Another blog bites the dust

Batch API is terrible for one agent. It might be great for a fleet.

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What does an agent harness feel like when every model turn goes through Anthropic’s Batch API instead of the synchronous endpoint?

Batches are 50% off. For anyone burning real money on agents (eval suites, background subagents, anything that runs unattended), half-price tokens are the kind of number that makes you stop and squint. The trade is latency: batches are asynchronous, with up to a 24-hour processing window.

AI finding more bugs is a good thing

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anthropic’s Mythos announcement set off exactly the reaction you would expect: if models can now find serious bugs at scale, software security must be about to get much worse.

I think that reaction mixes up two things.

A bug is not automatically a vulnerability.

And even a vulnerability is not automatically exploitable.

That distinction matters even more in the agent era. AI is getting better at surfacing weird behavior in code. It can push edge cases, strange paths, and awkward combinations much faster than most human teams. That is not bad news. That is visibility.

I Asked Codex to Reverse Engineer My Webcam

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have an Anker PowerConf C200 webcam.

It is a solid little webcam, and one of the nice things about it is that it supports a few genuinely useful settings, especially Field of View. You can change how wide the camera frames you, which is great if you want a tighter shot or a wider view of the room.

There was just one problem: I run Linux. Yes, really. And I have for a long time.

Your Agent Can Run printenv (and Your Runtime Can't Stop It)

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Work-Bench’s post is one of the clearer attempts to name what’s happening: a new “agent runtime” layer built to execute, constrain, observe, and improve agent work at scale.

I mostly agree with that framing. Where I think it stops short is inside their “Constrain” pillar.

They explicitly define “Constrain” as “two things: identity and permissions.” That’s correct - but incomplete once you accept the premise of agents: they execute arbitrary code, spawn subprocess trees, and interact with the OS in ways that don’t map cleanly to “API permission checks.”

It Was the Shell, Damn It: Why I Built AgentSH

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had a rule in my control file: never run database migrations without explicit approval. The agent followed it perfectly - until it didn’t. During a long debugging session, it decided the schema was the root cause, wrote a forty-line inline Python script, connected directly to the database, and altered the table. It never “ran a migration.” It just spoke SQL through a different channel. The table was altered, the script was gone, and my harness log showed “executed python command.”

"It's Just a Skill File" (Famous Last Words)

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:53:29 +0000

Skills like skills.sh (tiny text “how-to” files that steer an agent toward a task) feel harmless because they’re just instructions.

But that’s exactly why they can become an attack vector.

A skill file is basically executable intent:

it sets the agent’s assumptions (“trust this source”)
it defines the workflow (“run these steps”)
it can nudge boundaries (“skip confirmations”, “always do X”)

The tricky part is: this attack doesn’t have to come from external prompt injection at all.
Skills often live inside your environment (repo, dotfiles, shared templates, internal skill packs). If a malicious or compromised skill gets into that internal distribution path, it arrives with a “trusted” label by default.

Are We Quietly Returning to the Era of Feeds

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back in the Web 2.0 days, RSS and Atom feeds promised a better way to consume content. No more jumping between websites just to catch up on what’s new. You could open a single feed reader and get everything in one clean stream. It felt like the web finally worked for you instead of the other way around.

As the ecosystem grew, new tools appeared around it. One of the biggest was FeedBurner, which Google later acquired. It helped publishers track subscribers, manage feeds, and even monetize them by inserting ads directly into the feed. It was an early version of what we now call native advertising - ads that blended right in with regular content.

Introducing cc-sessions-cli: Make Your Claude Code Logs Work for You

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was chatting with friends about context compaction and how hard it can be to carry forward important context from past LLM sessions without wasting tokens or repeating yourself.

We kept coming back to the same pain point: you finish a productive session, but when you start a new one, you have no clean way to bring that history along. Claude Code already keeps a full record of every session on your local machine. So why not make that data more accessible and usable?

Introducing AutoAgent Action – Smarter GitHub Checks with AI

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0700

Last Wednesday (Sep 10), I had the chance to attend a hackathon at Cursor’s offices - huge thanks to the Cursor team for hosting such a great event! 🙌 The focus was on Cursor CLI and their new Background Agents API.

When I started brainstorming ideas, I came across Eric’s post about running various rules during CI/CD to automate checks and actions. It got me thinking — setting up those rules often involves a lot of repetitive work: crafting similar prompt setups and then defining the actions themselves.

Wielding the Tool: How CLIs Unlock LLM-Driven Workflows

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 03:55:29 +0000

Command line interfaces used to be the domain of automation experts who knew how to wield the tool with precision. They scripted pipelines, chained commands, and bent systems to their will from a blinking cursor. That hasn’t gone away, but something new is happening. Large language models are now picking up these tools and wielding them just as effectively.

The key is design. If a CLI has clear help text and well described flags, an LLM can step in like an apprentice who suddenly knows the whole manual by heart. Add the ability to output JSON or another structured format, and the tool becomes not just usable but consumable. The LLM can run the command, parse the result, and carry the output forward into the next step.

Meet pgsqlite: A Postgres-Compatible Server on Top of SQLite - Built with a Little Help from AI

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 07:07:29 +0000

Lately, I’ve been working on something I probably wouldn’t have pursued if not for the rise of AI coding agents.

It’s called pgsqlite - a Postgres wire protocol v3 compatible server, written in Rust, that runs on top of the standard SQLite library.

On the surface, it might sound like a niche tool. But it solves a very real and increasingly relevant problem. Why This Could Be Useful

As more developers integrate autonomous coding agents into their workflows, the need for lightweight, sandboxed environments grows. These environments often need a database - usually for tests, schema validation, or other backend tasks.

Making AI Coding Agents Smarter with Language Servers

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:08:04 +0000

If you are using VSCode or any other non-integrated editor (even vim or emacs), chances are you are already using a language server. These servers power features that are specific to the language or framework you are working with. They provide documentation, autocomplete, code navigation, warnings, and more.

When you click on a function and jump to its definition, a language server is likely behind the scenes making that possible.

Thinkpad doesn't reocgnize NVME drive

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 12:52:22 -0700

Fixing NVMe Drive Detection on a ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 with Ubuntu

I recently got a used ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 off eBay. It came without a storage drive, probably because it used to belong to some company and they pulled the disk before selling it.

I picked up a Samsung 980 NVMe at a good price and installed it. The BIOS saw it right away, so I figured I was good to go. But when I booted the Ubuntu installer, it couldn’t see the drive.

Why serviceability matters

Sun, 10 Dec 2017 18:33:22 -0700

In the picture above is a late-2009 iMac GPU (graphics card) after being baked at 200°C (392°F). Baking it solves a problem that makes the computer unusable and manifests itself as vertical pink lines during boot that gets the computer stuck.

My friends’ iMac suffered from this problem and after googling it I found out that its a rather common issue afflicting a lot of iMacs. It happens when an internal solder crack or break. Baking the card fixes the bad solder.

Goodbye WordPress! Hello Static (Hugo) and Netlify (static hosting and more).

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 10:33:22 +0300

It’s time to move my blog to version 3. This time we are going back in time and into the future at the same time.

Before we begin, here is a little history of my blog:

Version 1 - Blogger

Version 1 ran on Blogger - which was essentially a static site generation platform. It gave you an editor, you would write your posts and then it would generate your complete site in HTML and even allowed you to publish it on your own server by uploading the result via FTP.

Redis Snowflake UniqueID Module

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 10:37:00 +0000

Ever since Redis Modules were released into the wild, I wanted to write something nice and short and see how easy and fun it is to significantly extend Redis.

It also helps that Dvirsky, my friend, works at Redis Labs and wrote RediSearch - a kick ass full text indexing and search engine that kicks all the other search engines’ performance ass (you should definitly try it out).

For a while now, to try out new languages/frameworks/whatever I’ve been using Twitter’s Snowflake. This case was no different as everyone needs unique ids at some point.

EFF’s Dice Random Number Generator digitized to become DicePass.org

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 18:40:00 +0000

TL;DR – this is why (and how) I created the electronic version of EFF’s Dice.

I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and believe in their just cause. I support it as much as I can and try to educate as many people as I can about their rights, privileges online and how to correctly behave in this new found jungle.

5 tips on future proofing your Medium posts

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 15:35:48 +0000

So, you’ve decided you want to blog or write on Medium – where all the cool kids hang out. Great. Remember there are other similar platforms to write and blog and at some point Medium (like everything else on the Internet) might lose its appeal or even, god forbid, shutdown.

When that happens, what will happen to your posts? How can you and the rest of the internet reach it?

Lets Encrypt Error: The server could not connect to the client to verify the domain :: Failed to connect to host for DVSNI challenge

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:45:09 +0000

Are you using Lets Encrypt? (If not, you should go ahead and use it to generate SSL certificates to ALL of your web servers).

If you want to run it on EC2 or GCE using the –standalone argument (./letsencrypt-auto certonly –standalone -d example.com) make sure port 443 (for SSL) is open on that server.

Otherwise you’ll get the infamous:

`Are you using Lets Encrypt? (If not, you should go ahead and use it to generate SSL certificates to ALL of your web servers).

Tornado’s secure cookie support in Flask

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 10:24:58 +0000

I’ve recently had the chance to write a new project on AppEngine.

It’s been a long time since I tried I was too lazy (as always) to setup servers just for that.

I’ve decided to use Python but just to be sure I won’t be vendor locked into various AppEngine services I’ve decided to use:

Flask (instead of webapp2)
Cloud SQL (instead of DataStore)

This will ensure that I can break out of AppEngine easily with minimal code changes.

nsq-to-gs – Streaming NSQ messages directly to Google Cloud Storage

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 10:40:15 +0000

In addition to my previously published (very early) project to stream NSQ messages directly to BigQuery, I am happy to presents a modified version of nsq-to-s3 that supports streaming NSQ messages directly Google Cloud Storage.

Grab it while its hot from the nsq-to-gs repo.

I do see a future for a merged version of these two projects that supports both S3 and Google Cloud Storage but this would have to be enough for now.

nsq-to-bigquery – Stream messages from NSQ directly to Google BigQuery

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 08:14:39 +0000

In the spirit of nsq-to-XXX such as nsq-to-http and nsq-to-file – I bring you the very first version of nsq-to-bigquery.

nsq-to-bigquery, as the name suggest, streams data from an NSQ channel into Google’s BigQuery using the Streaming API and provide very effective means to stream data that should be then further analysed and aggregated by BigQuery’s excellent performance.

