Wayne D's Blog

I managed to snag an invite to lazyfeed.com when Techcrunch.com got a few in advance of lazyfeed's launch at the Real time stream Crunchup. Lazyfeed is a real time blog search tool, you enter tags and lazyfeed.com will return a list of blog articles matching your keyword. It doesn't aggregate the separate tags but highlights when there are new items in a particular tag and moves the tag to the top of the sidebar. You can also add individual blog posts to the sidebar as you can see in the screen shot below. This enables to bookmark a particular post so you can read it at your leisure. Lazyfeed has a lot of promise but there are still some bugs to be ironed out before it goes prime time. One glaring omission is that tags must be one word and there is no Boolean operator implemented yet. I can look for the tag "golf" or the the tag "simulator" but lazyfeed.com won't filter on "golf" and "simulator". The user interface can also be a touch confusing. Sometimes clicking on "View the stuff from past" shows you newer items than the new updates from the topic. Lazyfeed has great promise for lazy blog readers like me who don't want to bother which blogs to read and with a few tweaks could be really be a very sueful tool.

Let me guess, you updated Pidgin because you couldn't connect to Yahoo Messenger anymore and now it won't work at all. If you try to start the program from a console you get the following message pidgin: symbol lookup error: pidgin: undefined symbol: gst_registry_fork_set_enabled

That's what happened to me, the fix was simple, update gstreamer and gstreamer plugins to the latest version. Running "yum update gstreamer*" got me new versions of gstreamer, gstreamer-tools, gstreamer-plugins-base and gstreamer-plugins-good.

I'm running Centos 5 but I suspect others including Redhat EL5 users are running into the same problem, I hope this helps.

When I was looking around for a replacement for Flickr, I came across Cooliris. Cooliris is a browser plugin that allows you to view pictures in a picture wall style interface on Cooliris enabled websites like Flickr and facebook or on your local computer. A complete list of Cooliris enabled sites can be found here. Cooliris also has a embeddable Flash widget which you can see in action below. The widget and Cooliris use a Media RSS feed to determine which pictures to show.
Unfortunately the small size of the Flash widget doesn't do Cooliris justice but you can get the flavour of it.

When I do put my pictures up here I'll be making then Cooliris enabled. The only problem I've found so far is that the Cooliris plugin requires Glibc 2.7 and Centos the Linux distro I use is still back at 2.5.

After saying such nice things about Adobe and Linux with respect to Adobe AIR I found out yesterday that a problem I attributed to my trying to run Flash 10 on the EEEPC is actually a problem on all version of Linux using Flash Player version 10. Here is the text from the Adobe security announcement.
"Starting with version 10,0,2, Flash Player will not permit use of camera or microphone, or display of the Settings UI, when any of the following conditions are present:

* When the window mode (set with the HTML "wmode" attribute) is "direct" or "gpu"
* When the window mode is "transparent" or "opaque" (Linux only)

The Settings UI is the inline UI visible when users right-click or Control-click on SWF content and choose Settings."

Emphasis added by me. Adobe is incorrect, the settings UI pops up when you visit a site using window mode "transparent" or "opaque" but can't be dismissed. If you right click on Flash area it will also pop up and stay there. There is no way they can pass this off as a security enhancement when the behavior only occurs in Linux. Come on Adobe admit it, it's a bug. You introduced a new mode but decided not to implement it properly in Linux. This behavior makes it extremely difficult to use Linux on Netbooks because they are so useful when you want to use sites like 12seconds.tv, tokbox.com and the like.

Click the images to see them full size.

There are two workarounds, only one of which I would recommend. Go to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html scroll down to the site you want to access and click always allow.

Here is a list of sites where you have this problem from ubuntuforums.org if you try to use your camera. Please add anymore you find in the comments.

• megavideo.com
• supernovatube.com
• stickam.com,
• ustream.com

A little while ago I wrote about my experience with Mahalo Answers which is trying to micro monetize knowledge by offering users tips for answering other users questions.

Now I've heard about another site that is trying to reward their users for providing site content. Docstoc.com is an online document storage and sharing site with a difference. They include Google Adsense ads on the document pages, if visitors click on the ads shown below documents you have uploaded to the site Docstoc splits the ad revenue with you 50/50. You get your money directly from Google so you need to have a Google Adsense account to participate but DocStoc will assist you in setting one up if you need help. Now there are ads in the search listings that don't share revenue with the document uploaders but Docstoc has made it clear what the terms of the program are. It's nice to see sites that rely on user generated content rewarding the content their users generate. I don't think anyone is going to get rich off sharing their spreadsheets but who knows? I hope we see more innovative thinking like Docstoc's in the social media space.

Docstoc supports the standard doc, xls, ppt, pps, pdf, rtf, txt, docx, xlsx and ppts file formats. Docstoc has also developed a flash based viewer that let you embed your documents in a website, I have included a sample for your perusal below. They don't only have invoice forms but they also have amusing documents like The Largest Food Items in the World, documents in the news such as Mel Gibson divorce papers and book previews including When You Lie About Your Age, The Terrorists Win by Carol Leifer.

The Largest Food Items Ever Made -