Farewell Del.icio.us, farewell flickr, farewell Konfabulator; Shove it Yahoo.

I will not become a further addition to Yahoo’s massive consumer data set.

I love del.icio.us and run used to run Konfabulator on both my work and home machines. Flickr is cool; but I’ve never really made it part of my daily online experience.

So Konfabulator’s out the window — I guess I’ll switch to a Mac if I want those sort of toys again. I’ve mirrored my Del.icio.us account locally and will probably use something like Freetag to build my own version. Dreamhost’s one press installs of Gallery means the flickr thing isn’t an issue; that was setup in 5 minutes. Obviously the Gallery interface is a long way from that of flickr — I figure now that so many hardline ’socialist’ geeks will be evacuating these hosted services like a plague infested Titanic there should be plenty of people with common requests and suitable skills joining the communities of projects such as Gallery.

At least then something good will come of this for users at large.

Best blog on WordPress.com… Maybe

I design and develop web applications for a living.
Sad, I know (don’t worry, I’m on step 3 of 12 already!).

Anyhoo, as a part of that I take it upon myself to stay abreast of every flavour-of-the-month technology that wafts through the hollowed halls of teh interw3b.

During such nautical adventures, my ship ran aground on the shores of Go Flock Yourself; unquestionably my favourite of the plethora of AJAX-pimping blogs that have popped up of late.

May all their XMLHttpRequests return 200ok; and may all their subsequent modal dialogs fade smoothly.

More Flock Ponderings… upcoming.org please?

Flock is all about social web services and having a central point from which to access and control your accounts on these services. I’m all for that idea; always have been.

So far there’s a tight (but buggy) integration with del.icio.us accounts and a basic Flickr browser. That’s cool and all, but I’m holding out for the next obvious integration: upcoming.org and the Mozilla Calendar.

How long before flock automagically syncs up my upcoming.org events and suggests events that I may be interested in?

My guess is ‘not long’. We’ll see…

Technorati Tags: flock, software, web2, upcoming.org

Edit: Flock’s ‘Blog Editor’ interface still has some serious bugs to work out; eg: When this post was published, it edited the timestamp of my last post to 8:19pm tonight, thereby screwing the order of the posts. That’s not real cool

Flock ‘Social Browser’ – First Impressions

EDIT: I quickly became sick of Flock and uninstalled it. If my memory serves, it lasted ~3 days. Oh well, browsers are hard to do well.

I’ve just installed the pre-Developer preview release (aka. “There be BUGZ!! Use at your own risk”) of Flock and the first impression is certainly a good one.

This is just a quick test post to see how well their Blog Editor interface does with detecting and interacting with my WordPress.com account.

It doesn’t appear that ‘Save as Draft’ works properly; so I’ve just reported my first bug. Now to see if the tags I’ve entered in the Flock UI end up as Categories in WordPress…

Oh, and if you haven’t heard of Flock; don’t freak out! They’re using the Gecko engine, so it’s not going to cause more compatibility woes for client-side developers and hopefully most of the great extensions available for Firefox will work

Edit: The tags-to-categories conversion didn’t work, and the mark-up that resulted had a <br /> at the end of each paragraph. All minor problems considering this is a preview release of a preview release…

public tag: flock

How MS Visio crushed my spirit

Two days. TWO FREAKIN’ DAYS spent drawing up UML application design doc’s using textbook accurate symbols and language. Use Cases, Deployment Diagrams, ERDs, piles of Sequence Diagrams; all gone.

Fuck you Visio; I’m uninstalling you from my work system and my home system and I can guarentee that you will not make it into the next revision of our Developer’s Software Toolkit at work. That’s 12 less copies of your bloated ass cludging up our workflow. Not even a drop molecule in the M$ ocean, but a good start.

Now I just need to find an alternative…

All suggestions welcome

Google Will Eat Itself

GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself is to show-case and unveil a total monopoly of information [search-engine & added services], a weakness of the new global advertisment system and the renaissance of the “new economic bubble” – reality is, Google is currently valued more than all Swiss Banks together (sic).

I really like the concept behind Google Will Eat Itself, it’s just a shame that the ride seems to have come to an end.

Tags: google

WE’05 – Social Highlights

This is not a report on the presentations from WE’05. That will come shortly, once Ben and I have sorted through our collective notes.

Although it may very well appear as such, this is not a name drop post either. I’m of the opinion that it’s only name dropping if you continue to hold these people up on a pedestal. While my respect for these people has grown, I no longer think of them as ‘untouchable’ or ‘A listers’. They’re normal people, they just happen to have achieved things that many of us in the same industry find impressive. We may find their talents intimidating, but these people are our peers.

I’ve always read that these events are about more than the content; but just how much more did not become apparent until now.

