Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
3/5
Very much a vehicle for Palahniuk to rant about this and that through the voice of a 13 year old girl condemned to hell, supposedly for overdosing on pot. Entertaining, but felt that the plot served the ranting rather than the other way round.
More...
Book Reviews, catfood, shapefile, chuck palahniuk, programmers, explanation, funded, another, bernalites, everyone, terrorist, amendment, cracked, throw, interesting, franciscans, certainly, discover, testing, silicon, university, thanks, precita, geography, incorrect, disabling, visual, interstate, favorite, palahniuk, blackout, breaking, shredding, misplaced, launches, farallon, internet, illegal, office, heights, lights, dextronet, parallel, friends, commodore, released, restored, doomed, #API, #SOPA, #PIPA, #Censorship, #Blacklist, #fb, #todo
January 18th is Internet blackout day to protest against SOPA and PIPA. As I'm writing this post 6,988,056,464 people still don't read ITHCWY, so I'm taking part by blacking out my software site, catfood.net, which gets substantially more traffic.
Need to tweet from the Windows command line? Well, now you can…
REST API Design Rulebook by Mark Masse
2/5
Two huge problems with this book. It's short and very repetitive so the information content is about a couple of blog posts. The 'rules' are highly subjective, and much of the book is pushing the author's WRML 'standard' which I've never seen in the wild. The only real positive is that it's a comprehensive survey of the issues you need to think about when designing a REST API: just don't take the rules as gospel and research best practice from major APIs so you understand the context.
More...
Book Reviews, catfood, Links, mark masse, stickers, according, election, hackers, information, computation, advent, acknowledging, connecting, software, government, druid, applications, sphero, classic, something, intelligent, lightsaber, marketers, hijacking, questions, marmite, switch, rulebook, aliens, condition, #fb, #todo, #p2, #fail
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
5/5
Intelligent and humorous if highly contrived thriller set loosely around an MMORPG. Loved it.
More...
Book Reviews, Android, WiX, catfood, shapefile, neal stephenson, lee child, reto meier, attribution, programmes, secular, embassytown, intellectual, flout, doorways, software, windows, building, valuable, poster, polylinem, justanswer, extensive, factoring, darwin, projection, bootstrapped, patent, flying, launches, professional, designed, explaining, follower, mentions, defining, restful, dinosaur, startup, techcrunch, indexing, documentation, association, underage, #fail, #API, #API, #patents, #CHM
Klout is building PageRank for people. You get a score between 0-100 based on how large your social graph is and how much you influence it. They also have a simple API and have been kind enough to let me use it as part of Follower so I’ve just released Follower 1.40 with Klout integration.
Follower automates the chore of following new friends on Twitter. It also somewhat automates removing traitors who don’t follow you back – as much as Twitter would let me get away with. One problem with following promiscuously is that you do end up following a lot of spammy and scammy accounts. Adding Klout helps with this as you can now say ‘follow everyone who follows me as long as their Klout score is higher than 15’. This keeps some of the riff raff out. And if a follower’s score rises above the threshold then they’ll be admitted into the club.
You can also use Klout to weed out existing follows with a low Klout. In this mode anyone below a configurable score will be added to the remove list even if they are following you back.
The only snag I hit with API is that while you can lookup a user by Twitter ID the ID isn’t returned in the response. If you query multiple IDs at a time you don’t always get a full set of results so without the ID you can’t reliably tell which result is associated with each ID. For this reason I’m only looking up one score at a time. Twitter has nice bulk methods to grab IDs for up to 5,000 friends or followers, it would nice if Klout could match this or at least fix the ID issue. This is a small problem though and having an automated way of detecting the quality of Twitter accounts is a great addition to Follower. If you use Twitter check it out.
CNET stopped being a useful source of downloads for me ages ago. Over the lifetime of my account I’ve had nearly 100,000 downloads through CNET, but these days it’s one or two a week. I left my products up there anyway, but I’ve just asked them to remove everything they have listed for Catfood Software.
The reason is that CNET has rolled out a download manager that wraps every single download. Instead of the customer getting the product they thought they were downloading they are dumped into a CNET experience that tries to install a toolbar and push Bing / MSN into your browser defaults. Yuck.
It’s one thing for a vendor to partner this way. It’s quite another to roll it out site wide with little notification and no opt out, let alone a revenue share. CNET sell this as being about analytics. Of course it’s all about referral dollars. This isn’t the experience I want for my customers and so I’m pulling the plug on download.com.
I've just made a new time lapse video using web cams from the Catfood WebCamSaver directory:
If you haven't seem the time zone version it's a completely different take.
Two new Catfood releases.
Catfood WebCamSaver 3.10 adds support for simultaneous updates in 4 and 16-cam modes. The WebCam Directory has also been completely overhauled. WebCamSaver is a rather voyeuristic screensaver that lets you watch live feeds from around the world. As well as a screensaver the feed is available in my World Webcams Google Gadget.
Catfood PdfScan 1.20 follows hot on the heels of 1.10. The main update is showing a preview of each scanned page which is super handy if you always forget which way pages are supposed to go in your document feeder. Mentioning no names…
Three recent Catfood Software updates:
Catfood Earth 3.10 includes rotation to longitude / solar time, volcanoes, a screen saver, time zone updates and more. Catfood Earth uses satellite imagery and a variety of data feeds to render jaw-dropping live desktop wallpaper.
More...