Technology
Entries related to technology.
Recreational Hacking: identi.ca laconi.ca xmpp OAuth OpenID OpenSim and Drupal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/03/2008 - 09:56Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time writing some programs to interface a financial model written in Matlab with a Microsoft SQL database. It has been interesting work, and there are lots of interesting things yet to be done with that. However, during this, my unread emails have piled up and the list of new technology to explore has been expanding rapidly. So, with any luck, I’ll spend a bit of today doing some recreational hacking.
At the top of my list is identi.ca. Identica is running laconi.ca, an open source microblogging system based on a lot of cool standards like XMPP, Oauth, and OpenSim. I set up my identi.ca account yesterday, and have started trying to see if I can get a laconi.ca server running on my Linux box today.
So, why do I care about identi.ca? Edd Dumbill has written a very good post about Why Identi.ca is important. So, my first comment, is “yeah, what Edd said.” Dan York also wrote about it, The real meaning - and power - of identi.ca (a.k.a. open source Twitter) and pointed to Dave Winer’s excitement about identi.ca and Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post.
So, let me add a few additional thoughts. As Edd notes, it is still version 0.4.1, so don’t expect it to have as much functionality or reliability as even Twitter or Plurk. On the other hand, if open source developers go wild with it, expect it to leave Twitter and Plurk in the dust.
To me, there are is a very interesting parallel between Second Life and OpenSim and Twitter and Laconi.ca. The new open source version is getting kicked around and has great potential. For that matter, OpenSim and Laconi.ca are both kicking around using XMPP as part of their interaction. Hmm. OpenSim and Laconi.ca integration. That could be cool. As an aside, I have been getting emails about connecting old MOOs to Twitter, but that’s a different subject.
So, I’ve started installing laconi.ca on my Linux box. I’ve hit a few snags. It needs a Validate.php file, which I can’t find. I know that Evan is swamped, so maybe I’ll bug him later.
Laconi.ca also uses OpenID. I’ve been running OpenID for Drupal on my blog for a while. It hasn’t been too reliable, but I’m running an old version of Drupal. Between the desire for a more robust OpenID for Drupal, the desire to add Disque to Drupal and a bunch of other things, it is probably time to upgrade Orient Lodge to a newer version of Drupal. Maybe I’ll tackle that.
One thing that is still coming in Drupal is support for OAuth. Laconi.ca uses OAuth. Hmm. At some point, I want to tie my Drupal sites to my OpenSim sites and my Laconi.ca sites. That ought to be fun.
Meanwhile, also on my technology play list is twine.com and SecondBrain.
So, I’ll complete a few tasks around the house, check to see if identi.ca is stable after the latest upgrade and then start a fun day of recreational hacking.
Lightning hits Transformer in Harwinton
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/29/2008 - 19:51Sunday afternoon, I drove up to a graduation party for Avery Doninger, the young blogger who was disciplined for her criticism of the school administration at Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, CT. On the drive up, my daughter and I saw lightning hit a transformer, and we captured various parts of this trip with pictures, videos and audio messages from my cellphone.
Leaving from Woodbridge, it was a sunny, pleasant day. We drove up Route 8. After passing Waterbury, we saw large storm clouds gathering in the west. I was struck by how picturesque they were, so I took two photographs.
I also recorded this message on Utterz:
I noted the ominous feeling of the coming storm, without knowing what I was really about to encounter.
As we approached the Harwinton exit, the rain started coming down, hard. After I left the highway, I found an opportunity to put the cellphone on the dashboard and get a brief video of driving through the rain. By then, the rain had slowed down a little, but it was still substantial.
We were driving along Route 4, almost in Burlington when I started seeing lightning. I wondered if I could find a good way to set up the cellphone to capture some of the lightning. All of a sudden, in my rear view mirror, I saw lightning strike a telephone pole. I pulled into the next parking lot and prepared to take another video with my cellphone. Just as I started taking my video, the transformer exploded and the power lines came crashing down, almost hitting the car we were in.
I called 911 to report the explosion and the small fire the downed power lines had started. Then I drove down the road across the street from the downed power lines. I hopped out of the car and took this picture of the smoldering grass and the downed lines.
Soon the emergency crews showed up.
I recorded a quick commentary:
I also posted a quick update via Twitterfone. Twitterfone transcribed the voice and sent it on to Twitter which in turn sent it to Facebook and FriendFeed. At this point, I continued on to the party.
It was a good party, but we had to leave early for Fiona’s Blog Talk Radio show. Needless to say, we talked a bit about the party and the transformer explosion on the show.
On the way home, I posted one final comment via Utterz:
Mobile post sent by ahynes1 using Utterz. Replies. mp3
Exploring the Social Networks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/27/2008 - 10:49Over the past few weeks I’ve been pretty busy with conferences and doing some computer programming, so my exploration of the social side of the Internet has been a bit lame. However, last night, I spent a little time exploring a few different developments in this area.
Alexa
This month, my Alexa ranking has been plummeting.
This didn’t seem right, so I checked my monthly uniques on Quantcast. Quantcast bases its information based on a pixel embedded on the webpage and appears much more accurate. Sure enough, according to Quantcast, my traffic has been growing nicely this month, as I thought it was.
This matches reports on my server logs as well as on Google Analytics. It appears as if Alexa is seriously broken yet again.
atniz suggests that it is because Alexa is somehow ignoring EntreCard traffic. On the other hand, What About Brazil is claiming their traffic, as measured by Alexa, as increased because of EntreCard and looking at their recent graph, it doesn’t look like EntreCard traffic is being somehow deducted from their counts.
Having done a lot of programming, and remembering the old adage, never attribute to malice what can better be attributed to stupidity, I doubt that Alexa is deliberately discounting traffic generated by a popular new advertising site online. If they are, they should probably remove traffic from DoubleClick and Google Adense as well. However, that would make their data completely worthless, and I doubt they want to do that.
EntreCard
On the other hand, they may be wanting to filter out EntreCard because the ads there do encourage people to click on the ads to receive EntreCard credits. EntreCard users that click on an ad receive a credit, as does the website that has the card clicked on. This has encouraged some people to create pages so that people can very quickly drop on a website and move on. It is called ‘quick-dropping’ and does nothing to increase readership of the website. I’ve been ambivalent to quick-dropping. I don’t do it. I want to read the sites I visit and I hope people read my site as well. Based on Google Analytics, it does seem like people spend a bit of time on my site, at least scanning what I have to say.
However, EntreCard is not ambivalent to quick-dropping. In a recent blog post there, they have announced that anyone who supports quick-dropping will be banned from EntreCard.
I think this is a good idea, but I hope they have a way of appealing if someone gets delisted incorrectly.
While we are on the topic of EntreCard, I thought I would check my internal logs to get a better sense of where the EntreCard traffic is coming from. 58% of my traffic is coming from people clicking on my card in their inbox. 25% is coming from ads. Another 6% is coming from the categories. Less than 1% comes from my details page. I don’t know where the remaining 10% comes from.
MyBlogLog
From EntreCard, I visited RockFuse which has an entry about MyBlogLog new ‘Connector’. What the connector does is it displays all of your contacts in MyBlogLog with a table showing which other services the contacts are using and if you are currently connected to them on that service. The services that they list are Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Pownce, Last.fm and digg. They have a nice link to bring up your friends pages in each of these systems so you can easily add them. So, if you are a contact of mine in MyBlogLog and you recently got several requests from me to be a friend on other systems, that is probably why.
Unfortunately, the connector page doesn’t properly show if you are connected to a person in the other systems. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it work with Twitter. However, since the connector is in beta and Twitter has enough problems as it is, it isn’t too surprising.
Linux Inside
As I followed the links and saw some of what my friends were doing, I found to other interesting sites. The first is Linux Inside. They have a tool for tracking traffic on Flickr pages. I set it up last night. As of this morning, there isn’t any data, but I expect it will produce an interesting graph in the days to come.
http://linuxinside.org/flickr)" />
retaggr
Retaggr is yet another site to create a badge providing information about you and links to all the different social networking sites you are part of. It is an impressive list of sites they support. Here is my tag right now:
Tumblr
Another person was making good use of Tumblr, so I’ve started tweaking my Tumblr page. It should be getting information from various sources, have the retaggr badge and be themed to look a little bit like this blog.
So, I’ve tweaked various sites, added friends, now I need to head off to some offline tasks, and then return to writing some computer programs.
