CES (Consumer Electronics Show) – First weeks of January in Vegas
Next one: January 7-10 2010

The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a non-public trade show held each January in Las Vegas, Nevada, and is sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association. Here’s where Bill Gates did all his famous keynotes.

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) – First weeks of February usually in Monterrey, CA.
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference that defines its mission as “ideas worth spreading”. The lectures, also called TED Talks, cover a broad set of topics including science, arts and design, politics, education, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment. Speakers have included such people as former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Nobel laureates James D. Watson, Murray Gell-Mann, and Al Gore, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Billy Graham.

SXSW (South by Southwest) – First weeks of March
South by Southwest (SXSW) is a set of interactive, film, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring in Austin, Texas. SXSW first began in 1987 and is centered on the downtown Austin Convention Center. Each of the three parts runs relatively independently, with different start and end dates.

WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference) – First weeks of June in San Francisco
The conference is primarily used by Apple to showcase its new software and technologies for developers, as well as offering hands-on labs and feedback sessions

E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) – Usually the third week of May in Los Angeles.
The Electronic Entertainment Expo, commonly known as E3, is an annual trade show for the computer and video games industry presented by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). It is used by many video game developers to show off their upcoming games and game-related hardware.

In 2009 it was held from July 11 to July 13. E3 2010 will take place from June 15 to 17 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

JavaOne – Between April and June in San Francisco.
JavaOne is an annual conference (since 1996) put on by Sun Microsystems to discuss Java technologies, primarily among Java developers. JavaOne is held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California usually between April and June and typically runs from Sunday to Friday. Technical sessions on a variety of topics are held during the day. In the evening, Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions are held at the Moscone Center and surrounding hotels. BOF sessions allow people to focus in on a particular aspect of Java technology.

Google I/O – Last week of May in San Francisco
Google I/O was a web developer-focused conference organized by Google to discuss web applications using Google and open web technologies.

TechCrunch50 – Third week of September in San Francisco
TechCrunch50 was a conference held at the Design Center Concourse in San Francisco, California on September 8-10, 2008, hosted by TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis. Its aim was to find the best Web 2.0 start-ups and launch them in front of the industry’s most influential venture capitalists, companies and press.[1] TechCrunch50 was the 2nd of its kind, following the TechCrunch40 Conference of 2007.
The next one will be on September 14-15, 2009

I learned the trick from a couple of other videos in youtube, however I thought they were badly shot and I decided to make my own version from the point of view of the person taking the bra off.

Wish I someone had taught me this trick years ago, thanks Internet for being such a great teacher.

shameless marketing plug
And I’d like to use the occasion to let you know that the work of winter has resulted in a new version of FrostWire 4.18.0, make sure you download it from the official website only.

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If you recently got your first credit card, please remember these very simple rules.

1. Don’t buy shit you can’t afford
2. Always pay your balance in full

If you follow these simple rules, you won’t ever be affected by stupid interest rate hikes since you’ll owe nothing to the bank.

To explain a little further rule #2, when your credit card statement comes, DON’T EVER pay the “Minimum Amount Due“, pay everything you charged for during the last period, leave the balance in 0, it will give you a warm fuzzy feeling in your belly to know the bank won’t stick it up your ass anytime soon.

If you can’t pay everything you charged, it means you didn’t follow rule #1, shame on you!

Another tip, don’t use your credit card for the “points” or the “Rewards”, it’s all a load of crap.

Remember, a Credit Card is not Free Money. Believe it or not there seems to be a shitload of people out there that don’t seem to follow these 2 simple rules and now they’re “pwned” by the banks and crying to papa Obama.

Again…

DON’T BUY SHIT YOU CAN’T AFFORD, AND ALWAYS PAY YOUR BALANCE IN FULL

Today, I took my kid to a pig farm near Mexico City, I think I let him get a little too close to the animals, FML

But more seriously, leave a comment if you think the whole Swine Flu is total BS to keep once again the world in fear and have them worry about stuff that doesn’t really matter.

Just check the price of oil today (dropping), and the prices of small pharmaceutical companies on the stock market (some doubling today)

World Domination BS… don’t fall for it.

Who benefits from Swine Flu

• The US tourism industry by keeping millions of dollars from going to mexico. Just one airplane going to Cancun from say Florida, will take about 300 passengers. In average each passenger will spend at least about $1,000. That’s $300k a pop. I’d imagine there’s at least 10 flights a day going to Cancun from several destinations in the US. That’s $3MM that stay in the US or go somewhere else. Now multiply this by the number of touristic destinations in Mexico plus flights that come from other countries. Their economy must be bleeding tens of millions a day because of this.
• Companies that use pork derived products, now they can get pork for a lot cheaper. Think McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burguer King, Super market chains. Buy low, sell high
• 3M has had to step up their mask production to keep up with the demand coming from CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc.
• Pharmaceutical companies related to vaccine R&D

In the meantime, I see nothing but a pattern of destructive media against mexico, first it was the Drug lord wars, then Swine Flu, and more recently an Earth Quake (I totally believe the US must have weapons to produce earthquakes, it’s the perfect attack, you can blame it on mother nature)

The Festo Bionic Learning Network.

Repost if you can. This ad is the first TV Ad ever to be run nationwide in Pro of Marijuana legalization. It started today, 4/20 “four twenty” a date that matches the pot-iconic number. It’s time it’s legalized, it’s not like they’re not smoking, you might as well tax it, create jobs, export it and explode a billion dollar industry. If America does it, the rest of the world will follow, and damn it, it’ll be cool as hell.

ispak pointed out that it was a bad idea reading one byte at the time, also I had a gay ass try/catch that didn’t catch any exception :p

So now I read 16 byte chunks, and I also take care of the file ending. The previous version used to print the file ending with a bunch of null bytes. Now it stops reading at the end, and formats the output accordingly.

Here’s the new source:

//HexViewer.java
import java.io.*;

public final class HexViewer {
    public final static void printFile(String filePath) {
        try {
            File f = new File(filePath);
            BufferedInputStream bis =
                new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(f));

            byte[] chunk = null;
            int readStatus = 0;
            while (true) {
                chunk = new byte[16];
                readStatus = bis.read(chunk, 0, 16);
                char[] line = new char[16];

                if (readStatus == -1)
                    break;

                for (byte i=0; i < readStatus; i++) {
                    int readByte = (chunk[i] < 0) ? (-1 * (int) chunk[i]) : chunk[i];
                    String paddingZero = (readByte < 16) ? "0" : "";
                    System.out.print(paddingZero + Integer.toHexString(readByte).toUpperCase() + " ");
                    line[i] = (readByte >= 33 && readByte <= 126) ? (char) readByte : '.';
                }

                //We add some padding to print the text line right below the one above.
                String padding = new String();
                if (readStatus < 16) {
                    for (byte i=0; i < 16-readStatus; i++) {
                        padding += "   ";
                    }
                }

                System.out.println(padding + new String(line));
            }
        } catch (Exception e1) { e1.printStackTrace(); }
    }

    public final static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length == 0)
            return;

        printFile(args[0]);
    }
}

And see how it now handles file endings when the file size is not a multiple of 16 :p

I found many similarities between London life and New York life, but as I went outside every day I tried to put together a small list of things that I found curious from the perspective of a 4 year old New Yorker.

CCTV, CCTV, CCTV! From the moment you step foot in the city there’s a very clear message put into your head. CCTV!, Big brother’s watching!. The scare tactic seems to work, all my friends seemed to tell me, don’t do this, don’t do that, they’re watching. I personally think it’s more of a deterrent than anything. Nobody can possibly be watching so many cameras, they are probably used for “forensic” purposes.

Pound Currency design FAIL. I understand having different widths for blind people, but they made them way too wide to fit on a wallet. Also they don’t have their denomination shown on all 4 corners, for the tourist, if you insert bills backwards you have to take them out to see how much each bill is, slowing cashier lines with tourists.

They just don’t fit on my “American Sized” wallet. I guess you have to either have a bigger wallet, or fold them twice. Notice how you can’t tell what bills are what (If you’re a noob with the currency of course), no numbers on all corners.

One thing I loved though on the 10 pound bill, freaking Charles Darwin is in it!

Now see the mighty dollar (Euros have the numbers on all 4 corner) how good the “user experience” is (at least for the non blind)

London.Underground = NewYork.Subway;
London.Subway = NewYork.UnderPass
What the New Yorker calls the “Subway”, the Londoneer calls the “Underground”. Whoever designed the Logo of their system was a genius, it’s a very versatile logo. Now, here comes a weird thing, Waht we New Yorkers call an “Underpass” The Londoneer calls “Subway”. This little detail had me J-Walking a couple of big avenues with all my luggage right after I came out of the “Underground” , and I couldn’t find for the life of me a pedestrian area to cross, and I kept thinking that some parts of the city weren’t that pedestrian-friendly… Me and other tourists just had gotten out of what we call “Subway” when we saw a sign for the “Subway” again we didn’t use it and we J-Walked it baby. Then it was easy to cross big avenues. In london Underpass = Subway.

