Follow your friends’ submissions on Muti

Muti just implemented a great new feature IMHO. You can add Muti users to your friends and view only their posts. The standard pool of submissions stay as it is, but an additional pool is added where I can quickly filter out everything and see only what my Muti friends submitted by date.

Here is how it works:

Underneath the title of the submission you see the username. Click it.

You’ll see there is a button that says Follow username.

Click it!

Next it will tell you that You are now following username.

Repeat!

To see only your friends’ submissions, you will see a link in your user menu that says “friends posts”. Click it!

You will now see a list of all your friends’ latest posts in date order. So no matter how the votes go, you’ll only and always see your friends’ submissions! Neat! So, if you feel that the voting is getting you down (excuse the pun…) then use this. Same thing, if a certain someone (wink, wink) persist to submit his own “front page of Google” bullshit, simply ignore it by checking out only your friends’ posts!

Filed in: muti.co.za by: Stii

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Hêppie, hêppie Afrigator!

Wow, its been a year today! In all fairness, I’ve been a couple of weeks behind on joining the team, but it feels a lot longer than only one year…

Its been an extra-ordinary ride. I’ve learned an incredibly lot, which was ultra cool. Optimizing MySQL (a HUGE thanks to Ian Gilfillan who has written a MySQL book and his tips and tricks found on various development sites helped incredibly lot!), Python multi-threading and Python in general (another HUGE thank you to Neville Newey from Muti for his advice!), to name a few…

We’ve been a bit on the quiet side of late, due to obligations with our daytime/paying work. Its not easy to run a monster like this with only spare time to spare, which has been sparse of late. There are a million-and-one things in the pipeline, now I just need the time do get those done!

To read a bit more, see the Afrigator blog.

Filed in: Afrigator by: Stii

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Stand aside Ruby on Rails, make way for COBOL on Cogs!

Who says COBOL is dying?! Here is a web development framework built with COBOL! Okay, fair enough, this is a day late :P, but looking at those pages in true legacy style made me smile. I used to support a financial package for municipalities called ABAKUS (developed by ICL. Anyone remember them?) a long time ago, and this brings back shivers to my spine!

Go have look at: http://www.coboloncogs.org

Filed in: Funnies, Software Development, web development by: Stii

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Penguins fly South for the summer. Amazing footage!

This must be one of the best done April Fools pranks! Well done BBC. Love the end where the penguin land in a tree.

Filed in: Funnies by: Stii

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Stop bitching about crime, do something! Like this guy for example.

This weekend I read in the paper how a proudly South African said that instead of bitching and moaning, we should help combat crime, etc… Well, this guy sure did something. He built a safe around his pedals. The safe is made of 4mm steel and fitted to the body with 6 x 10mm bolts. As an extra measure the guy also welded the safe to the body, just in case, according to the person who took the photos.

Look, I don’t think its foolproof, but it will sure as hell make a thief’s job harder!

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

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A good example of the Semantic Web (a.k.a. Web 3.0 ugh…)

Recently, I discovered this example of what the Semantic Web is about through Neville on Muti. I think this is probably one of the clearest examples I’ve seen to date. Lets look at it.

The problem:
Consider the following sentence:
Voters are heading to the polls
The word heading in this context is an action. Unfortunately in natural language, heading is also a noun which could also mean: a division or section of a subject; a class or category.

So how do we teach a machine that heading in that context is an action and not a noun? Sure, it might be possible to try and parse the sentence and try and couple the word heading with other words that might identify it as an action. For example: condition: if word heading are preceded by an auxiliary verb (i.e. is, are, etc…) then it is an action. Can you imagine though how many possible combinations there would be in only the English language alone?!

The solution:
Enter the Semantic Web. By using simple markup, we can now enable machines to “understand” the context of the words. No need for machines to go through rigorous routines to establish whether or not a word is an action, name, location, etc., the machine is simply told what it is!

I hope you can see the actual advantage of it and how it could improve our online experience tremendously. To see this example in action please visit:
http://www.cortex-intelligence.com/tech/

For a long time now, we have been speculating whether or not the Semantic web would be adopted or not and how long it would be until the big guns start adopting it. Finally, Paul told me, that Yahoo adopted some microformats in a big way! Exciting news! Paul, you asked what I thought and I think it is FANTASTIC! Now it is simply a matter of time. So start adopting and taking this serious folks!

Filed in: Semantic Web by: Stii

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Yes, Twitter is indeed a chat service!

LOL, sorry Paul, I’m also going to be a bit sticky about this. See, the thing is this. If Twitter was not meant to be a chat service, then they should not have allowed for it to be used as such. Its a bit like Google giving a programmer all its source code and saying “here is all my source. Just don’t look at it or use it, okay?” That would kill a good geek. While it allows for chat it would be used as chat. Simple. It is the nature of us human beings.

The crutch is that while we use it that way, I have to agree with what Tyler said: FriendFeed needs to figure out a new algorithm for Twitter. 100% right. If Friendfeed offered me the functionality to exclude Twitter from my friends’ feeds, the problem for me will be solved. Without doubt. I also disagree that it is not their problem. They should be aware that the problem exists, so they should find the solution to make it work. People are much less likely to stop chatting on Twitter than leaving Friendfeed. Thats for sure!

