Happy New Year!

Wasn't going to post anything about New Year, but something is still missing 2009.


The computer just booted up for an hour and a half, I also restarted Conky, but it remains in 2009. :) Caching problem? tmux shows the correct year.

The partial layout code for this Conky setting:

TEXT
${font Brushstroke:size=16}${color pink}${time %A}${color lightgreen}$alignr${time %G }$color$font
${font Brushstroke:size=20}$alignc${color lightblue}${time %B %d}$color$font
${color #ffcc22}${font Florence:size=28:weight=bold}$alignc${time %H:%M:%S}$font$color

The conclusion is Conky loves 2009! :D

Updated on 2010-01-04

Today, I finally googled conky 2009 2010, the answer is just right up there for me to read.

%G year of ISO week number (see %V); normally useful only with %V

I have changed it to %Y and I swear that I copied the code from some there, really! :)

I just started using Backupify to back up some data of popular websites. First of all, go signing up now before 1/31/2010 if you want to use it for free.

My quick list of its features:

• Supports own S3 account
• Supports multiple accounts of all services
• Email notifications of backing up status

You can back up your data to its S3 or your own S3 account (That setting doesn't seem changeable after sign up) . You can also get a daily or weekly updates about the status. It supports multiple accounts of a service, for example, you have two Twitter accounts. You can authenticate first one, then re-logging in with another and authenticate the second one. You only need one Backupify account to back up all accounts your have that it supports. You can see how it support multiple account of a service from the screenshots as follows.


As it is a backup service, the data preservation is the point not the presentation, therefore the backed up data may not be pleasant as you view them.

Twitter

The data includes almost everything except new Retweets:

It even provides a PDF version of your tweets. Here is first two pages of mine:

The rest of data are all XML format or Atom feed, they should be the same as you access to your feeds or via Twitter API.

For normal users, it's just a file backup, you probably couldn't do much with it if you don't have a proper software to process it, such as simple searching.

Flickr

My Flickr account is free. As you should know, photos of free account can only be accessed from your photostream for latest 200 photos. But obviously, the Flickr API allows more or all, you can see by yourself:


I am not satisfied with this because you only have photo files and the titles of photos. Your descriptions of photos are not backed up. Each link is linked to a image file.

You can only download one by one, there is no option to allow you to download them at once (this is unrealistic I have to say), or download them by batch.

The should at least provide a full link list of files on S3, therefore you can use other software if you do need to download them into your harddrive. If you can't get data onto your computer, this sometimes might be less useful.

Also, using pagination to look up a photo is really hard if you know which photo you need. Searching functionality is required in my opinion.

I also wonder if I upgrade my Flickr account to pro, would it re-backup? Because photos on free account are limited up to 1024 pixels in both width and height.

Google Docs

It's same story for Google Docs. Title only, no searching, no batch download. Docs and Spreadsheet files are mixed up, sorting by dates. More, the file formats are .DOC and .XLS. If your are a OpenOffice.org supporter, you wouldn't be like this.

WordPress

I have WordPress.com but no self-hosting WordPress. This backup needs to install a plugin.

Delicious/Facebook

Both are XML files. For Facebook, the files contains friends, links, notes, statuses, and events. I don't have any photo albums on Facebook. I am not sure if Backupify would back them up.

Blogger

It backs up all posts of your blogs in Atom feed format.

FriendFeed

In XML feed with stylesheet, it looks like in browser:


Gmail


It supported Gmail, but it is disabled now, it might be back online soon.


Conclusion

It has more service supports, but that's all I have been using. Basically, it does what it claims, backing up. If you need more to do on back up files, you will need another program.

However, I think simple searching and batch download is really a requirement. They may not be used often but once you need them, that would be pain because you don't have them on Backupify.

One more thing, some backup seems to be one revision snapshot. That might be a big deal but if you really want to know when you unfollow someone or follow someone, you wouldn't know. But who on earth needs to know that? :)

It's free so far and it does great for the fundamental job. I say don't waste it, go signing up and setting up all of your accounts.

Firstly, you will like it after it goes public comparing to the old one or official one, it's still in alpha testing. I have the chance to preview it because I had asked after I read the developer's blog post.

I asked if I could post some screenshots, he kindly wished I wouldn't and I respect that because you wouldn't be surprise when you firstly see @Znurt (the buddy on the top-right at this post). Anyway, I would tell your little about it.

The layout is redesigned and it has more functionalities and information about a package, the color scheme is softer but remains same generally.

You can read Changlog and bugs right in the package page, you don't have to be redirected to cvs webserver or bugzilla. Use flags descriptions and dependencies (you don't have these two on official packages website).

I know it's hard to understand, but I believe you will see by yourself soon. It's really much better than official one, I hope someday it will take the place of official one.

Have you tried the Incognito mode in Google Chrome (Chromium)? And have you read it carefully? I finally did and that did make my day. See this screenshot:


The text is:

Going incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software. Be wary of:

• Websites that collect or share information about you
• Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit
• Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys
• Surveillance by secret agents
• People standing behind you

The last two are superb, I was laughing at fourth and gone crazy at last one. But it's not just for laughing, they are also true. In fact, the last one was probably the most efficient way to hack into your accounts.

