Lifestream down

I’ve posted about the lifestream concept before and I’ve even implemented such a stream for myself.

My lifestream feed was supported by Storytlr.com and it worked rather well, actually, but Storytlr decided, a while ago, to call it quits and yesterday they shut down their servers.
As such I went through all of the links on the site that referenced that stream and deleted them.

Now, to my utter surprise, I find out that some people were actually following that stream. They’ve asked me about it and why it started giving them an error page.
Amazed I am, yes… :-)

I currently have nothing that can substitute the Storytlr feed. Yes, they did put up their code for other people to use if they wish, and there are other alternatives out there, but what I would like was for something that would be at least as flexible and as “hands-off” as the Storytlr service was, and that I haven’t been able to find out (maybe due to lack of trying hard enough).
So for now I’ll redirect the lifestream.nunonunes.org domain back to the nunonunes.org site and if and when I find an alternative I’ll point it back there.

But the question lingers in my mind, what exactly did you like so much about the lifestream that made you follow it instead of any other feed I have (say my Friendfeed or Google Buzz feed)? I’d really like to know so that I can look for a suitable alternative.

Anyway, thank you all for following.

Google Wave - my take on it

This is a short series of essays on how I have been using Google Wave in the few weeks since I’ve got my invite and why I think it is a great tool for collaborating.
This started out as an idea for a single blog post, but as I began outlining it and fleshing out the sections I wanted to write, it soon became too big for a single article and so I decided to split it into a few different ones so as to make each part bite-sized, making the whole thing easier to read and spreading it out over time a bit.

I’ll use this first article to keep track of all the subsequent ones, so as to turn it into a kind of index of the whole series (look for it at the end of this post).

My feeling so far can be summed up in like this: I really like wave!
I’ve been wanting a product like this for a long, long time and I’ve been using things like Google Docs for some of the purposes I now use wave for, but some things have been lacking all along.
I always knew what I wanted out of such a product (I’ve worked on a prototype of a system loosely resembling part of what wave is many years ago, on my last years at university, and I’ve been pinning for something like this to show up ever since then) and now, after using wave for a while, I find that it fulfills my needs quite nicely.

It is still not all there, of course (and I will address this on an upcoming article,) but it is on the right track.

This, then, is why I love Google Wave and why I think it is a product with great, great potential.
In the rest of the series I’ll describe some of my best use cases, interesting ways I found to use it and what I still feel is lacking.

Hope you enjoy it! (And no, at this time I have no invites to hand out, sorry.) :-)

• Part 1 — Google Wave - what it is and isn’t
• Part 2 — Google Wave - how I use it

Google taking over - now for the calendar and contacts

Trusting Google with an even bigger part of my on-line life.

The background

For quite some time now I’ve been slowly handing my life over to Google.
In 2005 I started by entrusting it with the access stats of my site.
Then in 2007 I made the big move of having it handle my mail by way of supporting my domain in Google Apps. This also meant that I automatically gained XMPP accounts (or Google Talk accounts if you prefer) for the accounts on my own domain.
By early 2008 I tried (without success) to have Google support my calendars and contacts and by late 2008 even my feed reading needs were taken over by the big G.

The old setup

Thus far I’d been using a system based on my own server at home which basically consisted of using MAC OS X’s iCal for the calendar and Address Book for the contact management.

One of the most obvious and important features I absolutely had to have was full two-way integration (i.e. synchronization) with my phone which, with my recent acquisition of the HTC smartphone, meant that I had to install a program that provided an ActiveSync interface to the MAC OS X sync service. I found that “The Missing Sync” by mark/space was ideally suited to this end and I was a happy user for quite some time.
Apple’s products work great and are more than sufficient for my needs, and I grew ever more fond of the features they provided and which Google Calendar and Gmail contacts’ support sorely lacked.

Time passes… And since I’m not eaten by a Grue I keep looking around for alternatives.
Not that I dislike my old setup all that much, but I’d rather have something that automatically synchronizes over-the-air (thus releasing me from the need to dock my phone at home and only then have it synched-up) and that would let me edit my appointments even if I can’t use my phone at that particular time and I’m not home (I grew fed up with running VNC over my home ADSL line, especially since it’s reliability is less than stellar). Also I’ve grown way too tired of managing my own infrastructure. Life’s too short to waste it managing servers, connections and stuff. I’m old, I want things to “just work”. Preferably by magic. Or something undistinguishable from it.

