JCooney.NET

My awareness of the blogging site tumblr was pretty much zero, until recently I read a “shocking” story of someone’s tumblr subdomain being “stolen” from them. So why would a tumblr domain be worth “stealing”? From all I could tell tumblr was a me-too blogging service, with a name trying to cash in on the popularity of flickr/twitter, with all the usual web 2.0 trappings: big text, goofy colours, hipster “social media directors” living in lofts in NYC writing code on their Macbook Pros. So I asked this friend of mine who knows a lot about the internet what it was all about. This guys knows it all, from zombo to ninjas to LOLcatz. He’d rikroll your mother in her sleep without even thinking twice about it, anyway, the conversation went down like this:

Me: So…tumblr….what’s it all about.
Him: Well, it’s kind of like an internet micro-blogging site.
Me: So it’s like twitter?
Him: Well, not really, you can post much bigger content.
Me: So it’s like wordpress?
Him: Well, not really. See, wordpress has this ecosystem. Plugins, themes etc. It’s not just a hosting service.
Me: So tumblr is like blogger?
Him: Well, kind of, except blogger has got google behind it.
Me: Windows live?
Him: Errrr….
Me: So why would I use tumblr and not just set up my own blog?
Him: (shrugs)
Me: So why is tumblr “cool”?
Him: Well Joseph, tumblr is written in ruby on rails, and that makes it edgy and cool, even though it doesn’t actually haven any qualities that make it either of those things, the fact that it is written in Ruby just makes it POP.
Me: Right. It looks like I’ve got a lot more to learn about the internet.

Granted, I’m posting this on a blog running dotText 0.95. There are a list of tumblr features here, and some of those don’t look so bad. I guess I just don’t get it.

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of the homepage at least, RSS feed and individual pages seemed OK. “Touching” the web.config file to trigger an app-pool recycle seemed to do the trick. Aaaah, the joys of shared hosting. »

Recently Scott Hansellman posted an entry describing his IJW experience recording videos from his digital camcorder to his Windows 7 PC using some of the Windows Live applications. Spurred on by his example I extracted a few hours of footage from some digital tapes I’d been meaning to back up for ages, also with great success. Except that the resulting videos were bloated AVIs. Using Handbrake and Iron Python I was able to cook up the following script to bulk-encode a directory of videos. »

Imagine this:
<Smiling soft-focus pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit fill the screen>
husky voice: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are two of the most beautiful and successful people on earth
<more close-ups of Brad and Angelina>
husky voice: What many of you may not know is that they also share the same credit card number!
<swirling, glowing numbers and astrological symbols appear over the faces of Brad and Angelina>
husky voice: And thus the science of creditcardology was born!
Leon thought this up yesterday. I am truly amazed how, with the utterance of one word the man can invent a whole new discipline of endeavor.

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With November 5th only an hour away (in my part of the world anyway) I’m planning once again on watching V for Vendetta like I do every year on Nov. 5th. This year I’m doing something a little different, and starting on the 4th such that the 1812 overture scene, and the blowing up of the old bailey happens at around 12:00. V is the inspirational film that keeps me going until xmas, when the Albert Finney/Alec Guiness version of “A Christmas Carrol“ (especially the first half) re-fills the well of good feelings for another year.

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I’m writing an application in my spare time that I hope to release soon, and I’ve been asking a few favours from friends to give me feedback. One such unfortunate soul is the internet’s very own secretgeek. This is what my inbox looked like a few hours after sending Leon an email (on the week-end!!!) announcing my desire to get my application put through the wringer (with a little “fish-eye“ showing the type of feedback he adds to each image). »

I’ve just installed VS 2010 Beta 2 and want my “Document Map Margin” feature AKA “Document Mini-Map” like RockScroll. While there are a plethora of recent posts that mention this feature in VS 2010 it isn’t turned on for me, and I don’t see it anywhere in Tools -> Options -> Text Editor where other aspects of the text display are turned on (like the boring standard vertical scroll bar). Nor can I find it anywhere else in Tools -> Options. »

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This year I co-presented with Dave Glover on “what’s new in the windows7 UI and how can I take advantage of it”. The main takeaway from the session was that the Windows API CodePack makes leveraging all the new UI goodness in Windows 7 horribly easy, and as a result was a little “lighter-on“ as far as coding went compared to previous ones I’ve done. Demo-ing multi-touch is always fun (as everyone would have seen in the keynote). »

Thinking about starting a small software company? Here’s 5 links to help kick-start you:

• Secret Geek’s 25 steps to starting a microISV
• Andy Brice on running a microISV
• Your product is free because you’re lazy and scared Ian Landsman on why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for money
• Steve Pavlina on Amateurs vs. Professionals on the shareware scene
• Nick Bradbury on the joy of tech support and how it helps you connect with users.

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