A Distinguished Author...

I was just digging through some of my old drawings and I found this one I did years ago. I was sitting in Barnes & Nobel looking at the murals on the wall of famous authors and wondered what it would be like if Homer Simpson were up there.

Well, wonder no longer as here he is.

Getting your cable TV Syndicted to You IPod (Legally!)

I use a Comcast DVR to record the TV shows I watch. What
I have always wanted to be able to do is have my DVR
record what I want to watch in h.264 format and then
syndicate it as a podcast to my IPod and Apple TV. Well I
just got my wish. A product called Snapstream (http://www.snapstream.com/)
let me take an old PC I was no longer using with an ATI
video capture card in it and convert it into a DVR.

Open source solutions like this that I have looked into in the past
that allow you to turn a PC into a DVR have been rather complex
to setup and maintain but SnapStream, a .NET based product,
has a drop dead simple setup and install and a 21 day free
eval to try out (Its is not very expensive to purchase either
at around $60). Anyway, the product exposes an very nice,
web based, TV guide that allows you to pick shows to record.
If the ITunes compatibility feature is turned on, any recordings
made will be converted to h.264/mp4 as soon as the recording is
complete. They are then automatically added to a podcast
named after the series they are part of. Any metadata the
program can get from its TVGuide is also integrated into the
podcast as well. You can then use the product's web based interface
to subscribe to either the "All shows podcast" or just the one named
after the series you are recording. I may now be able to get rid of
my rented DVR!

All Good Things...

As many of you may have already heard, My current employer, Ringside Networks is closing its doors on September 25th. On thinking back on the last eight months I find I can relate my experiences to a Star Trek Episode. As disturbing as this might sound, the episode in question was from Star Trek the Next Generation, the series finale episode called "All Good Things". In this episode you know that this is the cast's last performance, that a great team is saying goodbye. They might work together again in the future (because lord knows, there were sequels) but at this point, from their point of view, it was the end.

Ringside had an epic team of developers and a great mission: The creation of a social networking platform that could interconnect communities across the internet. In the short time we were around we fought great battles to gain the attention of the social networking community. We produced a product in just a few months capable of integrating private social communities with giants like Facebook and Myspace but in the end, the people we thought were our greatest allies walked away from the deal. All the stuff of any classic episode.

In the last days the team produced a final, innovative product which would allow any web page to become a social experience. SocialPass was a product that would enable any website owner to allow their users to "Ask their Friends" what they though about a product or service, driving new traffic to the website. Watch the video demo on SocialPass and see for yourself. What a great user experience this could have been.

If I had the chance to go back in time and do things differently as they did in the Star Trek episode this entry is named after, I don't think I would. This was a magical experience, as small start-up companies always are, and I look forward to seeing all the cast members again in the sequel.

Yammer Me This

It is not often that a web service or a piece of software makes my work life better but I felt compelled to speak out about Yammer. My team at Ringside Networks would always hang in an IRC channel because we were spread out across the US. This worked great and made us feel like a co-located team but it had its drawbacks. You had to be logged in all the time or have a bot collect what was being said when you were not around.

Then came Yammer. I was already a Twitter micro blogging fan. I already use Twitter to stay involved in my friends lives and share mine with them but Yammer allowed my software development team to coordinate like never before. While Twitter asks you to answer the questions, "What are you doing?", Yammer wants you to ask the question, "What are you working on?". As my work day progresses, I would just Yammer on what I was working on and read what the rest of the team was up to. You would get more frequent, meaningful updates than I would ever see on IRC.

The big difference was, there was no pressure to respond right way or even be online all the time to do it. It just feels less stressful. Yammer also does not limit you to 140 characters or less which is handy when describing the details of what you are doing.

Another useful difference between Yammer and Twitter is that Yammer has an implicit group of people in its community. You must have a email address at a mail domain like ringsidenetworks.com to join Yammer. Joining and using the service is free and anyone from your company who has an email address can join. Yammer provides cross platform clients and clients for mobile devices as well so you can stay in touch with your team wherever you go.

You might wonder how they plan to make money. They charge for the ability to administrate your domain. If you want to administrate the community then a company representative must pay Yammer for this feature.

If you are looking for a team building tool for your remote development team you should give this a try. Follow this link to see the TechCrunch50 Video from the yammer team.

Don't Open That Box!

Sometimes you get lucky and capture interesting things while playing WOW . I was playing with my wife in the Terokkar Forrest the other night and she opened a box (which is something she loves to do) and we suddenly became surrounded by a ring of zombies which started closing in on us. We got lucky because they were not that hard to kill, there were just a lot off them.

Time Machine Saves Another Mac... Thanks to WOW

Well, a member of my family has had their MacBook die again (twice this month) but I am not complaining. It had a hard life and it was covered under AppleCare. This time it's the hard disk but we were very lucky because I have a complete backup (for once). The family member in question was not really a fan of hooking the external drive up often... until ... I moved World of Warcraft onto the external drive to make room.

What a co-incidence this was because now, every time they played WOW, Time Machine would silently do a update of the backup image of the Macbook. When Apple replaces the hard disk I will be able to restore it 100% thanks to Time Machine and the best Time Machine enabling software on the market, World of Warcraft.

How Easy is it to Run an OpenSocial App on Ringside?

Well now I have gone and made a video and its on OpenSocial Application Deployment. This is actually my first screen capture video made with Screenflow and there will be more to come. The process is relatively easy as long as you can handle looking at yourself on camera.

People around here felt I should get the word out about just how easy it is to develop OpenSocial applications using the Ringside Social App Server. In this first video you can watch me deploy the LastFM gadget inside the local Ringside server on my Macbook. Its as simple as creating a new app using the developer tool and then specifying the Gadget Specification XML as your callback URL.

This is by no means a guarantee that all your off the shelf gadgets will run unmodified in our Shindig based container. I am finding such a wide variation in OS versions (0.5,0.6!) and server customizations (if server=='orcut') as I have been testing off the shelf components that I am beginning to think that many of them will need to be modified before they will run cleanly. If you are interested in OpenSocial development try it out and let me know what you think.