I’m a big fan of outliners, as I’ve mentioned in the past. A substantial portion of my life lives in shadowplan, the palm/windows/osx outliner, and I’m always looking at interesting new examples to play with. (As an aside, there is a fantastic series of articles that’s been running in About this Particular Macintosh called About this Particular Outliner that anyone even mildly interested in outliners should check out.) I’ve been tinkering with a couple of web-based tools lately: tadalist and sproutliner. They’re both well designed with clean, easy to understand interfaces, but sproutliner wins on features – it’s actually an outliner whereas tadalist is, as the name signifies, just a way to make lists. Anyway both are free and well worth checking out.

Check out this novel use of flickr’s api to produce ‘compound’ photos – imagine if you took 50 flower photos and combined them all into one photo. The results are surprisingly cool.

I already knew this lesson but man, I came close to being bitten by it on ebay this week. I mentioned earlier that I’m selling my iriver mp3 player on ebay this month to pay for a sony PSP. I put the mp3 player up for auction on Sunday. I’d been watching them on ebay for the past 2 weeks to see what folks were getting for them and based on my feedback I figure on getting around $260 for mine. But three days into the auction I had no bids and only 2 people watching it. I was starting to get nervous – why no activity? All the other ones that had gone up had immediate activity. Granted the html I’m using for the auction sucks, but I have great feedback and the thing’s in great condition. What was up?

I had a brain fart is what was up. I listed it as an i-river mp3 player. It’s an iriver. No hyphen. People searching ebay for one weren’t finding mine. D’oh! A quick adjustment to the listing and 4 hours later I have 2 placeholder bids and 9 folks watching the auction. The lesson – dot your i’s and cross your t’s and double check them. I could have taken a loss on the auction if I hadn’t adjusted it.

I already knew this lesson but man, I came close to being bitten by it on ebay this week. I mentioned earlier that I’m selling my iriver mp3 player on ebay this month to pay for a sony PSP. I put the mp3 player up for auction on Sunday. I’d been watching them on ebay for the past 2 weeks to see what folks were getting for them and based on my feedback I figure on getting around $260 for mine. But three days into the auction I had no bids and only 2 people watching it. I was starting to get nervous – why no activity? All the other ones that had gone up had immediate activity. Granted the html I’m using for the auction sucks, but I have great feedback and the thing’s in great condition. What was up?

I had a brain fart is what was up. I listed it as an i-river mp3 player. It’s an iriver. No hyphen. People searching ebay for one weren’t finding mine. D’oh! A quick adjustment to the listing and 4 hours later I have 2 placeholder bids and 9 folks watching the auction. The lesson – dot your i’s and cross your t’s and double check them. I could have taken a loss on the auction if I hadn’t adjusted it.

That is to say this link, which is guaranteed to induce an epileptic seizure in most anyone. Don’t complain that you weren’t warned!

I put my iriver ihp 120 up on ebay tonight. If you’re looking for a best in class mp3/digital audio player, check it out. They go for over $330 and aside from itunes it has everything an ipod has plus tons more, most notably radio, digital audio in and out (as compared to analog on most every other player out there), recording, wired remote, and multi-format support including ogg, wav, wma and of course mp3. It’s really an excellent little device. I’m selling it because I crave a sony psp, so much so that I already bought it on the credit card. It’s fantastic, mostly. I’ll post impressions after I’ve had it for a while. Meanwhile though I need to sell the iriver before the credit card bill comes, so go bid up my auction, won’t you?

All those videogames, cartoons and pen and paper role playing games about giant walking robots were actually onto something. Think I’m kidding? Check out John Deere’s spiderbot, a giant walking robot designed for timber work. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the Decepticons don’t get their hands on one or we’re in trouble!

Another reason to prefer Skidmore over Bowdoin – ask, and the network folks open up a hole in the firewall so that my box is available from off campus. Easy as pie. As a result you can now get to my work weblog and wiki from anywhere. Assuming you’re interested, that is. I do occasionally bring up interesting apps on the box, it’s basically my test machine at work. Anyway the best way to get there is from my official skidmore website, where you can find a link to my blog. I’m running WordPress 1.5 in test mode on that box (after yet another instance of snipsnap shit the bed on me – this is absolutely the last time I touch that package. Very cool ideas, decent implementation, mediocre stability and totally crappy documentation).

I’m having an experience similar to one I had 5-6 years ago when I first starting tinkering with XML, this feeling of ‘woah – this is going to change how I do everything!’ What’s causing it? Ruby on Rails, this completely awesome framework for building web apps. I first starting looking into it after reading through some of the stuff about the development of instiki, the excellent wiki engine I linked to a few weeks ago. It turns out that the development of instiki inspired the work that became Ruby on Rails. Anyone building web apps would be well served to do a little reading on RoR. I’d be curious to hear if you have a similar reaction to the one I had. A few good starting points:

• Drop dead simple tutorial which uses construction of a simple todo list as the sample application.
• onlamp.com’s tutorial – there is a second part to this one as well.
• a response to the onlamp tutorial on slash7.com. There are a couple of other really good posts about RoR on slash7 as well.
• An introduction to Ruby for non-programmers – Why’s Poignant Guide – this is just one of the best introductions to programming I’ve ever read – fun, funny, well written, and it has an elf with a pet ham. What more can you ask for?

To give former colleagues a sense of how good I think this stuff is, I’m fairly confident that I could rebuild the notoriously buggy and never quite finished Flight to Freedom project myself, without the assistance of a programmer or DBA. I’m almost tempted to do this just for the exercise.

Anyway, check it out if you’re doing web app development. I’m glad I’m not at Bowdoin any longer – in 4 years there I couldn’t convince them to give me access to PHP despite the fact that outside of Java virtually all interesting web app development was happening on that platform. God knows how long it would take them to give me Ruby. Here at Skidmore I’ve already got it up and running for myself and am experimenting with using Rails for a project I have slated for this summer.

The news is all over the tech sites today so I won’t bother linking to it, but it looks like Tivo signed a deal with Comcast yesterday to provide the interface for Comcast’s DVR’s. This is great news for Tivo fans. Let’s hope they have more tricks like this up their sleeve, including (to my view most importantly) a more rational and consumer friendly approach to DRM.