Monthly Archives: August 2009

Let's See What Sticks

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It’s quickly becoming the norm that I don’t sleep before 3 AM. I was looking forward to changing that tonight, but now I have this weird urge to type something out. Here’s to hoping I just rock this post, and go to bed.

This week’s been very very busy. Finding a paid gig through a friend via Twitter was quite an interesting turn of events. I guess I’ll now be flipping back and forth between this new project and my own things.

In an effort to become more efficient with my time on the computer, I’ve got into vim and its lovely library of plugins. Memorizing what seemed at first to be complete nonsensical keystrokes that now seem completely logical proved to be quite an experience. Of course, this is slowing down a lot of the simpler things, but I feel like this period of learning is going to pay off big as time goes on.

I feel extremely tired and weary, but I feel like this state of insanity is where I need to be: A balance between the ideal and practical, optimistic and realistic. And there have been times I asked myself if this is what I actually want. Am I just chasing dreams because of thrill of the chase itself? Do I truly believe in my ideas and am I truly passionate? And is this enough?

Hello, race condition.

Again, realizing: Take it one step at a time. No one becomes awesome instead in one fell swoop. It’ll take a lot of tinkering to even figure out what “awesome” is. And then to achieve it? Good luck. Or something like that, for those of us that don’t believe in that jazz.

Continuing: Why haven’t you taken that first step? What’s stopping you? If it’s anything but you, are you off the hook?

I guess it’s been laziness, thinking that there’s going to be this innate ability that I can always fall back onto for sustenance. Talent. But letting this talent rot… such a shameful waste. Honing the talent… takes effort.

I sure hope I have the talent to get more talents.

Life.hack

Fueled by: The Submarines – Honeysuckle Weeks. Yeah, it took the entire album to write this post.

Also brought to you by: Isolator. Especially for these braindump posts that don’t require any fact checking, other than in my head, it works great.

List O' Applications

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Open periodically, but never too often:

  • Google Reader: Fluid
  • GMail: Fluid
  • Tweetie
  • Adium

Constantly open:

  • Preview: for docs
  • Terminal
  • MacVim
  • iTunes: sadly, I don’t have a better music playing app
  • Safari
  • Finder

Note to self: Need to find a xml-rpc blogging tool that does Markdown in Vim. I’m sure there’s some out there.

For now, still using MarsEdit for blogging, a solid piece of software.

An Empty Drafts Folder

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Feels great to not have anything to write about.

In reality, they always keep popping up in my mind. But at least, on paper, my mind is free to do what I deem is awesome.

And that’s that. I thought I was going to make this blog into something more than just a personal reflection, but the time is not now.

So we’re reverting back to my personal thoughts and shenanigans, rather than trying to become a tech blogger by any means.

I’ll share links as I find them, and maybe comment on them, but that’s pretty much it.

I’m going to probably use this podium, more so as a chronicling of how I’m going to fail at building a feed reader, but we’ll see where this one leads. I’ve still got time, and fingers to type code with. Money’s running low, but I can’t focus on that just yet.

Sharpening My Tools: Learning More Bash and Vim

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I’ve been having way too much fun, sharpening my tools. For too long, I’ve been sitting idly by, being okay with my level of knowledge in a lot of the tools I use on a daily basis, but no more.

In the past two (threeish, since I don’t really know where time goes anymore) days, I’ve been diving deeper and deeper into Terminal.app (which, by default, is running some weird mac version of bash, more on this later) and my editor of choice, vim. I do like having my vim windows separate from the terminal window, so I use MacVim from time to time.

And that’s really all I’m going to say on the subject, for now. I’m finally going back to making extremely neat and concise notes to myself in this process, almost akin to the anal-retentive days of note keeping days in high school. Basically, throwing away the need for so much metadata on what was learned at what second, but instead, opting to just learn whatever I need to learn.

After all, trying to kill two birds (building/learning and teaching/sharing) with one stone is fairly difficult. I fear I’ve been failing at trying to kill a single bird to begin with.

Another Push

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I’m ready to give it my all, another push.

It’s been tough, and there’s only two and a half weeks left until a private beta.

Go big, or go home. Fake it ’till you make it. Shut up and ship it.

Mountain Dew: Game Fuel Alliance, Horde

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Comments on two not-so-recent versions of Mountain Dew… er… Mtn Dew. Stupid rebranding.

Alliance (Boo-urns!)

Mtn Dew: Game Fuel: Alliance

Mtn Dew: Game Fuel: Alliance

I can smell the fake… sweetness. Smells like overly sweet, manufactured berries. Very akin to artificial blueberry flavoring added to medicine. And I know, it’s Mountain Dew, I should have expected such a smell, but especially for this version…

Sickeningly sweet. To me, it tasted a lot better with ice, since the sweetness is a little muted with the melting water. Nothing remarkable.

