Disqus - Latest Comments for Damon

Re: louisgray.com: TweetStats Upgrades Twitter Timing Graphs

Damon — Sun, 11 May 2008 08:26:19 -0000

Louis - thanks for the great blog post. I'm glad you like the new feature and hopefully more will be coming soon.

Re: Comcast DVR mute “bug” | A View from Judi Sohn

Damon — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 12:24:16 -0000

For the muting problem...Did you try pressing the "Cable" button and then just pressing mute? I thought I had to, but that seems to un-mute the cable box when that happens. Hopefully it'll work for you too - lot easier than remembering the twister routing and 00141.

I think the reason that they do this is that if you plug your tv into the dvr, it will actually turn the tv on (if I recall correctly) while it's recording. I came home a couple times to a tv already on, and recording, but muted.

Re: Comcast DVR mute “bug” | A View from Judi Sohn

Damon — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 13:53:04 -0000

That's unfortunate. I'm actually able to control the volume for the cable box as well when I do that. :-\

Re: Developers Bailing on Twitter

Damon — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:47:23 -0000

It definitely becomes tough to develop for a platform, not only when it's down, but also when it is constantly changing. I've gone to start a number of projects and found different behavior on the API or the web site on a daily basis. It seems Twitter approaches development the same way today as they might have when they first started in that features appear and disappear at will. Take a user's timeline which suddenly started displaying the username in front of each update. Another example is the rss view for user_timeline that now seems to ignore the count parameter and will be fixed "soonish".

It's not easy to develop for a platform where you have to put as much effort into keeping track of that bugs of that platform as well as the bugs of your own software.

It's really unfortunate because there are still so many Twitter projects I would love to work on, but keep getting stalled.

Re: Seattle and beyond - our June adventure

Damon — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:19:30 -0000

There's a good list of somewhat random things to do here: http://seattlest.com/2006/06/08/43_things_to_do...

A few of my favs:
Spend an evening at Golden Gardens
Take a ride on a ferry boat
Wander Pike Place Market - all kinds of great places for lunch
Enjoy some seafood - Ivar's Salmon House on Northlake has both a great view as well as great salmon

Wish I could be around to meet up, but I'm currently over in Germany.

Re: SaturdayHouse Lifehack #1 - Using Subversion to Manage Your Home Dir

Damon — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 04:20:06 -0000

I've done this to some degree on my boxen, although I've fallen a bit out of practice since my homedir isn't as important to me as it once was. I still use it for other things, though. Some useful links:
http://toykeeper.net/tutorials/svnhome
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/06/s...

Re: Vulnerability Discovery On Web Sites

Damon — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 17:59:26 -0000

One of the tough ethical questions with respect to finding vulnerabilities in live web apps is the ease with which something like SQL Injection can be tested. A single tick could indicate whether an app is vulnerable, but if a company wanted to...it could potentially prosecute for "attempted hacking" if you decide to report the error and its potential implications.

Re: Vulnerability Discovery On Web Sites

Damon — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 14:01:57 -0000

Well the ethical question being two-fold:

1. Do you indeed test for SQL Injection or the like in the first place when you are knowingly "misusing a system". Sure it's easy, but that doesn't mean it's OK to do.

2. If you do choose to test it and happen to identify an issue - do you report it, or just shake your head and go on. See Daniel's comment - my ethics would push me to report it to make the world a safer place, but a company may not see it as a friendly incident.

Re: Reason #9,876 Why NOW Sucks

Damon — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:32:14 -0000

One question I have always had - if women demand equality, why are they still not required to register for the US Draft (Selective Service System these days, how PC). In my mind, that is quite the insult yet never have I heard women's rights push for that.

There's some good information regarding that exact argument here:
http://www.sss.gov/wmbkgr.htm

Re: Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

Damon — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:35:56 -0000

How about another one from the creator of TweetStats - a tool to delete your direct messages en masse for those concerned about their "private" messages: http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/

Re: 2008/09/11/the-best-web-app-ideas/

Damon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:58:14 -0000

While not perfect, there's one we use for our local Six Hour Startup called IdeaScale. Haven't seen it mentioned here, so I thought I'd toss it in to the comment thread - http://ideascale.com/

Re: Twitter Implicated in Break Up Between Aniston and Mayer

Damon — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:56:53 -0000

Celebs are definitely getting on Twitter in a big way. pdiddy (@iamdiddy) has regularly made the top 10 most replied to people on a daily basis (http://tweetstats.com/twitter_stats), as does John Mayer occasionally. Diddy has received over 45,000 replies in the first 20 days of March alone, which is kind of astounding.

Re: 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends

Damon — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:52:25 -0000

TweetStats also lets you look at what's been popular over the course of a day, and the overall most popular trends since September - http://tweetstats.com/trends

Re: Using social media for a job search

Damon — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:56:06 -0000

Regarding the bio search - I recently built a tool that not only searches Twitter bios, but can search the bios of your followers. This is useful if you're curious who, in your network, has a particular skill or piece of info in their bio.

For example - Shift Communications people across all indexed bios:
http://tweepsearch.com/search?query=%22shift+co...
Shift Communications people that are following me (@dacort):
http://tweepsearch.com/search/dacort?query=%22s...

Great post! Twitter is an amazing resource.

