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)

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 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.

I actually liked the name PodShow, but now they renamed themselves to Mevio. I guess Metube was already taken… we already know youtube was. Here is a slogan for you Adam: “Mevio: Video for the me generation”

Chris Finke sent around an email this morning stating that Mahalo Share is now a recommended Firefox add-on! If you haven’t tried Mahalo Share, or don’t know what it does, here is a description ripped from the Mozilla site.

Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks. Press Ctrl+Shift+S (or Apple+Shift+S) to share the page you’re viewing. (There is a toolbar button as well.) Then, fill out the form that pops up and check the services that you want to post to. Mahalo Share will automatically post your link to all of your services. If the services you are posting to go down (as Twitter often does), Share will save the link it was sending and try again later. When this happens, an icon will appear in the status bar to notify you. As of version 1.3, you can store your account passwords with Mahalo so that you can use Mahalo Share on more than one computer without retyping all of your account information. Just click the checkbox titled “Link my login data with my Mahalo account” in the Mahalo Share options dialog.

Update: garthk on twitter asks: @rays, what are Mahalo Share’s benefits or hazards vs Shareaholic?

So Chris Finke gave the following answer:

• benefits: it auto-submits to each service, without you having to take further action for each one
• shareaholic just opens the submit window for each service, pre-filled
• drawbacks: doesn’t have as many services, doesn’t give you statistical information like shareaholic does

With the response video:

Funnier than a fat kid with a light saber.

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