eightface

Dissecting Queen’s Alumni Spam pt II

Time for another installment of ripping apart email from my favourite university, in partial service to those not fortunate enough to be part of the alumni listserv. In case you missed the first installment, it was taking a look at Karen Hitchcock’s plea for support Bob Rae’s super report.

This time around, Hitchcock’s name isn’t directly attached, so the blame cannot be placed on her shoulders alone. That said, it doesn’t do anything to improve the perceptions of a ‘country club’ attitude at the university. Here’s is the latest email in it’s entirety:

Dear Mr Kellam,

Spoil yourself with unforgettable golf. Through Queen’s University’s newest affinity partner, International Club Network, you have the opportunity to experience incredible benefits and savings at over 100 exceptional golf courses across Canada and the US. For a special Queen’s alumni price of only $99 per year (regularly $275), you receive one complimentary round of golf, 20% unrestricted savings on green fees and carts and much more at courses like Taboo, Angus Glen, The Marshes, Le Geant, Westwood Plateau and Wolf Creek!

You also have the chance to win a brand new set of Ben Hogan golf clubs and bag, one of 5 golf memberships or one of 10 dozen golf balls.

Click here for more information and to enter the “Tee Off & Win” contest.

I’m not going to bother with a rigorous dissection of this one, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the clever reader.

O’Reilly Roundup

First things first, if I say O’Reilly and “Computer books!”, pops into your head, you’re a nerd and are probably more likely to find satisfaction in the following blocks of text. Second, if you’re one of said nerds and didn’t know that they have a shiny new weblog called Radar you should check it out.

On to the meat of the story, Firefox vs. IE in O’Reilly Network Logs. Tim takes a look at the network stats for the company (with a predominantly tech audience) to see what kind of influence Firefox has had.

Here’s what I found out. (Stats are from the first quarter of 2005, from www.oreilly.com, www.oreillynet.com, and other sites we manage such as xml.com, onjava.com, and www.perl.com.)

• Internet Explorer: 54.66%
• Firefox: 35.08%
• Safari: 3.85%
• Mozilla 1.7: 2.70%
• Netscape: 1.26%

Compare these numbers to the first quarter a year ago:

• Internet Explorer: 75.53%
• Netscape: 19.89%
• Safari: 3.48%
• Other: 3.10%

In short, during the past year, Firefox has basically wiped out the Netscape browser, and has taken 20 points of share from IE.

It’s nice to see solid data indicating a change in the way people are looking at the internet. The entry also pointed out an article entitled Inventing the Future from a few years ago about Alpha Geeks being on the leading edge of technology. It essentially says that these people see the potential in the technologies and start using them even though they may not be fully developed.

Here’s a quick list of technologies they saw emerging a few years ago and felt the world would be writing about:

• Wireless
• Next Generation Search Engines
• Weblogs
• Instant Messaging
• File Sharing
• Grid Computing
• Web Spidering

Now, they didn’t really go out on a limb coming up with that list, but I’d have to say that it’s pretty much spot on. There’s probably a large list of things I could say they missed, but the big one I see missing is digital photography and photo sharing, but you could lump that in with weblogs if you wanted. One last thing, if you didn’t read the article, it starts with a good quote from William Gibson, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

flickrRSS plugin update

I’ve updated the flickrRSS plugin and changed its page address. The release is a little bit rushed, mainly because I’m going to be be away all day Saturday driving to Guelph and helping my brother move.

The big updates are as follows: I removed the bits that relied on allow_url_fopen functions, the plugin now uses cURL . It no longer uses MagpieRSS, Indi pointed out the rss functions built into WordPress (which technically use Magpie). I also revamped the Option panel, it’s a lot cleaner looking now.

There shouldn’t be any big problems with the plugin, but I’ve called it an alpha because it hasn’t been completly tested.

Download Version 2.0a (5kb)

Dreamhost, flickrRSS and allow_url_fopen

Starting today, Dreamhost is disallowing the use of php’s allow_url_fopen. It broke the image caching for my flickrRSS plugin and also broke an include I was using on my code page. I did a quick rewrite of the plugin to use curl instead of fopen, but I’m going to hold off posting it. I’m going to redo some chunks of the plugin and release it all in one go. If you really need the updated plugin, let me now and I can hook you up, otherwise, just turn off image caching for now.

Flickr releases updated badge

Flickr released a new badge today. It can do a lot more than the old one could, including the ability to choose from any of your photos (including sets), groups pools or user tags. It’s pretty solid and covers my main reasons for writing this script in the first place. The script can cache locally, but it can’t do random photos because it’s working with the RSS feed, which only serves up the last 10 images.

I’ll still be continuing development of the flickRSS plugin, mainly because I wrote it as a badge replacement for myself. It’s easy to customize on the fly, caches the images locally (so they won’t disappear if Flickr has a massage) and it has title tags on the links, so you get nice words when you wave the mouse over a photo.

There probably won’t be any work done on the plugin in the next little while. I have a week of teaching left in the high school, then the final two weeks back at the teacher’s college, we’ll see how it goes. It’ll probably be behind the scenes stuff, possibly removing the need for MagpieRSS, cleaning up the options page, implementing the options page as a function. Maybe a few more rss varieties while we’re at it.

Instructions for turning your degree into a paper airplane

Last year, the finest institution in the land awarded me the title ‘Bachelor of Computing’ with ‘Subject of Specialization Computing’ written underneath (an SSP is kind of like a major but it’s supposed to require more work). I thought the name of the degree sounded redundant, but it’s kind of funny for a CompSci degree. That’s one of the reasons that I went for it.

Realizing the error of its ways, the university has offered to courier me a new degree with a new title, Subject of Specialization Computer Science. I’m down, that’s cool. But they sent me a wee little envelope to return it in, so I figured they wouldn’t mind if I made a few extra folds trying to fit the degree in.

Without further ado, I present the step-by-step instructions for turning your degree into a paper airplane (Flickr Set & Slideshow).

iPod Possum

A little while ago, Apple released the iPod Camera Connector which allows you to connect your camera directly to an iPod Photo and download it’s contents.

It would be cool if it worked in reverse with an iPod Shuffle, allowing you to dump a random assortment of songs from an iPod onto the Shuffle. Imagine running into a friend with an iPod, plugging your Shuffle directly into their iPod and walking away with a different music experience.

It would work well within the ‘random music’ framework that Apple is pimping for the shuffle. It also takes the idea of jacking into someone else iPod to the next level.