This is a (very) initial version so it has some limitations and assumptions.

gonionoo – Go wrapper for the Tor Network Status Protocol – OnionOO

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:22:40 +0000

I’ve bene running a Tor exit node in the Netherlands since August 2013. I believe in the cause of Tor and it was only a matter of time before I started adding code in some for or another.

gonionoo is Go wrapper for OnionOO – the Tor Network Status protocol as is the first step in a slightly larger project I’m working on that I’ve been planning for a while ever since I’ve became a Tor exit node operator.

MongoDB Replica-Set Aware Backup Script

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 09:26:45 +0000

I’ve created a nice little bash script to take MongoDB backups that is replicaset aware.

It will only take a backup from a replica so if you have the classic master,replica,arbiter configuration you can setup the script via cron on both (current) master and replica and the backup will only run on the replica.

It will then tar.gz the backup and upload it to Google Storage. It can be easily adapted to upload the backup to S3 using s3cmd or the aws cli (aws-cli).

Seedcamp Tel-Aviv 2012

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:16:08 +0000

It’s that time of the year and Seedcamp Tel-Aviv is back (for the forth year!). This time lool Ventures is part of the event

In one of my hats I’m the CTO of lool Ventures and I’ll be there as a mentor to give advice and share from my experience in building a startup.

So if you have a great idea and started to work on it be sure to apply now.

Requiem for a modem

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 22:32:44 +0000

Two days ago I’ve shut down the longest running electronics device I ever owned.

Alcatel SpeedTouch Home - Image from isphelp.info

The device was my an Alcatel Speedtouch Home ADSL modem which I got circa 2001 when I was lucky enough to get an ADSL line at home.

It was only turned off when there was a power failure or when I moved an apartment.

Scott Berkun’s Mindfire: Big Ideas For Curious Minds – Book Review

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:20:11 +0000

I had the pleasure of reading Scott Berkun‘s newest book – Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds. I was also forunate to get it for free in the short period of time where Scott gave it for free on his site, but this is not a guilty book review of getting the book for free.

Mindfire is a collection of 30 essays which Scott wrote in various places, mostly on his blog. The essays got cleaned up and preped for the book which made the reading very clean and flowing. Scott’s writing style is very flowing and funny and while it may seem at times as a self emporment / self help book it really isn’t.

UIImage in iOS 5, Orientation and Resize

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:15:51 +0000

One of the things I found very strange is the fact that most operations that came with iOS prior iOS 5 which revolved around UIImage didn’t take into account the orientation of the image. This meant that if you want to read a picture from the camera roll and resize it, you’d have to roll your own code to correctly flip and/or rotate the image according to its orientation value.

Clone S3 Bucket Script

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:35:30 +0000

I had to backup an S3 bucket so I whiped out a small script to clone a bucket.

It’s written in Python and depends on the excellent Boto library. If you are running Python < 2.7 you’ll also need the argparse library (both available also via pip).

View the gist here: https://gist.github.com/1275085

Or here below:

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 21:39:28 +0000

I know the title is a bit alarming, but that was my first thought after reading @bryce‘s latest post “The Rising Generation“.

Briefly, he mentioned a 25 y/o asking a question on Quora about how was life before everyone had a cell phone and no one talked a lot or texted in public areas. Bryce also say that the new entrepreneurs, like the ones in yesterday’s Y Combinator Demo Day have different expectation, understanding and perceived value of technology than any other that has come before them.

Python Implementation of Twitter’s Snowflake Service

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:56:19 +0000

A while back Twitter announced the Snowflake service. Snowflake is a unique ID generator that is fast and generate 64bit integer unique ids that are “roughly sortable”. That is, newer ids are bigger than older ones, up to a certain point.

The service was originally written in Scala (which runs on the JVM) and has a Thrift interface, which means you can talk to it from almost any thinkable programming language.

Determine if an Email address is Gmail or Hosted Gmail (Google Apps for Your Domain)

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 08:30:56 +0000

For my latest venture, MyFamilio, I needed to know if a user’s Email address is a Gmail one so that I could show the user his/her contacts from Gmail.

Figuring out if the user is on Gmail is usually easy – the Email ends with @gmail.com. But what happens for all of those Google Apps for Your domain (like my own, which uses the @sandler.co.il domain) ?

Well, you can easily detect that by running a DNS query on the MX record.

Forecast: Cloudy – My New Cloud Related Technical Blog

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 06:01:28 +0000

I’ve started a new technical blog which talks about the cloud. It’s called Forecast: Cloudy and it will feature thoughts, ideas and some code driven mostly from my experience running services on cloud infrastructure.

The first post (after the traditional “Hello World“) already has some code :-)

Check it out and don’t forget to tell me what you think about it.

Extract GPS Latitude and Longitude Data from EXIF using Python Imaging Library (PIL)

Fri, 20 May 2011 21:27:25 +0000

I was searching an example of using Python Imaging Library (PIL) to extract the GPS data from EXIF data in images.

There were various half baked examples that didn’t handle things well, so I baked something of my own combining multiple examples.

You can get it here: https://gist.github.com/983821

Or see it embedded below:

Twitter’s Kestrel init script for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 20:02:28 +0000

Twitter’s Kestrel is a cool scala based queue server (based on Blaine Cook‘s (@blaine) Ruby based Sterling).

The two main features I like about Kestrel are:

Sort-of-transactional – If I take an item I can make sure others can’t get it. If the connect drops it will go back on the queue.
Read behind mode – If a certain queue reached a maximum pre-configured amount of RAM or items it will stop storing messages in RAM and will write it directly to the queue log file.

If you happen to be running it on Ubuntu 10.04 and want to use the provided init script (kestrel.sh) you’ll notice that it just won’t run.

PPTP VPN on Ubuntu 10.04 for your iPhone / iPad

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:51:24 +0000

Below are the steps necessary to connect your iPhone / iPad or any other computer via a PPTP VPN.

Why would I want to do this? For various reasons such as allow you to access information and servers that are behind a firewall, or maybe you just need to route traffic through different servers.

I’ve tested this on a 256mb Rackspace Cloud instance running Ubuntu 10.04 and with an iPhone and an iPad. Thanks to Yaniv for debugging the instructions.

Varnish High, Ever increasing CPU usage workaround

Wed, 26 May 2010 08:40:47 +0000

If you are using Varnish version >= 2.1 and experiencing an ever increasing CPU usage up to a point where you need to restart the service to force CPU usage to drop you may want to add the “-h classic” argument to the command line.

This will revert to use the older hashing method instead of the newer “critbit” that was first introduced in version 2.1.

You can read a little bit more about it on the Yedda Dev Blog.

Disco Tip – Crunching web server logs

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:22:57 +0000

At my day job we use Disco, a Python + Erlang based Map-Reduce framework, to crunch our web servers and application logs to generate useful data.

Each web server log file per day is a couple of GB of data which can amount to a lot of log data that needs to be processed on a daily.

Since the files are big it was easier for us to perform all the necessary filtering of find the rows of interest in the “map” function. The problem is, that it requires us to return some generic null value for rows that are not interesting for us. This causes the intermediate files to contains a lot of unnecessary data that has the mapping of our uninteresting rows.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and ies4linux – Installation

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:01:44 +0000

Installing ies4linux on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala by just running “./ies4linux” might show some warnings such as:

IEs4Linux 2 is developed to be used with recent Wine versions (0.9.x). It seems that you are using an old version. It’s recommended that you update your wine to the latest version (Go to: winehq.com).

In my case it showed the above text, which seems to be a warning, and run the UI but then got stuck and didn’t complete anything.

Message in a bottle

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:23:27 +0000

Launching a startup is like sending a message in a bottle. If the message is not clear, no one will come to visit your lonely island or send you a postcard back.

When you launch your startup, your online presence (i.e. website, twitter account, facebook page, etc) and the buzz you manage to create online via the online official and unofficial press are the message you are passing to your users. If the message is not clear you can lose a lot of attention.

WordPress Plugins

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:15:09 +0000

Don Dodge, Google and Developers Evangelism

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:57:20 +0000

I was just reading over at TechCrunch about Google quickly hiring Don Dodge after he was let go from Microsoft. It seems Don will be doing what he used to do at Microsoft – Developer Evangelism (good for him, and Google!).

I’m very happy to see that Google is putting their stock options and cash where their mouth is to evangelize their APIs, platforms (Android, AppEngine) and tools to developers.

A while back I wrote about the lack of Google’s outreach in the Israeli developers community, and it is still very visible in Israel by the jobs listings as well as various events and conventions that Microsoft Technology still dominates the Israeli high-tech software scene.

New programming languages forces you to re-think a problem in a fresh way (or why do we need new programming languages. always.)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:26:01 +0000

Whenever a new programming language appears some claim its the best thing since sliced bread (tm – not mine ;-) ), other claim its the worst thing that can happen and you can implement everything that the language provides in programming language X (assign X to your favorite low level programming language and append a suitable library).

After seeing Google’s new Go programming language I must say I’m excited. Not because its from Google and it got a huge buzz around the net. I am excited about the fact that people decided to think differently before they went on and created Go.

Google AppEngine – Python – issubclass() arg 1 must be a class

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:56:22 +0000

If you are getting the error “”issubclass() arg 1 must be a class”” with Google App Engine SDK for Python on Linux its probably because you are running Python 2.6 (and will probably happen to you when you run Ubuntu 9.04 – 2.6 is the default there).

Just run the dev server under python 2.5 (i.e. python2.5 dev_appserver.py)

Error: “Operation could not be completed (error 0x000006d1)” when adding a Samba based network printer to Vista

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:19:37 +0000

If you are getting the following error while adding a Samba based network printer to Vista:

Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation could not be completed (error 0x000006d1).

And you have a Samba server (version 3.0 and above) consider using the following technique to add the printer:

Add a local printer (not a network one!)
Select “create a new port”
Select “Local port” as type of port
In the port name enter the printer’s SMB path, i.e. \sambaserver\printer_name
Select the right driver

That’s all. Works like a charm!

“Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book” on Pidgin on Ubuntu / Debian?

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:42:28 +0000

Today I got the following error on Pidgin (I’m running version 2.5.2 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex) while it tried to connect to MSN:

“Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book”

After searching a bit I found this post by Gijs Nelissen which said to use a different MSN plugin for Pidgin called msn-pecan.

