tuxbox: hacking my linux box

Checking In On Checking In

2011-08-26T00:41:00.000-07:00

It's been a few months since I did my write-up on location-based check-in services. I've been checking in pretty consistently, and the three main services that I covered have each recently announced changes.

First, my experience: I chose Gowalla as my check-in app of choice, mostly because I like the colorful and attractive graphics that each category (and often individual spot) has. Gowalla also has the added benefit of being able to check in to Facebook and Foursquare, and show my friends' check-ins from those services.

Gowalla Items

At each check-in, especially since I auto-post them to Twitter and Facebook, I try to make the post interesting by taking a picture if appropriate, and always adding some sort of comment to give it context and personality. This works pretty well, but the pictures uploaded to Gowalla are tiny. I would prefer to be able to take and upload higher-resolution shots. I would also like to be able to post pictures not taken from the Gowalla app at the time of check-in. Often it takes a while to find the correct spot, and by that time, the moment I want to capture may have passed. It would be nice to be able to whip out the phone, take a picture, and then use that with my check-in. I know you can do this with Foursquare, but Gowalla likes to provide more assurances that you are actually at the place where you check in (though anything can be faked). I've considered creating a fake camera app that would simply allow you to choose an image to "take" from the existing Gallery images.

Another thing I've gotten into has been Item collecting. Occasionally when you check in, Gowalla awards you a virtual item, which can be "donated" to a spot that doesn't have too many items, or traded for an item at a spot, after you check in. This aspect of checking in appeals to the collector in me. What I ended up doing was keeping those items that had had the greatest number of owners, and trading the others, in hopes of accumulating items with long and interesting histories. I was doing OK plodding along, but the items don't come too quickly, which is frustrating, and they aren't a very intuitive feature, which means that most of Gowalla's already small user base doesn't do any trading with their items.

Social Apps

Gowalla just announced via their blog that they are going to do away with the item feature entirely in the coming months. This makes me sad, but I'm hoping that this means they have a clear and innovative vision that would clash with the item system. The post seems to imply that they have something big to offer in place of item swapping that they are not yet prepared to announce, so I'm hopeful, but I don't know whether anything they do will drastically increase their user base. Perhaps they have something in mind that will increase existing user engagement; something to do when checking in that they would prefer we do over item swapping.

Perhaps Gowalla could pick up some users from Facebook Places, which is apparently becoming less of a check-in service, and more of a way to tack your location on to an existing post. I actually think this is a good idea, since most Facebook check-ins are simply a person-place-time data point, and have no user-generated content to make them interesting.

Speaking of making check-ins more interesting, Foursquare recently announced that they are adding events to places, and they aren't relying on users to generate and update the schedules: they're turning to the pros. This is good news. Whereas before a typical foursquare user would check in at a movie theater or a concert hall without comment or commenting simply to mention the event, now the app presents them with a list of movies or acts that are currently showing where they are checking in, and they have the option to pick one. Hopefully this will encourage users to add details other than what they're there for, like what they think of it, or who they're with.

I actually use Foursquare through Gowalla, but this feature isn't available to me, since Gowalla only maps its spots to Foursquare's venues, not the new events. If Gowalla fails to deliver on their new vision, I might find myself simply using the Foursquare app to check in. Foursquare allows you to post any picture with your checkin, including one you already took, and the Foursquare user base is much larger than Gowalla, so I have many more friends who use it. Switching would be very simple for me to do, but I would definitely miss Gowalla's colorful and cartoony icons.

Google+: Impressions So Far

2011-07-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

I was able to get an invitation to join Google's new social network, Google+, a few days ago, and I thought I would give my initial impressions.

First of all, it's a social network, which means that you can post content which others you specify can see, and you can see others' content that they have allowed you to see. In that way it is much like Facebook. I think you all get the idea, so I'm going to focus on what's different and new.

Google+ Android app

The first thing you'll notice when you sign up is that instead of simply "Friends", Google wants you to categorize your contacts into "Circles", which are sets of contacts. The purpose of this is so that you can easily share different things with "Family" than "Work"; "Acquaintances" than "Friends" (your real friends), and of course you can create as many custom circles as you wish.

Of course, Facebook has Friends Lists which lets you do the exact same thing, but not many people use them, and almost no one picks and chooses which Friends Lists to share things with on Facebook, whereas the idea is that with Google+, that will be the norm.

I think the most compelling features of Google+ are as follows:

Hangouts - You can flip on your webcam and start a Hangout, which you can invite your circles to or post to your profile. Others who see you're hanging out can join you, and what results is a very easy multi-way video chat. When someone starts talking, the big video switches to them.
Automatic mobile photo/video upload - People like to take pictures and videos on their phone, and it can be quite a hassle to get those photos and videos off. You can either plug your phone in to your computer, or you can manually select pictures and videos for upload using an app. Google+ offers set-it-and-forget-it convenience: with the Google+ app, you have the option to have everything automatically uploaded to your own private space, from which you can easily share selected photos and videos. You can select whether to upload over the network, only over WiFi, or only over WiFi while charging, so it doesn't eat up your data plan or drain your battery if you don't want it to. The online backup feature alone is worth installing the app, even if you never share anything, but once it's already online, why not use it?
It's Google - and therefore very conveniently integrated with all of your Google sites, like Gmail, Google Reader, Picasa, and Google Calendar. Those of us who use these services will see a notification counter and "share" button in the top right hand corner of the page. It will just be "there" for us to use.

I find it interesting that, at least as yet, there is no way to publicly post a message to another person. On Facebook, this would be like posting to someone's wall. On Twitter, it would be @ mentions and replies. This makes it significantly less social in my opinion: basically everyone is simply publishing things and sharing and commenting on things that others publish. You can publish all you want, but no one interacts with your posts unless they follow you. Even when you mention someone else, only that person gets a notification, not their friends. The only serendipity is in comments.

I predict that this will make Google+ much less of a content generation space than Facebook. People will tend more to import their existing streams of content to Google+, rather than using Google+ to initiate the conversation.

I could be wrong. I hope so. Then again, I personally almost never post on other people's Facebook walls. All of my content on Facebook originates on other services, such as Twitter, Gowalla, Posterous, and Blogger. This makes it easy for me to check a box on those services and send the content to Google+ as well as Facebook, and thus Facebook is not the exclusive holder of my content (this is by design). But I wonder what the designers of Google+ are intending to do by not implementing such a seemingly basic feature.

They may not have been able to come up with a way to make it work with circles. After all, if all of your content gets published only to the circles that you pick each time, how can you trust your contacts to pick the appropriate circles with which to share their posts to your profile? (On the other hand, anyone who can see a post can republish it to anyone else, unless sharing is disabled.)

I don't think Google+ will die or be as obscure as Orkut (or as hated as Buzz), but I also don't think it will become as popular a place to spend time and interact with all of your friends as Facebook. Google+ is a great personal publishing platform, and it has some useful tools for connecting with friends and colleagues, but it is definitely not a Facebook clone, nor, I fear, a Facebook killer.

Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.: Location-Based Checkin Networks

2011-05-23T00:24:00.000-07:00

This post is the second in my series of Android app comparison posts. Last time I compared two Twitter clients, this time I'm looking at location-based checkin services.

Social apps

There is one thing to be careful of in sharing your location, and that is privacy. Particularly when I post pictures of my small children, I don't want to make it too obvious to creeps and stalkers exactly where I live. I also personally don't want my full name publicly associated with my posts. You'll notice I don't post it on my blog, or on Twitter. Of course, once these things get imported into Facebook, they become associated with my name, but I have configured my privacy settings so that the association is only visible to friends (and sometimes not all of them), or in some cases, friends of friends.

I'm the kind of person who likes to post things from my phone to share with my friends and the world. I particularly like to post pictures, but location is another very social aspect of sharing. Checkin services allow you to post about places such as restaurants, shops, parks, landmarks, transportation, or just about anything else. It's social because a places are concrete things that other people can experience too. They might enjoy the same restaurant, or be looking for one. They might see you check in at a series of airports (or ferries), and get a sense of your travel experience.

Facebook Places

The most popular checkin service is actually Facebook Places. I think this is because almost everyone already uses Facebook, so they don't need to sign up for anything new, or connect with a new list of friends to share: they can just share.

I haven't done much with Facebook Places. It's also the least interesting, at least among my friends, in that most checkins have no comments or pictures. When I post that I'm somewhere, I usually like to say what I'm doing there: what I ordered, who's with me, what I'm looking for. I also like to include a picture. You can do all of these things with Facebook Places, it seems that no one does, though.

Foursquare

The most popular of the dedicated checkin networks is Foursquare. Foursquare is where you will be able to connect with the most people who go out of their way to check in. Foursquare also makes checking in interesting in a number of ways:

Foursquare deal

Points: Each checkin is scored, and you can see how well you're doing in the last 7 days against each of your friends on the leaderboard.
Badges: Checking in earns you different badges based on the number and type of checkins you do. You can see which badges you have and which your friends have, and which you don't.
Mayorships: If you're the one who checks in the most days at a particular venue in the last 60 days, you become the "mayor" of that place.
Deals: Some stores offer special discounts to the mayor, or to anyone who checks in frequently enough.
Categories: Foursquare venues are categorized, and each category has a different icon in the interface and can earn you different bonuses.

Gowalla

Gowalla is in many ways very similar to Foursquare, however, they have their own unique twist to checking in at a spot. (You'll notice they each call it something different: place, venue, spot, location).

Stamps:Whereas Foursquare is more of a competition against others, Gowalla promotes itself as a "game" and tends to be more individual. There is no score, but every place you check in gives you a unique Stamp to collect on your "passport".
Pins: Similar to Badges, pins are awarded for checking in, sometimes for a number of times at a number of unique types of spots, sometimes for places (like states or countries), and sometimes for events or special days.
Categories: Gowalla has its own category system, similar to Foursquare, but whereas Foursquare's icons (including Badges) are drab monochrome black and white, Gowalla's icons are colorful and bright, drawn in a cartoony style resembling stickers that is very aesthetically attractive.
Items: Sometimes when you check in, you will find a bonus Item. There are over 100 different kinds of items, and each item has a unique ID number and a history of who has handled it and where. You can add items to your collection, or you can swap them for items left by others at different spots.
Trips: Gowalla has trips generated by users, which are a collection of spots to check in. Once you have completed the tour by checking in at each of those spots, you earn the pin for that Trip.

Gowalla also has some nice features on their website: if you check in at a series of airports within certain time parameters, it will combine them into a single trip, showing each airport along the way and the distance between them.

Google Latitude

Another checkin service that I have not used much is Google Latitude. Latitude is based on Google Maps, and will track your location (and give you stats for your own reference), and share it with your friends who also use Latitude. You can check in to locations, either manually, or automatically for locations you choose, or you can have Latitude give you a notification when it thinks you might want to check in.

The great thing about all of these checkin services is that you don't need to choose anymore. Foursquare will update Twitter and/or Facebook, and Gowalla will not only post your checkins to Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook, but it will also retrieve your friends' checkin information from Facebook and Foursquare and display it alongside your Gowalla friends' checkins. (All of these are optional.)

The one thing that doesn't get transferred between Gowalla and Foursquare is photos. Photos on Gowalla are posted to Facebook, but not Foursquare, and Gowalla does not retrieve pictures from other services.

Gowalla tries to match its database of spots to Foursquare's database of venues. It's not perfect, though. When there isn't a matching spot, or Gowalla doesn't have it matched, it will still update your foursquare friends, but the checkin won't count for points or towards a mayorship.

Footfeed

Footfeed is an app that allows you to manually manage which spots match with which (on Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Latitude), and then check in to all of them in one fell swoop. The app is a full featured replacement for any of the other services, with the exception of pictures.

You can report unmatched or mismatched spot/venues to Gowalla and they will add them to their database. Both Gowalla and Foursquare allow you to submit updated/corrected information, and to manually add missing spots.

Personally, I use Gowalla, but I have the Foursquare app installed, and most of my friends who check in do so on Foursquare or Facebook. Occasionally when I know that Gowalla doesn't match up the spots correctly (and I'm not posting a picture), I will use Footfeed to check in.

Android: Twidroyd vs. TweetCaster Pro: Twitter Clients

2011-05-22T21:06:00.000-07:00

Recently someone asked me about my choice of Twitter client on Android: why had I chosen the Twidroyd app over the official client from Twitter? At the time I had also just downloaded, and was trying out the TweetCaster Pro app.

Social apps

I have been meaning to do a series of posts about various categories of Android apps. Hopefully this will be the first such post. My goal is to be helpful to others who are curious about what apps are out there, but aren't as adventurous as I am in trying them all. Come on in, by the way, the water's fine.

The first thing that attracted me to the Twidroyd app was the Posterous Twitter help page, which basically says that if you want to use a Twitter app on Android that integrates Posterous, Twidroyd is your only option.

I have been using Posterous to post pictures, video, and occasionally long-form text from my phone since before I had a smartphone, and I'm still very happy with it. As such, Posterous integration was a good selling point for an Android Twitter app.

I also at the time downloaded the official Twitter app, as well as TweetDeck, but I didn't find either of them to be particularly compelling.

Twidroyd

I should mention that, while Twidroyd is the only Twitter app that integrates Posterous, there is also an official Posterous app, which generates posts that can be auto-posted to Twitter. This is the way that I end up sending most of my Posterous posts. The only advantage of using Twidroyd is if I wanted to create a Posterous post, but post it to Twitter with text that is different from just the title of the post.

Another Twidroyd feature that I like is its Bit.ly integration. Twidroyd allows you to enter your Bit.ly account's API key, and the shortened links will be "yours" and show up on your personal Bit.ly history, where you can track and manage them with the rest of your Bit.ly shortened URLs. What Twidroyd seems to do best is integrate itself well with other online services. Here's a list:

Photos: Lockerz, Twitpic, Twitgoo, YFrog, Posterous
Video: Lockerz, Vidly.com, Posterous, Twitvid.com
URL Shortening: TinyURL, is.gd, Bit.ly, Goo.gl
Tweet Shortening: Tmi, Twitlonger

It also works with multiple Twitter accounts, though I only have one.

Twidroyd lets you customize its notifications in just about every possible way. One nice feature that other clients don't have is that it displays the tweet text in the notification bar. This is something that I'm finding I miss when trying out other clients.

Speaking of other clients, Amazon recently gave away the Premium version of TweetCaster as their free app of the day, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

TweetCast

The first thing that struck me was that it was very visually appealing. And not only does it look good, the interface is very functional! Tweets by me, replies, and mentions, are all highlighted in different color gradient backgrounds. Favorites and retweets are marked with intuitive icons. Tweets by me have the icon on the opposite side, and for retweets, the retweeter's icon is superimposed on the bottom corner of the original author's icon. Looking at the settings, all of these things are customizable as well.

TweetCaster also integrates with Bit.ly, but it doesn't use the API key. It supports the following 3rd party services:

Photos: lockerz.com, twitpic.com, yfrog.com
Video: twitvid.com
URL Shortening: bit.ly, is.gd

The jury is still out on whether I'm going to switch to TweetCaster. The way the interface graphically communicates so much information is appealing. I can post photos and video directly to Posterous, and I have yet to post a Bit.ly-shortened URL link from my phone. If I have more than 140 characters to post, I can just use Posterous instead of Twidroyd's integrated text shortening features.

What it comes down to for me is Twidroyd's notification previews vs. TweetCaster's pretty and functional interface. For now I'm using both.

Atrix Screens

2011-04-05T23:38:00.001-07:00

I finally got a screenshot app on my phone that works (and it doesn't require root, which is good since the OTA update unrooted my phone).
This is just my home screens, but this post is also my test of the Blogger app.

Edit: Apparently it scales the pictures you upload. That's unfortunate.

Motorola Atrix 4G

2011-03-09T23:21:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I ordered myself a Motorola Atrix 4G! This is a big deal: I've been wanting a smartphone, specifically an Android phone, for quite some time.

My contract isn't actually up. Last February we renewed all four of the contracts on our family plan at the same time. This, I realize, was a mistake, because while it increases flexibility in that it makes it easier to leave the carrier (two years later when all of the contracts are up), it actually reduces flexibility in that if you have trouble with one of the phones (as it did with my dad's), you are left without the option to upgrade out of time.

Since my current phone is a "dumb" phone, the early termination fee (when I cancel the contract) is not so bad. With 11 months left on the contract, it will be $98.

The way I'm going about this is to order the Atrix on a new line on our family plan. When it arrives and I activate it, I will attempt to get AT&T to exchange the numbers associated with the contracts so that my old contract has the new number, and the new contract, with the Atrix, has my old number. I estimate that I have a 20% chance of succeeding.

I would like to keep my number, so if that doesn't work, I will simply port the old number to Google Voice. I currently use Google Voice for voicemail and for sending text messages from a computer, and I wouldn't mind it a bit if by default, everything went through it, especially text messages, since I would prefer not to pay for them. If I port the number, text messages sent to it won't be text messages anymore: they will be data. I have always hated that the carriers charged so much for delivering messages piggybacking on traffic between the phone and tower that was being sent regardless of whether there was a message.

Why the Motorola Atrix 4G?

Well, that's a good question, after all, the name is a lie. The Atrix is not physically capable of actual 4G, and AT&T has even disabled HSPA+ upload speeds on everything but the iPhone 4. What AT&T offers is "4G download speeds delivered by HSPA+ and enhanced backhaul." Real, actual 4G is coming to AT&T's network later this year (probably this summer) in the form of LTE.

Motorola Atrix 4G

If I waited until my line was eligible for an upgrade in October, there would almost certainly by then have been a crop of new phones introduced, of equal caliber to the Atrix, supporting actual 4G. Motorola wasn't my first choice in manufacturer. I have heard nothing but good things about HTC's Sense interface, and nothing but bad things about Motorola's Motoblur interface. There is, in fact, a direct competitor to the Motorola Atrix 4g: the HTC Inspire 4G. Why did I not go with that instead? It's even cheaper.

HTC Inspire 4G

There are a number of reasons, of course. First, despite Motoblur's sordid reputation, reviews and users in forums seem to be saying that it's actually a good experience on the Atrix. The Atrix is a very fast phone, with a Dual-core 1GHz processor and a Gigabyte of RAM. The Inspire is no speed slouch either, but, especially coming from a feature phone, I'm not keen on it's size. I have very good eyes at close distance, and have always liked screen real-estate: not largeness of screen, but number of pixels. The Atrix has over a third more pixels in its 4" display as the Inspire has in its 4.3" display. The Atrix also has four times the internal memory as the Inspire, though both can be expanded with up to 32GB microSD cards. The Inspire has an 8 megapixel camera, but the Atrix has both front and rear-facing cameras, and I don't think that the 5 megapixel snapshots taken by the Atrix will be of any less quality than the Inspire's.

The Atrix accessories have been touted as it's huge selling point, but I don't see much use for them, especially at the prices they're asking. I would rather haul a netbook around than a phone dock, and I already have a computer hooked up to my HDTV at home, so I don't think I'll need to hook the phone up directly.

Selling Points

In short, despite the hype about a "superphone," and "4G," I find the Atrix to be by far the best phone for me:

Despite being small (and pocketable--I'm a guy, I don't carry a purse), it has excellent screen quality and resolution.
Because it was made to drive a netbook, it is a powerhouse phone, capable of running any apps I throw at it--and I intend to be a power user.
Because it's a flagship product, it gets all the bells and whistles, like the fingerprint scanner, HD video recording, front-facing camera, gorilla glass, etc.

The iPhone is physically a fine product, but it does not interest me, mainly because of Apple's philosophy of control, especially when they see an opportunity to lock down a revenue stream.

Why now?

I suppose I could have waited until October. As I have mentioned before, AT&T is rolling out their LTE network, presumably with a new crop of top-of-the-line phones, and there would be no hassles with my phone number. I could just wait. I was going to wait.

But it was my birthday, and I got "smartphone" money! Did I mention I had already waited a long time? I think there will always be something better to wait for, and if you always wait, you will never buy. Pining for nice things is OK if you actually intend to buy; otherwise, you're just living in a fantasy land, coveting what you cannot have. The extra expense, to me, is worth the extra time of getting to use a smartphone.

I also found a decent price at Costco's wireless site, which gives you free activation, free shipping and a free accessory kit (including a car charger). [CarToys has the best price, but no option for adding a line to an existing family plan.]

