A Fresh Cup

Picked up a few more odds and ends in my peregrinations around the net.

• Get your Rails tests results via Growl notifications – I’m starting to rethink whether every bloody thing should come in via Growl. If test results come back quickly enough to be useful, aren’t they foreground information? Still, eye candy is seductive. (via dzone)
• Ajax File Upload – Not really Ajax, but a reasonably clever hack to keep everything on one page.
• iStalkr – New lifestreaming site with a public feed of everything. If this one becomes at all popular it could be a surefire recipe for drowning in infotrivia.
• “Ruby In Steel Developer Updated”: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-Developer-Updated – With various editing and debugging improvements, for folks doing Ruby on Windows.

If you like challenges, I can recommend LSL. It’s certainly one of the more hack-inducing, infuriating languages I’ve ever tried to work in.

• tumblr – Tumblelog software that can automatically import RSS feeds, and thus becomes another tool for lifestreaming. They’re coming out of the woodwork now.
• Capistrano security fun – Turns out there’s an information leak in the default use of Capistrano. Not a real high pri issue for most sites, but a bit sloppy. (via Ruby Inside)
• Customize Your Rake Files – To make rcov behave the way you want it to.

My head is all full of business ideas. My to-do list is all full of routine crud. Bah.

• Mugshot – Another online lifestreaming aggregator.
• Looking for feed addicts; trawlr.com reloaded! – Online RSS feed aggregator using RESTful Rails techniques as its backbone.
• Ruby In Steel PE (free edition) 1.0 Released – The free version of this Rails IDE for Windows has reached the 1.0 release milestone.
• VMware attacks Microsoft virtualization strategy – Virtualization appears to be the latest frontier for Microsoft underhanded shenanigans.

This is only peripherally related to the subject of this blog (my search for a new career) but it’s a topic that fascinates me. That may be because I spent many years involved with smart passionate people who were fighting like hell to protect their personal privacy from the looming spectre of Big Brother. Now I’m on the fringes of other communities of smart passionate people who seem intent on taking whatever shards of personal privacy they might have left and deliberately destroying them by putting their entire lives on the Internet. I’m talking about more than just the rise of blogging and Flickr and Twitter (where you’ll find me as MikeG1) and all the other outlets for the extroverts of the new millenium (minor digression: I think we actually need a new category for folks who are introverts in “real life” but extroverts on line, but that’s a topic for another day). The part that’s fascinating me tonight is lifestreaming – the idea that since all this stuff we’re throwing on line ends up in RSS feeds, we might as well combine it all into a single personal master feed and be done with it. As far as I can tell Jeremy Keith gets the credit for the name, though with the number of tools already out there, the idea was definitely in the air.

Intelligence agencies used to spend a bundle on the sort of painstaking assembly of apparently unrelated facts to draw a conclusion, and here we are handing it to them on a silver platter. I dunno; on the one hand, it all seems sort of creepy, on the other it seems inevitable. After all, anyone who wants to can already subscribe to the half-dozen RSS feeds that describe my life, so why not make it easy for them? And we’re clearly in the early days here, where only the technical weasels are playing with this stuff. If it catches on, we can bet on all sorts of unanticipated outgrowths:

• recombinant lifestreams where people steal bits of other people’s feeds to make themselves sound cooler
• spammers finding a way to sneak ads into our lifestreams (in return for bandwidth?)
• couples combining into a single lifestream
• shortly followed by a messy lifestream divorce
• some automatic Web 2.0 service (“hey, your lifestream is similar to X’s, you should meet!”)

Anyhow, if you’re interested in this stuff, either as a fascinated observer or a potential participant, there are a whole mess of tools out there already (you knew I couldn’t do a blog entry without linking to a bunch of tools, right?). Here’s what’s crossed my radar so far:

• FeedGrab – A plugin for the ExpressionEngine blogging engine that can merge multiple RSS feeds into a single stream.
• Jaiku – Focused on creating a “presence stream.” So you can add whatever feeds you like, but it only shows title, time, and source on Jaiku itself, and you click through to get to the original item.
• Planet Venus is a newsreader that works by intermingling multiple RSS feeds together into a single “river of news.” Edward O’Connor uses it to hack together a lifestream here .
• Profilactic is a “digital life aggregator” that you point at all your online identities. Then it automatically builds a mashup of them all. It can also search out and keep track of mentions of you on the Web.
• Slife is an OS X app that tracks your desktop interaction with apps like Mail, Safari, and iChat, so you can keep track of things that don’t even generate RSS feeds. This gives you a client-side record which you can then choose to share with the world through their Slifeshare site.
• SuprGlu – Lets you take a batch of RSS or Atom feeds, apply a template, and republish them as a Web page to make a sort of recombinant blog.
• Yahoo Pipes – With its ability to mix RSS feeds together, Pipes lets the tinkerer build their own lifestream, though sorting is a bit iffy at the moment. Jon Rowett has hacked together an example .

(Thanks to Emily Chang for a couple of links).