I’m happy to announce that friedcellcollective is sponsoring an art project by a French artist Alexandra Filiatreau. Friedcellcollective implemented the website (powered by WordPress 2.0), designed by Cicifoo.
Archive for the ‘general’ Category
Alaksi
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006Tracking comments
Sunday, August 27th, 2006A different problem arose recently – as I was reading more and writing less I found it annoying to track all the comments debates I was in. Going through all the flagged posts, clicking them to get to the page and finding all the comments is kindof annoying.
One way of doing this is the solution that Vitaly Friedman is using on his notebook. It seems that his RSS includes the number of comments in the title of the post which makes my reader think it’s a new post. I don’t like this idea much since on massively commented posts I get a new ‘item’ everytime which kindof clutters the reader.
I remembered that there is a web application that lets you track comments that I haven’t tried yet. It’s called coComment and I think I’m gonna try it now. I’ll probably review it in another post.
What I want from you (yes you, not the person staring in your screen from behind) is how you track your comments and conversations. Do you even make comments? Answers in the comments please :)
Wandering off
Saturday, July 8th, 2006The temporary void here is being prolonged by a small vacation. I’m wondering off in the morning and won’t be back until next monday. Hope to be back with enough ideas to take me through the next year…
The little bumps of the first time user
Monday, July 3rd, 2006As you can see, well read actually, I have about 0 time to do stuff. I haven’t the best idea why but I’m guessing it has something to do with work and heat. The immense heat in this part of the world.
I have a few stories to share and I’ll try to get around to posting them this week. In the meantime let me say this – Feed Demon is great. I’m currently testing it and I think it’s the first piece of software that I really liked from the start. And still like it. If it were documented better it’d be perfect.
On a side note, there seems to be a lot going on about Flickr. I haven’t really used it ever, but I’m doing it while writing this – I’ve been trying to get around to posting my pics from @media for some time now.
The first annoyance was the authorization of the Uploadr. Good thing I have the CTRL+S reflex (well ‘Save and Continue Editing’ anyways), since it opened over my WordPress tab. Then I figured there has to be a limitation to the free account even though I never heard about it. I have no idea if I really wanna go pro at this stage you know. So I find but I can only upload 20MB per month. C’mon you’re Yahoo! now. You could easily say 250MB per year (500MB would be even nicer you know?). Well, I thought the Uploadr would ease the tagging process but since it didn’t all my images have “needstags” tag now (picked up from Tantek).
All in all my experience wasn’t that great. I guess Flickr is a nice tool/app but it ain’t all that nice for a first-timer. And it’s really common to forget about these people since when you’re testing you’re not really one. So do test on your family & friends. Once only, then change friends or get more. Well, just for testing part.
Update: I updated the info on all pics – titles, tags, licensing. The only problem was that I kept adding the tags to the wrong picture – the field bellow the description just didn’t work for me. A bit more copy-pasting than needed. How about “zebrastriping” the entries?
Abstracting passwords
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006Joel was saying something about the abstraction that goes on in a company that most people don’t see.
Recently we had some decisions made at the company I work for that show some people here have no idea how to make things easier for developers. One of the things that cost a few minutes on every login (and I do it quite often since I lock the computer often) is changing the password on a certain time interval. This never works and I have no idea why administrators really insist on this. Either they have no idea what people are doing about it or they’re just ignoring it.
Let’s see how it works. You get an alert that tells you that you’ll need to change your password in the next week or so. You decide to do it now. First thing most people try is to add a number. If this works we have a number added to the old password that doesn’t make it any more secure. If the system does not allow similar passwords we have a few other scenarios.
- The first option is to change the password many times so that the system forgets what you’re actually changing and then go back to the old password. Not secure.
- Another one is to use things you see from your workplace as a password (for example monitor model name, poster in the back,..). This is not secure either but might work if the cracker doesn’t know where you work.
- The next option is that you try to think of a new strong password. You’re going to forget it or you’ll have to write it down. At best you’ll write it down on your phone or PDA. Not that secure either.
There are of course other options – you might actually be able to remember the new password. Congratulations, you’re a rare kind.
Whatever the argument for this I still can’t remember the password and I’m losing time, concentration and nerves everytime I enter my previous password instead of the new one.
Running the last mile
Saturday, May 27th, 2006Last week was amazing. I was finishing two projects at the same time. And as if this was not enough I had a bunch of other meetings for other projects. You just can’t belive how exhausing this can be untill you ‘try’ it yourself.
Finishing up is always difficult. It takes 80% of the time to accomplish the last 20% of the things that make the 80% of the impression on a user. It takes physical and mental strength to accomplish this as you have to tie all loose ends that you don’t even know exist. A nice end to all this was the feeling at the end of the week that it’s all 1.0 ready and released. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it’s close.
Now it’s time for recuperation – watching movies (Aardvark’d was insightful), relaxing, sleeping… During such periods I always get a bunch of cool ideas that will make the next month interesting. Not to get carried away, I really need to finish my last project before going to London.
