Josh Staiger

April 08, 2005

Yahoo 360° initial impressions

In my first half-hour of playing with Yahoo 360°, I reported seven bugs and/or usability problems. Three of these issues were with the feedback form that I was using to report the bugs.

Hmm, I suppose it is a beta.

In Blogging

Posted at 08:22 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Yahoo 360° invites

I have 98 Yahoo! 360° invites burning a hole in my pocket.

Email me if you want one.

In Blogging

Posted at 07:16 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Holding up cybercafes

Yolanda: This place? A coffee shop?
Pumpkin: Why not? Nobody ever robs restaurants. Bars, liquor stores, gas stations... you get your head blown off sticking up one of them. Restaurants on the other hand, you catch with their pants down. They're not expecting to get robbed. Not as expectant anyway.
Yolanda: I bet you could cut down on the hero factor in a place like this.
Pumpkin: Right, just like banks, these places are insured. Manager? He don't give a fuck. He just wants to get you out the door before you start plugging the diners. Waitresses? Fucking forget it! No way they're taking a bullet for the register. Busboys? Some wetback getting paid a dollar-fifty an hour, really give a fuck you're stealing from the owner? See, I got the idea, last liquor store we held up, all the customers kept coming in?
Yolanda: Yeah.
Pumpkin: And you got the idea of taking their wallets. Now that was a good idea.
Yolanda: Thank you.
Pumpkin: Made more from the wallets than we did from the register.
Yolanda: Yes, we did.
Pumpkin: A lot of customers come into a restaurant.
Yolanda: A lot of wallets.
Pumpkin: Pretty smart, eh?
Yolanda: Pretty smart.

(from Pulp Fiction)

During our discussion on Tuesday, Dave wondered why more people don't hold up cybercafes.

Why not walk into Cafe Cyclo, or Helios with a gun and walk out with $10,000 worth of laptops?

A tip for you aspiring deviants...

Pumpkin: And you got the idea of taking their laptops. Now that was a good idea.
Yolanda: Thank you.
Pumpkin: Made more from the laptops than we did from the register.
Yolanda: Yes, we did.

etc...

In Matters that are otherwise worthwhile

Posted at 12:01 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 07, 2005

Notes on the 4/5 Raleigh Meetup (the long version)

The latest Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup took place earlier this week. In attendance:

• Dave Johnson
• Vincent Lauria
• Martin Davidsson
• Chris Parker
• Didier "D" Deshommes
• Josh Staiger

The only truly new face this week was Chris, who is an IBM Extreme Blue intern, and also a Senior at Case.

Owing to the beautiful weather, we decided to park ourselves outside at a sidewalk table in front of Cafe Cyclo.

Dave and I observed that there is currently a fairly clear contrast in the type of crowd that frequents the Raleigh meetup vs. the Chapel Hill meetup. Thus far the discussion our discussions in Raleigh have been almost exclusively technical, while those taking place in Chapel Hill tend to put a greater emphasis on journalism and social activism.

It's interesting to observe the different "cliques" that are attracted to blogging for different reasons, but why the clear split between the towns thus far? Most likely, we can simply chalk this up to luck of the draw with two techies primarily promoting the Raleigh meetup thus far...

Here are a few topics, and links that we discussed during the meetup:

