u l t r a m o o k i e

Yahoo! Search BOSS was released a while back, but I hadn’t had time to play with it. Last night, I decided to give it a shot. I had played with the earlier Yahoo! Search API and it was fine, but BOSS is way easier to use. It took me about an hour [...]

Yahoo! Search BOSS was released a while back, but I hadn’t had time to play with it. Last night, I decided to give it a shot. I had played with the earlier Yahoo! Search API and it was fine, but BOSS is way easier to use. It took me about an hour of fooling around to whip up the basics for mookie’s minisearch (”all the goodness of yahoo! search, none of the fat.”). Most of that hour was really trying to figure out JSON since I had no idea how to handle JSON output.

After some tweaking and getting together an OpenSearch plug-in for Firefox 3 and IE7, my search “engine” actually works pretty well.  Now, I can search straight from Firefox 3’s search box, get fast results and have none of those fatty ads.

Yahoo! Search BOSS is damned easy to use and I would encourage anyone that is interested to take a look at it.  The one thing that the developer page did not have was a concrete example.  So, if you wish, you can take a look at the code behind mookie’s minisearch.  It is probably not the best code, but it will give you an idea how to get started.  Remember, this is skeleton code that really does only a small subset of what Yahoo! Search BOSS is capable of, I encourage you to read the documentation in order to get an idea of what it is truly capable of.

Kudos to the Yahoo! Search BOSS team for this release.  Now, the obvious question is: “How is this going to earn Yahoo! money?”.

So, while the kids are sleeping, I have had some time recently to work on my hobby project: mindof.  mindof is the software that I use to run my microblog.
I moved everything over to Google Code so that I can have everything in a repository for version tracking — plus it is nice to [...]

So, while the kids are sleeping, I have had some time recently to work on my hobby project: mindof.  mindof is the software that I use to run my microblog.

I moved everything over to Google Code so that I can have everything in a repository for version tracking — plus it is nice to have a place host the wiki, downloads and bug tracking (hey, if Google offers up free bandwidth and hosting…)

I also added features that I thought would be useful:

• Character counting code.
• Flickr and YouTube parsing and embedding code.
• Neat little pretty icons.
• An icon for iPhones and iPod touches.
• A favicon.
• Rounded corners (this is my favorite).

While I would love for mindof to be this huge success with lots and lots of people using it (like say Wordpress).  The cold hard reality of the whole thing is:

• I am way not a webdev by any means.
• mindof won’t be installed to a huge user-base because it is a tool that is written and customized for myself.
• Anyone could write what I wrote.
• Even if it became wildly popular, I would have no time to truly maintain it like it should be.  (’course this last one is false because if it because wildly popular, there would be others working on it as the code is all Open Source).

I will keep on poking and modifying the code in order to learn.  But, mindof is its own little niche software product with at least one user:  Me.

At least it has a cool logo (which is a riff on the ultramookie logo designed by JR).

Update:  Ugh, I pushed the wrong button and deleted this post.  Reposting from memory and half of an unpublished version.
I have been using MyBlogLog for a while now.  I like it a lot.  I tried out FriendFeed the other day and it is basically the same thing as MyBlogLog, but not as nice.  And recently, [...]

Update:  Ugh, I pushed the wrong button and deleted this post.  Reposting from memory and half of an unpublished version.

I have been using MyBlogLog for a while now.  I like it a lot.  I tried out FriendFeed the other day and it is basically the same thing as MyBlogLog, but not as nice.  And recently, there have been a lot of new features coming to MyBlogLog that is making it my default page in all of my webbrowsers.  In this Web 2.0 world (when are we getting the Web 2.1 or Web 3.0 upgrade by the way?), everyone has multiple blogs, feeds (like Flickr) and random sources of information (like Yelp, Twitter and such).  It is hard to keep track of all that information — and that is where MyBlogLog comes into play.  MyBlogLog “streams” your friend’s digital lives/information into one central location for you — it is like your very own internet secretary.  Very, very cool stuff.

And if you have a blog, the statistics tracking of MyBlogLog is also very useful.  I use MyBlogLog to look at outgoing clicks on my blog, that’s something not even Google Analytics has.  Yay!

So, if you haven’t tried MyBlogLog yet, give it a shot.  It is a very cool tool.

(And yes, Ian, I won’t get the streams crossed  :)  )

I admit I am no front-end web developer.  For me, writing code for a website is basically:

Does this work?  Yes.  Cool.
Does it really work?  Yes.  Awesome.
Does it look kind of decent?  Yes.  Nice!
Can I do some security stuff with it?  Kind of.  Good.

Yesterday was Crack Day at Yahoo! and I guess Alice was in the [...]