Are we there yet?

It has been apparent for some time now that Google is starting to pay much more attention to the needs of the “enterprise users”. Indeed it has been wooing the corporate folks with increasingly better features in it’s Google Apps offering, for example, and quite recently I came across news of it offering nice ways for the suit-and-tie crowd to connect their Outlook clients to Gmail’s servers (or something to that effect).
This got me thinking that it was high time that I went over to the admin pages of my Google Apps account and looked around for new stuff that might have popped up in the mean time.

And lo-and-behold, we now have the ability to sync up a mobile device both with Google Calendar and Gmail (for the contacts). This sync service is provided for a number of platforms which I already new about, but what struck me the most was that they provided an ActiveSync server for the users to sync up with.
Woha! The announcement of this feature must have slipped by me some time ago, but this means that I can now sync my phone effortlessly with Google’s services. Over the air. “Magically”.
This together with the fact that Google Calendar’s been getting pretty decent lately (feature- and stability-wise) and that Gmail’s handling of the contact’s information got a really nice bump (feature-wise) some time ago means that it was indeed high time I gave it another go. And a rather serious one at that. Even with all the warnings that Google plasters in our face when we go through all the hoops of activating the sync service. What can I say, I like to live dangerously.
Well… No, not really, I’m just rather lazy and I’d much rather the good folk at Google deal with supporting the servers than having to do it myself. :-)

The new (currently under evaluation, but looking rather good) setup

So now the time has come to finally switch over my calendar and contact management system to Google’s care.
I then proceeded to subscribe my external calendars on my Google Calendar, exported my own calendars from my server at home and imported them into my own calendar at Google, cleaned-out the mess that was my contacts list at my main Gmail account (and did so by nuking it entirely, a move which, in hind-sight, was not all that smart, as it forced me to re-request the authorization for every XMPP contact on my pidgin roster, but I digress), exported my contacts from my address book at home and imported them, nice and clean, into my Gmail account.
I then proceeded to zero out my phone (first sync is always a bitch if you have information on both sides, I’d rather not risk it. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did risk it and ended up with loads of duplicate information, so the second time-around I just nuked the phone’s data and was done with it) and sync it with my Google Apps accounts.

And I found…

Bliss!

So far I’m rather impressed with the result. I’ve been toying around with changing things on the phone and on the web interface and so far all is smooth sailing. What small differences I’ve noticed from my previous experience with data synching are easily overlooked for the benefits I get from this setup.

As it would happen, just this morning the “sync” link on my Google Calendar page stopped working (which got me worried about the possibility that the service might be pulled off the air), but then this afternoon the link returned and, with it, a new calendar emerged automatically on the “My Calendars” list —the “Tasks” calendar— together with the “Tasks NEW!” link on the top of the page.
Now Google Calendar’s documentation on synching (the link which disappeared temporarily) clearly states that Google’s sync service only supports calendar and contact data, not tasks, but maybe this is up-and-coming soon? Not that I care really, I never used tasks all that much and for the really important stuff I’m perfectly happy with using Hiveminder anyway.

So now I’ve taken the plunge and switched to using Google’s services to manage my contacts and calendars and I’ll force myself to keep at it for a few days until I reach a final decision on whether I should keep it up or drop it and roll back to my previous solution.
Please, please, let it work! I really want to drop the home server and this is a huge step in that direction!

Please note that I’ve enabled the testing of Beta(er?) features for my Google Apps, something that more sane (or less risk-inclined) people may not want to do and some of the stuff I described surely falls under this category.

Lifestream

The Lifestream concept is one that appeals to me in a really strong way.
I have (like most people) loads of content I produce on-line almost every single day of my life —of which this weblog is the least part, actually— and (if only for my own sake) I’d really like to have the possibility of reviewing it in a time-line and aggregate fashion. This is a need I’ve felt for a long, long time, since before the “Lifestream” term was even coined.