I’ll reiterate the instructions for those with Ubuntu / Debian:

Close Pidgin (make sure the process is really down)
Run “apt-get install msn-pecan”
Start pidgin
Change your MSN account type from MSN to WLM
Reconnect

I don’t know if this error affects other libpurple based multi-headed IMs (such as Adium) (UPDATE: It appears this IS a libpurple issue – so Adium IS affected), however, the msn-pecan project has a Windows binary release as well as source release (if you care/need/want to compile it for Mac OS X or other Linux distributions).

Ubuntu 8.10, Dell D630, fan issues and screen repaints issues

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:12:35 +0000

On the day of Ubunut 8.10 I’ve upgraded my work laptop (Dell D630) to Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve previously ran my home desktop on the release candidates and saw that all is well so I didn’t expect any specific issues with the upgrade.

After finishing the upgrade successfully I’ve encountered 2 problems.

The first was with the computer fan. It was workin on and off in full steam in 4 seconds cycles. Really annoying. A quick search in the Ubuntu forums led to this post saying I should upgrade to the latest BIOS version (A13 – at least at the time of writing this post).

Google Developer Day 2008 Israel – I’ll be there

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:21:57 +0000

As I’ve previously mentioned, tomorrow I’ll be at the Google Developer Day taking place at Avenue Center near TLV airport.

If you want to me and talk or just say hi ping me.

Google Developer Day 2008 Israel (yes, it’s in Israel)

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:28:05 +0000

About a year and a half ago I’ve written about Google Israel’s position in the Israeli development community (actually, there lack of) and that a company like Google should be more involved.

This was written around the time the 2007 Google Developer Day happened in more than 10 places around the world but not in Israel.

I opened my Email this morning and to my surprise I found an invitation to the Google Developer Day 2008 in Israel.

Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic Unable to copy the user’s Xauthorisation file

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:46:14 +0000

If you get the following error while running Synaptic:

**Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic

Unable to copy the user’s Xauthorisation file.**

Make sure to that you have enough space in your /tmp directory.

To check if that is indeed the problem run the following command in your terminal:

df -h

This command will show you each mounted volumes you may have including the one mounted to /tmp.

/tmp usually contains temporary data for applications while they run. It sometimes may reach a point where it 100% full (might have happened to me while I upgraded to Hardy Heron 8.04).

Solution (sort of): Mic problems with Skype on Dell D630 and Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy gibbon)

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:52:26 +0000

If you are using Skype on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) on a Dell D630 and have the “famous” internal microphone problems due to the HD-Intel chipset, I’ve found a simple solution, sort of.

I recently bought a Plantronics .Audio 470 headset at Best Buy for $50. Its a nice headset with good sound quality and a good mic that is also fold-able for good portability.

That headset also comes with a USB adapter which allows you to basically get a USB based sound card so you can use that headset with machines without a sound card (or a problematic sound card/chipset…).

SocialGraph FooCamp 2008 here I come!

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:08:11 +0000

I’m sitting in Frankfurt Airport (FRA) waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco which will let me attend Social Graph FooCamp 2008.

According to the cast of people assembled on the wiki it seems that its going to be lots of fun and hopefully very productive.

I’ll be arriving to SF after noonish. If you want to meet, say hi, or anything else, Email me through the contact page.

Since this is a FooCamp, I do have a very rough on the edges topic to discuss and bring up. I wanted to write a post about it before the camp but whenever I started writing the post I kept on hitting open issues (or at least issues that must be resolved before moving on). This eventually made the post very incoherent so I thought that the best way to resolve it is by putting up a session at the camp.

OpenID 2.0 Directed Identity and Emails

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:18:31 +0000

A couple of days ago I’ve talked with Eran Hammer-Lahav about an idea I had regarding his post about using Emails as OpenID identifiers.

During the talk another sub-idea came into light in regards to OpenID 2.0 Directed Identity and Emails. While I’m not sure if this has been discussed before (I didn’t have much time to go through old posts on the OpenID mailinglist yet) I thought about bringing it up here.

OAuth Core 1.0 Final – Out the door into a service near you

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:42:44 +0000

At IIW 2007b OAuth Core 1.0 Final was released.

I wish I could attend IIW but I had previous work related obligations that I simply could not get out of. I do hope to attend the next one (IIW 2008a).

Now it’s time to update the C# client to the latest and really final version of the spec.

Congrats to everyone involved with OAuth. It is a truly amazing group of people and I think we can all be proud of the outcome!

Knock knock! Who’s there? Yedda. Yedda who? Yedda from AOL

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:37:51 +0000

I know I’ve been very quiet recently but some of you know why. It took me a while to write about it but its true and it did happen.

Yedda is now part of AOL.

There are some very interesting things planned for Yedda inside AOL. You’ll just have to wait and see :-) so forgive me if I’ll disappear for a while again due to some work related obligations.

Got a new MP3 player – iRiver X20

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:43:12 +0000

Lately my 3rd generation 20Gb iPod battery started to die very early. It barely lasted for 2 hours. Changing a battery through Apple’s israeli representatives is not a very nice thing or easy to do and I didn’t want to wait for a replacement do-it-yourself battery from eBay so I’ve decided it was time for a new player.

In addition to that a 3rd gen iPod has only 32Mb of RAM (it optimizes the battery life by loading ~32Mb from the drive every time, thus reducing the need to go back to the hard drive every time) and Apple recommended to have files of 9mb or less for best battery performance. Being the semi audiophile that I am, my newer MP3s are ripped at 320Kbps and I was in the process of re-ripping my older ones for higher quality after setting up my home storage server.

OAuth C# (very) Basic Library

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 01:20:51 +0000

I know it took me a while (sorry) but I had a couple things on my plate.

At first I wanted to release a more complete integration of OAuth within ASP.NET, but that will have to wait to the next time frame I can allocate to work on this.

In the meantime, there is some basic C# code in the OAuth code repository which generates the OAuth signature, which is the most complicated thing to implement in the spec (not that it’s that difficult to implement :-) It’s actually quite easy).

Assembling a Linux based Home Storage Server

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:23:12 +0000

I’ve decided that I have enough data I want/need to store and backing it up with removable drives and/or burning DVDs is getting less useful each passing day.

I also like to have everything available all the time instead of going through backup DVDs searching for the right one and extract the information from it.

I have a friend who takes too many pictures in RAW format and have greater storage needs than I do but have little time or nerves to mess with installing and configuring something so he got a Thermaltake Muse NAS-RAID.

OAuth Core 1.0 Final Draft – Implement it while it’s hot

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:59:53 +0000

After Chris blogged about it Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote a Beginner’s Guide to OAuth I have little to add.

I will add though that my C# library which I’m promising for quite some time will get out very soon :-) (Sorry for the delay, it’s been hectic around here).

OAuth 1.0 Public Draft – Another brick in the wall

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:13:41 +0000

Others have made such great explanations as to what OAuth is and what it does like Eran Hammer-Lahav’s post so I won’t repeat it.

I will say that OAuth should make the Internet a little bit safer by giving the technical means to remove the need of a certain service asking the user to give his/her username and password to access another service that that user is also using.

OAuth is to credentials delegation what OpenID is to authentication. An open standard for delegating a user’s credentials between services, the same way OpenID is an open standard for authentication.

VmWare Server 1.0.4 on Ubuntu Server 7.04 (a.k.a Feisty Fawn)

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:57:52 +0000

2 days after my previous post about installing VmWare Server 1.0.3 from Canonical’s repository, VmWare released version 1.0.4.

I tried using its built-in install script on a vanilla Ubuntu Server 7.04 (a.k.a Feisty Fawn) and it worked flawlessly.

Aside from certain libraries which it needs to compile the vmmon and vmnet kernel modules (the installation script will tell you which ones are missing and you can get them from the repositories using apt-get), you’ll also need to install xinetd.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04), VmWare Server and Authentication problems

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 08:58:23 +0000

If you are going to install VmWare server (a great and free server virtualization product from VmWare) on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) and you’ve followed this post showing how to do it using Canonical’s commercial repository, make sure to read this post at the Ubuntu Community Docs.

Basically, if you encounter authentication problems at the Server’s Console after installing the VmWare server and until this bug is fixed, you need to edit /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd to contain:

Google Reader Search is here!

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:13:33 +0000

I fired up Google Reader this morning and to my surprise I found a search box:

This is one of the last missing features I wanted Google Reader to have.

I actually have a friend that didn’t want to switch from a desktop feed reader until Google Reader added search. Now he can safely move to it :-)

You can limit your search to all items in all of your feeds, all stared items, all shared items or items from a specific folder. I couldn’t make the search work with some of the search keywords I’m familiar with in Gmail like “from:XXX”, “label:XXX” etc, which I think is very important.

Israeli Shortage in High End Laptops

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:38:21 +0000

At Yedda (my day job) we recently ordered 3 new laptops.

Our spec was very specific (that’s how we are ;-) ):

Core Duo 2 running on at least 2Ghz
2Gb of RAM
100Gb or more hard drive
WXGA+ screen (1440×960 resolution)
14.1″ screen
Non shared memory video card
DVD burner

The reason we want 14.1″ screens is due to size and weight (some of us, not me, rides on bikes and/or motorcycles to get to the YeddaHQ). We also wanted as high resolution as possible and the WXGA+ seems very good.

Cross platform, Winamp functionality identical media player ?!

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:17:44 +0000

I like WinAmp. It’s a great media player. Always has been.

I’m still using it when I use Windows because its not as bloated and heavy as Windows Media Player or iTunes. If you got the right skin you can stick it up at the top of the screen where its reachable, useful, shows you what you are listening to and not get in your way.

It also has lots of plugins for every conceivable idea, which is always good.

Jerusalem ROCKS! ticket prices go down – Grab it while it’s hot!

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 14:51:52 +0000

According to this link on Jeff Pulver’s blog and this link on Ynet (an Israeli online newspaper – link is in Hebrew) the prices for the Jerusalem ROCKS! event I’ve previously mentioned, are now down due to demand from the people (mostly young people).

The prices are now 249 NIS for a place on the grass and 229 NIS for a place in the balcony (previous prices were 360 and 306 respectively). That’s a decrease of 25%-30% (depending on the ticket type).

Jerusalem ROCKS! Tickets are on sale

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:00:07 +0000

Jeff posted a couple of days ago that the tickets for the Jerusalem ROCKS! event are on sale at Hadran.co.il.

Go here to read more about Jerusalem ROCKS! I also wrote a little bit about Jerusalem ROCKS! here.

