Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

This is one of those videos where I just feel embarrassed for the people associated with it:

Akismet is awesome. I have had over 15,000 comments that are spam in the past 12 to 18 months of running Wordpress:

While I think it is cool that Akismet works so well, I think it is a sad state of affairs that on a relatively low traffic site like my blog, this much content spam occurs.

I recently made an impulse buy at BestBuy and picked up a Flip video camera. I didn’t have high expectations as the price point was pretty low ($150 for the premium, 60 minute one). I am happy to say that I have been very impressed and it quickly replaced my Sony MiniDV camera for a number of reasons:

• No tapes. Simply flip out the USB connector and plug into your computer to start copying video files.
• Great quality. It rivals the quality of my MiniDV. I can’t tell the difference in video quality although I technically know that it is not as good due to the compression codec used to store the file, versus raw DV. The audio quality actually seems to be better on the Flip.
• Simple Batteries. Takes two AA batteries. No proprietary chargers or expensive batteries.
• Portability. It fits in my pocket (or my wife’s purse). Means more chances for capturing video.
• Inexpensive. At $150, I don’t feel the need to be ultra careful with it as replacing it wouldn’t be the end of the world. In fact, I am considering getting another just to have in multiple places.

Pulling those video clips down to my hard drive, I run them through iSquint, to convert to H264s for editing in iMovie (would be nice if iMovie and Flip would work something out so that iMovie would support the codec that Flip is using, or visa versa). Pulling into iMovie 08 is very simple and quick. Throwing together videos with titles and music (iMovie comes with a decent collection of royalty free clips to use) is pretty easy for a non-professional editor like myself (Final Cut Pro just scares me).

Now sharing those finished clips with friends and family works great going through Vimeo. The user experience is key, at least for me, on this site. It reminds me of when I first discovered Flickr and feeling I would get when using that photography hosting service. It created a sensation in me that made me want to take more pictures so I could upload and share. It’s much the same with Vimeo — I find myself wanting to create another clip so that I can interact with the site.

Here are some samples of my first videos going through these products/services:

Running at Green Hills Mall from Patrick Altman on Vimeo.

A Few of Clare’s Words from Patrick Altman on Vimeo.

Mitch packaged up a new release that’s got some really great features since the previous release. My favorite being the configuration settings able to be in a system wide and/or a user configuration file, ini style file.

Mitch’s announcement:

A new release of boto, the Python library for Amazon Web Services, is now available at:

http://boto.googlecode.com/

There are many changes in this new release but the most noteworthy are:

• Support for 2007-01-01 API release for SQS (now the default SQS API)
• Support for EU location in S3
• Threaded Query in SimpleDB
• Use of standard Python logging facility
• Addition of site-wide and personal config files for boto settings

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome on the boto discussion group.

Mitch

There is currently a branch being maintained on the elasticfox project on SourceForge, that tracks Firefox 3 development so as to provide the community with a version of the extension that is compatible with the Firefox 3 line.

At revision 26 in the ff3 branch: https://elasticfox.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/elasticfox/branches/greg/ff3 The fix needed for compatibility with Firefox 3 Beta 4 was added by gregataws. I grabbed the source tree, built the xpi, and installed it. It works very well.

I have put the built xpi up here on my site, in case anyone wants to avoid the svn co, and local build steps.

Recently, I took the opportunity to try out git along with the hosted service github for a couple of my personal projects that were previously hosted on Google Code (pyphanfare and pycalais).

What I learned was that since these are two open source projects that are really just a single developer — me — I wasn’t realizing the goodness to be had in a distributed SCM like git. Since I work just off of trunk, I furthermore, wasn’t hampered by subversion’s marginal support for branching/merging. Lastly, the fact that I didn’t have subversions nice incrementing integer revision numbers, left me missing that feeling of forward movement in seeing the number increment — UUIDs are boring.

