Archive for 2008/12

  • Bye Bye Pownce

    It's always sad to see services that you actually really liked going the way of the dodo. It just happened a few days ago with Stikkit and now it's Pownce's time to leave the net. I personally never found a real use-case for me with Pownce but I always liked the service nonetheless for it's quite unique approach to social messaging. Now that Leah and Mike move on to SixApart, Pownce will be shut down (but at least with a 14 days time-period for getting your data out of it).

    What I don't get about this whole move is, that why SixApart is hiring both of them. From what I've gathered, SixApart seems to me like a pure Perl-shop while Pownce was (and for the next 2 weeks still is) a pure Django application. It's also definitely sad to see one of the biggest (or least most popular) Django sites go down.

    Anyway: Big thanks to Leah and Mike for Pownce and good luck with SixApart :-) (Perhaps you can teach them some serious programming language over there ;-) j/k). The whole story has one positive aspect, though: I finally can focus exclusively on Twitter for social messaging ;-)

    2008/12/01 at 23:05:29

    1 comments

  • Mercurial 1.1 is out

    Finally. Mercurial 1.1 is out with a tons of great new features and fixes and finally without deprecation warnings if you're using Python 2.6 ;-) Also most of the extensions got some new features like the pager-extension finally having an option to use it only on a subset of the available commands using the attend-flag in the configuration:

    [pager]
attend = diff,log

    On the web-front there are some new and improved themes as well as improved WSGI support, which I really have to give a try again after all these months with git ;-) In general, this release looks really great and it (as well as bitbucket.org) will probably make me want to use Mercurial a little bit more again in the future.

    2008/12/03 at 09:40:12

    1 comments

  • Python 3.0 released

    When I read yesterday night that Python 3.0 was imminent, I looked in awe at my calendar and thought "Is it already that late in the year"? This morning I then woke up, checked the newsfeeds and realized: Yes. Naturally this doesn't mean that everyone will just leave 2.x behind and move over to 3.x right away but this public release hopefully makes it way more attractive to people to finally look into it then was the case with all these preview-builds ;-) And there's much to look into, indeed:

    • A whole new way to handle strings (no longer do you distinguish between unicode strings and normal strings)
    • print is now a function and no longer a statement (which ended up in quite an ugly construct if you used it for printing to a specific IO-object)
    • There is now only one integer type anymore. So long got dropped (and int is the new long)
    • sets and dict now also have their own *-comprehension shortcuts

    and much much more. There are also some syntax changes, but from what I've seen so far Python stays Python :D

    I'm not going to dive into it right away, but Graham Dumpleton also just wrote that mod_wsgi should already work with Python 3.0 with some tweaks if you're using trunk.

    2008/12/04 at 14:12:07

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  • Git branches and PS1

    With the release of Mercurial 1.1 yesterday and me more and more getting into it again I complained on IRC that as much as I love git's named branches, they make it kind of easy to just do something to the wrong branch. If you have a branch per folder it's kind of more obvious in what branch you're operating all the time, in my opinion.

    But there is a simple solution for this: Martin today posted a quick guide on how to get the current branch name into your shell's $PS1.

    Read more about "Git branches and PS1" ...

    2008/12/04 at 17:20:45

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  • Slideshare now supports Keynote files

    Something great for all you Keynote users out there: No longer will you have to convert your slides to PDFs or Powerpoint files whenever you want to upload them to Slideshare; they finally support your files natively. There is one small catch, though: You will have to zip them since Keynote "files" are bundles which in turn are nothing more than folders on steroids.

    [via Daring Fireball]

    2008/12/05 at 19:49:30

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  • PULSE ... the browser-only show for PSN

    Screenshot from the PSN frontpageSony seems to be trying really hard to get some original content onto their PSN service. Last summer they launched the Qore magazine for paying subscribers and on the 5th a new show on PSN called "PULSE". It's basically a small preview of what's about to get released in the near future combined with some nice charts, so actually not bad for a corporate advertisement show.

