Recently I have been exploring the creation of video as an extension to my photography work – you can see some of the fruits of my labour on my YouTube channel. These have given me the taste for basic video production, and I decided to combine coding and videography, to put together an open-ended series of screencasts about how to create an XNA game for Windows Phone.

If you have any interest in this topic, I would love for the readers of my blog to go and check it out and let me know what you think!

Here’s the first episode:

You can find all of the episodes I have produced to date in a playlist. I am aiming to put a new video together roughly once a week – so be sure to subscribe if you like what you see!

• Unified messaging interface. Lets you seamlessly switch between Facebook chat, text, etc – in a single conversation.
• Linked inboxes, and conversation aggregation. You can view multiple email accounts from a single tile, and emails belonging to a conversation are grouped together. Very, very useful.
• Enhanced voice recognition. I just wrote a text to my girlfriend without touching the screen. Not to mention the fact that it nailed my (albeit simple) message body perfectly, first time.
• Local Scout. While apps like Yelp were already useful for this sort of thing, having a “guide” to local eateries and attractions built right into the Maps is great.
• Multi-tasking! Enough said.

All of these (and many more features) are great, but what I’m especially loving is how many of my little “niggles” have been dealt to, without me even asking! Here’s a list of some of the smaller changes that I’ve noticed so far, but that probably wouldn’t make it into a press release:

• Snoozing an alarm now snoozes for 10 minutes instead of 5. This is a lifesaver… Can’t see any way to configure the timeout myself, though.
• You can now switch off the camera shutter sound from the audio settings. That pervasive fake shutter noise is one of the most annoying things in the world – glad to be rid of it on my phone.
• Music + Videos hub now opens right up to the “zune” section, ready for you to select music, videos, radio, etc – instead of the “history” section that it used to default to.
• I use a PIN on my lock screen. You can now configure a “timeout”, whereby if you have already entered your PIN recently (say in the last 5 minutes), it won’t prompt you for the PIN for a second unlock within that period. Another great little feature – and one that I don’t see reproduced on other devices.

This is a fantastic update that tackles a variety of problems with the original platform – both large and small.

However, even after all these great updates, I am still left with just one question; Why, oh why aren’t there bus directions in Maps?! I can get walking and car directions, but no bus. The ONE TIME I typically want to catch a bus is when I’m out and about, and only have my phone available. This is a HUGE oversight, and I was disappointed to not see it fixed in Mango.

I was recently on holiday up in Vancouver, BC. Unfortunately my GPS unit had not been preloaded with Canada maps, so in the interest of not getting lost, I elected to open a map once or twice on my smartphone. I knew that this would be charged as “roaming” data, and as a smart person I had done my research, and established that AT&T would be charging me the exorbitant price of… $0.015 per kB. Didn’t seem soooo terrible – I figured that opening a map would use a handful of kB tops. If I was unlucky I was looking at a few dollars worth of usage. How wrong I was.

Total usage: 4.6MB. Total charge: $69. FML.

Let’s put that in perspective. I pay $33 per month for internet at home. I can use up to 250GB on my plan without repercussion, although let’s say I average around 100GB. That means I pay around $0.000000315 per kB.

The upshot of this, is that the data I used in Canada cost me more than 47,000 times as much per byte than my home internet plan. Forty. Seven. Thousand. For those keeping score, that means that if the roaming charge was the standard rate, I would be getting a 99.9979% discount on my internet bill every month. You can’t make these numbers up, we’re talking mind-bogglingly disparate numbers here.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the implications of roaming. AT&T has to negotiate with third-party providers to use their networks and their bandwidth when I’m out of the country. I understand that there is a significant difference between the cost of transferring data over a cable connection and a 3G connection. But if you think that all of those issues justify a 4.7 million percent markup, you have got to be pulling my leg. Canada is a first-world country, with (presumably) first-world cell networks and internet access. AT&T can give me an unlimited smartphone data plan for $20/mth, but can’t negotiate a better rate than $60 for 4MB of data?!

Give me a fucking break.

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me - it still sometimes happens - and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous - not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Ann Druyan, talking about her late husband, Carl Sagan.

A new photo taken by me is uploaded every day! Subscribe and stuff. I’m intending to use this as my main photography site now, so soon you’ll start seeing pics that don’t appear on my Flickr. Enjoy!

On it you will find fascinating and valuable information such as what car I bought, what I ate for breakfast, and who will be YOUR next American Idol! Or something. Just check it out. And comment so I’m motivated to update it more. Chur.

So today the Diaspora team finally released their source for developers. This post describes my efforts in getting Diaspora to run on Windows. It’s actually very straightforward (considering the readme has no mention of Windows!) – anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge should be able to successfully follow the steps below. I’ve included some fixes for common pitfalls. Please leave a comment if you are having trouble, or manage to find the solution to a problem you are having.

Warning: Diaspora is classified as pre-alpha software. You should not be ditching Facebook and moving your online social persona to Diaspora – at least, not yet. It’s full of documented security holes and bugs. You should only be installing it to have a play with it and get a feel for what the system is going to be like.

Prerequisites

The project readme describes the prerequisites for the project, and gives a basic installation guide (for Ubuntu and MacOS X). You will need to install all of them:

• MongoDB
• Git (TortoiseGit with msysgit – you need both)
• Ruby 1.8.7 (version is important!). I used the RubyInstaller Windows package. Make sure you specify that Ruby binaries be placed on your PATH.
• You will also need to install the Ruby DevKit from the same download page in order to build native gems. Comprehensive installation instructions are available for the development kit. I used 3.4.5, but later versions should be fine.
• OpenSSL (Win32 v1.0.0a precompiled binary)
• ImageMagick (6.6.4-2-Q16 Win32 DLL)
• Bundler (type “gem install bundler” at the command line)

You’ll need to make sure most things are on your path (especially your Ruby\bin directory).

