Nels Wadycki

I missed RSS Awareness Day

2008-05-02T11:47:00.006-05:00

According to ReadWriteWeb, yesterday was RSS Awareness Day. I totally missed it, but it's funny because yesterday Soup.io did something really weird with my Hulu RSS feed. At first, I thought it was a problem with the feed itself, but the feed itself in my Google Reader has only my most recently viewed items, whereas the Soup feed somehow fetched all the recently added items.

Installing Silverlight on Firefox

2008-04-23T08:08:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about Live Blogging this or something, but it's not like anyone is going to read it in real time. So, I'll just write my experience here.

By the way, I am really only installing Silverlight because NBA.com wants me to. I can't watch their Windows Media videos in Firefox, so I'm hoping that if I install Silverlight and am able to watch those videos, the NBA web admins will see their numbers go up and start putting everything in Silverlight. Then I'll be able to watch it all in Firefox and not have to go to IE anymore. That'll be the day.

So far, I've downloaded the executable and that's it... Note: I've got 8 tabs open right now, so if this requires a browser restart, it could be a problem. Moreso if it's an auto-browser-restart (which I can see Microsoft wanting to do).

Letting it through the firewall...

And I will have to restart my browser for these setting to take effect... but I get to do it when I want. So, I'll use my secret "crash Firefox" session saving technique (in which I end the Firefox process from the Task Manager, thereby saving my tabs).

Back in a sec...

Okay! NBA.com says it's successfully installed, and it looks like the video is there. Playback time!

Overall, not too bad. A little bit of skipping along the way, but that happens... Rewind was not so kind. Clicking on the playback bar results in the video stalling while the audio rewound and then played. If I used the scrub bar, then it worked okay after about a second. I'll take that over Windows "Buffering" Media Player, any day, though.

Friday Five

2008-04-18T16:19:00.000-05:00

1. Since when does PayPal require that you surrender money to them in order to use their service? I'd thought that honor was reserved only for Premium Members. Evidently it doesn't cost anything (and can actually be cost effective) to become a premium member. I just found this out when trying accept a $25 payment for Give Me The Rock.

2. I haven't even opened Google Reader today. I don't check it as much on the weekends, but today is only Friday! I hope I'm not missing out on some content I could use for the Friday Five.

3. NBA Playoffs start tomorrow. In case anyone besides me cares about that. I'm psyched. I'm going to be working outside most of the day, but I'm pretty sure I can at least break away for 2 hours to watch the PHX-SAS game on ABC at 2pm CST.

4. Friday should be Official Smoque Day. Well, every day should be Official Smoque Day, I suppose.

5. Blogger's Autosave keeps failing, and it's worrying me a little, so I'm going to go ahead and just publish this now. That and I need to hit that publish button so I can get back to writing stories about people who aren't real.

TypePad's BlogIt Facebook App and Social Media Addiction Rap

2008-04-16T17:36:00.004-05:00

I just tried BlogIt. It couldn't post to this blog. It said it would try again later, but how is that going to work? Do they have a message queue, and will just keep trying until it goes through? I will be interested to see if it does get posted here.

In case it doesn't, here's the video I was trying to post. And yes, I do know that the title of this post rhymes. If I sounded like Biggie, I'd be all over making my own Web 2.0 raps.

Keep it Twitterific.

Host your own Lifestream

2008-04-08T18:17:00.004-05:00

via [Lifestream Blog (who else?)]

Nuno Mariz has developed a Lifestream that you can host yourself using Django (a Python Web Framework). How long before someone develops a Wordpress plugin that does it all for ~~you~~ me?

I mean, the Python code doesn't look too bad (and I don't even know Python)... but I've been working for almost 11 hours today, and I just want someone to make a one-click install hosted Lifestream for me. Is that too much to ask?

Or I guess I could just make better use of my FriendFeed...

Lifestream.fm

2008-04-06T20:55:00.004-05:00

Lifestream Blog has found a new Lifestreaming service aptly titled Lifestream.fm. From the Twitter stream of the founder, it looks like they added 3 new services in the one day since the post on Lifestream Blog. It looks like just one guy developing it, but if that's true, it's a very impressive service.

So far, I believe it's the only Lifestreaming service to support Xbox Live. I've got HeadlessNels' Halo 3 games in one of my Lifestreams (Jaiku, I think) via plain RSS feed, but with Lifestream.fm, now I can have that + my most recently played game that's not Halo 3.

