Tweets for 2007-03-31

• Went to gym; had lunch; now back to reading. Can’t wait ’till this all ends May 5th. #

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Tweets for 2007-03-30

• Anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of “My Sweet Lord’? http://urltea.com/2w0 #
• Reading Sister Carrie. Dreiser is not as bad as I remembered. #
• Looks like I’m heading uptown. Between meetings and random stuff, I think I’ve spent one day actually doing my job this week. #
• Posted via youtube hours ago; still othing on blog. Why can’t they just give me the code? Missing tweet, too, so maybe it’s me? #
• Figured out YouTube. It was me. #
• Taking stock of the window box. Basil made it through the Winter but couldn’t handle spring. #

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Shift Happens

Stumbled across this while looking for ways to drive home the need for keeping up with technology in the classroom. I remember seeing it go around about six months ago, too. About half of it could be cut, especially the gratuitous comparisons between the U.S. and China and India. In fact, if I use it, I will cut about half of it. But the clip does do a good job of highlighting the volume of information students are faced with. And by implication, the need to navigate it more efficiently.

People just can’t be ten–or twenty–years behind the times any more. They’ll drown. And take their students down with them.

Tweets for 2007-03-29

• Clearly, I need to read to read LiveJournal more. People come to town and I don’t even know about it. Completely missed R, almost missed B. #
• Nowhere is the generation gap more evident than Higher Ed. How to you explain feeds to people who don’t get *email*? #
• @Scott: You’d rather user support? #

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Writer’s block

Today I’m working on a presentation for our annual Technology Day on RSS (and other) feeds an aggregators. It’s surprisingly difficult to describe feeds in a way that makes them sound interesting, but not scary, and doesn’t insult the listeners intelligence. There is surprisingly little room between “I know four-year-olds who do this daily. No, really, I do,” and “Atom and the two RSS specifications describe XML documents used to transmit information about periodically updated content via HTTP…” It’s the jargon that’s the real stumbling block. I think it’s important for people to come out with a basic vocabulary, but the concepts are so simple that there is a risk of the audience feeling like I’m talking to them as if they are idiots. Just throwing out the terms cold, though, is intimidating.

Take “aggregator,” for instance. On the one hand, if you don’t stop to explain it, nobody knows what you’re talking about. On the other, try telling a room full of academics, with a straight face, that an aggregator is a thing that aggregates.

Maybe I’m taking the wrong approach. Maybe something more along the lines of “Syndication Posited as an Approach to Modeling a Hermeneutics of the Blogoshpere…”

Just kidding. I’ll save that for the dissertation.

*cough*

Tweets for 2007-03-27

• “use of unitialized value in sprintf” ranks right behind “license and registration, please” in my list of least favorite phrases ever. #
• Meetings melt my brain. #

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Tweets for 2007-03-26

• Read a little Chaucer, now on to Dreiser. bleh. #
• Just spilled coffee on white pants. Ugh. #
• Hah! Email from Sun about “upgrading” from Linux to Solaris. Wipe the drive and start over is a funny kind of upgrade. #
• “inability to access the network due to a software license failure” means someone forgot to pay the bill, I think. #
• Thought for the day: Documentation is like sex; when it’s good, it’s very, very good, and when it’s bad, it’s better than nothing.–Dick Bra #

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Why does lack of business potential for users make something bad?

This post by Kathy sierra is making the rounds today, trotting out the tired argument about how social networks are bad because they sap productivity. New target, same old song and dance. First, it’s not true. Many people feed off the manic energy, to a point at least.

More importantly, I just don’t get the mentality behind it. I don’t understand people who look at social networks and are only capable of asking “does this make me less productive?”, “how can it make me more productive?” or “how can I use this to further my own projects?” (Side note: the corollary of that of course is “how can I, as a user, not an implementer, make a couple bucks off of this new system someone else is letting me use for free?” Not that I’m accusing Kathy of this, but for some people it seems to be the logical conclusion of the train of thought.) Every time I read something like this, I think I slip a little bit closer to that generic marxism people are always accusing academics of. I want to say things like “because [insert social network here, probably twitter this week] doesn’t make me a better corporate drone doesn’t make it bad.”

Social networks don’t have to make us more productive. The point is to let us socialize in new ways, or at least to reclaim some of the ground we’ve lost over the last decade to longer work days, longer work weeks, and shorter lunches. It’s the “social” in social networks that’s the important part.

God forbid people have a little fun now and then.

twittersleep: caching twitter while AFK

Ok, last post about twitter for a while, but I thought I’d share.

One of the things I don’t like about twitter is logging on in the morning to find more tweets than my client will display. Going to twitter.com and hitting “next” a few times isn’t really any answer; it would take all morning at the current refresh rate. To address the issue, I whipped up a little Perl script called twittersleep. It uses LWP::UserAgent and XML::Simple for the grunt work. LWP::UserAgent is part of the core, and if you do any web work at all, you probably have XML::Simple.

When I’m going to be AFK for a while, I run twittersleep. It grabs my friends’ statuses from the XML API every five minutes and logs them to a simple *DBM database.

When I come back, I run twittersleep -r to read them back out. Currently it generates a simple text dump suitable for passing to less or parsing with grep.

You can grab the code here.

Just installed twitter updater

Giving Victoria Chan’s Twitter Updater WP plugin a whirl. I’m not sure, yet, whether I like the idea or not.