Two weeks ago I had the privilege of meeting up with some of the OpenMoko guys. You’ve seen me write a little bit about this project, but meeting them and actually getting to play with a device was quite enlightening. Most foreigners in Taipei take taxis, but not I. I already had an idea how to go to FIC headquarters, yet it was – rough. I jumped on the right bus, going the right direction, yet didn’t really know where to get off. In my broken Chinese I started talking to a group of high school kids, who somewhat pointed me in the right direction. At one point we were coming up to a light and a lady just said: “get off, go down that road.” I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus. …

A mere three years later, I have finally put my Britney Spears remix online. I made it for a media-literacy class I was taking, and it has already been shown to well over a thousand people. If you have six minutes to spare, feel free to watch it.

The date is June 25, 2007, and I’ve sinned. Let me explain. I’ve been involved in technology for quite some time and have long been opposed to Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster. I never felt any urge to join; I always thought people spent too much time updating their profiles instead of writing something useful or insightful, or doing something productive. Two months ago, I broke my rule and joined MySpace for a single day because I needed to contact someone.

You can easily see that I am a big Linux fan, I’ve mentioned this over and over. I’ve also mentioned that I’m finishing up my MCSE, which started as a dare with my buddy, Ian. In the process of studying for my MCSE I’ve developed a certain amount of respect for Windows Server 2003, yet I’ll comment more on this later. What I really wanted to write two paragraphs about was an interesting discovery I made today. I happened to stumble over to Microsoft’s hardware site, and noticed in my little Server Spy monitor that it was running IIS/7 – the first time I have seen this anywhere. Upon further investigation I perused their GoLive program, which details several ways to test …

The buzz of Computex is finally wearing off, so I’ll finally scribe my account of the event. YS was kind enough to go with me, we actually called it a date. The scene was quite similar to the trade shows we saw last year, however there seemed to be fewer people. This might be because we went on the final day, although we suspect there weren’t that many people because there aren’t “sweet” deals to be had. Regardless, there were several main “halls” filled full of stuff. The first three (two were in one building) weren’t particularly interesting. I mean, there were some cool displays and lots of technology, but nothing that left me thinking “oh, that’s …

Today on Linux.com, Liferea was mentioned I find this particularly because I’ve been using Liferea for quite a few months, and haven’t been able to find anything that better suits my needs. It sits quietly in the corner until a new RSS is available, and slightly changes color. Plus, it integrates wonderfully into GNOME. Well, the Linux.com article does a great job summarizing the reader, so if you are in the market, I’d take a look. For posterities sake, I took a screenshot of the Linux.com feed of Liferea, in Liferea.

For the last 16 months I had been living in Taiwan (if it wasn’t obvious). Within the next month, that chapter will come to an end. Over the next few weeks I will continue studying for the GMAT and hopefully finishing my MCSE; any words of encouragement will be warmly welcomed. Meanwhile, I will try to avoid distractions, which seem to be coming in the form of Python. Django has been one of the most fun things I’ve ever played with. Recently I wrote and contributed some code to access both Alexa Web Search and Alexa Site Thumbnails via Python.

As a rule, whenever I’m online I’m logged into my server back in the States. I’m also usually wireless, which we all know is beyond insecure – I’ve found it especially useful to tunnel firefox over SSH. I try my best to tunnel stuff over SSH back, and if you want to also, this is how. I’m on Linux, so this is pretty darn easy. ssh [email protected] -D 1080 If the SSH daemon runs on a different port, you’d do something like this:

I generally like Firefox, and generally like Google. But having Google suggest enabled when I search for things is annoying, at least on my rather small laptop screen. Mostly it is because my internet right now is pretty average, so I try to cut down on any extra traffic. Anyhow, I didn’t even both Googling how to do this: Type in ‘about:config’ into your address bar and type ‘search’ in the top filter bar. Look about half-way down for this:

So, you’ve seen how to look up thumbnails via python, but wonder how to integrate this with Django? I created a sample app to demonstrate. One thing to note about this app is it is slightly more complex than just using the previously mentioned ThumbnailUtility. For starters, the thumbnail is downloaded from Alexa onto the server. Another part is first searching if the thumbnail exists already, and if it does, serving that instead of querying Alexa. Let’s just start with some code.