I just posted a blog entry about the open source Twitter client I’ve been working on. It’s over at Buttered Cat Blog. Hopefully some help will start trickling in.
Looking for a new name for it instead of TweetTweet, what do you all say about Tweetldum? Seems to be the liked one so far.
I’ve been super lazy and haven’t gotten my old posts from Typo imported into wordpress, I definitely know there’s a few articles that get linked a bit so hopefully I’ll get them back soon.
So apparently there’s this website Wikileaks who recently got censored by a California judge.
The funny thing is that I hadn’t even heard about until now. I recall seeing a few articles in my RSS feeds that mentioned Wikileaks but it never really triggered a response for me to read them. I didn’t really look into what it was until I saw it mentioned on Daring Fireball.
The interesting part is that the link I discovered it through is in itself a link to boing boing, which is then referencing another site. Basically the news causes a chain reaction on the internet, since it ends up on high traffic places like boing boing and then just about everybody else starts mentioning or finding out about it like me.
I wonder what they attempt to accomplish since there’s a ton of alternate domain names across many countries, not to mention using the IP address directly, that you can use to still read all the material on Wikileaks. They couldn’t get an injunction on the hosting since I believe it’s hosted outside of the US. Wikileaks was also given almost no warning, and didn’t even have representation in the hearing.
So now that they’ve censored it, they probably just increased the visibility of the site instead of what they intended. And I just found some excellent evidence of that: Graph of blog posts mentioning ‘wikileaks’ in past 90 days
UPDATE: Looks like it probably hit just about every major news site, it was on digg and slashdot, which both have the readership to destroy a web server.
So with the news that NetNewsWire is now free, I decided I should try to fully switch to using it along with using delicious in place of google reader’s shared items.
So if you follow my shared items, use my delicious feed instead, here:
Web: http://del.icio.us/jfro/shared
RSS: http://del.icio.us/rss/jfro/shared
If you really want to see everything I jam into delicious, use my regular feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/jfro
So my first impressions with Git which I’ve heard some various discussions about in #macsb has been quite good. It’s pretty easy to get started with, specially with the decentralized nature, meaning you don’t need to setup a repository and do the whole import/checkout dance that you have to do with subversion. If I have a project that I want to start versioning, I just jump right in and tell git to fire it up, add all the files (save a few like say build/) and then commit and I’m already versioning.
I always found the starting of a new project with subversion to be a bit confusing and awkward. It involved setting up a repository if there isn’t one, or a new folder in an existing, Importing the project somewhere into the repository, Finally checking out a fresh working copy of the project, moving aside your previous copy of it. There may be some better way that doesn’t involve shuffling your old pre-svn copy out of the way, but its still kinda clunky. From then on it’s not really that bad though.
One of the first things I noticed which was different, but that I actually like, is that by default you have to explicitly tell git what you’re going to commit. You go though and add any new or modified files that you want to be part of the commit. I like this since very often I find myself committing bits and pieces of a project, but not committing every modification I’ve made. In subversion I either have to do separate commits, or specify each thing after ’svn commit’ which is not as elegant as actually marking items for a commit like the approach git seems to take. It agrees with my method of going through a lot of changes and approving certain changes for actual committing.
There’s also some other benefits that I have yet to dive into beyond reading about, but one of the other strengths of git that people talk about, which is branching. Git allows branching in such a simple efficient way that you can easily branch off and experiment with stuff, easily coming back to your stable branch, merging anything that might have been a success. I’ve always found the procedure for branching in subversion to be a bit daunting, git’s in comparison is trivial. Creating a branch in git is literally a single command, making it much more attractive to allow you to mess around, track changes, but easily keep things cleanly organized. This I will definitely have to experiment to see if it really is as awesome as it looks.
I’d definitely recommend giving git a serious look, specially for anybody that isn’t already invested in a particular versioning system. It seems to be a decent fit for an independent developer like myself, and even sounds like it would work well at work if we weren’t already heavily using subversion. Since my personal projects only have me working on them, it works well for me to get going quickly with tracking changes, not having to do the bit lengthier setup that seems to come with subversion.
Check out the Git Tutorial to get a good feel of how git works. See if it may appeal to your way of doing things.
I rented The Orange Box recently, purely to play Portal which I’ve heard great things about. The reviews I read were very correct, it’s a gem. I started the game last night before dinner, and finished before bed, it’s definitely short but it was great. The game mechanics involving creating a portal to solve how you get out were not only cool, but the plot and humor throughout it was good too. All leading up to a decent ending with hilarious credits. It’s great. I don’t even really care to play anything else in bundle of games, Portal was worth the rental.
So I went ahead and cancelled my myspace account yesterday. After getting yet another porn related friend request decided I might as well just kill the account. Plus with everybody I know on facebook and with Google looking to bring new stuff into the social network game, why should I keep open an account on what I consider an abomination of web development. Glad to rid of that nasty place from the list of sites I hold accounts with.
So I just modified the layout slightly to my blog here, and what happened? Oh the front page stopped rendering, due to some filter chain stuff, which I know nothing about.
WTF? I had this happen before, forget what fixed it. It’s been restarted, now let’s see if this post helps
Glad to see the much talked about future for Sparkle is undergoing construction. The idea was to centralize the Sparkle update process, to be very similar to Apple’s own software update. This would allow you to keep much of the 3rd party software up-to-date without interruption within the applications themselves, and to easily keep them all up-to-date regardless of when you open them.
I think the big thing is actually the lack of interuption, sometimes you’re not so happy to have the sparkle software update window popping up in your face unexpected. This will be a savior for background applications like Hazel which is a pretty cool background system for organizing files.
I look forward to seeing this new iteration of Sparkle from Andy Matuschak come into fruition
Technorati Tags:
mac, macsb, programming, software, sparkle
So giving MarsEdit 2.0 a run, I’ve used ecto for a while mostly out of laziness, liking the WYSIWYG editor. It looks like MarsEdit 2 has features that make me happy, so I’m trying it out to see how it goes.
Flickr interface is pretty cool, check it out!
Spiffy, next up, blogging about Magento