David Pitkin

I converted my blog to run typo. It rocks, all AJAX and ruby and no more perl. My permalinks are broken so I took a static archive of them which is pretty lame. I now need to learn another lightweight markups like textile to write simple articles more quickly.

If you are reading this then the DNS changes have been made and I just have to update my feedburner link.

Now that the widget program Konfabulator is free I installed it on my work pc. I found out that the default Picture Frame widget can reference my flickr account as a source of pictures. Now when a contact either friend or family uploads a picture it rotates through my frame. Does the “info” button work for anyone? On both my computers nothning happens when I click it.

I think that BlogBridge is one of the reasons that I have been writing less. I used to use my powerbook to read web^H^H^H rss feeds using NetNewsWire. Now that I use BlogBridge on my Windows machine without a Mars Edit equivalent I tend to write less. I will have to renew my search for a windows editor.

Today was the release of BlogBridge 1.12 RC! Congrads to the team, Pito and Aleksey have been great helping me figure out my problems. The RC feels faster and much more defect free than 1.11. Best of all multi-machine unread marks are working great! At the office today I was running two Java applications most of the day (BB and Eclipse) and had a new problem of trying to determine which javaw.exe to kill when one was unresponsive… I like new problems.

I have written a bunch of ruby the past few days to manipulate source files for the development group. I am frustrated that the Ruby-Eclipse plugin is not compatible with version 3.1 of the Eclipse IDE. I hate spending time downloading and upgrading and then having to revert back to a previous version. I started to dive into the code where the problem lies in jface but real work called.

I also built my first Ruby on Rails application at home saturday morning, it was just two of the online tutorials but it was fun, ruby is still a joy to use. If you have not watched the fifteen minute Ruby on Rails video or I highly recommend it as an example of how quickly you can build a database driven website that is easy to maintain using the framework from basecamp, it is probably even quicker than the GUI in Visual Studio 2005.

Yahoo owns at least two pretty cool companies, flickr and Konfabulator. A good friend of mine also tells me that their desktop search tool is the best he has used (very similar to spotlight on the Mac).

I would have told you 6 months ago that Yahoo! was missing anything fun compared to Google, today I don’t know they have taken a few cool products that cost money and are giving them away for free!

One of the first things I did when I started my new job was install FlexWiki on a server. It has since taken off and the activity on it each day is fun to watch (via RSS). I had success with an internal wiki at my previous job and felt lost without a way to share and document things I was doing.

The latest @Wharton newsletter has a great article about the new internet. The fact that 50% of non-governmental GDP in the US is accounted for as transaction costs is shocking but easy to believe if you think about it. How much time is spent negotiating and figuring things out each day compared to actually doing them. Imagine the transaction costs of getting some text on a typical company intranet site. Now contrast that with the self-service of just clicking edit and save on a wiki page. The article also touches some of the social network things I am excited about.

After reading it I also thought about the fact that the FlexWiki I use is an open source Microsoft project. This is a company giving back in the Toyota model. Instead of using this technology internally or trying to sell it they are sharing it with everyone. This is a concrete example of the guys in Redmond being very fast and smart. I can imagine Channel 9 and the Microsoft employee blogs make a big difference both internally and externally for the organization. Compare then that Microsoft to the typical CFO or general counsel that Fraser thinks it will take 10 or 15 years to understand and embrace these new concepts.

p.s. How funny is it that the Channel 9 homepage has a video of David Ornstien the creator of FlexWiki on it today!

I got a new Macintosh mini last week and spent time using it as well as upgrading to Tiger. I have to say that spotlight and dashboard are pretty cool. I have a new iTunes problem now that I have consolidated my libraries to one computer but I think a fancy Airport Express will solve my ability to listen to music in the living-room with a nice user interface.

Combine a fun moving graph of your internet speed and a catchy domain name and you get: Internet Frog

My blog seems broken. This weekend I helped a friend upgrade his TiVo to an unsupported OS so that he could use Home Media with his DirecTV TiVo. The people at InstantCake are awesome. They have made hacking your TiVo easy and legitimate.

I am going to try to figure out what is wrong with the index page generation on the blog and read some more of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. I have never had so much fun reading documentation and I am afraid I am going to become a Ruby crazed person.

We have a project at work to scan in a large number of paper files. We got a very cool scanner from Xerox (it scans 50 pages a minute in duplex) and now armed with the latest Acrobat are off on our task.

Today I started to learn about the Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform which is an easy way to add XML metadata to your files. I downloaded the free tool MetaLab from Pound Hill Software to create an XMP custom dialog and put it right in Acrobat’s document properties. Now when we scan a document in we can control-d and click advanced and store the extra accounting metadata that we want. Now the theory goes that later when we get a XMP document management tool all our work will come to fruition with our new rich documents.

The next step I have is to figure out how to have Acrobat OCR our PDFs in the background, it should be fun.