blog.pmarca.com: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web:

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

* “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…

* “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

* With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a “container” — “apps” can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.

* With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — those languages and APIs don’t work anywhere other than Facebook — and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

This is kindda cool.

News from hatebook’s aspirations of world domination ? hatebook:

Hatebook is an anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU HATE.

Technorati Tags: hatebook

This is pretty cool, we have 5 (small) instances for OnMyList right now, the database instance could DEFINITELY size up to large or extra large. 🙂

Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon EC2 Gets More Muscle:

The Amazon EC2 team just added Large and Extra Large instance types to EC2. The former “one size fits all” instance type is now known as a Small instance.

Large instances are 4 times larger in each dimension (CPU power, RAM, and disk storage) than the Small instances and cost $0.40 per hour. Extra Large instances are 8 times larger in each dimension and cost $0.80 per hour.

Both of the new instance types support 64-bit computing. While the Large Instance type offers 7.5 GB RAM, the Extra Large Instance Type offers 15 GB RAM (compared to the Small instance type and its 1.7 GB RAM).

Technorati Tags: amazon, ec2

Twitter Blog: Tracking Twitter

I know I am 2 days late to blog about this, but shit, this is pretty effing cool! check it out, if you’re on Twitter you can add me, I’m “ayn” there…

This is the only way to upgrade WordPress besides using the latest snapshot:

ayn@NGBERT:~/.../wordpress.svn>svn info
Path: .
URL: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.3
Repository UUID: 1a063a9b-81f0-0310-95a4-ce76da25c4cd
Revision: 6114
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: ryan
Last Changed Rev: 6063
Last Changed Date: 2007-09-07 15:21:59 -0500 (Fri, 07 Sep 2007)
 
ayn@NGBERT:~/.../wordpress.svn>svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3/
...
Updated to revision 6170.

go to /wp-admin/upgrade.php and perform a database upgrade.

blog at version 2.3.

But of course life is never this easy, when I went into /wp-admin after the upgrade, it kept asking for me to go to /upgrade.php again, I instrumented the code and looked like in /admin/admin.php get_option(‘db_version’) returned 5183 and $wp_db_version was 6124.

In /version.php I see:

$wp_db_version = 6124;

so the app was at the right version, but the db was at 5183 somehow. I went into MySQL and did a “select option_value from wp_options where option_name=’db_version’;” and it returned 6124, so wtf?!

at this point, I realized I was using memcached with my blog, restarted memcached and apache, now it’s all good.

Technorati Tags: wordpress

FT.com / Companies / Media & internet – Microsoft in talks to buy Facebook stake:

While talks were still in the early stage, these people said that Microsoft was considering an investment of $300m to $500m for a 5 per cent stake of the company. Google is also said to be interested in an investment.

If you’re interested in getting invites to work with your Facebook app in Ruby on Rails, I just wrote up a quick howto at the OML blog.

Technorati Tags: facebook, Rails, RoR, ruby, rubyonrails

You probably know that Command-L or Control-L goes to the location bar and Command-K goes to the search box. But did you know that you can type in whatever in the location bar and it would perform a search on that stuff at Google, so there is absolutely no need to have Google set as default at the search box. So now I have Wikipedia there instead. Just thought I’d share this here, I’ve used FF for years and it never occurred to me that it was redundant to have Google as the default selection in the search box. Also, is there a shortcut to change the search engine in the search box without using the mouse? I would use the Yelp and UrbanDict searches more often if I didn’t have to change the engine with the pulldown menu and then change it back… anyone?

okay, Ray and I found the shortcuts to go through the list of search engines:

when Search Bar is focused (command-k): AltOpt+Up Arrow, AltOpt+Down Arrow

I also found that you can complete the .COM with command-return.

Technorati Tags: firefox, shortcut