Tag Archive | web

Testing Memonic.com, a new total recall application.

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More total recall applications. This is good. http://www.memonic.com looks lean, fast and useful at first sight. I will try it for a while and compare it against Evernote, my current benchmark.

Bing Introduces 3-D Photosynth Maps | TechWatch | Fast Company

Check out the fully Silverlight enabled maps with crowd-sourced photos to create 3D environments. Now let’s hope for quick, international coverage!

Test: Have a web server send me critical messages via Twitter.

Not to forget all my UNIX know-how, I run a little NAS based web server that runs Fever°, subversion and a couple of other web applications for me.

I set up automated scripts to update and upgrade the IPKG packages automatically once a week and to refresh the Fever° data daily. I care about the result of these actions, so I logged them locally… only to never look at them.

I have decided to try the following: create a Twitter account and have the server send only the most important status messages to Twitter. Only a select few every day… not to be the one who breaks Twitter…!

Now I can keep up with my server’s health by simply following it on Twitter. Cloud based logging? Let’s see, how this works out!

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I still have to figure out what to do with long messages, for now I just crop them.

I simply call the following PHP script from my batch file using curl and passing the log file to be posted as a parameter.

<?php
    $filename = "/share/logs/" . $_GET["file"];
    echo $filename;
    $fd = fopen ($filename, "r");
    $contents = fread ($fd,filesize ($filename));
    echo $contents;
    $tweet =  substr($contents, 0, 140);
    echo $tweet;
    fclose ($fd); 
    sendTweet($tweet);

    function sendTweet($msg){
        $username = 'x';
        $password = 'y';
        $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';
        $curl_handle = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url")
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$msg");
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
        $buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
        curl_close($curl_handle);
    }
?>

Apple store is ultra pessimistic. Tells me stuff sent out Nov 24 will ship on Jan 7, next year…

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I didn’t know, computers could be SO pessimistic!

Let’s see, when this item will actually arrive.

Has Twitter peaked? | Technically Incorrect – CNET News

According to
eMarketer
, three different digital actuaries declared that Twitter traffic
has performed a slight plummet.

Facebook is said to be for “older” generations, mySpace for musicians, Twitter traffic is declining – what might the next social media trend be? Or will people in the end become tired of constantly filling online databases with information?

Interesting!

Foursqare now covers Zurich! I’m in for the test!

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The goal of http://foursquare.com is for people to check in to places they visit and leave hints for other people/friends that are nearby. This can come in handy if we – once again – spontaneously look for a new restaurant to try before going to the cinema.

If you want to add me to your network: http://foursquare.com/user/techpreacher

Get the scripts to download PDC2009 Session recordings & Slides!

The http://bit.ly/pdc09scripts will download the PDC2009 sessions for you, the only thing you need to provide is enough disk space, some time and a working copy of CURL (http://curl.haxx.se)

No installation of CURL is required, simply copy the curl.exe and PDC09Downloader.bat into one empty folder and run the batch file using one of the parameters “wmvhigh”, “wmv”, “mp4” or “pptx”.

The second script, PDC09Renamer.bat can then be run to rename the “cryptic” session keys used for filenames into the session’s title. Alternatively, the contents of PDC09Renamer.bat can be used to look up sessions by name and find the corresponding files…

Now the only thing to find is hours and hours of time to watch all this great content!

Microsoft Surface Manipulations and Inertia Sample for Microsoft Silverlight available for download!

Download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4b281bde-9b01-4890-b3d4-b3b45ca2c2e4

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The manipulations and inertia processor classes allow graphical user interface (GUI) components to move in a natural and intuitive way. Manipulations enable users to move, rotate, and resize components by using their fingers. Inertia enables users to move components by applying forces on the components, such as flicking the component across the screen. The contents of this sample are covered by the Microsoft Surface SDK 1.0 SP1 license agreement, with any additional restrictions noted in the Readme file. The purpose of this download is educational use only and is made available "as-is" without support.

Also interesting: The Silverlight Multitouch Input Documentation on MSDN.