Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
The Netflix debacle
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web on October 11th, 2011
I received an email list night that I found rather humorous. Below is an excerpt:
“It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.
While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.”
I have been a Netflix customer for the past 6 years and I have enjoyed it. I was pleasantly surprised when, 3 years ago, they unexpectedly lowered our monthly cost for a reason that escapes me now. I thought I was with a pretty cool company that would actually lower their customer costs as the company did better. When the price hikes came about I begrudgingly accepted them as the price of Netflix’s rising popularity. I knew the movie industry fat-cats would want a piece of the expanding Netflix pie, and licensing is a highly subjective pricing scheme so I knew there were going to be repercussions that would radiate down to us, the consumer.
When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings came out and said that DVD’s would be handled by a new company ‘Qwikster’, I had a major WTF moment. No really, there is nothing I want more than another website login, and an entirely separate queue for my movies. Really!? But then, they tantalized me the prospect of renting games with this new split. Hmm, I might be able to warm to this, maybe.
Now, the intrepid Netflix CEO made a blog post that says Quickster is dead before it ever started and game rentals are a possibility. Oh wow, so you are taking away something I didn’t like and something I did like. I guess the status quo is maintained, I love them but I don’t exactly hate them either.
At least there have been some positive rumblings for a native Linux Netflix client.
Google+ for me
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web on July 9th, 2011
So I received an invite from a friend to join Google+ this week and I spared no time getting logged in and setup.
The first thing we tried as a hangout, basically a netmeeting, only with the ugly MS requirement. After installing the plugin (they actually have a Linux plugin!!) and a little snafu with my mic (which was totally my own fault) we were video chatting with each other and sharing YouTube videos. You can chat with a bunch of people all at once so I see this being a contender to all the WebEx and DimDim clones out there. [ BTW, if you miss DimDim, try BuddyMeeting, it is a fork of the open source DimDim code ] Actually on second thought, I am not sure if it will compete with those sort of products, its contingent on everyone having a Google+ account, so that right there is a big strike against its viability as a WebEx contender. But still, all in all, very cool.
Next are circles, or groups, for friends. A novel idea on groups, but nothing terrible new here. The act of adding friends to circles is sort of fun with the animation, but other than that I haven’t seen a lot of difference there. There is one thing worth pointing out about about how Google+ uses these circles however. When you post to your stream, or your microblog of sorts, you can choose which circles get to see the post. This is huge for me. One of the things that really turned me off to Facebook was the fact that when ever I posted anything, ALL my friends would see it. So all those stupid YouTube videos or slight NSFW links that I wanted to share with my friends, yeah, my parents could see them too. The only alternative would be to unfriend my parents, not really an options when I want to share pics and videos of the kids with the extended family.
Other than that there aren’t a ton of differences from Facebook. You can share your videos and photos, nothing new there, and having an android phone makes it even easier. Its intriguing enough to bring be back from a self-imposed exile on social media, but if it will keep me remains to be seen.
Hollywood style code hacking
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Web on April 28th, 2011
Hey kids! Have you ever wanted to pursue a career in programming? Checkout this site to see EXACTLY what its like! Just click the ‘Hack!’ button and start typing, you’ll be hacking Linux kernel code before you even realize what you are doing. Isn’t programming fun!
To alias or not to alias, that is the question
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web, Work on April 12th, 2011
I have a good number of servers I have to keep track of at work, and they all have rather long domain names, and I really haven’t gotten used to the subnetting at my job yet. So what is one to do? Well, I did what any concerned Linux user would do, I aliased all of then in my hosts file. Sort of like this:
192.168.125.133 dev1 192.168.125.137 dev2 10.6.8.201 uat1 10.6.8.202 uat2
I can hear you say already, “Jeff, just memorize them, there are only 4!”, yeah, ok, this is only about 1/16 of the aliases I have, so that becomes a bit more difficult. So here is my conundrum, do I continue with the aliases, or do I go cold-turkey and try to memorize them. The upside of aliasing is that I can fly when I am at my machine, its a no brainer to scp or ssh to a machine, but then I look like a total retard when I am at someone else’s computer, “What do you mean you don’t know the IP or domain name of your dev server!?”.
So therein lies the subject of my pondering..
