Nautilus Google Docs Uploader

Right click, upload to Google.

I have been slightly interested in python for a while, but just never got around to actually writing anything. Not that I am enough of a programmer to be particularly swayed by one language over another - but the path of least resistance for writing plugins and such for the Linux desktop seems to by python. This was a simple project that taught me some basics, and since there isn't a nicely developed perl module for the Google API I went on with the python.

Lets say you just made a little spreadsheet in OpenOffice



Now you want to share that amazingly complex spreadsheet with your lawyer on Google Docs



Now it's up there...



and you can edit and share with friends



Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, lets you drop scripts of your choosing into ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/. When you run the script on a file through the right-click menu the file name gets passed to the script. I knew this was possible, and have played around with OS X folder actions before, but I have to say that in practice this is a lot easier than AppleScript to me.

Grab the python script yourself, download and install the gdata python API, edit the file to have your own username/password, and right-click your way to uploading fun. Disclaimer: this is just a quick and dirty thing, do not expect it to be good.

Firefox 3...

I tried out the latest alpha build - and wow. It renders much faster and the SVG rendering is soooo much faster. Thank god.

digg is badass

digg añade sección podcasts

Originally uploaded by jagelado.

If you're not already a user of the fabulously popular user-generated social news site digg.com you're missing out. This week there has been a huge overhaul, making it much easier to customize the site to your liking. Whether you're interested in celebrity gossip or dorky Linux stuff, this is a great place to stay on top of the latest stories.

I'm also very impressed by the new Podcast section. I've used Odeo in the past, and I have to say that this is even easier. You can browse or search through podcasts by category, looking for the most dugg podcast. Then within that podcast you can jump right to the most dugg episode and listen to it right within your browser... very very smooth and seamless.

Become one with digg.

Mugshot

longhair

Originally uploaded by ryanmshea.

When I entered my freshman year of college I had a nice short haircut. I figured that this would be the last few years before I entered the work force and would need to be presentable. I decided to just not cut my hair for a couple years. This is what it looked like. I kept telling myself that it would look cool later. I was wrong.

Less expensive, but good enough?

I'm thinking about switching over to a Xen hosting solution over at GPLHost. It's a virtual machine but probably pretty fast. It'd save me about $50/month, which would be great. I'm nervous about migrating muppethouse to a new server. Its always such a pain in the ass. Just a thought.

Google Calendar expected 12/6

To me, Google is perhaps the only entity with enough push to be able to bring useful calendaring to the masses. Although most people are simply unconcerned with calendaring, if Google can make coordination very simple for families, teams, and community groups, it may become a more useful lifestyle tool for Joe Schmo. Obviously I'm hoping for iCalendar, RSS, and an open API to complement their offering - and if they could murder eVite along the way I wouldn't complain.

As the title says!

read more | digg story

Swap a paperclip for a house

This bloke started out in july with a red paperclip that he swapped for a pen. He swapped the pen for a door handle. He plans to continue this chain of trades until he can acquire a house or an island. He�s documenting it on this blog.

What a great example of wealth-building through trade. This should be mandatory reading for all Econ 101 students around the country. By simply making individual mutually-beneficial trades, this dude hopes to eventually turn a red paperclip into a house. He'll be able to do it too, and so could you... except trading in currency is normally a bit easier than the barter system. Microeconomics rocks.

read more | digg story

Yahoo! buys Upcoming.org

Future Evite crusher Upcoming.org is the lastest in a seemingly endless suply of Ajax powered web pages to be scooped up by search giant Yahoo.

In July of 2004 Yahoo purchased Oddpost, a future-looking web-based email provider whose features far outweighed that of the status quo Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Oddpost is the foundation of what will be the next iteration of Yahoo mail with features to peer-pressure even the innovative Gmail to advance. Add the new Yahoo mail to the queue of advanced web applications coming soon.

March of 2005 brought Yahoo's next purchase of a fast growing web app, Flickr. The online photo sharing, storage, and social networking tool has continued to flourish under the rule of Yahoo. Users can share their photos with the world and participate in communtiy driven groups and tag their way to a better experience.

