• Barcamp Brighton 2 (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) – Neil Crosby wrote an interesting writeup of BarcampBrighton2. He even mentioned Uncricket!
• cbetta – Twitter Stats – Did a quick stats of my twitter messages. Nothing particularly interesting.
• DeliciousSafari –
• 12 Future Apps For Your iPhone – An interesting article with some interesting ideas, but with some apps I can't see why they would have more reason for success on the iPhone than previous devices. Especially the business cards app.
• New Principles for a New Economy – Alper has an interesting article up on the Tipit blog about voluntary economics. Will be a major inspiration for my BarcampBrighton2 talk tomorrow.

• Quick, Dirty, Cheap API in symfony – Mark NG had a little article up on how to build a quick API on top of existing controllers. Very handy indeed
• Simon Maddox's Upcoming-to-Flickr script (using Fire Eagle) – I think the title says it all.
• Portable contact lists and the case against XFN – Messina has a nice article up about the over complexity of XFN and suggests promoting a simpler subset of Contact List Portability instead.
• Lawrence Lessig's Final Lecture on Free Culture, January 31st 2008, Stanford University – Professor Lawrence Lessig's final lecture on free culture. Very interesting and very encompassing of all he has been talking about all these years.
• Fire Eagle Launches – I am a bit late but this video of Tom Coates presenting FireEagle is definitely worth watching if you wonder what FireEagle is.
• Video Presentation: A Software Platform History of Apple, NeXT, Microsoft, and into the Future. — RoughlyDrafted Magazine – Daniel Eran Dilger had an interesting talk in Dallas on the history and future of Apple. The video quality is a bit like our Geek Dinner videos, but still worth watching.

This post was originally posted to FourStarters.com on the 12th of March 2008

I was talking and thinking about the recently released Apple iPhone SDK today, and realized that while I like the major idea of a controlled application platform I did have my doubts about some of the more intricate details. Selling an application for your price through the Apple controlled store sounds like solid business model for both Apple and developers, but quickly shows an contrast with how developers really build a community around their products.

Uniform Price Model

As far as I can understand, Apple let’s you set your own price, which at first sounds very cool, but is eventually very limiting in real life. Inherently this model will force anyone into a uniform price plan, which isn’t the same uniform price plan that is set in the iTunes music store where every song is either £0.79 or £0.99, but it does force every developer to stick to the same price for every customer. This poses an intricate problem for developers that might want to perform some kind of price discrimination.
read more…

• Video: Twitter in Plain English – Interesting video that tries to explain Twitter without showing Twitter.
• Bedup Shows What Happens When Bed Meets Ceiling – if you have limited living space (like me and Mel) than this bed just looks perfect
• Delegate Rendering a JSON API in Symfony –
• BashCompletion for Symfony – Really useful cause all those commands are not really rememberable .
• Mix08 – Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki Keynote – Interesting interview of Steve Ballmer by Guy Kawasaki. I still think Ballmer is possibly a retard though.
• How to use Subversion more effectively with proper Repository Structure and better use of Branching/Tagging/Versioning.. – A little cheatsheet for me on how to setup a proper svn structure.

• iPhone Dev Center – Can't wait to get playing with the iPhone API!
• The API has landed: Official Google Contact Data API – About time. Does this prove that companies CAN voluntarily participate in DataPortability initiatives?
• Welcome to Fire Eagle! – Long awaited and now finally there: FireEagle. Must give it a good eye though one of these days.
• Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story – Interesting story on why Silverlight makes perfect sense. Actually answered a lot of my questions.
• Where are ideas when they are on the internet? – Interesting post by Sjors Timmer on non-places and hyper-modernity.

After promoting hAvatar during BarcampBrighton and SemanticCamp, I was starting to get pretty happy with the response we got from people. So, you can imagine how annoyed I was when suddenly my own avatar stopped working on several sites. Today I took a dive into the code behind the hAvatar plugin for WordPress, and most importantly: hKit.

Problem Found

As I expected the issue was not with Alper’s code of the hAvatar plugin but rather with the hKit PHP library. As a step in the process of determining the hCard in the hKit library, the source code that is read is “Tidied”. hKit has 3 build in ways of doing this, the default being using the W3C tidy service.

The W3C service is a very simple service that simply takes a URL as a parameter like this:

http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/tidy?docAddr=http://google.com/

As a result this gives the tidied output of the source of that URL. Now the serious issue that I ran into was that for some weird reason my URL (http://cristianobetta.com) causes a timeout in this service. To be more precise: about every URL on my server causes an issues. Obviously I contacted my hosting provider about this issue but let’s put the problem in a different perspective.

The Bottleneck Dillema

The problem here in my opinion is that hKit relies on a “bottleneck” in their process. Normally this bottleneck only causes a performance issue, but this time it even caused errors. Sadly though, because of this use hKit is not really a standalone script and things can therefore go wrong without hKit knowing. In my opinion hKit would be much more interesting if it shipped with an in-build, platform independent solution to take care of this step.

There are currently some other options besides the proxy to tidy up code. One of the settings of hKit allows for changing the tidy mode to “exec”, “php” or “none”. The first tries to use the tidy command, the second the tidy php functions. Unfortunately none of both are by default available on most systems, making an easy deployment of hAvatar on those systems way harder. To use the “php” option the tidy library needs to be compiled into PHP, which is sometimes impossible, and to use the “exec” command a binary is needed, which makes the solution rather platform dependent.

The Plead

So here I am, asking for a new solution that makes hKit a more independent library. I think it makes sense from a technical and philosophical perspective, but most of all from a performance view. Currently hKit isn’t that fast already (you can’t instance it more than once, making parallel processing of avatars fairly hard) and I think that a server side, non-proxy solution would seriously give this kit a performance boost. Obviously I would be happy as people would by default probably be able to load my avatar, as where it is currently unclear why W3C can’t fetch my url.

* Update: After an email with my hosting provider it seems that the W3C proxy now has access to my server, enabling all hAvatar activities on my domains. Still, I think my point above is valid from a performance point of view.

The Geekdinners are coming thick and fast now, In the forth one of this year we have special guest Holmes Wilson one of the brains behind the very popular Miro Player (formally Democracy Player) and the Participatory Culture Foundation. A non-profit group setup to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage with and in their culture..

When: Thursday, March 13, 2008, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Where: Ye Olde Cock Tavern (upstairs bar), 22 Fleet Street, EC4Y 1AA
Nearest Underground: Temple or Chancery Lane
Special Guests: Holmes Wilson
Cost: 5 pounds for Food
Upcoming: 419336

Please use the upcoming link or comment below to indicate your interest

Recently I have been starting to get really fed up with Facebook (I am not the only one). My main problem is that I don’t use it but others do and expect you to be the same. My problem though is that Facebook data is very closed, inaccessible, and honestly I think I use better solutions.

One example is where I use Upcoming versus the Facebook event structure. More than one person have been nagging me about integrating the Upcoming events and the GeekDinner blog posts into the Facebook group because that’s easier for them. Honestly, I like Upcoming and WordPress perfectly well on their own. How hard can it be for someone to simply add the RSS feeds from either to your favorite RSS reader and then add the iCal events to your favorite calendar utility when you feel like it?

Anyhow, I will be trying to auto-integrate the blog and upcoming into the Geek Dinner Facebook group because I caved in. But please don’t expect me to Facebook because you do. If I don’t reply to a wall message, send me an email. All my info is freely available online. It is not THAT hard to find, seriously.