Friday Five? Is that enough?

2008-04-04T12:12:00.012-05:00

I knew I should have saved those other two awesome posts this week for Friday. I've been working too much this week to even care about trying to assemble 15 things for today. I do have a few...

1. Couldn't whether to go with this first or leave it for last... so, first it is.

via [Whatever]

2. As a tech note for this post, the original video is on History.com, but it doesn't look like there's any way to embed that one. Clearly someone ripped it from there and posted it to YouTube. I don't like embedding YouTube vidoes in blog posts because, while the video is there now, who knows how long it will stay up there. Videos on YouTube still seem very ephemeral (to me, at least). I suppose I could rip the video myself and upload it to Blogger, but then I'd most likely be in violation of the law, and History.com could just as easily make me or Blogger take it down as they could the person on YouTube.

3. Pursuant to this twitter and this follow-up: Davy Jones is in Money magazine this month advertising GorillaTrades. Davy says:

I'm a Believer! Why trade like a monkey [sic], when you can invest like a gorilla?

4. ArchPhoenix links and quotes from a new study on water. How long will the reprieve from 8 glass a day last until another study comes out saying we really need 16 glasses a day?

I've already had ~~a 12 oz can of Coke Zero~~ an 11.4 oz can of water, today. I could probably handle any amount of water the scientists throw out there as long as Coke Zero remains 95% H20.

5. See, I don't even have a #5

Heroes on Hulu

2008-04-01T07:20:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the RSS feeds Hulu provides, I was notified that there were a new Heroes videos available (I'm subscribed to what I guess you could call the Heroes Channel). I like this one with the Dylan song, but there were a couple others with different artists.

This is evidently an ad for the Heroes soundtrack (there's a brief hint of it at the end), but I also feel it's probably a little bit of a "Don't forget about Heroes" thing (yeah, like that's going to happen), and it may also be a test just to see how many hits the videos get.

Two things to note:

1. When you embed the video from Hulu, they actually let you select a start and an end time, so you can embed only part of the video. That would have been nice for this video of Dirk Nowitzki where the fun doesn't start until close to the end.

2. Google tells me that Hayden Panettierre's natural hair color is actually blonde, but in the clip she has the darker hair from "the future" (if I recall correctly), and it makes her look like she could be a much more mature actor - like someone who could be in a Jane Austen type period piece, or something like Closer; not sure if she could pull that off with the blonde hair...

Drupal Activity Stream

2008-03-31T10:05:00.004-05:00

I'm throwing this one out there, in an effort to a) get out more than one post per week and b) provide more timely posts.

[via Lifestream Blog]

Drupal now has an activity stream module. It's one of the first solutions (if you can really say it solves something) for a CMS that I've seen that stores the data. Most of the hosted applications like Jaiku, FriendFeed, and Soup store the data and allow some sort of commenting, but in the Moveable Type and Wordpress plug-ins I'd seen before, it was more of a dynamic loading of Lifestream events, as opposed to the actual copying/importing of content.

If you want a searchable Lifestream, then that more widget-like functionality is not going to work. I would think that importing RSS item and storing them in a Wordpress database would be easy for something with Wordpress development knowledge, but so far, I don't remember seeing anything that does that except this new Drupal module.

Friday Fifteen: The Day Before Earth Hour

2008-03-28T09:06:00.002-05:00

Brought to you by the Letter T

Tech

1. Everybody remember to turn off your lights on March 29 at 8pm. Even my office building is doing it, and it is one of the semi-skyscrapers in downtown Chicago.

2. Social Bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is now requiring new users to sign up using an OpenID. It appears to be a move to stop people from spamming the service... but will it really? It seems to me like it will just shift the sign-up spam to OpenID providers. I just signed up a new account on Wordpress.com without having to click on a link in a confirmation email or even enter a captcha. So, can't the spammers rewrite their scripts to get an OpenID account (or a hundred) from Wordpress, and then use that to sign in to all the wonderful services that require an OpenID login? Maybe I'm just being pessimistic.

3. I have yet to try them, but PhotoShop Express and SlideRocket were released yesterday. The first link there is a post from ReadWriteWeb that talks about the other web apps that Adobe has. I didn't realize there was an Adobe Share that will give you 1 GB of document storage, and the ability to embed documents on websites (still in beta testing). That could be useful for a writer who wants people to review, oh, I don't know, drafts of manuscripts?