Besides, come October, there will be three lines on our plan due for an upgrade, and I doubt that all three will want to exercise it just then. Perhaps if I there's an awesome LTE phone from HTC with NFC and I work things right, I can get that, and pass the Atrix (or my current phone) along to someone else.

Delicious Export HTML: Show Tags

2010-12-16T21:09:00.000-08:00

There are rumors going around that Yahoo! is shutting down their Delicious social bookmarking site, and there are already a couple of posts describing how to preserve your bookmarks. One of the most valuable aspects of bookmarks are your tags, and unfortunately when you export your bookmarks from Delicious, the HTML page that you download doesn't display the tags.

If it did, you would at least be able to open the web page and search for a specific tag. The tags are there in the HTML source, but they aren't visible on the page.

Here's how to modify the page source to make them visible. First, log in to Delicious, and go to the Export page in Settings. Download the export file and save it.

Next, open the file in gVim (You can download gVim here).

Enter the following command. You can either do this by typing it in, or by copying it from this web page (starting after the colon), typing the colon character ":", and then pressing Ctrl+V. Here's the command:

:%s/$<A HREF="[^"]*" .* TAGS="\([^"]*$">[^<]*<\/A>$\n.*$\?\)/\1\r<DD><I>\2<\/I>/g

Press Enter. This will apply the command.


:wq

Next, save the file and exit gVim. You can do that with the ":wq" command, but you can also just click the graphical "Save" icon.

Twitpic-to-Posterous Script: Another Update

2010-12-08T22:21:00.000-08:00

A while ago I wrote a script to import my Twitpic photo posts to Posterous and posted it on this blog.

Even though Posterous now supplies their own working transfer tool, it has its limitations. One person who tried that tool was unsatisfied, and tried my script. He really liked the results, but he noticed some drawbacks to my script as well. Here's what's new in my script v1.3.1:

New feature by request - #hashtags and @username mentions are now linked to the appropriate Twitter page in the body of the Posterous post.
Fix - issue where Twitpic now truncates the tweet text in the HTML title. Switched to using the image alt text from the full page.
Fix - Twitpic started escaping single and double quotes in the tweet text, which were showing up uninterpreted in the Posterous titles. The script now handles them correctly.
Other changes

Only download the Full images by default (Scaled and thumbnails can be enabled by setting flags.)
Print an error message and pause for 5 seconds if a download fails (Twitpic was being unreliable during my testing.)
Other miscellaneous fixes and tweaks

Special thanks to @RyanMeray!

Update (v1.3.2): better regular expressions for @username and #hashtag formats.
Update (v1.3.4): now optionally adds hashtags as post tags.

You can get the latest version here.

Dropbox Sync Script

2010-12-01T22:07:00.000-08:00

Recently, I started using Steam, and while Steam can install each of your games on each of your computers, it doesn't keep the game saves in sync. I wanted to be able to pick up where I had left off on any computer I wanted, not needing to worry about copying over save files, so I turned to Dropbox, which I've been using for a while.

I had created a set of batch scripts that I used on Windows to set up the sync folders, but since I was adding several folders, and the number of scripts was getting to be large, I decided to combine them all into a single flexible and streamlined script. I also decided to make it as generic as possible, so that other people could use it with minimal fuss. Basically the script has a function that moves files and folders located outside of the Dropbox folder inside, and then creates a symlink (or folder junction), so that the program accessing the files doesn't need to be reconfigured in order to keep accessing the files. If the item is already in the Dropbox folder, the original is kept under a different name, and a link is created to the existing synced content. If the item doesn't exist in either place, it gets created in Dropbox, and linked to in the specified location.

The script is populated with things that I want synced, which will probably be different from what you want to sync, but it should be a simple matter to change that. If you add items, the script is set up so that you can re-run it without creating more and more symlinks.

It's worth noting that the mklink command requires Windows Vista or later. If you're running an earlier version such as XP, it will use the linkd command, which comes with the Windows 2003 Resource Kit. (You don't need to be running 2003 to install it.)

So, without further ado, here is the script:

@echo off
:: This script creates symlinks (NTFS junctions) in order to sync the contents via Dropbox
:: Some of these items require Administrator privileges to execute because of where the items are located.

:: Copyright 2010 Tim "burndive" of http://burndive.blogspot.com/ and http://tuxbox.blogspot.com/
:: This software is licensed under the Creative Commons GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.
:: License informattion: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
:: This script was obtained from here:
:: http://tuxbox.blogspot.com/2010/12/dropbox-sync-script.html

:: Set this to your Steam user ID
set STEAM_USER=burndive

:: The path to your Documents folder
set DOCUMENTS=%USERPROFILE%\My Documents
if exist "%USERPROFILE%\Documents" (
  set DROPBOX=%USERPROFILE%\Documents
)

:: The path to your Dropbox folder
set DROPBOX=%DOCUMENTS%\My Dropbox
if exist "%USERPROFILE%\Dropbox" (
  set DROPBOX=%USERPROFILE%\Dropbox
)

:: Determine which command to use for making Folder Junctions
ver | findstr "5." > nul
if errorlevel 1 (
  :: This requires Windows Vista or later
  set JUNCTION_CMD=mklink /j
) else (
  :: This requires the Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools
  set JUNCTION_CMD=linkd
)

:: Find the correct Flash SharedObjects folder name if localhost subfolder exists
set FLASH_LOCAL=
for /F "tokens=*" %%I in ('dir /b "%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects"') do (
  if exist "%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\%%I\localhost" (
    set FLASH_LOCAL=%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\%%I\localhost
  )
)

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: The following items require only User privileges to execute
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

:: Make localhost Flash Shared Objects dir architecture neutral
if not "%FLASH_LOCAL%" == "" (
  if exist "%FLASH_LOCAL%\Program Files (x86)" (
    call:LinkFolder "%FLASH_LOCAL%", "Program Files", "%FLASH_LOCAL%\Program Files (x86)"
  )
)

:: Digital Blasphemy wallpapers
call:LinkFolder "%USERPROFILE%\Pictures\wallpaper", "db-fs", "%DROPBOX%\images\digital-blasphemy\db-fs"
call:LinkFolder "%USERPROFILE%\Pictures\wallpaper", "db-ws", "%DROPBOX%\images\digital-blasphemy\db-ws"
call:LinkFolder "%USERPROFILE%\Pictures\wallpaper", "db-preview", "%DROPBOX%\images\digital-blasphemy\db-preview"

:: Images
call:LinkFolder "%USERPROFILE%\Pictures", "images", "%DROPBOX%\images"

:: Pidgin Instant Messenger
call:LinkFolder "%APPDATA%\.purple", "icons", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\pidgin\icons"
call:LinkFolder "%APPDATA%\.purple", "logs", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\pidgin\logs"

:: DVRMSToolbox Commercials XML files
call:LinkFolder "%PUBLIC%\DvrmsToolbox", "CommercialsXml", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\CommercialsXml"

::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Humble Bundle Games
::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Penumbra Overture
call:LinkFolder "%DOCUMENTS%\Penumbra Overture\Episode1", "save", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\penumbra-overture"
:: Samarost2 : TODO
:: World of Goo
call:LinkFolder "%LOCALAPPDATA%\2DBoy", "WorldOfGoo", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\world-of-goo"
:: Aquaria : TODO
:: Gish : TODO
:: Lugaru : TODO

::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Humble Bundle 2 Games
::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Braid
call:LinkFolder "%APPDATA%", "Braid", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\braid"
:: Machinarium
if not "%FLASH_LOCAL%" == "" (
  if exist "%FLASH_LOCAL%\Program Files" (
    call:LinkFolder "%FLASH_LOCAL%\Program Files\Machinarium", "machinarium.exe", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\machinarium"
  )
)
:: Osmos
call:LinkFolder "%DOCUMENTS%", "Osmos", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\osmos"
:: Cortex Command : TODO
:: Revenge of the Titans HIB
call:LinkFolder "%USERPROFILE%\Revenge of the Titans 1.71", "slots", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\revenge-of-the-titans-1.71"
call:LinkFolder "%USERPROFILE%\Revenge of the Titans 1.72", "slots", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\revenge-of-the-titans-1.72"

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: The following items require Administrator privileges to execute
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

:: Eclipse workspace
call:LinkFolder "%USERPROFILE%", "workspace", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\workspace"

:: gVim config file
call:LinkFile "%USERPROFILE%", "_gvimrc", "%DROPBOX%\config\windows\_gvimrc"

:: Steam Game save folders
if exist "%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%" (
  :: Note: The caret is an escape character
  set STEAM_DIR=C:\Program Files ^(x86^)\Steam\steamapps
) else (
  set STEAM_DIR=%PROGRAMFILES%\Steam\steamapps
)
call:LinkFolder "%STEAM_DIR%\%STEAM_USER%\half-life 2\hl2", "SAVE", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\half-life-2-steam"
call:LinkFolder "%STEAM_DIR%\%STEAM_USER%\half-life 2 episode one\episodic", "SAVE", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\half-life-2-ep1-steam"
call:LinkFolder "%STEAM_DIR%\%STEAM_USER%\half-life 2 episode two\ep2", "SAVE", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\half-life-2-ep2-steam"
call:LinkFolder "%STEAM_DIR%\%STEAM_USER%\half-life 2 lostcoast\lostcoast", "SAVE", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\half-life-2-lostcoast-steam"
call:LinkFolder "%STEAM_DIR%\%STEAM_USER%\portal\portal", "SAVE", "%DROPBOX%\app-files\game-saves\portal-steam"

:: Pause so the user can review output
pause

:: End of execution
goto:eof

::::::::::::
:: Functions
::::::::::::

:LinkFolder
setlocal
:: Arguments
set LINK_PATH=%~1
set LINK_NAME=%~2
set TARGET=%~3
::echo Link: %LINK_PATH%\%LINK_NAME%
::echo Target: %TARGET%

if not exist "%LINK_PATH%" (
  mkdir "%LINK_PATH%"
)
cd "%LINK_PATH%"
:: If the folder is already a link, just delete it
dir | findstr /i "%LINK_NAME%" | findstr "<JUNCTION>" > NUL
if not errorlevel 1 (
  rmdir "%LINK_NAME%"
)
if exist "%LINK_NAME%" (
  if exist "%TARGET%" (
    echo Backing up conflicting copy
    move "%LINK_NAME%" "%LINK_NAME%-orig"
  ) else (
    :: Move the original if target does not exist
    echo Moving original folder to link location
    echo move "%LINK_NAME%" "%TARGET%"
    move "%LINK_NAME%" "%TARGET%"
  )
) else (
  if not exist "%TARGET%" (
    :: If neither exist, create target
    echo Creating target folder
    mkdir "%TARGET%"
  )
)
%JUNCTION_CMD% "%LINK_NAME%" "%TARGET%"

endlocal
goto:eof

:LinkFile
setlocal
:: Arguments
set LINK_PATH=%~1
set LINK_NAME=%~2
set TARGET=%~3
::echo Link: %LINK_PATH%\%LINK_NAME%
::echo Target: %TARGET%

if not exist "%LINK_PATH%" (
  mkdir "%LINK_PATH%"
)
cd "%LINK_PATH%"
:: If the folder is already a link, just delete it
dir | findstr /i "%LINK_NAME%" | findstr "<SYMLINK>" > NUL
if not errorlevel 1 (
  del "%LINK_NAME%"
)
if exist "%LINK_NAME%" (
  if exist "%TARGET%" (
    echo Backing up conflicting copy
    move "%LINK_NAME%" "%LINK_NAME%-orig"
  ) else (
    :: Move the original if target does not exist
    echo Moving original file to target location
    move "%LINK_NAME%" "%TARGET%"
  )
) else (
  if not exist "%TARGET%" (
    :: If neither exist, create target
    echo Creating empty target file
    echo "" > "%TARGET%"
  )
)
:: linkd will not work for files, only folders
mklink "%LINK_NAME%" "%TARGET%"

endlocal
goto:eof

This software is licensed under the CC-GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.

PS: If you use my code, I appreciate comments to let me know, and any feedback you may have, especially if it's not working right for you, but also just to say thanks.

For convenience, you can download this script from my server.

Trying VirtualBox

2010-11-11T23:33:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I compared Windows VirtualPC to VMWare Player. I thought I would also try out Oracle's VirtualBox to see how it stacks up against the other two.

VirtualBox is in many ways very similar to VirtualPC. When you launch VirtualBox, you get a management window with your virtual machines in a column on the left, and configuration options on the right. From there, you can launch them in a separate window.

The integration tools install in the same manner as the other two (virtual CD-ROM with auto-run installer).

One problem I ran into was that at first I couldn't take screenshots of just the VirtualBox VM window using Alt+Print Screen. This is because the VM was capturing my keystrokes when the window was selected. To fix this, I needed to disable the "Auto Capture Keyboard" setting under File -> Preferences | Input. Once that was configured I was able to take screenshots without problem. Interaction isn't seamless with this setting, but I actually prefer this for my purpose, which is to run old games, because then there's no danger of scrolling off of the screen.

I like the default escape key of right Ctrl, since it's easy to find with my finger whether my fingers are using the keyboard or the touchpad of my laptop.

In order to get a cool screenshot, I attempted to load all three of the VMs: VirtualPC, VMWare, and VirtualBox. I was able to launch the first two, but then VirtualBox wouldn't load the VM because it couldn't get full control of the CPU the way it wanted, and my PC slowed to a crawl. I think this was because of the amount of RAM I had allocated to the clients, but also running two different kinds of VM is probably a bad idea. I know I can run two VMWare VMs without problem, so I think it's just the host programs that conflict, and not the fact that there was more than one of them.

Anyway, I think VirtualBox is an excellent choice. Mouse performance was just as good as VirtualPC, and since it's an open source product, they have no reason to hold back full features like snapshots that aren't supported anymore in VirtualPC and that VMWare reserves for its Workstation product.

Because of these extra features, I would recommend VirtualBox over VirtualPC and VMWare Player.

VMWare and Virtual PC: Playing Age of Empires on Windows 7

2010-10-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, I decided to install Age of Empires on my computers. The game came up in a conversation with someone who periodically hosts AOE parties. Anyway, it was one of the few PC games I played growing up, and also one that my wife used to play. When I got home, I discovered that, indeed, I did still have the original discs for Age of Empires, the Age of Kings Expansion, and Age of Emprires II. I believe my sister salvaged them for me from the boxes left when my parents moved from a house to an apartment.

In any case, I had the software that I needed, so I installed it on my wife's PC running Windows XP. That done, I had a couple of old PCs running Windows 2000, but those are on the same KVM with my wife's PC, so they couldn't be used for multi-player. The problem was Windows 7. I had heard that it wouldn't be pretty (you have to shut down Explorer to play), so I decided to virtualize. That way, I wouldn't need to give up any part of Windows 7, even Aero, and it would run seamlessly.

I had used VMWare before, so that's what I started with. VMWare Player is free to download, and so I did. The installation went pretty smoothly. I chose to install the option to install the OS using the VMWare wizard, which turned out to be a problem later on when I had to manually eject the virtual floppy drive in order to be able to install VMWare Tools (VMWare thought that the OS installation wasn't complete, when it was.) Next time, I'll choose the option to install the OS after creating a blank virtual machine.

After installing the OS (I used the original XP that came with my laptop), I updated to SP3, and then had Windows Update install all of the latest patches. Once everything was updated, I installed the Age of Empires games and applied the appropriate patches. I also created a small subset in my list of software suitable for a minimalist virtual machine.

After that, I was good to go, so my wife and I fired up the game and played a few matches. We had to brush up on our skills first, but it didn't take us long to get back into the swing of things.

I used Bridged mode for networking, but even so, I had to disable Windows Firewall on the XP VM in order to host an AOE game, even after creating a firewall exception, and expanding it to the whole subnet.

Of course, it wasn't perfect. Even though I had VMWare Tools installed, the mouse was a bit unresponsive, and VMWare Player tends to release the mouse if you cross the edge of the screen. For this reason, and because I also wanted to try another option for virtualization that I hadn't used before, I decided to also try out Virtual PC.

It took some doing to find the download link for the latest version of Virtual PC. I think that Microsoft doesn't want anyone running Windows 7 Home Premium (which is what I have on my laptop) to find the file. I kept being redirected to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, which is the appropriate version if your host operating system is Windows XP or Vista, or to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate. I finally found the right link for Windows Virtual PC, which only supports Windows 7 as a host OS. This is also the basis of Windows 7's Windows XP Mode. Indeed, when I installed Windows Virtual PC on my Windows 7 Home Premium, it created a link in the Start Menu for Windows XP Mode.

The link doesn't work (it only displays a message that it won't work in this edition of Windows), and the only other item in the Windows Virtual PC start menu folder opens a folder. At first, I couldn't figure out how to create a virtual machine in this folder, but then I noticed the bar at the top of the folder window. When I created a new virtual machine, it stored only a small data file in that folder, with the virtual disk files buried out of sight in my hidden AppData folder. This approach is different from that of VMWare, and it reflects the fact that Microsoft does not expect me to move this VM, back it up, or access its underlying files. It's supposed to "just work", and I'm supposed to treat this small VMCX file as a proxy for the whole VM. With VMWare, I can easily move or back up the VM by moving or copying the folder containing all of its files: to a different drive, or even a different machine.

Windows Virtual PC with the Integration Tools installed has almost perfect mouse movement, which is essential for playing a real-time strategy game such as AOE. It wasn't difficult to get used to hitting Ctrl+Alt+Left to escape input capture, instead of VMWare's Ctrl+Alt.

I do have a license for Windows 7 Ultimate, so I would like to check out Windows XP Mode. However, this license is currently installed on our living room media PC. It will take a few hours to set up, so it will probably have to be a free afternoon on a weekend. If I installed the key currently on my laptop on the media PC, I might be able to use "Anytime Upgrade" to install the newly-unused Ultimate key to my laptop without doing a re-install. We'll see.

My Take on Windows Live Essientials

2010-10-05T19:39:00.000-07:00

Microsoft just released their Live Essentials suite of software downloads for Vista and Windows 7 machines. I've been using them since January 2009. Here are my thoughts.

You shouldn't install them all, first of all. When you download and run the installer, you get the choice to install everything, or pick and choose. Make the latter selection. If you have a previous version of something, they won't give you the choice not to upgrade, so if there's something you don't want to install, quit the installer and uninstall it first.

Which programs in particular to install will be an individual choice. I already had Mail, Writer, Photo Gallery, and Windows Live Mesh installed from the beta. I had installed Microsoft Office since last updating the software, and so the installer offered me the "Outlook Connecter Pack". I'm not sure what it is, but it probably won't hurt.

Speaking of hurt, though, unless you really, really want it, don't install the Bing Bar. It's just a bad idea. It will try to take over all of your browsers, and seriously, who needs a toolbar in their browser?

I've never tried the updated Messenger, Messenger Companion, or Family Safety. I hardly ever use my hotmail account to chat, and I use Pidgin when I do, so I don't really have a use for the Messenger enhancements.

Writer is apparently a very good blogging tool that works with a lot of popular blogging sites (like Blogger, which hosts this blog), but so far, I've stuck with the web interface for composition.
By far the most useful tool is Windows Live Mesh. If you're like me, you have a bunch of pictures, music, files, and other documents on various computers. The file sets are simply too large to fit into a free Dropbox account, and you don't really need access to them over the web, at least not most of them, you just want them on your various computers. It's a hassle to keep all of photos or music organized in more than one place, so you don't. You keep them organized in one place, and (hopefully) make periodic backups to another computer just in case. Well, Live Mesh allows you to keep it organized the way you want it, everywhere you want it, and it doesn't matter how big the files are, because Microsoft isn't going to store any of them (except for a special 5GB folder, which it will store in the cloud and allow you to access from anywhere on the web.)

Microsoft doesn't upload your files to its servers, but it does keep track of them for you. Any change you make to your shared folders gets copied to the other computers where that folder is synced, and the copying is peer-to-peer, so if you're at home, it happens at the speed of your home network. It will also keep your files in sync even if you're not at home, directly from your other computer, not through their servers.

The management interface is pretty simple, though it's easy to miss the "Remote" settings, which allow you to connect to your computer over the Internet if you have enabled it on that device. Connect is a lot like Remote Desktop, if you're familiar with that. Basically, it's just like you're sitting at the other computer. You have to be running MSIE on the computer you're connecting from.

The web interface is a lot like the desktop interface, except in addition to your shared folders, you also have access to all of your devices as well, and you can see which devices sync to each of your folders.