    There are some bummers for me, though, as far as I can tell: Not downloadable (just in the browser, I think), no RSS/Atom-feed and not on iTunes. The last one is kind of redundant but the first two really annoy me. I simply don't really enjoy watching shows in a browser but on my iPod on the go or in Quicktime/VLC when on the laptop. So eventually it will probably go the way of Gametrailers for me: Every now and then, but probably not regularly (GT has at least downloadable views but only the smallest versions in the feed).

    2008/12/08 at 21:46:41

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  • Pownce export and files

    It took a little bit over a week not tonight I finally got my export of my Pownce data, an API-dump of all my posts (or if I want all my posts combined with all the posts I've seen from all the other people I've followed). But the dump does not include the actual files uploaded to the service. They are still on their S3 account (or on the server they used prior to using S3) and only the links to those files are included in the export.

    Read more about "Pownce export and files" ...

    2008/12/10 at 01:31:25

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  • Twittering via XMPP via tweet.IM

    During the last couple of days I started experimenting a little bit with XMPP (again) and also installed my own little ejabberd server. Right when I was finished with that, another project by ProcessOne popped up on my radar: Tweet.IM. Remember when Twitter still had that nice XMPP-gateway where you could post using your Jabber client? Yeah, that one ... a long time ago. Since November there is with Tweet.IM an alternative for that non-existant service which actually works pretty well.

    Read more about "Twittering via XMPP via tweet.IM" ...

    2008/12/17 at 23:01:22

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  • Making OWL files readable

    While working on some projects I started also looking into transforming ontology files (and OWL/XML in particular) into something more pleasing to the eye -- such as HTML.

    I guess, the obvious first choice here is XSL(T) simply because it's what you want to use if you need to transform one XML file into another (or something different). So I looked around and found among tons of other people doing it some really great work ) by Masahide Kanzaki (whose Exif ontology I absolutely love) as well as some other XSL-stylesheets. Since I hadn't worked with XSLT in ages I also started tinkering around with a stylesheet on my own. The result of that is nothing really great, so far, but if you absolutely have to take a look you can find it within my owltools repository on github. I've only tried it with the OWL-files that Protégé 4.0.x produces and also with Masahide Kanzaki's Exif ontology, so I can at least be fairly sure, that it works ;-)

    There still remains the problem, though, that XSLT might not be the ideal tool to render OWL or any kind of RDF application for that matter given the syntax-independence there. For now this XSLT does what I want it to do but eventually the repository might also see some Jena/Pellet-based tool that will treat OWL files more like RDF graphs. I guess that's again something for my life after the final exam ;-)

    2008/12/28 at 16:51:36

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  • 2008 in Gaming

    2008 was quite an exciting year for me when it came to games. First of all: In March I got my PS3 mostly for Resistance, Uncharted and Super Stardust HD ... and after enjoying them pretty much stopped using it while moving back to the Xbox360. Back then I had no HDTV so I could only play PS3 games in SD which was kind of a bummer. My Xbox360 on the other side was hooked up to my 19" LCD-display on my work-desk, so at least there I had some kind of HD-experience which I shamelessly used as an excuse to get Burnout Paradise for Microsoft's white noisy thingy.

    The summer was pretty much dominated by Burnout Paradise and not even GTA4 could keep me away from it for long. In the end downloadable games like Geometry Wars 2 and Pixeljunk Monsters ended up being more important for me than GTA4 altogether (but perhaps next year). But the latest gangster-simulation was not their only victim: I think I haven't turned on my DS for at least 6 months by now and my PSP only saw a short comeback when I gave the Patapon-demo and echochrome a shot. So perhaps I should replace the "exciting" from up there with "weird" ;-) (More after the break)

    Read more about "2008 in Gaming" ...

    2008/12/31 at 00:12:27

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