Jeff is looking for bloggers from both Israel and around the world who would like to cover and/or promote the show. If you are interested Email to jeffp@pulver.com and introduce yourself.

I’ve corresponded a little bit with Jeff about why he was doing this Event and he told me that he wanted to do something that no one did for almost 20 years. Also he wanted that Israeli people will just have fun.

Plaxo OpenID support lacks OpenID Delegation support

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:15:04 +0000

UPDATE: Plaxo DO support delegation, just not XRDS. It seems a WP database problem caused some of my OpenID delegation plug-in to mess up settings the wrong openid.server and openid.delegate values.

It should have been http://www.myopenid.com/server for openid.server and http://eran.myopenid.com for openid.delegate. The problem was due to the fact that XRDS is yet to be supported in Plaxo. I didn’t notice the problem with the configuration of openid.server and openid.delegate due to the fact that the XRDS settings was correctly configured and all of the sites that I use OpenID with do support XRDS.

Jeff Pulver’s party for Israeli Facebook users and Jerusalem ROCKS!

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 15:05:14 +0000

Last Thursday I went to Jeff Pulver‘s party for Israeli Facebook users in the Tel Aviv Harbor.

All in all it was very fun and the mood was great. We also discovered that Israelis don’t drink that much even in an almost open bar – Jeff had to take a mic and rush us all into the bar to get to the minimum he told the bar he would pay for :-)

iPhoneDevCamp, iPhone, Safari and Microformats

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 08:10:40 +0000

I wish I could attend iPhoneDevCamp but unfortunately I won’t be in the area (or in the right country for that matter ;-) ).

I just read Chris’ post about iPhoneDevCamp and I think these are the right reasons to make the iPhoneDevCamp.

There are a few facts that support Chris’ view:

In the first week Apple sold 700,000 units
The iPhone is closed for outside application, but not for web applications
Having a couple of million units out (after it is also sold in Europe and Asia) means there are a couple of million users using Safari on their iPhone and want to get the right experience in all/most sites.

The day I heard that the iPhone will be closed to 3rd party apps but will use web applications as its main extension approach I thought one thing. Apple should make Safari (or at least just Safari on the iPhone) Microformats aware.

Facebook hCard Microformat Application

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 06:37:29 +0000

Being a big fan of Microformats as well as a relatively new Facebook user, I find it odd that Facebook has no Microformats support (at least non that I know of).

I’ve decided to remedy the situation a bit and created a small Facebook application which adds hCard support to your profile as a profile box. It is called the hCard application.

It features your Contact information (as much of it as it can) which include:

Yedda Twitter – Oh the joy!

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:41:01 +0000

I just wanted to let all of you know that we just released a new feature on Yedda which integrates nicely with your Twitter account.

You can read the official blog post here.

In a nut shell, upon giving Yedda your twitter username and password, you will be able to share your Yedda expecrience with your Twitter friends.

We will twitt on behalf of you about questions you ask, answers you give, questions you add to your watch list, thumbs up you give to other answers and questions you are being invited to answer by Yedda (all configurable through the settings screen).

Google Apps for your Domain, DNS, CNAME and Security

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:58:45 +0000

I’ve recently started to use Google Apps for Your domain to host my private emails on the sandler.co.il domain.

Google Apps for your domain is quite cool and was very easy to configure. I mainly moved to it due to the unbelievable amounts of SPAM and I didn’t have the power or time to configure SpamAssassin in a reasonable way that would actually work.

When I moved, one of the things I did was to change the “default” URL in which me and other members of my family use to access the web mail of the domain. Google Apps for your Domain allows you to do just that by configuring it in its configuration screen and settings a CNAME record that points to ghs.google.com.

My Google Development Community Piece was referenced at ZDNet

Wed, 30 May 2007 07:23:32 +0000

2 days ago I wrote a post about the lack of Google Israel’s involvement in the development community.

It seems that in most of the places (I’m sure in the US, I’m not sure if the rest of the development centers in South American and Europe have the same involvement) where Google has development centers they are a little more involved with the development community in the form of lecture, places to meet and chat, sponsoring events, etc.

Google Israel – Where Art Thou in the Development Community?

Mon, 28 May 2007 13:55:10 +0000

I know that Google‘s original Googleplex at Mountain View is very active for non googlers. There are frequent open lectures there and they host a bunch of other things like Summer of Code (well, not always host, but sponsor and make sure people know about it) and Google Developer Day (which is happening at 10 different locations worldwide, but NOT in Israel).

I know there are suppose to be two development centers in Israel, one in Haifa (which I know is located in MATAM cause you can see it from road #2 leading from Tel Aviv to Haifa near Intel and Microsoft Haifa) but I have no idea where the other development center in Israel is located, other than the fact that its suppose to be in the Tel Aviv area.

Nokia E61 Change Language Keys Combination

Thu, 17 May 2007 10:00:13 +0000

I own a Nokia E61 phone which I’m very happy with (leave aside the PC Suite backup problem my wife had when she upgraded to an E61 as well).

Even though I’m an Israeli I use its English interface because it’s less buggy and because most of the things I do with the phone (Emails and such) are usually in English, but from time to time I do need the occasional SMS in Hebrew.

Yedda Twitter .NET / C# Library

Wed, 16 May 2007 17:29:17 +0000

This is a bit of shameless promotion but I think it’s worthwhile never the less :-)

One of the things I did lately on my day job (Yedda) was to integrate it with Twitter (check the integration here and add Yedda as your friend!).

Yedda is all about sharing and us sharing things like code with the rest of the world is no exception.

So, without further due, I’m proud to present the Yedda Twitter .NET / C# Library (you will see that it’s more of wrapper than a library… really ;-) ). The post about it in our Dev Blog is here and the details, source and binary are here.

Corporate Identity and Identity Issues

Tue, 08 May 2007 16:53:18 +0000

There is a lot of buzz about Sun’s announcement of OpenID support and the fact that Sun will be giving OpenIDs for all of its employees.

While this is indeed good news for the identity community in general and for the OpenID community specifically, it got me thinking about the implications for such a move in which a big company OpenID enables all of its employee.

If a company OpenID enables all of its employees and its OpenID server is usable for outside parties to authenticate against it means that now every employee of that company, when authenticating with his/her OpenID can be verified as an employee of that company (providing that no one spoofs the domain and DNS settings, etc).

Bi-Wiring is Cool

Tue, 08 May 2007 09:23:46 +0000

I just moved to a new apartment and when I started to setup my home theater system again I’ve decided to use Bi-Wiring for my front speakers.

My front speakers support this and up until now had a bridge connecting the elements of my speaker. I removed the bridge and ran cables to each part.

While the Wikipedia article states that from an electrical point of view there is no difference when you bi-wire or not, I did notice a difference in the sound which might stem from the very small changes in resistance which theoretically exists since the system has changed a bit.

Feisty Fawn – Works as advertised

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:55:03 +0000

Whenever a new version of Ubuntu comes out I download the CD, run it in LiveCD mode and see if my Laptop (Thinkpad T43) works with everything included (video card – ATI, sound, Wireless card the Intel a/b/g wireless thingy) and succeeds in connecting to my home wireless network (using WPA2 encryption).

Previous versions usually missed either in the wireless card or the WPA (or it was really cumbersome to configure WPA).

The new and slick myOpenID.com

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:25:12 +0000

I’m probably the last person to talk about it, by myOpenID.com has a cool and slick new design [via Scott’s blog].

They also added a cool new feature, client side certificate, so when you install such a certificate on your machine you don’t need to do anything to sign in. It does all that for you!

Just remember to NOT use it on public computers or on computers that are being used by more than one person and do not have a different user names for each person.

Forgive me Outlook for I have sinned (not)

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:29:20 +0000

Forgive me Outlook for I have sinned.

I have been using you as one of the primary communication tools that I have form your very first days. I have stayed within the 2Gb PST file limits but when I was told that Outlook 2003 can hold up to 20Gb I have rejoiced, joyed and thanked you for your kindness.

I still dreaded the old 2Gb limitation but decide to look forward for a better future. I therefore installed Outlook 2007 blindfold as I have known that each version of Outlook brings it’s own bliss and helpfulness to the world.

Google Apps for Your Domain and Gmail Mail Applet for Nokia phones

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:57:55 +0000

I own a Nokia E61 cell phone. A nice phone all in all (aside from the backup problems my wife encountered).

Gmail has this cool little applet that lets me access my Gmail account in a nicer (and better cached) way from my cell phone. It’s a really nice program and I use it quite often.

It has one problem though. If you host your own domain through Google Apps for Your Domain to get the Gmail like interface for your Emails you cannot use this program.

Crawling to the people

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:07:40 +0000

Yaniv let the cat out of the bag about some of our ideas for making other parts of the search and its relevant data open, free and accessible to all of us.

I’d thought I’ll add some background and my thoughts on the subject.

First, the idea was iterated a couple of times when we were in that place where you have a solution(s) and you are seeking a problem(s) to solve.

Universal Binaries

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:21:25 +0000

Is it just me or Universal Binaries for Mac are a world domination scheme to increase the bandwidth usage of the world?

I know that the Apple folks didn’t want people to start figuring out “Do I have an Intel process or a PowerPC one?”, after all most people don’t really know what’s inside their machines, but in 99% of the cases, when downloading from the web most sites that do provide the software could tell quite easily if the the browser is running on an Intel Mac or a PowerPC Mac by looking at the “User-Agent” string that the browser sends.

New Theme – Whiippii!

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:21:59 +0000

I’ve moved into a new theme called Aqueous-Lite. Those of you reading my blog through my feed are welcome to check it out…

I felt kind of restricted in the old theme since it wasn’t fluid and it would be a shame not to use the full screen to show content, mainly for long posts (which I do have a tendency to write once in a while ;-) ).

Of course, this theme is widgets ready (like the previous one) so it’s nice to have the ability to switch themes without changing things too much on the widgets (mainly background colors and stuff).

Twitter and OpenID

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 07:03:06 +0000

Dave Winer says:

“[…] we could make Twitter the open identity system we’ve been looking for. Make your Twitter ID the one that you use to log on to other service […]”

I say let Twitter support OpenID with all of the good Relaying Party Best Practices including (but not limited to):

Ability to associate an existing account with an OpenID
Ability to switch to another OpenID (sort of a password recovery for OpenID)
Ability to create a new account directly with an external (non Twitter) OpenID (be a standard relaying party)

If they want to, they can also be an OpenID provider (which should be good for them, of course ;-) ).