4. Firefox 3 is up to Beta 4, but still doesn't work with self-signed certs. That means I won't be able to use it for work development. Which means I won't use it ever (until they fix that), because I'm not about to fire up a separate version of Firefox just to test for work. I'd rather just use one version that does everything I want it to do.

Trivia

5. I blockquote from SF Signal:

Bionic Woman and Battlestar Galactica producer David Eick tells Sci Fi Wire that he is adapting P.D. James' novel, Children of Men as a TV series. The series won't be about the story from the book, but will instead focus on the culture and society James has created. Eick is currently writing the script for the show.

I haven't read the book, but I saw the movie, and honestly, I thought the best part was the culture and society of the setting as opposed to anything in the plot. So, yeah, that sounds pretty awesome.

6. I found The Oneiromantic Mosaic from an email sent to Jeff VanDermeer (yes, my new favorite blogging writer) announcing (sort of) that is was now compiled online (even though there appear to be some missing pieces - but perhaps they were removed on purpose... or never existed in the first place). Anyway, I've been enthralled with it ever since I found it last week and usually have about 3 tabs open in my browser to follow the various tangents. Still haven't made it through the first Dream Journal entry, but I'm pretty sure that's the point.

7. I know it's better to be safe than sorry, but my brother-in-law had to go through Austin yesterday to get to Chicago, extending his (and his wife's) trip by 12 hours. My wife and I will try to make it worth the trip for them. Not sure that the weather will cooperate, though. But at least we have Command & Conquer 3 from GameFly for them to play (I don't think they've played it). Coincidentally enough, the GameFly subscription was a free trial given to me by the BIL.

8. Speaking of C&C3, I know it's late, but I saw that it got an 8.7 on GameSpot, and just for the record, I'd agree with that. I've only played the first few missions, but it's been fun so far. A lot more fun than Eternal Sonata, which totally grated on both my wife and I for 45 minutes before I put it back in the sleeve, and promptly sealed it up for return to GameFly. I'm hoping to get Culdcept Saga by Saturday, so I can play that with "the fam" over the weekend. Cause it's not like it'll be warm enough to go outside.

9. While I'm on the video game tip, it looks like Ninja Gaiden II will have a demo on XBL in May. Let's see if I can finish Mass Effect, Bioshock, The Orange Box, and Condemned (the first one) before NGII's June 3rd release. Then add Lost Odyssey and the aforementioned C&C3 to the list as well since I'll probably pick those up used when I've finished the other 5 games.

10. This is the point where we usually take a breather. Just relax for a second. It's almost over.

Tough Luck

11. Since I'm reviewing stuff, sort of, let's go with the Counting Crows album I bought this week. I've listened to it enough now that I'm okay with giving it a 6/10. There's a couple really good songs, but the whole Saturday Night / Sunday Morning concept/theme thing seems a little contrived. If you're going to do that, it has to be something as awesome as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, preferably with two discs. With the Counting Crows, it kind of just sounds like every other album they've made with half the songs being upbeat and half being really sad. So really, this album just makes me want to pull a couple tracks and make a Counting Crows megamix. Or just let iTunes do it for me.

12. Now that C-Webb is retired, a whole new generation will have to grow up and actually learn for themselves that you shouldn't call a timeout when you don't have any left.

13. Speaking of basketball, I played on Tuesday for the first time in at least a couple months. Who would have thought your arm could get out of shape, but mine sure did, because my triceps and forearm were sore as heck yesterday. And I know I didn't take as many shots as I usually do. Short bus!

14.

Truer LOLz were never written.

15. I told Val I have a deadline of January 1st, 2009, to which she replied, "Or if you don't make it, you can just do a find and replace with 2110."

Friday Seven and a Half: The Sequel

2008-03-21T11:43:00.002-05:00

1. What's the big deal about FriendFeed? I swear I've been talking about Jaiku since... well, since before I'd heard of FriendFeed. But now it seems like every other blog post on TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb is about FriendFeed and how great it is (or how bad it is that we even need something like FriendFeed). Is it just because Jaiku is older and harder to pronounce?

