Pipe into your netlife

/ Uncategorized / 2 Comments

Yahoo is doing a lot of interesting things these days. While Google gains a lot of the attention when it comes to search and web applications, Yahoo should not be ignored. del.icio.us and Flickr are of course two widely popular services, but they have a few useful utilities floating around their developer site.

There’s one tool in particular that I found tonight that has already proven useful. Pipes. Pipes allows a user to quickly put together a simple set of pipeline filters for turning various forms of data into an RSS feed and accompanying JSON file.

Such forms of data include user input (validated as a date, geographical location, number, text or URL) and web-based input (Flickr pictures, RSS2/Atom feeds, JSON/XML data, Google Base listings, Yahoo! Local searches, and Yahoo! search results). This data can be fed through several layers of pipes (including back into another Flickr pipeline and such as query input). The pipes can transform the data, walk through each feed item and modify or extract data, combine data together, sort, remove duplicates, apply regexes, translate languages, and so on.

This can be pretty powerful. While still a young project, many users have already published pipes, myself included. With the increase in API-enabled web services, I can only expect this to become more powerful, with work. It’s just a little tricky coming up with actual useful applications.

So I played around a bit and started to experiment with what could be done. I ended up with a couple of simple, but very useful pipes. One thing I have wanted for the longest time was a way to see feeds from several Planets in one listing (for Netvibes, since space is precious), without having to deal with duplicate entries. Pipes made this all too simple.

Unique Planets Pipe

I’m feeding several feeds into a Unique operator, saying to filter based on the title. I then output that. That’s all it takes. You can see the results and even add the RSS feed.

I then took this one step further and decided to write a quick pipe for searching through the planets. Now, pipes are reusable, so I was able to incorporate the Unique Planets pipe into this. This was fed into a Filter, using a couple of text inputs (for a text string and a name) as parameters to the filter. The screenshot below will clarify this. The result is the ability to quickly search four planets by name or content.

Planet Search Pipe

You can play with the results. Go ahead, give it a try.

Pipes can be published for other people to use, or they can be used privately. Private pipes are great when you want to deal with data that can’t easily be queried, such as your Twitter feed or your own Flickr feed.

Pipes are also quite useful when you have a small web application that needs to deal with several other feeds, filtering results or combining data from multiple sources. Sure, you could write this all yourself, but it’s far easier to change and maintain a Pipe than a whole bunch of code.

If you want to play with pipes, I recommend just jumping in and playing. Also take a look at some other people’s pipes, and you may want to browse the tutorials. For some starter ideas, try making a pipe that searches your local area for sales or singles or something using Google Base and Craigslist, or one that searches all your favorite blogs for a certain keyword, or maybe something that keeps track of your friends’ blogs and Flickr posts.

Now, pipelines are hardly a new concept. Several programs offer them, including some development environments that rely solely on pipelines for development in order to quickly produce simple programs. What makes Yahoo!’s Pipes interesting is that they make it very easy for almost anybody to quickly build a pipe to modify or search all kinds of data on the web that people actually use. This makes them more immediately useful to many people, and of course Yahoo makes it dead simple to start out.

What would be useful in the future, aside from adding native support for more services, would be to output data in other formats or somehow easily lay out information onto a page from one or more feeds. The project seems pretty young though, so I’m sure in time, this will mature into a much more useful project, both to developers and (certain) end users.

Watching you watching me watching you

/ Uncategorized / 9 Comments

We live in a new, very public age. While most of us didn’t quite grow up with the Internet, it’s been a major part of our lives. To these new generations of kids, a world without the Internet belongs only in the history books. It’s made the world closer and more open in many ways. This comes at a price of course.

Ever since the book “1984” was published, many people have been strongly concerned about their privacy and keeping “Big Brother” from knowing every detail of their lives. “Big Brother” is typically thought of as being the government, but that’s not necessarily true these days. While it’s quite possible that our lives are being monitored more closely by government agencies, “Big Brother” is really closer to you than you think. It could be your friend, your parents, somebody across the world. And is this really a bad thing?

We put out so much personal information these days, often times without really thinking about it. A lot of us seem to have a need to share our lives with the world.

Blog posts about the recent developments in your life or in that of someone close to you. Pictures uploaded to Flickr, complete with timestamps and information showing exactly where the picture was taken. Discussions on a public forum. Presence information on IM accounts showing when you’re at your computer, your mobile phone, how long you’ve been idle, and what your current away state is. Twitter updates saying what you’re doing right now and what you have been doing over the past several days. Complete social relations maps showing who you know and how. Online videos showing you and your family at a gathering. Nearly all of this indexed and easily searched by anybody anywhere in the world at any time.