Nokia > iPhone
Most people have Nokia phones there. Didn’t see a single iphone among my friends. Saw an Android though

The underground has no exits, only ways out.

When you cross the street they always make you waste time on this buffer zone, many of the times lots of pedestrians end up waiting in the middle. Maybe its a combination of making car traffic flow faster, and also to help tourists remember cars are coming the other way.

It seems that the city is a very democratic place and that it has lots of issues, during the 6 days I was there I saw protests from very different groups. It also seems that there’s this love for Rollerblading like nowhere else, saw big crowds of Rollerbladers (wearing funny customs some times) in several occasions. Not sure if they were also protesting.

Maybe I’m just used to it, but I think the water in New York tastes 1000 times better than the water in London. There’s something in the London water after you swallow, it never seems to quench my thirst, it has to be extremely cold for it to feel the same way, and it was my experience that everywhere that I went I had to ask for a lot of ice. It must be an european thing (my wife doesn’t drink iced water either, nor does her family, they can even drink room temperature beer, yuck) drinking water at its natural temperature, maybe it’s part of the energy culture in America that we don’t give a crap to spend energy in cooling water?

Overall, I loved the experience, the night life seems very much alive and real. Heard some stories of pickpocketing and of areas that I shouldn’t dare visit and this made me think that it may be a city a little more dangerous than New York.

Maybe it’s the week dollar, I don’t know, but everything felt to me that it was double or triple the price than in New York. I only spent money on food, transportation and internet connectivity, other than that I don’t think it was worth it for someone who comes from New York to do any shopping over there and I certainly didn’t spend a “p” on anything outside my most basic needs.

I was playing with a hex editor recently and then I thought it would be pretty easy to make a program to output what you see on a text editor. Here’s a quick & dirty Hex Visor I wrote in like 5 minutes with Java. It shows 15 bytes per line, and on the right side it prints all the visible characters of the ascii table, the non-visible ones are replaced with “.”

Enjoy:

//HexViewer.java
import java.io.*;

public final class HexViewer {
    public final static void printFile(String filePath) {
        File f;
        try {
            f = new File(filePath);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return;
        }

        try {

            FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(f);
            while (fis.available() > 0) {
                char[] line = new char[16];
                for (int i=0; i < 16; i++) {
                    int readByte = fis.read();
                    String paddingZero = (readByte < 16) ? "0" : "";
                    System.out.print(paddingZero + Integer.toHexString(readByte) + " ");
                    line[i] = (readByte >= 33 && readByte <= 126) ? (char) readByte : '.';
                }
                System.out.println(new String(line));
            }
        } catch (Exception e1) { e1.printStackTrace(); }
    }

    public final static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length == 0)
            return;

        printFile(args[0]);
    }
}

Usage:

java HexViewer <path to file> | less

java HexViewer Desktop/Puppet.wmv | less

30 26 b2 75 8e 66 cf 11 a6 d9 00 aa 00 62 ce 6c 0&.u.f.......b.l
74 14 00 00 00 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 01 02 a1 dc t...............
ab 8c 47 a9 cf 11 8e e4 00 c0 0c 20 53 65 68 00 ..G.........Seh.
00 00 00 00 00 00 f4 10 68 f9 49 76 2e 43 b5 9f ........h.Iv.C..
09 0a 2d 19 45 7c 32 3a 24 00 00 00 00 00 70 ee ..-.E|2:$.....p.
14 06 fb da c7 01 28 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 8c ......(.........
bb 53 00 00 00 00 10 88 dd 52 00 00 00 00 b8 0b .S.......R......
00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 40 1f 00 00 40 1f ..........@...@.
00 00 90 50 02 00 b5 03 bf 5f 2e a9 cf 11 8e e3 ...P....._......
00 c0 0c 20 53 65 61 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 11 d2 ....Sea.........
d3 ab ba a9 cf 11 8e e6 00 c0 0c 20 53 65 06 00 ............Se..
33 10 00 00 a9 46 43 7c e0 ef fc 4b b2 29 39 3e 3....FC|...K.)9>
de 41 5c 85 27 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 0c 65 .A\.'..........e
00 6e 00 2d 00 61 00 75 00 00 00 5d 8b f1 26 84 .n.-.a.u...]..&.
45 ec 47 9f 5f 0e 65 1f 04 52 c9 1a 00 00 00 00 E.G._.e..R......
00 00 00 02 01 ea cb f8 c5 af 5b 77 48 84 67 aa ..........[wH.g.
8c 44 fa 4c ca 62 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 00 00 .D.L.b..........
00 01 00 0c 00 02 00 02 00 00 00 49 00 73 00 56 ...........I.s.V
00 42 00 52 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 34 00 00 .B.R.........4..
00 06 00 00 00 44 00 65 00 76 00 69 00 63 00 65 .....D.e.v.i.c.e
00 43 00 6f 00 6e 00 66 00 6f 00 72 00 6d 00 61 .C.o.n.f.o.r.m.a
00 6e 00 63 00 65 00 54 00 65 00 6d 00 70 00 6c .n.c.e.T.e.m.p.l
00 61 00 74 00 65 00 00 00 4c 00 31 00 00 00 00 .a.t.e...L.1....
00 02 00 0c 00 02 00 02 00 00 00 49 00 73 00 56 ...........I.s.V
00 42 00 52 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 00 34 00 00 .B.R.........4..
00 0c 00 00 00 44 00 65 00 76 00 69 00 63 00 65 .....D.e.v.i.c.e
00 43 00 6f 00 6e 00 66 00 6f 00 72 00 6d 00 61 .C.o.n.f.o.r.m.a
00 6e 00 63 00 65 00 54 00 65 00 6d 00 70 00 6c .n.c.e.T.e.m.p.l
00 61 00 74 00 65 00 00 00 4d 00 50 00 40 00 4d .a.t.e...M.P.@.M
00 4c 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 2e 00 03 00 04 00 00 .L..............
00 57 00 4d 00 2f 00 57 00 4d 00 41 00 44 00 52 .W.M./.W.M.A.D.R
00 43 00 50 00 65 00 61 00 6b 00 52 00 65 00 66 .C.P.e.a.k.R.e.f
00 65 00 72 00 65 00 6e 00 63 00 65 00 00 00 a7 .e.r.e.n.c.e....
3f 00 00 00 00 01 00 34 00 03 00 04 00 00 00 57 ?......4.......W
00 4d 00 2f 00 57 00 4d 00 41 00 44 00 52 00 43 .M./.W.M.A.D.R.C
00 41 00 76 00 65 00 72 00 61 00 67 00 65 00 52 .A.v.e.r.a.g.e.R
00 65 00 66 00 65 00 72 00 65 00 6e 00 63 00 65 .e.f.e.r.e.n.c.e
00 00 00 b0 06 00 00 74 d4 06 18 df ca 09 45 a4 .......t......E.
ba 9a ab cb 96 aa e8 a4 0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................

This how it looks on a full blown hex editor like HexEdit:

The Code of HexViewer.java on emacs:

Screenshot of the output:

Homework
Hack the code so that it ouputs the first column shown on the HexEdit screenshot. That column represents the byte position of each row. It's basically a counter incremented 16 units at the time, and shown in Hex.

• American Airlines for the first time had really good food during the flight. Also the movies on demand rocked, I could watch Valkyrie and Yes Man.
• As we started to descend I realized I would not see the sun again during the whole vacation. Anywhere from 10,000 meters to like 100mts from the ground there were layers and layeres of clouds and fog.
• Subway cars are tiny



• The subway system is a piece of cake
• Every thing is twice as expensive as in New York, and it pisses me off
• There’s a never ending drizzle
• At first I thought the whole place would sound like I was in a harry potter movie, so far I’ve only heard Polish, German, Portuguese, Italian, and very little English with British Accent
• Everything reminds me of my wife, traveling with her is 10 times more fun than traveling alone
• It’s been only a few hours, hopefully I’ll get used in a couple of days on how crossing the street works, even though there’s signs in most places “Look right!” “Look Left”, I still have to think hard to figure out where cars are coming from on some streets. It’s all so crazy, they should switch.



• I forgot my power adapter
• Everything is too expensive, 20 pounds for the internet connection on the hotel is not good at all, that’s like $30 usd. In 2 days I’d pay my monthly ISP with that amount of money back home
• I still think the US is the best fucking country in the world, no matter how much people hate it, I find everything in america so convenient it’s hard to change it for any other country, at least for me

Update
In the afternoon after I walked more then I got more excited after I went to a few landmarks like the London Eye, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Picadilli Circus (below). I finally got some sleep, but I still feel that I’ve some jetlag on me, so I’ll take more of this sunday to sleep it off, that’s what vacation is for, resting.

The conclusion of the first day, most things in this country are backwards. I’ll try to make a list of them, it’s not only the driving. The bread toaster this morning was backwards, you’d get the bread down by pulling a lever up… wtf.

This is the official FrostWire T-Shirt. I contribute to this open source project to keep my java skills up to date. We had a lot of these t-shirt printed to gather donations for the project. Thanks to the people that support us there’s only a few left (only M size) so Get your T-Shirt and support FrostWire.

