Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Earlier this afternoon, Alex Payne announced on Twitter the availability of some new APIs, built by Matt Sanford that would allow programmers to make use of the searches and trends found at search.twitter.com

I checked it out, from curiosity, and immediately thought of an interesting use of this. Why not set up a twitter account that people can follow to hear about the "trending topics" of people's twitter messages? You could follow that account, and learn about the things which people around the twitterverse are talking about.

I was stunned to find that the account "trending" was not yet taken. So I set up an account and got to work on a quick little project.

And I mean quick. After just an hour or two of programming and setting up a simple database, I had my "bot" set up. Every five minutes, it checks the latest topics, and checks to see if anything is new. If it is, it posts each topic, along with a URL to perform that search on the web, as a new tweet.

It took a while to wait around for some new topics to come on the horizon, in order to verify that the automatic aspect was working properly. But, about three hours after the announcement, I announced this new account/service.

So if you use Twitter, give it a whirl — follow trending. It's fascinating to become aware, in real time, of what people are twittering about.

Also, if you are so inclined, you can follow me on twitter, and also Karelia Software. Fellow Karelians Mike and Terrence are also on Twitter as well.

Over on the Karelia weblog, we posted a note that we were looking for somebody to help with technical support, and also a Graphic Artist/Designer to contract with us for some cool projects.

We're covered on the tech support end now, but we are still looking for some really dynamite graphic designers, who would be interested in web designs, icons, and a very artistic user interface for a product that we are starting to work on.

Experience isn't really necessary but talent is. :-)

If that's you, and you have an online portfolio, drop me a line: contractors_summer08@karelia.com.

I've tried to post useful postings here on my personal blog, especially when it comes to topics of Mac software development. But it's really only the long essay that makes it here. When I have a small tidbit, I just post it on Twitter.

(I'm danwood on Twitter, not surprisingly.)

Regarding Twitter, Tim Ferriss of Four Hour Work Week fame said on his blog:

If you don’t yet use Twitter, don’t start. It’s pointless e-mail on steroids.

Well, I agree to a point; I mostly disagree, especially if you are an "indie" software developer and you want a sense of community and a network of people you can bounce things off of. Twitter has been called "the world's largest water cooler" and I think that's about right. If I am heads-down trying to work and concentrate, I turn it off. But if I'm doing my usual batch of smaller tasks, including waiting for compiles to finish, it's nice to have a connection with the outside world of other independent software developers, along with a few random friends and acquaintances who are also on Twitter.

Some downright useful abilities of Twitter and a good community are:

• Share a handy tip that you've discovered about development, Unix, etc.
• Ask a quick technical question or advice
• Get feedback for an idea you have
• Inform people where you are, or where you are going, to possibly meet up in person
• Gripe about the NDA that is still in place for iPhone development

OK, not everything is useful that gets tweeted, and it's possible to waste time by letting yourself get sucked into every URL of that funny new video on YouTube. Still, that's part of the charm because you get a chance to "know" the people you follow just a bit.

(The limited bandwidth and limited refresh rate is actually a positive; it keeps you from getting sucked in to spend too much time. When I was doing a lot of work in the internals of WebKit, I "hung out" at the #webkit IRC channel. Great people, but there was just too much chatter going by to be able to casually keep up with. Twitter's amount is just about right.)

So if there is a community happening in the Twitterverse, as there is with Indie Mac development, check out Twitter and start following people you know or find interesting. Reply with useful insight (prefixing a tweet with @username posts a public followup), and your network will grow if you have interesting things to say.

And if you work in an office and there are already enough people around you to distract you and help you, don't bother with it.

But not everybody may know what the heck those little things are. For the nonprofit that I work with, our home page is actually a weblog, complete with an RSS feed. But is the average surfer going to know the power behind the little orange icon? The page that results from clicking on that link would look like pure gobbledygook to the untrained eye!

So I did a little bit of JavaScript trickery to pop up an explanatory window should somebody happen to click on the icon. (Try it below, assuming you are viewing this on your browser!)

See more ...

Time Magazine's cover is so ... twentieth century.

This is what it really should look like.

Note: 21st-Century iSight-style camera and modern Safari/WebKit browser running on Mac OS X "Tiger" is needed. If you see black in the picture below or a plugin error, then please move along....

Inspired by Steven Frank and this prank on O'Reilly MacDevCenter by Chris Adamson. (For more thoughts about the notion of embedding iSight video, see this post by Jonathan Wight.) Oh, and see this movie trailer about you, too!

(Thanks to Sven-S. Porst for the CSS help on this!)

(digg this story)

How to discover and get some great new music:

1. Download tons of free MP3s from the SXSW festival over bittorrent (2007, 2006, 2005).
2. Slog through the music and find the songs that you actually like; throw away the junk.
3. Get thee to eMusic and start searching for the artists that you liked. Amazing how many artists you are likely to find!
4. Download albums from these bands. When you run out of music credits, well you gotta wait until next month or boost your subscription.

I have used emusic before, but now that I had the idea of finding bands from the songs I've found at SXSW, I now have dozens and dozens of albums that I'm ready to download.

If you like discovering new music, try this out!

(OK, this is a conceptual mashup, not a web 2.0 implementation ... that would be cool! And it has nothing to do with musical mashups!)

I like to work down at a nearby café one day a week or so, just for a change of pace, and to try to emulate the behavior of famous software companies. :-) Recently I started chatting with another patron there when I noticed that he stopped bringing in a Windows laptop and was now using a Mac. I learned his first name, and over the last couple of months, we've chatted at bit when we run into each other there.

Meanwhile, I've been corresponding with a fellow Alameda resident over the last couple of months; he has started up a local political group that I've been hoping to get involved with — but haven't yet.

Yesterday I discovered that those two people — the guy at the café and the guy I've been exchanging emails with — are the same person!

What a strange thing to happen, to have to now merge two "people" (in my mental model of the world) into one!

OK, it doesn't involve any hard-drive swapping or deal-making with Apple. Here's how I've upgraded to a 40 GB iPod -- I bought a new iPod, and I'm selling my 30GB iPod on eBay.

Actually, what I'm selling is almost completely new -- I had taken in my 30Gigger into the Apple Store because it was having a few problems (e.g. it was narcoleptic, falling asleep while playing music, even while docked). They swapped it for a brand new unit. But since it was so new, I thought this was a good time to "upgrade" to 40 GB, so I could sell the almost-new 30-gigger.

And it still doesn't hold my entire music collection. (I was an eMusic member for a while; it's amazing how much you can accumulate!)

If anybody wants to buy this iPod, which has all the accessories still wrapped up, since I just swapped them with the new stuff that came with the 40-gigger, I'll throw in a license to Watson to the lucky winner!

I had to share this with the world. My mom recently bought this water pitcher with the most bizarre label on it:

Product this peculiar overlengthy groove is it design to surface, can stretch reach flowering shrubs preventing rivers from overflow effective when watering flowers.

Full size scan @ flickr: The Luxurious Flower Shedding

Today I kept reading blog posts and notice iChat status messages of people I know so excited about the Nintendo Wii (pronounced "why" — I don't care for computer gaming) ...

... But this story was certainly a sobering take on the phenomenon.

"Oh, you're buying those Nintendo tapes? You've got those ones that are all war.. I've been there. I've seen it." A few people were perplexed, but still curious about what the guy had to say.

...

"You remember that, when you're playing your little tapes," the man said as he gestured playing around with a controller, "you remember that there are people really doing that. They're shooting and they're getting shot at."

...

Not only was it a moment of intense frustration, but also introspection - I was sitting in line for a f[...] Nintendo while there are people dying for no reason. I'm programmed to buy the latest crap just because it's the latest crap, and play games that mock the reality of the horrifying environment of war. You can try your best to change the status quo sonny, but it's not gonna work - so fire up your Sony NintendoBox 2000 and shut the hell up.

Read the whole story about the early-morning encounter at the mall.

Maybe somebody who reads this will have some suggestions. I'm trying to help a friend set up a blog that allows multiple authors to each have their own sub-blog, that they would post to along the same lines of a wordpress or blogger blog, and could be viewed or subscribed to individually as an individual blog; all the sub-blogs would be aggregated into an overall blog that would merge all of the authors together on a single main blog page, feed that aggregates all the other posts, etc. I don't think bloger or wordpress are up to this. Any suggestions?

A few months ago I came across a website that offered a number of nice banner images that could go across the top of one's website or weblog. They were free to use (sort of like stock photos), and they came in regular (about 800 by 200 pixels) and double size.

This was a very nice resource of images, but I can't for the life of me find this website anymore. Has any reader here come across it and know its URL?

Update:We have a winner! Free Web Page Headers, thanks to John Fox!