Just got my first Subversion repository up on my TextDrive hosting and it is working very well.
Just one thing though; If you ever need to logout your SVN user then on Windows you need to delete the %APPDATA%/Subversion/auth/ folder and on Unix you delete the ~/.subversion/auth/ folder. Doesn’t seem to be a way to do this through the SVN command line or TortoiseSVN.
Thanks to Max for the “logout” tip.
I have been using Windows Media Player as my main music player since it turned into a proper library driven app (version 8 or 9 I think). While it was never perfect it worked quite well with Winamp, Foobar and other players not coming close to my needs.
I tried iTunes when it first came out for Windows but something never quite clicked and I quickly went back to Windows Media Player 10.
iTunes 5 though seems like a keeper. My mate Jon describes iTunes’ allure as K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid) which while not completely true is a decent description. It does not have the tabbed interface of WMP but opts for a consistent list down the left-hand side; your library, playlists and other bits. It never disapears and it never scrolls horizontally like a WMP tree list can do. The menu bar is quite huge but it fits in the player controls and “LCD” info bar.
Couple things I am digging about iTunes:
Bits I am not digging though are:
The killer feature though is its consistent list on the left-hand side. Just makes things so much simpler and painless to use.
Now all I need is a nano.
UPDATE: I was bitching to my aforementioned mate Jon about how there is no option to hide the Music Store link the left-hand menu. I can’t use the Music Store as I am in South Africa. He pointed out it can be disabled though through the Parental Control menu in Preferences. So can Podcasts, Radio and Party Shuffle though through the General tab in Preferences. Nice one Apple.
Somebody has got to do a spoof on the various blog networks springing up.
Gawker Media, 9rules Inc. and Weblogs Inc. are the big boys out there but there are many others. Basically you, with your avatar sidekick robot dog blog, join a network and they list you. They make it hard by reviewing each submission to ensure that not just any old site gets in (though I expect 9rules will soon have to change their name to NineHundredAndNinetyNineRules Inc. And then again in Spanish, ElNinoRuloh Incoh.)
Anyhoo.
I can see it now, the spoof that is. Everyone, including Jessa Crispin (she is just too hot to exclude), Zeldman, David Bowie… I mean David Shea… and your mum, is a member. Oh and Shaun Inman, he is minty fresh. Anyone with a blog, a website, heck even a GeoCities or a LiveJournal is written into the roles of NAN (Not Another Network. Or Not A Number. Or a type of Indian bread.) We just use the Google, Technorati and Bloglines APIs see.
That is amazing eh? In one foul stroke we achieve what Scrivs and co. has been trying to achieve all the time; A-Listers. Zeldman for petes sake! On NAN!
The goal of NAN is to drive traffic to NAN. No, not a typo. I know they say the goal is to drive traffic to your site, by being an Old Boy, but come now; you put a big old leafy logo on your site that goes to the network’s world domination HQ site. How can that not be about driving traffic back to the blog network?
The goal of the Knights of NAN (that is you, blog boy) is to get out of NAN. That’s right, like Survivor but backwards (which is freaky considering Survivor is backwards.) The last NANian (sort of Lion, Witch and Wardrobe eh) gets to close the door on his, her or its way out.
I expect Zeldman would be first because he’d very politely tell NAN he can’t lend his awesomness to NAN without prior consent (Zeldman, you rock for not doing this whole A-Lister, blog network thing. A pity you already have a wife, I cook well.)
Every month we, that is me but it sounds better when you say we, go through the NANites (sort of iPod Nano, someone buy me one please) begging to be let in out and we choose the most fitting. A big announcement is made about each removal. We profile their site and talk about why we think it is suited to being let go. Great content, great design, great ideas, great design, great personality, great design, A-List status, great design, etc.
Everyone who gets kicked out is expected to make a self depreciating remark about how they never expected to be kicked out and they just threw their name in the hat on the off chance and expected to be laughed at and so on. Basically you sucker punch everyone with your removal post.
You: “I suck!”
Everyone: “No! You rule! Welcome brother!” (or sod off in our case)
Everyone, except those already kicked out, get to put a NAN badger (yes, badger, not badge. You know you can put Linux inside dead badgers?) on their site. NAN will link to Microsoft (because they would pay the most for it.)
So everyone belongs… oh crap. I just realised this already exists. It is called the world wide web. And nobody wants to get off.
p.s. In no way am I disrespecting any of the 9rules members or the Gawker/Weblogs Inc. writers. I subscribe to many of their sites and consider them to be Good For The WebTM. And while Paul Scrivs can talk a mile a minute I read his work too as it has a lot of useful information. I just think this whole blog network blitz needs a bit of deflating. It is fine to have it but for one 9rules needs to go easy on those submissions. It is not scaling and won’t scale, you are just becoming Yahoo! Directory with commentary. I already can’t figure out which sites are worth keeping track of in the 9rules network.
The spoof site would be a lot of fun though. 
EDIT #1: Changed 9Rules to 9rules. Spot the difference, apparently their CEO has nightmares about it. Bit like the poor .NET folks. Though funny how everyone remembers it is iPod and not Ipod or IPod. Or GoGetMeAniPodNanoNowPlease.
How do you rate your personal music collection in applications such as iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp?
They all offer up the usual 5 star system with 5 being better than 1. None though actually specify that 1 is bad and 5 is brilliant. They just present the 5 stars and let you choose. 1 could just as well be middling and 5 rather good.
Last night I switched over to iTunes as my main media player and began the fun task of re-rating all my songs as they played. It struck me then that 5 stars as usually used does not offer much of a gradient for good music. In my previous media player I treated 1 star songs as unlistenable garbage and 5 as “play it again, Sam”.
How then do you rate Thank You by Alanis, A Horse With No Name by America, Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles and Song 2 by Blur? They are all great tracks but, sorry Alanis, Thank You is no Song 2 which is no Eleanor Rigby which means Alanis gets a 3, Blur a 4 and The Beatles a 5. Except that Thank You deserves more than a 3 if it means “average” (1 being “poor” and 5 being “great”).
I then had an interesting thought; I don’t want 1 star songs in my library. A poor song gets deleted from my library. So the 1 star and 2 star feature becomes pretty useless as anything assigned either is invariably deleted. 3 starers barely survive by virtue of being “a cheesy but fun song.”
So I decided that 1 star is “cheesy but fun”, 2 stars is average, 3 stars is good, 4 stars is great and 5 stars is effing brilliant.
This lets me have a finer grain of control over my ratings all within the 5 star system. It does still feel strange selecting 3 star songs for a good listening playlist.
Of course it presents problems when this data gets out into the open of other systems where 1 is poor. But so far in 7 years of computing nobody has come up with a way for ratings to get spread around the internet through your desktop media player.
On September 28, 2004, a search on “podcast” in Google turned up 24 matches. As I write this, the number is 17,000,000.
from Seth Godin’s free Who’s There? ebook.
Just a thought; Can you use date ranges in Google? I reckon it would be useful for fact checking to be able to limit a Google search to a date range. Would the date range though check the date the item was added to the Google index or the creation date of the item?
TagCloud is a really nifty idea.
Firstly, it is not about tags. It is about keywords but since tags is the buzzword of the moment and the ideas are similar we all just call them tags. So it should be KeywordCloud.
Anyhoo. You input a few RSS feeds into TagCloud and it generates a list of tags/keywords that it found in your RSS feeds. It then applies styling to the keywords which indicates its popularity. The more popular the bigger the styling. This is a lot like the Flickr tags page.
For example I imported every single RSS feed I have in my Bloglines account (luckily TagCloud can use OPML) into TagCloud and got back this cloud.
Clicking one of the keywords will take you to a list of all items/articles/posts from my RSS feeds that have that keyword. Try it, click the New Orelans keyword for instance.
As I said calling them tags is confusing. TagCloud does not look for tags in the RSS feeds. Your RSS feeds don’t have to be manually tagged or have categories or any such thing. It just sifts the textual content for good keywords (it uses the Yahoo! Content Analysis web service to find keywords and phrases. Notice how hurricane and hurricane katrina appears while only new orleans and not just new appears. Seems a decent content analyser to figure that out.)
TagCloud lets you create as many clouds as you want using subsets of your feeds. You can then display them on yout website with some simple JavaScript (which they provide. Sadly I can’t put it into this Blogger post as SCRIPT is prohibited.)
Something like this could go far. It is simple, does one thing and does it well. Most importantly it works off of any RSS source you can throw at it. It isn’t restricted to photos or links or documents. Even just the idea of it is good enough for other implementations to be made. A Ruby version say to plug into your Rails site.
I have held off on commenting on this because it does not deserve a mention but I got so angry earlier today that I just have to vent.
The Delete Me! group on Flickr is the worst group I have yet to see.
The aim of the group is to collect a “safe” of quality photos through commenting and tagging. Members comment “deleteme” or “saveme.” When either hits 10 the appropriate action is taken.
Sounds admirable enough but the manner in which the members go about commenting is simply disgusting. Not in all my years on the internet have I read such vile comments. Decent photographs are ripped apart, sometimes with constructive though still vicious zeal but more often than not with one-liners of no redeeming value.
