Twitter has killed my blog updating… Trying to find a nice lazy way to kill two birds with one stone, but not be too annoying.

I’ve always wanted to go and Elaine and I were up in SF for the weekend, so I made it! I walked into the building above and assumed that was the whole thing. It was an enormous place with tons of exhibits.

The first one that caught my eye was a dude polishing a piece of glass for a telescope mirror:

I didn’t quite get how it worked, but it was fascinating to watch.

Next I saw a huge living sculpture of old plastic 2 liter bottles:

There was a line and pulley system that caused the ring of bottles to undulate in a wave.

There were many robot sculptures:

and scary vacuum guns!

These bike wheel LEDs were very cool! I almost bought the kit, but resisted… My birthday is coming up, hint hint…

I think this was part of The Long Now’s 10,000 year clock. I just thought it was cool:

Next I saw Tesla coils! They set up a board with hot dogs along a wire for the current to pass through:

Then there were more robots:

Some of the robots got all evil and started decapitations:

SOLDERING IS NOT A CRIME!

I was getting hungry by this point, so I stepped out of the building to get some food and discovered that there was 4x more Faire to cover:

This one was giving me the eye:

I want to try hanging a camera from a kite! Can I borrow your camera?

The robots were really being mean to children even…

Then they went all cyborg on this poor innocent:

This is the robot conversion factory:

The humans allowed to live had to pass through a life sized Mousetrap Game:

One hall was full of crafts and the witches who ply their trade:

and odes to their false idols:

ok, that’s a pretty cool ode – a yarn FSM!

And what would a trip to NoCal be without hippies and their dirty habits:

It’s sad what happened to some of the humans:

but I will admit to eating all the chocolate and vanilla ribbon off of the Hostess Cupcake car! Mmm, delicious!

Sheep lady’s twittering about seeing something stranger than her:

What could it be?

WOOP, der it is:

Some brave humans fought back the robot horde:

But in the end, who can fight robots?

Especially when they use child sympathizers:

I blame the XBoX generation for this madness.

But wait! There’s hope!

Mentos and Diet Coke save the day! And we all fly away:

and eat mushrooms:

and wear awesome coats:

Oh yeah, I ran into Andrew, Kim, and Site Con #3 (dammit, I can’t remember his name. Nice kid… )

More pix here:

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It boggles the mind…

I took a lot of pictures as usual. They’re all up on Flicrk, but here are a few I really liked:

Our hotel was right across the street from the Rhode Island State house. I forgot to fix my white balance before I shot it, but I kinda like the effect:

If all of the cars in front were as old as the one in the middle, I could have pretended it was an old slide

Here’s a more “accurate” shot:

We headed over to the local mall’s food court for lunch:

Lotsa folks in that one – Mike Giarlo, Rob Cassion, Ross Singer, Phil Cryer.

I really enjoyed spending a few days with our intrepid Esme:

(He lives in Florida, Mike.)

Here Dan Chudnov does his Bollywood routine in celebration of Slumdog Millionaire’s big Oscar wins:

Jodi Schneider was thrilled to see me, as always:

I finally met Ed Summers, in the middle. It’s good to see him inspiring others as he does me. Bess Sadler is enjoying the fracas as well:

Gabe Farrell, on the right, forgot he owed me $20. Never do that. It gives me WAY too much license…

Mike Park left me waiting to be picked up at the airport:

Well ok, he mailed me 3 weeks before the event asking if I needed a ride and I sent him an itinerary and said I’d confirm closer to the flight. Three hours before the flight takes off doesn’t really count! Mike drove me, Esme, Brad, and Dan all over the place, either because he’s a great dude, or I’m good at making people feel guilty. Either way, I win! Thanks Mike for being a great host.

Actually, I gotta say that the whole Brown Univ (or is that Univ of Providence?) crew kicked ass in prep and execution of this conference. BRAVO Birkin, Jean, Bonnie, and other names I can’t remember because I drink a lot.

I also take a lot of pictures, so I’ll inevitably get something cool like this:

Heehee! I love my Lensbaby!

Pizza is good!

Did you know the lead singer of Saliva is a librarian?

Ross pretends to laugh at something while trying to ignore the fat dude sticking a camera in his face:

Just looking at this costs me 14 points:

Brad, Dan, and I visited the inside of the RI State House before we ran to the airport, and decided that we should hold the next code4lib in the Senate chambers:

Never get on that end of a canon, especially when I am on the other end…

As usual, way too many pictures here:

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Awesome seeing you all again!