There’s all kinds of information about us out there, and a lot of people are watching, probably more than you’d suspect. Some guy 500 miles away may know you better than your neighbor does. Now, this is all information we choose to put out there. You’d don’t have to have a blog, or use IM, or put your pictures up somewhere, but you probably do, and your kids most certainly will.

Is this bad? I don’t think most people involved see it as a negative thing, and hopefully most are aware of how much personal information they’re leaking. People usually just consider it as a normal part of being in a wider net community. Posters on LiveJournal or Planet GNOME know they’re not only talking to specific communities but to the world. It brings people from all over closer together. Friendships develop, ideas are born, knowledge is spread. These are all good things. On the flip side, some people you’d rather avoid are going to pay close attention to you. You may never know and you may never be impacted, or you may end up needing a restraining order. It’s all part of being in a community, right?

If we’ve come to accept this, should we really be worrying so much anymore about “Big Brother?” Afterall, aren’t we all playing that part to some degree? Do you think a government is really more of a personal threat to you than some random guy that reads your blog and watches your Flickr gallery, or is it really a higher authority that you should worry about? In the end, is this more of a benefit to people, bringing us all just a bit closer together, or a danger?

Discuss.

VMware Tango Icons ♥ Creative Commons

/ Uncategorized / 5 Comments

The VMware Workstation 6 betas have been out for a while now, so I’m sure those using it have noticed that we’ve been trying to make our icon theme fit in with the Tango icon style (well, to the best of my current abilities). So far this has proven to be a dramatic improvement over our older icon style used in Workstation 5.x, and it really fits in a lot better on modern GNOME desktops. The overall look feels clean and polished, mostly thanks to the hard work of the Tango project.

We’ve been lucky in that the Tango project has provided such a good variety of high-quality icons. I haven’t had to do nearly as much work as I expected in designing these icons. There were several existing VMware icons that we needed to move to the Tango style still, such as power icons, USB, serial port, message log, etc. Just a handful, but while many of them may be somewhat VMware-specific, there are some that we felt could be useful to other software projects, icon designers, and, perhaps, to Tango itself.

So we’re releasing our non-trademarked icons (everything the lawyers are okay with) under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. It’s only fair that we give back, afterall. There will be a dedicated page for this later, but for now, you can download it directly from here:

Download: vmware-tango-icons-0.5.tar.gz

You can see what we currently have available in the image below. I’ll put out updates as we come up with new icons and tidy up some of the remaining ones that we still want to release.

Thanks again to the Tango project for all your work in making the Linux desktop a more beautiful place, and if any of these icons look at all useful to the project, please feel free to use them, modify them, or have me tweak them.

VMware Tango Icons

libsexy is not libegg

/ Uncategorized / 13 Comments

I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time, and finally decided that maybe now would be a good time to do it.

I’m really pleased that a lot of projects are now using libsexy. This is awesome stuff, and I want to thank people for making use of this library.

However, the one thing that bothers me is that everybody seems to think libsexy is like libegg. I’m seeing projects bundle libsexy directly in their apps or taking a piece of libsexy, renaming it, and sticking it in their tree. Guys, this lib is not meant to be used like this. It’s a formal library, and it’s pretty standard. Every distribution that ships notification-daemon or xchat-gnome also ships libsexy, so you can pretty much guarantee it’ll be there. I know it’s not part of the GNOME desktop, but given that so many apps are using it, I’d rather see it become a blessed dependency or a configure-time option than bundled.

Shipping a copy or fork of libsexy into your apps has the following problems:

  • Upgrades to libsexy proper won’t fix bugs or enhance the applications that are using it.
  • People end up modifying their forks and never send patches upstream.
  • Some projects end up copying from other projects and never even realize they’re using libsexy in the first place.

It also confuses me that some projects end up rewriting their own versions of some of these widgets instead of using libsexy’s. For example, Evolution has EIconEntry, which is like SexyIconEntry except that it uses an HBox and some style tricks instead of being an actual GtkEntry. Let’s standardize! 🙂

So this is a call-out to the developers of Rhythmbox, Last-exit, xchat, gedit, and any other projects in any way making use of libsexy incorrectly. Please fix your apps so we can have an actual shared library that can be properly upgraded.

And to the Epiphany and Evolution projects, is there any reason anymore to not use SexyIconEntry instead of a custom HBox-based solution? A while back, I was told that the motivation was due to some rendering and usability bugs in SexyIconEntry that have since been fixed, so this is a good time to find out if there’s anything more that I could do to get you guys to use it.

Thanks.