Adding Friend Feed comments to Drupal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/22/2008 - 08:50Last night, Bill Anderson added a Friend Feed comment on my Feed graph in Flickr.
Whoa! This is an engineering diagram that *is* a picture. What kind of systems are we building? The kind that Aldon has drawn here
What kind of systems are we building? Who is thinking about how all the moving pieces fit together? It is a very interesting line of thought to be following.
It led me to a different question. Are people adding comments to my friend feed that I, and others are missing? Have people commented on Orient Lodge blog posts over in Friend Feed?
At the same time I noticed that Friend Feed evangelist Steve Rubel posted a link: NEW FriendFeed Comment Widget (Blogger, Tumblr and FeedBurner).
It got me thinking. Can I add Friend Feed comments to Drupal? My first pass was to try and tweak some of the code in the article that Rubel linked to. That didn't work particularly well. So, I checked around on Drupal and found an example in this blog post
Doing a little tweaking, I came up with:
function friendfeedcomments(json) {
if (json.count > 0) {
var ffsection = "<div class='subheadlg' style='padding-top:15px;padding-bottom:10px;'>FriendFeed Comments:</div>"
for (var i = 0; i < json.count; ++i) {
var ffcomment = json.value.items[i];
ffsection = ffsection + "<dt class='comment-author friendfeed-comment-icon'><a href='" + ffcomment.link + "'>" + ffcomment.title + "</a>"
ffsection = ffsection + " says...</dt><dd class='comment-body'><p>" + ffcomment.description + "</p></dd>"
}
document.write(ffsection);
}
}
</script>
<script src='http://pipes.yahoo.com/pathawks/ffcomments?_callback=friendfeedcomments&_render=json&ffid=ahynes1&url=<?php print url($node_url,NULL,NULL,TRUE) ?>'>
</script>
which I added to my node.tpl.php file. Note: ahynes1 is my id on FriendFeed. If you lift this code, you should change ahynes1 to be whatever your FriendFeed id is, or you probably won't find any comments.
It looks like it is working. What would be really nice would be if I could add a link to the FriendFeed item even if there are no comments there, so that people could add comments on FriendFeed if they wanted to. That will wait for another round of tests.
Friend Feed and the Twisty Maze
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/21/2008 - 20:18Today, I received a direct message from a friend on Twitter complaining about receiving my status updates six times on Friend Feed. The problem, put simply, is that I use ping.fm to update my status on about a dozen different systems, Twitter, BrightKite, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, etc. Then, many of those systems get read by Friend Feed, so the same message shows up in Friend Feed half a dozen times, once from each of the different systems.
Another tool that I’ve been working with recently is Mento.info. Mento sends bookmarks to multiple places; del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and straight to Friend Feed.
In addition, some of the systems feed each other. So, BrightKite currently feeds Twitter, Twitter feeds Jaiku. Then, there are all kinds of other connections. I use Twitterfeed to update Twitter when I update Orient Lodge. My updates to Orient Lodge also show up in Facebook and Jaiku. Ma.gnolia, which I mentioned above, also updates Orient Lodge.
Beyond this there is the connection between picture sharing sites. Blip.tv feeds Flickr and Orient Lodge. Flickr also feeds Orient Lodge and much of this ends up in Friend Feed as well.
Of course, if I send messages from my cell phone, particularly pictures or videos, I typically send them to multiple services. I haven’t even mentioned Utterz or Twitterfone.
It all becomes a fairly complicated mess, as illustrated by this graph. Not included in the graph is the way I use my cell phone, IMs, Utterz, Twitterfone or other services that I’ve probably forgotten.
Oh, and Friend Feed isn’t the only site other there aggregating data. The same thing happens in MyBlogLog, BrightKite, and probably several other sites that I’m forgetting.
To address this, and appease my friend, I’m starting to cut some of the links. I’ve changed my setting on BrightKite to not send updates to Twitter when I post a note.
I’ve also removed BrightKite Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and ma.gnolia from my Friend Feed. Since the vast majority of the information that they receive is coming from other sites, it will significantly cut down on the duplicated entries on Friend Feed without Friend Feed loosing a significant amount of content initiated on these sites.
Now, it would be really nice if Friend Feed and other sites that aggregate social information could check for duplications like this, so I could keep all the different sites more fully connected. Perhaps that will come in the future.
