Category: Geek

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Get Your Twitter Timeline into WordPress

After Twittering for a few months, I started to feel uncomfortable about not owning my data, and wanted an automated way to store a copy of each Tweet for posterity. Another installation of WordPress would be perfect as a Twitter backup repository (alternatively, you could copy all of your tweets to a dedicated category within your main WP installation, but I chose to do it in a separate install, since I wasn’t looking for integration with my main blog.

There were really two problems to solve:

1) Have new Tweets automatically hoovered into the WP backing store.
2) Get all of my older Tweets ported into the system as well.

Here’s the resulting site. It’s not really intended for public viewing – I don’t care if people browse it, but it’s really just a backup system in the form of a WordPress site.

Part 1 is pretty easy; Part 2 was more complicated. Here are recipes for both procedures.

Continue reading “Get Your Twitter Timeline into WordPress”

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The Long Tail in My LR

Fried from a long day, then with a client until 11:00, much-needed couch time. Overwhelmed myself with Olympic opening ceremony last night, couldn’t take more. Then remembered – wasn’t Tivo about to grow a YouTube gland? Checked in and sure enough, a bazillion new vids were there, waiting to be inhaled.

As expected, video quality isn’t great blown up to HDTV size, and audio is sometimes out of sync with the video, but the range of human experience at your fingertips is mind blowing. Started with a few Captain Beefheart clips, moved on to Django Rheinhardt, then to Jacob Kaplan-Moss talking about Django at Google HQ in 2006. I’d never watch an hour-long video at the computer, too restless for that, but this works.

The long tail is in my living room.

P.S. Thanks to the WordPress dev team for creating the WP posting client for iPhone, which I’m tapping away at now – wallowing in luxuriant tech.

“The ink is never dry on these babies.”

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Drizzle vs. Oracle

Logo-Mysql For years, the MySQL project has been busy bolting on features to help it compete for attention/market-space with the big boys of relational database land (mainly adding triggers and stored procedures, but also lots of other smaller features). Result: MySQL gets more respect with every passing year, and is now one of the most widely-deployed databases in the world (with the exception of SQLite – does that count?). Other result: MySQL is becoming more monolithic, consuming more memory and system resources.

But wait… the beauty of MySQL was always that it was perfect for web applications, with ultra-fast reads (since web apps spend the bulk of their time reading from, not writing to the database). The majority of the database-backed web consists of weblogs, forums, and various content management systems, where none of the fancy stuff is needed. Modern developers put their logic in application code, not in databases. Isn’t MySQL getting a bit fat for the bulk of sites it serves?

Enter Drizzle, a slimmed-down, microkernel version of MySQL optimized for web applications, with all the cruft that most of us never think about or use removed. O’Reilly: MySQL forks: could Drizzle be the next of the new generation of relational database?

“Aker presents this step as a return to the quick and lightweight MySQL that made it popular in the first place, a database engine that may not appeal to large corporate back offices but can easily power web sites. I see it also as a step back to the philosophy that Aker calls “Databases without business logic”: let the application handle consistency and complex calculations instead of making the database do them. Trust your programmers.”

So what ends up on the cutting room floor? Slashdot:

Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types.

Also interesting: “Aker stated that he is unwilling to support platforms without a proper GNU toolchain, such as Windows.” That means Drizzle will only run on Linux, BSD, and Mac OS.

Maybe it’s the company I keep, but I never seem to hear anything positive about working with the big databases. One person after another talks about working with Oracle and other large database systems as onerous, unnecessarily layered, annoying. Workmate Milan had this to say:

I did oracle database logic in EECS for a year or so and it was just a huge waste of time. I really started believing that the war for business logic in the db vs in the application really just amounted to oracle dba’s getting paid insane amounts of money to fiddle with PL/SQL triggers and procedures. Putting that logic in the application makes more sense to me and allows the application to remain in one, preferably OO (not Java, guess who*) language, and hence easier to maintain. It follows along with the rapid dev and ORM approach, which most developers see value in. DBAs on the other hand see their territory encroached upon. I will be a happy man when Oracle loses its grip over the business world. Oracle represents an aging empire that impedes progress.

* He’s referring to Python.