Update: After installing Windows Live Mesh on my wife's new netbook, she experienced extremely slow performance. Her netbook has a 2GHz x64 processor and 2GB of ram, so it wasn't simply the fact that it was a netbook that was making it slow. I opened Task Manager, and found that the MOE process ("Mesh Operating Environment") was consistently taking up 40 - 60% of the CPU. I shut down the process, and deleted the "Run" entry from the registry to disable it starting up automatically. Any syncing that happens will need Live Mesh to be started manually. I also observed similar behavior on my laptop, but the media PC (which is on all the time) has the MOE process taking only 3 - 5% of the CPU. It's probably checking the synced files for updates every time it starts up.

Anyway, be warned: Windows Live Mesh is a resource hog on machines that need to turn on and off all the time.

The Cure For Vista Media Center's Insomnia

2010-09-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

At home we have a computer hooked up to our TV. It has two TV tuners, and is set up with Windows 7 Media Center to record our favorite television shows (and automatically detect and skip commercials). It's wonderful. We can also watch Blu-ray movies, access Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Unbox, and any number of other streaming services right from our living room TV.

This post is not about that computer. This post is about my laptop. Occasionally, when traveling, or when simply in another room of the house, I like to use Windows Media Center on my laptop. Currently, it's running Windows Vista, so in order to be able to view shows in the .wtv format used by Windows 7's Media Center, I have installed the "TV Pack" unofficially leaked by Microsoft.

It works great. Basically, I browse to the file I want to watch on a shared drive (I have a shortcut to the Recorded TV folder on the desktop), double-click it, and it plays on the laptop. The commercial scan files are automatically synced. When traveling, I usually copy what I want to watch to my Laptop's hard drive, but there's also this.

So, what's the problem? My laptop won't sleep. Or hibernate. At least not all night. It wakes up at 3:30 AM to download the latest TV listings, even though I never configured it to work with a tuner, so it has no listings to download. Needless to say, this is annoying. It drains my battery unnecessarily, and if it's in its case, there's a danger that it will overheat.

After living with this problem, usually dealing with it by shutting the laptop down every time I stop using it--which means a cold boot every time I start using it, and it takes a while to load everything up--I finally found the solution to my problem. Step 9 on this page points you in the right direction, but here's how you do it:

Launch the Task Scheduler. You can do this by opening the Start Menu, typing "Task Scheduler", and pressing Enter. You will get a UAC prompt, which you should authorize.

In the left pane, click on the arrows left of the text to expand down to the following item: Task Scheduler (Local) -> Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Media Center

Once you have selected Media Center, look on the top middle pane for a task named mcupdate_scheduled. Double-click this task to load the Properties window.

In the Properties window, click the Conditions tab, and uncheck the box next to "Wake the computer to run this task".

Click OK, and close Task Scheduler. That's it. No more waking up from hibernate or sleep in the middle of the night!

TwitPic to Posterous Export Script: Update

2010-07-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

In the time since I wrote my script which downloads all of a user's TwitPic posts (text included) and uploads them as Posterous posts, Posterous has come out with their own import tool.

However, as noted in their blog post, TwitPic is currently blocking Posterous' servers, so someone came along and tried to use my script. It turned out that the TwitPic site had been updated, and my script no longer worked.

Well, I updated the script so that it works again. The script can be found here.

TwitPic to Posterous Export Script

2010-03-17T01:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This post (and the script it contains) has been updated as of December 14, 2010. (v1.4.0) The script can also be downloaded from my server here.

Also, Posterous has done a lot of work on solving this problem since I wrote my script. You can see their latest solutions here.

Recently, I switched from TwitPic to Posterous as my method of posting phone pictures (and now video) to the Internet. But since I switched, I didn't want to have my data history split in two, so I decided to write a script to download each of my TwitPic images with their associated text and date, and upload them to Posterous with the same information.

Initially, I wanted to make one long post with all of the images, and their text below. However, with the Posterous API, it isn't possible to refer to a specific image in your body text, so individual posts is the way I went.

Along the way, I became familiar with yet another Linux command: curl.

I love that Posterous has an API that (once you figure out curl) is pretty easy to use. TwitPic, on the other hand, has absolutely zero support for exporting anything. The fact that they're so non-user-centric and out-dated was a driving force in my switching. The only reason I hadn't switched to img.ly already was because img.ly has a bug that prevents images sent from my phone from being posted, since my phone sends them without a file extension. I worked with their tech support for a while, but they didn't fix it. I got a new phone, but it was also a Samsung, and it did the same thing with images. Oh, well. Posterous is better.

Anyway, here is the script:

First run it with just the first two arguments, and it will download all of your TwitPic data, including thumbnail images. Once you're satisfied, supply your Posterous User ID, Password, and Site ID. (If you don't know your Site ID, run the script with your Posterous User ID, Password, and no Site ID, and it will query your Posterous site info as long as your Posterous credentials are valid.)

Note: if you want to run this from Windows, you should install Cygwin (with, at a mimum, curl and sed) and run it from there.

./twitpic-to-posterous.sh [twitpic-id] [working-dir] [postrous-id] [posterous-password] [posterous-site-id] [skip-number]

#!/bin/sh

# Copyright 2010 Tim "burndive" of http://burndive.blogspot.com/ and http://tuxbox.blogspot.com/
# This software is licensed under the Creative Commons GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.
# License informattion: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/

# This script was obtained from here:
# http://tuxbox.blogspot.com/2010/03/twitpic-to-posterous-export-script.html

RUN_DATE=`date +%F--%H-%m-%S`
SCRIPT_VERSION_STRING="v1.4.0"

TP_NAME=$1
WORKING_DIR=$2
P_ID=$3
P_PW=$4
P_SITE_ID=$5
UPLOAD_SKIP=$6

# Comma separated list of tags to apply to your posts
P_TAGS="twitpic"
# Whether or not to auto-post from Posterous
P_AUTOPOST=0
# Whether or not the Posterous posts are marked private
P_PRIVATE=0

# This is the default limit of the number of posts that can be uploaded per day
P_API_LIMIT=50

DOWNLOAD_FULL=1
DOWNLOAD_SCALED=0
DOWNLOAD_THUMB=0
PREFIX=twitpic-$TP_NAME
HTML_OUT=$PREFIX-all-$RUN_DATE.html
UPLOAD_OUT=posterous-upload-$P_SITE_ID-$RUN_DATE.xml

if [ -z "$TP_NAME" ]; then
  echo "You must supply a TP_NAME."
  exit
fi
if [ ! -d "$WORKING_DIR" ]; then
  echo "You must supply a WORKING_DIR."
  exit
fi
if [ -z "$UPLOAD_SKIP" ]; then
  UPLOAD_SKIP=0
fi
UPLOAD_SKIP_DIGITS=`echo $UPLOAD_SKIP | sed -e 's/[^0-9]//g'`
if [ "$UPLOAD_SKIP" != "$UPLOAD_SKIP_DIGITS" ]; then
  echo "Invalid UPLOAD_SKIP: $UPLOAD_SKIP"
  exit
fi

cd $WORKING_DIR

if [ -f "$HTML_OUT" ]; then
  rm -v $HTML_OUT
fi

# If Posterous username and password were supplied, but not site ID, query the server and exit.
P_SITE_INFO_FILE=posterous-$P_SITE_ID.out
if [ ! -z "$P_ID" ] && [ ! -z "$P_PW" ] && [ -z "$P_SITE_ID" ]; then
  echo "Getting Posterous account info..."
  curl -u "$P_ID:$P_PW" "http://posterous.com/api/getsites" -o $P_SITE_INFO_FILE
  SITE_ID_RET=`grep "<id>$P_SITE_ID</id>" $P_SITE_INFO_FILE`
  if [ -z "$SITE_ID_RET" ]; then
    echo "Please supply your Posterous Site ID as the fifth argument."
    echo "Here is the response from the Posterous server.  If you entered correct credentials, you should see your Site ID(s):"
    cat $P_SITE_INFO_FILE | tee -a $UPLOAD_OUT
    exit
  fi
fi

# Confirm that we have a valid Posterous Site ID
if [ ! -z "$P_SITE_ID" ]; then
  echo "Getting Posterous account info..."
  curl -u "$P_ID:$P_PW" "http://posterous.com/api/getsites" -o $P_SITE_INFO_FILE
  SITE_ID_RET=`grep "<id>$P_SITE_ID</id>" $P_SITE_INFO_FILE`
  if [ -z "$SITE_ID_RET" ]; then
    echo "Make sure that you have supplied a valid Posterous Site ID as the fifth parameter.  If you don't know your Site ID, leave it out, and this script will query the server."
    echo "Here is the response from the Posterous server.  If you entered correct credentials, you should see your site ID(s):"
    cat $P_SITE_INFO_FILE | tee -a $UPLOAD_OUT
    exit
  fi
fi

MORE=1
PAGE=1
while [ $MORE -ne 0 ]; do
  echo PAGE: $PAGE
  FILENAME=$PREFIX-page-$PAGE.html
  if [ ! -s $FILENAME ]; then
    wget http://twitpic.com/photos/${TP_NAME}?page=$PAGE -O $FILENAME
    if [ ! -s "$FILENAME" ]; then
      echo "ERROR: could not get $FILENAME" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
      sleep 5
    fi
  fi
  if [ -z "`grep "More photos &gt;" $FILENAME`" ]; then
    MORE=0
  else
    PAGE=`expr $PAGE + 1`
  fi
done

ALL_IDS=`cat $PREFIX-page-* | grep -Eo "<a href=\"/[a-zA-Z0-9]+\">" | grep -Eo "/[a-zA-Z0-9]+" | grep -Eo "[a-zA-Z0-9]+" | sort -r | xargs`

# For Testing
#ALL_IDS="1kdjc"

COUNT=0
LOG_FILE=$PREFIX-log-$RUN_DATE.txt

echo $ALL_IDS | tee -a $LOG_FILE

for ID in $ALL_IDS; do
  COUNT=`expr $COUNT + 1`
  echo $ID: $COUNT | tee -a $LOG_FILE

  echo "Processing $ID..."
  FULL_HTML=$PREFIX-$ID-full.html
  if [ ! -s "$FULL_HTML" ]; then
    wget http://twitpic.com/$ID/full -O $FULL_HTML
    if [ ! -s "$FULL_HTML" ]; then
      echo "ERROR: could not get FULL_HTML for $ID" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
      sleep 5
    fi
  fi
  TEXT=`grep "<img src=" $FULL_HTML | tail -n1 | grep -oE "alt=\"[^\"]*\"" | sed \
        -e 's/^alt="//'\
        -e 's/"$//'\
        -e "s/&#039;/'/g"\
        -e 's/&quot;/"/g'\
        `
  if [ "$TEXT" = "" ]; then
    TEXT="Untitled"
  fi
  echo "TEXT: $TEXT" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
  # Recognize hashtags and username references in the tweet
  TEXT_RICH=`echo "$TEXT" | sed \
        -e 's/\B\@\([0-9A-Za-z_]\+\)/\@<a href="http:\/\/twitter.com\/\1">\1<\/a>/g' \
        -e 's/\#\([0-9A-Za-z_-]*[A-Za-z_-]\+[0-9A-Za-z_-]*\)/<a href="http:\/\/twitter.com\/search\?q\=%23\1">\#\1<\/a>/g' \
        `
  echo "TEXT_RICH: $TEXT_RICH" | tee -a $LOG_FILE

  # Convert hashtags into post tags
  P_TAGS_POST=$P_TAGS`echo "$TEXT" | sed \
        -e 's/\#\([^A-Za-z_-]\)*\B//g' \
        -e 's/^[^\#]*$//g' \
        -e 's/[^\#]*\(\#\([0-9A-Za-z_-]*[A-Za-z_-]\+[0-9A-Za-z_-]*\)\)[^\#]*\(\#[0-9]*\B\)*/,\2/g' \
        `
  # Uncomment if you don't want hashtags converted into post tags
  #P_TAGS_POST=$P_TAGS

  # Add custom tags from a file (optional).  The file is formatted like this:
  # ,tag1,tag2,tag3
  TAGS_FILE=$PREFIX-$ID-tags-extra.txt
  if [ -s "$TAGS_FILE" ]; then
    P_TAGS_POST=$P_TAGS_POST`cat $TAGS_FILE`
  fi
  echo "P_TAGS_POST: $P_TAGS_POST" | tee -a $LOG_FILE

  TEXT_FILE=$PREFIX-$ID-text.txt
  if [ ! -s $TEXT_FILE ]; then
    echo "$TEXT" > $TEXT_FILE
  fi
  FULL_URL=`grep "<img src=" $FULL_HTML | grep -Eo "src=\"[^\"]*\"" | grep -Eo "http://[^\"]*"`
  echo "FULL_URL: $FULL_URL" | tee -a $LOG_FILE

  SCALED_HTML=$PREFIX-$ID-scaled.html
  if [ ! -s "$SCALED_HTML" ]; then
    wget http://twitpic.com/$ID -O $SCALED_HTML
    if [ ! -s "$SCALED_HTML" ]; then
      echo "ERROR: could not get SCALED_HTML for $ID" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
      sleep 5
    fi
  fi
  SCALED_URL=`grep "id=\"photo-display\"" $SCALED_HTML | grep -Eo "http://[^\"]*" | head -n1`
  echo "SCALED_URL: $SCALED_URL" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
  POST_DATE=`grep -Eo "Posted on [a-zA-Z0-9 ,]*" $SCALED_HTML | sed -e 's/Posted on //'`
  echo "POST_DATE: $POST_DATE" | tee -a $LOG_FILE

  THUMB_URL=`cat $PREFIX-page-* | grep -E "<a href=\"/$ID\">" | grep -Eo "src=\"[^\"]*\"" | head -n1 | sed -e 's/src=\"//' -e 's/\"$//'`
  echo "THUMB_URL: $THUMB_URL" | tee -a $LOG_FILE

  EXT=`echo "$FULL_URL" | grep -Eo "[a-zA-Z0-9]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+\?" | head -n1 | grep -Eo "\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+"`
  if [ -z "$EXT" ]; then
    EXT=`echo "$FULL_URL" | grep -Eo "\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+$"`
  fi
  echo "EXT: $EXT"
  if [ "$DOWNLOAD_FULL" -eq 1 ]; then
    FULL_FILE="$PREFIX-$ID-full$EXT"
    if [ ! -s $FULL_FILE ]; then
      wget "$FULL_URL" -O $FULL_FILE
      if [ ! -s "$FULL_FILE" ]; then
        echo "ERROR: could not get FULL_URL for $ID: $FULL_URL" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
        sleep 5
      fi
    fi
  fi
  if [ "$DOWNLOAD_SCALED" -eq 1 ]; then
    SCALED_FILE=$PREFIX-$ID-scaled$EXT
    if [ ! -s $SCALED_FILE ]; then
      wget "$SCALED_URL" -O $SCALED_FILE
      if [ ! -s "$SCALED_FILE" ]; then
        echo "ERROR: could not get SCALED_URL for $ID: $SCALED_URL" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
        sleep 5
      fi
    fi
  fi
  if [ "$DOWNLOAD_THUMB" -eq 1 ]; then
    THUMB_FILE=$PREFIX-$ID-thumb$EXT
    if [ ! -s $THUMB_FILE ]; then
      wget "$THUMB_URL" -O $THUMB_FILE
      if [ ! -s "$THUMB_FILE" ]; then
        echo "ERROR: could not get THUMB_URL for $ID: $THUMB_URL" | tee -a $LOG_FILE
        sleep 5
      fi
    fi
  fi

  BODY_TEXT="$TEXT_RICH <p>[<a href=http://twitpic.com/$ID>Twitpic</a>]</p>"

  # Format the post date correctly
  YEAR=`echo "$POST_DATE" | sed -e 's/[A-Z][a-z]* [0-9]*, //'`
  DAY=`echo "$POST_DATE" | sed -e 's/[A-Z][a-z]* //' -e 's/, [0-9]*//'`
  MONTH=`echo "$POST_DATE" | sed -e 's/ [0-9]*, [0-9]*//' | sed \
    -e 's/January/01/' \
    -e 's/February/02/' \
    -e 's/March/03/' \
    -e 's/April/04/' \
    -e 's/May/05/' \
    -e 's/June/06/' \
    -e 's/July/07/' \
    -e 's/August/08/' \
    -e 's/September/09/' \
    -e 's/October/10/' \
    -e 's/November/11/' \
    -e 's/December/12/' \
    `
  # Adjust the time to local midnight when west of GMT
  HOURS_LOC=`date | grep -Eo " [0-9]{2}:" | sed -e 's/://' -e 's/ //'`
  HOURS_UTC=`date -u | grep -Eo " [0-9]{2}:" | sed -e 's/://' -e 's/ //'`
  HOURS_OFF=`expr $HOURS_UTC - $HOURS_LOC + 7`
  echo "HOURS_LOC: $HOURS_LOC"
  echo "HOURS_UTC: $HOURS_UTC"
  echo "HOURS_OFF: $HOURS_OFF"
  if [ "$HOURS_OFF" -lt 0 ]; then
    # We're east of GMT, do not adjust
    HOURS_OFF=0
  fi
  if [ "$HOURS_OFF" -lt 10 ]; then
    HOURS_OFF=0$HOURS_OFF
  fi
  if [ "$DAY" != "" ] && [ "$DAY" -lt 10 ]; then
    DAY=0$DAY
  fi
  DATE_FORMATTED="$YEAR-$MONTH-$DAY-$HOURS_OFF:00"
  echo "DATE_FORMATTED: $DATE_FORMATTED" | tee -a $LOG_FILE

  echo "<p><img src='$FULL_FILE' alt='$TEXT' title='$TEXT' /></p>" >> $HTML_OUT
  echo "$BODY_TEXT" >> $HTML_OUT
  echo "  Post date: $DATE_FORMATTED; Count: $COUNT" >> $HTML_OUT

  # Upload this Twitpic data to Posterous
  if [ ! -z "$P_SITE_ID" ]; then

    # First make sure we're under the API upload limit
    if [ "$COUNT" -le "$UPLOAD_SKIP" ]; then
      echo Skipping upload...
      continue
    fi
    if [ "$COUNT" -gt "`expr $UPLOAD_SKIP + $P_API_LIMIT`" ]; then
      echo "Skipping upload due to daily Posterous API upload limit of $P_API_LIMIT."
      echo "To resume uploading where we left off today, supply UPLOAD_SKIP parameter of `expr $UPLOAD_SKIP + $P_API_LIMIT`."
      continue
    fi

    P_OUT_FILE="posterous-$P_SITE_ID-$ID.out"
    if [ -s "$P_OUT_FILE" ]; then
      rm "$P_OUT_FILE"
    fi
    echo "Uploading Twitpic image..."
    curl -u "$P_ID:$P_PW" "http://posterous.com/api/newpost" -o "$P_OUT_FILE" \
      -F "site_id=$P_SITE_ID" \
      -F "title=$TEXT" \
      -F "autopost=$P_AUTOPOST" \
      -F "private=$P_PRIVATE" \
      -F "date=$DATE_FORMATTED" \
      -F "tags=$P_TAGS_POST" \
      -F "source=burndive's Twitpic-to-Posterous script $SCRIPT_VERSION_STRING" \
      -F "sourceLink=http://tuxbox.blogspot.com/2010/03/twitpic-to-posterous-export-script.html" \
      -F "body=$BODY_TEXT" \
      -F "media=@$FULL_FILE"
    cat $P_OUT_FILE  | tee -a $UPLOAD_OUT
  fi
done
echo Done.

This software is licensed under the CC-GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.

Posterous Blogger Sidebar Widget Thumbnail Feed Script

2010-03-13T12:45:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since this blog actually lived up to its name and I posted something to do with actual hacking on my Linux box.

You may recall a post a while back where I used the 'sed' command to create a modified copy of my TwitPic feed so that a thumbnail would show up when I imported the feed into a Blog List gadget in Blogger.

Well, I recently switched from using TwitPic for uploading pictures from my phone to using Posterous for uploading pictures and video from my phone. There were many reasons in the "pros" column, but in the "cons" was the fact that, when I imported my feed into that same Blogger widget, no thumbnail appeared.

So, just like with the TwitPic feed, I set out to modify my Posterous feed in order to get the thumbnail to appear. One problem I encountered is that the feeds were totally different formats. I based my TwitPic feed modification on a feed I knew to be working (from Digg), but performing that same transformation on the Posterous feed proved to be problematic.

