NunoNunes.org

Diary 2010-05-27 - Recent concerts

06 Jun 2010 13:56:00 Z

The two concerts I attended most recently were A Silent Film at the Aula Magna and Grizzly Bear at the Coliseu.

I enjoyed both shows very much and there were a few pleasant similarities between them (for me, at least): I didn’t know the bands all that well, but having come across their songs I decided that it would be good to check them out live and so I bought the tickets without exactly being a huge fan of either; I really liked both bands live on stage (and this is by far my favourite way of getting to know new bands and new music) even though they are quite different from each other; the music they both make is, as I’d hoped, quite good and, at the very least, quite promising; both bands’ vibe was excellent and they put on a terrific show, made the concert-goers feel really good and made everyone really get into it.

But there’s one thing that was very much different between them. One thing that is a major aspect of any concert and that, unfortunately, goes wrong on the majority of shows I attend (on a trend that is getting steadily worse from year to year): sound quality and especially sound volume.

On the A Silent Film show the volume was so loud that nobody there could possibly enjoy all the nuances of the music they were playing. It was physically impossible to really get into the music. I left with a ringing in my ears and the feeling that had I seen them in their rehearsal room I would have enjoyed their music a whole lot more (and not because I’d be closer to the band, but simply due to the fact that the sound would have been much better than what we got at the Aula Magna).
This is a real shame, as the band (once again) is really good on stage and they do put on a very good show, not to mention the fact that Robert Stevenson has some pretty impressive vocal stunts, which I could not, for the life of me, appreciate in the middle of that wall of —not sound, but noise.
I think it’s a shame that the sound engineers seem to conspire to sabotage them (and almost everyone else, for that matter) by squeezing every possible decibel out of the speakers. But guess what: raw power is not what it’s all about and too much loudness is actually detrimental to our ability to enjoy the music!

Now the Grizzly Bear show was another matter altogether.
The band was just as good on stage (in their own, very different style, of course), they were into it and into the crowd, just like A Silent Film were, but they had surprisingly good sound. And I say “surprisingly” because I’ve been to my fair share of shows on that venue and the sound quality usually sucks in a huge way. But not so this time.
The sound was not so loud as to give us pain in the ears, so we actually got to listen to and really enjoy the music. Granted, there could have been some adjustments made to the sound setup of the softer, wind instruments (flute, sax, clarinet,) but then I think that room is not all that great in terms of acoustics and the fact is that other than that small detail, everything else was very well set up. I could hear all the subtle vocal harmonies really clearly, I could hear the lute as clear as is if was being played right there before me on an empty and silent room, but I could still listen to and feel the powerful guitar, bass and drum sounds.
This is not consensual, as some of the people that were with me complained that the vibration they felt coming from the drums and the bass notes on the keyboards were too much for them, but for me, it was an almost perfect sound setup. Something I don’t experience all that often any more.
I left the venue with my ears clean, without any ringing in them and totally won over to the band’s music. But also very pleased with the overall show. I definitely had a good time. And I feel really sorry that the ringing in my ears didn’t allow me to get away from the A Silent Film show with such satisfaction. They surely deserved it.

Lifestream down

03 Mar 2010 11:37:00 Z

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 Accounts and the induced schizophrenia

12 Feb 2010 17:31:00 Z

I have one Google apps account for my domain (nunonunes.org) and in it I have my canonical email account. Associated with this account I have the XMPP (google talk) address, the Google Docs stuff (where I keep the pdfs, spreadsheets and whatnot) and my Calendar and “official” Contacts list.

Then I have another totally separate Google account (a plain one, not on my own domain) where I have my Google Reader, Latitude and a few other bits and pieces such as Blogger, Google Wave and so on. Also, because of the social nature of some of these services, I must maintain a separate Contacts list on this account. This Contacts info is not synced to the main Contacts list because, well, there simply is no (sane/safe) way to do it.

Do you see a problem here? Do you?
Also, can you see how the new Google Buzz exacerbates this problem?

Just yesterday a friend was telling me how he wished Google had a tool to merge all the multiple accounts he has on it due to the services they’ve been acquiring over the years.
Me, I’d like to have a single account for all of the Google stuff on my own domain.

Come on Google, it is high time you let me merge my accounts or, at the very least, allow me to have something as obvious as a reader feature on my apps account!
Buying companies left and right, launching new products and disrupting the markets is all very well and lots of fun, sure, but how about a little love for those who want, who really want to use your stuff in a productive and sane way?
This schizophrenia you are inducing in my on-line presence is really becoming a major nuisance. People don’t know whether to look up my own address or the address of the “fake” account and are sometimes not even sure how to get in touch with me on the web (on your services).