Damon (@dacort) Cortesi

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Damon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:22:28 -0000

The primary difference is that Yammer is a hosted service. Is an enterprise really going to want to install the number of laconi.ca instances required to maintain a reasonable environment? Not only that, but laconi.ca is still in the early stages and under heavy development and likely to change (read: require heavy work on the admin side).

From the point of an organization, what would you want to do?
Install Apache/Laconi.ca/Jabber and maintain all those systems required?

or signup for Yammer.

While I appreciate the goals behind laconi.ca and (personally) would much prefer an independent solution for behind-the-firewall conversations (trade secrets, intellectual property, etc), I don't feel that laconi.ca is quite at that point yet where it can reliably support the needs of an enterprise without a lot of love and care on the admin side.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Damon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:49:53 -0000

@chris - Fair enough, though it would have to be a company comfortable with adopting brand new technology that's likely to change on a much more regular basis than typical enterprise software - decision for the business at that point. If putting in place and concerned about private conversations, I would also want to see a little more attention to security. (And neither Yammer or Laconi.ca are exempt here, as I have found security issues with both.)

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Damon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:21:05 -0000

@Ari Yammer does use SMS and even has a shortcode. This is one of the things that keeps me off laconi.ca and frustrates me about Twitter. Yammer lets you send notifications to email/jabber/sms, similar to how Twitter did and previously allowed me to manage the noise on Twitter a little better.

Re: Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Damon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:12:58 -0000

@Jesse - Don't you need to provide a profile url to follow somebody on a remote laconi.ca instance? That would prove difficult if the internal instance did not have an Internet-accessible address/URL. Not to mention I'd imagine those same CEO's would cringe if an external instance could receive updates from an internal instance.

Yammer's business model _is_ actually providing administrators control over the service. They can manage users of the network as well as restrict access by IP address. If Yammer wants to be considered by any reasonably-sized enterprise, however, they will likely need to put some sort of SLA in place as well as assurances regarding data privacy and security. Whether they have the potential to do so, that's unknown. I suspect they have some sort of sharding behind the scenes based on email address and if Big Org X wanted the service on their own subset of servers, it would likely be possible. Hosted services are not uncommon in an organization - just look at the success of outsourced IT services.

In the end, yes, Yammer is a hosted service and when it comes to a company concerned about privacy and security, would need to go with laconi.ca if they wanted "micro-blogging". That being said, there are several other enterprise solutions available for instant-messaging in the enterprise, but none with the public stream/micro-blogging concept.

Re: Dear Twitter- I'll Give Back SO Much Space

Damon — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:38:05 -0000

For those of you they may have tried to use my DM Deleter (http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm_deleter/), I just updated it today to make it compatible with some changes Twitter recently made.

It's a brute-force way of doing it, but it does allow you to clear out your DM's at the expense of Twitter's databases...

Re: The best blonde joke…

Damon — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:57:46 -0000

Pretty pictures... :)
http://dcortesi.com/gallery/geek/bj?full=1
http://flickr.com/photos/dcortesi/sets/1648540/

I was bored and traced back a tiny portion of the joke:
http://dcortesi.com/2005/12/24/blondes/

Re: Sitting in Chicago

Damon — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 14:59:51 -0000

Yea, I am quite disappointed with O'Hare's "ammenities". As a city that's seems to be battling Chicago for the "bigger and better" race (re: airport traffic and their new aquarium), I was VERY impressed with the Atlanta airport when I was last there a few weeks ago. It's clean, they have great restaurant selections, and they have "rest and recharge" stations all over the place where you can sit down and plug in your laptop instead of having to hunt around the terminal for a spare e-jack. Not only that, but it's #1 in Microsoft's list of the top 5 airports for wireless access...
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resource...

Re: Former boss in the New York Times

Damon — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 16:19:25 -0000

I'll keep an eye on the comments - I live downtown and am usually up late.

Re: Microsoft and Adobe developer/designer death match

Damon — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:43:22 -0000

If you're going to be in Chicago tonight, you should hit up the TECH Cocktail - http://www.techcocktail.com/ !

Re: iPhone vs. Nokia N95 a month later

Damon — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:04:41 -0000

I agree with your observations, Robert. Third-party apps are currently my biggest frustration. There is so much potential with the interface and only allowing web applications limits the capability of the platform to succeed drastically!

Nevertheless, despite the typical frustrations of the iPhone (Safari crashing + security issues, recessed headphone jack [wtf apple], poorly implemented gmail, minor text messaging quirks), the beauty of the interface and the joy that is now interfacing with my phone overrides those setbacks. A month after, people still like seeing my phone and I still take it out and enjoy using it every single day.

Re: 10 reasons why Twitter Direct Messages suck (and so do Facebook’s)

Damon — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:12:25 -0000

I wrote a small bookmarklet to help with the mass deleting of DMs. You can find it on my site, here: http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm_deleter/

One of the challenges, though, is keeping up with Twitter. I've had to update it once a month or so. Not to mention the times (like right now) where the delete functionality is disabled on DMs, which also affects the bookmarklet.

It's a hack, but it works quite well and I know several people whack a few thousand at a time much to the demise of the Twitter database...

Re: 15 Highly Recommended Twitter Apps for Web Professionals

Damon — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:04:50 -0000

I'm a fan of http://tweepsearch.com for bio search, but then, that's because I made it. ;)

It allows you to search all indexed bios as well as limit the search to only those that follow you or that you follow. And even though Twellow claims to have more people indexed, road tests show that TweepSearch returns more results - not quite sure why.