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.

I’ve made several improvements to my tumblog.

Previously, I merely plugged in the RSS output from Yahoo! Pipes to Feedburner, and served up the content using Buzzboost. Using techniques from Cristiano Betta’s lifestream and elsewhere, I simplified and modularized the Yahoo! Pipes mashup.

I then used the pipe’s JSON output and styled it with some simple CSS. I didn’t want too much dependence on other JavaScript libraries so I used native code as much as possible, except for dynamically loading the JSON object from Pipes (for which I used the JSONscriptRequest class). I’m still having trouble getting the logic of reloading the content asynchronously: for now, I simply destroy the child element containing the tumblog items and rewrite everything — expensive, I know.

I’ve also been thinking of creating a Google Gadget out of this, but the iGoogle API’s FetchFeedAsJSON method is somewhat limited. I may have to use my current approach of dynamically creating a JSON script request into the gadget.

Well, without too much fanfare, the code is over here, and the tumblog is right here.

I know, it’s supposed to be a tumblelog, but what the heck. I was able to squeeze out one for another domain I maintain: iandexter.com.

It was supposed to be for side projects, but since I’m neck-deep in work, I decided to make it a launch pad for my “presence” in the internet. But why stop there? So I decided to aggregate all that content, using Yahoo! Pipes:

Plunk the resulting RSS to Feedburner, and use BuzzBoost to put out HTML:

Then, voila! My very own tumblog.

Online identity verification system OpenID gains steam as prominent web companies adopt its use.

Recently, AOL announced that it will implement the OpenID system for its 63 million subscribers. In the wake of that news, Digg’s Kevin Rose announced at a web conference in London that the popularity website will accept OpenID and become an OpenID provider.

“We want to give people the freedom to move around online and this is a way to do it,” Rose said.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have also become OpenID adopters.

Users of OpenID can identify themselves using a URI that they own (a blog or home page, for example). They can then log on to OpenID-enabled sites without registering or opening a new account — they only need to sign in once to an OpenID provider. This addresses the single sign-on problem that users encounter when signing up for various web services.solves

Big-name web companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft has also addressed the SSO problem by implementing identity systems in their infrastructure.

• Starting today, we’re on DST, so a one-hour shift in the work sked. Yaiks.
• Last weekend, we were off to Taal Vista Lodge in Tagaytay for the Tech University, a two-day company event. The first day started off with an “Amazing Race”-style tech challenge — a battle of wits to solve real-world cases in 30 minutes or less. At stake: a 4GB iPod nano for each group member (five per group, two categories, SMB and enterprise). Unfortunately, we didn’t win, so there goes the nano.
• Sunday was capped with a teambuilding activity, complete with a motivational talk by APO Jim Paredes (something about creativity — I didn’t get to go through that one straight on, had to chow on the sumptuous buffet breakfast at the Cafe-on-the-ridge, heh).
• Got sick on purpose yesterday, so I could be with Peng and Gab at home. I really needed that. Tiyo Paeng was raging, so we snuggled in bed, and went through three “American Tail” DVDs (Gab’s current fave). Didn’t catch the endings, though, as I dozed off a few times in between.
• Question: you’re a system admin in a big-time government installation, handling a fairly large environment, when you come across a problem of the mail queue backing up because of multiple incoming connections (in the thousands), half of which are spam. The spam don’t get through, of course, but still you face the problem of the growing queue, so what do you do?
• I’m getting the hang of Firefox 2.0. The del.icio.us bookmarks extension by Yahoo! is constantly nagging me about uninstalling the Google Browser Sync extension, though. I also saved some precious screen real estate, with the chrome settling on less than 100 pixels or so of the top part. Coolness.
• Gone blog reading again, when the case load was low. I’m totally hooked on Google Reader. Stand-alone RSS readers are so overrated, but I still find them useful for offline reading so I still keep one at hand: why, Feedreader, of course.
• On to more Lifehacking, I’m using Password Safe to, er, keep my passwords safe. I used to keep a GPG-encrypted and signed text file for that, but then after 50 or so accounts (including 10 something just for work — talk about single-sign-on!), it got a bit tedious. Thanks, Bruce Schneir!