“If you go to the standard technology meet-ups,” says Gabriel Lawrence, director of IT security at UCSD, the glow of the pool reflecting in his glasses, “it’s all a bunch of geeks standing around lecturing each other. But look at this: There’s all kinds of people here. There’s the technology people, so, if you want to talk tech and be like 1, 0, 1-1, 0, 1-1, you can. But then there’s marketing folks, there’s radio personalities, there’s newspaper media—I mean, everybody’s here. Eric Bidwell, a candidate for mayor, is here. I voted for him because I met him at a Tweetup. This is what it should be like—you get to meet lots of people, there’s lots of ideas and it’s a fun environment.”

I wonder how drunk one needs to be to speak in binary…

I used Pwnage following these instructions and it all worked well.

One app I really wanted to try out was Cycorder because it allows you to make videos with the iPhone camera. I used the Cydia installer that comes with Pwnage to install Cycorder. Running the app is simple, just remember to hold the iPhone sideways so the video isn’t sideways like I did here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next, I wanted to grab the video and put it on my web site at home. I installed OpenSSH from Cydia or the InstallerApp (not sure which, but they both come with Pwnage), then sftp’d the files over to my home server from the iPhone’s hard drive at /var/mobile/Media/Videos. Remember that OpenSSH’s default login is “root” and the password is “alpine”. (I highly suggest changing the password using the iPhone terminal application.) That directory has .mov files that copy over and play just fine on Windows or the Mac.

Next, I wanted to put the movies up in YouTube because my home server is so slow. It was as simple as uploading anything to YouTube, but the audio was bad. Every few seconds there was a loud hissing noise. So, I used iSquint to convert the .mov files to .mp4 files, uploaded the .mp4 files to YouTube, and that cleared up the audio noise.

Too bad it doesn’t make the quality of the video content any better:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Follow my progress at http://twitter.com/declantest

This all started when Matt Browne set up a FriendFeed room for SDBloggers, a gathering of rss feeds from local bloggers’ sites. Matt then set up an RSS to Twitter feed using Twitterfeed.com that took the RSS from the room and posted it as the Twitter user SDBloggers. By following this user, people could get a tweet telling them that something new had been posted on any of the blogs in the room.

Now, there are over 50 different blogs in the room, any of which could alert Twitter that it had a new post. The problem I had was that the tweet looked like this:

I couldn’t tell by looking at the tweet which blog it was referring to. The “(via Blog)” part of the title was generic and the same on every tweet, regardless of the sender. I mentioned to Matt that he should change that. Manager that he is, he tasked me with looking into how to do it…

I knew from the raw HTML on the Friendfeed site that the name of each entry’s blog was available. And when I looked at the RSS feed provided by Friendfeed, all the parts where there. The item.content was made up of a lot of HTML and included some consistent text – specifically “an entry from” followed by an “a” tag that changed per entry, then the closing “a” tag. I just needed to parse the RSS, rip the blog name out of item.content, then replace “(via Blog)” with “(via ” + real blog name in the item.title.

At first I started with a perl script I found called RSS2Twitter. After spending a good part of a day off re-learning perl for the 17th time, I said, “heck, let’s learn something new…” and started playing with Yahoo Pipes.

I’m technical, but I’m not a programmer, so I usually start with some example and hack a piece of code until it does what I want. The initial problem I had with Pipes is that I wasn’t sure what context I was in. I knew I wanted RSS in and modified RSS out, but I was confused how to go about it. I looked at a couple examples and figured out I needed to start with a Fetch Feed object, and to stuff the Friendfeed RSS URL into it. The debug window was a bunch of help, showing me what the output of each object was as I clicked on Refresh.

So, now I had a list of RSS entries. I knew where my pieces were, I just couldn’t figure out how to extract them. I Googled “pipes tutorials strings” and the first link was from Daybarr.com and helped a ton. I needed to copy the item.content to a temporary variable so I could do some work on cutting it up without hurting the original item.content. From Daybarr’s page, I saw to use the “Rename” object and invoke the Copy As method (not sure that’s proper programmer talk) to replicate the value of item.content’s to my new variable called content_holder.

Here’s where it really gets ugly. I hadn’t touched regular expressions in a long time, but I’d need one to isolate the blog name from all the HTML. Another few Googles gave me some tutorials, and I settled on one from Apple. The intro mentioned Reggy, a regex validator that lets you write ugly little regex code in the top pane, paste some text into the bottom pane, and see the results in real time. It really helped:

You can see the regex I used in a Pipes Regex object in the top pane of Reggy above. What I’m doing is finding whatever is in that space, shoving it into the regex variable $5, then replacing the whole of content_holder with $5. It seems kludgy, and it probably is, but it works. I use another line in the regex object to strip the generic “(via Blog)” text from the item.title.

Believe it or not, the next Pipes object was the hardest to get my head around. It helps a lot to cursor over an object’s connection points to see what input and output is expected and delivered. I did this for a long time before I read Daybarr’s loop example. The Loop objects consumes items and lets you perform operations on them individually, as opposed to the whole stream of items at once. The Loop object is modular in that it allowed me to plug a String Builder object into it. Once I understood that I had access to each item’s fields, with the blog name stuffed into my content_holder variable, all I had to do was add string parts to the String Builder in the order I wanted them to be concatenated. The last little trick in the Loop object was to assign the results to item.title.

I’m not really clear why everything else just gets passed through untouched, but that’s the context problem I was struggling with. Once I stopped worrying about all the details and concentrated on the parts I knew I wanted to change, I made a lot of progress. It’s not how I normally work. Understanding the boundaries of a system usually helps me know which way to start a solution. Assuming that “it’ll all be ok” doesn’t occur to me naturally.

One last Regex object to strip the content_holder variable out of the resulting RSS, and it’s all clean.

Here’s the Pipe:

I fed this to Twitterfeed.com and it fails validation, BUT after waiting the 30 minute delay, I got results!

Here you can see the name of the blog (in this case it’s mine for testing) right in the tweet!

Ok, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but I learned something new and now I have a blog post I can go back to when I forget it all!

My regex is probably flawed. If there were a blog with “an entry from” in the title, I bet it would fail. And I didn’t use any “[” or “^” so I’m not very cool.

How would you have gone at this problem differently? How have you learned Pipes?

This is Andrew.

So I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I am very happy with it. You can work on things in a local space, then change the status to Published and it will be pushed to your blog. On slow connections, it will time out sometimes, just like any uploader. It does remember it’s state though, and tries again the next time you try to upload.

I have had an issue setting more than one category on a post. It seems only the first one gets added, but I’ll need to test more before I complain officially.

Another interesting issue I found with my first few posts was that even though it looked like a post had been successful from the phone, the post didn’t show up on my blog page. I didn’t have time to mess with it, so I checked the blog a few hours later and it showed up then. I tested with another post, and got the same issue. I looked in the list of posts, and it was there, it just wasn’t showing up on the homepage. The issue turned out to be that the time stamp on my server was off by a few hours, so the post from my iPhone looked like it was from the future and WP embargoed it until the time stamps matched.

Our newest arrival is an iPhone 3g that I got for work. It is even cooler than the Touch because it has a camera. I’ll have a lot of lower quality photos now, but it’s super convenient.

A couple complaints about the phone, that I’m sure I’ll get the whine about on the MacVeritas podcast soon:

Battery life – with 3g, wifi, and heavy use, don’t expect this thing to last more than 5 hours.

Charging change – this just kills me. The device won’t charge in my car now. Lots of discussion on the forums that Apple decided to drop the pins where most car systems charge the phone. I’m hoping there can be a firmware fix. If not, maybe my car device has a switch, or I can build a little wire switching dongle. Either way, shame on Apple for messing with this with no real warning.

Exchange email set up was a snap – but I think I’m missing some emails… It’s being a little flaky with the ActiveSync. More experience with the device is needed.

Calendar confusion – some recurring events that have canceled exceptions are showing up as valid meetings. I know this is complicated programming from the WirelessKnowledge days. Apple needs to get ahead of this or people will lose confidence in their data.

Apps crash a lot – and have to be reinstalled. AIM, Twinkle, and others just try to start, then go back to the home dock. I’ll even get an occasional reboot.

Other than that, the device is nice! It’s sleek, so it slips in and out of pockets nicely. So far it is way more resistant to scratches than my 60G iPod.

Now that I have the phone, I don’t know if I need the Touch. The girl wants it, but I might sell it and the cool Surefire flashlights I won and buy a proper lens for the camera.

Five planes flying at high altitude in formation dot matrix printing the sky is geeky cool. Reading about insurance companies and bad radio djs in the sky is kind obnoxious.

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From www.skytypers.com:

Five aircraft flying at 10,000 FT. emitting biodegradable vapor "PUFFS" in a dot matrix pattern. These puffs are regulated by an onboard computer that controls the sequencing of the vapor to form the letters in the sky.
The average time to skytype a character, "The size of the empire state building," is only four seconds! The hang time for a eight mile long (25-30 characters) skyboard is three to seven minutes. That's a lot longer than a fifteen second TV commercial... or the average sign on the road read at 55 mph in 7 seconds!

