As if the current proliferation of social networks was not enough, Plaxo has recently launched its own offering called Pulse, in the best tradition of branding-via-metonymy. First of all, "Pulse"? I am generally not in the habit of checking my friends' vital signs several times a day, so that kind of got lost on me. Maybe they could have done better with Spasm, Borborygm, or ultimately, Omphaloskepsis, since that's basically what social networks are.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that Plaxo Pulse fails. Out of the gate. Dead on arrival. Why? Well, ever since it launched I've been receiving notices that such-and-such has added me as friend or wants to add me as a business contact. These notices provide a link to go to Pulse site and confirm the connection. Not recognizing one of the names, I decided to clicke on the link to check it out, but all I saw was a page that said, "Not a member yet? Sign up!" Are you freaking kidding me? You expect me to sign up just to see who wanted to add me as a contact? No thanks, Pulse. You lost me at "click here".

The slides from my VIM for (PHP) Programmers talk that I gave at OSCON 2007 are now up in the Talks section.

Now that Yahoo! Photos is closing down, Flickr is going to experience another surge in membership. It is already the most popular photo sharing service that matters (forget about Photobucket and such), and it has an unparalleled API. So with that in mind here's the first of Andrei's Web 2.0 Laws.

Law #1: As the number of mashups increases, the probability of a new mashup not using Flickr approaches 0.

Proof, what proof? This is not math or physics here, this is Web 2.0. But do go and take a look for yourself; Flickr infiltration is everywhere. And if you find a mashup that doesn't use Flickr API, then there are only two explanations: a) the authors have thought or are thinking about using Flickr in one way or another; b) they are Amish.

I, for one, welcome our new megapixel overlords.

By virtue of living in Silicon Valley and working at Yahoo!, I frequently get phone calls or emails from recruiters. Their general expertise and cluefulness range is pretty wide: some are knowledgeable and do their research on my background before contacting me, while others expect that Hey, I have a C#/.NET as well as Java positions in New York City, please get back to me as soon as possible will garner some sort of response. And of course there's the middle ground. But by and large, the scale is definitely skewed towards the not so good side. I received another "hot" email today:

Hi Andrei,

I am a recruiter in software industry and I work with few exciting
start-ups and other big companies in silicon Valley. I got your resume from internet and would like to discuss about some opportunities in Silicon Valley. Please let me know what would be the best time and phone number to reach you.

Where to start... First of all, I understand that English might not be this gentleman's second language. Still, when you contact people on behalf of your clients, you do want to project a professional attitude, and that involves correct grammar and spelling. But even disregarding that, the email is very, very vague. So I applied my patented DeRecruitoMizer™ algorithm to it:

Original: Hi, Andrei
Decoded: My mail merge software tries to be personable. Nifty!

Original: I work with few exciting start-ups
Decoded: I don't really care that omitting an article conveys a completely ridiculous impression upon the person I am contacting.

Original: I got your resume from internet
Decoded: I, for one, welcome our Google overlords whose mind-bending search technology put your resume in the top 20 results when I typed in "C#", even though it is mentioned only once in the text under "secondary experience".

Original: let me know what would be the best time and phone number to reach you
Decoded: Come on, call me. I know you are desperate for a sucky job in New York City, since you have your resume on the intraweb. You are desperate, aren't you? Aren't you? Why won't you talk to me? Whyyyyyy? <sobbing>

I think that, given the top tech news of the day (hint: the combined service name might be GooTube), I think my response was quite appropriate:

Hi,

Can you still get me into YouTube?

-Andrei

An eagle-eyed user Mike Ryan noticed that Netflix changed the structure of the Queue page and sent in a patch. Download the updated NetflixQueueShuffler.

The Developer Tools group at Yahoo! has an opening for a Senior Perl Hacker. Here is the job description:

Are you a motivated Perl hacker?
... a self starter needing little supervisions?
... interested in developer support tools?
Then the platform engineering team is looking for you!

Come join us and build the next generation of host configuration,
package management, and release engineering tools used by Yahoo!
developers worldwide. Ideal candidates should be able to develop
working relationships with members of the various engineering teams at
Yahoo!

Basic Qualifications:
* Perl and Unix is required.

Preferred Qualifications:
* A BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent and 4+ years experience
* Experience with SQL, PHP, Subversion, CVS,
* Perforce, and Makefiles a plus.

Note that this is an on-site full-time position. I used to be in Developer Tools myself and I can attest that they are great bunch of people to work with. If you feel you qualify and are interested in applying, send me your resume and I will forward it to the hiring manager.

I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 and found out that my NetflixQueueShuffler GreaseMonkey script no longer worked. So after some digging, I fixed it up and it's available for your downloading pleasure.