Amazon Recommendations, Big Giant Collection Books, Reprints and New Editions

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:24:51 +0000

I really like Amazon. I really like Amazon’s recommendations and ever since I inputed most of my books into Amazon I get really good recommendations.

There is one thing that bothers me, though.

I recently made a big order from Amazon and included two books which I was long overdue in owning and reading them. The books were “Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul” and “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” both by Douglas Adams.

Mac Software Updates – I expected more from Apple

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:27:17 +0000

We recently got a Mac Mini to the office so that we can test Yedda better with Safari and in general how Yedda looks, feels and works on all of the various browsers on Mac (mainly Safari, FireFox, Camino and Opera).

It’s a cute little machine. I can easily understand why people fall in love with Mac and Apple products in general.

After setting it up and powering it up I ran the Software Updates so that I will have the latest, greatest and safest Mac software.

mesibo.net – Invitation

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:21:11 +0000

http://upcoming.org/event/156316/

I always get a little bit envy when I see all the cool events various people arrange in the USA for all kinds of stuff. Camps, Conferences, Confluences, un-conferences, whatever.

Now, the Israeli Internet scene is starting to wake up and everyone will see what cool events we can do :-)

You are all invited! Register, come and enjoy!

Nokia PC Suite Content Copier .nfb / .nbu Fiasco

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:55:44 +0000

This is going to be a long rant about the new Nokia PC Suite Content Copier backup file format and how its software is NOT compatible with previous versions and there is no mentioning anywhere from Nokia (other than the fact they changed the backup file format stated in their help).

My wife recently upgraded from her Nokia 6230 to a brand new Nokia E61. She really liked the personal information management (PIM) features and that it had a full QWERTY keyboard.

Why use OpenID? – A matter of choice (and consolidation)

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 13:21:08 +0000

One of the advantages of OpenID is that it enabled you, the user, to consolidate various accounts on various web sites into one (or more, if you have more than one OpenID) identity. Of course you get the side benefit of having only one login and password to use, but for the sake of this argument, that’s a side effect :-) .

This is a choice that was never available prior to OpenID, and when it does exist in the form of Google Accounts/Yahoo BBAuth/Microsoft ~~Passport~~ Live ID it allows you access to the provider’s web sites and assets and a handful of 3rd party sites that supports that vendor’s authentication protocol.

libtool: compile: unable to infer tagged configuration

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:21:54 +0000

I got the following annoying little error after I tried to upgrade to a newer mod_python on my Gentoo Linux box:

�libtool: compile: unable to infer tagged configuration

It seems that the main problem was due to the fact that I’ve switched to GCC 4.1.1 and when compiling mod_python, the compilation uses libtool that is brought and compiled with Apache (located under /usr/share/apr-0/build/) which should have been recompiled after I’ve upgraded to the new GCC (I was too lazy to continue running the “emerge -e system” command so I stopped it after GCC was recompiled).

Associating Multiple OpenID Identities – I’m not the only one…

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 09:01:13 +0000

It seems that Martin Atkins wrote about the need for associating multiple OpenID identities to an account on the same day I wrote my (additional) input on the matter.

It’s nice to see I’m not the only one thinking that.

OpenID Vendor Lock-In (sort of)

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:11:03 +0000

Continuing my previous post about OpenID and Vendor Lock-In, a reader of this blog named Andrew commented on the previous post about a problem he had with MyOpenID.com and Zooomr. He has some valid points here which I wanted to highlight in this post (he also had some points that I think can be easily fixed or that are actually a non issue). You can also read my complete answer to Andrew here.

Prior to discovering the whole idea and notion of OpenID Andrew registered to Zooomr. Zooomr’s accounts are actually OpenID accounts which they provide, so every Zooomr user also gets an OpenID account that he can use on other OpenID supported sites.

Could not run/locate “i386-pc-linux-gnu-gcc”

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 08:33:37 +0000

I have Gentoo Linux on my home machine and after I’ve upgraded GCC (and subsequently the whole toolchain) I wanted to compile a perl related library – crypt-rsa.

When I tried to emerge it, it failed with the following error:

Could not run/locate “i386-pc-linux-gnu-gcc”

After searching around I found this thread on the Gentoo forums which had some instructions how to handle this issue, but it didn’t help much.

In one of the posts on that thread they said to re-emerge the offending package (if you find it). I figured, since I’m trying to compile something related to Perl, perhaps Perl is the problem.

OpenID, Trust, Vendor Locking and Delegation

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:38:14 +0000

There is a lot going on about OpenID these days and a lot of claims are being raised which prevents greater adoption of OpenID by users.

One of these claims is about Trust and Vendor Locking. How can I trust a certain OpenID vendor? after all, gaining access to my OpenID account will give access to all of the sites I’ve signed in/up using OpenID.

This is a legitimate claim, since it reminds everyone of how Microsoft ~~Passport.NET~~ Live ID is not that successful being a one vendor, non transferable identity.

Online Life Feed

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:17:43 +0000

After reading Grant Robertson’s post – “Taming your own river of news” I’ve decided to use Yahoo Pipes to create my online life feed (it sounds better than “Eran’s river of news”, don’t you think?)

You can check it out here.

Basically I aggregate the feeds from this blog, my Advanced .NET debugging blog, my Yedda questions, my Yedda answers, my del.icio.us links and my Flickr photostream.

These feeds are most of the content I’m generating or contributing to (at least the ones with a feed in it). If I’ll remember some other feeds that I’m contributing to and forgot to add, I’ll update the pipe.

FreeYourID.com

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 08:56:16 +0000

I’m probably the last person to talk about this but Scott Kveton posted on his blog that his company, JanRain and GNR (who manages the .name top level domain) has come into partnership to deliver a solution that encompasses a .name URL for you as well as built-in OpenID delegation support.

Check the details at the FreeYourID.com site.

You’ll get a 90 days free trial, after which it will cost $10.95/year.

You’ll get a forwarding email address in the form of yourFirstName@youLastName.name (if its available) as well as a site in the form of www._yourFirstName_._yourLastName_.name. You can forward that site to whatever page you wish.

Yahoo Pipes, Microformats and Extendability

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:48:12 +0000

I think Yahoo Pipes is really cool. The main attraction is its slick user interface and ease of use.

I just created a pipe of all of the Recent Questions of Yedda translated using Babelfish to French and it took less than 5 minutes.

I do have a couple of ideas that I think will make Yahoo Pipes into something very interesting:

Accept Regular HTML pages
Have a built-in Microformats parser
Support for a more complex piping scripting (perhaps in the form of a JavaScript script)
Support for state saving (or at least a limited way such as the ability to compare the previous version of the page/feed you are piping)

**Accept Regular HTML pages

Bad Text and Part of Speech Tagging – Background

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 22:07:09 +0000

I’ve recently been fascinated with some aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) having worked on some of them at my day job.

One of the key aspects that are very important for a computer program to understand natural language is called Part of Speech Tagging (POS or POST).

Basically, in the POS tagging phase, the computer assigned the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc) to each word of the specified text, thus allowing the computer to figure out what this text is about and perform later analysis with it.

Help find Jim Gray

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:52:27 +0000

If you don’t already know, Jim Gray, a computer scientist and Turing Award winner has disappeared at sea on Jan 28th 2007 while solo sailing his boat on a trip to Farallon Island near San Fransisco.

His friend, Werner Vogel – Amazon’s CTO, has harnessed the help of Amazon’s Mechnical Turk to get people to search for any interesting items in a couple of satellite images. If users mark that these images are worth further investigations they will be treated as such.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets integration with Gmail

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:52:37 +0000

Google Gmail recently got a new feature allowing one to open Word documents using Google Docs and we can safely assume that PDF and Excel (for use with Google Spreadsheets) documents are on their way as well.

Sometimes a Word document can be quite big with lots of added stuff like images, drawings and so on.

If Google can handle the on-the-fly (or at least on-mail-receive) Word documents conversions I do think that they can (and hopefully will) handle Movie files conversions like I suggest in my previous post about integrating YouTube/Google Video with Gmail.

idproxy.net

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 08:06:02 +0000

If you haven’t done so already, go check out (and hopefully use, afterwards) idproxy.net.

As written in idproxy.net’s about page:

idproxy.net acts as a bridge between these two worlds. You can sign in to idproxy.net using your Yahoo! account, and then create one or more OpenID accounts for use elsewhere on the Web.

Basically, if you have a Yahoo ID, you can sign-in and create an OpenID for yourself at idproxy.net thus allowing you to use your Yahoo ID and password to connect to any OpenID supported site.

OpenID Tests

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:57:12 +0000

Everyone else has written about it and since I’m a bit behind on my feeds reading list I just got around to check it out.

OpenID Tests is a testing tool allowing you to test your OpenID server and OpenID page. This is such a great tool and could save an OpenID developer tons of work.

All I can say is “Hip hip Hurray” to the fine folks at JanRain on yet another fine OpenID piece of software.

idproxy.net and OpenIDBridge.com or I’m late, again!

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 18:30:59 +0000

I just read Simon Willison‘s post about idproxy.net.

It’s funny, I just talked about such a service in a previous post and also mentioned I’m working on the same service. I was suppose to release it a week ago but had some other issues to attend to as well as some learning curve with using JanRains’ PHP OpenID library and only manage to get it almost working yesterday. I was planning on release it this week, but since Simon already released idproxy.net I’m rethinking that :-)

WordPress Upgrade

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:41:45 +0000

I’ve just finished upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.1. This is my first post in 2.1 and if it goes well, it will mark the succesful upgrade of this blog to the new and fine WordPress version.

In the process I had the oppertunity to also verify that my MicroID Plugin for WordPress as well as my OpenID Delegation Plugin for WordPress works in version 2.1 as well as they did in WordPress 2.0.x.

Mono hosted inside SecondLife

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:28:18 +0000

I just read on the official Linden Blog that they have completed an initial version of hosting Mono within SecondLife.

What they have done is to compile the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) into Intermediate Language (IL) code and they automagically gain all the advantages of the .NET Runtime – Just In Time (JIT) compilation, advanced Garbage Collection and, hopefully, the ability to extend SecondLife with other .NET supported langauges (though that’s a personal wish ;-) having .NET so close to me – my Advanced .NET Debugging blog)

Amazon Checkout Interface – Group to as few shipments as possible

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:36:46 +0000

I recently ordered a couple of books from Amazon.