2. archphoenix totally unintentionally stole my idea for Tracer Photos. A Tracer Photo is a public photo in a Flickr set with Friends and/or Family only photos that is used to notify people who might be subscribed to the RSS feed of your photos that there's new stuff. You can also post it to your blog, to be like: Hey, here's a picture that everyone can see... there's more where that came from for the special people in my life. Sort of like this:

3. It may be snowing, but at least the sidewalks are warm enough to melt it.

4. I was hoping to get to start watching LOST (finally) on ABC.com yesterday, but then I ended up working a lot more than I wanted to, and decided to watch the USC v KSU game so I could see future NBA stars OJ Mayo and Michael Beasley. Too bad Beasley was in foul trouble for the first half, and Mayo was playing like CaCa. Then halfway through the second half, CBS switches to Duke v Belmont, thus putting a disappointing period at the end of OJ Mayo's college career. Yeah, the DvB game was a good game, but Duke ended up winning, so it was just as disappointing as cutting away from the other game had been.

5. Apparently, if you want a traffic spike, just make some disparaging, yet clever, remarks about Scott Sigler. If he wrote Terminator books, you'd probably call it "Bringing Metal Down."

6. I finally bought the new (December 2007) Lupe Fiasco album. I saw his new video somewhere the other day, and decided the song was good enough to give it another preview listen. After the preview listen, I went with it. Haven't listened to it much since then, but I'm sure I'll get more in when I go downtown next week.

7. The new White Sox commercials on WGN seem to be designed to fit in with the commercials for the other dramas shown on the network (known as the CW here).

7.5. Sit. Stare. You know the drill.

Food Court Musical

2008-03-12T15:50:00.002-05:00

From Roberson's Interminable Ramble:

He's the most singingest janitor I ever seen.

Wednesday Seven and a Half: Cause I'm going to Mexico!

2008-03-12T08:37:00.002-05:00

1. FriendFeedFeed. Indeed.

2. LifestreamBlog reports that the new version of NoseRub will be able to add a URL as a contact. If the concept sounds bizarre bordering on useless, let me put it in this non-anchor text way: You can add the URL of friend's blog (or, perhaps better, FriendFeed page) and NoseRub will find all the services that pertain to that person (provided they use the appropriate tag attributes). So, you put in the FriendFeed profile page, and it adds all the services listed on that page to that "friend" on NoseRub.

3. Joey has a video of casting for the Notorious B.I.G. Please note: probably not the real casting call for Notorious B.I.G.

4. Did some experimenting with Piknik on Flickr. Piknik has a "Lomo" filter, but only for premium users, so I was trying to see if I could come up with the same kind of effects using the free filters.

5. If the gas prices are getting to you, you may be able to take some small comfort in the fact that if the China continues at its current rate of inflation, in 5 years, a Papa John's pizza will cost $129. If you're not wondering where we'll get our clothes from then, you're probably still stuck on: They have Papa John's in China??? Yeah, took me a while too...

6. Who knew house painters were so eager for work?

7. I'm a little bit upset that I'll be going to Mexico when it finally breaks 50 in Chicago (for this first time this year?), since it'll be back down to the always annoying high 30's when I get back. But, oh wait, I'm going to Mexico!

7.5 Time to stare off into space for a second. You know you want to.

Friday Fifteen: Lebowski Fest Week

2008-03-07T09:36:00.001-06:00

The Friday Fifteen is evolving already in only it's 2nd edition... I've added topic headings.

Public

1. Read/WriteWeb does it again with a list of 35 lifestreaming apps. And what is this blog without a link to something about Lifestreaming?

2. Hulu has Deleted Scenes from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. That's the kind of stuff that these Internets are made for.

3. How come Amazon doesn't let me add MP3 and Unbox Video downloads to my Wish List? One explanation would be that people are supposed to buy stuff for you off your Wishlist, and since the MP3s and Videos are usually downloaded to your computer immediately, you're supposed to be buying them for yourself. For the MP3s, though, since they're DRM free, my friend could buy it off my Wishlist and then email it to me. Or burn it on a CD and give it to me. Or make me a USB Mixtape.

4. So evidently, the reason that I'm not able to log in with "nelswadycki" as a Google Account user name is because I already registered "nels.wadycki" and Google just goes ahead and ignores the "." in the user name. Something could have been brought to my attention yesterday! I knew I was getting email at nelswadyckiATgmail... but I could never log in with that name. Well, problem solved... sort of. See, I actually prefer nelswadycki to nwadycki (there's my one OCD moment), so I've been switching everything over to nelswadycki now... at least Google makes it very easy to share stuff with your friends (or in this case, yourself).

