I have decided to in fact move my journal to Google Plus. I can be found HERE Those using RSS should be minimally impacted.

The address blog.spidey01.com may at sometime be made to link to a custom setup that pretty prints my Google Plus data via API, and perhaps other stuffs. As a side effect of the move over to Google Plus, this means those relying on my RSS news feed should review their feed next week. If you are using RSS, there should be no problem but if in doubt insure your reader is pointing directly to my feedburner.

Sometime after adapting Blogger, I had set things up with Feed Burner. My RSS feed via feed burner for this blog is here. Thus Blogger is setup to redirect spidey01.blogspot.com feed stuff to this address. Making it an alias of the feed burner. I assume that I should be able to keep this and point my feed burner to a new feed, completing the daisy chain. Soon I will try updating my feed burner to point through GPlusRSS pluss to my Google Plus entries. EDIT: Had an issue with GPlusRSS so I’ve used pluss—and the feed is active on feed burner!

Those who rely on my RSS feed being re-syndicated on my Facebook and Twitter accounts should see business as usual with the exception that it will direct you to Google Plus rather than Blogger, and it still stands that you’ll be silently ignored if you comment via Facebook instead of clicking through the link. This is an advantage of dereferencing the pointer’s in the right sequence lol.

Content that isn’t suitable for G+ will likely reside in cloud storage and be attached to the entry. This is actually an evolution, because in the past, I’ve usually made a document in text or an HTML’able markup in my ~/Documents/, and then posted it to Live Journal/Blogger as applicable. Now I won’t have to manually sync updates, hehehehehe.

Set course, second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Engage.

Austin

She left without leavin’ a number
Said she needed to clear her mind
He figured she’d gone back to Austin
‘Cause she talked about it all the time
It was almost a year before she called him up
Three rings and an answering machine is what she got

If your callin’ ’bout the car I sold it
If this is Tuesday night I’m bowlin’
If you’ve got somethin’ to sell your wastin’ your time, I’m not buyin’
If it’s anybody else wait for the tone you know what to do
And P.S. if this is Austin I still love you

The telephone fell to the counter
She heard but she couldn’t believe
What kind of man would hang on that long
What kind of love that must be
She waited three days and then she tried again
She didn’t know what she’d say
But she heard three rings and then

If it’s Friday night I’m at the ball game
And first thing Saturday if it don’t rain
I’m headed out to the lake and I’ll be gone all weekend long
But I’ll call you back when I get home on Sunday afternoon
And P.S. if this is Austin I still love you

Well this time she left her number
But not another word
When she waited by the phone on Sunday evening
And this is what he heard

If your callin’ ’bout my heart it’s still yours
I should have listened to it a little more
Then it wouldn’t have taken me so long
To know where I belong
And by the way boy this is no machine your talkin’ to
Can’t you tell this is Austin and I still love you

I still love you

Austin—Blake Shelton

Hmm, I wonder. There are just so many possiblities of what can be done, and my brain can baloon with ideas fed off that. In the mean time, I know it’s most important to scratch the itches with the most value, first.

Off my operating environment, the more pressing lack is notes taking. Simplenote works but via Android, I seem to be in need of writing my own client (been a while since I’ve hit that part of my GitHub). One thing that might be of interest is some client side integration, of being able to mate Simplenote, Blogger, and G+ and apply a little meta-search magic.

Hmmm.

You know, this page isn’t as slow as I thought it would be on my tablet. I’m not sure I’d prefer it over a native client option though, that does better than Google’s own offering.

At some point, I think I need to bust out AIDE :-).

Well, updates to the previous; and a little numerical data:

G+ posts since my last Blogger post: 16.

In thinking more thoroughly about the subject, G+ has one large-scale lacking: no pre-formatted code blocks. While I can live with the available formatting capabilities otherwise, ahem, I tend to post a lot of formatted examples: source code, program output, etc. A fair bit of semi-formatted output such as quotations and lyrics as well.

The simple fact remains, however that my G+ is apart of my journal.

One possible solution:

  • Program blog.spidey01.com to point to a “Special” page.
    • Display posts from G+ and link to the entry for commenting/etc.
    • Display posts from Blogger and link to the entry for commenting/etc.
    • Similar technology could be used (and maybe marketed, hehe) for Twitter/Facebook crap, if people wanted to pay or write it.
  • Update spidey01.blogspot.com with a note to such effect.
    • Redirect tech might even be leveragable for this, given the domain stuff already in use.
  • Write a custom client for updating Blogger, with an automated reshare to G+ or a demon that auto-shares my blog posts.

That would achieve the same end goal, more or less.

My Journal (blogs) future

Lately I’ve been using Google+ more and more, and more, and unlike the times where Facebook was apart of my routine, things focus more on G+. In fact, I use G+ enough that I’m considering turning off commenting here and modifying things to direct people to Google+.