When reaching the check out screen I, obviously, selected to group my shipments to as few as possible. I then looked and saw that it was grouped into two shipments, one book should be shipped the next day and the other 4 should ship only on the 20th of March – almost two months afterwards!

This was a bit strange considering the fact that Amazon showed that all books were in stock.

Proxy OpenID Services

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 10:24:28 +0000

I just bumped into this post by Martin Atkins that talks about proxy OpenID services that can delegate OpenID formated requests to their respective browser based authentication identity providers.

I’m actually working on such a thing that will delegate OpenID to Yahoo’s BBAuth authentication allowing anyone with a Yahoo ID (and, of course, anyone with Yahoo Email) to authenticate using OpenID.

The only annoying thing is that the URL is a bit ugly. Currently, my version uses a URL structure of /users/john@yahoo.com which is a bit annoying, but should be sufficient for now.

WordPress Full Text Feed

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 09:49:15 +0000

I, as many other WordPress users, have encountered a problem with Full Text Feeds not actually showing on FireFox Live Bookmarks (the thingy that shows you the feed in a nice way) as full text, but are rather cut.

It seems this is not a problem at all. This is a feature in FireFox’s Live Bookmarks which simply shortens the text only on display. If you’ll look at the page source (View -> Page Source) you’ll the see the XML file of the feed and that the tag contains the full text.

Gmail integration with Google Video and/or YouTube

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 09:40:51 +0000

You know what would be a cool feature (and even a useful one) to Gmail?

Integrating Gmail with Google Video and/or YouTube to provide video previewing of videos received as attachments.

I haven’t received a video as an attachment on my Gmail for quite some time now, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t work same way as it works with previewing attached images.

Gmail could convert the video on the fly to a Google Video/YouTube private film, one that is not posted on the site and is only available to the people using Gmail and allow me to preview it directly.

Advanced .NET Debugging new home

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:09:18 +0000

I just wanted to point to those who read this blog and also my other blog – Advanced .NET Debugging, that I’ve purchased the domain dotnetdebug.net and moved the blog there (dotnetdebug.com was already taken…).

If you are subscribed to the Feed Burner feed of the blog you are all set, if not subscribed to it now or to the blog’s feed (which redirects automagically to the feed burner one).

Another MicroID plugin for WordPress

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:04:47 +0000

A reader of this blog, Nate Olson, just informed me that there is another WordPress plugin for MicroID and is written by Richard K. Miller (Thanks Nate!).

Richard’s plugin adds microid on the homepage (it uses the admin’s Email for that), on each of the posts (according to the Email of the post’s creator) and on each of the comments (according to the supplied URL and Email of each of the commentators).

OpenID Delegate Plugin for WordPress

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 22:03:05 +0000

Continuing my WordPress plugin frenzy and after release the MicroID WordPress plugin, I’m releasing another plugin, this time for OpenID delegation.

The plugin is named “OpenID Delegate” and you can read all the details and download it from here.

Q: So what’s this OpenID I’ve been hearing about?

A: According to OpenID.net:

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.

OpenID Delegate Plugin

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:42:13 +0000

OpenID Delegate WordPress plugin will add OpenID delegation abilities to your blog, thus allowing you to sign in to various OpenID supported sites using your blog’s URL.

In order for the plugin to work you must have an account on an OpenID server. If you don’t want to (or don’t know how to) run your own OpenID server you can register in a free OpenID server such as myOpenID or if you already have an account in one of the sites listed here (note: not all of them are OpenID providers, some are only consumers), you can use them to delegate the request directly to the servers there.

Contact

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:54:41 +0000

MicroID Plugin for WordPress

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 23:05:27 +0000

MicroID as the web site says is:

MicroID is a lightweight identity layer for the web, invented by Jeremie Miller (creator of Jabber). MicroID enables anyone to claim verifiable ownership over content hosted anywhere on the web (social networking sites, discussion forums, blogs, etc.). MicroID is not an authentication or single-sign-on service, just a straightforward method for identifying content ownership that complements existing technologies such as OpenID and microformats. The technology is radically simple and enables developers to build new and unique meta services with minimal effort.

MicroID Plugin

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 22:05:02 +0000

MicroID WordPress plugin is a plugin to add MicroID support to your WordPress blog.

Adding a MicroID to your blog will allow you to claim your blog using claiming services such as claimID and allow you to have a trusted way of showing the world the you do own your blog.

You can read more about MicroID on Wikipedia, on the MicroID home page and on the MicroID blog.

Click here to download the latest version.

Migrating from Blogger Beta (or the new version of Blogger) to WordPress

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 09:44:40 +0000

When I started to think about migrating from Blogger to my own WordPress blog running on my own server I started to look at migration options.

It seems that since I already migrated to the new blogger system (which is out of beta now), the current import options from Blogger available in the latest WordPress installation (2.0.5 when I was installing it ;-) ) didn’t work anymore.

The default blogger import can fail in two points:

Eurekamp

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 10:40:42 +0000

I’m blogging directly from Eurekamp where I’ll start a presentation and discussion about Trust and Identity online. I’ll try to cover topics such as why do I need, how to do it (OpenID, OpenID, OpenID) how to claim what is content that was generated by me (MicroID, MicroID, MicroID).

I’ll post some of the slides here after we will finish.

The slides will be a bit not organized, mainly because they are markers to the point in the presentation/discussion and does not represent a standard presentation.

Out with the old (erans.blogspot.com) in with the new (eran.sandler.co.il)

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:37:12 +0000

I’ve roughly completed my transfer of “Another blog bites the dust” from Blogger to http://eran.sandler.co.il.

If you are subscribed to my feed burner feed it should redirect automagically. If you are not, it’s a good time to subscribe to it :-). Since this is my own WordPress blog there is now also a total comments feed located here.

Hopefully this new place will allow we to better experiment with stuff and essentially be the master of my own destiny/blog.

Moving on up to my side

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:15:00 +0000

While Blogger is a great platform, I’ve decided that this blog of mine, which suffered a bit from neglect as opposed to its technical brother, will be transfered to its own respectful domain.

It will allow we to experiment more with plugins and all kinds of funky stuff and all in all will give me greater control over what I want to do, how I want to do it and so on.

About

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:28:50 +0000

Hacker at heart and soul.

Loves to take things apart and put them back together while usually ending up with a few (very few) missing pieces.

Currently working on Canyon Road and AgentSH.

Find me on:

OpenID Sign In/Up Processes on OpenID supported sites

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 15:33:00 +0000

Most sites today distinguish between the process of Signing Up – the user wants to register to the site/service and does not have a previous account (or wishes to create another account), and the process of Signing In – the user wishes to identify himself/herself with an already existing account on the site/service.

Whenever I reach a site that support OpenID I always try to see what is the process of sign-in/up with OpenID to the site/service.

Identity and Identity Relationships

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 08:34:00 +0000

I just read this post by Kaliya and it got me thinking about Identity relationships.

I think Kaliya is right that the connection between identity and relationships between identities (a.k.a. Social Networks) is a hot topic which will probably get some answers in 2007 (hopefully even good ones).

What if we could have relationships between identities (between OpenID identities, for example)?

We could store them as part of our identity (I’m sure we can think of a creative use of XFN and identities like OpenID since it is also a distributed way of showing relationships between people) and “take our friends with us” to other sites that we sign up, eliminating the need to manually re-enter and “drag” our friends to every hot new social networking site.

Completely removing ZoneAlarm

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 07:00:00 +0000

I use ZoneAlarm Security Suite on my laptop (yes, it’s running Windows…) since its a cheap and nice complete suite that has a firewall, an anti-virus and anti-spyware software plus a lot of other stuff I rarely use (IM Security and the likes).

I have it for about a year and a couple of months and I saw in the support forums that there is a beta release of version 7.0.

Recursive Definitions

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 08:56:00 +0000

If you have a cool new startup that is going to launch and all you have to say about it to better describe it is “It’s Flickr+YouTube+Riya+[Enter a cool new startup with cool technology or hype here]” something is wrong with your pitch.

If you can’t describe your startup in layman’s terms without using the name of your competitors (or, in this case, the war casualties after you kill them all and win the internet web 2.0 war) you should really start to think twice about what you are actually doing.

Folksonomies, Taxonomies and Coexistence

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:16:00 +0000

I have read “Beneath the Metadata” as well as its reply by Dave Weinberger.

I’ve also read Thomas Vander Wal’s response.

I personally think that folksonomies are not here to replace taxonomies.

If Elaine fears the use of folksonomy for classifying Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), she should not.

Folksonomies will (probably) never completely replace taxonomies since the science, understanding, principles and experience behind classifying items into a taxonomy are very extensive and cannot be overlooked.

Thou Shall Create a Widget for All to See

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:38:00 +0000

At my day job (Yedda, if you dont already know) we just introduced a whole bunch of new features.

Some of the new features includes these cool Widgets that you see on the left side of this blog which allows you to interact with Yedda.

The first widget is the AskBox widget – it allows you and your readers to post questions directly from your blog or Web site into Yedda. Each posted question will contain a link back to your blog or Web site stating that this question was posted from your blog or Web site.
The second widget is a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) widget – You specify topics that you wish to view in your widget and when placed on your blog or Web site you’ll see a list of these questions.

If you have your own blog or Web site go to the Yedda Widgets page, create a widget and place it on your blog or Web Site.

An idea to better promote Google Talk in a corporate envrionment

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:00:00 +0000

I just read this post about the deal that eBay and Google signed which will also allow Google Talk and Skype to interoperate and possibly be able to communicate even via chats.

It them folloed by an enlightened moment (Ka ching!) where I thought of an idea that Google can use to deepen Google Talk`s penetration in the corporate environment.

Google Talk is based on the solid and open standards of XMPP (Jabber).

OMTC (Oh My TechCrunch)

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 11:04:00 +0000

It seems that Mike of TechCrunch fame posted about Yedda.

If you don’t know what Yedda is (and you should after reading Mike’s post) just go and sign up :-)

Did I say why it was quiet here for quite a while? oh yes I did ;-)

Yedda and me or why didn’t I post here lately

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:39:00 +0000

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been very busy with Yedda and it is the main reason why it’s been very quite here.

But now, you can check out my Profile at Yedda as well as see questions I’ve answered and questions I’ve asked.