What is FrostWire (According to Wikipedia)
FrostWire is a peer-to-peer file sharing program for the Gnutella and BitTorrent protocols. FrostWire is written in Java, and is a fork of LimeWire, another popular Gnutella client. Released under the GNU General Public License, FrostWire is free software.

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Open a new Terminal, it should open pretty fast after that.

That’s a screnshot of my wife’s iPhone finally running skype.

We just tried it for a few minutes and:

Good

• Looks and feels like skype. It evens has all the sounds you’ll hear on the desktop client
• There’s no lag when it comes to Instant Messaging
• Sound Quality is Great
• It’s a great option to make calls when you are traveling outside of your own country. Now you can take your iPhone with you and not pay for international roaming to effing AT&T (or your carrier) and use any internet enabled WiFI network to make your calls. It will rock even more if you have SkypeOut. Update: According to GigaOM the application works only over WiFI, which is great for me. When you’re out you use the regular phone. If you travel abroad, just piggyback on some WiFI network you find.

The Bad

• We could call from her iPhone to my Skype client running on MacOSX, but I couldn’t call her back
• The iPhone’s lack of background application running kills the purpose of skype. You’d have to have the application open all the time for it to be useful. As soon as the app closes your session dies, so there’s no way to get notified if someone called or messaged you
• The contact list (if you have hundreds of contacts) was very laggy to load

So far this is just a glimpse of what phones will be able to do in the future when wireless internet will be as common as electricity. When I first heard about WiMax the first thing that came to mind was “No more cellphone bills!”. The day we have broadband internet access everywhere for free (think the wireless spectrum that will be left for grabs once the TV stations go all digital) all we’ll need is an iPod (since it supposedly runs on the iPod too) or internet mobile phone and Skype or similar VoIP software.

Related Posts
Review: Skype for iPhone. Verdict: Awesome.
Skype calls over 3G working on 3.0 Beta
Skype Now Officially Available for the iphone

I feel it’s my geek given duty to make a post about this presentation. I was lucky to finally have the time to watch their hour long presentation and Q&A session at the Game Developer Conference 2009 (which ends a couple of days from today). They could have not picked a better place to finally demo their technology.

In short, they’ve introduced a huge new concept to the video game industry, I’d call it “Cloud Gaming” to not only host the games, but also host the processing juice. You won’t need a console anymore, they keep the hardware to execute and stream the game to your screen. They support TV (with a miniconsole), PC and Mac.

So bear with me, they say they have solved the issue that you’re thinking about now, Lag. The people behind this worked on apple to create Quicktime, and they identified differences between what it takes to compress linear (regular) video, vs Interactive Video. They say their compression algorithm doesn’t take seconds of lag (like when you stream over a webcam), but miliseconds. They have custom chips to process the graphics, and I bet they might even built their own network protocol right on top of IP.

So what are some of the implications of this:

• We’ll all be able to finally play Crysis and even more demanding games on low end PCs
• No more buying more hardware, no more upgrading your PC to be able to run games, no more buying consoles
• All your games live on the platform, so you can play from any computer, and you’ll keep the state of your game until the last time you hit the Pause button
• Your friends can see you play, live. I bet we’ll be able to see live tournaments, we’ll start seeing a new breed of famous people get more attention, the Elite gamers. Imagine seeing the best Call of Duty player in the world playing live
• New Genres of video games will emerge on this platform, maybe even new genres of entertainment, think new Live Broadcast shows where participants use an avatar to either act or compete (game show)
• Game Developers not need to think of the rendering limitations that they might have nowadays, and will be able to design games that could only be imagined in the past. Render quality only thought for movies will now exist for video games, think of virtual reality now
• There’s about 100 million PCs/Macs/Laptops out there that are not ready today to play high end games, now they’ll have the possibility of playing virtually any game by installing a 1Mb plugin from OnLive.com
• Takes Piracy out of the Business Equation
• A bigger gaming audience makes an even better case for companies placing advertisement in video games, maybe there will be a lot more high end free games with bigger audiences, think the next Grand Theft Auto coming out for free with superb real life like graphics rendering, all ad sponsored and free to the consumer. The amount of people that you could have playing a great game for free would make other developers think twice about charging for their games and having their virtual worlds ad sponsored.
• No more installs
• Now multiplayer will have almost no latency since all players live inside their datacenter, you only get the latency of your ISP if there’s any
• Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft must be shitting their pants
• Services that sell used games are going to be selling vintage and their business will be reduced

However I think there will always be room for the old consoles. This is the biggest entertainment industry in the world, we have grown up with consoles for almost 30 years and there’s a lot of changes to push into people’s minds:

• How do you convince me, that finally made up my mind after years and dropped $500 on a PS3 to play with my friends in latin america online to switch to this, if my friends will probably have no way to even have access to the system in years to come?
• How do you convince PC gamers that rather pay for the hardware and pirate the games? (There’s plenty of those, probably the majority of the PC gaming population outside the US never plays for a PC game, and doesn’t get into consoles because they pirate the games) into renting or buying games on the cloud?
• How do you convince all the people that they should switch when their gaming experience depends entirely on being connected to the internet. So If the ISP is having issues I can’t play? isn’t my console awesome?

It seems that many of these complains are similar to all the complains brought upon business models that didn’t exist online and that are now thriving. This presentation left me with my mouth wide open, and I highly recommend you watch it. You’ll be blown away by the power of the UI, and how as you Browse for games, you can even see how other people are playing live, it’s like streaming video is nothing for OnLive. Really sick technology.

In the case that they succeed, I just can’t wait for them to have competition by the existing big brands, it’s going to get so interesting once cloud gaming becomes the defacto platform, maybe we as consumers will end up playing games for free, all sponsored with in game ads.

Just by listening to the guy if you’re a techie, your mind will start to fly to barely start to imagine the awesomeness of the technology that should be behind this. I can imagine anything from custom virtualization technology, to custom GPUs, custom network cards, custom network protocols on top of IP, deals with major internet backbone networks, ISPs, deals with game publishers, sick level API development, incomprehensible comprehension technology for my retard brain… when I see shit like this, I always think… how the hell is there people that still believe in god? Mankind is the closest thing there is to something like that! I’m thankful for people in this world that can think so big.

The service is supposed to launch next Winter 2009, but you can sign up to be a beta tester

From Joost. Internal (bad) joke about their competition. I don’t think this joke is very funny now.

At Hulu I bet they say “Whoost?”, specially after you see the recent numbers from comScore.

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Having all this money, there’s an ingenious evil marketing strategy you can implement that will make you look good, get your free press and it’s only going to cost about $150,000, which is the equivalent of let’s say 3.6 hours worth of your revenue, so think about it, in 3 and half hours from now you should have the budget for it.

If you have made up your mind 3.6 hours after reading this, here is what you need to do:

1) Start modifying the logo of your company on every holiday or special occasion.
2) Create and promote a competition in all schools across the country for kids to redesign an “out of the box” version of your logo, and offer $50,000 in prizes.

Open the competition to all U.S. residents between the ages of 5 and 18 who attend elementary and secondary schools (i.e. grades K-12) in the U.S. The National Winner will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to your main Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. Also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab. (This is where you’ll spend roughly $50k)

The Prizes will go as follow:

What your company gets in exchange:
Free Press on all major media outlets TWICE, once when the competition is announced and once when the winner is announced. You know that if you wanted to get that amount of attention it would cost you millions of dollars in advertising. Nothing beats free press baby!

Best of all, you will inspire millions of kids ages 5 to 18 to admire your company and your brand, you will imprint your logo in their brains permanently, they will redraw it over and over while thinking how to make your company better. They will even write essays about you.

All the kids get to think they’ll make the best logo and win the first prize (poor bastards). This is the best time to create an image of trust in their minds when they think of your brand. In the future it will be hard for them to pick any other competing company over yours. In the end they will also be more than willing to work for you once they’re old enough.

And remember… Don’t Look Evil!

Starting with my personal Twitter History
According to TwitterHolic, I joined Twitter on February 28th 2007 at 7:53:01pm. Since then I’ve sent 9,880 updates (as of this blog post), or about 13 Twitter updates a day. That probably makes me an addict since day one, and I admit it.

First Twitter was fascinating because it was a lot of fun, sharing and getting to know a little better how some “internet friends”’s lifes were like, and sharing mine with them. Now, I find myself using it in more advanced ways, and trying to analyze how trends are spread and what causes you to have an ever growing number of genuine loyal followers.

Twitter didn’t invent the idea of Micro blogging, I believe Jaiku has the credit for this, at the beginning we all opened accounts on as many services as possible (Jaiku, Twitter, identica, plurk, pwnce, friendfeed,…), but it seems Twitter’s simplicity (and board of directors and contacts) had the magic to grow virally like no other service in its field.

One thing they did right from the beginning is that they opened up the service with an accessible API for developers available from the very early days. I remember using a Python-Twitter and being fascinated with how easy it was, then I wrote integration scripts for (the almost deceased now) wedoit4you.com’s blog directory and twitter, for MyBloop.com, and scripts to send me direct messages which twitter would send to my cell phone via SMS when my linux servers were having trouble.

They had a very rough first year in terms of scalability (they still have some issues), the service was always going down, and for a time, I found myself cheating on it on plurk, service which I also found fascinating until I reached it’s “Nirvana“. Along the worth mentioning competitors there was also Pwnce.com which closed up shop last December, and I don’t blame them, they were probably in this to be number one, and they realized they just couldn’t keep up with Twitter’s popularity.

Many Twitter based services came along, and also many competitors including Facebook which copied the whole notification thing and put it on the facebook timeline feed, and it became really annoying cause with Twitter being down all the time you would be tempted to try Plurk for a while, and then ping.fm came along to post on all of them from one place.

Introducing Power Twitter
About a month ago, I found a Firefox extension called Power Twitter that made me abandon ping.fm for good, and therefore all the other micro blogging services. I’m doing all my micro blogging on twitter now.

Twitter likes to be proud of it’s simplicity, but I think little by little they will have to add functionality that us addict/advanced twitter users appreciate from extensions like Power Twitter. They should thank Power Twitter for bringing back some of us.

Where Twitter is now
So now that the Twitter service is a lot more stable, and it’s grown a lot in the past two years, it seems that it’s becoming a mainstream phenomenon. Every day you hear something on the TV, and Google News is a good way to see how much web press they get every few hours. This in my Internet business experience is the best thing that can happen to your company. The amount of genuinely interested traffic that press can get you can’t never be matched to any publicity campaign, so I’d say Twitter is already profitable by not having to spends tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in publicity.

But let’s see a little bit of numbers.

The following graphic is why I think Pwnce’s board made a wise decision to leave the race and move on to other things, they were in it to be number one or a close number two, but it didn’t happen, Twitter has no match in its arena as it is right now, and it’ll be very hard even for a company like Google to build something similar and compete, they’d be better off buying Twitter (but twitter can’t sell out for less than a 10 figure sum).

Monthly Visits: Twitter vs Jaiku vs Plurk. 54.2M as of Jan 09

As you can see, it’ll be very hard for the competitors to catch on, even for Jaiku which was the first to do this, and which got acquired by Google. As it is, they’re clearly the number one by several orders of magnitude. The others might have decent businesses going for them, but they won’t be a billion dollar landmark on the internet. Competition will always be good though.

So they beat everyone in their field very early, now it’s time to take over the world, let’s see what Twitter has to do to become a billion dollar company (be it on their own, or by valuation and acquisition)

Uniques: Twitter vs Facebook

This graphic shows unique visitor count according to compete.com for Twitter and Facebook until January 09. Twitter had 5.9 million unique visitors monthly at that time, today analysts are talking about 7 million uniques a month. Twitter is not a fool and that’s why they dind’t sell out to Facebook, they’re going for an user base as big (and of course bigger) than Facebook’s, which shows here some 68 million users as of January 09.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder has said it clearly too (and that’s why he didn’t sell out either), his goal is to connect EVERYBODY, so he’s probably looking to get traffic like that of Yahoo’s or Google’s 131 million unique visitors a day, and of course the whole planet the day we’re all finally using the internet the way we use electricity (that’s going to be a really interesting to live on).

So how can it make money you ask
Before you read this section, keep in mind that Twitter has already achieved $55 million dollars in funding. To have an idea how much this money can last, try to remember how YouTube used to spend around $1 million dollars monthly in bandwidth alone right before being acquired by Google. Twitter by no means eats that much bandwidth, and it’s a small operation of 29 employees. Making things expensive, put each employee at an average salary of $100k a year, plus let’s say $20k a month in (bandwidth, hardware, office) expenses to cover my basis, that would put their costs in around $4 million a year (I believe it’s much lower if they run things cheap like we do). They got enough money to run for 13 years if their costs didn’t grow, so let’s say they have enough money for sure to run for the next 5 years without making a penny, 5 years is a long time to make things happen on the internet. So in response to Neal’s Post, the internet and the whole financial system would have to go down for a Twipocalypse to happen, not even this economy, or a depression would make it go away, the service is FREE, and they got plenty of money to run it for a long time.

This graphic shows the number of Visits per month the site it’s getting (according to compete.com, it could be more). As of January 2009, this was 54 million visits a month. That makes around 10 visits a day per unique visitor, not bad at all, almost like email.

So let’s do a simple exercise, thinking very very small. If Twitter was run by a couple noobs that weren’t really ambitious and just wanted to make a good living off of it, they could be raking in right now, easy $12-$50 million a year without being very creative.

I’ve seen way smaller sites with good sales team selling CPM campaigns at $20, $25 and even higher. I cannot imagine a good sales team selling CPM campaings on a site like Twitter, which could be perfectly well targeted based on reading your twitter update history and that of your followers, your re-twitts, etc. Let’s use the numbers of January:

With only ONE Ad, and without growing the traffic:
54,000,000 visits at $20 CPM => $1,080,000

A small minded biz model with just ONE ad would bring now $12.96 million dollars a year minest $4M in costs and then effing taxes, would leave them with abour $4M cash in their pockets. Some people would settle for $4M a year, but this is petty cash for what it can make, and you could argue that it’s a very high CPM with this economy, but even with a lower CPM still it’d make enough to make the founders a decent living with a couple million dollars a year, my point is it can be monetized and run profitably without doing anything out of the ordinary. But of course, Twitter is not a million dollar business, it’s a billion dollar business.

Since they don’t show any obvious business model to the public now, there’s a lot of morons out there thinking the site can’t make money, or that Twitter “doesn’t know how it’s going to monetize…” YEAH RIGHT.

Still thinking on Ad-Revenue based business models, let your mind fly now, and think how much money they could make if they slowly showed us that they’re building a more powerful search engine (before Google deploys a Twitter search) and they had targeted ads on their search results just like Google’s #1 income source.

As they have more users sending updates, they’ll have more and more information about everything happening in the world, url recommendations from all over the world for the content that matters, from respectable twitter users, showing us the latest and most relevant content. If they could manage to index all of this information this information and searches would yield results as good as Google’s we have in our hands a billion dollar business with sponsored ads, just like Google’s #1 source of income.

I personally do a lot of searches every day on Twitter as it is and find a lot of stuff that’s more up to date than Google’s results, plus you find related people that know about the subjects you are looking for. That’s gotta have tremendous value for the company given that Search Traffic is the traffic that it’s monetized the best today on the web since it’s the one with the highest conversion rates for advertisers.

With it’s API alone, there’s already an ecosystem around it building companies, some may even be monetizing already and keeping it quiet. Twitter also, in another non-creative way, could charge for use of its API, but I think this would cripple their grow and deter companies away from using it. However it’s possible in the future they will have enterprise access to their API for large amounts of transactions per second and they could make a fortune on this alone, without even altering one bit the current user experience.

Another way it could be making a lot of money without ever changing the user experience would be to have data mining services for marketers. Subdivisions of Nielsen make hundreds of millions a year on data analysis services that big corporations pay for every month. Twitter has an awesome potential to analyze what people love, hate, want, bought, sold, go, read, do… only doing this I think it has one hell of a business model. It just needs to focus on growing enough so that they can have enough data to make it a really valuable source for analysis. And they’re focused on growing, growing, growing, that’s all that matters at this point.

Then, there’s other business ideas I won’t mention because I might pursue them myself, and there’s also the obvious exit strategy of getting bought by bigger companies when you have a billion dollar valuation. Potential buyers… Yahoo! for example is looking to grow it’s search by getting into social networks, I think Twitter is both an amazing social network and the next tool for searching the most up to date information. I’d even dare to call Twitter “a human powered search engine index of the most current information in the world”, and that also has to be appealing to @Google which only a week ago has created a few Twitter accounts and it’s a little scary to see Google for the first time interacting live with people, doing replies, and even RTs (Re-Tweets, a name for forwarding what others have twittered).

I hope that after doing this very simple analysis you also find it funny when you read or hear people saying that “Twitter doesn’t know how it’s going to make money”. No VCs in their right mind, in this economy, would drop $55 million dollars on a company that didn’t have their shit straight.

When I hear these kinds of comments, I feel glad there’s very naive or short sighted people in this world.

I feel better now, I just wish I could invest money in it. For now I’ll be glad to have a few more followers

I must be the Joost fanboy with the most Joost T-shirts :p, this is the last one I got though.

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I made this one at spreadshirt.com to express some pride on the work I was doing back at Temboo while I was there. One of the coolest work experiences I’ve had, everyweek I’d say I’d learn something new while I was there.

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This is an oldie that I still keep from when I used to work at LimeWire back in 2005. I had another one that said “search me”, not sure where it is now.

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002. Start using IRC.

003. Group and birth a site.

004. Experiment with research chemicals.

005. Design a three-step program.

006. Take a powerful stance for something positive and essential.

007. Regulate nothing.

008. Say that you have to move in two weeks, but stay for seven months. Come back a year later and do it all over again.

009. ROTFLOL.

010. Relax, you’re already halfway there.

011. Just kidding.

012. Don’t think outside the box.
Build a box.

013. Support support.

014. Organize and go to parties and fairs.

015. Start 30–40 blogs about the same things.

016. Drain the private sector of coders, graphic artists and literati.

017. Create a prize that is awarded.

018. Express yourself often in the media, vaguely.

019. Spread all rumors.

020. Seek out and try carding, and travel by expensive trains. Don’t order sushi.

021. Start a radio station.

022. Everything you use, you can copy and give an arbitrary name, whether it’s a news portal, search engine or public service.

