The Slakinski Log

The Mahalo Daily Team just did a vid on one of my favorite subjects - Sailing!

More:

• How to Sail
• Sailing

As seen in the below video Mahalo now supports the Wiki Auto-Discovery button. Which is a button that indicates to you quickly and easily that you can also contribute to this page!

Today I had a large (re: 4GB) file that I needed to do some search and replace on, and none of my text editors including my beloved Textmate could even open the file. So I turned to the most trusty of tools in my tool chest which is python!

f = open(infile, “r”)
n = open(outfile, “w”)
for line in f:
output = line.replace(oldtext, newtext)
n.write(output)

In just a couple of minutes I had a new file with the changes I needed. Its pretty basic stuff, but non-programmers (especially those that don’t use languages like python) might not think of trying.

We are hiring once again at Mahalo! We are looking for that person that can help us scale as our usage keeps going up, up, and up, especially compared to those other guys! So if your looking a new gig then I’d urge you to read Jason’s post “Systems Engineer, Los
Angeles” to get the full job description.

I’m releasing the iPodderX Python codebase As-Is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

This is the codebase that was to go into Transistr, it has never seen the light of day before now and has not seen much testing.  I have made changes to the stock Bittorrent codebase and Feedparser, so you might want to look those over before updating them to newer versions.

I’m releasing this with zero support. If you’d like to use this code in a commercial application in part or in full please contact me at ray dot slakinski at gmail dot com

Update: I chose a CC license for the iPX Python code instead of a standard GPL, LGPL, MIT, Python or even a BSD license because right now I just want the code to be out there as a reference. If you want to use the code in a project feel free to email me and I’m sure we can work something out. As the license states, you can read and distribute the code free of charge, but I still maintain ownership of the code so please do not use it in full or in part without my written permission. Thanks

Update 2: Feel free to use the code locally and change it if you want to get it to work for you, I didn’t mean to say in my first update that you couldn’t at all play with it or upgrade your existing copy of iPodderX engine.

Before we start, lets first start with a picture:

This shows sales over a 4 year period. The 3rd blip right at the end was iPodderX going away and was suppose to turn into Transistr.

When iTunes 4.9 was announced, August and I were right there for the announcement. Later we went on TWiT to talk about it, we did our best to stay positive, hiding our fear in talk about fish cheeks

We already moved iPodderX from Podcatching client to into a standard RSS reader for feed reading and podcasting. But when we decided that, we put ourselves right into the mix with NetNewsWire and NewsFire which where very popular applications that did podcasting and RSS reading very well as well. It was easy for those applications to add good enough Podcasting support. From what I know, no one ended up using iPodderX to read news feeds.

As sales were dropping like a rock, day jobs were becoming demanding, and stress on august and I’s friendship also became very strained. We decided to stop working on it and move on to other things for a bit. August has been doing great work with his FoggyNoggin software creating very useful mac utilities, and I moved over to the web,  now working full time with Mahalo.com!

I’d like to also note now the RSS application space on the desktop has changed drastically. NewsFire and NetNewsWire are now free, RSS is now in the browser (the browser itself and web apps like google reader and bloglines) and all handle RSS enclosures (what makes podcasting possible)

One last thing to leave on, iPodder (not releated to iPodderX) who is now known as Juice hasn’t been updated in eons and no other development has been made with any of the other podcatchers. We were not the only casuality.

If you have questions feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to answer them.

 Check out what August has to say regarding all of this.

Update: Talked with Andrew Grumet who now works for PodShow and this downloads chart looks very similar to ours.

On twitter ages ago I wrote pyFlickrFan.  I thought I might have turned it into an app like what we did with pyPodder into iPodderX. August and I were even talking about it on and off.  Then the last keynote happened and it sounded like Apple was building all the functionality into Apple TV.  So the project sat dormant on my machine running every once in a while.

So I decided now to release the code incase anyone else wanted to check it out.

And here is the source

ps: Thanks to Dave Winer who came up with the concept and original FlickrFan app

Today I posted a message in the Google Group for Mahalo Development that talked about a new set of tools for 3rd party developers.

Along with Mahalo Social we deployed a new Special page to handle feeds for that data. We are providing them in Atom, RSS2 and JSON formats (we just added JSON a couple of days ago)

import simplejson, urllib2
f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Feeds?group=people
                            &un=rslakinski&action=links&type=json');
data = f.read()
links = simplejson.loads(data)
del(data)
if len(links) > 0:
    for link in links:
        print 'Title: %s' % link['linktitle']
        print ‘Description: %s’ % link['linkdescription']
        print ‘URL: %s’ % link['linkurl']
        print ‘Submitted On: %s\r\n’ % link['linkpub_date']

Great job Veronica and everyone else on the Mahalo Daily Team!