Check out listpic and realize how nice it is for searching craigslist. Now they just need to expand it south from SF. :)

WOXY is a web radio station that I discovered listening to the web 2.0 podcast. They play non mainstream indi sounding rock which is defiantly not what I normally listen to, but thats probably why I’ve been enjoying it.

On the podcast they were presenting , which is a site that lets you trade CD’s with people for 1 buck. It goes something like: you post or find something you want to trade, lala sends both of you postage paid envelopes to put the cd in, it sends out the person you are trading with. Cool idea.

I’ve been mildly obsessed with the idea of SSO for the web since I fist heard about people working on it some years ago. Despite the past hype it has received progress and adoption have been fairly slow. Movement, however, is being made with sites like

 

When I first signed up for there were only few sites that utilized them for SSO [LiveJournal (shares creator with myopenid), Zooomr, and a couple of others I can’t recall]. Counting now, the lists is up to 33, but with only Technorati standing out to me.

With something in place like OpenID.net sites looking to implement SSO are now free to let users choose their SSO provider and use whichever to authenticate them. A system like this becoming the De facto standard for web logins currently sounds too good to be true, but it or something similar will come around. I know that I am more willing to try a site when it supports an OpenID sign in, as it is practically effortless.

Revel in a fantasy for a sec and imagine logging in to a social community site using SSO. It queries other SSO photo sharing sites for your participation and lets you search for a photo to use to identify yourself on this new site. It then prompts your with your “about you” blurp from your blog, from myspace, and others. You choose one to start with as a template. You then select which photosharing sites along with criteria to use for populating your “recent photos banner” and set your recent blog entries to come from a chosen service. Your profile is instantly generated and accessable as a part of this new site you just joined. And this is just my silly thought up scenario. I can’t imagine what may be possible if various services decide to play well together in the future.

It’s true, Apache + FastCGI is a horrible, horrible solution, unless your problem is “how can I waste my time on a dodgy server config?” in which case you shouldn’t be using the Intarweb while drunk.

I’m currently putting together a Rails, Mongrel, Apache configuration (maybe capistrano….). I was glad to find this article while looking how to use apache, with mod_proxy_balancer, and Mongrel instances.

I was reading through an interview of Zed Shaw (Mongrel developer extraordinaire) and liked his personal code review steps before a release. He looks for:

1. “missed assertions” — Unstated assumptions about inputs and outputs.
2. “missed else” — Logical branches that don’t cover all test domains.
3. “will it stop” — Looping errors that will cause classic infinite loops or short loops.
4. “check that return” — Return values that aren’t dealt with properly (which are really assumptions about other inputs and outputs).
5. “unexpected exceptions” — Exceptions are pretty darn evil since they’re rarely documented.
6. “simply readable” — Replacing clever code with readable simple code where possible, and documenting complex code so it can be reviewed by others.

Many would benefit from additional focus on 1 and 6. Myself, I need to start putting assertions to greater use.

link to interview

Need to get a site put together pronto? See, breath, be the prairie dog and check out this large collection of open templates. Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place! link

And again… we have ourselves a money stealing Woot-Off!

Last time was November 16th… under a month ago, not bad.

… and I am going to steal Cory’s link since he stole my picture last time. :)

Handy Woot Off Checker

… and if you want to know what you have missed.

Woot Forums

… or (it looks like it is coming alive, and you don’t have to worry about the Woot servers going down)

Woot Wiki

I picked up firefox 2.0 today (this spell checking rocks my blog posting world) and discovered firebug when trying out some new extensions.

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

This is the shit…. edit the page on the fly and get instant feedback. Move the mouse around and find out which parts of the code correspond to it. Set some break points in the javascript and debug your issues away. FireBug - > web like irb - > ruby. Well.. maybe.

Do not know quite what to say about this. Sony has caused Lik-sang.com to shut down due to multiple lawsuits. They used tactics to bleed the company dry in legal fees, opening as many cases as possible in as many regions as possible.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - OUT OF BUSINESS NOTICE

Hong Kong, October 24th of 2006 - Lik-Sang.com, the popular gaming retailer from Hong Kong, has today announced that it is forced to close down due to multiple legal actions brought against it by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Sony claimed that Lik-Sang infringed its trade marks, copyright and registered design rights by selling Sony PSP consoles from Asia to European customers, and have recently obtained a judgment in the High Court of London (England) rendering Lik-Sang’s sales of PSP consoles unlawful.