And as Yaniv pointed out, this is also a test question. I’m not really into baking and stuff…

Technorati : Answers, Eran, Knowledge, Questions, Social Software, Yedda
Del.icio.us : Answers, Eran, Knowledge, Questions, Social Software, Yedda
Ice Rocket : Answers, Eran, Knowledge, Questions, Social Software, Yedda

So you did see my Email!

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 08:40:00 +0000

A while back Google added a feature to Gmail so that you can see which of your friends is online and chat with them.

While this might look cool there is another side to this story, people can actually see when you are reading your Emails on your Gmail account.

I, for example, use GAIM as my main IM client and since Google Talk (GTalk) uses Jabber as its underlying protocol, it means that every Jabber supported client can connect to GTalk. Jabber has built in support to show your status and the client you are using and most Jabber clients (besides GTalk) allow you to see this text.

Own your authentication!

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 08:38:00 +0000

After ~~Passport~~ Windows Live ID and the Liberty Alliance Project now comes Google Account Authentication, which opens up the ability to use anyone’s Google Account to perform authentication to a system.

What surprises me in this whole deal is that it seems we are going backwards, back to a “one authentication to rule them all” idea that Microsoft tried to introduce with ~~Passport~~ (errr) Windows Live ID which, as you know, didn’t go quite where they wanted it to be.

Google openning a second research center in Israel

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 15:10:00 +0000

According to this, Google is opening an R&D center in Israel in the Tel Aviv area.

This is the second center, the first one opened in Haifa.

Microsoft has a research center in Haifa from 1991 and it was published in the Israeli press (sorry, I couldn’t find an English reference for this) that they are planning to open another research center in the Tel Aviv area.

The only company now from the big GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) that doesn’t have an R&D presence here in Israel is Yahoo.

Google Ctemplate

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 09:32:00 +0000

I just saw that Google released the Google Ctemplate library.

While they do need to get some kudos for their efforts of releasing various code bits out as open source, I do have a problem with the Ctemplate library itself.

I don’t know when they wrote this library, but what I do know is that its yet another templating language to use. Why couldn’t they have used a standard language such as JavaScript (more exactly, ECMAScript) instead of inventing their own syntax? There are so many templating engines out there, why invent yet another one instead of trying to use an official syntax know by many?

Zoundry Blog Writer – a new version

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 10:33:00 +0000

Zoundry released a new version of their Blog Writer product. Some of the more prominent features added (which a lot of users including me asked for) are:

XHTML Editor – You can now see and edit the generated XHTML
Spell Checker – No more copying and pasting stuff to another spell checker :-)

Check out the full feature list and download.

I’ve been using Zoundry for the past 6 months as my primary posting tool for this blog as well as my Advanced .NET Debugging blog and it has been really helpful. With the new features now released it is now a kick ass blog writer.

The feed reader of my dreams

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:34:00 +0000

I’m what you may call a medium to heavy feed junkie. I read most of the information today using my favorite feed reader RSS Bandit.

While RSS Bandit is a great feed reader it does have its limitations. The biggest one being that its a client side application and it doesn’t sync to one of the server side readers.

I sometimes want to read my feeds at home, sometimes at work or sometimes when I don’t have a computer with me and I just want to login in some Internet cafe and be able to continue reading where I left off.

SpaceX is about to launch the Falcon 1 rocket for the first time – History in the making (I hope)

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 20:43:00 +0000

I’m just watching the live feed of the SpaceX‘s Falcon 1 rocket launch.

I can’t even begin to describe what the impact of this whole move is if the launch succeeds as planned.

The Falcon 1 rocket is the first all American, built from scratch, rocket in the last 25+ years. It is built from new materials and its launch cost is $6.7 million which is about a quarter of what a launch will cost on a Delta II rocket or equivalent (even the Russian launch costs are higher than this the cost of launching Falcon 1).

ajaxWrite and Open Office / Open Document Format

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:10:00 +0000

I just read on Om Malik on Boardband that Michael Robertson of MP3.com, Linspire and SIPphone fame just annonced a new project called ajaxWrite.

This is a pure web application word processor without any storage behind it like Writely (when you open a document you upload it and when you save it you download it) but it seems very well written.

The only thing that bothers me is that they claim they support all major file formats but what they actually support is MS Word, RTF, Text and PDF.

Bubbles – Clean, round and really refreshing!

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 08:42:00 +0000

Ohad, the leader of a small Israeli software studio named 3D3R, just released a cool little app named Bubbles.

The concept behind it is based on the fact that the new age of web applications doesn’t really play nicely with your desktop, so instead of living up and playing nicely with the rest of your desktop application, web application tend to stack up in your tabbed browser (if you have one of those, if not, get one here).

Google will open up an R&D Center in Israel

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 15:09:00 +0000

According to this link in Globes, the Israeli Business newspaper, Google is going to open up an R&D center in Israel in the second quarter. The center will be led by Dr. Yoelle Maarek, a long time (17 years) veteran of IBM’s research labs and will be located in the northern city of Haifa (near the Technion, surprise surprise)

The only company out of the big 3, a.k.a, GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), that has an R&D center in Israel is Microsoft. Yahoo had something in the first bubble and after the explosion of the first bubble it was quickly closed.

The Tail of the Tail

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 09:14:00 +0000

If blogs are the long tail of knowledge, what are the comments that most blog posts have?

Are the comments the long tail of the long tail of knowledge?

Think about it…

I got a refund! Woohooo!

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:29:00 +0000

A long long time ago on July 6th 2005 I’ve posted a rant post about how I’m so pissed at Google after I had to pay $37.25 to get a “Free” Google T-Shirt I won because I wrote the Google Search API .NET Wrapper.

Well, now after 8 months I finally got a refund.

It started as a strange Email I got from the GoogleStore saying something about my request being handled. I didn’t figure what this was and the Email didn’t have any special links in it.

Tags or Labels? Which one do you prefer?

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 08:07:00 +0000

I read a this post on Niall Kennedy’s blog about the new features in the Google Toolbar which includes the ability to store and ~~tag~~ label bookmarks that can also later be retrieved when logging into a different machine.

While the concept is nice (and is similar in a number of ways to the del.icio.us extension for FireFox the thing that caught my eye was the fact that Google decided to call the tags labels.

Yedda

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:20:00 +0000

I know it has been a little quite around here and on my other blog.

I may have hinted a bit in the past that I’m involved in this new and cool project but if I didn’t, I’ll say it out loud, I AM INVOVLED IN A COOL PROJECT :-)

That’s the main reason for the quiteness.

This project is called Yedda and you are more then welcome to visit the site and the Yedda Blog to get more information.

Connect Google Talk with MSN, Yahoo and AIM

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 20:23:00 +0000

Just saw this on Digg and since I’m already on a Jabber frenzy due to my previous posts, I thought I should share.

Looks quite cool, though I haven’t tried it yet.

I’m using GAIM so I got everything all up in one client. I’m just waiting to get a build of GAIM that works with libjingle so I would be able to chat with my friends using Google Talk’s voice features.

If I only had a bit more free time to actually code on GAIM that would be even better… oh well… back to the salt mines.

Gmail dot Scandal

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 09:00:00 +0000

I’m sure you’ll all have heard about the Gmail dot scandal and that it WAS confirmed by Google.

I’m not a heavy Gmail user but I do have an Email box there (like everyone else) but it DOES pisses me off, specifically since my Email HAS a dot in it.

This can also explain why I got an Email a while back from someone that claimed to be my wife (although she was referring to another Eran Sandler ;-) ).

Company-Wide Instant Messaging with Jabberd

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 21:48:00 +0000

Continuing my current fixation about Jabber and Jabber related stuff (it all started with this post about how Google is openning up Google Talk to talk with other Jabber based servers), there is a good article up on O’Relly’s OnLamp.com about the pros and cons of a Company-Wide Instant Messaging solutions as well as how to setup Jabberd 2.x to do just that.

It’s really worth the read for people that are trying to figure out how to utilize an IM solution in their company while still retaining a high degree of security.

Jabber Servers Supporting the DialBack Protocol

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:51:00 +0000

I promised in the previous post about Google Talk’s support for federation to check what open source Jabber servers supports the DialBack protocol described in RFC 3920 used by Google Talk server to talk to other Jabber server.

Well… it seems that the dialback protocol is supported by all server listed here and a bunch of other non open source servers not listed there.

This is a good thing, but it seems the dialback protocol is not encrypted like the other TLS and SASL server-to-server protocols. On the other hand all other IMs today are not encrypted by default so privacy issues regarding this are legitimate as to the rest of the IMs available.

Someone heard my call – Google Talk support federation

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 09:27:00 +0000

A while back I posted a request/hope that Google Talk will open up to AOL using one of the Jabber bridges.

I also secretly hoped (meaning, I forgot to blog about it) that since Google Talk uses Jabber, they will open up its federation abilities and enable everying Google Talk user to communicate with any other Jabber user (providing that that user supports the necessary XMPP spec that Google Talk uses, which I still don’t know if it is one of the common ones, but I’ll check that up).

Google Talk and AIM talks

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:15:00 +0000

I’m sure you all have heard by now that Google and AOL have signed a deal in which part of it is to enable Google Talk and AIM users to communicate with each other.

Google Talk is based on the open XMPP (Jabber) standard which has built in abilities to work with gateways that enables this protocol to communicate with other protocols.

I just hope Google will use some of the Jabber/AIM bridges such as AIM/ICQ-Transport to make this thing work.

VCs, Google, Innovation. What can done?

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 09:47:00 +0000

I’ve recently read this article on BusinessWeek about how Google changed the landscape for VCs and innovation.

To sum things up, the article states that instead of encouraging innovation, VCs are looking for companies that can fill in some gap in Google’s portfolio (at least the portfolio they think Google is seeking for, since they don’t really tell anyone what they are doing most of the time).

This step alone can diminish innovation since less VCs will invest in things that cannot be sold as quickly as possible to Google (or some other one of the big giant such as Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and the rest)

Amazon E-Commerce Web Service API

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 12:38:00 +0000

I’ve recently experimented with Amazon’s E-Commerce Service.

In general, it’s a very complete API giving you access to almost every piece of information including titles, images, prices (and historical prices) that Amazon stores.

There were two things that were a bit problematic, in my opinion, which I think should be addressed.

The first thing is the ItemSearch method. This method allows you to search for items answering a set of criterias.

GoogleWorld the new Web and privacy

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 13:29:00 +0000

Whether it is Gmail, Google Base, Google Video, Google Answers, Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Maps and Google Toolbar, Google seems to be conquering the world by offering a lot of services in different and diverse areas.

