lixo.org

I have just finished migrating all my stuff from a friend’s dedicated server to my own little space at Dreamhost. So far, the service has been flawless, but please let me know if there’s anything wrong. I haven’t quite found a theme I like, and might have to adjust this one a bit.

Meanwhile, I got my tiny little cards from moo.com. The quality of the prints is really, really good. Plus, it’s cheap and novel. As are the USBCell batteries I got in the mail on the same day. They might not have enough power to keep my digital camera up for too long, but having the charger built into the batteries themselves is just so convenient it makes it worth it.

It’s probably not surprising to those who know me, but I’ve been caught up in the podcasting craze lately. I get caught up in every craze, no matter how foolish, that comes around in the internets, anyway, and that includes pluralizing its name. Ah, well, what can I do, I get distracted easily by shiny things waved in my general direction.

So, when I was trying to find new stuff to listen to in my daily little-over-an-hour commute, I was having a look around and stumbled upon Joshua Snatcher’s Casting the net wider. So those of you already using del.icio.us, here’s the good news: you have a podcast. Just put a bunch of audio files online, bookmark them with the tag system:media:audio (try looking at all posts – there’s quite a bunch of stuff there already), and you’re done. Here’s my feed, just in case.

I’m not planning on recording anything for now, although I’m interested in the possibility of getting an iTalk and just randomly grabbing someone at the office for a quick interview at geeknights or other even via Skype. Volunteers? Drop me a note!

You know the kind of stupid stuff you do when you’re 16? And they suddenly appear again many years later to haunt you? You know, like having kids, smoking crack cocaine, burying corpses on your backyard… or even, on those moments of utter carelessness, sharing root passwords?

Some may have noticed this website was compromised yesterday and asked me what happened, so here goes a little advice: don’t use the same “low-security” password you’ve been using for the past 7 years out of sheer laziness on a public website that gets syndicated. In fact, don’t use it anywhere, dammit.

In this particular case, I had a few friends from high school days who happened to know this password, as we shared a few local user accounts on eachother’s machines, and sometimes needed to get root access to help fix things. Being the idiot I am, I ended up using this same password for many other things, some of them not as low security as I’d think, and completely forgot about the fact that one of these friends has his moments low self-esteem, and needs to draw attention to himself every so often. But instead of getting a nicer or more expensive car, computer, cellphone or girlfriend, like everyone else who was beaten up as a child would, he goes around annoying people. Sad.

So, I’m changing all my passwords to 50-character passphrases. With alphanumerics, l33t-sp33k, spaces, non-ASCII characters and whatever else I can think of. Sure, it takes me about a minute to log in to my daily stuff, and it’s a pain in the ass, but it saves me from the trouble of thinking about all those different torture methods. Well, sort of, there’s still a lot of spam…

Chad Fowler came up with a very interesting find: the Lingua::EN::Sentence and Lingua::EN::Syllabe libs, which he used to write a random haiku generator with his own posts as input.

As I don’t have that many posts here yet, running his script over my babblings didn’t turn out to be too interesting, I needed some good quantity of weird stuff. So, of course, I ran it over the all the BoingBoing posts I had archived (since somewhere around early December).

Here are some of the best:

Throw potshots at it.
(click image for enlargement.)
We’re all gonna die!

Free registration.
Devastation & much more!
Find it on eBay!

No records of death.
And you have to be humbled.
But, IT’S NOT ENOUGH.

Shown here, “crochet crotch.”
The detail is impressive.”
Link to example.

So he called the cops.
They want dolls and baseball bats!
And those come from you!

“They were DELICIOUS.”
I demand a recipe.
I was skeptical.

Ah, the good joys of automated text processing and its usually bizarre outcome!

Here’s the full output, before randomizing it into haiku-like 5-7-5 triplets.

A small update: if you don’t feel like fiddling with Ruby in order to generate your own haikus, here’s a nifty (Python based, oh the irony) haiku generator using Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe as a source. Everytime you reload, you get 42 fresh ones. Check it out!

Despite all the XML abuse going around these days, there are is a small, but growing, number of web service consuming applications out there, and one very neat app I found is FlickrGraph (see my Flickr profile in it).

FlickrGraph wouldn’t at all be possible without the Flickr API, which exposes many of the funcionalities in Flickr as REST, SOAP or XML-RPC calls to any developer interested in using them.

This is what Jeff Bezos points out in his Web 2.0 talk:

Web 2.0, from where I stand, is about making the internet useful for computers.

Blogs with RDF/RSS/Atom-based aggregation were only a very tiny first step to making content and services more widely available, and now everytime I think of a useful service on the web, I end up sketching out its API first, figure out a few interesting uses for it, and then decide if it’s worth or not implementing.

If you look at Flickr’s insane popularity rise, there are definitely a few lessons to learn about a great web application, and providing an API is certainly one of them. It’s an incredibly dense app, even with the apparent simplicity, so I’m sure there’s a lot more.