walkah: striving towards mediocrity

As someone who spends a fair bit of time on the road, I've become increasingly paranoid about my backup strategy as well as my general "travel kit". To address both, I made a purchase recently that I'm so in love with I just had to blog it:

The G-Drive Mini from G-Tech is an awesome little portable hard-drive. I got the 250GB, dual interface model and so far it has been wonderful. At 250gb, it has plenty of room to store my Time Machine backups as well as any extra files I (might) need on the road.

It's a really nice looking little unit: aluminum case (that matches my macbook pro), with it's own heat sink. It's quiet enough that I hardly notice it. AND it comes with it's very own leather carrying case.

I'm happy with the new addition to my travel bag, and I'd recommend it for yours as well.

My favorite web browser slash social movement, Firefox, released version 3.0 yesterday. To generate some buzz around the new release, the folks at Mozilla are trying to set a Guinness World Record for software downloads in 24 hours. They're initial target was 5 million downloads. As of this writing, they're at 6.5 million downloads and counting - with 6 hours to go!

I also spent a few hours last night at the Mozilla Toronto launch party. Mozilla is full of great people doing great work... it was nice to help celebrate their latest milestone.

If you haven't yet, go now. Get Firefox 3.

Last night I put together a simple module for Drupal to implement the XRDS-Simple spec. It is based loosely on the xrds-simple wordpress plugin.

XRDS-Simple is an important piece of the DiSo project. From the XRDS-Simple spec::

XRDS-Simple provides a format and workflow for the discovery of resources metadata, and other linked resources. As web services continue to grow, applications utilize a wider range of web services and resources across multiple providers. XRDS-Simple allows providers to document their resources in a machine-readable way, which can be automatically discovered by consumer applications.

So, check it out: http://drupal.org/project/xrds_simple .

I had an interesting e-mail exchange yesterday with Chris Messina and a handful of folks from the DiSo project about "DiSo for Drupal". For those of you who haven't heard of it DiSo is:

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

See, Chris recently started a new job working on DiSo full-time at Vidoop. With the announcements of Facebook connect and Google's Friend Connect, there is a battle raging for control of your identity and your relationships. DiSo, in many respects, is the free open answer for the rest of the internet. It combines several free, open standards that already exist in the wild like OpenID, OAuth, and Microformats for exchanging identity and "friend" information.

So, Chris reached out a handful of us Drupal folks about getting on board. The good news is: we, the Drupal community, are already well on our way:

• OpenID (in Drupal 6.x core)
• OpenID Provider : http://drupal.org/project/openid_provider
• OpenID Attribute Exchange : http://drupal.org/project/openid_ax (in progress via Google SoC)
• OAuth : http://drupal.org/project/oauth
• Atom : syndication only - http://drupal.org/project/atom - might be nice to have a basic envelop generator/parser implementation
• XMPP : http://drupal.org/project/jabber , http://drupal.org/project/xmpp and http://drupal.org/project/xmpp_server (the latest of which is maybe the most promising)
• vCard / hCard : http://drupal.org/project/vcard

The big holes at the moment (from a DiSo perspective) are XRDS-Simple support and better support for microformats - specifically XFN.

From the list of Drupal modules above, you may notice that this is an area of interest of mine :-P I look forward to working with the rest of the DiSo project and the Drupal community on this stuff!

My love affair with Fluid.app continues. The latest release (0.9.1.4) includes support for running your SSB as a Menu Extra (i.e. something in the OS X (check out the video).

As shown in the video, I think the best use for this new feature is in conjunction with iPhone sites. In the video, Tod shows creating an app for http://i.brightkite.com/. I've been using this to check-in on BrightKite. It's nice, unobtrusive and easy in lieu of BrightKite's own, native desktop apps.

My other favorite (pictured) is http://i.rememberthemilk.com/. Remember the Milk's iPhone app has a nice feature that the "Today" tasks list also shows overdue tasks (which I haven't figured out how to do in the standard web app).

More and more of my webapp usage is moving to fluid these days. I can't say enough good things about this app. And google gears support is coming!!

I'm looking forward to hanging out at Mesh 2008 the next couple days. I've had to miss it for various reasons the first two years, so I can't wait to see what all the buzz is about! Watching the talk on twitter today about MeshU has gone well and things are off to a great start.

As usual, I'll be the one decked out in Lullabot gear talking about Drupal. Hope to see you there :)

I spend a fair bit of time talking on Skype (whether I like it or not). I am also a big fan and heavy user of quicksilver (the ultimate launcher and more for mac os x). Now, I generally keep skype contact list hidden to keep my desktop clean - and was thinking "Gee, it'd be great if skype was integrated with Quicksilver". But.. it's not... directly

However, I found this tip and can now initiate skype-to-skype calls directly from quicksilver:

Here's what I did:

1. In quicksilver's preferences - I enabled the "Services Menu Module" plug-in
2. In Address Book, I added a 'custom' phone field with the label 'skype' where I can keep skype contact names (It would be really awesome if Skype did this for me...
3. Now, I can do the following: invoke quicksilver, type a contact's name, hit '/', find their skype name (down arrow), hit tab, type 'sk' (to get the 'Skype/Call' action) and hit Enter. Skype will then make the call to that user.

Ok... so typing quicksilver commands doesn't *look* pretty... but it's one less thing I need to switch my right hand to the mouse for, and I like that. :-)

(I should probably post more tricks like this)

The third annual Drupal Camp Toronto event is coming soon. On Friday May 23rd and Saturday May 24th join the Toronto Drupal Users Group in celebrating two days of Drupal at the University of Toronto!

We're putting together an exciting event this year. We have John Resig coming to talk about jQuery and ActiveState will be giving away prize packages. Plus we'll have two full days of information - tips, tricks, case studies and howtos. Make sure to register soon! We already have over 100 people signed up!

Also, we are actively seeking both speakers and sponsors. Propose a session or contact us if you're interested in sponsoring or have other questions.

Hope to see you there!

I was just in the midst of a Sunday morning podcast & RSS catchup stint, when I caught Episode #131 of commandN where Jeff was outlining some Front Row tips and tricks. It reminded me that I came across a great one recently that I thought I'd share.

As Jeff mentioned, Perian is a great (indispensible) tool to allow QuickTime to play non-QT file formats (particularly AVI/DivX). And, while it's true that Front Row will then play any AVI files in your Movies folder, I've long wanted to go one step further - specifically for TV Shows. See, iTunes will keep TV Shows separately and mark ones that are "unwatched", etc.

Enter Movie2iTunes. This droplet allows you to simply drop Movie & TV Shows on it and it will add them to iTunes. In fact, if your TV Show files use the given file naming convention, the TV Show metadata (show name, season, episode) will be completed correctly as well. The script works by creating a QuickTime media link to the original video - which has the nice benefit of having all your movies and TV shows in iTunes (hence front row) but they can still reside on, say, an external HD. I love it!

Summer is coming - which means it's time for Google's Summer of Code. This is the fourth year of the project (and the fourth year that Drupal has been involved). We continue to be one of Google's favourite open source projects this year grabbing 21 spots - which means a $105,000 investment in Drupal development this summer!

I'm excited as this will be my third year as a mentor and my project this year will be OpenID Attribute Exchange support for Drupal. Attribute Exchange is one of the next important pieces in digital identity and one that I'm pretty excited about. My student, Anshu Prateek, has shown a lot of enthusiasm. I think it's gonna be a good summer!