I can guarantee that of the 150+ sites running on both Birdhouse and the J-School, not a single one has any need for triggers, procedures, or any of the other non-core shiny stuff. Every site I’ve ever worked on would be perfectly happy running on a radically slimmer database, as would the vast majority of the web. Will be interesting to see this project evolve.

Music: The Kinks :: Brother
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Spore Creature Creator

I’ve written a few times over the years about Spore, the new life-cycle simulation game by Will Wright (creator of The Sims), with spontaneous/generative music by Brian Eno. The game’s release is now just a couple of months away, and Maxis have released the Spore Creature Creator in advance, so users can get started creating a library of bizarre land, water, and air-borne beings. Luckily for us, the game’s many delays have given Miles just enough time to grow up enough to start appreciating basic concepts of evolution, and to become comfy with a mouse.

Just spent the bulk of a cold grey summer morning playing with the Creature Creator, and my jaw is on the floor. Spore manages so much complexity behind such a simple and intuitive interface. Performance is superb, movement is silky smooth, and the creative possibilities are endless. Working mostly by himself, Miles created HasEverything, Headfeathers, Aquaboogie, and Ezra. This is Ezra:

Yep – in test drive mode, you can build short movies and upload them directly into YouTube, without leaving the game. The resolution here isn’t great, but inside the game, both creatures and settings are stunningly beautiful.

If we’re having this much fun with just the creature editor, I can only imagine what the actual game is going to be like.

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Web 2.0 is Sharecropping

So tempting to let everything live in the cloud, to hand over storage and bandwidth requirements to YouTube and Flickr, to use an external wiki service rather than host your own, let Google run your email… but think hard before handing it all over. Before you know it, you’re an indentured servant.

From the recent ignite conference:

Music: Orchestra Baobab :: Jiin Ma Jiin Ma
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Twistori

Twistori2 Watched an interesting presentation by Robin Sloan of current.tv today, nice coda to last night’s talk by Chris Walton of the BBC. Both networks have harnessed the power of user-generated content in ways that go way beyond the casual contribution – BBC has an entire bureau (“hub”) of editors tracking, databasing, fact-checking, and processing cell phone photography, comments on beeb stories, email messages, etc., all now a staple of their “normal” news gathering process.

The idea behind current.tv was always to be UGC-focused, but many didn’t think it had legs. It has, it’s profitable, and it’s good. The relationship between their web and TV properties is total symbiosis – the web acts like a catch basin, accepting UGC from all comers and posting most of it. Editors squeeze and condense out the best of that into the content stream that feeds the TV network. Brave new world.

In passing, Sloan showed a mesmerizing web experiment called Twistori that sifts and filters key words from Twitter streams. Sit and watch the world of love/hate/think/believe/feel/wish go by. The public mind on parade. Weird and kind of wonderful (and strangely depressing).

Music: Bruce Lash and the Virgineers :: How Far Does Space Go?
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Sharing WiFi Connections

Reader baald pointed me to a discussion at thegearpage, where a user asked whether utilizing someone else’s unsecured WiFi access point was tantamount to theft. Amazingly, this is a not-uncommon perception, and people have even been arrested for availing themselves of publicly accessible WiFi signals (which is insane).

My take: If I’m sitting in my car outside your house and can access your WiFi signal without a password, you are transmitting an open signal into my space. How is that not an invitation to use it? You’re literally bombarding me with with signal and simultaneously telling me I can’t use it?

I’ll go further: Anyone paying for a broadband connection is only using a tiny fraction of it and, IMO, practically has an obligation to share it, in the interest of making life better for everyone. We want to get to a point where wifi flows freely, like water out of public drinking fountains. When you pay for a signal and have tons of it to spare, you can / should help the world approach that nirvana.

That doesn’t mean you should be stupid about it. You should make sure your home network is secure and un-surfable. You should only share the TCP/IP, not LAN access. Big difference.

So:

A) Ideally, everyone with a connection shares that connection — but does so smartly.

B) Yes, one should be able to safely assume that a non-protected hotspot is there as a public service.

While sharing a connection is against the Terms of Service of some ISPs, others think more like their users — British Telecom actually encourages their users to share the love.

