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Cool Flickr set feature

October 8th, 2006 Tony No comments

I was always annoyed at how Flickr couldn’t keep my photos in order of date taken when I created a new set. After some messing around I discovered that they have added this feature. Go Flickr! The screenshot below should show you how to change the ordering. Hey Flickr… this should be the default behavior :)

flickr-arrange.gif

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

Parallels… Another reason to love my Mac

October 8th, 2006 Tony 1 comment

I went to the Raleigh ruby on rails group hack night last week with David Black and had a good time chatting with local programmers. I spotted someone with a MacBook Pro and headed over to ask for some advice on how to get lighttpd running properly. Not only did Jared of No Fluff, Just Stuff help me with a better choice of RoR web server (he suggested Mongrel and after spending a weekend with it I whole heartedly agree) but he also sold me on the whole Parallels thing.

parallels.gif

Once I switched to Mac I really never had any desire to waste any of my precious disk space on Windows. I use Remote Desktop to take care of my few Windows needs. However RDP often fails to work properly and is slow. So when Jared showed me how freaking fast and reliable and how little disk space a Windows XP install took on Parallels I was convinced. Its crazy. Boot XP in 30 seconds, in FULL SCREEN mode and it feels like you are on the fastest PC available. Not only that but you can boot just about any OS such as SusE or Fedora in Parallels.

Important one: It functions way better if you follow this tip from Jared (reply to my question about two mouse pointers and slow response):

Regarding the double cursor..

Load the Windows VM, then make it a partial window (via [alt]+[Return]).

Then, from the menu bar, go to VM/Install Parallels tools. I think that takes care of it. They enhance various OS level integrations.

Categories: Switching to Mac Tags:

Danah Boyd does freestyle social networking talk at UNC

September 14th, 2006 Tony No comments

I skipped out on the office today so I could catch Danah Boyd’s talk on social networking ala MySpace on the campus of UNC. Danah is a candid speaker and a damn good one as well. She put on as the shy type before the talk kicked off but as soon as Fred Stutzman introduced her she hit the ground running in a very entertaining and comfortable talk about the explosion of MySpace and the general teen culture on the internet.

danah-boyd

Danah let it slip that she had collected info on nearly all Friendster and MySpace users which I interprete to mean that she wrote code to scrape all profiles. Cool! I can relate! So it was you that was the cause for Friendster to be so slow back in the JSP days. :) (P.S. to both Danah and Fred: the 100 million figure on MySpace is bogus. I know people generating MANY believeable profiles on MySpace with bots and I think they account for a pretty large chunk. MySpace is pretty inept to dealing with bots. Open up a thousand threads and let her rip!). But most of the talk was non-geeky and focused on how teens and adults interact in the virtual world. Here are some of my notes:

As a result of the 60’s backlash society has sought to constrain teens
and keep in a constant state of activity. Myspace is an outlet in a world in which teens are mostly occupied with school related activities.

These are just rough notes. I’ll clean them up this weekend.

Properties of MySpace
persistance – conversation continues when you aren’t around
searchability -
replicability – publish your conversation you had with your friend
invisible audiences -

Diliemna for teens – be cool but not get in trouble with adult peers

battlecry – social network by jerry fallwell

privacy problem with FB feeds
yes you can get that data by refreshing someones profile daily or through a script but not likely

exposure – don’t tell the world when i join a threesome group. friends with that geeky person
but don’t want all your friends to be notified

invasive – information that people are not ready deal with. cobot collected data in rooms.

cognitive caps to how much info you can deal with. following all that info is not reciprocal.
just b/c i follow someone carefully doesn’t mean they are there for you. what are the social
costs of having this info?

Categories: Social Networks Tags:

Roll your own Ruby on Rails Training

August 31st, 2006 Tony 3 comments

I’ve been wanting to dive into Ruby on Rails for nearly a year now since I saw that amazing 15 minute demonstration on the official site. I’ve known for a long time now that there is something really wrong about the repetitiveness of the code we’ve had to write in Java/JSP everytime we update an object model or change an interface.

Read more…

Categories: Ruby on Rails Tags:

Virante’s super clever use of on page optimization

August 23rd, 2006 Tony 2 comments

Russ IM’d me today to show me something cool. Very cool. Check out the clever use of on-page optimization to get rankings for a non-competitive phrase: five seo excuses

Pay particular attention to the subdomains and what they spell out. Very slick. I’m sure your phone will be ringing off the hook over at Virante now Russ.

Categories: Search Engine Optimization Tags: