Mark's World » Tech

Google I/O day 2

Mark Lise — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:47:13 +0000

Wow x2. Yes, that’s Google I/O day two = wow x2. Vic Gundotra wasn’t kidding when he had some more surprises up his sleeve at Google I/O 2009. Wave was amazing to say the least.

Normally in these presentations you get the typical echo-chamber response to events.. lots of hype etc.. but this is really impressive. Google Wave started 1.5 years ago, and if you think about it – that’s a long time ago to come up with this kind of vision of where the web should be. Some have suggested that they have looked at Facebook connect and other web properties to guide them over time. Maybe they did.. It’s irrelevant. They’ve achieved some really neat stuff, plus they open sourced it. They are ahead of the curve by a mile, although as they stated it themselves – the web hasn’t moved fast enough hence what they’re doing/releasing now.

To take a page from @anotherjesse, goodbye HTTP – hello XMPP. The web as we know it is already old school, so welcome the new school of realtime communication and collaboration c/o Googl Wave. I for one, as I mentioned in my last post, am quite excited. The web is becoming more like an OS

Google I/O day 1

Mark Lise — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:36:55 +0000

So I’ve finished my first day at Google I/O. Man, what a day it was. The keynote was great and I actually got to sit front row. To see Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google no more than 20ft away was pretty cool. Vic Gundotra was the most active of the speakers and I’d say the most well-spoken next to Eric.

They have been really pushing hard for evangelising the next phase of the internet. I think of it similar of the situation when desktop software became mature. Multi-threaded apps were necessary, storage, accessibility, API standards for drawing etc. These are now the things that are translating into the things that Google is trying to promote. Background workers, pixel-based drawing, and offline mode just to name a few obvious examples.

I’m really stoked for this since I was one that was brought up upon C/C++ and threading and the like is a natural thought process for me. Initially, coding javascript in the early days was almost a step backward for me – but now it appears that’s about to change. I’m really happy a large company is behind these sorts of changes. I really means the web is moving in an incredibly exciting direction. Kudos Google.

If you want to check out the keynote for yourself, head to Google Youtube keynote for Google I/O 2009.

DemoCampVictoria #3 update

Mark Lise — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:39:13 +0000

So I have a scheduling conflict. I’ll be heading down to SF on May 26th for GoogleIO. It’s Google’s largest developer gathering so it should be pretty exciting! Unfortunately that means I can’t run DemoCamp Victoria #3. I need people to take the reigns! DemoCamp isn’t really *that* rigid or complicated, but to make it easy for people I’ll outline the basics:

Welcome everyone to DC3.
Explain what democamp is in very brief form, take some questions.
Explain the format, get the list up and get those names on the board
30-second intros, vote on the best 4-6, followed by the presentations of such. (again, not a hard rule, let the crowd decide
Let the presentations rip and ask questions, engage.. don’t just sit there and watch!
Enjoy the event, go out for a social afterwards

There should be a photographer going, but in addition we should have someone tweet the event (you #victoriatweetup ppl should come), and lets get more people blogging about it.

I’ll follow the hashtags while I’m in SF, good luck!

SEO eBook

Mark Lise — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:35:01 +0000

SEO eBook

I’ve wanted to learn more about SEO and how it can help drive traffic. I’ve managed to get my hands on the following SEO eBook. I was expecting a lot of complicated details which were difficult to figure out, hard to implement, or otherwise take me more time than actually worth it. I was pleasantly surprised!

The book clearly defines the area to target, why you want to do it, and how. If you’ve made a website before, you’re certainly capable of understanding this and making a big difference to your page rank. Reccomending this to anyone who wants to enhance their SEO without investing a ton of time.

DemoCampVictoria #3

Mark Lise — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:39:54 +0000

DemoCampVictoria

Hey everyone, that’s right. We got another democampvictoria coming up May 26th, 2009! We’ve got some really interesting demos in the pipe so I’m really looking forward to this one. It’s at the Canadian Pacific Lawn Bowling club.

Barcamp page here: http://bit.ly/67pHX

Facebook event page here: http://bit.ly/12v7YZ

See you all there!

Don’t Click on Twitter Explained (sorta)

Mark Lise — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:46:37 +0000

So if you are on twitter and you’ve seen the “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6″ status message, seriously. Just don’t click it. @apeatling was first on my list to state that it was a bad thing to do and it got me into investigative mode. Besides viewing the source, I found a site explainin how all the so-called “magic” happens, and if you can read French check it out: http://www.korben.info/petit-cours-de-twitt-jacking.html

It’s quite simple actually, it relies on an embedded iframe that visits the url: http://twitter.com/home?status=”http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6″. Now everone that’s following you will see the same message you on on that friend and who konws who’ll click on it and propogate the badness.

