Friday, September 26, 2008

My Activity Stream on Jaiku.com

Jaiku.com might resemble Twitter but it's much more interesting. Apart from allowing you to publish your status (e.g. "Right now I am picking my nose and eating the snot.") using web interface, IM or SMS, it also also displays feeds from whatever sources you define. That means you can have one cleanly organized stream of your personal thoughts and all your public activities.

When you look at fuxoft.jaiku.com, you can see my status changes ("wha I am doing right now" - like on Twitter), but - more importantly - you can see my blogposts, my photos uploaded to Flickr, my videos favorited at YouTube and interesting links I found using Google Reader sharing. Everything on a single page with automatically generated RSS feed. If you want to know about "everything Fuxoft is up to", this is the page to go to (or subscribe to).

In order to prevent flooding of person's Jaiku stream with dozens of items each day, the items from each source are indexed only once every 24 hours. You have to click on "... and XY more" link in each post to see special page where all the items from this day and from this feed are displayed (in the right-hand column).

Jaiku has been bought by Google and you can probably expect its integration into Google infrastructure fairly soon.

Jaiku registrations are not yet public but everyone has been given an infinite number of invites recently. If you want to register at jaiku, I can send you the invite. But if you just want to watch what I'm up to, you don't have to register at all!

Friday, September 12, 2008

Hardware is Confusing

Although I always liked computers and programming, I never understood computer hardware or any other electronics. I can configure software but when there are hardware problems it drives me mad. I still don't understand the difference between Amperes and Volts and I don't want to understand it (that's basically why I left the college after two years).

Knowing all this, you can imagine my terror when my LCD monitor suddenly went blank in the middle of websurfing. No, the computer did not accidentally reset. The monitor went back on in three seconds, with my Ubuntu desktop intact. I was relieved but cautious.

About 30 minutes later, the exactly same thing happened. The monitor went black and, after 3 seconds, the desktop appeared again in all its glory.

That pissed me off. Will I have to buy a new monitor? Will I have to buy a new videocard? How to diagnose this when it happens only once in 30 minutes and lasts for a few seconds? Surely this cannot be software related...? This has to be another ugly hardware problem!

Yes, it was hardware based.

Albert was sleeping under the table, warming his ass at the exact spot where the video cable was plugged in too loosely and occassionally wagging his tail...

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