023. Buy a bus.

024. Install a MegaHAL.

025. Make sure that you are really good friends with people who can use Photoshop, HTML, databases, and the like.

026. Read a shitload of philosophy.

027. Give yourself cult status, and act accordingly.

028. Never aim.

029. Pick on everyone.

030. Invent or misuse Kopimi.

031. Do things together as a composition, not as a collective.

032. Make your advertising confusingly similar to that of established ventures.

033. Always act with intent.

034. Assert, in any context, that the establishment is lagging.

035. When criticized, blame others and refer to the cluster formation’s non-linear time-creating swarm hierarchy.

036. Send everything to all media, regardless of niche.

037. Start an anonymous confession venture.

038. Make babies and blog their upbringing.

039. Be sure to closely study and keep abreast with substances.

040. Participate in lively Internet discussions that don’t interest you.

041. Start at least three to four IRC channels about every project.

042. Fight and make up often.

043. Share files with anyone who wants them.

044. Deal often with humor sites.

045. Hang out with the Left, the Right, and the Libertarians.

046. See “23” in everything.

047. Flirt with money.

048. Be AFK very little.

049. Threaten large American culture corporations.

050. Broadcast radio from Skäggetorp.

051. Make a “100 list” for successful projects.

052. Be unsure what the list should be named.

053. Take upon yourself a lot of projects.

054. Make sure to be connected to technical, aesthetical, and philosophical people of world class competence.

055. Sleep over at each others houses regularly.

056. Publish a book about Kopimi.

057. At a trial, deny everything.

058. Cultivate unfounded myths and react to them.

059. Hack sites, e-mail accounts, and more.

060. Continuously mock and ridicule all aspects of copyright.

061. Create an Internet site where people can buy and sell votes in democratic elections.

062. Claim to be true, fair and satisfied.

063. Collect money for fraux’s trip to Iceland.

064. Confidently claim that all disconnected computers are broken.

065. Do NOT go to Kurdistan.

066. Make sure to thoroughly establish the claim that all hardware is overpriced.

067. Affirm all words and signs.

068. Mindfuck each other to appropriate extent.

069. Take care of small animals.

070. Create and spiritualize the concept of “Snel hest.”

071. Start and own a think-tank.

072. Deny magnetism.

073. Start a business school. Drop out.

074. Write press releases often.

075. Use IRC while in your underwear, and eat pizza.

076. Juggle with other people’s balls.

077. Ensure that there is no conclusive evidence of Ikko giving monki advertising money by means of volada’s helicopter.

078. Cause inflation and a global financial crisis.

079. Express yourself vaguely if anyone asks you, “How much is a bandwidth?”

080. Use “dynamic” to mean “completely out of control”.

081. Never mention Hotmail, MSN, or Windows.

082. Have all project meetings on IRC.

083. Claim to receive around 1256 e-mails a day.

084. Force a prosecutor to draw up several thousand pages of drivel.

085. Above all abstract everything.

086. Have a liberal vision of hell.

087. Consider yourself overly qualified for top positions in American film and music industries.

088. Create the world’s largest file-sharing service in a twinkling.

089. Attract international attention by accident.

090. Control the portal and opinion makers in all mediums.

091. Standardize and explain your way of doing things at all levels.

092. Have 3576 anonymous confessions on your hard drive. Including the authors’ IP addresses and personal information.

093. Preserve the Internet.

094. Mention the Internet as a source in serious discussions.

095. Rarely mention reasons for your IT elitism.

096. Dismiss expressions like “from farm to table” as superstition.

097. Follow the yellow fellow.

098. Skip the last points of your 100 point list.

099. Establish social services as a parody of antisocial services.

100. Start from scratch.

100. Be careful of burning kittens.

100. Write a book, but start with the back cover.

100. Use parables in abundance, preferably about “butter” and “snow”.

100. Stop using IRL. Use AFK instead.

100. Cultivate contacts within the powers of state intelligence services.

100. Always define “flat organization” arbitrarily, subjectively, and without common sense.

100. Upload.

100. Take over #g-d.

100. PROFIT.

Limitations
The only problem with it is that given the limitations of the Twitter REST API, I was forced to send a request per message to be deleted, and it seems that Twitter will only allow 100 requests per hour (per client).

So in theory you will be able to delete 100 an hour, although I have seen it delete over 400 messages Twitter gets all grumpy on me.

Usage
Just save the script as twitter_delete_direct_messages.py, open a terminal and run it:

python twitter_delete_direct_messages.py

After that just follow the instructions on screen and enjoy as messages get wiped out.

If you find this useful, you can thank me by following me on Twitter.

Get The Script

Everytime I need to do so, I always end up coding functions to convert a (x,y) coordinate to the real index n in the array.

Let me illustrate, with an example. You have a string that defines the elements of a game board, and you want to work using (x,y) coordinates.

s="xxxxx@xx@xxx@@xx"

If you were to look at it as a matrix (width=4), it’d be something like this

s="xxxx
   x@xx
   @xxx
   @@xx"

However, I can’t do
s[x,y], since it’s a linear array, it’s a string.

You need to convert from (x,y) to a number that represents an index in the array.

This is very simple:

width=4
def getNforXY(x,y):
  return x + width*y

What if you want to do it backwards. What if you need to know what’s the X and Y for a given index N in the string?

def getXYforN(n):
  y = int(n/width)
  x = n - width/y
  return (x,y)

Cheers

My first attempt at a political satire using some fiction. Obama always reminded me of President Palmer on 24. The future release of a bunch of uncertain status prisoners in Guantanamo reminds me of Jack Bauer going through hell, doing a lot of illegal shit to catch the bad guys, and then they’ll get released, they’ll say they were put in there ilegally and they will be back outside more pissed than ever.

London, UK: Georgia Wonder, an unsigned British band, climbed into the top 20 most shared music in the world last weekend, reaching 14th position in just four days with their debut EP ‘Hello Stranger’.

The EP was put onto the Pirate Bay tracker on Wednesday 14th January and by Saturday 17th was the only music in the top 100 from an unsigned artist. The EP of five songs, which the duo released themselves last year, hit the Pirate Bay Top 20 on Saturday evening and peaked at the 14th position in the early hours of Sunday morning. The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest tracker of shared files.

The band were able to propel their music into well over 50,000 homes across the world in just a few days after making their EP readily available to download from the welcome page of the Limewire software offshoot ‘Frostwire’.

“What Frostwire helped us achieve is incredible” explained Stephanie Grant, vocalist with Georgia Wonder. “Their support has put our music into the hands of tens of thousands of potential fans in a matter of days. 40 billion songs were shared online last year – that’s 6 songs for every person on earth. You can imagine what just five days in the top 20 means to a relatively unknown band like us.”

“We met the Frostwire guys on Twitter” said Julian Moore, the other half of Georgia Wonder. “I’d recently dusted off our Twitter account after hearing that British celebrities such as Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry had become avid users, and after a few weeks we got chatting to the Frostwire team. They were really keen to let us try their new approach to band promotion and as we were already letting people share our music on Twitter we agreed to give it a shot. I’m so glad we did!’

Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker has repelled many unsuccessful attempts to shut it down over the last few years including a police raid in 2006 and bitter disputes with a variety of music and media companies in 2007. “It’s easy to forget that while the major record labels and anti-copyright groups have been taking high-profile shots at each other there are a lot of independent artists out here who are simply trying to navigate their way through the wreckage” said Julian. “Our success with Frostwire proves that you can cut through the argument and chart your own course.”

About Georgia Wonder

Georgia Wonder played in front of over 14,000 people for Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall on his UK tour and performed at an historic election night at the London American Embassy alongside Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze. Their song ‘Girl You Never Knew’ from their debut EP ‘Hello Stranger’ has been on rotation on Bliss TV for six months and has received plaudits from Record Of The Day and Pop Justice who called it ‘..one Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack appearance away from being an international hit single.’ They were recently nominated for an interactive award at Eurosonic and won best video in the rock category on OurStage.com in November ’08 for their song ‘Would Love To Meet’. Originally picked up by legendary BBC presenter ‘whispering’ Bob Harris who played their demos for two concurrent weeks on his BBC Radio 2 show, they have performed live on BBC Southern Counties, BBC Radio Solent, Original FM and a host of other regional radio stations.

–ENDS–

Contact

Julian Moore
julian at gwonder dot com

References
Pirate Bay Snapshot 18/1/09

40 Billion Songs Shared Online

Links

Georgia Wonder Website

Frostwire

‘Hello Stranger’ EP Torrent on Pirate Bay

Reviews

Record Of The Day

Record Of The Day – Record Of The Week

Pop Justice – Song Of The Day

They decided to share their EP, “Hello Stranger” for free via FrostWire. Their torrent has reached the Top 20 most shared music torrents of The Pirate Bay in only 4 days.