Twitter needs to (and I’m sure by the time most people read this it should be fixed) check the referral on any API call, of course this is just *one* way to help fix the problem.

I then looked into the rest of the site and see how I could exploit DM messages and anything else (on the advice of @quaelin). I theorize that you can use XHR to grep the twitter ID of any user you’re following and then DM them message. The same idea applies, use “http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/xxxxx” (where xxxx is the twitterID of a particular twitter account) construct an http POST, pushing in the authentication_token value, and wham you got your script sending DM’s to everyone.

I’m deliberately leaving out a lot of details, but in short this sucks. The same methods could be applied to many other sites, it’s not just Twitter that has to worry about this.

Follow me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/marklise

iPhone Developer Meetup

Mark Lise — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:21:28 +0000

Well, I just got back from the event and I’m now I’m sitting on my couch about to sum it all up.

About 14 people showed up to the event and everyone was contributing and the discussion never got stale. We talked about a lot of things: IUI, provisioning codes, 3-inches of love (don’t ask), appstore – and two ways of getting into it, disk IO, and even went through an exmaple app in objc.

An interesting thing to note came up which I wasn’t aware of; When filling out the tax information on your app store application, choose ITIN and use “nine zeroes” as the number. Apparently Canadian citizens are exempt and don’t need to fill out the huge forms asking you almost everything, stopping short of your blood type.

There was talk about how to deploy your app. App store or ad hoc method? If you go through the app store method, there were some obvious benefits – however if you’re just wanting to hack and release to a few (hundred) people or so, ad hoc was the way to go. Why? App store has a huge amount of gates (review process, etc) and Apple can essentially reject your application for a variety of reasons – “We don’t like it” might just be valid enough. If you go ad-hoc, you can deploy onto anyone’s iPhone, but you’ll need their iPhone GUID and bake it into your app first, creating a new binary for that user to download and only then will it install.

Something that irked me, interpreted languages are NOT supported on the iPhone! Now, I don’t know if this is something that will change in the future, but I have to think that it must. I can’t see, and I’ll loosely call it, “fun integration” with web API’s etc consumable by objc alone. I could do a lot of things really fast in script (fast as in development time), it would be laborious to code up equivalent in straight objc. I dare not speak about my work on an “unnamed” browser platform in C++.. linking times is absolutely killing me, but I digress.

Last note is the book of choice was “iPhone SDK Development
by Bill Dudney, Chris Adamson, Marcel Molina”. I haven’t seen it myself, but I might have to get myself a copy (currently available as a betaPDF). First time I’ve heard of a book being in “Beta”…

Mac Battery Life

Mark Lise — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:20:33 +0000

I was suggested to try out this program to determine my battery life on my MBP. It’s quite cool! I am looking for something similar for Linux/Win but nothing very interesting yet.

Excerpt from http://www.macupdate.com/:

“coconutBattery is a tool that reads out the data of your notebook-battery (iBook/Powerbook). It gives you live feedback, what’s going on in your battery (not only a snapshot like other tools).

It shows the current charge of your battery as well as the current maximum capacity related to its original. If coconutBattery detects that you have connected the wrong charger (i.e. an ibook-charger plugged in a powerbook) it will warn you! That’s a cool feature!”

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19085

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Founders and Funders

Mark Lise — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:39:59 +0000

If you’re looking to meet other entrepreneurs, you’ll definitely want to check this out. David Crow and Jevon MacDonald put together the inaugural event in Toronto in 2007. The whole point is to meet up with other startups, VC’s and Angel investors. Cross pollinate the mix and create the next big company! Contact me if you’re interested or just go straight to Boris at Bootup Labs.

Asus EEE PC love

Mark Lise — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:01:18 +0000

Rumor has it that Asus is going to release the EEE PC Desktop. Some may think, WHY.. the EEE PC is an ultra portable laptop, why would we need something similar in the desktop space?

I’d say for those not wanting a giant box sitting under/on their desk whirring away, this makes for a perfect computing device suitable for most things home users need out of a computer. Email, internet, facebook, whatever the next cool Web 2.0 site is… you get the point. Why would my parents need quad-core, 4G ram etc? They don’t.

Minimalists will love it. Those living in small apartments want to make good use of space, and this little thing can sit in a living room or studio apartment without being completely obvious. Apple has similar functional (and stylistic) achievements with their Mac Mini and iMac products.

There’s a EEE PC in my house and I will most certainly pickup an EEE PC Desktop if/when it arrives. I’m guessing the price point will only be a few $100 more than the laptop version. Go Asus!