TOOLS, TINKERINGS & CODE
Greetings one and all.
% cue tumbleweed %
I’ve been working on a pet project called Neatweet (actually it’s had a dozen different names, but good luck finding a combination of Twitter app name, domain name, and Google app engine name that isn’t taken).
Neatweet is a service that lets you filter incoming status updates from twitter to your chosen Twitter client using basic allow & deny rules.
For example, you follow a group of people, some of them keep tweeting Spymaster game information, others tweeting Foursquare annoyances, these are your friends and otherwise post plenty of great tweets so you don’t want to unfollow them.
To make this example a little more complicated, lets add that you’re following a news station who posts really useful information on public transport disruptions, but otherwise posts great heaping helping of generally useless information.
Allow
Keywords that are part of your public transport interests, for example here it’s Queensland Rail or QR so the rules allow rule is simply.
Deny
Pretty much all of the news source is rubbish so lets just block it entirely.
Spymaster and Foursquare both use their own applications so we can block by source
It’s that simple, there’s even a wizard interface on the site that makes it a bit easier to define rules, it’s almost point and click.
Notice how we didn’t define any rules to allow all?
If a tweet matches an allow rule it’s instantly approved and never gets checked by deny rules.
If a tweet doesn’t match an allow rule it’s then checked by each deny rule in turn, if it matches no deny rule it is allowed by default.
I’ve never been a fan of consoles, I’ve never been a fan of Sony – I bought one console since the days of the Sega Megadrive (Genesis for some of you), the PS3, because it offered the freedom of Linux.
In fact, out side of that console, and the 5 or so games, and one blu-ray movie I own, I don’t think I’ve ever bought another Sony product.
I will put up with a fair amount of crap, but I won’t put up with a feature being removed on a device I have purchased LONG after I purchased it. I’m currently in the process of writing letters and making complaints (setting the release date for Easter Long weekend was an arse thing to do btw Sony)
I also have to point out that Sony has shot themselves in the foot – because if myself and my neighbor (who to be frank has a much larger game collection than myself) and the thousands of others refuse to update – they’ve lost customers because we won’t be buying blu-ray movies any more, nor will we be buying games for these consoles.
Now you can be sure until the end of days every time I pick something up to buy I will go over the food chain in my head to see if Sony is part of that purchase.
On a very similar note, I can say the same for EA and Ubisoft.
I’ve already left Ubisoft before, back over Star-Force (remember that? I still have my old defunct DVD burner around here – take it out for show and tell sometimes) but I decided to give them a second look recently – only to find out they require a constant internet connection, and like EA release more bugs than games.
The sad fact is – these companies will NEVER associate a lost sale with bad business practices and pissed off customers, no every movie I don’t go see and every game I don’t buy – they’re going to call me a pirate, after all that MUST be the only reason someone didn’t buy/see their product, not because I’d rather go for a ride or to the beach than get ripped a new one by some faceless corporation.
They blame piracy for losses in sales as an excuse to increase DRM measures which results in more pissed off customers… and the vicious circle continues.
Personally, I have a huge DVD video collection, it fills quite happily 2 regular old flat pack book shelves, and 2 sets of shelves I’ve designed and built specially to hold DVD’s. I have a moderate gaming collection 5 or so for the PS3, 30+ games for the PC (notably, not a lot of “block busters” or even ea games hehe)
For more reading:
Sony’s US Playstation Blog
Sony’s EU Playstation Blog
And archived media from the time I purchased my PS3:
Wayback machine archive of PS3’s Open Platform
Wayback machine archive of PS3’s Manual
Greetings once again folks.
It appears to be that time again, Internode have released a new customer tools API – which means at some time in the future the old one will be discontinued.
As a result, I’ve updated (re-written) Node Usage – which is now on it’s 4th version.
New Features
It is a little slower now as it has to perform 3 requests, I’m afraid that can’t be avoided.
Requirements
Installation
You only have one option this time – the script is twice as long as the last version so I’m not going to post it here.
First, be sure to unload your existing NodeUsage before you load this one – in the menu bar of mIRC, click on the Commands menu, go down to NodeUsage 3, click Unload
Download the current version of the script from here and save it into your mIRC directory (newer versions have a scripts directory under the mIRC one, you should place it there)
Once you have saved it, pop into mIRC and run /load -rs NodeUsage.mrc (or for newer versions /load -rs scripts\NodeUsage.mrc)
Note
There will be updates in the coming days and weeks to bring it up to full compliance with the specifications and add help for the templating, the script will prompt you to update if there are updates, you can also check manually using /nodeusage.checkupdate
You know, a good 80% of the traffic to my website is directed at that page, yet almost none of my ad revenue comes from it…
While I’m fully prepared that some people have adblock installed, it’d be real nice if you guys would white list my site – I’m only using google adwords it’s not like I’m using something that’s obnoxious and nasty – You never know, you might see a relevant and interesting advertisement.
So anyway, I’m contemplating setting it up on it’s own domain/subdomain and turning it into more of an application – perhaps even loading some specifically targeted ad banners locally hosted.
What do you think?
I’d like to take some time to introduce you to a cool free tool I found – Bitvise Tunnelier
Having just got my netbook setup and running (MSI Wind U100+ BTW), I wanted to provide a slightly more secure setup then just using my 3G provider – easiest way is a ssh tunnel to home with port forwarding
If I was running Linux on my netbook, it’d be easy – just background a ssh process. Windows makes it a little more difficult, so after a little Googling, I tried a couple of other things – but have pretty much fallen in love with this tool.
Once you configure your host and load your ssh key, it pretty much maintains the connection by it’s self sitting in the tray.
It’s list of features include connecting and maintaining a ssh tunnel, maintaining port forwards (both as a pair of static lists, and dynamic socks5 forwarding), persistent sftp graphical interface, and terminal emulator
I do have a few items on my wishlist tho.
With regards to the second item on that list, there’s probably some commandline parameters I havn’t found yet (not that I’ve been looking)
If you’re looking for the ability to automatically maintain a ssh tunnel in windows, this is probably going to be #1 on my list for a long time.