This is just shoddy on your part Google. I know it must take a bit of effort to get this particular bit together, but if anyone has the talent and resources to do this in a heartbeat, folded and with both arms tied behind your backs, you are it!

End rant.

Diary 2010-01-29 - On reading

29 Jan 2010 12:56:00 Z

Reading is something I’ve enjoyed doing since I was a boy. It is not something that I’ve done consistently along my life, but those periods when I read the least were (usually) not particularly good ones and I didn’t read mostly because I just couldn’t find the time to do it.
Sure, I’ve always had a pile of books on my nightstand from which I would, on those occasions, pick one and start to have a go at it, until I fell asleep within a couple of minutes. At most.
Reading in bed, whenever I’m overly tired, just doesn’t work.

These last few years have been one of those spells when I hardly picked up a book. I didn’t stop buying them, though, I just stopped reading them, which had the effect of turning the to-read pile into a to-read shelve and then two to-read shelves.
In all honesty, I must say that I didn’t completely stop reading, I just stopped reading anything that was not technical and directly related to work. (One of the biggest advantages of being an engineer is that you never really stop reading and learning.)
This state of affairs lasted until a few months ago, when I decided to effect a few changes in my life which indirectly contributed to me having time to read again. Specifically, I started taking the train to work. Which turned a two to three hour daily drive into a 2 and a half daily commute.

So now I find myself reading again and, as I was discussing with a friend a few days ago, it feels like I got re-acquainted with a long-lost, but dear friend of mine. One which I’d missed so much!
The pile of books I have on the shelves is rather diversified and so far I’ve delved with much gusto into such topics as finance, historical fiction, randomicity ad uncertainty, pop anthropology, neuroscience, ancient treatises on the Bushido and Zen, science fiction, architecture and design…

I dourly missed my story telling friends and, thankfully, the pile of new stuff is still pretty big (and I still want to re-read lots of stuff,) so even if I were to stop buying new books now, I’d still be settled for a long time to come.

New comment system - take 2

06 Jan 2010 17:14:00 Z

This post is just a quick heads-up (and a test actually) for the fact that I’ve switched the comment-handling system on this site again.
This time not because of spam, but because my previous “provider” —Haloscan— is going for a paid service and I’ve always used it for free and I can’t even remotely begin to justify paying for this functionality on this site. There are other reasons for switching, but this was the one that made me jump to attention and just do it.

Therefore, as you may notice, this site’s comments are now handled by the Disqus system.

Due to the nature of the writing here (more of a record of my findings, thoughts, etc,) I’m not overly concerned with losing the old comments with this transition (after all I have gone down this road before and I could never bring the previous comments along on the two or three migrations that this site has undergone anyway), but I will in time look into the possibility of importing the old comments into the new system.

That is all, the irregular programming will now continue as scheduled.

Google Wave - my take on it

11 Nov 2009 09:25:00 Z

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

17 Jun 2009 19:16:00 Z

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

03 Mar 2010 11:40:00 Z

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

AnyEvent goodness

16 Jun 2009 10:34:00 Z

AnyEvent and all of it’s associated modules are my new best friends. In particular AnyEvent::Mojo.

I’m running it over libev (by way of EV) and it seems pretty impressive so far.

There, I’ve blogged again. :-)

It’s the globalization. Or something…

17 Apr 2009 13:54:00 Z

I’ve recently been in the market for a new compact point-and-shoot camera so I did the rounds and decided that I should get Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX500.

To that effect I went over to a FNAC store, on my lunch break yesterday, to see if they had it available for sale. It turns out they did not have it in the store, but there was another FNAC store nearby which had it in stock and they could transfer it to the store went to for my convenience. It would take 3 working days for the camera to get there and the price was X.

Fair enough, but I decided that maybe I should look around at some on-line stores and do some price comparison, so I took a peek at the usual suspects and ended up ordering it from Expansys.

The order was placed yesterday during the afternoon.

It took Expansys slightly over 18 hours to deliver the camera to me (all the way over from Marseille, France to Lisbon, Portugal) at slightly over two-thirds of the price that FNAC was asking for it.

Yes, it’s the globalization, I guess.

New hosting

06 Apr 2009 23:47:00 Z

For technical reasons regarding the server where this blog was hosted I had to have it offline for quite some time.
The fact that I wasn’t all that sure that I wanted to keep the site also helped extend the hiatus, of course.