Then there was the github hosting, while great in many respects, it lacked a simple task management system. While I hadn’t used one up until now, I got to where I wanted to log items that I was thinking about with my two projects and didn’t have anyplace to put them other than a wiki page. I resorted to keeping a simple TODO.txt file in the root of my repo, which in some cases I think I prefer it, but overall, I like having the simple Google Code style item tracker.

So, I have reactivated those Google Code projects and updated the code with the changes that I had made in the git repository and deleted the repos on github. If and when, either of these two projects becomes very popular (doubt they will because of their very limited scope) then I might consider moving back to git and take advantage of all the wonderful things Malcolm points out in working with django via git. Until then, I’ll enjoy the simplicity of subversion on Google Code.

PS: I noticed that Homebrew Coding has got an interesting article on using git, specifically the git-svn bridge, with a subversion based repository — in this case a Google Code repository. I might have to check that out at some point in the future.

The on going saga of my defective Mac Book Pro screen has been resolved thanks to the really cool folks and service at MacAuthority, a local full service independent Apple dealer.

I took my laptop into them yesterday at 2PM, paid $75 for rush service, and got it back with a brand new Display Housing and LCD at 1PM today (laptop was still under warranty, so the only charge was the $75 for rush service). Furthermore, I was able to walk right in and talk with someone, instead of having to get an appointment.

This is far superior service to what I have found at my local Apple Store!

I just committed the following patch to the Key class in the boto Amazon Web Services python framework:

Index: boto/s3/key.py
===================================================================
--- boto/s3/key.py      (revision 492)
+++ boto/s3/key.py      (working copy)
@@ -267,7 +267,7 @@

     def get_file(self, fp, headers=None, cb=None, num_cb=10):
         path = '/%s/%s' % (self.bucket.name, self.name)
-        path = urllib.quote(path)
+        path = urllib.quote(path.encode('utf-8'))
         resp = self.bucket.connection.make_request('GET', path, headers)
         if resp.status < 199 or resp.status > 299:
             raise S3ResponseError(resp.status, resp.reason)

If you have unicode characters in your strings that out of the 128 ascii character range, then trying to access that path with urllib could cause you some trouble. As I did with my previous patch to boto on this issue, I solved this problem by encoding the string that was passed to urllib to utf-8 and all was well.

This is a tragic and yet amazing story of how the tornados that came through the other night (I live in Nashville) kill some while some are miraculously spared.

To think that this child flew over 150 yards from their home in the middle of a tornado, killing the mother but sparing the 11-month old baby.

Forbes highlighted this week the shift that is starting to occur in capital costs in technology. This is a story that I think has been slowly building for the past year or so and is starting to reach an inflection point in the market where we’ll start seeing and hearing about it more.

I think this will be especially true if the common fear of recession is realized and capital expenditures are reduced. This has some very interesting potential impacts to both our economy as well as our technological landscape.

It seems we are poised for some tremendous growth, especially in new technology startups. By lowering the barrier to entry of capital costs (e.g. building a data center, using up front capital, versus pay as you go computing and storage services), smart and innovative ideas are no longer priced out of testing products and services in a free market.

All this growth will likely be coupled with a very healthy outlook for VC funding. I think these numbers from 2007 will increase as investors pull more of their money out of real-estate and seek to put it somewhere:

At the end of August, VC Keith Benjamin of Levensohn Venture Partners proposed that tech IPOs and the investors who launch them could flourish as the mortgage mess poisons Wall Street. Benjamin says the credit crunch could be “the catalyst to put tech stocks back into favor.” The idea is that money will move from investing via hedge funds and private equity back to technology, which has been under a cloud since the dot-com crash.

I think that these things coming together now couldn’t come at a better time. It might save us from a real recession, or at least cut the pain of one. Of course, to really see this innovation take off, we might actually need the recession to forced the tightening of the corporate pursestrings that would fuel technologies like Amazon Web Services and the knowledge growth to build solutions on these platforms.