• Owing to Dave's recent dive into podcast listening, we talked briefly about podcasting.
• Dave gives ITConversations a big thumbs up, as most techies do when they discover the site
• As usual, Dave reports that he's been busy lately with Roller installations and his book
• We also talked briefly about triangleblogs.com, registered by theshu, which will reportedly become a triangle blogs aggregator (similar to Dave's Planet Triangle experiment), along with a "community" site, running drupal.
• When the Extreme Blue crew (Martin, Vincent, and Chris) decided to join use, they reported that they had just been go-carting at Funworks in Raleigh. Something that they highly recommended, as they apparently slick down the track somehow to give the feeling of driving a rally car (sounds kickass to me).
• We spoke briefly about Yahoo 360. None of us had actually used it, but by the end of the meeting Chris had obtained and invite from one of his friends and sent out invites to the rest of us as well.
• Vincent reports that after having questioned a Google developer at a recruitment event, internal blog usage at Google is surprisingly less common than one might expect.
• Dave reports that judging from the error messages he has seen, Blogger is likely written in Java (I found this to be somewhat surprising).
• Martin showed us a slick Firefox extension called GooglePreview that adds thumbnail images of webpages inline with Google search results.
• We spoke briefly about the Robert Soble, Cory Doctorow autolink argument broadcast on ITConversations. This brought up the "moral" issues of tools such as autolink and greasemonky.
• Dave reports that Mark Pilgrim has written a handful of new greasemonkey scripts, one of which "hijacks" Amazon.com affiliate links, allowing you to send proceeds to a "worthy charity partner" of your choice.
• Martin reports that Jon Udell has written a bookmarklet that automatically links isbns for books appearing on webpages to an information lookup for the book at your local library.
• Martin asked me how my own greasemonkey escapades were progressing, and I gave a quick overview of my experience developing Interchange, a greasemonkey scrip that adds links to view Yahoo Maps searches in Google Maps.
• Dave reports that blogging has really caught fire at Sun, with Solaris developers mobbing OSNews to the point where OSNews had to push back to allow other viewpoints through.
• The Wordpress scandal was briefly discussed, and it was also noted that wordpress.org now still shows up as the number 1 search result for "wordpress" on Google. Google must have given Matt Mullenweg a reprieve?
• I mentioned having started an internal blog on my own server at IBM as an experiment to help me keep track of things I learn, and also help me to communicate information to my teammates. I'm running blosxom, having been attracted to it for it's simplicity.
• Dave reports that there is a Java version of Blosxom available called Blosjom (which also happens to be his chief competitor to Roller).
• On the topic of using blogs to help organize one's thoughts and remember things at work, Vince mentioned that he is currently reading a book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, and was thinking about how he could write some software to facilitate the principles highlighted therein.
• D pointed out that David Allen, himself, already puts out an Outlook plugin to help with this.
• D also points out that an Emacs PlannerMode is available, that could also help (sounds really cool to me).
• We discussed tagging a la Gmail and agreed that it is a much more natural way of organizing information than the traditional hierarchy structure.
• D says that his aggregator, Gregarius now allows him to tag incoming items for alter retrieval
• We talked about OurMedia.org, a new content management interface to Archive.org, though none of use had much experience with using it
• We talked about Google's solicitation for home video uploadsfor analysis. Chris proposed that Google likely already has an abundance of commercial and otherwise processed video to work with, and are likely looking to balance out their sample pool with personal video (given that it obviously has a different style from commercial video).
• Chris mentioned that HP is offering an incredibly interesting video editing research internship, where the idea is to develop software and algorithms for automated editing of video.
• Speaking of cool internships, we talked briefly about Paul Graham's Summer Founders program, with different opinions on Paul Graham, himself.
• Vince, talked about his Logitech io pen, a pen that automatically keeps a digital copy of things that you write, for later retreival.
• Martin wondered whether there was a site that would extract only the photos from Engadget. None of us knew of such a script (even though it sounds trivial to write), however I mentioned LiveJournal Image Theft, a site which extracts the last 200 photos posted to Livejournal (may not be safe for work).

Please feel free to note any omissions or corrections in the comments.

Alternate Perspectives:

• -D-
• Vince

We will be meeting again in two weeks, same place, same time: Tuesday April 19th, 6:30pm @ Cafe Cyclo.

Stay tuned for an rsvp link.

In Blogging, Technology and Software

Posted at 10:24 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 04, 2005

Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup, Tuesday April 5, 2005

Join us tomorrow (Tuesday April 5) for the first Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup of the month.

What: An open meeting to talk about blogging, podcasting & whatever's on your mind
When: Tues @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

2020 Cameron St
Raleigh, NC 27605 (map)
(919) 829-3773

Who: Bloggers & people who want to blog (Podcasters welcome!)

Optionally RSVP at the Meetup.com Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup page.

See the notes from our last meetup to get an idea of what we talk about.

Hope to see you there!

In Blogging

Posted at 08:53 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Geeks Get the Girls

...
The very next day, he guessed she ran away
The one and only in his bed so lonely
But she comes walking in, with coffee and a grin
Crazy as it seems, it wasn't just a dream
And all around the world, people shout it out
The geek's got the girl

Last night he finally got it right
Even losers can get lucky sometimes
All the freaks go on a winning streak
Shout it all around the world cause the geeks get the girls
...