What I ended up doing was simply extracting the information I needed from the Posterous feed, and then creating a one-item feed in the known-good format. The feed looks nothing like the original Posterous feed, but that's just fine, since all it will be used for is pulling the latest post into my blog sidebar.

One improvement I'm considering working on is providing a useful thumbnail when I upload a video. Currently (at least with the 3gp format), the Posterous feed just sticks a generic blank file icon in the thumbnail field. What I would like is a still frame from the movie. In order to do this myself, I would need to download the enclosure link, process the video into a still image, post the image on the web, and then put the image URL into the feed. All very doable given the right tools.

I'll have to test out what happens when I use the MP4 format for video, which my phone is also capable of creating.

Here's my script (so far). Feel free to use it under the terms of the license listed below. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

posterous.sh (run as an hourly cron job):

#!/bin/sh

# Copyright 2010 Tim "burndive" of http://burndive.blogspot.com/
# This software is licensed under the Creative Commons GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.
# License informattion: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/

# This script was obtained from here:
# http://tuxbox.blogspot.com/2010/03/posterous-blogger-sidebar-widget.html

DOMAIN=$1
FEED_DIR=$2
FEED_TITLE=Posterous
FEED_DESC="The purpose of this feed is to provide a thumbnail of the latest item in a Blogger sidebar widget."


if [ -z $DOMAIN ]; then
  echo "You must enter a Posterous DOMAIN."
  exit
fi

if [ -z $FEED_DIR ]; then
  echo "You must supply a directory."
  exit
fi

if [ ! -d $FEED_DIR ]; then
  echo "You must supply a valid directory."
  exit
fi

FEED_URL="http://$DOMAIN/rss.xml"
TMP_FILE="/tmp/posterous-$DOMAIN.xml"
FEED_FILE="$FEED_DIR/posterous-$DOMAIN.xml"

# Fetch the RSS feed
wget -q $FEED_URL -O $TMP_FILE

if [ ! -f $TMP_FILE ]; then
  echo "Failed to download $FEED_URL to $TMP_FILE"
  exit
fi

NEW_LATEST=`grep guid $TMP_FILE | head -n1`

if [ ! -f $FEED_FILE ]; then
  FEED_LATEST="" 
else 
  FEED_LATEST=`grep guid $FEED_FILE | head -n1`
fi

# Comment these out
#echo "FEED_LATEST: $FEED_LATEST"
#echo "NEW_LATEST : $NEW_LATEST"

if [ "$FEED_LATEST" = "$NEW_LATEST" ]; then
#  echo "There is no change in the feed."
#  echo "FEED_LATEST: $FEED_LATEST"
  exit
fi

IMG_HTML=`grep -i "img src" $TMP_FILE | head -n1 | grep -Eo "<img src='[^']*'[^>]*>" | sed -e 's/\"/\&quot;/g' -e 's/</\&lt;/g' -e 's/>/\&gt;/g'`
#echo "IMG_HTML: $IMG_HTML"

IMG_URL=`grep -i "img src" $TMP_FILE | head -n1 | grep -Eo "http:[^']*" | tail -n1`
#echo "IMG_URL: $IMG_URL"

# Create a minimalist RSS feed
echo "<?xml version='1.0'?> " > $FEED_FILE
echo "<rss version='2.0' xmlns:media='http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/'>" >> $FEED_FILE
echo "<channel>" >> $FEED_FILE
echo "<title>$FEED_TITLE</title>" >> $FEED_FILE
echo "<description>$FEED_DESC</description>" >> $FEED_FILE
echo "<link>http://$DOMAIN/</link>" >> $FEED_FILE

echo "<item>" >> $FEED_FILE
grep "<title>" $TMP_FILE | head -n2 | tail -n1 >> $FEED_FILE
grep "<pubDate>" $TMP_FILE | head -n1 >> $FEED_FILE
echo "<description>$IMG_HTML</description>" >> $FEED_FILE
grep "<link" $TMP_FILE | head -n3 | tail -n1 >> $FEED_FILE
echo "$NEW_LATEST" >> $FEED_FILE
echo "<media:thumbnail url=\"$IMG_URL\" height=\"56\" width=\"75\" />" >> $FEED_FILE
echo "</item>" >> $FEED_FILE

echo "</channel>" >> $FEED_FILE
echo "</rss>" >> $FEED_FILE

# Cean up
rm $TMP_FILE

This software is licensed under the CC-GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.

Facebook Gmail Phone Filter

2010-02-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

The other day I had an idea that I think is worth sharing.

I post to Twitter, but most people who see those posts don't see them via Twitter, they see them when the tweets are imported to Facebook as status updates.

When someone responds to your post on Twitter, you get an SMS with their reply. When someone responds to my post from Facebook, which is where the vast majority of responses and reactions occur, I don't get notified on my phone, which is usually where I sent the original message from. Often I'm nowhere near my computer, and won't be for hours.

This means that I don't see the response until I check my e-mail (or Facebook, but e-mail is usually first). I have Facebook configured to send me a message when someone responds to my posts. It occurred to me that I could get those same notifications on my phone. Here's how.

I set up a filter in Gmail that forwards matching e-mails to my phone's multi-media message (MMS) e-mail address.

Here's what the filter looks like.

Here's the first step in creating the filter. I'm also forwarding Facebook messages to my phone. If I were to leave off the word "your" and just say "commented on" then the filter would include comments on other people's posts that I had previously commented on.

Here's the second step. The MMS e-mail address is the address that appears on an e-mail if I send an MMS message (e.g., a picture) from my phone to my Gmail address.

And that's it. When someone responds to my Twitter/TwitPic posts from Facebook, I get the message on my phone right away. Since it's an MMS and not an SMS, the messages are not limited to 160 characters. I have a messaging plan with AT&T that doesn't distinguish between the two kinds of messages.

Google Buzz Kill

2010-02-12T01:19:00.000-08:00

For the past few days the Internet has been all aflutter about Google Buzz, some saying it's a Twitter killer. Google Buzz is not like Twitter. Rather, it is like FriendFeed. I have used FriendFeed for quite some time to aggregate all of my online content into a single stream, and Google Buzz is designed to do exactly the same thing.

Like FriendFeed, Google Buzz consumes Twitter and other content-generators, that is, you can have your Twitter posts show up on either service, as well as you blog posts, your online photos, forum comments, and so forth. Content originates in multiple places, but these services enable it to all come together in one place specific to the person who created it.

Now, I have no problem with Google creating their own FriendFeed and then foisting it on all Gmail users. I think it's a great idea. My mother, for example, will never set up an account with FriendFeed, and she hasn't quite figured out Google Reader, but she might just try out this Buzz thing in her Gmail inbox, there she might see my latest tweet, or blog post, or photo album, or shared article.

Now, some of this stuff she already sees, since I import my Twitter updates and blog posts into Facebook, and so in a way, Google Buzz is competing with Facebook.

Online Identity

When you activate Buzz in your Google account, they let you know that they are making your Google Profile public, and that that includes your first and last name.

As it happens, I have gone through the trouble of NOT directly associating any of my public online content with my real name. That way if you "Google" my name, you don't find all of my content (insert horror story here about prospective employers finding something they don't like or disagree with).

My real name is of course associated with my content inside of Facebook, but that content-name link is only available to my friends. Most of the same content is available outside of Facebook, but it is tied to "burndive", not my name.

Google's corporate mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". This is no doubt why they are pushing for people to publicly link their full real name with all of their online content.

Well, I'm not going to be pushed.

For many people who do not maintain a barrier online between their friends and the public, this will not be an issue, but for me it is.

My Google account is used as my primary e-mail address. I want my name to be associated with my e-mail address to my contacts, so I can't simply change my name to a pseudonym on my Google Profile, and it would be extremely disruptive for me to switch to another Google account.

Google is obviously aware of people in my situation, because they already have a feature in the Google Profile called a "nickname". Anyone on my contacts list will see my real name on my profile, everyone else will see my nickname. This is how it works with Google Reader shared items, and it's a very good system. They just don't want to use it with Google Buzz.

The Problem

I went ahead and added my blogs, Google Reader, my Twitter account, and my Picasa Web account to Google Buzz, but nothing was being imported except Google Reader.

I looked further into the matter, and it turns out that it wasn't importing my content because after signing up for Buzz, I realized what had happened, and had restored my profile privacy settings. "That's logical", I thought, "They won't let me post publicly because my name isn't public. I'll just change the import settings so only my friends and family see the posts. They can already see my name." No dice.

So what was up with Google Reader? Google Reader has separate privacy settings, as it turns out, but, as I discovered, it will STILL share your full name on the posts and make it visible to the world.

So, after a brief stint, I have turned off Google Buzz. I never really intended to consume content there, but I had hoped it would be a venue for others to consume my content who would otherwise not occasion to see it, and a user-friendly comment forum.

Firefox Extensions Collection

2010-01-28T23:54:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I wrote a post in which I create a list of software to install on a new Windows box. I did this mostly for my own reference, but it might be useful to others.

The first item on my list is Firefox, but (until now) I didn't include any extensions. Firefox is all about customizations, and extensions are the most powerful way to customize it. But who wants to go through the trouble of sorting through the thousands of extensions to find the useful ones? Well, it's more a matter of keeping your ear to the ground and trying out the ones that sound good and/or come recommended.

After years of research, I've created a collection of extensions! I didn't write any of them, I just bunched them together because they were all useful to me.

I plan on updating the collection as time goes on, so here's the link:

burndive's essential extensions

You can choose to install them individually, or as a group. I hope you find them as useful as I have.

Dropbox: File Synchronization

2010-01-13T16:11:00.000-08:00

Ever since we got our second computer (back in 1998, I believe), I have been dealing with the problem of how to keep my files in sync between multiple computers. Initially, I simply didn't, or I used floppy disks to move files back and forth. Then I bought an Ethernet hub, and used windows shares to pass the data back and forth. When I bought a CD burner, I would periodically create snapshots of the family's files.

Over the years, I have had many hard drives crash, and many more clean installs. Solving the file sync problem is often best accomplished in conjunction with backing up those files.

Until recently, I still basically used the LAN solution: Keep two copies of my files on different computers, and periodically (or sporadically) copy one set of files over the other. Of course, if you do it this way, you can never change your directory structure, or you have duplicates, and when you try to clean up the duplicates, you lose files.

