity. Brian mentions that he’s sure he’s got a smaller audience, but is getting a much more intimate/rewarding experience. I fully agree. Over the last few months I think I’ve switched to be doing much the same thing, with the blog providing a narrative journal of daily work/projects/interactions. IMHO, this kind of blogging is actually much more useful (or perhaps more meaningful or thoughtful) than the previous link-blogging style.

Anyway, give the interview a listen. Brian is always entertaining and engaging. And every single time I hear him talk about social software, I find new ways of thinking about it, or of applying it, or just of describing it. He is such a deep thinker about this that I am truly humbled as a mere software geek :-).