• Battery life? It’s cool that it has a removable battery, but how long does it last?
• What can we build on it? They mentioned HTML, CSS and Javascript as the tools of the trade, but if their JS interpreter doesn’t give us namespaces or global access to built in functions to access core functionality of the phone, there won’t be nothing more than a bunch of web widgets available. There was no mention whatsoever of games for this platform, maybe they’re going after the blackberry crowd and not the iPhone crowd
• How do developers distribute apps? I didn’t like the whole Sprint Exclusive crap, give us a palm-pre store!
• Flash Support?
• No demo of the camera, can it do video, no demo whatsoever of multimedia so far
• No demo of the device making a phone call

Not sure if those are things that we should take for granted, or that the device still has a long way to go. ]]> http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2009/01/13/remaining-questions-about-palms-pre-and-its-webos/feed/ 0 http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2009/01/10/preparing-your-primary-mount-and-swap-with-fdisk/ http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2009/01/10/preparing-your-primary-mount-and-swap-with-fdisk/#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:23:31 +0000 gubatron http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2009/01/10/preparing-your-primary-mount-and-swap-with-fdisk/ I have 4 big drives on a new machine, each can hold up to 2Tb of data, at first I thought I’d use the first drive for the OS and the other 3 for a RAID5 (software controlled)

Then after I had installed the operating system, I decided it was a big waste, and that I’d only need about 80gigs for the OS, and that I should use the 1920Gb (-swap,-other blocks) to be part of the RAID.

The first thing I needed to do was to resize the primary partition, but you can’t really do this while you’re using it. So I restarted with the Ubuntu CD in rescue mode, and jumped to the part where you setup the partition sizes. I told it I wanted to make the first partition smaller, I made it 80Gb, I accepted the rest of the options, and after a long while, it was finished creating the file systems, but it seems like it did a mess.

I restarted without the CD, crossed my fingers, and it did boot.

I did a:

sudo fdisk -l
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63   156264254    78132096   83  Linux
/dev/sda2       156264255  2930272064  1387003905    5  Extended
/dev/sda5      2882334168  2930272064    23968948+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6       156264381  2834380079  1339057849+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7      2834380143  2882334104    23976981   82  Linux swap / Solaris

and there were 6 partitions, some overlapping, but the primary looked right. I entered fdisk and deleted the 5 other partitions, and started a new.

Created a new partition (2) for Swap. Since the machine has 8GB of Ram, that’s the amount of Swap I used for it. After the partition was defined, I changed it’s type to type 82 (Linux Swap)

Then I created another partition (3), this one using the remaining space, and set it’s type to 83 (Linux)

I wrote the changes (w) and exited. It told me that the changes were written but the partitions would not be used until I rebooted, so I rebooted.

When I came back and did:

sudo fdisk -l

There they were:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        9727    78132096   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            9728       10700     7812500+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3           10700      182402  1379193956   83  Linux

But now there was a problem, when I checked for the memory available there was no swap

$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8183920     198524    7985396          0       6668      70284
-/+ buffers/cache:     121572    8062348
Swap:            0          0          0

So, first thing, I made sure the swap was specified on /etc/fstab for the next boot to include the swap

/dev/sda2 none swap sw 0 0

And then I had to make a file system for the swap

sudo mkswap /dev/sda2

Then, the “free” command did show the swap:

$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8183920     220420    7963500          0       7552      86880
-/+ buffers/cache:     125988    8057932
Swap:      7812492          0    7812492

In this case I didn’t have to make the file system for the primary partition because it was already made, I suppose the term “making the file system” is the equivalent of saying “formatting the drive with a specific filesystem”

However I had to do it for the remainder of the disk:

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda3

I’ll let you know if I find anything different from the tutorials on how to make RAID5.

New /etc/fstab format in Ubuntu
I while later, I updated the /etc/fstab to include the UUID of the swap partition on the fstab, instead of the device name.
To obtain this UUID I learned about the vol_id command

$ sudo vol_id /dev/sda2
ID_FS_USAGE=other
ID_FS_TYPE=swap
ID_FS_VERSION=2
ID_FS_UUID=b9b825c2-85dc-4def-bfd1-9071042452fa
ID_FS_UUID_ENC=b9b825c2-85dc-4def-bfd1-9071042452fa
ID_FS_LABEL=
ID_FS_LABEL_ENC=
ID_FS_LABEL_SAFE=

Now my /etc/fstab file looks like this:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
#              

proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda1
UUID=13676a4b-b669-4a7a-9776-cb10c7b492b9 /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
#/dev/sda2
UUID=b9b825c2-85dc-4def-bfd1-9071042452fa none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

About Joost
(From Wikipedia)

Joost is a system for distributing recorded TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name “The Venice Project”, Zennström and Friis assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about six cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse. According to Zennström at a 25 July 2007 press conference about Skype held in Tallinn, Estonia, Joost had signed up more than a million beta testers, and its launch was scheduled for the end of 2007.

The teams are currently in negotiations with FOX networks. It has signed up with Warner Music, Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions (Indianapolis 500, IndyCar Series) and production company Endemol for the beta.[2] In February 2007, Viacom entered into a deal with the company to distribute content from its media properties, including MTV Networks, BET and film studio Paramount Pictures.

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It was sent to me back in December 2007, the group takes pictures of things that happen only because of Venezuelan people living on this planet. Thanks a lot for the gift.

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Me and my family saw this (and laughed hard as I took out the camera without hesitation) on our way into the first G car on Court Sq. (headed towards Greenpoint of course) First thing that came to my mind. “This is so NewYorkShitty.com material”

If you find the image funny, wait until you read the post by Miss Heather, which made this very “Dear Reader” have a real LOL.

Please Digg Up Miss Heather’s Post

About NewYorkShitty.com
Taken from it’s About Page:

As you can probably deduce from the title of this blog, I live in Green Brownpoint, Brooklyn. During my one block trek to the Franklin Corner Store one April day (in 2006) to get a sandwich, I was astonished at the sheer quantity of dog shit I encountered.

Green Street is not the easiest sidewalk to negotiate: the sidewalks are uneven and pock-marked with holes. Dodging piles of dog shit every five feet does not make this task any easier, much less when carrying delicious Cuban sandwiches. It was during this adventure through Poopland that I had the following epiphany:

1. This is ridiculous.

2. I wonder if the people who see fit to use my block as a pissoir would like it if I took a shit in the middle of their living room? Probably not.

3. This is like walking through a fucking mine field, so maybe…

4. if Queen Noor (and Lady Diana before her) can lobby against the use of land mines, perhaps I can raise awareness about the plague of unattended dog shit in my neighborhood. Call me the Dog Shit Queen of Greenpoint New York Shitty. I’ve been called worse.

There’s however one thing lacking in these technologies to relive the past or to tell stories, and I think it could be one of the most powerful ways of telling a story, smell. We all have at some moment smelled something in particular and have that smell help us vividly remember a moment 10 years ago like if it was today.

I keep thinking on how to do it, and I want to share an idea I had last night after thinking about it for a few minutes.

At first I thought, is there a way to quantify or mix chemicals to produce smells out of basic components, the same way we can do it with color (RGB or other schemes)? hmm, maybe, maybe not, I think there’s too many chemicals involved, so scratch that. However, I believe that a smell, once it hits your brain, it’s nothing more but a series of electrical impulses sent to a specific area of the brain which is in charge of making you smell something.

We need a sensor, our noses, and then that information, somehow must be transformed to electrical impulses, and I think this is the foundation to create a device to record smells.

First we’d need to have some sort of electronic nose, whoever could build this will have to take a serious look on how our nose detects smell in the air. I suppose we’ll have iteration after iteration of this device until it can record up scents not even humans can detect (this reminds me of mp3 and how it just ignores a lot we can’t hear).

Then, once you can record this information, the problem is… how do you get it in the brains of an audience, I don’t think we’d attach anything to our noses and have something mix substances to reproduce a smell, that’d be ridiculous, instead, we need to send an electrical signal to our brain so that the smell can be interpreted and smelt, without using our nose. So I suppose in theory, there will be at some point in history a device that can broadcast brainwaves to a lot of people on a movie theater audience, or on your home tv.

The applications would be awesome… Imagine playing Gears of War 8 with smell, the battlefield experience would be so much more engaging if you could smell the smoke, the lead, the blood, …

After that we’ll probably also figure out a way to record and broadcast weather conditions, and make us feel heat, or cold, or wind, all while sitting in front of our console, or on a movie theater.

If for some crazy reason you start developing this technology, or you know of someone doing it, please let me know, it’d just be awesome to know that this is happening during my lifetime.

Download Torrent

mattpondpa.com

Matt Pond PA (commonly typeset as matt pond PA, or mppa for short) is an indie band formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1998 by singer/songwriter Matt Pond. Throughout the years the band released 7 albums, 9 EPs and played with artists like Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Youth Group, Nickel Creek and Mae.

So why making this album free?

