Because I am a (mostly) out-of-practice programmer, I intend to build an application to help me with this task.  Some features that I have planned for NaNoTools (name to be fixed later) are:

• Text editing (duh)
• Live word count
• Daily word count stats
• Planning calendar
• Word sprint tracking

Any WriMos have suggestions as to features that they would like to see?

• Unreasonable maximum bids:
  • Emergency!  Expert needed!  Must fix absolutely everything wrong with my system!  $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable communication requirements:
  • Bidder must be reachable at all times, 24 hours a day, Antarctica time zone
• Unreasonable experience requirements:
  • Bidder must have written 20 apps from scratch using the TwitBook API.
• Unreasonable demonstration of experience:
  • Bidder must show us 20 apps they have written.  We require an NDA before you get any more info
• Unreasonable grasp of reality:
  • (repost) (repost) (repost) Why isn’t anybody replying to my ad? $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable grasp of geography:
  • Need programmer for North American properties database.  Geographically restricted to Antarctican coders only.

Yes, it’s better than going out and trying to find clients, but some of the ads are painful to follow.

However, hunting through the docs was painful.  The official docs aren’t organized in a logical way (I had to rely heavily on example code, rather than proper API documentation).  Then, there’s the errors.

You see, unlike a local library, there is no debug version of the FB API.  This means that, if I’m having issues, all I can do is plug in a parameter and rely on the error code to tell me what I’m doing wrong.  This doesn’t help AT ALL if the error message I get back is:

{“error”:{“type”:”Exception”,”message”:”(#1) An unknown error occurred”}}

Not very helpful.

Eventually, I figured it out, but couldn’t find any documentation (or even a blog post) on it.  Facebook only allows Unix-style EOL characters (LF), not DOS-style (CR LF).  Not fun to debug

Anyway, I’ve re-found the site Rent a Coder, where programmers (such as myself) can find projects to work on, without dealing with the hassle of advertising, accounting, management, etc.  In other words, for an administration fee (taken from my payment), I’m cleared of dealing with non-payment (everything is held in escrow), advertising (although I do have to propose my services in response to RFPs), accounting (client pays RaC, RaC pays me), etc.

It turns out to be a supplement to my income, and allows me to keep my skills in play.

Maybe I should have thought it all the way through; obviously there was some way that they had to fulfill their advertised numbers, but WTF?  From now on, I’m staying with the old-fashioned way of following and getting followers – find something related to my own interests.

I was experimenting with recovering data from a semi-fried USB stick.  Then, with it still plugged in, I tried to sync my iPod music using MediaMonkey.

Little did I realize, all my drive letters had been mixed up.

The computer thinks that the USB stick is my F: drive (which contains the music), my music drive is G: (which is my iPod), and my iPod is H:.  So it tries to copy non-existent music from the stick to the hard drive.

This wouldn’t be a problem, but for some reason that probably made sense at the time, I configured MM to automatically erase files on the destination that aren’t in the sync list.  Unfortunately, this includes all the music in my collection which doesn’t exist in the empty USB-stick sync list.

Fortunately, I realized that it was taking a long time erasing files, so I was able to cancel it.  Then I fumbled around for a recovery tool, which I found (eventually) in Recuva.  So I’ve managed to (almost) get everything back; only 342 files (out of an original 20763) need to be recovered by other means.  That’s about 1.6% loss; it could have been much worse.

Shorteners, although convenient and necessary for microblogging, have a tendency to obscure the linking structure that makes the web usable.  They add another service that goes between the browsing user and the browsed site.  Another point of failure in an already fragile system.  Someone to absorb your pagerank, add advertisements, and add delays to browsing.  And, of course, to redirect to shock sites.

And yet, with a 140-character limit to microblogging bursts, it’s often necessary to shorten URLs.  Yes, it’s a short-term gain, but what are the long-term effects?  And how long will it take us to realize them?

I, for one, will continue to microblog with shortened URLs; I doubt that my Twitter usage will significantly impact my blog’s stats.  My followers know I’m not likely to post a link to shock them, except maybe for April 1st.

Also, I’ve restarted using Last.FM whenever I’m listening on the computer.  It keeps track of what music I listen to, then gives me suggestions of other music, based on what others are listening to.  It will also let me know if there are any concerts nearby from my favourite artists, based on my listening history.

Today, dberkholz seems to disagree with the working of the bazaar.  He states that Gentoo would be improved by closing the development teams to only top-notch contributors.  The question becomes, who determines “top-notch”?  And, if development is closed off, how do more contributors become top-notch?  And how are users to become open-source developers?

Edit: I incorrectly attributed this to srlinuxx. Now corrected.