Disqus - Latest Comments for mikepk

Re: Python Django noob: custom forms, errors, and fieldsets

mikepk — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 20:58:19 -0000

I am by no means a Django expert so you should take my opinions with a grain of salt :)

You can add validation logic in the clean method, but I think that's generally a bad idea. In my opinion, it's better to have explicit validators. When you read the username input, you can see the validation required for that field, rather than hunting through the logic in the clean method.

It's one of the things I don't like about Django validators, that a multi-input validation is impossible without monkeying with 'clean' (although this may be different in newer versions since I wrote this). Messing with clean seems more like a hack. Its generally concerning when you have to use two different mechansims to provide validation.

Re: Smarterer Badges – My Score on the Google Search test

mikepk — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:01:00 -0000

Hey Jon. It looks like you may need yo use the "HTML mode" of your blog's editor to paste the badge. Some blog editors try to be "smart" and prevent you from being able to paste regular HTML code. Let me know if this helps, if not I can dig deeper into your particular blog platform.

Re: Smarterer Badges – My Score on the Google Search test

mikepk — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:15:41 -0000

You have to find someone who's a member and click through to their profile. Once there, you can request an invite within the smarterer system. Only people in the system already can hand out invites!

Re: Smarterer Badges – My Score on the Google Search test

mikepk — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:14:50 -0000

If you're interested in an invite, click the badge above and request it through the site (the small banner at the top of the screen). Only current members in the system can respond to invite requests!

Re: Smarterer Badges – My Score on the Google Search test

mikepk — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:13:35 -0000

Thanks, we had several bugs, the most egregious of them have been cleaned up. Thanks for the heads up!

Re: Flock, Now Ending, is Like a Hot Tub Time Machine for Tech Blogs

mikepk — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:28:10 -0000

The enthusiasm in the tech press may be dampened since those days, but like you said, what's possible with today's tools blows away the things we were working on back then.

I've been a bit nostalgic recently because Node.js and server-side javascript is all the rage in the hacker community. Grazr was a bit ahead of it's time with GrazrScript. I've been thinking about rebuilding something conceptually similar as a side-project using Node.js because what took us months of dev time a few years ago can be mostly setup now in an afternoon today. Crazy! Although I know feeds are so passe. :)

We live in interesting times.

Re: Attracting The Techy

mikepk — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:49:40 -0000

You're approaching this all wrong. The first thing you have to accept is that your idea *sucks* and is deeply and fatally *flawed*. Your idea has little (I won't say 0) value.

You're not looking for some pair of hands to implement your idea (like carved tablets handed down from on high), you're looking for someone who will help you explore what *is* interesting in your *wrong* idea and for you to evolve it together. You're looking for a partner to take co-ownership of the idea. What's exciting to the tech person is exploring the problem space, not taking direction and implementing your vision.

You had also better bring something other than "an idea" to the table. You better be a damn good hustler, have money, or something tangible, or else you're just one of a million "unique" snowflakes with a half-baked idea. You're not just competing with other people with ideas, but most of the "techies" you're interested in have plenty of their own (equally flawed) ideas too, and they can actually build and test them.

Re: Are QR codes increasing in popularity? Google Trends seems to think so.

mikepk — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:17:52 -0000

Should be fixed now!

Since SMI is email-based, it gets bombarded by huge amounts of spam emails. Sometimes the volume of "bad" emails cause the system to go down (even with filtering, sometimes the amount that gets through spikes). Since SMI is a free service. and a side project., I can't guarantee 100% uptime on it. Hopefully it's still useful though!

Re: Scripting News: What makes local sites hum?

mikepk — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:58:24 -0000

Dave, I couldn't agree more. I think the human curator trumps the mass software aggregator especially for local and niche interest. No one has built a real platform to allow people to publish their particular take on information and news. I wanted to push Grazr in that direction before the company shut down.

Re: Are QR codes increasing in popularity? Google Trends seems to think so.

mikepk — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:54:05 -0000

It's become kind of a game, counting the number of times I see QR codes now in a day. Store windows, magazines, posters... it's definitely increasing in frequency.

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:53:49 -0000

I haven't found a tool that provides the same features either. The number of people who appreciated Grazr for it's unique feature set was pretty small. A lot of people are happy with long delayed feeds and displaying only a list of titles and links.

Re: Read and Decode QR Codes Without a Smartphone

mikepk — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:46:11 -0000

I've put in a temporary fix to avoid rogers messages causing the decoder to crash, you should be able to use the service now. I need to do a little more analysis to see if I can find a more permanent solution, but it is working now.