As for Pownce, it would be much more difficult persuading everyone following me on Twitter to convert to Pownce. We are where our social network is. I hate Facebook, yet I use it now and again as a lot of my friends are there. No matter how badly I want to go to Orkut, getting them all on there would be a fulltime job, that is more that likely to fail as they’d have to convince all their friends, etc, etc…

Filed in: Social Web by: Stii

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How Twitter spoils stuff…

Firstly, this morning Twitter REALLY spoiled bandwidthblog.com’s scoop. Thats another story altogether. My main gripe is that it is spoiling the kick-ass Friendfeed feeds. Sure, I’m pretty much tuned in on Twitter, so by the time it gets to Friendfeed its old news, but have a look at this and tell me if this makes sense AT ALL:

I’m sorry, but this just makes zero sense. It makes some A-listers look like complete nut cases talking in an elitist language of their own… Even clicking through to a user’s Twitter profile you still end up more confused that cat vomit in a tumble dryer.

I’d love to appeal to all Friendfeed users: Please remove your Twitter accounts from your feed if you are using anything but the web to update Twitter. Pretty please, with sugar on top!

If you don’t know what Twitter is at all, see this:

Thank you, Justin!

Filed in: Web 2.0 by: Stii

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When did we become such pussies?

Disclaimer: Pussies as in cute, furry kittens!

One thing you will always get within Social Media (or any kind of social establishment) is differing opinions. This is a good thing. It allows for (somewhat) healthy debates. Sometimes these debates breaks out in fights. That is also not necessarily a bad thing. Friends do fight. Hell, my wife and I fight like cat vs. dog sometimes! It does not mean we hate each other! We simply differ in opinion and we sort it out over an undisclosed period of time using various tactics. (Of which the “silent treatment” tactic is B’s favorite! ) Nevertheless, it is not a sign of sickness, rather it is a healthy sign.

With the SA Blog Awards, every year without fail, you get “arguments” with a somewhat unhealthy element. You get these pussies (as in cats, remember) that spray bullets in the sky with the attitude “if the shoe fits…”. Not very helpful. It is exactly that “if the shoe fits” mentality that gets us nowhere, since no-one wants to put on that shoe if it was not specifically meant for them, so NOTHING is resolved at the end of the day.

I’m talking about this post of Jarred Cinman on Thought Leader. The post is laced with innuendos of certain “entrepreneurs” who are working out of their bedrooms in their parents’ house [sic] which is a shoe I can fit on dozens of people. Even on my own foot to some extent. The thing is, I do not particularly think Mr. Cinman aimed at anybody specific (though, he must have been thinking about some folks specifically at the time of writing it), although if you look at some of the comments on Muti, people’s perception is different:

people [are] sick of all the egomaniacal crap that goes on from certain ‘players’ in the industry.” and
“Once again timbloem - ‘players’ Stop beating about the bush and actually name them. ” and
“I’m waiting for a blog post on who these “players” / “in-crowd” / “big heads” are. Everyone quotes the above sayings, but no one ever names them. Why? Scared? ” and
“I propose the following formula: Count the number of times the blogger has “web2.0″, “entrepreneur”, “seo expert”, “new media strategist” in their banner and add it to the number of photos they have of themselves on their blog, add another point for any “vote for my blog” icons and subtract the total from 10. This is the “South African Blogger Expertness Score”.

So why not simply say it? What are people afraid of? At least it would give the “players” the opportunity to defend themselves! Surely that is only fair? To label a bunch of people as these so called “players”, but no-one knows who these elusive “players” are is kind of stupid?! Its like saying “the illumenati is a bunch of wankers”. No one will take that serious!

People have a lot to say about Richard Catto’s troll tactics, but at least he has the balls to say “Stii is a doos” (”doos” as in the Afrikaans version of a “box”… tsk tsk tsk…)

Clearly there are a bunch of people who dislike another bunch of people for undisclosed reasons. How can they begin to know why if they’re not even sure who? In the end, all that will happen is that people will start to ignore these “innuendos” and stay out of the “debate”. As noted so many times, we’re a fairly young movement in Africa. We tend to still take this shit seriously. This too will change as it gets bigger.

Now I can hear it already: “So what you are saying is that whenever I talk of a certain group of people I now have to mention who I’m talking of?” Sheesh, don’t be silly! I cannot tell you what to do! Gmf…

What I will say is this: If you do not have something good to say about someone, don’t say it. If you do say it, say it so that person can at least defend himself/herself. Have some balls, FFS!!

Peace! Out!

Filed in: Blogging by: Stii

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Happy PI day! π rocks!

Its that magical constant number’s special day today again.

From the official π day’s site http://www.piday.org/:

With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. The symbol for pi was first used in 1706 by William Jones, but was popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737.

Amazing, isn’t it?!

I’m a bit late, but I’m ordering me a cool π shirt for next year!

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

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