Now this concept has been gaining some attention from many people (as it obviously would) and a few services have appeared that address this need in different ways.

My own forays into using these services have been somewhat limited. I’ve been using my FriendFeed account as a kind of content aggregator which can produce a kind of lifestream (which powers the side-bar mini-lifestream gadget that I currently —as of this writing— have on the weblog pages) and that has been going well for the most part.

More recently, however, the concept has been gaining even more traction (as demonstrated by the amount of content generated on the lifestream blog) and a few services have surfaced which are even better suited to this end.
After having messed around briefly with a couple-three of them I seem to have settled —for now at least— on the Storytlr one and I must say I’m quite impressed.

The design is not all there yet (and knowing me it will be a long, long time before it is), but you can take a peek at it at http://lifestream.nunonunes.org/. Neat, heh?

Update on March 2, 2010: Storytlr has shut it’s servers down and discontinued the service. The lifestream links have been removed from my site today. Read more about this move here

HTC Touch Diamond

I’ve recently parted ways with my beloved Sony Ericsson k750i (due to it’s death by over-usage) and after a brief period of looking around to see what was out there (and what was available to me through my company), I’ve decided to get me an HTC Touch Diamond (a.k.a. HTC Touch p3700).

This is by no means a consensual —or easy— choice and many people said awful things about the phone, both from the hardware and from the software perspective (yes, it runs Windows Mobile 6. Oh the horror!)

So now that I’ve had it with me for a few weeks, I think I know it well enough to make a first appraisal of it and to evaluate the choice I made.
And the verdict so far is that I really like it.

It is small enough to fit in my trousers’ pocket (a must for me), but still has a big-enough screen (mainly because it is a touch-screen-only phone, with only a few physical buttons, but I’ll get to that,) and it works well enough, if you can tolerate the less-than-desirable response time of a few operations. Which I found out I can.

So what is not so good about it then?
Well, for starters the slow response I sometimes get from it when I try to do anything with it while it is “thinking” in the background. I got the hang of it, obviously, and by now I mostly know when the thing is going to take a while to pay me some attention and this is not such a bad thing for me, but if I where someone more of the short-tempered ilk, I’d sometimes go berserk with it, that’s for sure.
Another issue that I have with it is the God-awful quality of the camera, when in less-than-ideal lighting conditions. On a bright sunny day it works great, but take that shinny light away and the results are utterly disgusting. Which only compounds to the fact that actually getting to take a picture with it is not that easy.
Now I’ll grant you that I come from a phone which is brilliant as far as the camera functions go —I could get it out of my pocket and snap that picture within seconds, easily—, but on the Diamond this is just not possible, as I have to wade through menus to pull up the camera and get it working. Also, the shutter-button is positioned in a really awkward place, so taking pictures with it is not as easy as I’d like.
The camera is (or would be) a big deal for me so this phone is really a let-down on that department. Which means I’ll just have to stop procrastinating and get me a nice point-and-shoot to carry around with me, as I knew I should have done long ago anyway.
Other than that, I managed to crash the phone once already, but in all fairness I was testing out so much new software and pushed it so far (HSDPA on, GPS on, camera on, surfing the net, IM-ing with a multi-protocol client, all at the same time) that I really don’t blame it for freezing up on me.

And that’s the main point, I think, when it comes to this (and I’m sure most other pocket computers disguised as mobile phones): what we’re dealing with here is basically a computer, and a rather powerful one at that, so you have to make a choice as to how you’re going to treat it. If you decide to go all out, install every piece of software you can find for it and test it to the limits, it is going to crash on you. Probably a lot. That’s just to be expected. But if, on the other hand, you decide that this is, primarily, your phone and second a handy computer, then you should refrain from testing every bit of software that you can think of on it and, in that case, it actually works quite well, Windows and all. This is the view I’ve been getting from my friends which are already using WinMo-based smart-phones for a while and I, so far, concur with it.

