I’m looking for a plugin that will

1. Pull the Tumblr feed format.
2. Parse into WP importable xml.
3. Create new WP posts for new Tumblr items.

What I’ve found so far are Tumblr exporters/WP importers, javascript to embed tumblr, Ping.fm, other miscellaneous useless plugins. I’m not moving platforms so I want something that will pull out the new Tumblr items and post them here.

Do I need to code this or has it already been solved? (I admit my search for a solution was pretty feeble).

Advice appreciated!

Another in my series of non-sequitur titles. I’m not cashing out of anything (wish I had a Ponzi scheme going or something)…

This is a follow-up to the last two posts. I’m going to combine 5 or 6 posts into this single one, so here goes:

1) Am I Selling Out On Twitter?
Talking to people over on Google Buzz cleared my mind on this topic. It all comes down to “if I feel OK posting something, go ahead and post it”. The giveaways and other promo looking things I post, I don’t get any cash for, I’m either trying to make my followers happy (so I get more) or I just genuinely like a product and want to promo it.

2) Hacking Google Buzz
I’m gonna wrap this together with Gaming Social Networks. Most social networks have APIs public and private that you can use with a fun, handy tool called cURL. So in certain cases, you can either a) use tcpflow and watch what is going over the wire or b) set up a local proxy and capture everything there. The local proxy helps quite a bit when uncovering iPhone APIs. I’ll leave it to the imagination, what you have to do next.

3) More Google Evilness
This is just a suspicion at this point and I don’t think I could ever find hard evidence so I’m not going into it. The gang at Google is not dumb so they wouldn’t leave things laying around in the open for people like me to find.

4) Why Chrome Sucks
Just going to list one reason here and shut my trap about the others. In OS X, open about 20 tabs in Chrome, use your machine doing other stuff for a couple hours and come back. Click to a different tab, it reloads because during those couple hours, Chrome decided to purge memory and unload that tab (same concept of memory management seen in Android OS). Since I use 20 tabs all the time, I just can’t deal with the loading/unloading. I’m also using the dev channel build so this may be different for mainstreamers.

5) Google Buzz Still Leaking Personal Info
Whenever you look at someone’s friends or followers, up to 10,000 user profiles are downloaded (even if you just want to see the first 10). In this JSON stream, you can see account aliases which more often than not are email addresses. I was able to see all of Jason Calacanis’ emails. I’m not sure if this has been fixed or not (haven’t been wading in the Buzz JSON stream lately).

6) The Holy Secret Of Compiling Mod_Python
And this goes for mod_wsgi as well. More often than not, you’re going to get some bs about not being able to move mod_python.so because it doesn’t exist. Why? Because the shared/static library it depends on doesn’t exist? Why? Because you don’t have the apr-utils installed. Why? Because you didn’t compile them when you built httpd. Why? Because it’s not obvious at all this is what you need to do.

And if you’re on RHEL, just install the httpd-dev RPM and all is good.

And if mod_python works, but everything you run gives you a 500 error, make sure python and httpd are using the same libexpat version (the ldd tool is handy for this). Even if it’s complaining about something super irrelevant, check that libexpat.

And if this doesn’t take the award for the most boring post on this blog, I don’t know what would.

Oh yeah, I’m adding my résumé to my about page. You can download the pdf here. Comments appreciated. And this doesn’t mean I’m on the market.

Follow Me On Twitter!

This is a great image, by poopbear, of fictional vampires duking it out. There is no significance here, I’m not down, or out, or anything; just busy. Some topics that I’ve been meaning to write about:

• Hacking Google Buzz
• Google Buzz Still Leaking Personal Info
• More Google Evilness
• Why Chrome Sucks
• The Holy Secret Of Compiling Mod_Python
• Gaming Social Networks

These are just off the top of my head. I’ll write some of this stuff up soon, but if anyone is interested in something, let me know!

Follow Me On Twitter!

Update: And that’s a… over. The iWrap giveaway is over!

I was convinced I didn’t need an iPhone, until I laid hands on one. That day I got the first generation iPhone and put it in the category of “most life-changing device” I’ve ever owned. I’m an absolute fanatic. Of course, I got the iPhone 3GS the day it came out and I’m sure I’ll get the iPhone A4 when that comes out.

Anyway, to the point. One thing I love about the phone is how easily it slips into the pocket. I’ve always wondered WhyTF people used these big ugly screen protectors on the device making it as huge as a brick. I’ve never used a cover and have taken excellent care of my devices. Sure they get minor scratches, but you have to look pretty close to see them. I once had an argument about this with a brick-cover user and finally won by pointing out he still had a large scratch even with the protector.

Anyway, back to the point. If I were to get anything for my iPhone, it would be a wrap/film cover so as to not make it bulky. And that’s exactly what I’m giving away, the iWrap.

I haven’t used this product, but looking through the site, reading about it, and reading the testimonials, the iWrap seems like the best option out there.

I have 10 iWraps to give away from now until 2/21/10 (maybe 9 since I want one for myself). Just leave a comment (you can say whatever, but keep it civil) and make sure to fill in your email address in the comment form. I’ll announce winners each day on my Twitter account – @clatko – so follow me to see if you win.

Follow me on Twitter!

I love Terminal.app. Especially with tabs. I spend most my day in it. I don’t want to make you read my ramblings, but the thing that almost drives me to jump out the window is consistently losing connections due to timeouts. I’m usually on three or four servers at a time and when I’m at home, every few minutes, timeout. BLAST! This doesn’t happen at all locations, usually on residential connections. I’ve dealt with it for years. Why?