That leads me to also thinking about what directions I want to go in. For the short term, nothing will change, except people should probably look at my G+ more than here, perhaps.

Three possibilities for the future years:

  • Migration to G+ 
  • Retention of Blogger 
  • Migration to a custom solution hosted at Cyb3Web.

The Google Plus solution has some merits. It really is convenient for me, and it integrates well with my data flow. Because it meshes with other data, in my stream. It’s so neat. That’s one of the good things about Facebook too, even if their filtering stuff took to damn long. The primary concerns I have with the G+ solution is data access and navigation. It can be hard enough to find things again that I have posted on Blogger or Live Journal, because at best I need to do a site: search in Google or know approximately what time period I posted it in. Tagging has proven some use in narrowing the results down but is only as good as ones tagging discipline and yields to many results!

Pro’s for a switch to G+:

  • Convenience.
  • Even better and growing integration with Google services.
  • Much better privacy controls.
  • Search Plus Your World may make it easier to find things again.

Con’s for a switch to G+:

  • Commenter’s would need G+.
  • Finding crap again might not be fun +3 years later, even by the current standard of blogging.
  • I’m dependent on Google for features/data issues. They tend to do Good at releases but they tend to do Slow at making new features available. But hey, at least things are well tested…
  • Limited data access via API o/.

Those who would just say use Facebook, will have their heads beaten in. Yes, I mean it. Fuck you. Just like you may choose Facebook as a hub, I choose Google Plus.

Unlike Twitter but like Blogger, G+ handles larger, “Blog” style posts pretty well. I like it. Some gripes like the limited control over formatting but I can probably live with that, heck it already has more formatting than I strictly need.

Getting data out of Google Plus is not bad. Seems to offer HTML or JSON. I’ve just downloaded my Stream content in JSON format. Something that would be very good for data munging. I cannot exactly say that Facebook can win at control over my data here, and their track record not so good at the completeness part IMHO.

The Blogger solution is what I already am doing really. The only thing I have to complain about with Blogger, is API side effects. Blogger integrates into exterior services better than G+, and more importantly does so better than Blogger integrates into G+! I have to manually share things to Google Plus, where as the process of sending it to RSS, Twitter, and Facebook, is fairly good. Except that getting people to respond HERE instead of e.g. on Facebook, took some stern wall posts, on top of the whole signature saying so… lol

It is much easier to build up infrastructure around Blogger than G+ right now, even for custom shit. The problemo is integrating anything with G+ is a bitch at the automata level. Thanks to whoever wanted to protect us for all those shitty Facebook apps I guess. Don’t remember who posted it.

Some possibilities exist with custom client-side code perhaps but that is what I really am missng I guess. I love Blogger but it doesn’t mate with G+ good enough for me, nor does G+ really mesh with anything outside it yet.

Pro’s of Blogger:

  • Already in use, 85%-90% of my journal data is here in some form.
    • The rest is on G+ or in private text files.
  • Ease of integration with custom tools and third party services.
  • Nice formatting controls that blend ease of use and pure power, for those of us who know HTML :).

Con’s of Blogger:

  • Sharing to G+ is manual.
  • Can’t make “Comments” system just link to a G+ entry.
  • Have to change web pages to view other content that belongs in m y stream.

Notice that non of those cons are really Blogger’s fault! Google+ seriously needs better integration services, ffs!!!!

The custom solution has it’s merits. I’ve got the web setup and programming skills to cook up something, and I frequently do hack out tools to scratch itches. But I also know canned solutions have great value. Going custom, I get full control: over data, tools, etc. And I have a great web host :-). Doing some custom code isn’t a big issue here, so much as ROI of going Blogger -> Custom instead of Blogger -> G+.

Most of things contra for keeping Blogger, extent to rolling a custom solution. The only difference is the amount of control: if it’s humanly possible to achieve, I can. With Blogger, I have to rely on Google engineers and super system admins.

The real pro’s are also similar, but larger. Namely I can leverage the extra power to do things like automatically copy post data to an offsite data store: like Dropbox or BOX, on top of having backups with my web host.

Another possibility is that since there is an API for reading data out of G+, my “Custom” solution could really just be a way to pretty print my G+ content, and link back to allow commenting/resharing services. What I am not so sure of, is the affordability of that on my wallet. Maybe it’s a good thing that my site doesn’t get hundreds of thousands of views a month.

What I am going to do is experiment with the following issues with G+:

  • Finding things again.
    • result: beats Blogger to shit.
  • API access to G+.
  • Experiments with scripting G+.