That said, I was kind of fearful I would not get along well with a touch-screen-only phone and I was afraid I’d go nuts without at least the numerical keyboard, but I have to say I’m quite happy with the (virtual) full qwerty I have on it and not having physical buttons for most of the operations turned out not to be a problem at all. Note that I avoid the stylus like the plague and only use it on very specific situations and with certain programs. The “phone” functions work perfectly well with just my fingers, as it should. And so does the calendar, contact list and so on. The Touch-Flow 3D interface, for all it’s slowness, is really well thought out, even for big thumbed guys like me.

I have installed a few pieces of software on the phone, obviously, even if I was judicious about what to put in it, and I expect to write up on that shortly, so I’ll finish up this post with the re-iteration that, so far, I love my Diamond and I haven’t (yet) succumbed to any form of strange and evil disease just because I let a Windows-powered device in my house and in my life. :-)

OpenID TypeKey vs myOpenID.com

OpenID authentication rocks.

I’ve been using TypeKey as the OpenID provider for my domain for a long time now and until today things had gone by without a hitch. But tonight, as I was in a hurry to log in to tarpipe to write a quick workflow to use on my upcoming journey, it just failed me.

Now tonight, of all nights, I became aware that not only has TypeKey undergone some changes, but also tarpipe itself changed something in the authentication page so I was confused for a brief period as to what was failing where. But then I followed the authentication steps and it became obviously clear that TypeKey was the one failing me and having zero time to read all their explanations about the changes they performed (and really annoyed that those changes broke the service they’d been rendering me without any kind of previous warning whatsoever —I’m assuming it is a bug, not a conscious decision, but still, a failing authentication service? Ouch!) I decided to take the only course of action that was available to me on the spot.

So TypeKey is misbehaving but this being OpenID, tarpipe doesn’t really care who authenticates me, as long as they do authenticate me, right?
So I just had to open an account on any other OpenID provider, set up my domain to refer that provider as the one that authenticates me and then everything should work, right?

As it turns out yes, that is all there is to it. I created an account on myOpenID.com (don’t know them at all, maybe it was a good choice, maybe it was a bad choice, I’ll have to look into them more carefully later, but for now I just needed to be able to log into tarpipe and do it NOW), I made the necessary changes to my site to reflect the new authentication provider and voilá, instant gratification! I can now log into tarpipe and create and tweak my workflows at will.

It took me all of 20 minutes, from coming across the problem to solving it. Good heh? :-)

Twittlis 5

Yesterday I finally made it to my first Twittlis meeting —Twittlis #5.
.oO( About bloody time too! )

Excuse me? “What in the world is Twittlis,” you ask?

Well, I’m glad you did ask that question! :-)
You see, Twittlis is a meeting of people who use Twitter, who also happen to be around Lisboa on the first wednesday of any given month and who also like to chat with other people (which is obviously a given for almost anyone using Twitter.) The fact that this chatting happens over a few beers and, possibly, a nice pub-food-based dinner doesn’t hurt in the least. :-)

The (sub-)thirty-second pitch is, in words of Pedro Pinheiro (the organizer and afaik “father” of the thing):

Completely informal - arrive at any time, leave at any time. Come meet in person the people who you follow or follow you on twitter.com.

The venue that hosts Twittlis is, at the time of this writing, the most excellent O’Gilins Irish Pub and in it, again in Pedro’s own words:

Besides the wonderful assortment of lagers and ales (and non-alcoholic drinks too), there is a good and hearty selection of dinner choices, at affordable prices.

Oh and contrary to popular belief, the conversations are not all geek-oriented. Really. It’s nice! ;-)

Feed reading with Google Reader

I’ve recently started trying out Google Reader for my rss reading needs.

Until now (and for quite a long time, too) I’ve been using News Gator for that purpose. Together with the Mac desktop client —NetNewsWire— It has been my platform of choice because of it’s seamless integration with the desktop client, it’s mobile interface (which I think is pretty good) and, especially, the ability to synchronize status across multiple readers (yes, even multiple desktop readers).

At a time when I routinely used my iBook laptop, my iMac at the home desktop and my Linux laptop at the office (using the web interface) this made sense. Nowadays I find myself reading more and more online (via the web interface) or on my phone, but rarely do I fire up any of the NNWs on any of the Macs.