Smack my head. I should have jumped out that window. This is so easy to fix:

1. Open up your sshd config, usually in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
2. Uncomment “ClientAliveInterval” and add the number of seconds after. I went with 600.

Problem solved. Kind of makes me question how much misery I just accept because “That’s just the way it is”.

Gort!

Update: It seems that I’ve over-optimized a bit on the latest build. I’ve toned it down and made it Tiger-compatible. The new build is on the downloads page.

With a few new browsers released this past week, I thought I’d redo the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on a couple (sorry Opera), and report the results. As usual, I disabled all add-ons, extensions, InputManagers, etc. The benchmarks were run on the same machine as the previous tests.

I also created another Intel Optimized Build of Firefox 3.5 RC preview (Shiretoko) using an updated .mozconfig file based on several reader contributions (including Mozilla employees). This new config is heavily optimized (that’s your warning). You can download both of those files on the downloads page.

Safari and Shiretoko did better than their previous incarnations, while Chrome OS X suffered in it’s jump from Chromium. The breakdown looks something like this:

• Safari: 20.9% faster
• Shiretoko: 13.6% faster
• Chrome: 16.7% slower

And the neat graph looks like this:

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results

Oh, and to find out what Gort is all about, go to about:robots in Firefox.

Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!

Update 2: And people thought I was nuts when I said the compass is important. Apple also seems to have not realized as they are just now working on more video hooks in the current 3.1 betas. Also, check out this video from AcrossAir. Mind blowing…

Update: Here is a much more in-depth posting on the importance of the compass:

The New iPhone Is a Pointing Device For The Real World: The Ground Will Speak.

One of the sleeper hits of the WWDC was the announcement of a magnetometer in the iPhone 3GS. I’m not sure this is getting the attention it deserves as I believe it is truly groundbreaking and will open an entirely new paradigm in mobile computing.

Well, I guess one guy understood the importance (from Gizmodo):

There’s also a built-in digital compass. One guy goes crazy. “A cool compass fan out there,” says Phil.

So what’s so special about a compass? Two hints:

1. Sky Map for Android (I guess they changed the name from Star Map after Searchology)
2. Wikitude AR Travel Guide (Top-50 finalist in Google’s Android Developer Challenge)

What I’m getting at is Augmented Reality. This has been a dream of mine for the past 10 years or so, first envisioning the idea as a set of glasses you could wear to annotate and read info on various locations. Later I dreamt of wackier and wackier ideas, but always knew I would never be able to pull it off – the technologies weren’t ready or weren’t cheap enough to go mainstream. Until now.

I’m not going to say much more on this issue… something’s brewing in the lab!

A couple posts wrapped into one:

Gmail IMAP Slow on Mail.app
With over 110,000 messages in my gmail account, Mail.app started choking bad. The problem got out of hand two days ago so I did something about it. This isn’t for the weak of heart. First quit Mail.app, then fire up terminal:

# cd ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-xxx@xxx.com@imap.gmail.com/\[Gmail\]/
# rm -rf All\ Mail.imapmbox
# ln -s /dev/null All\ Mail.imapmbox
# rm ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

DO NOT DO THIS WITH A POP ACCOUNT. Also, I advise you to back up these directories rather than deleting them, but I like to throw caution to the wind. Fire up Mail.app and it will reindex you mailboxes and you’re off the races. The dreaded “All Mail” directory will still be in your list of mailboxes, but don’t worry, you’ve neutered it.

Update: Check out this excellent article about achieving Mail.app nirvana.

Chromium Builds For OS X
I’ve been providing builds of Chromium for OS X on my downloads page for a while. Recently, Google has opened up their BuildBot Snapshots to the public. At first I was a tad skeptical of this as I was a BuildBot Waterfall freak, waiting for the perfect level of green before grabbing a revision to build. I’ve been watching the Snapshots and can say with a bit of confidence now that they are legit builds and are only pushed if the OS X code base has been touched (If I’m wrong on this, please correct me). With that said, I’m no longer going to provide custom builds of Chromium.

Apple’s m-Commerce Strategy
A very interesting app hit the app store this morning (or last night) that made me scratch my head a bit. It’s the Burger King Now app that allows you to pre-pay for purchases. Pre-Pay? That made me think of TechCrunch’s m-Commerce article on Jack Dorsey‘s new stealth startup code-named Squirrel. And there is this quote:

Squirrel is both a physical device add-on to the iPhone as well as an iPhone app. Ingeniously, the device derives enough power from the physical swiping of the credit card to then read the card, so it requires no external power from the iPhone or anywhere else. The physical device apparently looks something like an acorn, thus the code name Squirrel.

Swiping Cards? WTF? iPhone OS 3 will enable in-app payments that connects directly to your iTunes account and your credit card. Why is a physical device needed? Well the answer to that is to bypass the 30% Apple tax.

Apple could potentially enter this space, but would probably raise some flags at the DOJ. I think Jack is on the right track here and the potential of such a business boggles the mind.

Instead of updating each post with new download versions, I’ve consolidated all builds onto one page – Downloads. I have also added the mozconfig file I’m using to build the Intel Optimized Shiretoko as many have requested. I would really like to get feedback on it so that future builds get faster.

I’m not quite ready for nightlies (but getting there). I’ll also be adding some iPhone apps with provisioning shortly. I’m not going to deal with the app store just yet.

I also have some WordPress plugins that I want to release. So those will be available shortly as well.

Reality

This is what I hope the future holds.

image: pyxelated