Re: Read and Decode QR Codes Without a Smartphone

mikepk — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:32:29 -0000

Hi Angela, I just checked and something about how rogers sends SMS -> email causes the decoder to crash. Rogers appears to add a bunch of random small images in the message (probably for tracking) that make snapmyinfo get heartburn. Later tonight, I'll see if I can add a fix to avoid this problem (don't have time at the moment). If you send another message from rogers, I'm guessing it will cause the decoder to crash again (not positive about that). I'll reply here when I get a fix in place.

Re: Read and Decode QR Codes Without a Smartphone

mikepk — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:12:47 -0000

I found a couple of stuck messages in the decoder. I cleared them out so it should be working again. I'll look into why it got stuck in the first place. Thanks for letting me know.

Re: Read and Decode QR Codes Without a Smartphone

mikepk — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:52:21 -0000

I'll check it, thanks for the heads up.

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:24:28 -0000

I don't know of any other service that displays full opml. I think Grazr was fairly unique in that respect, but few people appreciate the power of OPML and the concepts behind it.

Re: Android development, can the breakneck pace continue?

mikepk — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:03:47 -0000

I did miss that, thanks. I think I would replace "developers" with "handset makers and carriers" in his statement, but I think it helps out both camps. They need/want to be able to get revenue from the innovation, not churn on it.

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:29:24 -0000

Sorry, I'm touchy about the "programming for non programmers" thing, didn't mean to paint you with that brush :). I still think that if you want to do anyting above a trivial program or simple example , you really need to learn to code. That's just my opinion, but I think the history of visual programming environments has mostly borne that out.

I've looked at moderately complex behaviors in Pipes, and frankly the "program" is usually very scary and full of crazy hacks. I look at it and think, "That should be 5 lines of code, instead it's 6 pages of crazy wires and feedback loops strewn all over this canvas". I think many people are intimidated by code and that it could be made a lot friendlier (and easier to play with without repercussions).

One of the objectives with GrazrScript was to make it completely hosted, without the need for an IDE or installed tools. Millions of people dabbled with javascript because there was an existing runtime environment (the browser) that they didn't really have to monkey with. I wanted to bring the same kind of experimentation and code sharing to the feed and information "flow" space. Never quite got there. :)

Re: A tip for using IMAP with Gmail and Apple Mail

mikepk — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:26:45 -0000

Yep, although because of the way I have gmail setup (with an IMAP prefix) I don't have the [Gmail] folder in my interface. You get the same effect by creating it under the inbox account too.

Re: A tip for using IMAP with Gmail and Apple Mail

mikepk — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:23:29 -0000

Hey mistered, you should be able to make labels from Apple Mail no problem.

Assuming you have gmail setup with IMAP, then your gmail inbox should be listed in a little drop down list when you expand "inbox" (the little gray arrow). Click on the gmail inbox so that it's highlighted. Then in the lower left part of the Apple Mail window (along the bottom), click on the [+] symbol and "Add mailbox...". (I know that sound weird but it's just a difference in naming things between Apple Mail and gmail). A pop up should appear that asks you to name it and your gmail account should be in the drop down automatically. When it saves, you should now have a "folder" that also has a label in gmail. Let me know if this was unclear, I can take a couple of screenshots if it will help.

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:22:16 -0000

I think visual programming can be a terrific tool to help introduce people to programming concepts, but I've always bristled at the concept of "programming for non-programmers!". I feel like the phrase is a bit of an oxymoron. If you're programming, be it via visual drag and drop blocks or lines of code, you are a programmer. I agree, though, requiring a development environment and a server of some sort is still a huge barrier. I also think that if there was some way for people to "graduate" from introductory visual programming to more powerful tools (code, or a mixture of visual blocks and code), that would satisfy a lot of the frustrations I've heard voiced by people using Pipes.

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:58:32 -0000

I feel like the problem with Pipes (and what I've heard from people who use it) is that it makes the easy stuff, easy, but makes the moderate or hard stuff damn near impossible. I think visual programming languages are just too fundamentally limited to do anything of substance with. That's just my humble opinion though. :)

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:17:55 -0000

I let you know, derrick, if I put something together. So far the response has been a bit muted but I still have some interest in bundled information flows.

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:15:24 -0000

Tony, I think you were one of the few who really saw the power and potential in Grazr. We always got stuck trying to explain all the additional power when 99.99% of people just wanted a dynamic blogroll.

GrazrScript in particular makes me sad since so few people even knew it existed and just as the language was getting *really* interesting, internal company realities led to us abandoning it. I still maintain that feeds are essentially the de facto API for much of the web's data and a hosted powerful 'glue' programming/scripting environment that can manipulate that data (not just a toy like PIpes) would be amazing. Of course who would pay for such a thing?

Re: The Grazr widget will stop functioning

mikepk — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:10:51 -0000

Oh, and I agree, comments are a tough problem no one has been able to really figure out. Backtype kind of tried to aggregate comments but it didn't quite gel with me.