The Slakinski Log

Wow this is pretty cool when you get good blogging software for a devicethat fits in the palm of your hand granted I could blog from my old palm 3 but it was never this easy!

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!

Have some fun this summer with these great How Tos from the How To team over at Mahalo this week! Enjoy over the summer with friends and family

How to Make Spring Rolls
How to Make Bread Pudding
How to Make a White Russian
How to Make a Sex on the Beach
How to Make a Long Island Iced Tea
How to Make Potato Salad
How to Make Egg Salad
How to Make Iced Coffee

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.

I’ve installed the WordPress plugin for Seesmic, which allows you now to post Video comments to this blog! all you need is flash, a webcam and a microphone… oh and a seesmic account

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.

I was working on an RSS feed generator for something at Mahalo and whenever I do such things I go through the RSS 2.0 Spec again to see what elements I should add to make the feed as useful as can be for 3rd party developers. I noticed a little used item called which is to link to where people can post comments to the item. Sounds simple, but no RSS reader that I’ve ever come across will use this so I asked Dave Winer why via twitter and then 2 things happened

1) Oddly enough eariler in the day before any prompting from me, Dave added to Scripting News’s RSS Feed 2) He replied to my question with this flickr link: http://flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/1876196880/ and he couldn’t have been more correct.

Come on guys, if your going to support a spec, support ALL of it!