ayn blog

Facebook just confirmed that their chat uses Jabber/XMPP, a few days back Adium added support for Facebook chat, you can compile it from their source on SVN, someone did that and posted a nightly build so you can just install that too.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

So we got a Flip Ultra, when you plug it into the USB port it shows up with an ugly default USB drive icon in the desktop. I wanted to change it to a picture of the Flip Ultra itself. I googled on how to make Mac icons and found this post. It involves using either a PS plugin or Icongrapher. I tried that and it was a bit too much work to just make an icon.

It then occurred to me that I can just look at the info (⌘-I) on any image file, clip on the icon in the File Info dialog, ⌘-C that, go to the File Info dialog of thing I want to change the icon for, and ⌘-P to paste that in. Real simple!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Now I should really make that image transparent so it looks better. We love the Flip btw, super easy to use, quality is pretty damn good too. If you get one use one of these links…

(your RSS readers might not show embedded iframes so see the post in the browser if you don’t see anything)

I just refactored some of my MySpace code this afternoon, to contact an outside server from an OpenSocial app you have to use the makeRequest call, here’s how my makeRequest wrapper looks like:

function makeRequestWrapper(target, callback) {
  try {
    var server_base_url = "http://dev-host.yourdomain.com/myspace"
    var params = {
      METHOD : 'GET',
      AUTHORIZATION : gadgets.io.AuthorizationType.SIGNED
    };
    gadgets.io.makeRequest(server_base_url + target, callback, params)
  } catch(er) {
    console.log(er.message);
  }
}

Here’s how you call this from the MySpace canvas surface:

function submitForm() {
  makeRequestWrapper(
    "/form_submit?" + $("#user_info_form").formSerialize(),
    function (data) {
      submitFormCallback(gadgets.json.parse(data.text));
    }
  )
}

In the userFormCallBack method, you can access the JSON object as arg.foo.

Method to perform makeRequest from the home and profile surfaces (I have no idea why they are different, but this works):

function retrieveHistory() {
  makeRequestWrapper("/show_history",
    function (data) { displayHistory(data); }
  )
}

Notice here you don’t need use data.text like you have to in the canvas surface. I found out that MySpace ignores the request type, on canvas it always returns a JSON object and if your server endpoint returns a JSON encoded object (like with render :json => my_hash.to_json in Rails ), it is stored in data.text, so you have to parse that with gadget.json.parse() to get another JSON object. On the home and profile surfaces it always returns HTML, you can parse the data as it (no need to use data.text), or you can just display the html returned with something like $(”div#blah”).html(data), if you use jQuery.

lol

British schoolchildren in the west of England are terrorizing their chums by impersonating pedophile stalkers.

[From Kids scare each other by impersonating online pedophiles - Boing Boing]

Dummy is still my most played album in my library, this should be here tomorrow:

Trunk show of 3 of the top specs brands at Spectacles for Humans, May 10th, I’ll probably stop by.

This is pretty useful, I am working on another site but it won’t be much of a social site, but I am definitely using quite a few of the plugins in this list. (instead of acts_as_taggable_on_steroids we’re trying to use acts_as_taggable_on). I also think cache_fu will be a must-have if you ever think the site is gonna have real traffic.

Building a Social Network Site in Rails | Jim Neath

Been wanting to write a blog post for [context] blog on my experience with MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), got some free time last week and finally got to it, and it has just been published at the [context] blog. Check it!

Too dumb, whoever wrote it didn’t even put in a proper phishing link:

If you get any ISS phishing emails, forward it to the email address listed here. By the way, this is a good reason to use OpenDNS.