Diary 2008-04-29

Lots and lots of little trivial things happening. Here are but a few…

• I’ve been playing around with an idea for a simple web-app that will allow me to test out the Google App Engine. It also forces me to learn a little bit about Python. All I need now is an account on the App Engine. But then I haven’t finished the app yet, so no rush;

• This past three-day weekend I went off the grid and took to the hills for a very different (and special) kind of hike. My feet have blisters on their soles, but I did walk ~90Km and did a lot of philosophizing and soul-searching and it felt really good. Walking like Donald Duck for the next few days, well, that I could do without;

• There are two “new” albums out there that could have been great. They are the Bauhaus’ “Go Away White” and The Breeders’ “Mountain Battles”. Both of them could have been great, but then both of them are “meh…”, at best. A shame really, I don’t know what artists of this caliber can be thinking of releasing this stuff. Might as well release another “Best Of”;

• Finally caught the “Blade Runner” on the big screen last night. There’s a reason that film is still a cult film after all these years. Watching it on a big screen with very decent quality and great sound was a great experience. Fun times!

Video on Flickr

Just uploaded a couple of old videos (formerly shown as videoblog entries here) to Flickr.

First impressions about Flickr’s new video capabilities:

• The 90 second limit is something I can understand for now, but which prevented me from posting some of my old videos (including my favourite one). If I do end up using Flickr to host my videos, though, I think I could make the 90 second limit work for me;

• Not being able to choose the thumbnail for the video (something which is coming soon, I think) is really annoying, especially if you make a small white-text-on-black-background intro as I usually do. I do hope this changes soon;

• From the two issues above I gather that Flickr isn’t really trying too hard to get into the full-fledged video hosting scene (as opposed to say YouTube), but rather they may be experimenting with making it easy for people to jot their mobile-phone videos down on the web. The thing is that here are already a couple (more?) good products out there that already do that, so let’s see how that pans out for them;

• The privacy and permission settings and controls already in place for photos also work on videos and that is a most welcome feature indeed!

CPAN search on Firefox

Adding a new search engine plugin for CPAN to Firefox is actually pretty easy, so I’ll write it down here in order not to forget it.

You just have to edit a file by the name of CPAN.xml (or something similar that strikes your fancy) and stick it in firefoxe’s searchplugins directory. You might find it somewhere around /usr/lib/firefox-XX/searchplugins or, better yet, in you own homedir at .mozilla/firefox/XXXXXX.default/searchplugins).

Enter the following content into the file:

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>CPAN</ShortName>
<Description>Comprehensive Perl Archive Network</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon,%00%00%01%00%01%00%10%10%00%00%00%00%00%00(%01%00%00%16%00%00%00(%00%00%00%10%00%00%00%20%00%00%00%01%00%04%00%00%00%00%00%C0%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%FF%FF%FF%00%7B%00%00%00%00%7B%00%00%7B%7B%00%00%00%00%7B%00%7B%00%7B%00%00%7B%7B%00%BD%BD%BD%00%7B%7B%7B%00%FF%00%00%00%00%FF%00%00%FF%FF%00%00%00%00%FF%00%FF%00%FF%00%00%FF%FF%00%00%00%00%00%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%F0%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF%FF3l%FC%BF%EF%18%E6%D7%EB%F0%F6%DB%00%00%FA%E9%00%02%F8%C3al%FC%03te%F8%02Co%F0%02r%20%E0%01%5C%D0%E0%03%11%00%E6%0F%BF%E6'%1F%00%02%07%FF%00%06%87%FF2%80%E3%FF1%E0</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&amp;query={searchTerms}"/>
<moz:SearchForm>searchFormURL</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>

The long line there is the funny little camel picture, and it must not be broken up.

It is actually trivial to create plugins to almost any search engine you can think of, this is just a good example that is handy for me.
If you need to add any extra parameters or so to the search, you can find the documentation for the search plugins at the mozilla developer center.

Note: Credit where it is due, I found the original example here and pretty much copied it over to this post with the minor fix of substituting the & Url element for the encoded version (&).

Guncho

Amazingly enough, in this day and age there are still some people creating moo/mud-like virtual worlds.

This year’s (2008) April’s fools day Guncho was introduced (announcement here).

It is located at guncho.game-host.org 4108 and you can create your own character at http://cp.guncho.com/.

The wiki with all the info about the “game” is at http://wiki.guncho.com/.

The concept is interesting enough: any player can create realms for others to play in and the goal is essentially to implement a virtual reality base for people to create their interactive fiction with others.
Yes, it’s been done a long time ago on many a MU[D|OO|SH]. Still, the fact that nowadays someone actually created something like this with only a text interface intrigues me deeply.

I plan to take a closer look at this virtual world and if it turns out to be as interesting as it sounds, I’ll be taking some notes here.

After the game

Um ano. Já passou um ano. Caramba!