techniQal support

Aside from being a clever play on words, this post is really about one of the most interesting things to land on the web browser in a long time. Care of Mozilla Labs and Aza Raskin, Ubiquity is a Firefox plugin that brings the command line to the web, and the utility of the quicklauncher to your browser. Imagine a great tool like Quicksilver or Launchy , but for your web browsing tasks.
The utility available in this tool is truly amazing, and the potential is huge. I urge you to goto the Ubiquity page, watch the video , read the tutorials , and get a better understanding of what it does. So what can you do with Ubiquity with the stroke of a few keys?

• Search:Google,Lijit(see below),Yahoo,Ask,MSN,Amazon,Wikipedia,flickr
• Twitter
• Email a page, google map, selected web content to any Gmail contact
• Add a Google Calendar item

The list goes on and on(type command-list in the the command window to get a list of all of the command options).
Once you have it installed, visit this page to subscribe to a cool Ubiquity command that allows you to launch a Lijit search from any site that has a Lijit wijit installed.
Once you subscribe, if you are on a blog that uses Lijit, launch Ubiquity , and type liijit + “search query” to search that blogger , and all of their content.
It was a lot of fun to hack this up, and it will definitely inspire me to write some more commands.

More information
Firefox Plugin: https://people.mozilla.com/~avarma/ubiquity-0.1.xpi
Tutorial: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial
Developer Docs: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_Author_Tutorial
Video:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Barack Roll

The political videos are getting better every day. This is too good not to share.

FYI–Blogged this directly from Youtube–took 4 days to show up. Last time I do that.

Long ago, when I was slightly younger, in better shape, and maybe even better looking, I threw together a little wordpress plugin that made it a bit easier to add a Lijit Widget to a wordpress blog. Not long after that, I scored a job at Lijit and became so busy I never updated it or even really looked at it again. Until now…

Please ignore the melodramatic paragraph above. The truth is, we decided to get someone with some more wordpress plugin experience to help us out. We enlisted the help of Alex King and the great team at CrowdFavorite to help us create a new wordpress plugin that has more features, and is better integrated with the Wordpress platform. The result is a great looking plugin that makes it easy to add Lijit to your wordpress blog,

Whats new:

• Use your existing account, or create a new account from within the plugin admin menu
• Choose between the classic sidebar widget, or hijack the wordpress search widget.
• See your Lijit statistics from your wordpress dashboard.
• Tighter plugin and admin menu integration

Where to get it:

Goto http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-lijit-wijit  to download the plugin and read the install instructions.

Need help or have questions?  Send an email to support@lijit.com .

After experimenting with Disqus a few months back, I decided that the best bet for my 25 blog comments was to keep them in Wordpress and out of the “cloud”. I think Disqus changed my mind today. They just released a new wordpress plugin that gives you the best of both worlds.

It allows you to keep your comments on your site, which adds extra “hit points” to your SEO , but it also means that comments may actually come up in search results. This is huge since I work for a company that does stuff on the internet that has something to do with search. The new changes, and ease of install make using Disqus as your primary comment manager a no-brainer.

Add a Lijit Widget into the mix, and you have everything a blogger could need. Plus, with easy Disqus/Lijit integration , your search experience gets even better.

Congrats to Daniel Ha, and the rest of the Disqus team.

File this one in the ridiculous category. I’ve waited for quite a while to do the Tiger – > Leopard upgrade on my Macbook. But the promise of easy backup with TimeMachine made me make the decision that this was the week to make “the switch” . So I get the install dvd and try to go through all of the steps of getting the install to work. That is when the fun begins. I tried multiple DVD’s, so I know it wasn’t the install media. Regular DVD’s and CD’s work fine, so it probably isn’t the drive.

Problems:

1. DVD only boots 20% of the time..
2. All install methods fail before they get going.
3. DVD gets spit out 80% of the time.