“We took ourselves captive, and became our own producers, manufacturers, and distributors. It was a deferential revolt against inertia, a clearing of the throat to answer the quiet. Or maybe it was an inevitable reaction to seeing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

In adherence to our own demands, these songs were recorded in a cabin in Bearsville, NY, as a simple sonic manifestation of our opinions concerning the arguable value of a waterlogged paperback.”

So why ‘The Freep’?

freeep
noun
1. a free EP designed to express gratitude.
2. emptiness generated to fill other emptiness.
3. an extremely anxious person.
verb
1. the inability to conform to socially accepted modes of interaction.
2. an open or free form of moving one’s body: there was something so awkward and beautiful in the way she would freeep.

Or maybe simply FreeEP…. hmmm…

You can find out more about the band from their website www.mattpondpa.com and from their Wikipedia entry or by simply sitting back and listening to their music:

There’s only 2 copies of this shirt, I made them on spreadshirt.com, the other one belongs to Fitim the original founder of MyBloop.com. I believe I’m the 3rd or 4th person to join the project, I did so around 2006, and it wasn’t until spring 2008 that we had the current look and feel of the site, along with the current logo which was created by El Blogo, an amazing graphic designer from Venezuela, who also gave birth to the FrostWire logo.

MyBloop.com According to Wikipedia

MyBloop is a file hosting and social networking website, based in New York, USA.

Angel Leon, one of the founders of the service once said:

“Google downloaded the Internet, MyBloop.com uploaded everybody’s hardrive to it“

Details of the service

* Free of cost
* No need to enter CAPTCHAs to access files
* No waiting time required to access files
* Unlimited number of simultaneous downloads
* No limit on the size of file the user can upload
* No limit on the number of files the user can upload and manage in account
* Ability to upload all types of files
* Ability to stream .mp3 files, without the need to download them (with a flash interface)
* Ability to stream .flv files, without the need to download them (with a flash interface)
* Ability to stream .wma files, without the need to download them (with Windows Media Player plugin)
* Ability to stream .wmv files, without the need to download them (with Windows Media Player plugin)
* Ability to organize the music files in playlists
* Uploaded images are displayed in embedded form (no need to download them to see them)
* Ability to organize files in folders
* Ability to delete files
* Ability to rename uploaded files
* Files are never deleted (unless the user deletes them, of course)
* Ability to upload multiple files at the same time
* Ability to mark files as “private”, so only people that know (or guess) the exact URL of the files/folders can access them
* No discrimination against people based on their location (unlike Megaupload, for example)
* Free and open source, cross-platform software, that allows the user to upload files from the desktop (BloopLoader)

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Take this example, there’s a bunch of photos, they’re all contained in divs that have a css class called “photos”, inside we just throw
a bunch of <img> tags, and all of a sudden our boss tells us he wans to have every image on that page linked to “http://domain.com/photos”. jQuery to the rescue, no need to wrap each <img> with <a href=”"> by hand, you can do it all in one line

So if the code looks like this:

       <div class="photos">
            <img src="http://domain.com/0670027481_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/211161aa99_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/173bb0cd6_m.jpg"/>
        </div>
        <div class="photos">
            <img src="http://domain.com/841fd90b5b_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/52dda2cee5_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/b569399599_m.jpg"/>
        </div>
        <div class="photos">
            <img src="http://domain.com/8806e863a4_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/5e43aa95fe_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/68a74a088c_m.jpg"/>
        </div>

        <div class="tshirt-photos">
            <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3149/3113619519_72ce82c545_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3236/3105792155_99f2388869_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2114/2372582266_765842fae9_m.jpg"/>
        </div>

With jQuery you can match all the <img> elements, and wrap them all with “<a href=”http://domain.com/photos”></a>” in a single line of code:

$(document).ready(function() { $(".photos img").wrap('<a href="http://domain.com/photos">') })

So to explain how it works, when the document is ready (when it’s finished loading) the function inside is called back, it will use the jQuery selector $(”.photos img”) to match all the <img> tags contained withing elements of css class “photos”, then it applies the wrap() function, which will wrap the matched elements with the given html tags.

About jQuery

jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It was released January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig.

Dual licensed under the MIT License and the GNU General Public License, jQuery is free and open source software.

jQuery contains the following features:

• DOM element selections
• DOM traversal and modification, (including support for CSS 1-3 and basic XPath)
• Events
• CSS manipulation
• Effects and animations
• Ajax
• Extensibility
• Utilities – such as browser version and the each function.
• JavaScript Plugins

jQuery Documentation

Last week I traveled by car from Washington,DC to New York, and on every service station I stopped along the highway, it was pretty much impossible to get a starbucks coffee because the lines were ridiculously long.

I thought it was a Manhattan phenomenon that so much people would want to pay for expensive coffee, given that you can actually have really good coffee for $1 or less if you think about it.

Has the dollar lost so much value, or we no longer think about how much things are worth?

To put it in perspective, I often think about the cost of energy and all of the things you can do with a gallon of gas.

The most expensive gallon of gas I’ve seen so far in the United States has been about $5 and we were outraged. But seriously, we’re paying way more for coffee.

To get a gallon you’d need about 16 cups, let’s say each small cup of starbucks costs $3, that’s $48 a gallon. The average car holds up to 15 gallons, you’d have to pay about $720 to fill up the tank.

Coffee is a freaking renewable resource, it can grow on it’s own for all we know, why do we accept to pay so much for it?

Oil heats your home, Oil is used to make electricity so you can read this, Oil can transport you and your family with a lot of shit in the car for miles, it’s been extracted out of the earth, it’s been processed by super expensive technology, there’s shitload of R&D to find it, if it wasn’t for it, pretty much billions of people wouldn’t even exist, we couldn’t travel or transport goods, and best of all, it’s non renewable… why the hell is it so cheap? or is the right question, why is coffee so damn expensive?

Fashion, laws of reason don’t apply

If George Boole would enter Lord & Taylors, he’d come back 15 minutes later with an Ak47 after loosing his mind and shoot everyone in the store for being so stupid.

If I showed you this, how much would you say it’s worth, a black jacket and white shirt for a woman, that pretty much looks like an every day use garment

$50, or maybe even $150 for the whole thing (and I still think that’s expensive) right?

Think again…

$200 for the shirt, and $500 for the jacket, $700 fucking dollars! And that’s without shoes, skirt and jewelry, seriously women, what are you thinking? are you thinking?

And then I looked around me, and there was this herd of women lurking around the store, looking at all the clothes like if they were hunting for their prey, they had this twisted look in their eyes as they checked every piece of clothing.

And why? Why do they even there pricing a jacket for $500 (or more, I saw even more expensive ugly crap in there) Because I think that Fashion companies rely on the fact that there’s dumb ass people that have no clue on what to do with the money, and who have lost perspective of all the things they could be doing with the same amount of money, or who really don’t have a clue of basic aritmetics, or the “greather than” operator, and that a higher numbers on a price tag means more money?

Sometimes I really feel like saying Recession my ass, and I often wonder if all the people being layed off are just suffering the consequences of the irrational fear on investors, which has been manufactured by the media puppeteers, who sometimes decide to sell us Britney’s clubbing stunts and another day scare us with “the crisis”.

And Fucking Christmas, every year I see how much faker it gets. With so many layoffs the TV should be telling you to keep your money for food, and to just go and enjoy your family and plan on what to do next year. But that’s a whole different subject for another post.

Thanks to Kalong from Strands.com for sending this one.

About Strands

Strands, Inc. is a developer of social recommendation technologies founded in late 2003 by Dr. Francisco J. Martin.

Strands develops technologies to better understand people’s tastes and help them discover new things they will like. Strands has created a social recommendation engine that provides real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.

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As of FrostWire™ 4.17.0, we can promote legal content, or important information using the FrostWire™ welcome screen. We’ve vowed to never use this screen for spam or evil purposes of any kind, only to help content creators of all kinds (musicians, film makers, writers, software programers, photographers, video game shops and independent professionals) that are willing to share some of their work for free, or under creative commons licenses get their message across our ever growing network.

Sean Fournier is the first musician to do so, in only 4 days his 6 track album “Oh-my” was shared via FrostWire™ by over 25,000 users, at the time of this writing the download count by the torrent tracker is 27,923, saving Sean almost 1 Terabyte of data sent, plus having his music on tens of thousands of computers and who knows into how many portable music players.

You can read the full story on FrostClick.com, our initiative towards the distribution of 100% free and legal content over FrostWire™.

Here’s a press release we found this morning on the news:

Milford, CT (PRWEB) December 2, 2008 — Musician Sean Fournier harnesses the power of Peer-to-Peer networking to distribute his free album, ‘Oh My’, to hundreds of thousands all over the world via FrostWire’s welcome screen. Within the first weekend, this exposure returned over 25,000 complete downloads for this independent singer/songwriter.

FrostWire Welcome Screen Featuring Sean Fournier

Spread it like the plague.
Fournier’s ‘Oh My’ is the first free album download to be featured on FrostWire’s Welcome Screen, which is a new feature designed to help musicians and content owners share their media for free on the FrostWire network.