Update: Last-exit now links against the system’s libsexy. Thanks to Brandon Hale for his work on this 🙂

Transparent notification screenshots

/ Uncategorized / 10 Comments

In my release announcement for the new libnotify and notification-daemon, I advised that people try the new release in order to see the transparent notifications for themselves. This was obviously a mistake as many people wanted to see screenshots. Silly me.

I guess I thought that this was one of those things that looked better in person than on a screenshot. I was also a bit tired and busy with other tihngs and didn’t want to put in any more effort. So I took a couple and hey, it looks pretty good anyway. My apologies. I should have done this last night.

New libnotify and notification-daemon releases are out!

/ Uncategorized / 3 Comments

I’ve just put out libnotify 0.4.4 and notification-daemon 0.3.7 releases. I highly advise that everybody upgrades, as several memory leaks, rendering glitches and other bugs have been fixed.

Along with these releases is some basic support for accessibility in the notifications and a nice, subtle transparent effect on the notifications when running on a system using a compositing manager. Don’t worry, it’s not bad at all, and it doesn’t make the notifications any harder to read. I’ve been running this for some time at this point 🙂 I would show a screenshot, but it’s probably best to see it on your own setup.

The downloads are available on the downloads page, and full release notes are below:

libnotify 0.4.4 changes

  • Fixed a bug where a notification’s ID could be reset when a different notification was closed. Patch by jylefort. (Bug #94)
  • Fixed a crash when the D-BUS proxy was not being freed on notify_uninit, which was problematic when used in a loadable module. (Bug #92)
  • Fixed a crash when a signal handler for the notification’s closed signal caused the notification to be destroyed. (Bug #116)
  • Fixed memory leaks when creating notifications. (Bug #112)
  • Fixed potential memory leaks where the function passed to notify_notification_add_action to free the user data was not being called. (Bug #119)

notification-daemon 0.3.7 changes

  • Fixed a compatibility issue with dbus-glib 0.72. Patch by Pawel Worach. (Bug #95)
  • The background of the window in the standard theme is now just slightly transparent when compiled against GTK+ 2.10 and when using a composite manager. Patch by Matt Walton. (Ticket #110)
  • Fix several rendering glitches with the borders in the standard theme.
  • Fix a memory leak when removing a notification. Patch by Sven Wegener. (Bug #105).
  • Added initial accessibility support with the standard theme engine.
  • Clicking anywhere in a notification should now close the notification. This was happening only on the body text sometimes.

FTD.com’s Flowers Screwup

/ Uncategorized / 20 Comments

I’ve been using FTD for a couple of years now with no complaints. So naturally, when it was time to buy flowers for my girlfriend for Valentines day, I went back to FTD. My girlfriend couldn’t come visit this week due to being sick, and I wanted to surprise her with a nice bouquet. The website guaranteed that the flowers would arrive in time, so I didn’t give it a second thought.

On Valentines day, around late afternoon, I received an e-mail saying that my order was being postponed a day. I was pretty upset by that, and ended up telling my girlfriend that flowers were coming but that they wouldn’t be on Valentines day. But that’s okay, right? One more day can’t hurt too bad.

They never came.

Today I received an e-mail simply stating my order has been canceled. Nothing more. No explanation. I tried to call up FTD and couldn’t even reach their customer service line.

It seems I’m not the only one.

Has anyone else experienced this problem this Valentines day?

Update: With Mikey’s inspiration (see the comments) I’m opening this up to more general flower screwup stories.

VMware Workstation 6.0 beta 3

/ Uncategorized / 4 Comments

We’ve just put out VMware Workstation 6.0 beta 3. As per the ancient traditions set forth by the VMware founders, we decided to make this release awesome. I’ll go over a couple of my favorite, but for the rest, read the release notes.

  • Record/Replay

    Workstation 6 beta 3 is the first release to support our new Record/Replay functionality that we mentioned at VMworld. Essentially, it allows for making a recording of (almost) everything that happens to a VM between the time you hit Record and the time you hit Stop. This is not a movie recording, but more of an execution recording. You can play it back however many times you like.

    What is this good for? Well, have you ever tried testing a program only to encounter a bug that you just can’t reproduce? Maybe there was some memory corruption that happened under some specific case that you just can’t seem to diagnose. Or maybe it’s a network packet that came in in some form that your application didn’t expect. Under normal circumstances, you’d have to do a lot of guesswork in order to find out what exactly happened. Far too often, it’s just too hard to reproduce the bug and it goes unfixed for some time.

    Now imagine instead that you’re testing the program in Workstation and, before your testing, you hit Record. You attempt the test and the program crashes in some weird manner. No problem. Hit Stop and replay the recording. Just before the crash occurs, stop the playback and attach a debugger. Messed up? Didn’t find the cause? Replay that recording again.