American Hi-Fi - The Geeks Get the Girls

• ITunes link
• Quicktime Music Video
• Windows Media Music Video

Thanks to Jeff for telling me about this, although I'm sure that anyone who has ever stepped foot on Case's campus will have heard it by the end of the day tomorrow.

In General

Posted at 01:11 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Fixing the right alt key for a Debian woody console

Without fail every time I install Linux (my preferred flavor being Debian), I run into the same pitfalls over and over. Every time I end up finding solutions for these...eventually, only to forget them again by the next time I install.

In order to break the cycle, I'm documenting some of my more common problems, along with their solutions here. The first problem I'm going to tackle involves the right alt key.

Early on in a Debian woody install, we select a qwerty map for our keyboard.

However, after our system has been set up, Emacs does not recognize the right alt key as being a meta key when we are using an extended keyboard (PC104+) and a plain old console (sitting at the actual machine, no ssh, no telnet, no X).

The Solution

The solution to this is to remap the the keyboard in the operating system. Looking online, there is plenty of documentation on how to fix this problem under X, but little mention of how to do so when just using a plain console.

Continue reading "Fixing the right alt key for a Debian woody console"

In Technology and Software

Posted at 12:26 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 26, 2005

Spending a little time with myself

Mmmm...easter weekend.

The girlfriend is gone. The roommate is gone. Damn near all of my friends are gone.

I'm sitting here by myself, watching Garden State, drinking wine, and eating cheese (French Cantal) reminiscent of my time in Paris.

Say...this reminds me of a story:

I’ve always kind of been partial to calling myself up on the phone and asking myself out. You know... (whoops from the audience). Oh yeah, you call yourself up too, huh? Yeah... Well, one thing about it, you’re always around! Yeah, I know. Yeah, you ask yourself out, you know. Some class joint somewhere. The Burrito King or something. You know... Well, I ain’t cheap, you know. Take yourself out for a couple of drinks maybe, you know. Then you’ll be... some provocative conversation on the way home. And park in front of the house, you know, and you... Oh yeah, you´re smooth with it... you know, you put a little nice music on. Maybe you put on like... you know... like shopping music, something that’s not too interruptive, you know. And then, you know, and eh... slide over real nice, you know, say, ’Oh, I think you have something in your eye’. Eh-heh-heh. Well, maybe it’s not that romantic with you, but Christ, I... you know! It ain’t... you know... Take myself up to the porch, and take myself inside. Oh, maybe... I make a little something, a brandy snifter or something. Would you like to listen to some of my back records. I got something here... Well, usually about 2.30 in the morning you’ve ended up taking advantage of yourself and... there ain’t no way around that, you know. Yeah, making the scene with a magazine, there ain’t no way around... I’ll confess, you know, I’m no different, you know. I’m not weird about it or anything. I don’t tie myself up first, I just... you know. I just kind of... spend a little time with myself.

-- Tom Waits, Intro from "Nighthawks At The Diner" (as sent to Raindogs Listserv Discussionlist, October 31, 1999)

In Matters that are otherwise worthwhile

Posted at 01:14 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 25, 2005

A lesson in caution on using the <pre> tag for wide-margined text

We have yet to develop a good method for displaying inline code in html documents, and as it turns out this is exactly what bit me with the previously mentioned IE6 problems with displaying this site.

The culprit was my previous entry: A tale of woe on dynamically building the Movable Type Individual Entry Archive template.

In that entry I cited a few snippets of perl code, inline with the rest of the html for the entry. Naturally, I surrounded this code with a <pre> tag, as this is the easiest way to preserve the spacing and indentation of a code snippet.

It just so happened that the pre-formated code that I had included for that particular entry happened to be quite wide - wider than the <div> it was enclosed in.

What happens when <pre> text overruns the boundaries of <div>'s and other enclosing tags that contain it?

As it turns out, the answer depends on the broswer.

In Firefox, the <pre> text simply runs through the boundary of the <div>:

This is ugly, but it does not catastrophically alter your page layout.

Internet Explorer 6 behaves differently, however. Instead of allowing the <pre> text to overrun the <div> as Firefox does, it expands the <div> outwards to contain the <pre> text:

Unfortunately this can unexpectedly cause elements situated to the right of the enclosing <div> to be crowded out.

In my case, in IE the entire sidebar column of my page was crowded out and pushed all the way down the page, below all of my main page entries.

I've corrected this now by reformatting the <pre> text in the entry so that it isn't quite as wide, but the problem went unnoticed by me for weeks (I don't generally use IE6), and the fix wasn't especially obvious once it was pointed out to me that my page wasn't displaying correctly in IE6.

The moral of the story is to be careful not to place <pre> text on a page that has a high probability of overrunning the normal width of the <div> that contains it. Attempt to reformat <pre> text so that it will not surpass the boundaries of the element that contains it, and just to be safe, give your site a quick check in IE6 if you're using <pre> formated text.

In Technology and Software

Posted at 10:32 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

On viewing this site in IE6

In response to my critique of this website, I've been informed that my site renders hideously in IE6. This has been going on for months. I apologize. I have brought shame to my family name.

I'm somewhat hurt that none of my supposed "friends" thought to inform me of this.

Or have I simply converted enough people around me to Firefox that I now live inside a bubble of hippie browser users? Hmmm...

In Site News

Posted at 05:55 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 23, 2005

A critique on the design of joshstaiger.org

As I've been meeting more and more bloggers in person, I've also been becoming more and more self-conscience of the design shortcomings of my site.

Here are some of my own criticisms of joshstaiger.org (in rough order of importance). Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. I have no about page explaining who I am, and no prominent photo of myself (this is always the first thing I look for when I happen upon a new blog).
2. Entries are not categorized, making it difficult for regular readers to find things they may recall reading in the past, and also difficult for new readers to get an idea of what I tend to write about.
3. I have no site map. Thus, for instance, it would be very difficult to find the most popular service of my site, the Xanga RSS Fixer, by entering through the front page or casual deep link.
4. A search box only appears on the front page. It should appear on every page.
5. Visited links do not have a distinct color, flaunting users' expectations of the common web interface.
6. The calendar on my front page is a waste of space.
7. The recent entries links on my front page are a waste of space. Readers need only scroll down the page to see recent entries.
8. The light grey text coloring used in different portions of the site (such as "Posted by") does not have enough contrast with the white background.
9. Permanent links for entries are currently represented using the time the entry was posted. These should instead be explicitly say "Permanent Link"
10. The light blue that I'm using for links could be a bit darker to contrast better with a white background as well.
11. My temporal archive list is getting somewhat long and ungainly. This could be consolidated on a separate page perhaps.
12. It is not obvious to the casual user what my XML syndication feeds are supposed to be. It would be helpful to take a page from Blogger's book and apply a special stylesheet to feeds that says something to the effect of "This is an Atom formatted XML site feed. It is intended to be viewed in a Newsreader or syndicated to another site.".
13. My site is not fully accessible.
14. My photo.net snipits use html that does not validate

I just wanted to say publically that I am very much aware of these flaws. I hope to fix them soon, and will be documenting some of the fixes as I implement them.

UPDATE:

I have created a snapshot of this site's front page, circa March 2005:

http://www.joshstaiger.org/snapshot/march2005/

In Site News, Technology and Software

Posted at 02:24 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 17, 2005

Using c-mode to edit Javascript in Emacs

As part of my foray into the Greasemonkey world, I've been on the lookout for a good environment for editing standalone Javascript files.

Emacs being the One True Editor, you'd think that there would be a decent major emacs mode for editing Javascript, and you'd be wrong.

Just using straight c-mode with Javascript works fairly well, although for some reason c-mode in Emacs 21 out of the box has an irritating indentation offset of only two spaces.

We can fix that up right quick, however.

Add the following to your .emacs file to fix the indentation problem and associate .js files with c-mode:

In Technology and Software

Posted at 12:14 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 16, 2005

On the third Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup

The latest Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup took place tonight.

In contrast to the sparse attendance last week, we were able to draw a fairly nice crowd this week, with some new faces in attendance. Participants in addition to myself included:

• Vincent Lauria (atom)
• Martin Davidsson
• Didier "D" Deshommes (rss)
• Dave Johnson (rss)

Interestingly, both Vincent and Martin happen to be IBM Extreme Blue interns, although this was my first real correspondence with either of them.

