Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • “looks like we entered the Hoth system”

    A new trailer for Stargate: Universe, which has me way more excited than anything I’ve seen regarding Caprica.

  • RSS is dead; long live RSS!

    I was quite perplexed to see this article at ZDNet on techmeme, arguing that RSS is a failure. Now, I’ve been relying less and less on Google Reader myself as a source of news as well, but that’s not because of a failure in RSS technology but rather the obsolesence of Google Reader in the Twitter age. Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW has a response, arguing that RSS isn’t dead but just one of many information-delivery mechanisms he relies on; I think this response misses the point, however. The truth is that RSS has become an infrastructure technology, the glue that binds the web together and makes it useful. Yahoo Pipes was a great example of how RSS could be used to manipulate content, and half the functionality of Twitter itself comes from the ability to use RSS to import content to it. Friendfeed also relies on RSS feeds generated from your social sphere, and Facebook has supported importing of RSS feeds for a while. The point here is that RSS is so prevalent it has become invisible. Yes, you can tap the raw stream of RSS content directly, using Google Reader or equivalent, but that’s like drinking from the firehose. The better approach is to let your social graph do the filtering for you and then present the result as a steady stream (the so-called river of news). That stream is content, but the streambed is RSS.

    Related: Dave Winer makes much the same point, that “the Internet is layered.” Also see James Robertson’s comments about the closed tech pundit circle.

  • a perplexing paucity of PHP programmers

    My friend Abbas Ali, who is one of the lead programmers for the open-source Coppermine gallery project, writes with mild frustration about the seeming shortage of talented PHP programmers in India. He cites a number of reasons, one of which is a lack of good trainers:

    Unfortunately in India you need a trainer for learning programming languages. No one is willing to learn on his/her own. As soon as a student goes to university, (s)he starts to search for training institutes. There are very few training institutes offering PHP courses and I will say none of them are good (at least in Nagpur). The sole reason is that the trainer himself/herself is not adept at PHP.

    This is surprising to me. Certainly the vast majority of programmers in the US I know are self-taught, especially the web-centric ones who sling PHP and SQL code around all day. The availability of numerous and inexpensive training manuals (notably the O’Reilly series) seems to foster a DIY mentality towards picking up a new language, though neraly everyone has of ocurse had at least one programming ocurse in college even if they aren’t formal CS majors (and few are). Are there no such eequivalent resources available in the Indian market? Or is there a cultural difference at play here? Either way, it seems like there’s an opportunity of some sort to rectify this situation. There’s a vast amount of PHP and SQL based web application development going on, especially around the Twitter and WordPress ecosystems. Then again, James and crew over at WPMU.org are also always trying to recruit talent, too, so I wonder if the problem isn’t limited to India.

    In fact, looking at my own example, my own knowledge of these technologies is pretty basic. I have written two plugins, one of which makes some vey nominal SQL calls and the other which is just a few simple PHP functions strung together, leveraging the hooks and wordpress API. I doubt very much that I’d come close to a “talented” PHP programmer of the sort Abbas’ company and others are looking for. Perhaps the depth of PHP knowledge is shallow overall and deep in only a few places, in which case Abbas has hit upon an observation that is truly global. If the depth of PHP and SQL knowledge could be increased across a broader swath of the talent pool, would we see an explosion of even better apps?

    It certainly feels like there isn’t much technical innovation going on in the web right now. The only person out there in the tech punditsphere who actually gets his hands dirty and tinkers with code is Dave Winer, and he has built some really elegant things. Also I was really quite impressed with Joe Moreno’s URL-shortener solution. These sorts of things require broader knowledge than just PHP and SQL, such as DNS mapping. Most of the new sites that spring up covered by TechCrunch seem to be simple ideas implemented cleverly, but nothing really innovative seems to have come down the pike since, well, Twitter. Is the web industry stagnant for lack of talent overall?

  • Tags to Hashtags #wp

    I’ve written a new plugin for wordpress entitled “AHP Tags to Hashtags” for use with WordPress and WordPress MU. The plugin can be found for now at pastebin here, I will update when it’s been added to the official wordpress plugin repository.

    The plugin appends the tags for each post to the post title in the RSS feed. For example, for a post titled “Awesome post” which is tagged with “Amazing, Awesome, Super awesome”, the RSS feed will show the post titles as “Awesome post #Amazing #Awesome #Superawesome”. Note that spaces in a tag are removed, and hash symbols (#) are prepended to each.

    This plugin is useful primarily to bloggers who pipe their posts into Twitter. The post tags become Twitter hashtags. Since post tags and twitter hashtags are both a form of metadata, it is natural to simply and automatically reuse the one for the other.

    Consider a blog post on the Iran election. Normally youd tag the post Iran and then when you tweet it, youd have to manually insert the twitter hashtag #iranelection. Now, you can simply tag the post iranelection (no # symbol) and it will automatically be hashtagged. Combined with a service like Twitterfeed, this plugin can greatly automate the process of piping relevant posts into the twitterverse.

    Note that the plugin makes no attempt to check that the total length of the post title, including hashtags, falls within the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter.

    At present the plugin has no options. The feature roadmap includes the following:
    – add title character length checking
    – toggle using tags or categories for conversion to hashtags
    – let user decide whether to remove spaces in tags, or convert to underlines or other character

    this is a pretty simple plugin so other feature requests are appreciated.

    UPDATE: version 2.0 of the plugin is at pastebin here. This version no longer appends all tags, but only those already beginning with #. This way the blogger can selectively choose which tags they want converted into hashtags.