People who have complained about the brutality of the group are told that they shouldn’t read the comments. But I love reading comments on Flickr. Most offer wonderful insight into not only the photograph but the person making the comment. Negative aspects of the photograph are dealt with in a constructive and civil manner. I don’t pass through the Delete Me! pool to Flickr photographs. I find the Delete Me! laced commentary on photos in my friends’ photostreams and elsewhere. Mainly though Flickr is not and never will be a photo critique site. If I want venom laced commentary I go to PhotoSig.com or Photo.net.
So when I view an interesting photograph and start reading the usually great comments I am gutted by the sprinkling of Delete Me! blades.
The group brings out the worst in people which is something that Flickr normally does the opposite of; bringing out the best in people. Just check out DRP’s or Slight Clutter’s photostreams to find beautiful odes to life. They don’t dodge the rough edges of life but they don’t rub it raw so that it bleeds.
Here are a couple of the tamer Delete Me! comments. I can’t bring myself to repeat the harsher ones:
yay! look everyone. i got neck! and for your benefit, i have named it “neck” even. maybe you think its boring or uncreative or unarty. But guys, its in BLACK AND WHITE! by kuriakonz
this might mean something to you or your lover. to us it just looks like an accident in photography. by phil h
Those two are from just one photo.
I have been told that the means (vile comments) justify the ends (quality “safe” photographs.) Thankfully, for my belief in a beautiful world, I have seen better results through better means. The Safe photo pool is fine. There are some beautiful photographs in it and some decent ones too. All the really stand out ones though I have seen in other groups and through other means.
Even if the results were extraordinary though I would not want it to come through this haze of vicious verbage that Delete Me! members spout. Flickr is not a photo critique site and Delete Me! is regularily spoiling my Flickr experience. I hope the members remember they are decent folk and go back to enjoying their Flickr experience rather than getting all worked up over besting other Delete Me! member comments.
Hailing from Durban, a sunny, sea-side city in South Africa where 15 degrees celcius is considered freezing, I tend to walk through Cape Town winters in shorts, a t-shirt and takkies. While others are warmly bundled up I stuff my hands in my pockets and walk through the cold wind and rain. That is how you can spot a Durbanite in Cape Town; just look for shorts on a winters day.
One can do this in Cape Town because while it is colder than Durban the winters here are mild in comparison to Europe or North America. It snows only on the highest mountain tops, never drops below zero degrees and there are odd winter days where you can hit the beach in a swimming costume.
Ireland though, where I am soon to live, is a different story. It may be considered mild for a European country but it still beats the winters I have experienced by a long margin. I will also be hopping over to the mainland every now and then and want to try my hand at skiing.
With this in mind I went out one winters day, in shorts and bare-feet of course, and bought myself my very first outdoor jacket from Due South. Jerseys, pullovers and track-suit tops have been sufficient for all these years. Now though I have a new Columbia mountain jacket with all the bells and whistles; waterproof, breathable, wind breaking, pockets galore, strappable wrists, hood and a detachable inner.
Couple things I like about this jacket:
So far I have not tested out the waterproof capabilities (rain damnit!) but it sure cuts through the wind and cold with ease.
With the proliferation of web-applications it is all too easy to end up registered to a horde of systems.
They make it very easy to sign-up but what if you want to remove your details? Very few make that easy. Most don’t mention it all in their help systems even. The common method is to send off a few emails to various contacts begging to be removed from their database. Often they have no plan for how to handle this.
Flickr makes it easy to kill your account with them and other web-applications should take heed.
The last few days I have been scouring the net (no, not with AJAX) finding as many tools, applications, web-apps and projects related to feeds as I can. For each one I find I put a stub page into our project wiki with a Quick Info heading. It gives an ordered summary of what the tool/app/project is, what technologies it is based on, requirements etc. I’ll then go back over the list and start filling in details so that by the end we will have an overview of the “state of the art” of feed systems on the net.
That is the idea. In practice finding out even the simplest details of the various feed systems is a nightmare. You are lucky if you can tell whether it is a desktop or web-application. There is a lot of marketing on these sites but very little useful information. Sure, you don’t want to put your technology requirements on the front-page but you definitely should have them on the download/sign-up or the FAQ page. On a couple of projects I have had to download the app before I was able to figure out exactly what it is. On another I had to open the source files to see that it was a PHP application.
SourceForge projects do a good job of quickly informing you what technologies the project uses. But opposite to the other projets they contain very little marketing info. You end up knowing that a project is a Windows desktop app built using C# but you have no clue what the app actually does.
And this applies from the smallest open-source projects to the largest commercial projects. Very few give you the info you need to decide if it is worthwhile.
Daily bits...