So I decided to try out the big G for yet another one of my on-line activities (seeing as it is already the keeper of most of my wired life’s information anyhow).
And the result (not unexpectedly) is that I am now ready to start dropping things from News Gator and start reading them solely on Google Reader.

The only thing that still keeps me from ditching News Gator entirely is the way that the G (doesn’t) handle private (i.e. authenticated) feeds. It has been pointed out to me that there are services out there that deal with this issue, but I’m not the least bit comfortable with having my credentials stored in some mom-and-pop web shop somewhere, so I’ll keep the private feeds safely within News Gator for a while until I come up with something I like better.

And now for the ironic part: why am I writing this now, instead of reading my feeds before lunch? Well, because Google Reader is not working! Ta-dahhh! Feeeeed meeeeeee! :-)

New iPod Classic

The new iPod is in da house!

I finally made up my mind for the 160GB classic. It was a no-brainer, really, as my music collection alone was more than the 60GB of the old one and on this one I will also carry my photos, videoblogs and so on and so forth.

It is slim, grey, heavy and has a nice engraving on the back with a line from one of my favourite songs (it actually took me a while to decide what I wanted engraved in it, you know?)

So the advantages of the new iPod are:

• My car supports it (haven’t tested it yet, but it should) so now I can operate it using the standard car-stereo controls, which is way nicer (not to mention safer);
• My music collection can continue to grow at it’s own pace without me being in constant need of deleting and moving stuff around to make it fit into the iPod.

Soooo, I now have an old 60GB iPod Photo (third generation, if I’m not mistaken) with heavy, heavy use, which is still in perfect working condition (appart from the scroll-wheel which sometimes stops responding and requires a locking and unlocking sequence to start working again).
This baby has been with me through thick and thin and I was considering keeping it for the sentimental value (of which it has a lot), but then I realized how silly that would, so now I have to find a good home for it.

Can’t wait for the new one to synch up so I can start testing it! (It will take a while yet, that’s for sure…)

Jaiku wishlist

Today, due to the massive problems that Twitter has been facing for quite some time now —which got really worse in the last couple of days—, lots of people in the “portuguese geek scene” went over to Jaiku to check out the service.

Now, I’ve been using Jaiku for quite some time now and I know it is far from perfect, but given Twitter’s latest trend of (at least partial) unavailability, I think Jaiku may look like a viable alternative to some people at least.

I don’t believe that people will actually flee in droves to Jaiku and the most probable outcome of all of this is that when (if??) Twitter deals with it’s load issues (and they should be more than on the ball on this one, especially now that they’ve got the funding to do it), everyone will just come back “home” and twitter away to their heart’s content, their Jaiku accounts soon forgotten.

But in the off-chance that the people at the big G do try to grab some serious market-share at this time, here is my (very personal and off-the-cuff) wishlist for nifty Jaiku features:

• Let us choose which if our contacts we want to receive notifications on our mobile devices from and which ones we just want to see updated on the web. (Twitter does this);

• Let us group our contacts and give us a nice and easy interface to turn on mobile notifications for those groups of contacts. An (admittedly esoteric) extension of the above feature which I would find most useful;

• Remove the spurious characters we get when we receive an update via SMS which is actually a comment on some message. What’s the point of those characters anyway (am I just being dense and not getting it, I wonder…);

• Am I missing something or is there no direct messaging capability? If it really isn’t there, do add it;

• Stability, stability, stability;

• Speed (but only after stability);

• Design it to scale, please, while you still can! Hurry up moving it to the App Engine.

More things are sure to come into my mind, I’ll update the list if/when they do.

Dying drives

OK, my iPod has been acting up and it seems like it is ready to go to the big electronic garbage can in the sky any day now.

Last week the drive on my home server died on me.

Today the drive on my work laptop is dying on me (I’m trying hard to get my home directory out before it fails completely).

What the heck is wrong with my electronic equipment?

You’d better watch out if you see me getting anywhere near your computers these days. You never now what sort of weird electromagnetic fields I might be emanating.