Upcoming.org is more like Evite meets Washington Post Online meets Flickr. They have embraced the ever-popular folksonomy paradigm, allowing social tagging of events and creation of groups. Upcoming has the idea of a "metro", or a geographic metropolitan area for which you are interested in events. The first thing I thought of was Andrea when I saw this site, because its a great place to announce all those little events that may normally only be announced in the City Paper.

Like the Netflix website or LiveJournal, there is a community-centric theme on Upcoming.org where you set people as friends, join groups, and actually enjoy using the site. Rather than rude information-squeezing or bombarding the user with ads, the site embraces a more open feel that we're starting to see more of on the web. They make use of popular and open technologies like RSS and iCalendar and put the information back in the hands of the users with an open API like Flickr, Craig's List, and Paypal.

On the surface it seems that this site is geared toward more public events, but in my testing it seems quite capable for personal events. Upcoming allows you to create personal venues (like your house) and personal events (like a dinner party). You can simply enter in email addresses of people you would like to invite and off goes the message. Unlike Evite, you actually see details of the event in the email message rather than being cat-herded onto a banner ad viewing site. For those (like me) that often need a gentle reminder of where they need to be and when, Upcoming offers SMS event reminders for free. In fact, free is the norm on Upcoming.org, both monetarily and philosophically. I created my account without even giving them my name!

All in all, I'd recommend adding Upcoming.org to your online toolbox. The community will ultimately drive this site and I can see a lot of improvement on the horizon. Check it out. Tell me what you think. Avoid evite like a disease.

All Hail Gmail

This GMail thing sure seems to be popular, doesn't it? The kids are raving about it, and I say for good reason. A few years ago people were mostly using yahoo mail, hotmail, and aol for their personal accounts - and to be honest, it wasn't difficult to put together a system that beat the pants off of those ad filled monsters with their 5MB limits. I did. My system had essentially unlimited size and I could integrate it however and with whatever I wanted. The same web-based features that yahoo had at the time were available using Squirrelmail. I could write my own fun scripts and use my own kick-ass email address. Times have changed though - today there is GMail.

Lets look at the primary reasons to use an account on muppethouse:

unlimited storage space - well Gmail essentially has unlimited space

advertisements on yahoo and hotmail suck - well, they still do, but Gmail ads are quite acceptable

cool email address at muppethouse or your own domain - well, google solved that a week or two ago

privacy - well I think I still have an edge on this one

Hotmail, AOL, and Yahoo reek of evil - Google doesn't seem to be effected by the stank

Portability - if you have your own domain with me, you are the ultimate owner... more on the solution in a moment

I know several of you out there have gmail and muppethouse mail, but I would like to show you how you can use your GMail account with muppethouse...

Y!

Grumble Grumble. Yahoo and Flickr logins are merging. Sounds like a good idea, but for those of us (David and I) using third-party tools like the Firefox flickr sidebar, iPhoto Flickr Export, and the Wordpress Flickr Gallery it sucks ass. Don't merge until you are forced.

You're not the boss of me

Having done my part to positivly promote the adoption of Firefox, I've decided to make a tiny change to my .htaccess for www.muppethouse.com. IE will hose up your computer, but worse - if you get infected with the viruses and spambots that are spreading these days you'll infect others. No more IE visiting muppethouse please. My mission will be accomplished if one person downloads Firefox because of this.

Technolgies that will take over the world

Here is my prediction of future technolgies that will really take off in the next two years. Some of these may not be revolutionary, but I'd just like to get my predictions out there so maybe I can review this in a couple years to rate my predictive skillz.

The first technology is social networking. Those who frequent livejournal realize the importance of web communities and following your interests by viewing the interests of others. Although blogs will continue to grow and converge (settling on RSS 2.0 and atom as the syndication standards), the real story will be in the convergence of social networking services. Right now sites like del.icio.us solve two problems: they give the ability to store your bookmarks on a central server (sorry, roaming profiles are dead), but also to share those bookmarks with others. This may not sound that interesting, but our friends at google seem to think that cross referencing information to determine relavence is of significant importance. There is an idea of adding keywords to entries to help the process along; this reminds me of setting meta-tags in web pages for search engines to pick up on. Flickr is an amazing site that also builds social networks, but this time pictures are the central focus. XML and web services will be the glue that ties this all together. Another prediction in this category is that client-side rss aggregators are a non-starter. It's server side or bust.

