Category Archives: Web Site Stuff

Fedora Core 4 … and Up2Date still sucks

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I haven’t posted for a bit … too busy with work, play, and
family.  I did get a chance to install Fedora Core 4 though, and
is was a good experience.  I actually did an upgrade of a Fedora
Core 2 box, since that is what most of my servers are running now.

I wanted to see just how hard it might be to bring them all up to
date.  I had tried to do upgrades to Fedora Core 3, but that
failed completely.  There were far too many packages broken when I
tried to do this.  I’ll do some more work with Fedora Core 4 and
see if this might be my next platform to move to.

One thing that I have to comment on is that Red Hat and Fedora still
have a LOT to lern from Microsoft and Windows Update.  Since doing
this upgrade I have tried numerous times to get the server up to date
using the free Up2Date application.  And it fails 90% of the
time.  I fully understand this is free … and uses distributed
servers across the globe … but it still fails.  The packages
begin to download and inevitably there will be one that simply stops
during the download … and it never recovers.  I have left it for
hours, and nothing … just stuck sitting there.  What a piece of
crap.  Anyone that understands network programming has to account
for these types of failures and deal with them gracefully. 
Up2Date still isn’t completely baked …

Anyhow … we’ll see how things go besides that.  I really wanted
to get to Fedora Core 4 so that I could install and get some PHP5
applications working.  I have had to run them on Windows up till
now.  I’ll see if I can get things working by this weekend.

Firepoll … get cash with the right identity!

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Some friends of mine have created a very cool new start-up called
Firepoll.  It’s like combining Instant Messaging with Surveys
… and you get paid for it!  Well … if you have the right
identity.

What they created is a small IM-like service that you install on your
machine.  You then register with their server, and they ask you a
lot of identity/profile information.  All of this is stored at
their server.  Companies interested in doing market research can
then visit the Firepoll web site and subscribe to do “Instant
Surveys”.  Through a web page they select all of the attributes of
the target market that they are interested in surveying, and in
real-time they can see how many of “those” people are currently
on-line.  They can then design their survey through their browser,
and select which “rewards” they are offering for completed surveys.

Lastly, they indicate how many survey results they want and when they
post the survey it is sent – instantly – to all of the on-line
community members who match the profile that was defined.  As soon
as enough people have replied, the survey is closed.

As a user of Firepoll, I have it running on my machine all of the
time.  When a survey is created, where I match the demographic
profile requested, I get a small pop-up message on my machine. 
When I click the message my browser is launched directly to the survey,
and the first question is “Which reward do you want?”  I can get
things like MP3 music, $1 to my PayPal account, discount coupons,
etc.  I then proceed to answer the survey questions, and then post
my results.  I get an e-mail with my reward notification in
minutes.  The entire process is a clean and simple experience.

To me, this is a facinating solution for a number of reasons …
combining many facets of the Internet into one powerful solution that
really leverages the power of distributed networks.  On top of
that, I can leverage my identity – or the one that I define and create
– to actually generate money.

It’s a cool product … I’d love to hear feedback from others on what they think of it!

Skype … ready for prime-time

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Years ago (wow … almost 10 years ago!) I was experimenting with voice and video over IP using products like WebPhone, CU-SeeMe, and NetMeeting. 
It was a blast … and all using 14.4kbps dial-up modems!  This is
what really drove me to upgrade modems through the 28.8kbps, and then
to the 56kbps modems.  All of these products seemed to fizzle
during the Tech Boom, and also went away during the Tech Crash.

Sometime during the last year I installed an early copy of Skype
and was impressed … it was pretty raw, IMHO, but it was on the right
track.  Well … as of a couple of months ago I upgraded and have
been continuing to track the progress.  Skype is now looking
really good … I am thoroughly impressed.

What really got me over the edge was using Skype with work.  At
Agilix Labs we are dealing with Universities that are all over the planet,
and I found that many of the schools from Asia are requesting all
“conference calls” to be done using Skype.  I had a call last week
that was over one hour and forty-five minutes long … with two people
in Singapore, one in California, and two of us in Utah.  It was
clear, and free.  I have now added Skype as a permanent service on
my desktop!

Configuring Radio Userland to mirror posts to Blogger.com

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The Radio Userland Atom Bridge Tool is designed to allow anyone using Radio
Userland an easy way to mirror posts to any Blogger.com or Blogspot.com
blog, using the Atom API. This tool is based on prior work from
other developers – Dave Winer and Steve Hooker – who wrote the
ManilaBloggerBridge and xManilaBloggerBridge respectively.

The installation is straight forward and should require very little
effort overall. There are a few key points to understand about
how this tool operates:

  • Once it is installed, you will configure the tool using the Radio Userland Tools link on the Home Page.
  • The tool will not mirror posts
    from your blog home page to Blogger … only posts to categories are
    mirrored. This is on purpose so that you can selectively post to
    your Blogger blog by using categories. If you want a post to go
    to your home page, and to a Blogger blog, then simply create a category
    and always check both your home page and that category when posting.
  • This tool ought to work with any other Atom API compliant
    server. Give it a try, if it fails then come back here and
    comment or complain. If you provide enough information I’ll see
    if I can take a look at it and get it working.
  • NOTE:
    There is still one dependency on another tool from Steve Hooker – the
    backLogAllRSS Tool. You will have to go to his backLogAllRSS web page and download a copy
    of this tool, and install it in Radio.