5. I was part of the digital revolution yesterday. I bought the new Nine Inch Nails "Ghosts" album off Amazon. I've listened to it once through (albeit while working), and out of the 4 Ghosts, I like 2 of them, and the other 2 I'm okay with, but not excited about or anything. Anyone want to guess which are the 2 ghosts that I like?

Pointless

6. She doesn't post to it often, but Elizabeth Bear has a category called "entropy requires no maintenance. Nice.

7. Now just stare off into space for a second.

8. This spot reserved for stuff that should be on Give Me The Rock, but is a little too random to get over there. This one is Benny the Bull on Jerry Springer. Evidently they show this during half time. I've been to 2 Bulls games this year, and didn't see it either time. Some day... season tickets... some day...

9. More random videoness from Chicagoist: Hipster Girl. It's not all that funny, but it's clever enough. And come on, it's Friday. You have something better to do?

Personal

10. I was really happy to see the Bulls win last night without Tyrus Thomas. Cause that means he won't play ever again. Which is certainly good for the team. And his confidence. And all that. At least Joakim is living up to his potential.

11. Since I'm going, here's an interview with the guy who the Chicago Lebowski Fest.

12. Since I don't include Give Me The Rock in any of my Lifestreams, here's a link to a post I wrote about the changing world of basketball. The scary part is it's about Kobe Bryant.

13. Another blog (in my ever-expanding blogging empire) that is not in any of my Lifestreams is the America's Next Top Model blog. Here's a post I wrote yesterday about the show on Wednesday. If you don't watch the show, you don't need to click on the link.

14. Writing (and blogging about writing) was going really well up until this week, when I've written a grand total of 80 words. Of course, that doesn't include the previous blog posts from GMTR and ANTMBlog... but those can't really be turned into a novel, now can they?

15. Could I be any more ready for Spring? The answer is: no. Probably not.

Friday Fifteen: Starting on a Leap Year

2008-02-27T16:00:00.006-06:00

1. LifeStream Blog has a pseudo-ranking of the Top 10 (actually 12) Lifestreaming services. They ranked solely based on number of features available without ranking the features. Just in case you were wondering why Jaiku isn't #1.

2. someecards.com is great. Thanks del.icio.us for letting me stalk people and their bookmarks.

3. I hope this was a 20% project. Of course, it would also be acceptable if Google just hired some Russian artists to do a giant-sized recreation of Gmail. Complete with GChat.

4. Read/WriteWeb totally copycheated my last post about the Facebook RSS feed importation. That said, I kind of copycheated a lot of their coverage about the new feature to write my post in the first place. And if you want to join the Facebook group for the cause, that's something you can do as well.

5. Google Reader is now in the top bar of Google apps. Hooray for saving me an extra click! I wonder if that is for everyone, or if Google actually does it dynamically based on which apps you have actually "installed."

6. Speaking of Google apps... oh, sorry, Google Apps... Google's got a Wiki now. And only 16 months after buying Jotspot, which kind of seemed like a complete Wiki app already. It'll be interesting to see if they release Google Sites to non-Capital Google Apps people at some point.

7. LinkedIn! Now with Status Updates! Actually that's good, because then I can post Twitter-style messages without all my "business contacts" knowing how much I really want a beer every day at about 2 in the afternoon. What's that? My Twitter updates are public? Oh boy.

8. This probably belongs over at Give Me The Rock, but I'm trying to get to 15 things here, and I only came up with the idea on Wednesday. In case that doesn't entice you to click over, it's an incredibly well put together video of Blue Chips and Dwyane Wade's botching of the All Star Skills Challenge.

9. Found this site called AnthologyBuilder which could be an easy way to cherry pick some award-winning type stories. You know, cause I don't have enough stuff to read already.

10. If you like The Smashing Pumpkins, but didn't realize they have a blog, it's probably because they only post about once every other month. This time, they've got a link to their new video, which I'm guessing you'll either really like, or really hate. It's kind of a hard one to be on the fence about.

11. Speaking of music videos, Joey at Straight Bangin has your remix of the year. Awesome. I'm pretty much convinced that any 50 Cent song would be better with someone besides 50 Cent doing the 50 Cent verses.

12. They keep saying the temperature in Chicago is going to get to 40 degrees two days from now. No, two days from now. How about two days from now?