  • Osamu Tezuka

    There’s a lengthy, detailed write-up at AICN on the DVD release of The Astonishing Work of Tezuka Osamu, who was one of the early pioneers of Japanese animation and manga, whose experimental short features really pushed the boundaries of art and expression. His work was clearly one of the major influences for most of the major players in anime today – Miyazaki’s constant naturalistic themes were likely influenced by Tezuka’s Legend of the Forest, for example, wich is on the DVD along with 12 other short works that span the full range of Tezuka’s career.

  • cheap games

    along the lines of my earlier post about sci fi, I am also interested in soliciting recommedations for cheap, preferably indie, games. I’ve claimed to be a console snob in the past (even though my Wii is only the second console I’ve ever owned – the previous one being the original Nintendo) but given that recent events have compelled me to build a machine capable of reasonably modern gaming, I’m willing to broaden my horizons. Here are some of the games I want to try out:

    – Portal. This just seems an obvious game to pick up. I assume the PC version is the only version there is? Is there a way to get this without Steam?
    – World of Goo. I hear this is available as a PC version and also on WiiWare – I am leaning towards the latter because I have also heard it’s multiplayer on Wii. This would be one I really would want to play with my daughter.
    – The Path. Shamus just reviewed this and it looks fascinatingly non-linear.
    – Myst. Yup, not exactly indie, nor new. But I hear its been released as a full graphic environment rather than the static screens, and on a single DVD instead of several CDs. It might be worth a try to play again. I still would prefer to play it as an in-Warcraft zone, but that will never happen. I also want to get the sequel, Riven, if available in same format, as I do have the original and gave up on it because the hassle of swapping discs became a serious impediment to play.

    The general, non-ironclad guidelines I have for what i’m looking for are, 1. cheap ($15 or less), 2. simple (you sit down, you play. Not Warcraft) and 3. innovative (I’m not really interested in running around killing things). If a game is suitable for me to play with my daughter, thats bonus. Also if it is available on Wiiware, thats another plus.

  • your age vs your level

    As my main character’s level approaches my age, I am struck by how the leveling process is both a metaphor for youth and also an escapist fantasy. In life, as you age you get stronger, faster, smarter – up to a point, and then you plateau out, and then gradually decline in most of those attributes (though not all). In Warcraft, you just keep on going up and up. Thus the early levels, say up to about 30-40, its a direct analogue for the aging process, and then above that it’s the fountain of youth. Of course the chronological time it takes for you to level from 40 to 80 is a lot less than from 1 to 40, so in practice most people arent going to be growing measurably older during the lifetime of their game character. But still, its easy to see how the game might appeal to someone older than the target age grouup of mid-20s to mid-30s. Unlike Second Life, which is basically a recreation of modern life’s drudgery, at least Azeroth gives you a story and heroic role to play.

    I’m 35, and as of this writing my main toon is lvl 32. I’ll hit equal age-level sometime next week, in all likelihood. Maybe I should throw a party.

  • the sublime art of Japanese McDonald’s food

    this is a masterpiece.

    The Mega Tamago Burger at Japanese McDonald's
    The Mega Tamago Burger at Japanese McDonald’s

    It’s basically what would happen if you took an American Big Mac and exposed it to nuclear radiation – it’s godzilla as applied to burgers. This thing must really skew the heck out of the Big Mac Index.

    (via Brian)

  • a Galactica movie? no thanks

    I have absolutely zero interest in this. Zero:

    Bryan Singer, director of the first two “X-Men” movies, “Superman Returns” and “Valkyrie,” is “nearing a deal” to produce and perhaps direct a new big-screen “Battlestar Galactica” movie.

    […] By all accounts, any new feature would take place outside the alien-free “Galactica” universe created by Moore, and be based instead on the original 1978 Glen Larson series.

    There’s just no way I am going to poison the memory of Galactica with something almost guaranteed to suck – especially when you take an idea meant for televisioin and run it through the Hollywood plot-liquefaction wringer. They pulled it off with Star Trek as a reboot, but that had the benefit of 1. four decades and 2. writers and a director who actually had interesting ideas. From what Bryan Singer did with the Superman reboot, it is clear he has absolutely zero imagination. Even Singer’s work on the X-Men movies was really pretty dull.

    More details at AICN and HitFlix (the latter including absolutely atrocious Cylon concept art that sucks whatever residual interest I may theoretically have had for such a project completely down the drain).

  • backups should be local, not to the cloud

    One of the lessons of Friendfeed’s buyout by Facebook is that the cloud is not a good place for backup. In an era of the sub-$100 terabyte, the idea that the best place for our data should be anywhere other than right at home is a strange one. Cloud backup is useful as a meta-backup – for example, using Jungledisk and Amazon’s S3 service to backup your local backups – to guard against catastrophe, but should never be your primary repository.

    For data like photos, this is pretty much a moot point, as everyone keeps their originals on their disk and uploads select photos to Flickr/Picasa etc (and at lower resolution than the originals). But for text, like blog posts and tweets, most people simply leave their content in the cloud – which includes leaving your wordpress database at your hosting provider rather than on your local disk. I haven’t yet found a good solution for local wordpress database backups but I have written previously about various backup strategies for twitter. Sarah Perez at RWW just did a piece on 10 ways to archive your tweets as well, but most of these are again cloud-based solutions. Marshall Kirkpatrick has a guide to using Google Reader along with Dave Winer’s new OPML tool to consolidate all your tweets and your friends’ tweets, but this isn’t a true backup solution either, as I point out in comments. The point however is as long as the data is in the cloud, it’s not really backed up – data wants to be imprisoned, not set free.