Important

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11
Sep 09

Funny Cat Pictures Suck

If you want to be successful, you have to listen to your audience. On radio shows people call in. With news papers, people write letters. On blogs, people find you on Google. I always figured that if I would be an authority on anything, it would be something computer related. Programming, perhaps. But as it turns out, I’m not. Or maybe a bit. According to Google I’m an authority on… search-terms

Yes. Funny cats. And suckage. So my dear visitor. I am giving you want you want. Here are some funny cat pictures, that suck, like Java does.

Funny cat with orange on its head.

funny-cat

Funny cat with bunny ears.

med_funny-cat

I think my Google PageRank just went through the roof.

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19
Aug 09

push-notify: Playing with iPhone push notifications

PushMail is a nice, reasonably priced (2.49 euro, so I guess that’s about $2.99) iPhone application that is intended to realize push mail notifications (see update of my GPush post). It does so by giving you an @dopushmail.com e-mail address. Any e-mail sent or forwarded to that address will not be stored, but rather pushed to your iPhone.

Any mail you send to it.

push-notifySo I wrote this little bash script, called push-notify:

#!/bin/bash echo | mail -s "$*" myid@dopushmail.com

chmod’ed it +x so I could execute it. Now, I can run it like this:

push-notify This is a test

And “This is a test” will appear on your iPhone. Of course, this has many applications. If you have a long batch job or compilation running and want to know when it has finished executing, you just run the command like this:

make; push-notify Done with compilation

and you’ll get a notification when it’s done. With some notification you could probably also receive a notification when something went wrong, when a server reported some exception. As long as you can invoke the push-notify script when it happens, you’ll be notified within seconds.

Powerful stuff.

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19
Aug 09

The 10th dimension

(via BoingBoing)

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18
Aug 09

Exit iPhone Mail: GPush is here

I have owned an iPhone for about a month now and I’m very happy with it. Its mail application is acceptable, but it’s not very Gmail-esque. It does not have the conversation view, archiving e-mail means having to move it to “All mail”, which is a bit annoying. Ergo, it works, but it’s not perfect. The Gmail web application on the iPhone is very good, it works just like the desktop Gmail web client and it’s fairly responsive for a web app, it’s only missing one thing: the ability to check for new mails every x minutes. The iPhone mail app can do that, but of course, a web application cannot.

Enter GPush (iTunes link). This $0.99 application enables push e-mail on your iPhone. You enter your Gmail credentials and whenever you receive a new e-mail, within seconds you will receive a push notification on your phone. You can then open a mail application (be it the native Mail client, or the Gmail web app) to actually read the e-mail. This may even save battery life, because your phone no longer has to poll for new e-mail every half hour, hour or whatever it’s set to.

homescreen

To test if the Gmail web app makes a good mail application replacement, I got rid of the native Mail application from my iPhone dock, and replaced it with a bookmark link to Gmail.

I’m not a privacy or security nut, but one concern is that you do have to give your Gmail credentials to the GPush service, which is maintaining an persistent connection to Gmail IMAP server through it. You hack the GPush service, you hack helluva lot of Gmail accounts.

Update: After a few hours of usage, GPush seems to have stopped pushing e-mail to my iPhone. Until that’s fixed I found an alternative: PushMail. It works a bit differently and is not specific to Gmail. The idea is to automatically forward e-mail you want pushed to your phone to a special @dopushmail.com address. The nice thing about this is that you can create filters in Gmail to only push particular e-mails to your phone. I have been using it for a few minutes, and so far it’s working. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

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18
Aug 09

They met on a YaBB board

Last week, I received the following e-mail:

Hello Zef, I am officiating a wedding this coming weekend and I’ll be thanking you in my speech. :) My two friends first met on a YaBB message board in 2001 and I’m giving the audience a brief history of how they met (going all the way back to 1958 when DARPA was created). It’s really not as nerdy as it sounds, or maybe it is, but it’s not a room full of computer-y people. Anyway, I know you’ve long moved past the YaBB days, but I thought I’d let you know. http://www.urbanhonking.com/amodernwedding/ -Mikey

Yesterday, I received the follow-up:

Hey Zef, Here is a video of my speech (it’s long!): http://www.urbanhonking.com/kmikeym/2009/08/question-27-complete.html I mention you at 4:39 and again at the end. And then I used your email as a toast later. :) Photos are just starting to pop up on Flickr with the tag “amodernwedding”. Feel free to use whatever you want! -Mikey

amodernwedding

My first reaction was: why am I being contacted about this? I started YaBB 9 years ago and left a year later. I have not been involved at all for 8 years. Plus, these people, who I never knew existed, met on a site I never even heard of: krec.com. But I guess this is the power of releasing some software for free to the world to use: you don’t know what’s going to happen to it, you don’t know who’s going to use it and you don’t know who’s going to meet through the use of it.

In his speech, Mikey lists a number of events that lead to Andrew and Ritchey meeting. They met on a forum that was, then, powered by YaBB, which in turn was a project started by me. Would they not have met if I hadn’t started YaBB? Probably they would, but you can never be sure.

