Tag: Around The Web Posts

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I’ve wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I’m pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I’m just going to describe what would happen, and we’ll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology completely from scratch. In my head I am thinking that it would be basically a weekend-long sleepover involving donated beer, good people, music, and tons of know how on various aspects of the web world and technology. […]

Seriously. I look in my spam folder of my gmail account and on my blog every few days, and it’s absolutely ridiculous just how much garbage ends up in it. Between the two I see about 100 or more combined comments/emails per day. It’s just insane. No, I don’t need viagra, or 100 different types of drugs, or some girl in YOURCITY to come over, or to come to your shitty seminar. Please give up already. It’s not like any of these are intelligent either. I bet I could wire up a resistor, a few capacitors, a nine volt battery, and a piece of chicken that would catch 99% of them without any fancy algorithms. Do any of these honestly get through anymore? I guess on my old hotmail account I see the odd one make it through, but rarely does anything come close to getting through my blog or […]

Lately I’ve been noticing a ton of problems over in Facebook land. First of all, alot of the searches seem to return inconsistent results. Sometimes certain friends will appear, and another times they don’t. It seems to be entirely random, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass once you cross over a 100 friends or more. Local gastown-walking-guru Rod Bruno has also had his account randomly deleted several times now, with no apparent explanation. Also, from time to time when I try to login I get the “your user account is down for maintenance” message, and then told to try again later. Maybe this is happening to the users above when they temporarily do not show up in searches. I’m surprised they don’t seem to schedule these things late at night so as not to disrupt usage. In terms of the developer APIs, Facebook is changing many of […]

Last night while watching TV with my dad, I decided to slowly hack together the start of a new game for Facebook. Inspired recently by The Oregon Trail on there, I thought I’d put another good game from my youth up, namely Lemonade. There’s already one on Facebook that mimics the old version (although, it’s basically a wrapper for a website that already has it), but I have some ideas that will sort of bring the game into the modern age, including a mobile component. To be honest, the mathematics behind it all has proven rather interesting. I want the game to be challenging, without easy loopholes to win, and to that end I’ve spent a lot of time mulling over the math in my head. For example, having a weather forecast is fairly useless unless it mimics the approximate success rates of forecasts that we normally have. To that […]

For all of you people who upgraded to Leopard and are using GMail, you have have noticed a few weird things going on. For me, my contacts no longer auto complete properly, and periodically all the javascript in gmail stops working. I’ve checked a lot of newsgroups and many people are having the same problems. Apparently gmail has tried moving to a newer version that isn’t really compatible with Safari 3.0 yet. The solution is to just go up to the top right in gmail and click “old version”, which will roll back your GMail version to one that does work with Safari. You’re welcome 🙂

So tonight I was trying to figure out just how in the world I was going to go about merging multiple RSS feeds together. The end result I was trying to achieve was so my RSS feed on this site would actually have my entries from duanestorey.com as well as those from matthewgood.org. I sort of assumed that feedburner would do that for me, but it turns out you can’t combine your own RSS feeds using it. The solution? Yahoo Pipes. I had never heard of it, but after doing a quick search, I learned it’s the tool to use. And man oh man, is it cool. You can pick and choose different source elements, filters, operators and outputs, and make your own custom output, RSS or otherwise. Took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to merge two streams (using the Union Operator), and then output a sorted […]

As I was browsing the internet tonight and accidentally ran into a photo of mine on a website. So, while I was there, I figured I might as well see where else some of my photos have ended up. Chris Blackburn used one of my HDR shots in a blog posting A shot of Boris used in a blog entry My HDR shot of Kitsilano used on the Kitsilano.ca website My aurora shots on the NASA website A photo of Rebecca on her blog Las Vegas Travel Blog As I was tracking these down in Google, I realized how nice a feature it would be if Flickr had some sort of trackback mechanism, then you could see who was using your photos on the web.

Even though I spent quite a bit of time working on my last theme, I’ve grown rather tired of it. So, after checking out some themes on the net tonight, I found this one which I rather like. I think I’m going to modify it a bit and put up a new version for people to download.

If you accessed my website at all today, you would witnessed one of the slowest websites to ever grace the series of tubes that we call the internet. I spent about two hours on the phone today with web hosting company GoDaddy.com trying to convince them that it was their problem. Unfortunately, even after escalating it multiple times, they still told me it was my fault. So about an hour ago I decided that I had had enough of GoDaddy. I cancelled my hosting, acquired new hosting via HostMonster, and managed to change my DNS and completely set up my blog from scratch in a little under an hour. Unfortunately the hosting costs are a little more at HostMonster, but thankfully everything seems quite a bit faster than it used to be. So long GoDaddy.com. Thanks for coming out. Also, here’s a shot I took off my patio earlier tonight.

I finally cleaned up the main plugin for this website enough that I’m ready to release it to whoever wants to test it out. You can read about it and download it from the Crossroads Page. Basically all the flickr pieces on this website are handled by that plugin, so if you like what you see on this website, then feel free to test it on yours. I still have a ton of work to do on it, mainly in the speed optimization area, but I figured it’s good enough now for some people to test out. Enjoy.