Lik-sang.com was my prefered online shop to import games from Japan and other countries. It was one of the most popular, and only websites that offered this service to gamers worldwide. I was able to pre-order games and get them days after they were released in Japan, for the same cost as a US release. In addition they sold many things that are not avaliable anywhere else, and offered deals that cannot be matched on things such as Metal DDR pads.

Sony has sunk to a new low with this effort. Here is Sony’s justification:

ultimately, we’re trying to protect consumers from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards, due to voltage supply differences et cetera; is not - in PS3’s case - backwards compatible with either PS1 or PS2 software; will not play European Blu-Ray movies or DVDs; and will not be covered by warranty

To “protect consumers” they have just, to put it kindly, raped the import market, removing one of the only places avaliable for average consumers to get things for a resonable price. This reeks of greed, more than anything. Shut down the little guy who sells our hardware for cheaper than we do in the UK. Consumers who are importing know damn well what they are buying, and do not need protection from Sony.

Goodbye Free Worldwide Shipping on Imports.
Goodbye to the supplier who sold me my DS Lite months before a US release.
Goodbye to the supplier who provided me with Berserk, Bleach, Soul Caliber 2, Naruto 1, Naruto 2, Naruto 3, Naruto 4, and countless other games. Not to mention mugs, t-shirts, and more.

Farewell Lik-sang.com. The gaming community will miss you.

If you want to have a little fun while browsing web pages, paste the following code into the address bar, replacing the loaded page’s address, and hit enter. Since I cannot seem to get the code to wrap properly on the blog, just triple click it to select it all, then copy. :)

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Once it starts, even the links will still work. The effect is pretty awesome on pages with lots of images. Though you need a pretty good system to be able to do it if a page has high resolution images. :)

Great news for those Linux users out there who have been screwed by web content creators for the past year and a half or so. The beta version of Flash Version 9 is out. So run on over to Adobe Labs and grab it. :)

Getting it working is as simple as the following steps:

1. Download the installer for linux.
2. “tar xvf” the installer.
3. cp libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/ if you are root, or into ~/.mozilla/plugins/ if you are a user.
4. Restart firefox.
5.

You now have Flash 9 working in Linux as well as a page that, “gasp”, makes flash seem decent.
In addition you did not even have to pay $600 and buy a PS3 to play Fl0w.

Holy Crap!!! Here we go again. Break out your credit cards ’cause the Woot-Off train is here again!

Here is is best Woot-Off Checker I have found so far:

Semideaf’s Woot-off Checker v1.0B

Jump to see some more useful links…

(more…)

Well, most know what this means now… if you don’t then run!

… and for those that want to follow this woot-off…

As I was refreshing I clicked on the woot! logo and it took me here…

Thats new (new to me… it has been going since May 22, 2006) and quite random… oh well, whatever.

One Day, One Deal… One Week, One Wine.

Do you run a site that has a public commentable space? Is keeping comment spam free driving you crazy? I wish I had an answer. That magical solution that as Akismet says would “restore [the] innocence to blogging”. But I have no answers.

The spam is so out of control on my photoblog (pixelpost software) it recieves hundreds of comment spams a day. Just sit and watch the comment list for a few seconds and another wonderful annoyance will arrive. Cleaning out the spam involves mysql database queries that I would take the time and effort to do each time I tried a new comment spam solution that I dreamt would work.

With the Akismet [addon] for pixelpost comment spam became a bit more reasonable. I would take about 20 hits of comment spam a day and I would report each one of those to Akismet. This is still not reasonable though so I installed Anti-Comment-Spam-Addon that places a graphical chunk of numbers the user most enter before the post will get through. I thought that this was the final end to the sad spam, but I was wrong. I am still getting between 5 and 10 comment spams a day. I have no idea how they get posted despite this addon and I am now considering closing off public comments completely as I don’t have the time for the battles. What to do?

Wordpress spam has also seemed to be kicked up a notch lately. I’ve been using and loving Bad Behavior for a long time now but have reciently been getting spam slipping past it as well. Are the comment spammers becoming more advanced or what?

This is interesting. Google is providing opensource project hosting with issue tracking, a project page, subversion, and mailling lists (google groups).

Internet.com: Google, The Open Source Projects Host