Getting the source and dependencies

First, git clone the source into a sensible place using TortoiseGit. The repository URI is as follows:

http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git

Then, at a command line, browse to the repository and run the following command to install project dependencies:

bundle install

If you encounter an error about a native build failing, make sure you have installed the DevKit properly.

If you encounter an error about bundler not being able to find its functions, you will need to modify one of bundler’s source files. Open up Ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\bundler-1.0.0\lib\bundler\lockfile_parser.rb and modify line 14 so it reads as follows:

      lockfile.split(/\r?\n+/).each do |line|

Then run the bundle install command again. (Thanks Kristoffer!)

When the command succeeds, you should see a pretty substantial list of items install (in the order of 50 or so). The Diaspora team certainly know how to reuse existing solutions!

Running Diaspora

There is an official guide to installing Mongo on Windows, and running it as a Windows service, so I won’t go into that here. Just make sure that it is running before continuing (preferably as a service). Then, run the following at the command line from the repository directory to start the development server:

bundle exec thin start

You might encounter an error that looks like the following:

rbreadline.rb:4404: uninitialized constant RbReadline::Encoding (NameError)

A quick search turned up a blog post that described commenting out the affected line, which seemed to work for me. Just open Ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\rbreadline.rb in Notepad or similar, and comment out line 4404. This shouldn’t break anything significant. (It might affect you if you are doing some development and need to use the test suite – otherwise shouldn’t make a difference if you’re just running Diaspora to have a play).

Run the bundle exec thin start command to start the server once more, and you should see something similar to the following:

>> Using rack adapter
>> Thin web server (v1.2.7 codename No Hup)
>> Maximum connections set to 1024
>> Listening on 0.0.0.0:3000, CTRL+C to stop

Opening localhost:3000 in my web browser, I am then presented with the following:

Success! I should mention that this is of course just a development server. If you close the command window then the server stops running.

Getting access to your Diaspora node

Update: To register on your server, browse to /get_to_the_choppa. [This may no longer work, see next update]. It seems they haven’t yet built a proper registration page (or at least, you’re not supposed to be able to go to a random server and register). [Official signup page is now present]. Interestingly, that page worked for a short time on the developers’ own nodes – it seems they’ve since plugged the hole though.

Update 2: I assume the fact they’ve plugged the hole means it’s also plugged in the latest copy of the source. Here’s the “official” way to be able to log into Diaspora. [This way still works fine, but you may prefer to start from scratch - see next update]. From a command line in your repository, run the following commands:

gem install rake

rake db:seed:tom

bundle exec thin start

The rake command prepopulates some data, allowing you to then log in with username tom and password evankorth.

Update 3: It seems a Sign Up link has now been added to the login page (and /get_to_the_choppa redirects to this). You may want to use this to gain access instead of one of the above steps. I would recommend using the method above however, as it populates some images and a “friend” to play with.

Here’s what my running version of Diaspora looks like:

Although, as you can see, image resizing seems to be broken at the moment – perhaps a problem with my ImageMagick install. Other than that, seems to functioning ok. Of course, the “excitement factor” of testing the experience of a social platform by oneself is not particularly great!

Updating your Diaspora installation

Code updates are being pushed pretty thick and fast currently. To upgrade your Diaspora node, run the following commands at the command line in your repository directory:

git pull

This gets the latest version of the source code. You may need to run a git stash first if it complains about uncomitted changes.

bundle install

This will update and install new dependencies. You may encounter an error about a native build failing. To temporarily add DevKit to your path to allow building, first run devkitvars.bat from the extracted DevKit directory, then try running bundle install again.

rake

This compiles code and runs the test suite. Don’t worry too much about failed tests! You can also optionally nuke your database to start fresh again by running:

mongo diaspora-development
> db.dropDatabase()

Note that this requires MongoDB to be on your PATH. Finally, run the server again:

bundle exec thin start

That is, sidebar text that looked fine in Firefox was now weirdly spaced out in Chrome, and some elements (e.g. Archive date links) that were meant to be plain text now had Cufon styling.

For the longest time (well ok, maybe ~2 hours – still, a long time for such a minor annoyance), I searched my code, and tried out many different things in order to find a fix. I tried changing the Cufon selector (bypassing jQuery, for example), getting deep into the WordPress API to modify the output of the archive date list, messing with CSS, upgrading Cufon/jQuery, etc etc etc. Nothing I tried gave satisfactory results. Eventually I just gave up, and chalked it up as a behaviour oddity of jQuery selectors or Cufon, or something (I just knew it was nothing to do with me – how could it be, after putting so much time into it, right?!).

So today I was preparing to describe this oddity to someone as being a concrete example of weird JS in Chrome, and I happened to find this in part of the source:

<li><h1><a href="/">Home</a><h1></li>

See the problem? I had fudged the closing h1 tag. So basically, the behaviour I was seeing was not a bug in any of the libraries I was using, but rather Chrome and Firefox choosing to treat my broken code differently. It was also a frustratingly simple fix to what I had assumed was a complex problem (and had spent considerable time trying to fix). Going back for a second look, I found the 6-month-old bug almost by accident, in the space of about 30 seconds.

So at long last, my sidebar works correctly in all major browsers. Hurray! I just wish I’d had the aptitude to run my HTML through a validator or check it fully by hand back when the problem first manifested… Hindsight, as always, is 20/20.