    It should be pointed out that these recording logs take up a lot of space, so you don’t want to keep too many around. Also, the feature is very experimental, so don’t be surprised if there are problems. Some things are not yet supported, like 64-bit guests, Virtual SMP, and certain devices (USB, for example). We plan to change the UI around a little bit, and it’s likely that future Workstation releases will improve the usability and usefulness of this feature.

  • Debug guest apps from the host using Eclipse

    We now offer the ability to debug applications inside the guest from Eclipse on the host. This provides for a nice sandbox for the application. Your app can crash the computer during a debug session and your host won’t even feel it! There’s a good blog post from the developer of the Eclipse support discussing this feature and some of its many uses.

  • Fullscreen improvements

    A previous beta introduced the new combined Fullscreen mode. We used to have separate Fullscreen and Quick Switch buttons on the toolbar, each useful for certain purposes. The new combined mode is closer to Quick Switch, but until now has missed the nice aspect of Fullscreen where the image would actually by the size of the monitor (due to changing the screen resolution).

    Now, when in fullscreen, you have the option of changing the view mode (from the drop-down toolbar). The guest resolution can be changed to match the host’s screen resolution, the guest can be stretched (emulating the original fullscreen), or the guest’s screen can be centered on the monitor.

  • Tab dragging

    The Linux UI now supports tab dragging, thanks to the new support in GTK+ 2.10 and some hacks to get around some bugs. Combined with the multiple window support we put in a previous beta, you can now have as many windows open as you like and drag and drop VM tabs between them. While not a major feature itself, it is a nice usability thing we’ve wanted to do for a while now.

  • Many many bug fixes

    The new feature list may not be huge, but at this point in the beta cycle there shouldn’t necessarily be a lot of new features. So what have we been doing? Why, fixing just tons of bugs of course. A lot of crashers have been fixed, work has gone into improving multiple monitor support, the UI has improved in various areas, and code has been cleaned up. All in all, we’re in good shape, and will be mostly staying in bug fix mode until the final release to ensure that the result is a product we can all be proud of.

I should also point out that if you are not a Workstation user but have been contemplating a purchase, you don’t need to wait for Workstation 6. You can now buy Workstation 5.5 and get a free upgrade to 6. This only applies to new purchases, so if you’ve been a Workstation 5 user for a while, you’ll have to purchase 6 separately.

Terror on Amtrak Bus 3717

/ Uncategorized / 9 Comments

This past night, Thursday the 8th of February, I journeyed home to see my family by way of Amtrak. It was a typical train ride, followed by what should have been a typical bus ride for the final stretch home. Not surprisingly, the bus was delayed an hour and a half. When it finally arrived, the bus driver told us “Tonight is going to be a very late night.”

None of us had any idea how true this would be. Aside from one person, perhaps — The Terror on Amtrak Bus 3717.

Sitting in the shadows at the back of the bus was a crazed man who was very high on something, and it wasn’t life. Few knew he was even there, at least for the first 10 minutes of the trip. And that’s when we first heard him speak:

“Three of you are going to die a painful death tonight.”

Half the people on the bus heard his words, but most paid no attention to it. Just a common jokester messing with friends, some of us thought. It wasn’t long, though, until someone began to panic and called out for the driver.

“Driver! Driver!!”

There was a loud scream.

The bus came to a sudden stop and the lights flashed on. Everyone turned to look at the back of the bus. The crazed man was repeatedly punching an older lady in the face as her daughter watched in horror.

Without hesitation, four men jumped up and pinned the attacker down. Two held on to his arms, holding them such that any movement would cause the arms to twist painfully. The third had a hold of his feet, while the fourth had a grip on his head and neck, strongly hinting that he would gladly snap the neck if the man dared struggle.

The victim’s face was covered in blood and the daughter was crying with fear. Seeing that the man was restrained, the bus driver immediately called for the highway patrol.

10 minutes went by, though it may as well have been hours. Eventually, the police pulled over and stepped onto the bus. Two went to the back and cuffed the crazed attacker, while a third attended to the lady.

The next hour and a half was a blur of testimonies, uniforms, and contact information exchange. By the end of this, we learned two things.

  1. If the attack had not happened, the attacker would have left the bus on his next stop, which was a mere 15 minutes away; and
  2. There was already a warrant out for his arrest.

Finally it was all over. The assailant was gone, people had been let off at their stops, and the lady was deemed “well enough” to avoid an ambulance trip.

Remember, boys and girls (especially the girls). Make sure that when riding a bus, you sit as close to the front as possible. It’s far safer and gives you more protection against the hidden terrors that lurk in the shadows of the back of the bus.

Scroll to Top