I also back up important files weekly to an external drive, and I keep four weekly backups, plus six monthly backups. This process is automated thanks to a customized version of a backup script and some cron jobs on my Linux box. This part hasn't changed.

Recently, however, I discovered a handy little service called Dropbox. Dropbox will back up your files, keep them in sync on all of your computers (2 GB for free, pay for more), and enable you to share them with other users if you choose. I've tried Windows Live Mesh, and I still might use that for remote login, but Dropbox gives you more free storage space, and it is able to sync files from one computer to another over a local LAN (which saves ISP bandwidth). Also, Dropbox supports Linux, which is a must for me.

[Note: if you want to sign up, use my Dropbox referral link an we'll both get an extra 250MB of free space.]

Dropbox enables some pretty cool syncing tricks if you're willing to roll up your sleeves at the command line. Here are a few things I'm doing:

The Linux client for Dropbox treats symlinks to folders as if they were just folders. Initially, I didn't like this, because it meant I couldn't just plop my existing file structure in place (because it contained symlinks to large data sets in other locations). Also, I didn't want certain directories synced. My solution was to simply link to the things I want to sync from my Dropbox folder. That way, I can structure my directories any way I want, and cherry-pick the things I want to sync from that structure.
I use the Pidgin client for all my Instant Messaging accounts on Windows and Linux. Pidgin logs all of my conversations, and saves them to a local folder. Whenever someone IMs me or I open a chat window to IM someone else, the chat window is automatically populated with the latest conversation with that person from the chat log history. In order to synchronize these logs between computers I created a symlink in the Dropbox folder to the logs folder on my Linux box. In order to get my Windows pidgin accounts to use this folder, I created a folder "Junction" within the Pidgin AppData folder (.purple) using the command: "mklink /J".
I use DVRMSToolbox along with ShowAnalyzer to automatically find and skip commercials in Windows Media Center. ShowAnalyzer is run on our living room media PC, and that is where the files are stored that tell the DTBAddin component where the commercials are within a given recorded TV file. (If you're interested in setting this up yourself, see this guide.) Normally, I would have to periodically copy new files in the CommercialsXml folder from C:\Public\Users\DvrmsToolbox on the media PC to my laptop in order for my laptop to know when to skip a commercial. Now, the files are synced automatically, and I don't have to think about them. I just open my laptop, fire up Media Center, and select the show I want to watch. It's a pretty sweet setup.

Google Wave - Keyboard Shortcuts

2009-11-23T20:55:00.000-08:00

This post isn't going to be any kind of an exhaustive list. Others have done that. A friend and I recently tried to figure out how to do basic chatting without using the mouse. Here you go:

To open an in-line reply to where you currently are in a blip (either to the selected text, or the cursor position):

Ctrl+Enter

To finish editing a blip (equivalent to clicking "Done"):

Shift+Enter

To edit the current blip:

Ctrl+E

Everyone should know these next two, but I'll put them here anyway.

To jump between blips that have been edited that you haven't "seen" yet/since:

Space bar

To move up or down one blip:

Up/Down arrow

There you have it. Wave on, mouse-haters!

Google Wave and Privacy

2009-11-21T19:26:00.000-08:00

The important thing to consider when you're thinking about privacy on Google Wave is that it's not fundamentally any different from e-mail, Facebook, or a wiki. When you send someone an e-mail, they can choose to forward it along to whomever they want. When you post on Facebook, your friends can see it and comment (or pass it along, if they copy and paste it). When you post on a wiki, someone can come along and change it. Wave doesn't change any of that, it just automates the process of sharing and changing and brings it all together.

Google isn't developing Wave as an internal proprietary system that they maintain control over (like Facebook). They're making it like e-mail, which means that anyone can set up a Wave server, and it should work the same, and inter-operate seamlessly with Google, and everyone else out there with a server and a peering relationship. This in itself dictates that users will have limited control over who sees what information, and how they can control it.

In a closed system, it can be possible to un-send a message, or to prevent someone from easily passing along what you send to them (at least, in the same form). Wave is not a closed system. Once your information hits a foreign server, you can have no control over it, and so in order to create a consistent system, once your information is sent to any other user, you can't take it back.

What kinds of controls are possible?

If you have any kind of information, you can send it to certain people, and not to others. You cannot prevent them from sharing that information, but you can refuse to accept their changes to the canonical version of the information (at least, canonical according to you). So it is theoretically possible to divide people into three categories with respect to information:

Those with no access. These people don't know about the information at all.
Those with limited access, who can read, but not change the canonical information.
Those with full access, who can both read and write changes back to the canonical information.

With wave, at least as the Google Wave preview is currently set up, there are only two categories: 1 and 3. If you add someone to a wave, they can change it, and they can add more people (and robots) who can read and write back to the wave.

So using Wave means that you must trust those who you share with, not because Wave makes it possible for information to be passed along to more and more people (or to everyone), but because it makes doing so very easy.

One thing that is not currently in the preview, but will be in the final product (nay, protocol) is federation. Federation basically means that Wave will eventually be like e-mail, because Google will agree to exchange Wave information with Yahoo, and Microsoft, and Apple, and even Bob's computer in his parents' basement. Everyone except, hopefully, spammers, but I'm sure they'll find some way in. Joe@googlewave.com will be able to add suzie@acme.com and frank@microsoft.com to the same wave, and it will not be any different from adding bob@bobsparentsbasement.com.

I'm not certain what Google's plans are for the 2nd category. Personally, I would find it quite useful to allow only certain people to edit, but a larger set of people to view (and possibly comment on), but not edit a blip. This would be perfectly doable in terms of federation, except that a foreign server can perform any action that its users have a right to do, so granting write access to suzie@acemwave.com might give craig@acmewave.com write access too, depending on how the acmewave.com server is coded.

Actually, I've been thinking a lot about writing a robot that would allow me to expose the content of a wave to the public through a website (e.g., a blog), and allowing the users of that website (optionally including anonymous users) to interact with the wave using the website and the robot as their proxy.

Basically, it would be a lot like Bloggy, but without needing to make the wave public, and with finer-grained control over user actions. The first step would be to make a robot that simply reads the wave contents, and posts them on the web, updating the website whenever the wave is updated.

Google Wave (Preview)

2009-11-13T00:27:00.000-08:00

I just got in on the Google Wave preview.

I immediately had 8 invites, of which I have used 4, so far. The first one went to my wife, of course.

I like it. I think it has awesome potential.

It's a "preview" (a.k.a. "beta"--or, since we're talking Google's definition of "beta", it's an "alpha"), so there are lots of rough edges.

Right off the bat, here's what bugs me. Hopefully the bugs will get fixed.

First of all, here's Google Wave:

So here's the first thing I don't like. Say I want to narrow down my contacts, to find the one I'm looking for. I go to the Contacts widget, and type some text:

Okay, so now I want to see the rest of my contacts, in the default view. What do I press? There's no little [X] button. I have to select the text in the box and hit Delete or Backspace. That is just bad UI design. There needs to be an [X] right next to the magnifying glass that clears the field. Google, please fix that. (Yes, I've already submitted feedback about this.)

This next one is probably just something I'll have to get used to. When you go to create a new wave, or add someone to the wave, be careful when you click! Creating a wave or adding someone to it is irrevocable, and the UI doesn't ask you for confirmation, it just shows up in their inbox, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I accidentally added my friend Victor to my first wave, because I clicked his name:

I was expecting there to be a confirmation dialogue, in stead, he was added. I hope he enjoys my work.

Applications are not easy to find. There's a link to an Extensions Gallery wave in the introductory "Welcome to Google \/\/ave" wave that starts in your inbox, but all it has is Sodoku and half a dozen other apps. I'm not knocking the apps. They're good, but there are a whole bunch more out there that were shown off in the video.

After some poking around, I found this list (and this list) of Bots, Apps and Gadgets. The one I was most interested in, Bloggy, doesn't seem like it's working. I added it to a wave, but it didn't do anything. It's supposed to make the wave public and post it to your blog so that everyone (even those not logged in to Wave) can see it, and interact with it if you allow public editing. Hopefully they brought it offline so that they could fix it, and that it will be fixed soon.

One last thing, and then I need to go to bed. There's an "Options..." menu item that doesn't do anything for me. I've only tried it in Firefox (and I'm using 3.6b2), but clicking on it doesn't do anything at all.

Just so no one thinks I'm being negative, let me state this plainly: I'm VERY excited about Google Wave. I know it's a pre-released product, and I don't expect perfection by any means. I'm documenting these things here because I want to share my experience, and I would like to see the shortcomings addressed so that the final product will be awesome.

Yay for Google Wave!

Google Wave

2009-07-23T01:39:00.000-07:00

Google Wave looks amazing! (For those with 10-minute attention spans, here's the abridged version. The longer version is worth the watch if you have the time.) It's a new Internet communication protocol/framework being developed by Google. It's not a walled garden: anyone can make their own implementation (or even base it on Google's code), and it will be interoperable with everyone else, just like e-mail. But this isn't your grandfather's e-mail. Wave is basically a conversation/collaboration tree, with full version control, history, and really cool tools for mashups, transformations, translations, and anything else anyone on earth can think of and write a plugin for. This is really that revolutionary. Imagine if every e-mail, chat, wiki, invitation, blog post, tweet, photo album, forum, and whatever else on the Internet was as simple to interact with as an item on Facebook or a wiki, only with way more powerful tools, and it wasn't confined to anyone's walled garden. Tomorrow's kids will laugh at us for using Facebook for the same reason that today's kids laugh at their elders for using Juno. I don't expect all of those other technologies to disappear, but to some extent they will be eclipsed, and they will have to keep up or be left behind.

Qwest Woes

2009-06-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

I just got off the phone with Qwest tech support. Apparently, the "modem" that I bought isn't just a modem, it's also a router, NAT, and firewall, so none of my port forwarding I had configured in my router was working. First, I had to configure the Qwest modem/router/thing (an Actiontech M1000) to "bridge mode", so that it would turn off its NAT and firewall and just give me a connection to the Qwest network, and then I had to enter my Qwest account PPPoE credentials into my Linksys router (with, to complicate things, Tomato firmware). But now it works as it should, so my HTTP server should be up and running on the 'Net.