Abhi Yerra

I use the following services:

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Del.icio.us (which I realize I barely ever use since I can just Google stuff so it’s becoming less relevant for me.)
• Flickr
• YouTube (Old)
• Facebook
• my blog
• last.fm

The problem with all of these is they all try to do the social network thing. However, that really falls on its head because you need to start building friends on each of the networks. And who the hell has patience to build that many social networks?

I guess that’s the real deal behind Facebook apps. You create the app and Facebook provides the social network to back it up. The problem then becomes not of the application, but the authentication. It seems like a shitty resolution if we have to keep track or two sets of authentications to use a facebook app. However, I guess facebook could be the “desktop widget” of social networks. Where people go to keep in touch with their broad range of friends, but go to the other social nets to work out the more specific niche apps. Like going to last.fm for music and Flickr for a more photo related deal.

Still building all those social nets is going to suck unless it becomes easier to build those existing nets. What if there was a social networking authentication method? I guess OpenID? Where you could have friends with each other and they automatically transfer over to other places. I think that would be the next step in the facebook revolution, not really facebook itself, but the distribution of identity. After all why should I trust facebook with all my interests?

I recently got a ShoqBox as a gift and since I couldn’t access it on my Mac since I don’t have MusicMatch I decided to write my own script. This is written in ruby and requires the mp3info gem. So what needs to be done to run it?

1. First place your mp3s in /Volume/FLASH/_system/media/audio folder.
2. Run the program like so: shoqbox.rb > /Volume/FLASH/_system/media/audio/songsql
3. Next change to /Volume/FLASH/_system/media/audio/ directory
4. Run: sqlite2 MyDB
5. Under sqlite run: .read songsql
6. Quit sqlite and the songs should be copied.

This is a really bare minimum copy into since it doesn’t take into account the Artist and Song information at all. The songs should appear under All Songs in the player.

Here is the source for the file:

I have decided to use Mercurial as my SCM moving away from Subversion. I must say it is quite nice as it is very simple to use and the commands are mostly compatible with Subversion. So what initiated me to move to this SCM instead of sticking with trusty old subversion?

Well I was getting weary of having a centralized repository as my server is quite unstable since I tend to run the latest and greatest of software so I thought it would be appropriate to move to a more distributed SCM. Also, since the repository is distributed it would make it easier to work when I don’t have access to the internet. How is this possible? Well Subversion works such that when you want to commit changes you have to interact with central server. Not so with Mercurial because any commits you do stay local. If you have a central repository type structure you can “push” the changes to the “server.”

So what’s the big deal yet another SCM right? Well it seems the big shots are starting to use it such as OpenSolaris, Mozilla and Xen. So I will post a follow up after working with it for a while.
Distributed revision control with Mercurial

Mercurial Project

Hey all. I just moved my blog from slicehost to wordpress.com. I did this because I am extremely worried about my sysadmin capabilities (I don’t backup stuff ) so I decided to move to the wonderful wordpress.com. I will still use and totally recommend Slicehost! If you don’t have it well wait in line to get one. It’s just that awesome. Hopefully, by moving to wordpress I can worry less about the safety of my blog posts (not that the content is anything to worry about in the first place).

So what will be new? Well I sort of don’t want to spend money so I am doing a cheap 301 redirect to abhiyerra.wordpress.com. It gets the job done. All links should work like before. Hopefully this will get me more readers? Who knows, but enjoy!

There seems to be a mixed bag about the iPhone not having an SDK and only allowing “AJAX + Web 2.0″ Apps. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think that’s great! So why do I think that? Well consider the inconsistencies we have to deal with using J2ME, it is so diverse that an app doesn’t really work well anywhere.  Also, having to go out and grab upgrades to your application is so 90’s. I want applications once they are upgraded to immediately work on whatever I am using.

So what will iPhone provide? It will make development for the phone a much easier affair. We don’t have to worry about different versions and the announcement said that you’d be able to access Google Maps and make a call, so they must allow some JavaScript based abstraction layer to let it do that.

Therefore, I think the iPhone is going to take off in a big way and finally bring the internet to the phone. Currently all phones have a shitty browser, but this will probably revolutionize the mobile web.