I admit I am no front-end web developer.  For me, writing code for a website is basically:

1. Does this work?  Yes.  Cool.
2. Does it really work?  Yes.  Awesome.
3. Does it look kind of decent?  Yes.  Nice!
4. Can I do some security stuff with it?  Kind of.  Good.

Yesterday was Crack Day at Yahoo! and I guess Alice was in the mood to do a security review of my mindof code.  And she had some nifty front-end engineering security tips for me (since she is a front-end engineer).  And of course, she came up with some horrific hacks that could happen if I didn’t update my code.

So, I just updated the code with the tips that she gave me on the security side (updated code here).  There are some scalability and not-as-critical security enhancements she found, which I need to work on soon.  But, I wanted to get the critical stuff in there right away and released.

My thanks to Alice for the awesome tips and for teaching me some cool stuff.

So, uh, I can code in PHP. I can even do some MySQL stuff. Really, I convince myself over and over again that I can.
Anyways, I was getting into the whole Twitter thing. I think it is pretty good as a microblog. But, I like to have my data for myself. [...]

So, uh, I can code in PHP. I can even do some MySQL stuff. Really, I convince myself over and over again that I can.

Anyways, I was getting into the whole Twitter thing. I think it is pretty good as a microblog. But, I like to have my data for myself. Twitter is cool and all, but I want to run my own thing. So, I went on the prowl to find some Twitter clone. I didn’t find any that suited me — some were cool and all, but still too big and did too much.

So, I wrote my own. I call it mindof. I am now runnning my own microblog using my own software. The reason for a microblog (or as I have seen “sideblog”) is so that I can collect my random thoughts. Most of the time I have lots of random things floating around in my head — all of which would not make a decent blog posting. So, I like the idea of a microblog that just capture a stream of consciousness which would otherwise be lost.

The code for mindof is out there for everyone to see. The lastest version is here. Don’t giggle too hard. It’s not a big project because I don’t have much time between family, work and other things (school, etc).

I’ll try to work on it some. I know there are lots of improvements I would love to see in the code. But, the basics that I needed for a microblog are there already (add entry, delete entry, permalinks, rss feed, and user security). I’d love to add commenting, Twitter updating using the Twitter API, and integrate some Yahoo! services also. We’ll see what kind of stuff I can do with it.

I am happy that at least I finished one release. Yay!

Thanks to JR for sending this very cool web analytics software over (via delicious). The software is a new package named Piwik, which is the “new” version of phpMyVisites. I’m going to run Piwik side-by-side with Google Analytics for a week. If Piwik can gather the stats that I need correctly, then [...]

Thanks to JR for sending this very cool web analytics software over (via delicious). The software is a new package named Piwik, which is the “new” version of phpMyVisites. I’m going to run Piwik side-by-side with Google Analytics for a week. If Piwik can gather the stats that I need correctly, then I will shutdown Google Analytics for two reasons. First, I can then keep my analytics to myself — sorry, no more spying for you Google (not that this measly blog would make much difference). Second, well, I can keep my analytics to myself! Privacy is a nice thing. Lets see how it goes.

I installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my main PC notebook.  I admit it.  I did it.  Yesterday.
While I loved having Fedora 8 — or in general any distro of Linux — on the notebook, I wanted to do stuff that I couldn’t do in Linux.  One of the big drivers was the fact that [...]

I installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my main PC notebook.  I admit it.  I did it.  Yesterday.

While I loved having Fedora 8 — or in general any distro of Linux — on the notebook, I wanted to do stuff that I couldn’t do in Linux.  One of the big drivers was the fact that Netflix’s Instant Play just went unlimited.  That means that I can stream as much as I want from Netflix and still have my three DVDs delivered.  That makes for a wonderful deal at $14 a month.  The only problem was that the Netflix player only works in Windows.  Sigh.

A side benefit is that I can now play some of my older games, like Command and Conquer.

Other than the stuff that came with Windows Vista, I haven’t really put any other tools on there that need to be purchased.  Everything else is pretty much Open Source stuff — Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.  There’s some freeware stuff that I installed also like iTunes and Yahoo! Messenger.

Installation was a breeze (Microsoft did do a good job of cleaning up the install process).  Most of my devices were detected and installed during installation — whatever was left (like a MemoryStick reader) was later installed during a Windows Update.  Vista is not as slow or bad as people say it is — I am running it on a older Celeron M 420 notebook that I bought in April, the box has 2GB of RAM, a fast SATA drive, but suffers from slow built-in video.  Is there “Wow” in Vista like Bill Gates wants people to believe?  Not really.  Vista is really a five year warmed over version of XP with some extra bells and whistles added on.  It works, it’s OK.