13. I feel like a total yup with the amount of SoBe LEAN that's in my fridge right now. But it is hydration with vitamins, and helps me cut down on my caffeeeeeeeine intake. And it was on sale 10/$10 at The Jewel.

14. I'm doing kind of a double test with this post. 1) I've switched my feedburner feed to Blogspot (not that anyone will notice), because I tested that, and the titles come out correctly in Jaiku (as opposed to Wordpress, which, for some reason, Jaiku can't figure out). 2) I'm composing in Google Docs and using the integration to post to Blogger. We'll see how that works out. I'm not sure about the HTML here... I'm thinking it'll get turned into amperscamps, but we'll just have to see.

15. I meant to try to divide this more evenly into: Web stuff, Random Crap, and Personal Notes. Perhaps in the future I will bring Balance to the Force. Or maybe in only two days from now. You know, when it's a little warmer outside.

Where's the Facebook RSS News Feed?

2008-02-25T19:34:00.008-06:00

Yes, I know they have added a Status Feed, and a Notes Feed. But all that really demonstrates is that we know that they can produce RSS feeds.

The easy way out is to boil it down to money. My guess is, Facebook wants their millions of users to see the ads that Microsoft paid for, as well as advancing their Social Ad platform. That is certainly understandable; internet advertising is big money. But...

Shouldn't (or maybe, at least, couldn't) Facebook continue to be a pioneer of web technology as they did when they created the Facebook Platform for internet applications? While I probably overestimate the adoption of RSS, I think part of the reason for that is because, as it stands right now, there is no money to be made from it. The closest I've seen is Feedburner's integration of Google Ads (and being as Feedburner is owned by Google, this is not a big suprise; Google has also provided integration of their ads into Blogger, as well as integration of Feedburner and Blogger). In Feedburner's page about the Google acquisition, there's this:

Google believes that feed-based content and advertising is a developing space where we can add value for users, advertisers and publishers.

Now, perhaps Facebook does see feed-based advertising as a space where they can add value for advertisers, and it's possible that they're working on it internally before revealing a solution publicly. But...

Facebook is going to let users insert additional RSS content into their News Feeds. Yee to the Ha. Let's add a few more bricks to the wall around the garden. How about let's work on getting my content out? If the Facebook argument for not creating RSS feeds from members' News Feeds and Mini-Feeds is purely based on advertising, then how come they can't:
a) Just keep putting those ads that are already in the News Feed into the RSS version of the feed, and/or
b) Insert ads at the bottom of RSS items as some publishers currently do

Now, I certainly understand that Facebook may be keeping the News Feed to themselves in order to keep members coming back to the site for reasons that are only tangentially related to advertising. The lock-in provided by making members come to the site to check the News Feed is something I can understand, but it also seems narrow-minded. If you can get people to subscribe to (or add to their My Yahoo) a feed that links back to your site, you will be feeding them reminders to go to your site more often than they're likely to ever think of it themselves (yes, I know this doesn't apply to that category of people who check obsessively, but I would still wager that aggressively encouraging the use of an RSS News Feed would actually increase the amount of traffic on the site).

The other advantage to such a feed is that, because it is connected to a network of a member's friends, it's unlikely that people would unsubscribe from it. Facebook already has the algorithm in place to sparsely populate the News Feed so as to not overwhelm members with News Items. (This would work well for RSS readers, but while I'm at it, I'd like to suggest that Facebook also offer an RSS version of a full News feed, for people like me who don't have hundreds of friends, and want to keep track of more friend updates than just what is provided in the News Feed; but, really, that's a whole different post)

So, really, the point of the post is this: WRT News Feed as RSS Feed... Make It Work.

Jaiku is still the best Lifestream app

2008-01-31T13:51:00.001-06:00

I wrote back in September that Jaiku was the ultimate microblogging platform. In the 4 months since then, it's gone from Microblogging to Lifestreaming, but it's still the same thing. SocialStream didn't come about as anticipated, but I've tried a bunch of different Lifestreaming/Microblogging web apps since then. Tumblr keeps being brought up as one of the top lifestreaming apps, but the advantage of easily mapping your tumblelog (sp?) to your own domain is immediately counteracted by the fact that you can only import 5 feeds. That's probably enough for most people, but for those of us like me (how many of us are there anyway?) who have Twitter, Flickr, blog (you're reading it), Yelp reviews, del.icio.us bookmarks, recent Diggs (or other social news site votes), and recent Halo 3 games, you can't fit them all. (I could add my Netflix At Home or Queue feed in there, but I haven't really decided which of those Netflix feeds I want to expose to the public) Anyway, as you can see, there are too many feeds to put into a Tumblr lifestream.