‘Oh My’ is a six-track album which was created to be 100% free. Sean encourages his listeners to download it, share it, give it friends and family – and do anything within their power to “Spread it like the plague.”

Aside from it’s recent exposure on FrostClick.com, listeners can get their hands on ‘Oh My’ at Sean Fournier’s Official Website.

If you’re a professional content creator willing to share some of your work for free to get more exposure and thus increase your sales, contact us at FrostClick.com

Related Links

Sean Fournier’s Blog – FrostWire related Post #1

Sean Fournier’s Blog – FrostWire related post #2

FrostClick.com – Sean Fournier’s “Oh My” – A great Free Album

This T-shirt I got thanks to my wife, it was sitting at their office for some reasons I should probably not disclose.

The thing is that I’ve been a fan of last.fm for a very long time (my account says it has 5800 plays since 2005) and I wear this t-shirt with a lot of pride.

I actually had the chance to meet Michael Breidenbruecker one of the founders of Last.fm in 2006 during the Plone code-sprint in Austria. Michael and his team (some of which I also met during that sprint) are now working on RJDJ, a very interesting music application for the iPhone.

About Last.fm
From Wikipedia:

Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 21 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD).

Using a music recommendation system called “Audioscrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user’s computer or some portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (”scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites.

Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm’s music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rights holder has previously authorised it. Registration is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations.

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How I keep my wordpress updated by hand
I tend to keep my wp-content folder outside of my wordpress installation for 2 reasons:

1. I don’t like to loose my themes, plugins and customizations
2. I like to keep all my customization changes under subversion

So, if I had my wordpress installation say at:
/home/user/public_html/blog

I’d keep my wp-content folder for that here:

/home/user/public_html/wp-content-for-blog

So when I upgrade my blog, I always remove the original wp-content folder that comes along wordpress, and I symlink my hard worked on wp-content folder that lives outside to the freshly unzipped wordpress folder.

user@machine:~/public_html/blog$ ls -l
...
lrwxrwxr-x 1 user www    54 2008-11-26 09:29 wp-content -> /home/user/public_html/wp-content-for-blog
...

So what I endup doing all the time, is downloading the latest.zip to ~/public_html/, it will unzip under ~/public_html/wordpress, and then I’ll copy the current ~/public_html/blog/wp-config.php to ~/public_html/wordpress, then I’ll remove the default ~/public_html/wordpress/wp-content and symlink the outer wp-content with all my customizations, themes and plugins to it. Once done, I’ll make a backup of the old wordpress folder, and then I’ll rename wordpress folder to the name of the blog folder, and it’s all done.

It’s simple, but when you have to do it for 5 blogs, every week, it’s not fun anymore.

The Update Script

So here’s a script to do it in one step. If you’re not using my symlinked technique, this will do it for you, you only need to specify the full path to the folder where you want to keep your current wp-content folder outside the new installation before you apply the update, and the name of the folder where your current blog lives. The script below will have its configuration variables towards the beginning set so that they are in line with the example I’ve been talking about.

#!/usr/bin/python
#########################################################################################
#
# upgrade_wordpress.py - Script to automatically upgrade your wordpress installation.
#
# Requirements:
#   - Python 2.4 or older
#   - Wordpress should already be installed
#   - CURL (sudo apt-get install curl)
#
# Author: Angel (Gubatron) Leon
# LICENSE: See the GPL2 license.
# 2008
#########################################################################################
import os

#########################################################################################
#Config (relative to the folder where this script will be run from)
#########################################################################################

#The current folder where the blog lives
BLOG_FOLDER='blog'

#
# The first time you run the script, it will try to make a copy of your
# current wp-content folder outside. Copy here the location of where
# the wp-content folder with your themes and plugins should exist.
#
# After it unzips, it will remove the default wp-content folder from
# the new installation, and it will symlink the external wp-content
# That way you don't ever have to worry about loosing your customizations
# and plugins.
#
WP_CONTENT_OUTSIDE_COPY_FOLDER="/home/user/public_html/wp-content-for-blog"

#This is where a backup of your current blog will be
BLOG_FOLDER_BACKUP_FOLDER=BLOG_FOLDER+'.old'

#Where to download the wordpress latest.zip from
WORDPRESS_LATEST_ZIP_URL='http://wordpress.org/latest.zip'

#### DO NOT MODIFY AFTER THESE LINES ####

def downloadWordpress(url=WORDPRESS_LATEST_ZIP_URL):
    if os.path.exists('latest.zip'):
        print "Removing old latest.zip"
        os.remove('latest.zip')

    #Try to download with CURL
    print "Attempting to download latest.zip from wordpress.org"
    os.system('curl %s -o latest.zip' % url)

    if not os.path.exists('latest.zip'):
        os.system('wget ' + url)

    return os.path.exists('latest.zip')

def dirExists(dirName):
    return os.path.exists(dirName) and os.path.isdir(dirName)

def backupBlog(currentBlogFolder=BLOG_FOLDER,
               wpContentOriginalFolder=WP_CONTENT_OUTSIDE_COPY_FOLDER,
               backupFolder=BLOG_FOLDER_BACKUP_FOLDER):

    #Remove any previous backups
    if os.path.exists(backupFolder) and os.path.isdir(backupFolder):
        print "Removing previous backup folder"
        os.system('rm -fr ' + backupFolder)

    #Copy the current blog folder into a backup folder just in case.
    #We won't do any database backups for now.
    print "Creating new backup folder"
    os.system('cp -r %s %s' % (currentBlogFolder,backupFolder))

    #Check for the copy of wp-content outside the blog, if it doesn't exist
    #we'll make it for the first time.
    if not dirExists(wpContentOriginalFolder):
        print "Creating outside copy of wp-content"
        os.system('cp -r %s %s' % (os.path.join(currentBlogFolder,'wp-content'),
                                   wpContentOriginalFolder))

    #Copy the latest wp-config.php outside to the current folder
    print "Copying your latest wp-config.php outside"
    os.system('cp %s .' % (os.path.join(currentBlogFolder,'wp-config.php')))

    backupFolderExists = dirExists(backupFolder)
    wpContentFolderExists = dirExists(wpContentOriginalFolder)
    configFileExists = os.path.exists('wp-config.php')

    return backupFolderExists and wpContentOriginalFolder and configFileExists

def upgradeBlog(currentBlogFolder=BLOG_FOLDER,
                backupFolder=BLOG_FOLDER_BACKUP_FOLDER,
                url=WORDPRESS_LATEST_ZIP_URL,
                wpContentOriginalFolder=WP_CONTENT_OUTSIDE_COPY_FOLDER):

    if not downloadWordpress(url):
        print "Could not download latest.zip, aborting."
        return False

    if not backupBlog(currentBlogFolder,wpContentOriginalFolder,backupFolder):
        print "Could not backup blog or wp-config.ph, aborting."
        return False

    if currentBlogFolder == 'wordpress':
        print "The current blog folder cannot be 'wordpress, aborting."
        return False

    #1. If a wordpress/ folder exists, wipe it.
    if dirExists('wordpress'):
        print "Removing old wordpress folder"
        os.system('rm -fr wordpress')

    if dirExists('%s.delete' % currentBlogFolder):
        print "Removing old %s.delete folder" % currentBlogFolder
        os.system('rm -fr %s.delete folder' % currentBlogFolder)

    #2. Unzip new copy
    os.system('unzip latest.zip')

    if not dirExists('wordpress'):
        print "Could not unzip the wordpress installation, aborting."
        return False

    #1. Copy wp-config.php into the new installation
    os.system('cp wp-config.php wordpress/')

    #2. Remove the default wp-content folder
    os.system('rm -fr wordpress/wp-content')

    #3. Symlink the original wp-content that lives outside
    os.system('ln -s %s wordpress/wp-content' % (wpContentOriginalFolder))

    #4. Verify symlink was created
    if not (os.path.exists('wordpress/wp-content') and os.path.islink('wordpress/wp-content')):
        print "Could not create symlink to wp-content, aborting."
        return False

    #5. Move original folder to folder.delete, and make this wordpress folder the current folder.
    os.system('mv %s %s.delete' % (currentBlogFolder,currentBlogFolder))

    if not dirExists(currentBlogFolder + ".delete"):
        print "Could not rename current folder for later deletion, aborting."
        return False

    #6. Rename the new installation as the current blog
    os.system('mv %s %s' % ('wordpress',currentBlogFolder))

    if dirExists('wordpress'):
        print "ALERT: The wordpress folder still exists."
        return False

    if not dirExists(currentBlogFolder):
        print "ALERT: The blog doesn't exist, recover from the backup folder %s please" % (backupFolder)
        return False

    #7 Cleanup
    os.system('rm -fr %s.delete' % (currentBlogFolder))

    return True

if __name__ == '__main__':
    upgradeBlog()

Requirements

Installation

Usage:

python upgrade_wordpress.py

The script is very fault proof, it will always try to abort in case something is not going the way it’s expected. At the end of the day it’ll also leave a backup copy of your current blog in case something goes bad, you can always recover.

Thanks to Daniel Chang for sharing this with me.

Cola: Real-Time Shared Editing from Mustafa K. Isik on Vimeo.