I recalled there was a joke (I couldn't remember exactly, sorry). It was like this... Someone was hired to hack to bring down the system. He was asked to provide the code he used. He did. His code had only one-liner of comment, actually. Made a phone call and requested unplugging the power plug from the socket.

Honesty, I had never thought about a security breach from them as I would never thought of using Skype to dial 911 (Skype has a notice about it. And no, it won't work if you wonder). People always have some thing beyond our imagination.

See the image by yourself:

I have Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 to show you how I don't like the select box in Chrome (4.0.275.0, Chromium) on Linux. You can see the dropdown box is shorter than text input and the button. It creates strange visual distraction, quite annoying. The others two browsers have same tall UI elements, I don't know what's wrong with Chrome.

The HTML code is:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello HTML</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello World!</p>
    <input type="text" value="Text Input"/>
    <input type="button" value="Click on me!"/>
    <select>
      <option>This is always shorter and I hate that!</option>
      <option>Option2</option>
    </select>
  </body>
</html>

I don't have any other WebKit-based browser installed, therefore I really don't know if this is Chrome's problem or Webkit's. I hope it will have same visual appearance in further releases. I couldn't find an issue on its list about, but I am also lazy to create one. So give me a link, I will star it.

It's still the same story...

tiv is an interesting tool to view image in your terminal if you have 256 colors support. It is written in Perl and requires ImageMmagick (It can also generate from raw image if you have ufraw installed).

Here is a sample of this blog's logo:


Note that you have to specify the width (-w) of your terminal and the path to the image file (-f) at least.

You can save it to file by running ./tiv -w $COLUMNS -h $LINES -f /path/to/image.jpg > result and run cat result to view it later. Perhaps this is a new way that you can send your Happy New Year card to your friends?

I tried to fix the Content-Type of a feed in my app, I read the Response Class doc and it had a line of code (didn't try Expires)):

self.response.headers.add_header('Expires', expires_str)

Needless to say I adopted it and made it to be:

self.response.headers.add_header('Content-Type', 'application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8')

It works on Development Server but not on Production Server, so I also tried after I read wsgiref.headers:

self.response.headers.add_header('content-type', 'application/rss+xml', charset='utf-8')

Still no luck.

I searched on discussion group, then I found everyone coded in this way (and I actually didn't like this way):

self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8'

And it works. I have no idea what's going on Production server and I didn't bother to look into it.

I wrote a Python script to get a word cloud of my tweets:

I use Twitter Backup to get my tweets in text file, then run my script to generate a list which you can use on Wordle.net's Advanced.

If you have a common.txt, that would help to remove some common words in result, but you can remove in Wordle, too.

PS. Twitter only allows you to access last 3,200 tweets, so go to back up as soon as possible! (I lost almost 400 tweets, hope I can get them back someday)

This is probably my third time I tried to use Chromium. First time, I pulled source code and compiled it, the result wasn't good at all. Second time, I grabbed the binary package from Gentoo tree, it's okay at the time. But it didn't support extension at the time. This time, I installed the binary package again. I am satisfied with its performance and almost every bit of it.

However, I am still using Firefox. I just let both browsers sit on my desktop, I mainly opened web pages in Chromium. The reason of keeping Firefox is Chromium didn't have Vimperator-like extension and I doubted a full port of Vimperator would come in near time. Chromium's API didn't allow to do many things, you couldn't have done what you could do in Firefox yet. Without Vimperator, I have to heavily rely on mouse, I have to move the cursor to click on bookmarks, that was really time wasting. (Typing in address bar isn't fast enough)

Vimperator enables you to use bookmark's keyword (which Chromium's bookmarks do not have such property, you could enter the keyword in Firefox address bar, that is a fast way to use bookmark). I have gm for Gmail, gr for Google Reader, etc. Every time, I need to read emails, I just type (I don't have to move cursor to anywhere) ogm, five keystrokes send me to my mailbox, it's quick and fast. But now, I still couldn't do that in Chromium. 

The only similar extension is Vimlike Smooziee, but it's just not Vimperator. I didn't even try it after I watch the video. If you are a fan of Vimperator go to star this issue, we may have Vimperator on Chromium someday.

Beside Vimperator, I really couldn't find anything else to complain. With Firefox, I have several addons, but now I have basically only one, the RSS Subscription Extension, and two of mine, Keep Last Two Tabs and Twimonial.

I used to have AdBlock Plus, FlashBlock, Firebug, Screengrab, Zemanta, and Vimperator. I used AdBlock and FlashBlock because Firefox is really a memory hug, I don't want to have more to eat up memory. Now, I don't even worry about that. Chromium has Developer Tools, which is similar to Firebug, but Firebug is still more powerful than Developer Tools, however it's good enough for me. As for Screengrab, I didn't find an alternative one to use.

Chromium is really fast and clean. I now don't have to restart the browser every a while. Firefox could easily eat up to 20% of 2G memory by just refreshing a page.

Supplements (2009-12-20)

I found out I forgot to mention one bug. The version I use is 4.0.275.0. The Chromium window will flick about three times when it gets or loses focus.

And there is another thing I just discovered, if you drag tab in Firefox to make a separate window which plays a YouTube video, the page would reload and so would the video. But in Chromium, it works smoothly, the video would be interrupted. Awesome!

I got this Load and Help not long ago, you can download a free copy of SoftMaker Office 2008 and this company will donate 0.1 for each download. So I downloaded it but I didn't give any hope because I didn't see 64 bit mentioned in download page and the file I downloaded indeed a 32 bit version. I couldn't use it because my system is a pure 64 bit. I really want to try another office suite other than OpenOffice.org, though SoftMaker Office 2008 still looks like MS Office-like. (I am kind of sick of that UI)

But I still want to help spread the word. Download it even your system is like mine (and ask them for 64 bit version, I did). It supports both Windows and Linux 32 bit, and you will get, in MS Office terms, Word/Excel/Powerpoint/VBA(Windows only) apps.

PS. This is my first time heard of this office suite.

Twimonial and Let Secrets Out ("LSO") are my 7th and 6th GAE apps, it created both in a month. I decided to post about them because I couldn't get anyone to use them.

You can read about why I created LSO in its blog, the code is licensed under the modified BSD. Here is a screenshot of it:


As the title describes, it's a place let you post your secrets, anonymously. I believe I created for good of the world, but I just could get it to the people who need it.


Twimonial is an webapp to let you read or add testimonial about other Twitter users. I got the idea when I saw someone tweet a Follow Friday recommendation. It's just a list of @username, I wondered would anyone really follow by just seeing that? I really doubted, at least, I would not follow. And a screenshot of it:


So I thought what if I could read more about those Twitter users? Then, that is testimonial. And here comes Twimonial. The code is not released, it's not because I didn't want to. It's because why I wasted my time again. Not really much people are interested in my stuff. The only code I got someone (probably only one) to use is BRPS, which might be the only thing I could say I made it! I think I should also mention a failure of mine, I Thank.

If you are interested in participating or giving feedback, free feel to contact me or leave a comment. If you would use any of them, I just want to say you are the best!

PS. I also submitted a link to reddit for Twimonial.

Updated on 2009-12-16: Someone asked if I could make Twimonial support Identi.ca and I did but it is a separate app called Dentimonial. Go check out if you are a Identi.ca user.

My Gentoo updated xinit and X to 1.2.0-r3 and 1.6.5 (I am not sure if the change were made in them, the changes should be made around after 2009-12-08), then XDM didn't bring up fluxbox but the twm.

Here is a related post on Gentoo Forums. In simple words, XSESSION in rc.conf won't be working anymore. You have to do this, in case of fluxbox, as root:

echo "XSESSION=fluxbox" > /etc/env.d/90xsession
env-update

Once you click on shutdown in xsm and login again, it should be working.

PS. I have to reboot, one of my monitors didn't work after turning on using xrandr but fluxbox does.

I got this hours ago:


Do you know what is inside?


I have forgotten I had requested one CD. It's not really taking long to ship, I think it took less than a month to ship.

But you may ask a question if you have read this blog regularly: Why on earth you want a Ubuntu CD?

You might ask that for two reasons: first, I could download and I did; second, I am not a Ubuntu user.

Yeah, but I stumbled on the request page, though it's not my first time saw that page, but I requested at this time. So now I have this free CD. I might install Ubuntu 9.10 again.

PS. I found this is interesting:


It looks like a koala... matching the codename Karmic Koala, right?

I just read this security bulletin, it affects all systems:

Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.32.18 and earlier. These vulnerabilities could cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

It is classified as critical, so you don't need to think twice go upgrade right now.

PS. Including AIR.

Every pack has two special cardsOne for love, the other to love; both with luck.

The odd is pretty high to love, 1/52, almost 2 per cent. Even if your life is two wild, you still 1.85 per cent of chance.

So, good 7uck if you are a love chaser! If you are in love, wish you that would be a 42-year love to !

Got inspired by the photo in background, when I was wasting my time on recent photos. I have no idea what kind of the game they were playing.

This is another not so useful script of mine. It is a Bash script and it gathers the search results counts via Google/Yahoo/Bing APIs to make an historical chart of specified keyword using the Annotated Timeline (with no annotations, :-))of Google Visualization API.

I made this script, search-result-count.sh, because I wanted to have a historical chart of this keyword livibetter. Yep, I searched my nickname regularly, I admit it! I like watching the number of result climbing up, which would make me feel better. :-D

I wasn't planning of using Yahoo and Bing because their APIs require AppIDs, the IDs will be out to apparently public if I use Bash to write this. I don't like it, but I couldn't resist to see the result counts from them.

Because it is still new, I could not have much data to show you. The following chart was collected about two weeks. (Bing results was not included)



The following is the screenshot of rendered HTML page:

Please aware of few things if you want to use this script:

• You can use cron to run it regularly, several times a day. Don't worry, it will only update the data file once a day.
• It will only update when three counts from three search engine are available. If any of them couldn't return the result, you may have a missing data. But it should be okay, the counts do not change much from day to day.