Soup.io lets you add as many feeds as you want, and they make it pretty easy to map your own domain. Buuuuuuuut, neither Soup nor Tumblr let you leave comments on someone else's Lifestream/Tumblelog/Microblog. Jaiku does. And Jaiku still lets you unsubscribe from friends' individual feeds. So, if you don't care when I play Halo 3, or what I digg (not that it happens that often anyway), then you can (still) unsubscribe from those aspects of my Jaiku-ing. And now that Google has purchased Jaiku, you can rest assured that the service will continue (even if no further development is done on it) for what will probably be a long time (in web-relative time).

I also wouldn't be surprised to see the Jaiku feature set integrated into the social activity streams that Google is slowly adding to their suite of applications. At first I thought that the mobile app Jaiku built was the reason Google made the acquisition (and I still think that's probably part of it, since Google is now launching their own mobile OS), but I can now see that the - shall we say - more advanced lifestreaming features were also an important part of the deal; the ability to unsubscribe from individual feeds probably being at the top of the list there.

While I'm on the subject and rambling away, I think Google/Jaiku made a serious error in shutting down the open sign up process when the purchase was made. I'm sure that day was the most traffic Jaiku had ever seen, and I know that both Twitter and Jaiku were set ablaze with comments on which one people should be using. Google should have capitalized on the momentum to get as many new Jaiku users as possible, and given them the opportunity to see why Jaiku is still the best Lifestreaming platform as well as a great microblogging platform.

Colin Moock's ActionScript 3 Tour - Chicago

2007-12-05T11:39:00.001-06:00

On a metaphysical level it was nice to have another day off from work. On a realphysical level, it was nice to get back into the routine. And not having to walk all the way from the entrace of Navy Pier to the back. It was a 10 minute walk and I was trucking it.

I took a picture of Colin with my cameraphone, and I was all excited cause I found out the USB cord for my real camera connects to my phone, too. But when I connected it, Windows couldn't find the software, and so, no picture.

Anyway...

Colin was a great presenter, and I applaud him for presenting for essentially 8 hours (he kept saying 9, but that included the lunch break). I guess when the name is "ActionScript from the Ground Up" I shouldn't have been expecting any real advanced coverage of the topic. I got a great review of OOP, though, and I'm sure for all the Flash "design" type people there, it was way too fast. It was essentially a 9 week course crammed into 9 hours with no time for homework. So, yeah, I'm sure there were some minds blown. But I also am sure there were people who were bored out of their minds. I was close, but I hung on and managed to pick up things here and there even in the OOP stuff. That said, I'm pretty sure I can skip his book (sorry Colin!) since the reviews on Amazon say that it goes a lot into the OOP stuff. But that frees up some cash, so I can get the RIAs with Flex and Java book I've been wanting forever, or else Adobe's Flex 3 training book. And for Adobe, I think that was the point anyway; just to get people more exposure to ActionScript and make them more interested in using it; so they can stay on top of Silverlight.

I am also glad I got to see how similar ActionScript is to Java. I'd say that AS is probably more like Java than JavaScript. Of course, names for languages really don't tell you anything about them.

I overloaded myself with the Flex/ActionScript by reading my Flex 2 with ActionScript 3 book on the train and bus to the event. Now, I will try to busy myself with a game I'd like to develop using Flex/ActionScript, and try to also fit in an extra credit project at work using Ruby on Rails. My FA side project will be a good one since I can probably move quickly to advanced Flex/ActionScript concepts since the languages are so similar to what I already know. The RoR project will have a bit more of a learning curve since I'm still getting to know Ruby.

Just an FYI (while I was finding the picture below), I came across this TIOBE software site that ranks programming languages. As of Dec 2007, Ruby is at #9 while ActionScript is #25 (glad to see it's at least that high; MXML doesn't count as a programming language). Java is #1 with a 20% share, so I guess it's good that I've got that one down pretty well.

Code, Glorious Code

2007-11-29T22:30:00.000-06:00

Actually did some coding today! Well, front end coding I mean. With Javascript and everything. I love the front end. It's fun.