Update: Security expert Bruce Schneir also leaves his home Wifi network unsecured, for all the same reasons.

Music: Kimya Dawson :: Loose Lips
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iTunes and Network Attached Storage

Deets on recent iTunes weirdness and attempted solutions, mostly for people asking about it on Twitter.

I’ve been storing my music collection on an Infrant ReadyNAS RAID system for more than a year. Aside from slow write speeds over a lame 10 megabit connection, it’s worked really well, and it’s comforting to know that, even though I’m not backing up the collection, at least I’m reasonably well-protected from disk failure.

But over the past month or so, I’ve been noticing more and more of those little exclamation marks in iTunes indicating that a track could not be found. Ah… turned out I had accidentally run iTunes for a while with the NAS unmounted, and iTunes had re-set the base dir to my home (thank you, how nice!), so now the collection was partially split across volumes.

I could re-navigate to find missing tracks individually, but there were too many to catch them all, and because the files weren’t on a local volume, the process per-file was agonizingly slow. Tried the Advanced | Consolidate menu option to try and force iTunes to put everything back on the NAS, but no dice – still a sea of exclamation points.
Continue reading “iTunes and Network Attached Storage”

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Maker Faire 2008

Awesome day, as always, with Miles at Maker Faire yesterday. Arrived early and glad we did – heard that by early afternoon the traffic and lines were so bad that people were turning around on the highway and returning home. This was our third year at the show, and somehow things didn’t click as well as they have in the past – didn’t manage to catch any of the scheduled events (giant mousetrap, Eepybird’s Diet Coke and Mentos display, floating R/C battleship war…) And starting to realize there’s a lot of carry-over from year to year, so didn’t get the delight of surprise from a lot of stuff. Crowds larger than ever, and the presence of Disney at a DIY fair kind of gave me the willies (though Miles loved their toy Wall-E bot).

Bicycle Guitar

Still, Maker Faire is one of the most inspirational things going – a wonderland of unpackaged, under-funded, can-do creativity. Cyclecide had their full range of human/bike-powered rides and attractions, the giant mousetrap was fully operational. A glass-blowing artist displayed his Prozac-eating chicken, an electronic calliope and a chariot pulled by an Arnold Schwarzenegger bot wandered the grounds, blending in with the Extra Action marching band as Total Annihalation jammed on stage near a 40-ft goddess made of welded steel cable, spewing great balls of flame from her heart chakra. Battlebots battled and hovercraft hummed and dudes roasted pickles near a giant Tesla coil. Steampunk ruled the day, its centerpiece Neverwas Haul alive and well (and until you’ve heard a steam gizmo concerto, your ears ain’t lived). People ground bags of flour from raw wheat with a bicycle, affixed Legos to a Jeep, 4′ cupcakes drove around, kids blasted model rockets 200 yards into the air, a man knitted and drummed at the same time (with the same sticks).

Steampunk Concerto II

In other words, Maker Faire is Burning Man Lite — and that’s OK. If you can’t take off a week to hang out in the desert, or don’t want to usher your kids into a psychedelic love den, Maker Faire brings much of the same creative juice, with a more scientific bent and none of the drugs. It’s one of those things that makes you feel blessed to live in the Bay Area.

Total Annihalation I

Dylan Tweney: Maker Faire and DIY culture

Wired.com: From Welding to Weddings

Here’s my Flickr Set from the day, which also includes five short videos – using Flickr’s new video upload capability for the first time, with 30fps videos taken with my new PowerShot SD1100s – amazing to see how far the video quality has come in consumer still cams.

Other public Flickr shots tagged makerfaire2008.

Music: Stereolab :: People Do It All The Time
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“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”

Something has happened to PBS favorite “Charlie Rose.” The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule. The one-on-one interview between Charlie and his guest begins as usual but quickly goes awry, so much so that Charlie is warned that, somewhere, a man named “Steve” is “not happy.” Though this seemingly random statement might confuse us, Charlie understands it for what it is — a threat. But who is “Steve” and why is he angry? And why does the mere mention of his name stop Charlie cold? Using appropriated footage from a single episode of “Charlie Rose,” filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical in “‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett.”