brad's life

Ukraine

Nobody reads my LiveJournal anymore, but thank you to everybody in Russia protesting Putin's insane war against Ukraine. (I know it's risky protesting in Putin's Russia.) Here's hoping for peace and better times for all.

Happy Birthday!

Happy 20th Birthday, LiveJournal! 🐐🎂🎉

hi

Posting from the iPhone app. Maybe I'm unblocked now.

Why, hello...

Long time no see. How's my baby doing?

Contributing to Open Source projects

Prior to joining Google I always joked that Google was the black hole that swallowed up open source programmers. I'd see awesome, productive hackers join Google and then hear little to nothing from them afterwards. When I joined I decided I'd solve this mystery and post about it but it's been over 2.5 years and I've been busy and somewhat forgot. Fortunately a discussion at work last week reminded…

Realtime LiveJournal -> Buzz

If you've seen all my "test" posts over the past few days, you probably knew I was up to something. Indeed.... If you add your LiveJournal to your Google Profile (and your LJ links to your Google Profile and is crawled), and then you "Connect" your LJ to your Google Buzz account by adding it as a connected site, all your LJ posts flow into Buzz in 1-2 seconds, using PubSubHubbub . And hopefully…

Thirty.

I'm 30 today. Happy Birthday to me! :) Come party tonight if you're around SF: http://crush3r.com/page/ytziecxddo

Doing Hos is Hard Work

Etch-a-Sketch doesn't involve much hill climbing. GPS-a-Sketch in San Francisco does, however: Merry Christmas from me and whatever_art to you! * In other news: not going anywhere for Christmas. Staying in San Francisco, hosting a 10 person orphan dinner. But then going to the Caribbean on a 7 night cruise over New Year's with parents, Sierra, my brother Cole and his girlfriend. Should be fun. :)

Halloween Costume: Where's Waldo?

This year's costume, with whatever_art : http://picasaweb.google.com/bradley.j.fitzpatrick/Misc#5398929204952872962 I tried to get http://bit.ly/whereswaldo but it was already taken (and awesome!), so I got http://bit.ly/whereswaldo2 so people might discover the awesome version by mucking with the URL. Time to run my own URL shortener... don't trust any of them.

Speakeasy pricing confusion

Speakeasy peeps, Am I over-paying? (I'm assuming yes.) I currently have: DSL: Home Plus OneLink ADSL 6.0/768 Pro-Install (C) (activated 12/21/2005) PKG1822837 which is $105.95 (+ $6 fees) per month. I called to get it reduced and the guy on the phone was super vague and generally useless. Between grunts and burping and "Oh that's interesting!" interjections as he played on his computer, I heard…

Vedomosti article

Don't believe everything (or anything) you read here: http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/2009/09/23/214519 I'm told that it's horribly "mistranslated" (probably intentionally) to make a more interesting article. I wish I brought my own recorder to the interview so I could post the mp3 of what I actually said, which is that I'm working on making social networking federated & inter-operable…

Moscow evening plans

Muscovites, any recommendations on what I should do tonight in your fair city? SMS might be best, since I'll be leaving work soon probably. +7 (915) 353-36-83. Thanks!

On PubSubHubbub and rssCloud ...

Are you confused about the difference between PubSubHubbub and rssCloud? You're not alone. Here's how the confusion came about: Dave Winer invented rssCloud way back in the day. It only distributed lite pings, the callback endpoint was the IP address that you subscribed from, and nobody really ever implemented it, so you probably never heard of it. We sure hadn't. Fast forward 5 or 6 years. Brett…

Announcing "Squeezer" for Android

Open sourced as promised earlier... Squeezer ! Control your SqueezeCenter (aka SlimServer) and all your synchronized SqueezeBoxes, receivers, Booms, etc from your Android.... http://code.google.com/p/android-squeezer/ http://android-squeezer.googlecode.com/files/squeezer-0.1.apk http://github.com/bradfitz/android-squeezer/tree/master http://groups.google.com/group/android-squeezer Very rough…

Android Squeezebox Remote!

Fun project of the evening: start of a Squeezebox remote control app for Android. And it works! Well, at least play/pause/stop. Much, much more to go, but just fun at this point.... Will be open sourcing it as soon as possible tomorrow. Update, 2009-08-12 2:23am: Squeezer is born.

Messing with survey people

I just got a call from a survey company, asking me to rate the quality of some service phone call I'd made recently. First she asked if I had five minutes to complete a survey about a phone call I'd made recently. I thought that five minutes was longer than the phone call itself, but I felt bad for her, and I was amused, so I agreed to the survey. "How would you rate the overall quality of the…

this has gone too far

wot? San Francisco Water does social networking?!

Google Profiles has XFN now

Google Profiles just launched a new feature that's too dorky and obscure to warrant an official "Google blog" blog post, so the product manager on it said, "Brad, you're dorky... you should post it. You do Social Graph API stuff. The right people would read your blog, right?" (roughly) So sure, I'll blawg it here. Google Profiles now have XFN rel="me" attributes on links. Again. (It had them…

Birthday Card

Sierra's brother sent her a birthday "card": I do not support the holiday card industry. Happy b-day. Love, Ian M-S.

Hiking

Went to Seattle with Sierra this weekend. Hung out with her parents and brother and went hiking with her dad and recorded it with the "My Tracks" Android app, which let me upload it to Google Maps: the 7.6 mile Hansville hike . Good hike & good app. Back to SF tonight.

Facebook Phonebook Exporter updated

Updated my old Facebook Phonebook Exporter / sync tool to work with Facebook's new layout.

Found on my desk... awww?

PubSubHubbub

Brett and I made a bunch of progress on PubSubHubbub today. Bunch of new docs, two Perl modules, protocol clarifications & spec cleanup, hub server updates, etc. If you haven't read about it, or it's been awhile, I encourage you to go check it out. We're looking for help with client libraries and general involvement if you have any time! Join the list and claim a language / CMS.

Newspaper Death

When I read blogs, I'm more tolerant to grammatical mistakes. But the AP? C'mon: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/19/ap-obama-gores-foreign-po_n_188770.html .... At his news conference Obama said he didn't think he did much damage to U.S. security or interests by shaking the hand of Chavez, whose country has a defense budget about one-six hundredth the size of the United States, and depends…

Happy 10 years!

Happy 10 year birthday, LiveJournal!