Face recognition technology is getting really good. Yesterday I saw a link to Intel's OpenCV library float through the mailing list at work and a note that someone wrote a PHP extension for it. "Interesting", I thought. I hacked up a simple PHP script that would take an image and process it slightly to make detected regions more obvious. Here's an example of the output. Not bad, huh? Then Jeremy tried another image, with some spooky results. Note that aside from the person, there are a couple more regions that the library thought was a face. If you look closer, the larger rectangle on the carpet encloses something that does have vague face-like features. Nice job, Intel.

Here's another Mozilla/Firefox tip: if you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:

user_pref("editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines", 3);

to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.

After trying to figure out how to keep my bookmarks shareable between computers (del.icio.us, various FireFox extensions and such come to mind) I was pleasantly surprised to see the unveiling of Yahoo!'s MyWeb2 - a hybrid of bookmarking, tagging, and sharing your pages within the community of your friends from Yahoo! 360. So, all it takes now for me to bookmark something is click on the little Save link in the search results or in my browser toolbar, put in a couple of tags, maybe a note, and set the access level. But the best thing is that when I do a search on Yahoo!, its MyRank algorithm rates the pages saved within my community higher, and also brings up a list of my bookmarks at the top of the page. And it's dead easy to import your del.icio.us bookmarks or any other RSS feed into MyWeb2. Salvation at last.

This is a random world. And people seem to like randomness: witness the popularity of iPod Shuffle. I am no different. I also watch a lot of movies: my Netflix queue has 72 DVDs in it currently. Recently I wondered whether it was possible to randomize my queue, so that the next DVD that comes in is somewhat of a surprise. After emailing the Netflix customer support and getting back a completely unhelpful reply telling me that I can re-order the queue by changing the priority numbers and clicking a button, I decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands.

Input: GreaseMonkey, Javascript, and a couple of hours of hacking. Output: NetflixQueueShuffler. I know that GreaseMonkey scripts site already has a Netflix queue randomizer, but I think that one is lame, since all it does is change the priority numbers and click the submit button for you. Mine actually re-orders the table rows visually and lets you do it a few times until you are satisfied with the randomness.

I fill out forms on the Web. Sometimes lots of forms. When I shop, when I register somewhere, when I log into sites, in short, everywhere. Suffice it to say that I developed a close attachment with the Tab button on my keyboard for moving focus to the next element in the form. However, ever since installing Firefox 1.0 on my Powerbook I could not use the Tab key to move focus into anything other than the text fields. This was incredibly irritating. After doing some research I found an answer on a Firefox support form. Apparently accessibility.tabfocus entry in about:config user preferences page should be set to 3 instead of 1.

I changed the value and now I can Tab again with abandon. But let me ask, what dunce, excuse me, would ship Firefox with the Tability restricted to the text fields only? I can only shake my head and wonder.

My friend Zak Greant (former MySQL Community Advocate) asked me to post this.

Recipe for MySQL ComCon Europe 2004

Take equal parts kick-ass MySQL community event and MySQL mission-critical business event. Add key MySQL community members and developers. Drop in three days in November (8th to 10th). Shake well. Serve ice cold at http://mysqlcomconeurope.com/.

Hard to believe it's been over three years since I first released PHP-GTK. A community has grown around this tool, but in the last year or so I really did not pay it much attention until I read a big thread on the php-gtk-general list called "what is going on with gtk.php.net?". And when I read it, I felt ashamed. Here were people who have come to depend on this tool, who are trying to contribute to the best of their abilities and time constraints, and who are frustrated by the incomplete documentation and lack of updates to the website, and I was absent from my duty.

Yes, when you release a piece of software into the wild, wild world, you have certain obligations and duties as the author or the primary maintainer. There is plenty of abandonware in the world already, and adding one more corpse to the pile does not help anybody. Software is only good if there is someone behind it, whether it's a single person, a group, or a whole company. So I wrote a Letter to Community, apologized for my prolonged absence, and tried to kickstart the project again. And it worked! People came to my call for help, and now the website is getting updates, the documentation is getting new content, and I have gotten back to my responsibilities of developing code and overseeing the project at large. PHP-GTK 2 is on the horizon, boys and girls, and that's all I'll say for now.

I'm off to embark on the PHP Cruise where I'll be giving a talk about regular expressions in PHP. Back in a week.

Ryan Norris has written up a good article on the benefits of tiered application development in PHP. As he correctly points out, there is a difference between keeping your logic and presentation completely separate and dividing it along the more appropriate line of business logic vs. presentation and its related logic. I have long been an advocate of this latter approach and a lot of it is reflected in Smarty, at least when I used to work on it. If you developing a PHP application consisting of more than a couple of pages, it would probably be a good idea to read this article and apply it to your project.