Obvious Ideas

Judging by the fact that I’m not the only one who received the exact same message today, I guess someone figured out how to harvest emails from GitHub repositories. Probably from the readme files people post or from some metadata in the repositories (the email address is part of the username in the commit history).

I don’t understand how the originator of this spam attack thought that someone will fall for that, but oh well.

Hopefully next time Gmail’s spam filter will catch this kind of spam.

Arik

And, like other disruptive technologies, it’s getting better all the time.

This, after all, is the typical pattern with disruptive technologies.  The disruptor enters at the low end of the market, providing a simple service that is cheaper and more convenient than incumbent alternatives and “good enough.”  The low end of the market adopts the technology–and the incumbent players, which serve the profitable middle and high-end of the market–snigger and point out that their products are “better,”

But then the disruptor improves its product, the way the Huffington Post has improved its product for the last few years.  And soon the disruptive product is useful to the middle of the market as well–and it’s still simpler and more convenient.  Soon, the incumbent player, under attack from below, is forced to migrate to the higher end of the market, seeking to preserve its huge profit margins.  Eventually, the disruptor takes over the middle of the market, and the incumbent player collapses.

(from: Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age)

I really recommend reading the full article which talks about how the Huffington Post is soon (in 2-3 years) to become bigger than the New York Time in terms of traffic and probably revenues. And to think that the Huffington Post is a 5 years old blog and the New York Time is a 120 years old publishing house. It sure is a great example that disruptive technology is more about disruptive use of technology (I’m sure that in pure terms of technology NYT is better than the Huffington Post).

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

Just read on TheNextWeb that Facebook is about to allow users to switch from profile urls like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567890 to http://www.facebook.com/username. Awesome, right? They will open up the registration on Saturday, June 13. On the registration page there’s currently nothing, but a countdown until registration is open.

If you have a common name and you’re afraid that your username will be taken (like I do), you probably want some alert before the countdown reaches 0. Well, that’s exactly why I created the @fbname Twitter bot.

Just follow @fbname and it will DM you 1 hour before the registration of vanity urls is actually available on Facebook.

Enjoy
Arik

The Mr. Tweet people announced their new API to the public and I’ve just published on GitHub my PHP Wrapper for the Mr. Tweet API.

PHP Wrapper for Mr.Tweet’s V1 API
API Doc: http://api.mrtweet.com/v1/docs

It uses libcurl and requires PHP 5 >= 5.2.0 for json_decode.
Of course, you can rewrite to use other json decode funtions (or SimpleXMLElement for the XML response) and something
different than libcurl.

While it very straightforward, see MrTweetApiTest.php for example of usage.

Used originally for Topify (http://topify.com/).

Their API is in alpha right now, so you need to request an API key by emailing api@mrtweet.com.

Would love to hear comments and to see people forking it!

Arik

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

bit.ly is the url shortner we all been waiting for since the creation of tinyurl. It’s simply awesome.

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

I really like the built in screen capture ability of OS/X. I specially like the ability to easily take a screen capture of only part of the screen by using Cmd+Shift+4. What I didn’t like was the fact that it created a hell of a clutter on my desktop with all that screenshots.

Cluttered Desktop

For long time I’ve been just manually moving the screenshots to different folders / deleting them. But today I decided that enough is enough and looked for a solution. And of course a simple solution exists. To save you the reading here’s a summary of what you need to do:
1. Open the Terminal.
2. Create a new folder for the screenshots by using mkdir, i.e.

mkdir /Users/Arik/Desktop/Screenshots

3. Run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location [the-folder-you-created-in-step-2]

That’s it. Almost. Now you need to logout and login again in order for the changes to take effect. Instead you can use the following command (from Terminal):

killall -HUP SystemUIServer

Now you really done.

Hope it helps.
Arik

Lior Levin asked me today if it’s possible to create a Firefox extension, that will block Facebook part of the time. As a result, I created a Firefox extension (a compiled Greasemonkey) that blocks Facebook for 45 minutes each hour (form :16 to :59), i.e. blocking Facebook for 75% of your time.

This is a very rough alpha version. It will work, but it has a lot more to do with.

Will be glad to hear if you’re using it, and what you think of it.

Download extension | Download Greasemonkey Userscript

Arik