If you don’t already know, the pioneers and groundbreakers of our community are (in general) incredibly warm and approachable people. I already knew this through approaching many of my influences via email; but meeting the majority of the presenters really cemented this.

WE’05 Highlights – the ‘less than nerd’ version

• Carrying on the after-party in Kings Cross with the majority of the international speakers, a couple of the dedicated local speakers, three quarters of the core WE’05 team and a handful of my fellow delegates who were in as much denial as I that this would have to end eventually.
• Watching a somewhat ‘jovial’ John Allsopp direct ~20 people into cabs and then educate Cameron and I on the finer points of synchronized orbit.
• Finding out that shortly after I had left the final party location, Derek had treated the remaining party-goers to a rendition of his “Hammer time” dance. (If only he had MC Hammer’s parachute pants!)
• The Beginning
• The Evacuation
• Sneaking stronger drinks into the Day 1 party and the fun and relaxing dinner with Bec, Kara, Pat (URI’s please?) and Ben at Wagamama’s (I still maintain that’s not a word )
• Sharing Pizza with Eric as he explains the fundamental difference between an OSX crash and a Windows crash
  

  …and then I realize that this thing (OSX) is ‘blue screening’ me, but I can’t get mad because it just looks so good while doing it. You get this beautiful opaque window with rounded corners, drop shadows; the lot!

  For someone who gives the initial impression of being somewhat reserved, Eric is a helluva lot of fun once he relaxes.

• The “smartass presenter” award was a complete whitewash – no one stood a chance against Cameron Adams. Forget Google maps, Cameron’s ‘Meyer vs. Bowman’ boxing game is the best use of JavaScript ever. Oh and then there’s the fact that he replicated the entire OSX desktop including the Dock, Finder and Safari – just because he could! You’re a freak Cameron. Freak on

  I’m not sure if anyone won the “smartass delegate” award, but I was definitely in the running. The background screen was a good start, but the golden touch was a 15em, blinking, <marquee> equipped, red “w007 JavaScript” on a green background that was aimed at Cameron from the front row as he prepared to begin his presentation. It didn’t faze him, but it gave Molly a good laugh; so I’m going to chalk that one up as a success.

• Meeting and partying with some of the Melbourne WSG crew. One of those crazy Melbournites was a gentleman by the name of Lachlan Hardy. What to say about Lachlan? Well, I think Hunter S. Thompson summed it up nicely:
  

  There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

There were many more memorable moments, most of which I don’t remember

In short, WE’05 was an absolute blast. I’ll be back next year, no doubt about it!

Technorati Tag: WE05

The Mass Evacuation

At the end of Tantek’s presentation (read it!!!) there was an alarm. All of a sudden, a distinctly british recorded voice told us it was time to evacuate.

Oh dear, this could get mighty interesting…

Upon leaving the building, an escaping army of W3 lovin’ web nuts was spliced in two by a group of sternly focused fire fighters attempting to enter the building. The look of confusion in the eyes of one or two conference goers as they got out of the fire fighters’ way would have been great to capture; unfortunately I was unable to get hold of a camera in time.

While waiting to go back in, Ben and I ran into Cam, who had come to a Brissy WSG meeting a few months back and the three of us had agreed to meet up at WE’05. As we shuffled through the crowd we ran into one of the presenters; Cameron Adams. I’ve been a fan of Cameron’s writing and approach since he started his blog and have hassled him regularly via his comments and contact form. A friendly conversation ensued and Cameron agreed sell me a Widgeditor license to use on the next version of my site in exchange for a few beers.
Sweet, now I’ve just got to make sure I feed him beers at the party tonight and it’ll be legally binding. Or, maybe it won’t…

Jeffrey Veen taught us all something very important — You either Have Hay or you Need Hay. For my money, Jeff’s was the standout presentation so far, followed in close second by Tantek.

That’s all the time I have for this blogging session; more to come post-party.

Technorati tag: WE05

The Beginning

It’s Thursday, 7:15am. I’m sitting in the lobby of the conference venue and Russ walks by.
A quick chat ensues and Russ ends it with “I’m expected you to stir a lot of shit…�? , to which I respond “Oh f*ck yeah; once I’ve got my pass I’m going back to the hotel to get loaded on coffee!�?

With that, Russ had given me my first laugh of the conference. Hopefully, the first of many.

Technorati tag: WE05

Wifi Hell

I’m at WE’05. More to the point, I’m sitting in a computer lab near WE’05. This is due to the fact that I have zero chance of getting wifi access during this conference.

Reasons

• Any Windows box that’s running a firewall (which should be every windows box) can’t access the network.
• I don’t have admin privelages on this work notebook and therefore cannot turn off the firewall.

With that out of the way, I will now post my notes from today…