John Villarreal captured me on his YouTube show. The topic is the “Porkulus” bill going through the senate right now.
Category: News
I now have two apps live on MySpace, Random Advice and Random Band Names. The core functionality is exactly the same as what’s on Leon’s Random Generators. Both of them place content on your MySpace profile. You can see them in action on my profile page, myspace.com/leonatkinson.
It’s somewhat obtuse to get the apps on your own profile. Visit the app’s profile page (linked above). Click the button to add the app. Then, modify your profile and add the “module”. (I’m hand-waving a bit here). I think you must be upgraded to the 2.0 version of profiles.
Despite my bickering about how I was fighting with the approval process last month, I did get the advice generator active. The band names app was approved within hours. So maybe they like to hassle unproven developers. In any event, the advice generator has been live for less than a month and has 116 “active users”. I’m not clear if that means installs, or if people have activated the module in their profile. I can’t find any examples of profiles with it installed.
Categories
My 1&1 Account Has Been Down For Days
I’m now into day 2 of my account over at 1&1 being down. Their estimates for recovery keep going up, from 4 hours, to 12 hours and today they say it will be two more days. Luckily, I don’t trust my main site, www.leonatkinson.com, to them. I leonatkinson.com with he.net and I might have had a couple of hours of downtime in the 10 years I’ve been with them.
I have all my emptyz.com stuff with 1&1, and that means a couple of my Facebook apps are down. Plus, I stuck some client work on the server last week. It’s a huge drag to have that stuff unavailable for two more days.
I suspect this is an isolated event, unlike the widespread outage from a couple of years ago that made it to Digg. I can’t find anyone else talking about it. Anyway, it seems like a good time switch providers.
Categories
Google Notebook Going Away
Google announced that they will stop developing Notebook, a tool I use every day. This is downside to using free-as-in-beer tools. They aren’t planning to shut off the service (right away). And it’s easy enough to export the content. There are alternatives that might take me a while to evaluate. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
You can export each notebook directly to Google Docs. I don’t like the interface. I like to switch quickly between notebooks. I don’t want a heavy MS Word replacement loaded on multiple Firefox tabs. This solution doesn’t work for me. Neither do the tasks functionality in gmail or building something custom with Google Sites. The suggestions given on the Notebook blog indicate that the team doesn’t understand how I use their product.
Zoho has their own Notebook. The interface is radically different, but the overall data architecture is the same. I suspect it would take me a while to move the data over given Zoho’s way of implementing pages. I do like how Zoho let’s you make a page be a spreadsheet instead of free text. In my limited playing around with it, though, I found that opening up directly to a saved notebook showed me a twirling progress indicator for longer than I cared to wait.
Evernote offers a Web interface as well as a Windows executable (that I don’t care about). They show one, small screenshot of the Web interface, which looks overly graphical. The big fail for me, though is that after getting through the annoying captcha, I had to wait for an email with a confirmation code. It didn’t come right away, so I moved on.
I won’t bother to look at Microsoft One Note. I assume it won’t work well on Ubuntu. I might go back to writing notes as email drafts. I can’t find an open source project that duplicates Google Notebook, so I might write something myself.
Categories
Cool Threads From Livity
It’s probably too late to shop for gifts, but if you get cash for Christmas, head over to Livity Outernational and check out their cool clothes. My childhood friend, Isaac, runs the business and sent me some samples. The hoodie he sent me is now my favorite casual jacket.
It’s super heavyweight and really fought off the cold. It’s been especially cold here in Northern California in the past couple weeks, but I’ve been comfortable. I also like the the whimsical and useful features of this hoodie. There are holes in the sleeves for your thumbs which while kind of fun are also practical for keeping the sleeves from riding up while your doing something active like snowboarding. There’s also a cool design of a “Kelp Overload” on the inside, or on the outside if you choose to turn this reversible jacket inside-out.
Maybe you’ll find something else at the store that you fancy, so check it out.