NJFF — San Francisco — 2009

Proposed schedule for this year’s NakedJen Film Festival in SF.

8:30AM — Breakfast at Mel’s Drive-In restaurant, 801 Mission Street (415) 227-4477.

10AM — Sherlock Holmes at Century San Francisco Centre, 835 Market Street (2hr 14 min).

12:30 — 1:30 — Lunch nearby, Apple store visit, get some air.

1:45PM — Precious at Century San Francisco Centre (1 hr, 49 min).

3:40PM — The Princess and the Frog at the Metreon, 101 Fourth St (1 hr, 35 min). NYT review.

5PM — Sushi snack at the Metreo, festival wrap-up.

Podcasting and WordPress

Imho there should be a field in the post editor where I enter the URL of the item enclosure.

If there’s nothing there, no enclosure.

Scraping the HTML gives unpredictable results.

Apparently it misses the MP3 sometimes, as in this post:

http://rebootnews.com/2009/12/17/rebooting-the-news-37/

A Google search shows the problem has been reported.

http://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+podcast+enclosure

Quick review of Avatar

For the first hour and a half I was riveted.

Watching every nuance, carefully listening to every line of dialog. Delighting in all the delightful visuals.

Then the movie turned into Star Wars. A great movie in 1977. And since then there have been two types of scifi movies — originals like The Matrix — which never resorted to the simplistic hero vs villain CGI war scene. And movies that fall into the Star Wars pattern. This time Luke and Han and the two robots were played by blue avatars. Instead of flying in jet-like space craft they flew on prehistoric birds. But the plot circled around the same theme for an hour of crud. Sorry — the movie got boring, and the reviewers aren’t saying it.

I was expecting originality and was disappointed.

It isn’t a great movie. The Matrix is a great movie.

Avatar has a great idea. No spoilers. Too bad they stopped developing it. And only came back to it at the very end of the movie

I’m tired, so maybe I’ll write more later. But no way is this a great movie or any kind of a game-changer. It will make a lot of money that’s for sure.

Hey but I didn’t like Titanic either, so if you loved Avatar, more power to you.

Want to see a great movie — check out Up In The Air. Fantastic acting and story and it’s not predictable. No CGI though and no chases.

WordPress.com implements the Twitter API

I just got an email from Matt Mullenweg over at Automattic saying they’ve implemented the Twitter API on wordpress.com. This means you can use any configurable Twitter client to post to and read from wordpress.com blogs.

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/twitter-api/

I haven’t tried it out yet, but I plan to.

It’s a beautiful move. As I said to Matt in an email: it’s both deeply respectful and deeply insidious. It’s exactly what I would do if I were in his shoes. In fact, I did do it, in 1999, when the Blogger API came out. I immediately implemented it in our Manila blogging software.

The implications? Well, the Twitter API may have just become an open standard. I know that Identica has already implemented it, but wordpress.com has a much larger installed base. Where the client vendors may have overlooked the connection to Identica, they will be tempted by the connection to WordPress. Should they implement special features for WordPress? Hmmm.

The big question — what will Matt & Company do next?

And should I send him the feature requests the Twitter guys have been ignoring?

EZTV’s RSS gets guid, comments and category elements

A bit of progress to report.

NovaKing reports in a comment on Unberkeley that they have added support for guids and links to comments to their feeds.

An example:

http://ezrss.it/feed/

They also have a category element for each item, which for them of course is always TV Show. Perhaps you guys could come up with a list of categories. It would make sense if everyone used the same spelling. I’m assuming the category names would not be case-sensititve.

Anyway, thanks NovaKing — we’re off to a great start!

Cross-platform issue in Frontier kernel

Just spent about an hour chasing down a bug that was caused by a cross-platform difference in how the kernel converts dates to strings on Mac and Windows.

On Mac if you convert a date to a string, the year is expressed in two characters, on Windows in four characters.

For example, on Windows:

string (clock.now ()) == “12/6/2009; 7:09:24 PM”

And on Mac:

string (clock.now ()) == “12/6/09; 7:09:24 PM”

Usually it doesn’t matter, the date is just converted to a string for display purposes.

In one of my applications I use the date string to index into a table. It works fine until you try to take a table from the Mac and use it on Windows. It doesn’t work, of course.

Probably can’t fix this without breaking something. At least I’m documenting it.

Ideas for a BitTorrent namespace

Background: On Friday, I started reviewing the RSS produced by some of the BitTorrent sites. What I found was pretty great. There were some problems, but nothing that can’t be easily sorted out. What was really exciting was that through Twitter, some of the developers of the feeds and apps that use them, got in touch. As a result of the discussions, I agreed to outline ideas for a possible BitTorrent namespace. That’s what I’m doing here.

These are just ideas. Please don’t implement anything based on what you read here. If you have observations, please post a comment below. If this yields a namespace that people use, there will be a fixed URL that contains the docs for the namespace. It won’t be on unberkeley.com.

All elements in this namespace are optional. It’s perfectly valid to have an RSS file that represents torrents in enclosures without using any of these elements.

Each RSS item describes a single torrent. The enclosure element describes the torrent file itself. The length attribute is the size, in bytes, of the torrent file. The type attribute is the MIME type of the torrent file. The url attribute is the address of the torrent file.

While the namespace is designed for use in RSS 2.0 feeds, it may be used in any XML-based file format that allows extension through namespaces, such as Atom or OPML 2.0.

For terminology, I used the BitTorrent vocabulary Wikipedia page as a guide.

Now for some of the possible elements of the namespace.

torrent:contentLength

• The total number of bytes in all the files the torrent makes downloadable.

torrent:contentFiles

• The number of files the torrent makes downloadable.

torrent:seeds

• The number of clients that have complete copies of all files made available by the torrent.
• It’s a guide to how quickly the files may be downloaded.

torrent:peers

• The number of clients that have a partial copy of the files made available by the torrent.
• Note: This was originally “leechers” but was changed because there was a consensus that it should be called “peers.” DW 12/6/09

torrent:verified

• A boolean value, if true, the torrent has been verified — it’s a real working download, not a fake or scam. If false, it has not been verified.

Do you use Hotwire for NY travel?

Hotwire has been hassling me. Somehow they figured out that I’m planning a trip to NY (I guess some of the sites I’ve been using share data with them) and they keep sending me offers that get better and better.

However, I once had very bad experience with Hotwire that resulted in me not even checking in and forfeiting the whole amount I had prepaid for a three-day trip because the hotel wanted to put me in a smoking room, and I just can’t stay in a smoking room (as a former smoker I’m super sensitive).

But that wasn’t in NYC, it was in San Jose (when I was living in the Boston area).

So the question is — have you used Hotwire for NY hotels, and if so, did you have a good or bad experience? I’m thinking about taking a chance because the prices are really attractive.

Teen tweeter cashes-in on SUL placement

BBC: “A Twitter feed set up by a Dutch teenager as a hobby has been taken over by Microsoft news channel MSNBC.com.”

The report emphasizes the rate that the feed is growing, by 3000 to 4000 followers per day. What it doesn’t say is that the feed is on Twitter’s Suggested Users List, and that growth is normal for feeds on the list, even ones that aren’t run by prodigious teens.

Editorial comment: Might as well say that a Dutch teenager amazes his parents by traveling from Europe to America in a matter of hours without saying that he booked a flight on KLM.

We live in a time of pseudo news.

Another observation. It would be interesting to know how much Microsoft paid for the kid’s feed. That would, right there, establish the monetary value for SUL placement.

Testing some new lifeliner features

It should now automatically turn a side-smiley into an image: