Open Parenthesis

BarCamp Boston 4

Posted on March 20, 2009 by John

One of my favorite new trends of the last couple of years is the unconference movement and the *Camps, associated originally with BarCamp (an alternative to the invite only, highly exclusive FooCamp put on for “Friends Of O’Reilly”) but now extended to PodCamp, HeroCamp, TransparencyCamp, and even MooseCamp. (There’s also the inevitable CampCamp, though the name CampCamp was in use by another group since 1997).

Now BarCamp Boston 4 is coming up this April 25th and 26th at the Stata Center at MIT. Although ultimately the topics discussed are determined by who shows up, odds are that free and open source software, social media, voting, government transparency, robotics, hardware and software hacking, startups, and all kinds of topics related to openness, the web, and business will be common.

I definitely plan to be there and I’d encourage you to register and attend, whether you’re a veteran or a n00b to the unconference world. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have a real conversation, in the absence of hugely expensive registration fees or overbearing sponsors.

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Whoami? Google Account Leakage?

Posted on March 3, 2009 by John

So I’m up working late tonight (well, late for me – 10pm. I normally go to bed by 9 – I’m old) and I fired up Firefox to recheck the time of my flight tomorrow morning (Yay! DrupalCon DC).

I landed on the Firefox Google homepage, as I always do in a new browser window – http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official is the address, I believe it is the default shipped with firefox.

But look at what I see in the upper right hand corner where my email address should be (click on the image for full sized one):

Very strange. I tried, just for investigation, clicking into “my account” or some of the other google services – I don’t seem to be actually logged in as someone else. Anything which would require login actually asks me to login and doesn’t prefill the box with stephenandmandy or anything. But it is really odd to see someone else’s email in that upper right corner.

Anyone else seeing this?

(For the non *nix folks in the audience, whoami is a shell command on most unix/linux systems that tells you what user account you are currently logged in as – or, as the man page so concisely puts it:

whoami — display effective user id

Try it on your local *nix box today.)

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Identi.ca Tools 1.6

Posted on February 23, 2009 by John

Alex King’s excellent WordPress plugin, Twitter Tools, has been released in a 1.6 version.

As described in this earlier post, I’ve modified Twitter Tools to use Identi.ca endpoints rather than Twitter ones, since I have my Identi.ca account set to auto-cross-post to Twitter.

Here’s a revised version of what I’m calling Identi.ca tools – just replace the twitter-tools.php from the 1.6 release with this one (rename it from twitter-tools.php.txt to twitter-tools.php of course) and you should be good to go:

twitter-tools.php.txt

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WPBook 1.2 Released

Posted on February 14, 2009 by John

(Updated: 1.3 has been released, so I’ve disabled comments here – please raise any still open issues there.)

Just checked in changes for WPBook version 1.2 – get it from the WordPress Plugin Directory or on this blog.

The biggest change here from 1.1.1 (and why I decided to make it 1.2 rather than 1.1.2) is a change to the mechanism used to create the user profile boxes. Although it worked for some users, the previous method (relying on an fb:ref url pointing to the recent_posts.php page inside the WPBook theme) was at best inconsistent, and could even cause uncaught exceptions.

The new mechanism, which sets the profile FBML in a function and uses an fb:ref handle to refresh it, seems to be more generically robust and should improve things, especially for anyone who had the “No content to display” error when trying to add the profile box to the profile.

Also in this release are some administration page improvements (thanks Brandon) and timestamp on posts.

As always, comment below if you have issues, and if you get your blog setup using the plug please leave a comment on this page.

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Dopplr import fail

Posted on February 11, 2009 by John

I use Dopplr and TripIt, to keep track of traveling colleagues, update people on my own travel, and just generally simplify life. (I’ve blogged about each many times as well: see posts containing dopplr or TripIt).

I’m getting tired of Dopplr’s consistent FAIL on a common (for me) use case- a one day trip to NY on Delta.

Whenever I forward such a confirmation here’s what Dopplr does:

Thanks for sending us a message by email.

We automatically created a trip to Atlanta, GA, United States (from Newburyport, MA, United States) between February 10th and February 13th

We won’t share coincidences from this newly-created trip with your fellow travellers until February 18th. This is to give you a chance to check and correct any problems in interpretation.

If you’d like to check, go to [link removed]

Yours sincerely,
The Dopplr Team.

The problem is, I’m not going to or from Atlanta – that’s where Delta airlines headquarters is, sure, but it’s a long detour on the Boston->New York route.

I’m also not travelling Feb 10 to Feb 13, I’m leaving and returning on the 13th, and the trip was booked on the 10th.

I can (and do) go in and manually fix the trip in Dopplr, but in this type of case TripIt’s import feature just works.