erik.wiffin blogs

So, most recent project is something of a mosaic.

http://wiffin.com/images/jpg

Originally, the intent was to make something of a slideshow. Some way of aggregating a series of images posted to twitter in an artistic/useful presentation. Might go back to that, might make some customization options so that either/or could be used.

The idea, is that this is a mosaic of the most recent images posted to twitter found in a particular twitter search.

The search featured above is “jpg”, more or less because it’s a good way to guarantee that it actually has pictures in it. Everything after “images/” is the query, for some reason #hashtags don’t seem to work though. (yes I know they count as anchor links, %23 doesn’t work either).

What I learned:

Caching is hard… the way I’m doing it, is that if you are the first person to touch on a query in 10 minutes, it rechecks the twitter feed, follows all the links, gets the header content-type, and if it’s an image, saves it to my database. Essentially, if you’re the first person to land on a particular search in 10 minutes, it takes 10 minutes for the page to load. This isn’t good, but it seems like a cron job scanning every tag ever searched before would do horrible horrible things to my bandwidth.

What it can do:

It’s pretty  easy to put together a personal mosaic. http://wiffin.com/images/from:erikwiffin is a mosaic of all the images I’ve thrown at twitter (ie an picture of a bottle of tiger sauce it’s delicious). If I can get hashtags to work, a pretty nifty crowdsourced mosaic could be made pretty quickly. Specific events and whatnot would get a better visual representation here than they would as a series of links on their native twitter.

Todo:

I’mprove the caching. If I can pull the caching out, so that it never affects load times, then that would be a major improvement. Perhaps only query twitter via ajax calls, let the initial download only pull from the database.

If I can do that as well as get a more accessible layout, this could very well end up as a visual adjunct to twitter.

If this could be built into an image only layer of twitter, it could be really powerful.

an image is worth more than 140 characters

I’ve started reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. It is absolutely amazing. I absolutely recommend it to anyone remotely intersted in the internet and the content found therein.

A combination of Jeff Jarvis and the shenanigans that the Associated Press and Newspaper Association of America have been up to lately are starting to make me seriously worried about working for a newspaper. Until now, I generally assumed that—at least at The Capital—newspaper subscription would slowly dwindle, positions would be cut, and we would eventually end up a far more streamlined publication catering to the internet. That we would somehow deal, and while we may not emerge stronger, we would at least make it through. Now I’m honestly not so sure.

I give it a year, tops. Before somewhere, a large enough piece of the industry collapses and sends big enough shockwaves through the rest of the industry and destroys the whole thing.

Submitting bugs should be easy. I was only trying to help, why must you make things complicated.

Refering to prototype.js and internet explorer and how even super-popular libraries don’t work in the damn thing.

(the following has nothing to do with Indiana Jones)

Stupid paypal is more confusing than it genuinely needs to be.

Word on the street is that all ecommerce solutions are lacking, but if anyone has any good experiences, shoot me a line. 1 click installs that allow people to give me lots of money are what I’m going for here. That’s not too much to ask is it?

I’ve been working on a site for a friend. The one up right now is his old one, the new one will be identical but WORDPRESS POWERED. extra. with hurley woorlies. dunno when that will happen but soon. Don’t even doubt. Things were a bit rocky for a while, wordpress 2.6 was giving us some issues, but 2.7 showed up in the nick of time and fixed everything. it was magical.

Also, Jaunty Jackalopes. Everyone loves Jackalopes yes? Jaunty ones must be extra good. I haven’t installed the beta yet, I might actually hold out till the full release. New OS means a harddrive wipe (it builds character) and backing up all my data seems like a chore I’m not quite up to yet. Maybe this time around I’ll make a bit better use of external hard drives and dropbox. The trick is figuring out what I want backed up on the cloud.

I apologize if this post is not up to my usual standards. I’m just not funny anymore.

I recent news, ruby is bamf. It’s a “book” about ruby. Props go out to Why for writing cool shits. Haven’t finished it, but I’m looking for a project to experiment with ruby in now.

proxy stuff
so the idea is that you sign up for this here dandy little proxy, and any pages you go to get filtered through my server. at that point, I add/edit the HTML so that whatever your downloading is made more betterer. The point of all this diddling around is that you can add extensions to your browsing, with no real overhead. Also, you could set this up on any computer in a matter of a few seconds, on any browser. cross browser extensions, so my dear dear opera no longer gets the shaft. Possibly revenue stream: I’m watching everything you do, means I can sell some pretty nifty stats to interested parties.

super recommendation engine
This is a bit less technically impressive, but plausibly more implementable.Started with a conversation I had with a friend earlier today. The idea started with, you provide my database a list of things in your closet, I tell you what to wear today. I would base this on what the weather is like, whether or not you need to laundry (yes it keeps track of that too), etc. “It’s a nice day out, wear some tight jeans to woo the ladies.” This mentally progressed to something that would keep track of pretty much everything about you, and save you the mind numbing task of actually thinking. What to have for lunch, should you bring an umbrella, what websites should you visit, what book should you check out from the library. Possibly revenue source: again, copious amounts of meta data sold to interested parties. (yes, if you tell me your habits I will sell them to the highest bidder. I am a horrible keeper of secrets. [I wonder if there is a market for stealing secret journals from 7th graders])

hacking into livejournal to blackmail preteens for their deepest darkest secrets
not even sure I could use ruby for this, but the possibilities are endless.

So. Going to make an effort to actually post to this thing. If anyone stumbles accross this anytime soon, I would like to warn you/defend myself.

I am a programmer web developer coder MAGICAL COMPUTER SHAMAN. Not a writer. I can’t write. This will be painful. Bear with me please.

This will be in part an experiment in SEO, as well as an attempt to contribute back to the internets from whom I have learned so much. I’ll post a lot of links (that whole sentence was supposed to be links but I can’t think of any).  Maybe somebody links to me? That would be nice, but until I can think of something interesting to write about, I wont count on it.

Today’s Code:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/swap-two-variables-using-xor/

apparently:

a = a xor b
b = a xor b
a = a xor b


Will switch a and b without needing a temporary variable. this is all well and dandy, but until proven otherwise, doesn’t work in php.  Which means that either php suffers a fundamental problem with some pretty basic elements of programming (= and xor) or I’m doing it wrong. Normally I’d go with option B, but lately I’ve found php to more and more wonky, doing things I wouldn’t really expect. So I’ll play around with it a bit more, see if I can’t get the darn thing to work, but I wont get my hopes up.

such an awesome blag