The Slakinski Log

Friend and co-worker Chris Miller just posted about one of his fans wife of his podcast has passed away, and learned of such fact via Twitter. Here is the full story reposted as well as a link to chip in to a fund to help with expenses.

C.A. Sizemore has been a fan of The Secret Lair since day one. He has provided us with feedback and even contributed a manuscript that we simply haven’t gotten around to publishing yet. C.A. has been with us since long before The Secret Lair became a reality: he followed us here from The House of the Harping Monkey and Volcanicast, where he was a loyal, involved fan. I’m hard-pressed to think of a podcast that C.A. doesn’t listen to and equally hard-pressed to think of a podcaster who doesn’t know him. He is the best kind of fan we could possibly ask for and we are all lucky to have him.

This morning C.A.’s wife, Kelly, passed away unexpectedly. Our hearts, thoughts, prayers and deepest condolences are with C.A. in this difficult and tragic time.

If you have ever thought about donating to any of the podcasts that I produce, I’d ask that you please visit the donation site established by Mae Breakall and give what you can to help C.A. cover the expenses that tragic events like these always incur.

(originally posted by Kris Johnson at The Secret Lair)

I have to admit, these games are fun. I don’t tend to play GTA as a story, I just like jacking cars and shooting at things. I rememeber GTA I and how bad the graphics were but also how fun it was to play. It looks like GTA IV doesn’t just look good but its still fun to play. Check out all the leaked videos and pix over at mahalo if your even remotely interested in the game.

So Jason over at SDF1.net got us moved over to Dreamhost from his dedicated DSL line and off of MoveableType and onto Wordpress Which is great because I’ve been dying to try some of the cool plugins that Chris Miller put together for Mahalo. They are currently unreleased, but I’m sure once we get through the testing we will make them available for all to play with.

Now I just need a nicer template since I lost the really nice one I had that Sean Jackson did (also from Mahalo) for me a few years ago Any volunteers?

Dave Winer is looking at starting a new podcast client and I wish him the best of luck but as a friend I need to warn him its not going to be easy.

Back in early 2005 there was an arms race between iPodderX (which I co-wrote with August and later with Sean for the Windows version) and iPodder Lemon (now Juice) It was an arms race because we were racing to create better features than the other application, to give users what they wanted, to give podcasters what they wanted and to add value in our commercial client over their free open source one.

When Apple released iTunes that supported podcatching (I was there at the event) my heart first sank but after looking through the features my spirt had lifted. Both clients were more feature rich and provided so much more… Apple got so much wrong from what we could gather based on over a year of development and talking with users (podcasters and listeners). We were wrong! not sure if it was that we had too many feature, we were not user friendly enough or the fact it was built into iTunes but our sales dropped like a rock and I noticed new downloads for iPodder Lemon(Juice) also fell.

We changed directions and tried to be a feed reader as well, but people were moving to bloglines or staying with NetNewsWire or some other RSS reader to even try us… plus they all offered some level of podcatching built in as well. We lost our market. More importantly the sails got knocked out of the innovation that was happening on a weekly basis in the space. Two big innovations that were already in iPodderX and iPodder Lemon that iTunes has yet to support is OPML as a subscription format (which is what dave wants to do) and Bittorrent or some other P2P method of distribution.

During FanExpo I asked a panel of video podcasters about which technology helped them do what they do now and rise in fame and ‘fortune’; Podcasting/RSS or YouTube. They all said YouTube. Maybe what the world needs is not another podcatching client but rather a YouTube for audio…

Dave is going to have a hard time building community momentum on this, I’ll help in anyway I can but I know its going to be an uphill climb.

I started working on a Python class to support working with Mahalo data, this is by far not complete but I thought i’d get this out there to help inspire some people

    1 class mhoPageOPML(object):
    2     import xml.dom.minidom, urllib2
    3     from xml.dom.minidom import Node
    4
    5     def __init__(self, url):
    6         self.url = url
    7
    8         f = self.urllib2.urlopen(‘%s?action=opml‘ % url)
    9         self.opml = f.read()
   10
   11     def getTop7(self):
   12         top7 = self.getSectionLinks(‘The Mahalo Top 7‘)
   13
   14         return top7
   15
   16
   17     def getSectionLinks(self, section):
   18         links = []
   19         site = {}
   20
   21         doc = self.xml.dom.minidom.parseString(self.opml)
   22
   23         for node in doc.getElementsByTagName(“outline“):
   24             text = node.getAttribute(“text“)
   25             if text == section:
   26                 for n2 in node.getElementsByTagName(‘outline‘):
   27                     if n2.getAttribute(‘type‘) == ‘link‘:
   28                         site = {‘title‘ : n2.getAttribute(“text“), ‘url‘ : n2.getAttribute(‘url‘)}
   29                         links.append(site)
   30         return links
   31
   32     def sections(self):
   33         sections = []
   34
   35         doc = self.xml.dom.minidom.parseString(self.opml)
   36
   37         for node in doc.getElementsByTagName(‘outline‘):
   38             if node.hasChildNodes() and len(node.parentNode.getAttribute(‘text‘)) == 0:
   39                 sections.append(node.getAttribute(‘text‘))
   40         return sections

Mahalo is looking for a developer to build multiple Mahalo IE Toolbar technologies. You should be familiar with desktop application programming under Windows 2000, XP and Vista, as well as MS Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. Should understand multi-threaded development models and have an understanding of general web technologies and how to interface the Toolbar with remote websites. Core competencies: C++, MFC, ATL, COM, ActiveX, Win32, Win16.

This is a highly visible, front line position in a high-profile search startup. The company is backed by all-stars Sequoia (Google, Youtube), Newscorp, CBS, Alon Musk (Paypal), and several others of note. The ideal person is a self starter with the “general get it factor”. You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence. The culture of the company is one where you’ll work hard and play hard, and new features and ideas are very rapidly prototyped and made live. We release and iterate in fast cycles. The opportunity to work with a world-class internet startup in Los Angeles is rare. We expect the coming year to be extremely exciting, with high growth and great rewards. Come be a part of it!

Send resume to mark at mahalo dot com, or myself and I can forward it along.

Global Hermit who has been with Leo on Call for Help and now on Lab with Leo took this great pic of Leo, Cali and myself the last time I was on Call for Help ( awhile ago)

Jason pointed me to Bitty Browser after I showed off Grazr Both are really neat technologies that make browsing small and portable, and both use OPML to work their magic! hazah!!

Dave Winer creator of all things good (RSS, OPML) is moving closer to the final spec for OPML 2.0 and has just released some comments based on feedback the OPML Community has been giving! Its great to watch this as it all unfolds.