Sheesh! :-(

Mail by Google Apps

Heads up everyone sending me Email: I’ve moved my mail to the Google Apps account I’ve setup for my domain (nunonunes.org) and today I’ve turned off the scaffolding I still had on my previous server in order to get any stray mail there was coming it’s way. So if there is any funkiness with my Email and I don’t seem to be answering you back, please try again (or contact me any other way you wish) and let me know what’s up.

I finally have a decent webmail interface for my Email and also IMAP access to it. Sweet!

Moblogging with popular webapps

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Erm… Right, OK, a while ago, I talked a bit about moblogging and how I wished the media posts were handled and so on. After that I didn’t really think much about it, but I did keep on doing what I always did as far as posting things “on-the-go” was concerned and thing kept evolving.

Now on my recent foray I used and abused of my mobile phone to do what can only be described as moblogging. Namely, I routinely posted small text snippets into twitter, pictures (taken with my phone’s camera, so the quality is not brilliant, but passable) into flickr and I did not (because my phone’s video capture is rubbish) but could very easily have posted videos to youtube.

All of this I did (or could have done) with MMS messages. The email interface would have given me even more options about what to do with the stuff I posted and how to categorize it, but on a country such as the one I was in I was lucky enough to have GPRS as it was.
And that is precisely the point, when you get to a stage where you have this kind of connectivity on a country such as Morocco, you truly are able to moblog to your heart’s content easily, with a (nowadays) more or less run-of-the mill phone.

The issues I alluded to on the old post are taken care of by default (you just have to use different email addresses for the pictures in order to specify their privacy settings, for example) and many people are now able to understand how to do all of this stuff easily.

If you want you can even use a service such as, for example, ShoZu to make even more sophisticated stuff with your media, but it really is not necessary.

The only thing I couldn’t do so easily was to post to my regular weblog, but that is a result of my decision to use a proprietary platform. If I were using any “normal” blogging platform out there it would be easy as pie to do it too.

Fun stuff.

Fixing a virus and spyware-ridden Windows XP

Dear Lazyweb,

This coming weekend I’ll be performing a thorough cleansing of a Windows XP PC which, by the description that was made by the users, is probably filled with spyware and maybe even some viruses (despite the fact that it has Norton’s Antivirus suite installed and —I’ve been assured— religiously updated).

Now I know that this will most likely end up in a complete re-install of the system and since the users have dutifully been doing their backups to an external hard drive I should be able to just leave it at that but… The backups have got to be infected with some viruses so I will have to clean some stuff up no matter what.
Also, I would really rather not go into the fresh install thing because it will just mean a lot more trouble with all the apps they need.

So what I need is to find out what the cool kids are using these days to rid their PCs of the vermin. I haven’t done windows in ages (and I mean years thank goodness) so I’m really out of the loop here.
The last time I had to do something like this I found out an article entitled “How to fix mom’s computer” or somesuch but I can’t seem to find the article now and besides, it was a long time ago so it is probably outdated.

So in short, Dear Lazyweb, can you tell me what I should arm myself with in order to get all those nasty bugs out of the system?

Thanks a bunch!

Yous faithfully,

Nuno ‘Lazy’ Nunes

Google Desktop

Since I’ve stopped being able to use my Mac @ work a while ago, I reverted to using Linux (in one distro or another, which is beside the point here). Now being used to having spotlight at the tip of my fingers (so to speak) I found it hard to adjust to what there was available for indexing and searching at Linux-land.

The best bet there was at the time (and until recently actually) was Beagle and even if it did have some of the features I required I could never get it to work properly on my desktop. I’ve been using Macs for a while now and I just can’t be bothered with all the hassle my friends and co-workers go through in order to get something like this running (and note that I said “running”, I didn’t even dare to go so far as to say “running smoothly“…)

Now I’ve recently been attuned to the Linux version of the Google Desktop by a friend and after using it for a couple-three weeks I must say that even though it doesn’t compare with spotlight (blessed are those who never knew anything better than what they have now), it sure beats Beagle by a long way.

Now if I could only be sure that Google will never, ever do any evil I could even turn on the “Advanced Features”… But being the suspicious guy I am, I think I’ll pass on those.