Verdict: Never again. Lame. And not just because Alliance sucks. ;-)

For The Horde!

Mtn Dew: Game Fuel: Horde

Mtn Dew: Game Fuel: Horde

Smells a lot like cotton candy.

Citrus Cherry Flavor? Eh. There’s a tiny bit of orange flavor, mixed with that fake cherry flavor. Why does everyone think that flavor tastes like actual cherries?

Definitely tastes closer to Mountain Dew than the Alliance Edition did.

It’s strange, but I thought that I had tasted this somewhere before. Turns out… it’s the same formula as the Halo 3 Game Fuel.

Verdict: Didn’t like the Halo 3 version too much either. Probably won’t be getting this one again.

Closing

Caffeine content: 121 mg per 20 oz bottle (6.05 mg/oz), which is more than a regular Mountain Dew, which is 90 mg per 20 oz bottle. So I guess there’s more caffeine, at least.

Conclusion: Bring back the Throwback. Pepsi Throwback was delicious. Mountain Dew Throwback was a bit weird at the beginning, but I grew to like it. Too bad I never sat down and did a review of those two… now they’re just memories.

Quentin Tarantino's Top 20 Movies Since 1992

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Via YouTube. Because I realize that for those that don’t use a feed reader, this breaks my layout. Oh, you ever growing video dimensions…

His List (with minor corrections):

  • Battle Royale (Dir. Kinji Fukasaku)
  • Anything Else (Dir. Woody Allen)
  • Audition (Dir. Takashi Miike)
  • The Blade (Dir. Tsui Hark)
  • Boogie Nights (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
  • Dazed & Confused (Dir. Richard Linklater)
  • Dogville (Dir. Lars von Trier)
  • Fight Club (Dir. David Fincher)
  • Friday (Dir. F Gary Gray)
  • The Host (Dir. Bong Joon Ho)
  • The Insider (Dir. Michael Mann)
  • Joint Security Area (Dir. Park Chan Wook)
  • Lost In Translation (Dir. Sophia Coppola)
  • The Matrix (Dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski)
  • Memories of Murder (Dir. Bong Joon Ho)
  • Police Story 3 (Dir. Stanley Tong)
  • Shaun of the Dead (Dir. Edgar Wright)
  • Speed (Dir. Jan de Bont)
  • Team America (Dir. Trey Parker)
  • Unbreakable (Dir. M. Night “Shamalamadingdong”)

My Notes:

He considers Battle Royal #1, and the rest from #2 to #20 are all in alphabetical order. I liked Battle Royal, and it definitely was one of “those” movies… but I wouldn’t put it at the top of my list. But that’s Tarantino for you.

Boogie Nights. I’m not so sure if I want to watch this one again. I don’t remember much of it, but I’m almost certain I’m not remembering what I’m should remember the most. ahem

Who doesn’t like Fight Club? Seriously.

It’s weird, but I’ve seen a large part of Friday. And liked it.

Three out of his twenty (The Host, Joint Security Area, and Memories of Murder) are Korean movies. Very very well made Korean movies. I wonder if he’s seen Tale of Two Sisters, one of my favorite Korean movies of all time. Also, It’s quite amazing that two Bong Joon Ho films has made his list.

Lost In Translation was confusing. Very very confusing. I don’t remember much of it. I just remember feeling like there was something more to that movie, but was always too lazy to figure it out.

The Matrix was supposedly his #2 before the later two came out. (Yes, I don’t like to refer to them by their names.) My thoughts are very close to Tarantino’s on this topic.

I saw Hot Fuzz first, then saw Shaun of the Dead. I actually enjoyed Hot Fuzz more, because it was a bit more approachable since I hadn’t (and still haven’t watched) too many zombie horror flicks.

Team America? Wha…? Funny, but to make the top 20? Uh…

If I had to pick a movie I liked by M. Night Shyamalan, I would pick Unbreakable, too.

The movies I have yet to see on this list: Anything Else, Audition, The Blade, Dazed & Confused, Dogville, Friday, The Insider. But in actuality, I would love to watch most of the rest of these movies again.

Git, GitHub and Social Coding

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via Video: Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and Scott Chacon — Git, GitHub and Social Coding.

While I don’t use GitHub for my projects, most of the rubygems and other code bases exist on GitHub. I guess there are the few that are still on Google Code and even fewer on SourceForge.

The video, not only being extremely informative for someone who doesn’t know anything about git (but would like to know more), was a very nice overview of what I’ve been learning in the past couple months. (Especially more so the past couple of weeks.)

What I find awesome is that (at least Chris specifically) had a very personal problem he wanted to fix with version control systems (Subversion, in his case) and supporting tools (Bugzilla, in his case).

Sidenote: Chris’s presentation images are just hilarious. One comment: SVN could have been the lighthouse, not the “house”. The whole centralized repository idea?