Oh, and while I can see people might have issues about e.g. control over visual matters being a big blurb for something like what I am contemplating, it is not for me. I usually find Google has reasonable taste and I prefer content over wizbang themes.

Thoughts on Oracle v Google stuff

Or more specifically after parsing this, thanks Noles ;).

Personally, I think under that context, Oracle will likely win.  I do not believe that a language /should/ be copyrighted but that they technically can be, think about how the types involved might mix for various copyrighted works.

I’ll be the first to admit that our system for copyright, patents, intellectual property, trademarks, and the like is a maze with more than a few turns just full of bullshit. But let’s think a moment: what is it really about? Money. It’s not about fostering innovation (patents) or controlling your property (oi). It’s about money. That’s it, simple.

Java is a product and a creative work, sufficient to be copyrighted. So is the GNU Compiler Collection and that last book you read.

What is the jist of copyright? Wikipedia as of this writing, defines it as a sub class of Intellectual Property that is generally “the right to copy, but also gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other related rights”

Java, as it applies to Android, is not very different than any other language applied to other systems. The devil is in the details as they say. An Android application is a collection of Dalvik bytecode, native code, and resources running under the Dalvik virtual machine: and Android provides a runtime.

The implementation is not “Java” as Oracle ships it. In fact, as Microsoft’s various efforts to make a .NET dialect of C++ and projects like JRuby confirm: you can have a fair bit of abstraction between *concept* and implementation. Android developers typically write code in Java to an interface documented in Java. They could just as easily write in any language you can eventually wrangle into Dalvik bytecode! Android applications can and have been written in other JVM languages, and non JVM languages. The interface, well hell, many things in the .NET world are done in C# but you could just as easily use Visual Basic or F#. Really helps to be able to read C# though. Just like how on many systems, it helps to be able to read C and or C++.

That runtime part that Android applications depend on is quite “Java like”. Many intrinsic components are provided. C programmer’s should think of the stdio library. Because that is the sort of thing that has been “Copied” from “Java”. Essential programming interfaces, not implementations but interfaces (as far as Oracle holds right to). GNU implements C’s I/O library in their runtime. So does Microsoft in their own. They didn’t have to supply crap like printf() and puts(), they could’ve supplied their own pf() and IoConsolePutLStr() functions! Nether group owes the other jack shit over that. But hey, printf() and puts() are what are widely used: even in other languages!!!!

A lot of things in Androids runtime are also unique. For example, the parts that make it Android specific rather than able to compile under Oracles development kits for PC. The implementation is not copied but the conceptual interface, yes.

So that’s a problemo, how far does that level of control and ownership apply to derivatives? And what actually constitutes a derivative work?

Is copying the script of a movie scene for scene, line for line, and reshooting it for your own release and profit, an issue? Yeah. Obvious. Is doing a movie about a train, going to allow whoever owns copyright on some other movie with a train, to sue your ass for it? It shouldn’t unless it’s close enough to the former, or similarly having a legal problem of some other sort.

It’s more of a question like, should Matz and Oracle be able to sue the developers of JRuby for copyright infridgement: because it provides an even stronger resemblance to both Ruby’s and Java’s programming interfaces than Android’s runtime does to Java’s. Things like C, C++, C#, Common Lisp, Scheme, and EmcaScript are formally standardized to some extent. Things like Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and Lua are not. Could Niklaus Wirth (or Apple) have sued Boreland over Delphi?

I do not feel that it is responsible to exercise such strong-arm aggression against users. It’s bad for Java, it’s bad for business, it’s bad for the continuing evolution of the industry, and it’s bad for those who have already invested.

And as far as I am concerned, enough programming languages “Borrow” stuff that applications of copyright the way Oracle must be seeking, or not feasible—and may very well fuck up language development for the next decade. Now we have to worry what the fuck we name our classes? What next, companies are going to start exerting control over _our_ works made with their tools?

Thanks Oracle, hope your stock plummets and your employees find good jobs with businesses that offer better job security.

Before testing fork(bombs), break glass

Like everyone who spits off a fork bomb during a test, and realizes they’ve forgot the most important thing when testing a multi-process program for correctness and typo’s.



$ ulimit -u

15878

$ ulimit -u 20

$ ulimit -u

20

Lower the max user processes first!

Titanium Backup + Dropbox HOWTO

I set this up today at long last (and assume most of it will apply to Box as well). Couldn’t find much use on how to actually make it sync, so here is a picture!

Go into your Preferences -> Cloud sync settings; and enable dropbox. You can go into Dropbox Settings to control stuff like what to sync and where to sync, etc. Then go to the “Schedules” tab and voila!

I don’t see what is so schedule about that, and I seem to remember reading that you have to do sync’s manually rather than on a schedule but whatever. Couldn’t find crap on Google, so I took a screenie ^_^.