Congratulations Andrew and Ritchey!

Exactly a month from today I am going to get married myself. Although we were not originally introduced through it, initially much of our relationship developed through the use of Skype. Maybe I should send the original founders an e-mail.

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18
Aug 09

Analyzing the crap out of nothing

groundhog-dayWolf Gnards:

It seems like almost every day someone approaches me and asks, “How long did Bill Murray spend trapped in the film Groundhog Day?” And I always say, “Hmmm, that’s not the most timely of questions, but I’ll do my best to answer it.”

An important concern in journalism is that when newspapers such as the New York Times fold, because it is too expensive to maintain a large staff of journalists like that, who will do investigative journalism? Who will not just copy whatever somebody else has been saying, add a few ROFLs and past in a funny cat picture, but actually do the hard work?

As of today, I’m no longer concerned about that. Because, if there are people who can spend, I’m sure hours on figuring out something silly like how long Bill Murray spent stuck in the film Groundhog Day (an estimated 8 years, 8 months, and 16 days, by the way), I am sure that every other tiny little detail in the world will be figured out as well.

Albeit 16 years after the fact.

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17
Aug 09

Tr.im-ming your way to sainthood

When I was 16 I ran a simple website listing free stuff available on the internet. Free stickers, free webspace, free e-mail. My site wasn’t the only one doing it, there were many others. Of course, I borrowed stuff listen on other sites, which was not always appreciated. One of my competitors felt threatened, and started a crusade against me. Wherever he could he badmouthed my websites and removed links.

This made quite an impression on me. I was about 16 years old. Somebody actually cared what I did. I felt important. I needed to act!

But eventually I folded my website, because I realized that neither I, nor my simple website wasn’t all that important.

I was 16.

I was reminded of this when I read the latest installment of the tr.im soap oprah, going on their blog and around it. In case you were on holidays, don’t care about twitter, or, frankly, have a life: tr.im is a URL shortening service. Long URL in, short URL out. Why is that interesting? Good question.

A week or so ago, tr.im decided it would fold, because the big bad twitter and tr.im’s competitor bit.ly were out to get it. Twitter decided bit.ly was the chosen URL shortener and pushed tr.im into a corner. Tr.im, would fold, all existing tr.im shortened URLs would continue to work until the end of the year. The blogosphere went wild. Why? Because everybody realized that URL shorteners were in fact a single point of failure. If a URL shortener goes down, all of a sudden thousands of links, in particular on Twitter break.

All the attention clearly gave the tr.im people a warm feeling inside. People cared about them, they concluded. They must act! And they did, they brought tr.im back. But it didn’t make that much of an impact, so today they took it a step further.

“tr.im to be community owned”:

Therefore, starting today, tr.im will begin its migration into the public domain, becoming 100% community-owned, operated, and developed.

This whole announcement is full of pledges, and stories about how bit.ly tried to buy them for only $10,000 and that this was clearly a PR stunt, and even if bit.ly would eventually get to them the shortened URLs would be freed. Because tr.im is going to save the Internets, by giving its most valuable asset to you: itself. Its data and its source code, ensuring that you can enjoy the tr.im, forever. Guaranteed.

Tr.im, seriously, you are just an URL shortening service. There are dozens more like you. You are not special. Do not think what you do has that much of an impact on the world, even if you get a  little bit of attention. Just run your little service, or shut it down, but don’t keep making such a big deal out of yourself.

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17
Aug 09

Blast from the past: Adlez

While talking to a colleague today about programming we did when we were younger, I all of a sudden remembered about a game that I developed with a friend when we were about 10-12 14-16 years old: Adlez. A puzzler written in Turbo Pascal, with pretty much everything developed from scratch: the VGA graphics library was written by us (I wrote the PutPixel implementation in assembly even), the fonts were “designed” by us. The graphics were made using a program called PowerPaint, which was a DOS Paint program, also developed by us (using the same graphics library). The cool thing is that it still runs, using DOSBox. So, if you feel like giving it a go: adlez.zip. There’s quite a few levels in there. For those, who’re not convinced to download and play it yet: here are some screenshots:

adlez-menu

adlez-info

adlez-ingame

(in the picture below, you are the little guy standing next to the rock (with the red hat).

Those were the days…

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14
Aug 09

Damn Squirrels!

They always crash photos when you pose in front of marvelous scenery.

squirrel-portrait-banff-sw

(from National Geographic.)

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13
Aug 09

New Google Reader features

send-to

Google Reader added some nifty features just now, which are very welcome to those who still read RSS feeds, as I do, occasionally. It’s a bit 2007, I know. First, each item now has a “Send to” option, to easily link to a post on various social networks, e.g. facebook and twitter. I tested the feature with twitter in the latest Chromium alpha and Safari 4, but it does not seem to work. On Chromium (a very alpha product) nothing appears to happen, in Safari it complains about a popup being blocked.

markallasread

Another nice feature is the ability to automatically mark all items older than a certain amount of time as read. If you’re still reading RSS (or Atom for that matter) feeds, give it a whirl.

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