FeedSt: Real-Time Feed Updates By PubSubHubbub, Superfeedr, And Heroku

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One of the few key features I’d like to implement on FeedSt is real-time updating feeds. Or as real-time as I can get them.

Thanks to PubSubHubbub (PSHB), this is actually going to be possible. I’ve been working with Superfeedr to make the backend work. Add Heroku into the mix, and I’m left to wonder, why there aren’t at least 10 companies doing the same thing. (Unless there are, and I just haven’t found them yet.)

Real-Time

What drives me up the wall is when I post something on this blog, and it takes about half a day to a full day before it shows up in my Google Reader.

It’s not Google Reader’s fault, exactly: They’re merely saving their resources for feeds that are more popular or more updated. It’s more of the problem with the requirement of polling of feeds.

Sidenote: And actually, if you were using a desktop feed reader (like NetNewsWire, of which the beta works with Google Reader), this isn’t a problem at all. You can personally set the time interval that the application grabs and parses the feed. Of course, there’s are plenty of Pros and Cons for going online and offline.

In my opinion, the fact that not all feeds are hit with the same time interval breaks the fair access model that the Internet has become widely known for. I will always get a kick out of the fact that you can visit google.com as easily as you can visit joshkim.org.

PSHB is the fix for this. And actually, Anil Dash talks a lot more about the Pushbutton Web, definitely worth the read.

Exciting New Technologies

They’re exciting, and they’re new. Now to make something awesome with them.

Fav.or.it Shuts Down

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fav.or.it | fav.or.it is Dead, Long live favorit.

I remember when fav.or.it was just getting started, and thinking about the ways that it would make my life easier. I didn’t hear this until today, but it’s being shut down, and their efforts are going towards TweetMeme.

Particularly interesting are the reasons Nick Halstead (CEO) list for having not succeeded in their endeavor. I love learning from people’s successes and in this case, failures.

1) The commenting market shifted to what I call ’surface comments’ – these are comments that appear inside other networks, i.e. Facebook, Google Connect, Twitter, FriendFeed (to name just a few) and although some of these have open platforms from which to aggregate from, the problems of context and also a rapidly shifting market soon made it extremely difficult for a small team to continue to compete (for which whole companies have dedicated their resources to notably backtype + ubervue).

I’m not all that knowledgeable on the subject of handling comments across multiple platforms, but I do know that Backtype is awesome. I’m using it right now for the blog.

As a sidenote, what I believe to be much more interesting are the comments made privately. Private and exportable comments are what I feel like is missing. I guess you could email or IM or Direct Message a link to someone with some commentary, but it seems like there would be a better way to do it. And if you do share a link that way, a lot of metadata is lost.

And I love me some metadata.

2) RSS is DEAD – back in early 2008 I presented at thenextweb conference in Amsterdam, and said that RSS was dead for the mainstream market. It was clear to me that as a technology it worked, but that adoption was never going to go mainstream. We attempted with fav.or.it to remove the need to know what feeds you needed to read (you created ’slices’ of content), but it became clear this intention was ahead of it’s time but also poorly implemented, and I doff my hat to the people at lazyfeed for getting it right.

Maybe for the mainstream, “RSS” is dead. (And I hope he meant “feeds”, unless he’s saying that Atom is alive and well. Oh dear, I think I just played into the “correcting Internet geek” stereotype. [Cue Conan O'Brien adjusting his fake glasses]) But since I’m mainly focusing on the power feed users who know what’s going on with feeds in general, I think I have a better chance. This is also why I can get away with not caring about IE 6… and maybe even 7 or 8.

I do agree that feeds are dirty. The implementation is a hack. You know what else is a huge hack? The Internet. When did the ARPANET become a tool for commerce and entertainment? Okay, did I just stretch it a bit there? Ahem.

In any case, I personally use feeds nonstop, even in the midst of this world of Twitter/FriendFeed… uh… yeah, in the midst of the world of Twitter. As long as I’m designing an experience for people like me, I’m sure I’ll be okay.

3) The site has also not been without controversy for re-use of content (through public RSS feeds), and although we put massive effort into support of licensing models (such as auto-detection of creative commons) our approach to aggregation of content for which we could not detect a license, and that required the publisher to opt-out (rather than opt-in) was in hindsight misguided.

Was it for the money? I don’t know… but it’s a bit shady, in any case.I stopped tinkering with fav.or.it when the site became more of a public aggregator, which is why the news of their closing got to me a couple days after the fact. How could I become a supporter of your dream if you take some very interesting routes to becoming awesome?

What Have We Learned Here

It’s hard, starting a company. And knowing when to quit is probably harder. Well, easier in my case, because it’ll be when I run out of money and have to find a job.

Oh, to be young and foolish… maybe I’ll eat these words later.