Anyway now that the old server finally died out I had to get a move on and decided to get the site back up as it was and consider a platform change somewhere in the future, but not just now.
The move was done from a slimed-down backup I had and so it is expected that some things may be broken at this time (most notably images and videos from old blog entries). They will hopefully be restored when (if?) I can salvage the data from the old disk.

Then, in due time, I will probably upgrade the site’s software and things will break in much more interesting ways. It will be most fun, that’s for sure! :-)

HTC Touch Diamond

31 Jan 2009 21:43:00 Z

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. :-)

Music All Around

31 Jan 2009 20:51:00 Z

I’ve been really quiet lately and because I intend this space to be a sort of record of my activities, here goes a review of what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks (/months) musically-wise.

First off, the fun’n’games part: I’ve become hooked on Guitar Hero. Specifically Guitar Hero World Tour.
I was never one for game consoles, but this time I ended up buying myself a full kit including a Nintendo Wii and the Guitar Hero World Tour single guitar pack. (The Wii came with a game which I’ve only touched two weeks after I got it and only that one time. It shows how much I care about video games. And about music.) ;-)
As with almost all activities that demand dexterity and extreme hand-eye coordination, I have to really work at it to become proficient (and it is a given that I’ll never achieve greatness) but the “work” that is involved is really, really fun.
So now I play both real and game instruments. Rawk On!

And I say that I now play real instruments because after quitting the saxophone lessons due to getting braces on my teeth, I decided it was high time I devoted some time to learning music a bit more in-depth and so I enrolled in (theoretical) music classes (my aim is learning enough to be able to write music, I really wanted to be able to express all my feelings, thoughts and even ideas through music). And while this could have meant the (temporary) end of instrument playing, the fact is that I have now turned my attention, once again, to the piano. It started out as a learning aid and I got hooked again. I’m too easy, I know. :-)
Someday I may even get good enough at playing it to loose my inhibitions and start playing for my friends and even other people. Crazy, crazy!

Other than that, things are moving along steadily in the musical realm, 2008 was a good year musically-wise (although not a great one), and I’m still absorbing some of the albums and new bands that showed up last year.
I’m also, as always, discovering and learning about stuff that’s been out there for a lot of time but to which I’d never devoted my attention. One of the latest “discoveries” I’ve made is Chico Buarque.
“Yeah Gods, is he serious?!?”? Yes I am, both in the sense that I’ve started listening to a lot more Brazilian music (and by “a lot more” I actually mean “any at all”) and in the sense that I’ve come to enjoy both the music and the lyrics of a bunch os songs from Chico and a very few others.
In the case of Chico, not all of his songs appeal to me. In fact, given the size of his body of work, I’d say most of them don’t, but the ones that actually do something for me are really amazing.

Last.fm, Blip.fm and 8tracks.com are my current on-line hangouts as far as music is related.
Last.fm is da bomb, Blip.fm is an interesting concept which still has to grow up a bit and prove itself and 8tracks.com is a great ideia whose future I just don’t believe in, due to the difficulties the music industry will undoubtedly cause them (which is a shame as the “mix-tape” or playlist format is one that is particularly near and dear to my heart as far as sharing and enjoying music is concerned.)

Help Wanted - days of the week songs

11 Dec 2008 10:14:00 Z

Dear lazyweb, I need your help with some song suggestions.

What I’m looking for is songs that talk about each day of the week.

I’ve already got some days down, from my own ideas and from discussing this topic with @phantas, but I am sill a few days short of a week. Nevertheless, I am still accepting suggestions for the days I already have (which are Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday).

But there are some specific rules about the songs I’ll end up choosing, namely:

Please, please, please, no “Friday I’m In Love”! I’m a big fan of The Cure and I’ve been trying very hard to forget about the ignominy that is the fact that they wrote that song (let alone that they recorded it), so please be considerate! :-)
The songs have to be about the day in question. Just mentioning the day or even having it on the title is not enough. Something about the “day of the week” or even about that particular day of that particular week is acceptable, but otherwise just mentioning it for no good reason is no good;
The songs have to have at least one cover version made. Don’t mind too much about this issue, though, I’ll do this part of the research. For now just throw as many suggestions as you can, please.

So lazyweb, can I count on you? Will you come through for me? I hope you do, I’ve been thinking about this list for quite some time now (OK, let’s be honest here, it’s been nagging me on the back of my mind for quite some time, but I haven’t really given it the due attention until now) and I’d like to get this thing done.

Thank you! :-)

OpenID TypeKey vs myOpenID.com

24 Nov 2008 22:39:00 Z

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? :-)