blog.dknowles.org

A seamless google reader / wordpress integration.   

I want to be able to pull up the links I’ve shared in my google reader and write comments about them to post directly into my blog.  Most of the time, I read articles directly in reader so it’s a pain to have to click the links copy them, then paste them here to comment on them. I’m thinking either a greasemonkey script, or maybe a way of making a daily digest.   

Anyone in the lazyweb want to make that happen for me? :) 

24 people who mattered in 2007

A nice list of people who mattered (in the technological world) this year.  There’s a number of people on that list whose work I follow pretty closely, and a few more that I’ve heard of before.  Good stuff.

• From a coworker, a great article on how django processes a request.  I’d actually figured most of this out from digging through the django codebase in the past.  Would’ve been nice to have this reference then. :) 
• A good primer on javascript keyboard events in different browsers.  I’ve been fighting with this one at work recently.  Not fun.
• An interesting javascript pattern for handling real public/private variables.
• Seven rules of unobtrusive javascript.
• Seven is a popular number:  Seven javascript techniques you should be using today
   

I’ve got a bug in one of my scripts somewhere that’s saving multiple entries for video files in mythtv’s videometadata table. Here’s a quick hacky SQL query to find them:

SELECT intid, filename, coverfile
FROM videometadata
WHERE filename IN
  (SELECT filename FROM
    (SELECT filename, COUNT(*) AS ttl FROM videometadata
     GROUP BY filename HAVING ttl > 1
    ) AS tmpfoo
  ) ORDER BY filename

Maybe one day, I’ll convince myself that using MySQL transactions is a good idea, and start using them whenever I do SQL writes.

In related news, I just NULLed out all my coverdata fields in my mythTV’s mythvideo table. Regenerating all of that crap is really tedious, as the website’s API I use gets flaky after I hit it with a few hundred requests in a matter of minutes. :(

Sigh.

Update:

All fixed.   Took ~90 lines of python.  Good script to have around anyway:  looks for entries with no/missing/invalid coverfile and tries to re-fetch it from thetvdb.com.  One day I’ll get all this crap into SVN.   I’m getting quite the collection of these handy scripts. :)

I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate all blogging software.  It all sucks.  None of it fits my specifications, but I’m too lazy/busy to write my own.  For now I’m settling with WordPress, but I’m not completely satisfied.  I was fairly okay with Movable Type for a while, but I got really frustrated with its admin interface.  It’s really slow.  And I tried to set up dynamic page loading (lets face it, I’m not getting enough traffic here to take down my shared host), but then realized it wanted to use PHP for some ungodly reason even though the rest of the app is written in Perl.  (Yaay consistency!)

I’m hoping I’ll be more satisfied with this WordPress nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.  (Well, as optimistic as one can be about a PHP app)

I wish there was a good blogging solution written in Python.  Then again, python support on shared hosts isn’t all that great.  And likely more work than I’m willing to put forth.

As for the love part of this, OpenID gets my thumbs up.  I’ve been a fan since brad first posted about it way back when. I’ve never done much with it until now, though.  I get a free identity with my livejournal account, but I’m really not a fan of having my old whiney LJ entries be the face of my identity.  So I set up an account with myopenid.com, which seems pretty solid.  And I set up dknowles.org to be a delegate for the identity.  I’m pretty sure I could do the same thing with LJ serving my identity instead, and dknowles.org would show up in comment posts and what not; but I’m mostly over the LJ thing anyway.  I should probably just subscribe my few remaining friends that write there to my google reader.

I installed Leopard on my work Macbook Pro on Friday. Other than some corporate image wonkiness (there’s always something…) it’s been an incredibly pleasant experience thus far.

At first, I wasn’t a huge fan of the new dock UI. It’s growing on me, though. Mostly it’s probably because I made it even smaller than it used to be, so the bright light things that show when an application is open isn’t so offensive anymore. Or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it.

Stacks looked like nice eye candy at first, but not so useful. But I’ve come around. Adding my downloads folder & my applications folder to my dock is a really handy, quick way to access those things. (Of course, I usually default to quicksilver keyboard shortcuts for applications)

Spaces is by far the best virtual desktop implementation I’ve seen yet on mac. It’s still lacking a few things: a keyboard shortcut to move windows to different desktops, proper option+tab app switching behavior, maybe screen edge triggers for moving windows to other desktops. But once I figured out how to have firefox windows on multiple desktops, I was sold. That was always my biggest shortcoming with virtue/desktop manager/any other solution I’ve tried in the past.

The new terminal is wonderful. I spend a lot of my time (at work & at home) inside a terminal session, so having a sane implementation is a godsend. (Although iTerm has become a really good drop-in replacement lately) Built-in tabs, better/more configuration options, proper keybindings are all great additions. The only thing I’ve had a hard time adjusting to is the lack of select-to-copy. Between my linux sessions & the old iTerm functionality, that’s going to be a hard habit to break.

From a work point-of-view, I’m enjoying filevault not taking a shit every few days. I’ve had it want to clean up once or twice now, but it did it automatically and didn’t take very long. It’s about freaking time.

Autofs + kerberos nfs is great. I can access all my work auto shares from terminal without any wacky configuration nightmares. It just works.

Likewise, the new mobile account option is really nifty. Lots of things are auto-syncing from work when I’m there (or VPN’d in) which makes my life easier.

There’s also a lot of small UI tweaks that I really like. An example: the networking pane in system preferences is pretty. Showing a lock next to secured wireless networks in the tray menu. The new finder look. All good things IMO.

Now for my biggest gripe thus far:

The translucent menu bar is really ugly. I really like blue backgrounds (the tiger default background anyone?) and the translucent menu bar turns a pastel blue with this configuration. Bad move, apple. You’ve been known for that glorious grey menu bar for years. Why change now?

All in all, I’m really happy with my Leopard install. Between Apple & Google’s macops team, I’ve got a really awesome cutting-edge OS on my laptop. And it’s pretty. And I like pretty things. :)