Calendaring will soon become a real focus. Look, those of us in the web focused community are all doing the same thing. We're using IM, we're sending emails, we're posting pictures, we're blogging, we're browsing (and finding interesting links). We are people who like to use the web, but we also have complete lives. We go to parties, we have friends and families, we date, we manage our finances. All of these things are going to converge. I predict the hula-project will blow oxygen-rich air on the spark that has been started by Apple with iCal. We are all part of a worldwide community, and groupware projects to date have it all wrong. Look for common sense solutions that prove that information technology hasn't even gotten warmed up yet. Say bye-bye to proprietary solutions to obvious problems like evite. Hula has its head on straight.

The pendulum of (server side - client side) is swinging back toward the client side yet again with our friend ajax. Prooving themselves yet again, google has burst out of the gates with google suggest, gmail (if you want an account just ask me), and google maps. Web clients are here to stay and they don't have to suck. Flickr is pushing the envelope of rich web apps (that steer clear of .NET and JAVA thank god).

Advances in Social Computing

Activities once reserved for those rarely-bathing dungeon-masters among us are now leaking into the realm of social acceptance. Many seemingly normal people are beginning to rely on the internet for communication, entertainment, and a general social outlet (this entry being an example).

Online dating may have started as a logical extention to classified ads, but now it has progressed into a place where more than just 'furries' can meet each other. Young and old, people are finding that match.com and eharmony.com are able to hook them up with more compatable individuals than the traditional bar scene. As our eyes open to online dating, we all seem to be realizing that not only is it here to stay, but it honestly is a better way to meet people.

Even luddites are making the seemingly unavoidable switch to digital cameras this holiday season. They will find a need for easier photo printing and online sharing. With 4 Megapixel digicams being par for the course, finally we seem to have disposed of the "email me your pictures" method of distribution. How will the plug-and-play folks deal with this newfound presentation challenge? Even for those who don't own a digital cameras, the wireless phone industry is pushing them upon us more and more with each wave of mobile phones. Much like the Platinum visa or mastercard, you'll have one eventually whether you like it or not.

Blogging has now become a household term, with anyone worth their weight in chum insta-publishing their latest thoughts to the half-dozen friends that read the thing. In our busy lives the blog method is here to stay. What's the alternative - bjerkelike mass mailings that share information whether we want it or not?

Photos, social networks like friendster.com, blogging, and online photo organization like flickr.com are merging more and more each day. The heterogeneous synchronization of data is no longer work for the enterprise, now it is something that each information savvy guy or gal must face. RSS feeds are paving the way for more seamless XML based information exchange, but we've got quite a ways to go. Open source tools are flooding the network, more rapidly adjusting to this information munging trend than their commercial counterparts.

In my opinion Microsoft should pay attention to this trend. They can keep their market share if they embrace the interoperability model and build new and creative ways of using the information. Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and GMail should at least have features ready to help users build these networks. People are using Livejournal, MovableType, and Wordpress. They want to link those blogs into their Netflix RSS feeds, and latest uploaded pictures. People want to build social networks by linking all these pieces of information together. We are in the information age now more than ever and I see huge potential advances in calendaring, billpaying, contacts, and digital signatures. For the love of god can we get rid of the fax machine yet.

Blogging is Difficult

I haven't been spending much time blogging lately. I didn't comment to Margaret's Firefox 1.0 post - a clear case of fishing for a comment if you ask me. I neglected the Feris for President post and I neglected ripping into Crispy for bringing up Goonies at every possible opportunity. Man, I'm out of it.

I feel like this may be a Wesley empty promise, but I'm going to blog more - coming soon. I've been trying to find a news reader that meets my needs. I now have two - Firefox and Thunderbird. Want to read your blogs like email? Dream no more. You can also have fun little pulldowns in the bookmark bar for RSS feeds in everyone's favorite browser Firefox. Fun