Ok … so how to get started. First, go and download the RadioAtomBridge Tool.
Once you have it downloaded, copy it into the Radio UserlandTools
folder on your computer. On Windows systems, this is usually the
Program FilesRadio UserlandTools. I’m not real sure where this
folder is on a Mac. When you copy the tool into this directory,
give it a minute or so and the tool will be installed.

Next, you’ll want to go to the Radio Userland Home Page, and then click the Tools
menu. You ought to see a new tool called the
RadioAtomBridge. Make sure that the checkbox to the left of the
name is checked. If it is not, then check the box to enable the
tool and Submit the page. If the tool is enabled then the name
RadioAtomBridge will be a highlighted link … click it.

You will now be presented with the configuration page. You will
see each category and a checkbox where you can enable that category to
be mirrored. The first three configuration fields are already
configured for Blogger.com, so you only need to update the Blog ID,
your Blogger username, and password.

To get your Blogger Blog ID, go to Blogger.com and log in. On the
Dashboard, click on the name of the blog that you want to configure in
Radio. If you now look at the URL in the address bar of your
browser you will see a URL like:
http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=99999999

… your Blog ID
is the number at the end . Your Blogger username and password ought to be
obvious.

Lastly … do not check the box about Manila sites. I’m probably
going to remove this option as it is an older feature of the
ManilaBloggerBridge.

Once you have entered all of these settings, Submit the page and your
changes will be recorded … and you’ll be ready to start
posting. Go back to your home page … write a post … check the
category that you configured. After you have posted, go to the
Radio Userland Events page and look for the indication that the post to Blogger occurred. You can also go back to the RadioAtomBridge
page and scroll down to your category. There should now be some
statistics about the post, and possibly an error message if there are
problems.

So far it works for me … I’m going to keep testing and might have
some updates. Good luck and I hope that someone finds this
valuable!

More Radio Hacking

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I am still doing some experimentation with Radio Userland
after my success
last night.  I know … a lot of people don’t understand what the
big deal is … but this is more research that I am doing into the
future of blogging, and various blogging tools.

For a long time I have been looking at how to create the ultimate
blogging tool … a way to be able to post to numerous blogs – both
public and private – easily from one tool.  I’m now getting closer
to the model that I want … and will then be able to see which
implementation wins.

This post is actually a test of some other minor changes (damage?) that
I made to Radio this morning … I talked with Steve Kirks at Userland
and he gave me some very good tips.

Posting to Blogger/Blogspot using the Atom API

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Ok … I was able to get my first “test” post through late last night
… well … early this morning.  I now have a basic framework of
code for Radio that is able to post to Blogger.com or Blogspot.com using the Atom API.  Woo hoo!

I do not yet have this completed for redistribution … but soon
will.  I was able to do this by creating hacked copies of Dave
Winer’s blogger.newPost methods, and creating a blogger.newAtomPost
method.  I did one quick test post, and then headed to bed. 
There are a couple of bugs that I have to work out, and then I was to
see if I can hack this into the #upstream.xml
file processing.  I’d like to simply be able to put a line in the
#upstream.xml file that indicates that I want to upstream using the
Atom API.

If not, then I’ll still end up creating a seperate tool that will be a fork of the xManilaBloggerBridge
tool written by Steve Hooker.  Fun stuff … I’m glad that I took
the time to write this … it was a good learning experience.

P.S. For anyone who wants to use the xManilaBloggerBridge tool with
Radio and Blogger, I found that there are two core changes to get this
working … I had to search for “metaWeblog.” and comment out the calls
to these methods, and then look right next to them and un-comment the
“blogger.” methods.  Once I had done this, the basic Blogger API
stuff started to work just fine.  There is not support for
‘titles’ in the Blogger API though … this is why I pursued the Atom
API support.

Posting to Blogspot using Radio

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I am trying to get my blogging tool – Radio – to post to Blogspot …
and I think that I just got it working.  I’m going to do some
experimentation over the next few days, but this first test
worked.  I was able to get a tool called the xManilaBlogger
Bridge, and then hack the code to get it to use the Bloggr API.

At some point in the future I’ll be modifying the code to see if I am
get this same tool using the Atom API … this will allow me to add
titles, etc.

Cool … this will make it so much easier to keep my Tablet PC Thoughts blog going …

A good anti-phishing solution

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I really liked the idea behind this solution being developed by Bank of America for anti-phishing. 
It’s really the simplicity that I like.  In short, it allows a
bank of America customer to customize the web page for their on-line
services … with a picture of image of their choice.  So now,
when a customer goes to log into the Bank of America site, they can
verify that the image is the one that they picked!

I know that there is still the general phishing scam that can be sent
out indicating that “Oh yeah … we had big problems with your server,
and your image can not be shown!” … or “Uh … we lost your image,
please log in and set your image again!” … but this is a very good
start.

The idea of customizing the page … to maybe even allow the customer
to choose among different types of customization … will allow users
to easily notice the differences in the web site, and then identify
potential phishing scams.

Simple … and a good start.

Music Plasma

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Clint Carlos showed me a Music Plasma tonight. It’s a very graphical version of the older FireFly Networks that was bought by Microsoft.
Music Plasma is a very cool site that allows you to enter the name of a
band, and it will show you a very cool graphical display of other bands
related to the band you searched for. The relationship is a
“people who like this band, also like these other bands” … and the
size of the bands graphic is the size of their following.

It’s a very cool way to find new music and to think about data
relationships. I have more that I wanted to say about this,
however I have to run …