Anaheim = Disney, don’tcha know?

All of the images from the class:

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Those first few images are of a mystery device that was installed over my hotel room door. Never did figure out what it was. I’m not interesting enough to surveil…

The class was a lot of fun, especially because it was small and the attendees got really involved in asking questions.

The new site has a lot of black, which seems kinda dark to me, but since I post so many pictures, black sets them off nicely.

He succeeded.

Short version: We spent 8 straight hours and won a $200 flashlight each! Thanks Surefire!

Long version: Our team included me, Robert, and Jonathan. We were up against some young punks from #sdcolleges, and I was sure they’d cream us. In fact, it’s a sad shame on them they didn’t. What self respecting protohacker can’t pick a lock in under a minute… There was also a team of people I hadn’t met, and one more team of kids who were around last year.

The challenge started out with a url to 9 subdirectories of starting clues and problems to solve. These included passworded zip files, sound files with hidden messages in the ID3 tags, and many hashes that took John the Ripper quite some time to hash out. We were certainly stymied by the lack of access to ssh to a proper computer to run John, and SOMEone set up my laptop with virus scanning software that wouldn’t let me install John. Damn IT people…

Anyway, after 4 hours of discovering all the places Dan “oopsied” the challenges, we got to the physical box challenge designed by Billy. He’s made a nice couple of movies of the challenge:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Any bad language you hear is all Jonathan.

Here’s more footage of some LOOOOzers:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch for the sad @numist and @djcapelis as they snip the wrong wires… priceless

I’d planned on crowing more about the victory, but after 8 hours of grueling hacking, I was dead tired. I think I put my head on the pillow at 5am that night. But there was so much more going on Sunday morning, that I was back by 10:30!

Thanks to Dan and Billy for a great challenge. Thanks to my teammates for the win!

And thank goodness those punk kids didn’t beat me…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

found on boingboing

I’ve come over for 2 weeks, the first at a work conference called Open Repositories in Southampton. This week I’m on vacation in London, first in Watford, then heading over to Gillingham in Kent tomorrow. I have some cousins there that I haven’t seen in 10 years. Should be a hoot!

Robert, Chuck, Christian, and Effy joined me at my aunt’s place and just left for home this morning. Part of me would like to be heading home too, but part of me is excited to see the cousins again.

Some random thoughts on the experience so far:

I followed some advice and forced myself to stay up one sleep cycle and acclimate to the local time, arriving at 8:15a and going to bed at a normal 10p. I think that was 36 hours of straight awake time as I couldn’t fall asleep sitting up on the plane. There were some slight hallucinations toward the end of the night, and 5 or 6 blackouts at the pub during dinner, but I awoke the next day fairly rested and ready to take on the conference.

I’d given myself plenty of time to get showered, dressed, and fed, until I discovered that the Jury’s hotel had run out of hot water. BigD don’t roll with the cold shower, so, thankfully, I’d showered the night before in an attempt to stay awake. I was afraid that this was just a normal English thing, but no, a boiler had failed. They got it fixed and there was normal hot water afterward.

The room felt spartan compared to similarly priced American hotels. No real flourishes, just a clean couple of beds and a spare bathroom. Nothing wrong with it, but no charm.

A lot of the toilets here have 2 flushing modes, whoosh and WHOOSH! The flush button is split in two. It takes some experimentation to see which setting does what. I saw something like it in Portland.

Wifi sucks. Well, bad implementation of it sucks. We are SO spoiled at UCSD with the ubiquitous nature of the wifi and how well it is managed. Southampton’s implementation is just… FAIL. Very frustrating, especially when we’d only have about an hour of overlap time with people back home actually being awake while we were online.

Free wifi is findable around town. I could get on fairly reliably within a 15 minute walk from the hotel, which sucked a bit. It was usually at a pub, which didn’t suck so much. The hotel offered wifi in the lobby, or wired access in the rooms, but it was 5 pounds for 4 hours, or 20 pounds for a day.