Google CSE article
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Technology, Web on April 9th, 2011
I just finished the Google CSE article I started a couple of weeks back. It was an interesting project, mostly due to the fact that I have never worked with the Google search API before and it was enjoyable to learn something new.
Hopefully you find it useful. When I was putting the code together, I found there to be a distinct lack of articles or documentation on the Custom Search Engines. Hopefully this helps someone. Then again, Google will probably EOL the JS CSE API in the next few months and I will have written the article for my own benefit. Ah well..
Wow, Gmail motion wrocks!
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web on April 1st, 2011
I logged into Gmail this morning and I was looking over my inbox when I just happened to scratch my nose. Oddly, a new message was created addressed to my top most mailed addresses. What an glitch I thought. Then I ran my fingers through my hair and Gmail created a new label “80′s Hair Bands” and applied it to the message I was reading. Wow! Gmail is behaving very strange this morning! Then I tried experimenting with other motions, and sure enough they produced other effects in Gmail. I found ways of forwarding all my junk mail to family members with only a flick of my wrist, and marking all my inbox messages as spam with a nod of my head. I found out that I was using Gmail Motion! This has got to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, no strike that, the greatest thing since AdBlock Freedom!
Internet comeback of the day
I usually don’t repost this sort of stuff, but this is a quality to the ridiculous rant by some UCLA undergrad..
Don’t blame me if this gets stuck in your head. Link to video
I love the internet, in all its highly unproductive glory. That and it pays the bills, yeah, thats important
These are not the same
I have been coding for over a decade now and one thing about other coders has never ceased to annoy me. In defense of my rant, I present two snippets of HTML code, see if you can pick out the difference and the source of my exasperation, I’ll leave it up to you to make the determination as to which is the good and which is bad:
<div id="content"> <div id="content-wrapper"> <h1 class="layout-indent">Page Title</h1> <div class="separator thick-separator"> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-left-cap"> </div> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-right-cap"> </div> </div> <div class="layout-indent"> <div class="yui3-g"> <div class="yui3-u-1-3"> <a href="#" class="link action-link ">Filler Text....<br /> <img class="link-arrow" src="img.png" alt="" /> </a> <div class="clear"> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>
<div id="content"><div id="content-wrapper"> <h1 class="layout-indent">Page Title</h1> <div class="separator thick-separator"> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-left-cap"> </div> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-right-cap"> </div></div><div class="layout-indent"> <div class="yui3-g"><div class="yui3-u-1-3"> <a href="#" class="link action-link ">Filler Text.... <br /><img class="link-arrow" src="img.png" alt="" /></a> <div class="clear"> </div></div></div></div></div></div>
The structure of these snippets is identical, they probably layout the same between browsers too. I guarantee you that if anyone ever had to make a change, the first one would be far and away easier to change. So why do people still insist on editing spaghetti code? This isn’t just an HTML issue, it happens in every coding language I have ever encountered. I just want to say to people, “Would it kill you to use the tab and enter key from time to time?”, its as if not indenting their code will somehow make them work faster. “Look boss, I saved 2.78 seconds last week, by not formatting my code!!” In my opinion it really shows that someone [programmer] has pride in their work if they spend the extra few minutes documenting and formatting their code.
You can never really escape it
I enjoy running Linux, not only because I am sort of a fanboy about it, but I have been running it long enough to be much more proficient in it when compared to anything else. There are things that drive me nuts about it, just there are with anything. In my job, I am a front-end/UI developer. Not a designer, mind you, I am not terribly good at dreaming up good user interfaces, but I am good at implementing them. This is in the web-based world also I have to add. So that brings me to the biggest gripe I have about my profession, browser differences, or more specifically Internet Explorer.
I have the pleasure of being able to run Linux on my workstation, but I still have to keep a Window partition around so I can reboot occasionally and check my work in Internet Explorer. Usually there aren’t a lot of issues to correct for it to layout right in IE, but sometime there are major problems and I find myself spending the whole day in Windows. *sigh… I guess you can never really escape
Great post on relaying Postfix through Gmail
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Technology, Web on March 6th, 2010
I was setting up a home server and I wanted to relay postfix through Gmail, but I was having a terrible time getting it to work. I found this site that explains it very simply. Should take you longer than 10 minutes and you will be realying to your hearts content…provided you have a GMail account 
http://www.felipe-alfaro.org/blog/2009/05/10/have-postfix-relay-e-mail-to-gmail/