(You can get a good review of the various Google Services here)

With your Google Account (which is also your Gmail email), Google can also track a person specifically and learn things about what him/her, what he/she searched for, shoped, interest in, etc.

My first post using a Blog Editor

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:33:00 +0000

I’ve decided I wanted to find a reasonable blog editor to post from instead of using the web interface of Blogger (which is nice, but not THAT nice)

After long searches and going through a lot of blog editors (some even cost money) I’ve found this one which is called Zoundry which is even written in Python.

It has some neat features in it like:

Tags support – including support for Technorati, Del.icio.us, Flicker, 43 things and more.
Preview with your OWN template. It even downloaded my template and enabled me to view this post as it would appear in the blog.Anyhow, this is my first post out of it to test it out and see how it is and if its worth using it all the time.

GoTag

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 19:40:00 +0000

My good friend Yaniv lately talked a lot about tags and other tagging related issues.Now this whole tagging thing is kinda going out of hand so I’ve decided to create a new game that will bring tagging to the real world.I’ve decided to call it GoTag.

Ingredients:

One pack of 3M PostIts in the color of your choice (Yellow is recommened because you can see it very well on all clothes).
One dark marker pen to write on the PostIts.

How to play?

A virus is a virus no matter what

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 06:40:00 +0000

I’ve just stumbled upon this article stating the the IFPI – the international equivalent of the RIAA – has just released a virus that will delete your P2P software.

Now I find this act to be criminal.

All the recent worm writers that were caught and legal action was taken against them. This virus is sponsored by an organization and as much as they’d like to fight P2P piracy, writing a virus and deleting software from my computer without my knowledge IS a CRIME!

Google Talk Log Abilities

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:46:00 +0000

As my good friend Dudu pointed out (and I forgot to tell you), Google Talk’s log abilities are very limited.

It only saves the last 20 lines of chat (and only if the window was closed properly, otherwise it will NOT save the log).

Since Google Talk currently lack any normal API (heck, its just one executable file ;-) ), I thought about writing a small up that would listen to file changes in the log directory, parse them and accumelate them in one file per converstaion with a person (similar to what the log is doing now).

Google Talk Chat Log Viewer

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 13:36:00 +0000

After discovering the Google Talk Chat Log format and seeing that its not human readable, I’ve decided to write a log viewer so I can check out and read my logs whenever I want to.

You can download the Google Talk Chat Log Viewer v0.1 from here .

I’ve also written there the Google Talk Chat Log format if anyone else is interested.

Enjoy!

How to edit/delete Google Talk custom messages

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 10:28:00 +0000

Google Talk stored all of your custom messages that you have entered in a file in your user profile directory.

The file is located at “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\status”

Inside you will find a file named in the format [userid]-history.txt.

So if your Gmail account is John.Dow@gmail.com the filename will be john.dow_gmail.com-history.txt (besides, there is usually only one file there anyway ;-) ).

The file format is very easy. It start with a first line which has the character “1” in it. I’m not sure what it stands for and what it do but you can disregard it.

How to disable Google Talk Auto Update

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 10:18:00 +0000

If you every wondered how to disable Google Talk’s auto update feature, I found an easy way of doing this which, at least for now, seems to work.

NOTE:

Be sure to backup the registry entries before using the registry’s Export feature when standing on the Google Talk AutoUpdate key.

Close Google Talk
Open the registry (using regedit.exe)
Go to My Machine\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Talk\Autoupdate
Change the value of UpdateURL to something in valid (or empty)
Start Google Talk

That’s it.

Some more interesting speculation about Google’s future plans

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 06:12:00 +0000

I’ve just stumbled upon this, which seems to contain some very interesting speculations as to Google’s future plans.

They all strengthen my point about in my previous post that Gmail IDs are a Passport like system for authentication and they will be used throughout current and future services. They are already being used in most of Google’s personalization sites.

Another thing the link I started with talks about is the fact that Google Talk is also more about managing your contacts and you can see that the integration with Gmail and its Contacts into Google Talk also adds to the fact they it is heading to a more centralized authentication system.

IM Wars – And I’m not the only one thinking about it

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 19:31:00 +0000

It seems that there are more than a few people (well, at least 2) that have some other thoughts about Google.

I must admit that at first I was also inside the Google Talk frenzy, submersed in all the hype, but after reading Nuggest’s post and Drunken Batman’s post I started to ponder a bit about their thoughts and I must say that have some really good points.

Although Google Talk is still in v1.0 (or v0.1, depends on how you look at it) and it lacks a lot of the client features that its competitors have, we should also assume that their server software (even though based on the open XMPP standard that Jabber uses) is at v1.0 (or v0.1, as I said about the client).

Google Talk – Let the IM revolution begin

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 14:40:00 +0000

I just installed Google Talk (talk.google.com). Its REALLY cool.

It’s a basic IM and its in Beta but the Voice has a really good quality.

I really liked the fact that they use an open standard, the Jabber/XMPP (www.xmpp.org) which is always good. This means that you can use any Jabber/XMPP supported client like iChat (for MacOS), GAIM (For Windows and Linux), etc.

Read their developer manifesto here, to see that they mean business and I do hope that they will use the built-in federation ability of the Jabber/XMPP protocol to federate messages to other IMs such as Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN.

Discovery is back, and in one piece

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 13:33:00 +0000

I’m so glad to see Discovery back in one piece.

I still remember Feb 1st 2003. It was my grandmother’s birthday and we were sitting in a nice restaurant at the northern part of Israel.

After eating, we went to visit a nice little place called “Hacula Vally” which was a swamp that was dried out in the 1920s or so but was now back to its (almost) original dimension.

We got a phone call from my cousin who went home instead of continuing for the short trip saying that there was something wrong with Columbia’s landing. We went back to the car, opened the radio and there was much confusion running around.

Windows (Alta) Vista

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 07:14:00 +0000

I just found out about the new name of the previously Windows code named “Longhorn”.

Guess what, it called Windows Vista.

Now I wonder who is the smart-ass marketing guy that thought about that?

What is this? half resurrecting dead Digital Corp. companies?

The year branding (95,98,2000,2003) I could live with, the XP signature was OK (at least it sounded good) but VISTA?!

I guess Office will be the next thing to lose the year branding (although it lost it in XP and gained it back in 2003).

Blindly go where all men has gone before

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 07:57:00 +0000

I ran into this post today.

It mainly talks about the extremes a great deal of developers “ping-pong” between during their life times. Catching the buzz words as they fly and instead of reviewing them and taking a few pointers that can enhance their current development procedure and cycle they just completely and utterly soak themselvs inside of it and forget anything else that existed before it.

I had the dubious luxury of assisting a project that it was simply frightening to send a few of the developers there to any software related conference (even a one day review). They would immediately get enlightened by whatever it is they heard in that conference and start changing every piece of code or procedure they know to accomodate the new “Torah” they were given in their imaginary “Mt. Sinai”.

Have you ever worn a 37.25 USD T-Shirt?

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 06:01:00 +0000

UPDATE: It took a while, but Google eventually refunded me. See my post about that.

Apparently, I am going to be the “proud” owner of a 37.25 bucks Google Desktop T-Shirt.

The same T-Shirt I was suppose to get for free from Google and apparently, If you are outside of the USA they will ship it ONLY in UPS Express.

For god sake, can’t you just USPS it? Normal Air Mail?! it will cost like $7.

Goolge are not so bad after all!

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 07:25:00 +0000

The saga of the geeky Google Desktop T-Shirt continues

Do you remember my rant post about not being able to order my free Google Desktop T-Shirt that I got after submitting a Google Search API .NET Wrapper?

I’ve decided today that I’ll go to the GoogleStore again and try again.

I got in, enter the coupon code and it work. Oh what joy!

Expect to see me with my Geeky Google T-Shirt rollering around Tel Aviv on my newly bought K2 Exo 4.0 Rollerblades (I’m still a rollerblades virgin, so you’ll probably see me more on my ass than actually roller blading).

AJAX

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 10:37:00 +0000

Its nice to see that MS has finally concluded that AJAX is a technology that is worthy of getting frameworktized into the .NET Framework :-)

If you don’t want to wait for “Atlas” and you need to use this technology in .NET Framework 1.1 I would like to suggest Ajax.NET written by Michael Schwartz.

It’s well designed and written piece of software which is now even open sourced (Thanks Michael!).

I’m sure MS will borrow a few things from it for “Atlas”.

My so called Google Desktop Search Plugin

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 11:50:00 +0000

If you remember, I talked in one of the previous posts about the Google Search API .NET Wrapper I wrote that includes a single coherent API for both Google Desktop Search (GDS) and Google Web Search (GWS)?

I submitted it to the Google Deskop Search Plugin program almost a month ago and I just got an Email saying that it got in. You can check it out here.

PDC 2005 – What shall I do?

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 08:03:00 +0000

I just read in my Roy’s blog about the contest Channel9 is holding in which you can get free lodging, enterance and $1000 travel fair for the PDC 2005.

You can do that by either blogging your way in or code your way in using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the Shareware Starter Kit.

Now I’m in a bit of a dilema.

Google’s Search APIs

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 13:20:00 +0000

I’ve been messing around lately with Google’s Search APIs including the Google Desktop Search (GDS) and Google Web Search (GWS).

This is part of some experimentations I’m performing in regards to productivity and search engine/applications.

I’ve wrapped both GDS and GWS APIs in a nice .NET assembly (source code in C#). Both of them have the same interface and can generate the result as a .NET DataSet, as an XMLDocument and return the raw format that is being returns from both GDS (string) and GWS (their result structure).

Transmeta – the end of an era?!

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 07:25:00 +0000

I just read here about the slow decline of Transmeta and its risk of closing its doors for good.

I first heard on Transmeta when the hype around Linus Torvalds’ decision to work there started. I checked their web site and continuously monitored their progress because I really thought they had something good going.

They actually innovated the industry and left their mark. You can see it in all the various power consumption technologies that all the big players (Intel, AMD and IBM) have produced since.

Don’t you just hate first posts?

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 06:20:00 +0000

Hello.

My name is Eran Sandler and I’m a serial blog killer. (you should say “Hello Eran, we love you” at this point).

I create and kill blogs all the time but I do hope this blog will be different.

First of all, the blogger interface is much better than the last few places I’ve bloged before, so that will probably get me to write a little more.