nicholasdejong.com

Recently Twitter has thrown the switch and killed basic-auth authentication for interaction with their Twitter API. This means you can no longer simply use cURL in the following manner to make status updates etc:-

The guys over at Freelancer.com have produced an API to interact with their already cool site. Their API is well documented and easy enough to use but there are a few hoops to jump through to get an application authorized and and the response data structures do not always seem consistent among all the possible calls (but that could just be me).

A quick test to see if I can easily get my Twitter messages into Drupal with minimal effort...

Extending an ext3 volume on an Amazon Elastic Block Storage volume is fairly straight-forward if you are using it as a simple-straight-through block storage device (i.e. you are not striping across multiple EBS for the sakes of improving performance... apparently this is possible.)

To enable the built in USB based WiFi card on the FitPC under Ubuntu 8.10 make sure you have the rt73-common package installed:-

A while back I purchased a FitPC and wrote briefly about my intention to take it with me on a moto ride from NYC to SF. While I'm still not certain I'll take it due to increasing concerns about having sufficient power I have been working with it here and there.

Google recently enhanced Google Alerts such that it is possible to obtain RSS feeds of canned searches.

This is enormously useful but there is no API that enables one to programaticly list, add and remove items to their set of Google Alerts. So partly because it's too cold outside to do anything and partly because this seems like useful functionality I spend a few hours today writing a PHP class that implements an API to Google Alerts.

rdiff-backup, another one of those tools you come by and wonder why you've not seen it before. I've lived through all manners of ssh+rsync+tar to handle remote system backups and incremental changes with varying degrees of success. rdiff-backup is beautiful because it is powerful yet so easy to work with. Just install the same rdiff-backup package at both source and destination ends and everything then just works.