Given that everyone who attended this week had a technical background, the discussion immediately took on somewhat of a technical flair. My memory can't possibly do justice to all the topics we covered, but here is my best shot:

• We discussed Mark Pilgrim's Butler script for the Greasemonkey Firefox framework. We agreed that Greasemonkey opens up the door to some very interesting hacks, especially in conjunction with XMLHTTPRequest (aka Ajax) - the technology that drives Google maps.
• Martin pointed out a in interesting bookmarklet that animates a Google maps route, as demonstrated by John Udell
• Vincent would like to see a method of allowing readers to rate blog entries, and remarked that he would like a way of exposing only the highly rated posts to new users, when it might otherwise get burried in a flurry of blogging randomness.
• It was discussed that someone is trying to patent a method of only exposing higher quality entries to new subscribers of an RSS feed, as an introduction, while regular readers will receive all content.
• We discussed tags on flickr and technorati. This lead to a discussion on Metacrap, and the limits of metadata.
• D remarked that del.icio.us is a lifesaver.
• We discussed various ideas for automatically highlighting interesting content across the blogosphere, including Steve Gilmore's attention.xml, even though none of us really had any clue on what attention.xml actually is or how it is supposed to work.
• We talked about Gmail, and using algorithms to scan the content of an email and automatically group related content without having to resort to manual labeling (avoiding metacrap pitfalls)
• We were quite pleased with Google's offering of free POP access to Gmail (along with smtp), but wondered how they could possibly have no future plans to charge for it.
• Podcasting was discussed, and it turns out that I'm not the only one who has stopped listening to Adam Curry because I'm sick of hearing podcasts about podcasts.
• Marty wondered about how the concentration of bloggers in the Triangle compares to the rest of the country, and remarked that it would be interesting to see a map illustrating the density of bloggers by region.
• Dave mentioned that GeoURL had recently come back online, and could possibly serve as the geographic map that we envisioned
• YouSendIt.com was mentioned - a service that seemlessly allows one to temporarily host large files too big for email (up to 1GB) in order to "send" them to another user.
• Comment spam was discussed, including the usual suspects of nofollow, captcha, and methods of defeating captcha.
• Dave wondered how clickthrough pricing is determined for systems such as Google AdWords. It is actually a marketplace system where advertisers bid for keywords. Although Google doesn't do so, Overture allows you to view advertisers' max bids for specified search terms.
• The Super Shuffle, a blatant Taiwanese rip-off of the iPod Shuffle was also discussed.

Please feel free to leave a comment if I left out anything important or got anything wrong.

We came to a consensus that bi-weekly would be a good frequency to meet. Given this, I propose that we meet on the first and third tuesdays of the month.

Hopefully this will keep my readers from lynching me for having to hear about a Raleigh meetup every other entry...

Time to sleep...

UPDATE 2:

Alternate perspectives on the meetup:

• Vincent #1
• Vincent #2
• D

UPDATE 3:

The next Raleigh/Cary meetup will be Tuesday, April 5, 2005.

Details:

When: Tues, April 5 2005 @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

2020 Cameron St
Raleigh, NC 27605 (map)
(919) 829-3773

Informally RSVP at the Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup.com page.

We will meet on the first and third tuesdays of the month, at the same time thereafter.

In Blogging

Posted at 01:56 AM | Permanent link | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

March 15, 2005

MT-TrackbackAntiSpam

In an effort to curb the trackback spam I've been receiving, I've installed the MT-TrackbackAntiSpam plugin from James Seng (the same guy who brought us the scode captcha plugin for Movable Type).

Installing the plugin is very easy. Just drop the script in your plugins directory, make sure it's executable and you're good to go - no additional steps necessary.

It's been a few days and so far I haven't received any new trackback spam and genuine trackbacks are still getting through. We shall see what the future holds.

In Blogging

Posted at 12:06 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 14, 2005

Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup, Tuesday March 15, 2005

Join us tomorrow (Tuesday March 15) for the third weekly Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup.

What: An open meeting to talk about blogging, podcasting & whatever's on your mind
When: Tues @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

2020 Cameron St
Raleigh, NC 27605 (map)
(919) 829-3773

Who: Bloggers & people who want to blog

Optionally RSVP at the Meetup.com Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup page.

Amongst other things we will talk about this week is the frequency of future meetups.

See notes on our last meetup.

Hope to see you there!

In Blogging

Posted at 11:09 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)