Speaking of pounds, the exchange rate is murderous. We’re getting less than 2:1. I’m trying not to think about it. But a decent dinner is $50USD. OUCH! Can we get out of Iraq, pls? kthxbai

I’ve visited my aunt before who, by the way, is actually not in the country at the moment but off in India or something, and the feeling this time is different. I’ve been trying to articulate it to myself, hence this long post, but I’m having trouble. Maybe it’s because I’m older, or have traveled more, or I’m jaded, but in the past this place always seemed more otherworldly to me. What does that mean…? I’m not sure I am not as struck by the differences this time as I have been in the past. I still notice all the things that seem odd to me – driving on the wrong side, different ways of saying “common” things like “way out”, the different currency. They just don’t glare like they used to.

Maybe it’s the internet… I’m not feeling so isolated because I touch base with Elaine and other friends in IM and IRC in real time almost every day, if I can find wifi. Maybe this is bad? Maybe there’s some need to separate to be able to fully appreciate a place. With the internet so ubiquitous, it’s difficult to separate though. In fact, it’s quite difficult to operate off the net altogether. I’ve used it to check trains, find restaurants and pubs, and to send back up mails to people I couldn’t find online or with the phone.

Maybe it’s because I came here in a work mode. I find myself skimming work email because it’s easy to do when I’m checking my personal stuff. Heck, some people send personal stuff to my work address. Half of the places we visited in London had a Library focus They were still cool though. Yesterday I saw one of the original Magna Cartas and a Gutenberg Bible.

Today I’m just bumming around Bushey and Watford, enjoying the calm after the other four people headed out. They were a very pleasant crew, but that was a small place to jam 5 people into Not to mention the one shower and the bout of black plague hitting some of them. Thank goodness, I haven’t gotten sick (/me knocks wood). I’ve got some tidying up to do at my aunt’s, then getting packed up for the visit East tomorrow.

I know this is a bit more rambly than my regular stuff, but hey, it’s a blog! I think I’m supposed to ramble. Ok, here’s one nice picture from last night:

Dan Tentler was on hand to take pictures with his new light boxes:

She decided to wear a geek shirt to match my stylin’ MacVeritas shirt!

I was watching a couple friends flirting on twitter today and started talking to Gabe about a good word for flirting on twitter. I came up with “twirting” and looked around to see of someone else had come up with it. I didn’t see it in a google search, so I went over to Wikipedia and looked up twitter, found no Vocabulary section, so I added it and added my word and a few others I’ve heard.

Go here to add others!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s Mike Giarlo actually being chivalrous and holding open a door:

On the far left is Mark Phillips, quite a great photographer. On the right is a blurry Jonathan Brinley. On the far right is Kurt, one of Mark’s coworkers. In the middle is a shiny guy:

Jim Tuttle from NC was there, accompanied by his huge, misshapen head:

This is the position I saw Antonio Barrera in each time I saw him. All that changed was the content of the glass:

Devon Smith has the irc nickname that I would kill for “decasm”:

Here’s Anjanette Young from UW trying to ignore the dork with the camera:

I server on a Shibboleth committee with the guy on the left, Tod Olson from UChicago. On the right is Andrew Bullen from the Illinois State Library. He did an amazing presentation on scanned sheet music, an example of which was converted to MIDI and played as background during his talk:

This is Rob Casson from UMiama, OH. He’s got a lot to say about Drupal, and really needs a haircut:

Jodi Schneider from MA also looks thrilled with the photographer:

We all had some fantastic Indian food:

All the pictures from that evening:

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I walked around the city and took a few pictures:

I got to have dinner with Dave Pearson and Greg Tao, a couple of my old students. Real old now…

More here:

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Here is the Moon from last night:

Compare this to the best shot I could get with a Tamron 28-300 lens:

I’m pretty happy with the results so far. Really looking forward to the 2/20 eclipse!

We’re playing with the format a bit. Lots of CES talk, lots of MacWorld anticipation.

Click to download–>

Hear us ramble on about our geek New Year’s Resolutions!

Click to download–>

PLEASE download the mp3 version so I can get Dan to quit whining about making him provide it!

This week on the MacVeritas.com Weekly Podcast, Dan, Damon, Mike and Declan talk about the latest news, our holiday tech gifts received, a few rumors, a tip on using a custom ringtone on your iPhone and other fun stuff, so go ahead and take a listen.

Dan has finally acknowledged that there is a world out side of AAC, so we now have added an .mp3 file format for download here at the website (not yet available via iTunes).

Click to download–>

Click the picture or here to get the podcast.

Click the picture or here to get the podcast.

What’s BarCampSD?

BarCamp San Diego 2 is an ad-hoc gathering of technical professionals, internet enthusiasts, and others in the San Diego area who wish to share and learn in an open environment.

Here are my pictures:

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