Solution:

1. Turn the macbook on it’s side. Seriously. It has also been suggested that turning it upside down may do the trick.

Photo Courtesy of Tara’s sweet camera

Notice the gap near the back. Although precarious, it gave me enough room to leave the power attached. How stupid is that?

Paris Hilton finally displays some value to the human race.

While checking out my great stats on Lijit recently, I started to see a pattern. I was able to determine that a large part of my Re-Search(search engine) traffic was coming from a post I did about reading and writing to files in Python back in  2005. In an effort to shamelessly attract more traffic on this topic, I have decided to flesh this post out a bit.

A common task that I run into both in my work life as well as my personal life, revolves around programmatically downloading content from the interwebs. This little code example will illustrate how to use urllib to download a file, and write/save the file contents locally. You may be saying to yourself “Self, can’t I do this in my favorite web browser??” . The answer is “YES”, but it’s a pain in the ass if you have more than 5 files you want to download.

Assume there are a set of images on your favorite website, and they are all named  image1.jpg,image2.jpg,image3.jpg, etc. Now imagine there are 50 images using this naming convention.How do you download them all using python , without struggling to do it one image at a time in your browser? Look below!

# Let's create a function that downloads a file, and saves it locally.
# This function accepts a file name, a read/write mode(binary or text),
# and the base url.

def stealStuff(file_name,file_mode,base_url):
	from urllib2 import Request, urlopen, URLError, HTTPError

	#create the url and the request
	url = base_url + file_name
	req = Request(url)

	# Open the url
	try:
		f = urlopen(req)
		print "downloading " + url

		# Open our local file for writing
		local_file = open(file_name, "w" + file_mode)
		#Write to our local file
		local_file.write(f.read())
		local_file.close()

	#handle errors
	except HTTPError, e:
		print "HTTP Error:",e.code , url
	except URLError, e:
		print "URL Error:",e.reason , url

# Set the range of images to 1-50.It says 51 because the
# range function never gets to the endpoint.
image_range = range(1,51)

# Iterate over image range
for index in image_range:

	base_url = 'http://www.techniqal.com/'
	#create file name based on known pattern
	file_name =  str(index) + ".jpg"
	# Now download the image. If these were text files,
	# or other ascii types, just pass an empty string
	# for the second param ala stealStuff(file_name,'',base_url)
	stealStuff(file_name,"b",base_url)

That’s it. It not only reports on any errors it encountered while downloading, but think of all of the time you just saved… Really though, how important is your time to you if you’re reading this blog???

My wife and I just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary recently. The whole “5 years” thing hit me, and caused me to reflect. If I look at any other 5 year snippet of my life, it doesn’t even start to compare. The last 5 years have been the best, and as good times usually go, they flew by.

To celebrate, Mary and I enjoyed a wedding gift from a friend. It took some will power to wait five years, but it was worth it.

Thanks for the cool gift Jennifer.

And to all future wedding attendees, you should try this out for a gift:

Bottle of Champagne (for 1 year anniv.)

Bottle of Wine(for 5 year anniv.)

Bottle of Port(for 10 year anniv.)

It is a risky bet in a country with a 50% divorce rate, but at the very least your newly divorced friend may invite you over to drink it with them. Or have them accelerate the schedule (1 month, 6months, 1 year) ?? Either way, it’s a cool idea.

Thanks for an awesome 5+ years Mary…

lucas and the laptop

Originally uploaded by Tarable1

Great pic from the Lijit 2nd birthday party.
If you look real close, you can even see that he is writing a blog post for the Lijit blog.
It’s about time that little monster started earning his keep.

Read this pretty hilarious article on nytimes.com.

Either the first guy inspired the second guy or the second guy went crazy due to his job in IT (you have to be a little crazy just to get hired in this industry). Basically, two people thought it would be cool to climb up the NY Times building yesterday. I am pretty sure there is a larger than normal mass of crazy in New York right now. My favorite part is the quote from the police inspector in charge of the scene/arrest : “That’s the last climber today.” .  At least he isn’t over-committing . He totally gets the whole  “under promise , over deliver”  work ethic.