Coredump

I just noticed that my Twitter timeline RSS is not being displayed in my tumblog, so I went back to Yahoo! Pipes to sniff around. It appears that the Twitter feed is not coming up valid (or Pipes could not parse it).

(Update: The Twitter feed is valid, according to the W3C, but the Feedburner one is not. Oookay, so Pipes accepts an invalid feed, but not a valid one?)

As a workaround, I plugged in the feed through Feedburner and fed the Feedburner RSS back to my Pipe, et voila! my tumblog is back to normal.

In related tumblog news, popular social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, has been rebranded as, plainly, delicious.com. The old URI still works — I like it better than the boring new one (love the new layout though, much cleaner and faster), which lacks the, er, whimsy-ness of the old domain — but just to be sure, I upgraded the link to the new feed.

The first WordCamp Philippines will be held on September 6. Spearheaded by the Mindanao Bloggers, it will feature tracks in deploying WP as well as themes and plugins development.

Registration is free — all you have to do is blog about your intent to join the event.

The event, which is set to be held at the College of St. Benilde in Manila, is sponsored by the following:

• i.PH: the Domain for Individuals
• Free Online Flash Games
• Wazzup Manila Philippines
• Real Estate CRM
• Real Estate Website Designers
• Orange County Real Estate
• Auto Insurance Quotes
• Lane Systems Inc.
• RedMedia
• Orange County Business Lawyer
• Cebu Pacific Air
• Buddy Gancenia Reality TV
• SmartBro Wireless Broadband
• SPOT.ph
• Make Money with Performancing Ads

Google recently unveiled GMail Labs, experimental features that Google engineers are working on out of their 20%.

The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break. (There’s an escape hatch.)

I’ve been testing a few features, and already I’m loving some of them.

Quick Links lets me add bookmarks to access searches, conversations, and even shortcuts to specific GMail settings.

Email Addict puts you offline for 15 minutes and renders your GTalk status invisible. Great for those who need to walk away from the computer once in a while. Problem is, reloading the page will undo the lock-out.

Those are my two picks. I’m not particularly hot about the other features so far: Superstars, Muzzle, “Old Snakey”.

One other feature caught my eye, though: Random Signature. Remember when you used fortune for your random sigs? Well, here’s the Web 2.0 version: the feature allows you to use a feed for the random signature. I plugged in my tumblog feed, and watched as “Compose Mail” generated a random feed entry — surreal and almost Zen-like.

GMail Labs is supposed to be also available for Google Apps, but like @JeromeGotangco, mine doesn’t seem to have the feature yet.

You’ll probably notice the cool Flash tag cloud on the sidebar. That’s courtesy of Roy Tanck’s WP-Cumulus plugin. Thanks, @sofimi for the heads up.

I’m still on K2 (RC3), but I’ve ditched its Sidebar Manager for WP’s widgets. SBM has been causing lots of issues for me lately, but I haven’t had the time to muck around it. (When did I ever have time for anything, anyway? ;)) It’s working fine in my sandbox, though — well, RC5 at least, but I’m not that keen on porting my tweaks yet to that release.

I haven’t been posting here lately. Like a few other bloggers I know, Twitter (and FriendFeed) has been the choice for posting “lifestream” tidbits. But, heck, I don’t even use Twitter that much now (prolly, the IT sec audit at work has something to do with it, heh).

It’s been a while since I last handled the eee.

I haven’t gotten around to changing the default Xandros OS to either Ubunty or Fedora. Frankly, the OS works just fine for me. And as long as I can get a command-line and an internet connection, I’m a happy camper.

But it’s been an unusually quiet weekend so I decided to focus a bit more on this cute little monster.

First off, an upgrade. It was a simple matter of doing a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. The bad side is, since the OS uses unionfs, the 4GB storage is now down to only ~260MB free (or around 83% in use). I’ll have to look at the repackaged updates from the XEPC project, if the storage factor becomes critical, but for now, I can live with this.

Next, the OS change. I did attempt to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the eee, but hit a snag while creating a USB bootable flash disk. I had a spare 1GB flash disk at hand, and was able to dump the netboot image from the Ubuntu archives. For some reason, the eee cannot recognize it. Again, I’ll have to dig into this later, but as I’ve said, Xandros works fine for me for now so I’ll stick with it at the moment.

Since I cannot change the OS, I opted to optimize whatever I have for now. One major “annoyance” is the screen real estate (i.e., the lack thereof). Firefox, for example, have large chrome properties that need to be slimmed down. I’m using the basic display mode for Xandros, so there’s desktop screen space is not a primary concern. Since I mostly use the eee for browsing, I need to trim the fat off Firefox.

I had to download the TinyMenu extension. This reduced the menu to a vertical one, which is nifty since I was able to move the navigation bar buttons alongside it. I reduced the space even further by using a minimalist theme called Mini Firefox. I then hid navigation bar buttons that are currently disabled through some tweaks in userChrome.css:

#back-button[disabled="true"], #forward-button[disabled="true"], 
#stop-button[disabled="true"], .search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

The result: