Finally, someone made it dirt easy to transfer Flickr pictures to Facebook

Normally, I don't care about Facebook albums. Flickr has many more features, handles it better, and has a more photo-centric community around it. Unfortunately, I'm vain, and want as many people to look at my pictures as possible. I've played with a handful of Facebook applications that "integrate" Flickr into Facebook, but I've never found one that made the transition completely seamless. In fact, it seems as though the "new" Facebook design broke the last Flickr application that I used.

I could re-upload all my photos to Facebook. But why do that when I've already done it once? I just want some back end service to pull selected albums from Flickr and put the files on Facebook. It looks like dudemeister Matt McNamara felt the same way, so he wrote flickurbook. This is a dead-simple, hacked together way to pull photos from Flickr and put them on Facebook. I love it! It's exactly as unpolished of an application as I would have written. This does what I was hoping Oosah would do; Oosah is a start-up that I saw at the Palo Alto new-tech meetup a couple of months ago that boasted being able to do the same thing (remotely manage photos between different sources). Unfortunately, when I tried it, it didn't work. Looks like it would have been overkill anyway, flickurbook does exactly what I want it to do.

PS: Check out my Tahoe pictures

Mango Lassi: Better than Synergy

About 3 years ago, my friend Lann showed me this sweet, cross platform program called Synergy that lets you share one computer's mouse and keyboard among multiple computer/screens. Why was this cool? This meant that with my laptop, sitting on my futon I could control my TV computer. Yea, I'm that lazy.

As the years go on, I find myself getting lazier. Now that I have an apartment, the couch is even further away from my TV! So, I went out to set up good ol' tried and true Synergy so that I can use my laptop to control my Mythbuntu box. But, it didn't work. Every time I moved my mouse off screen, if showed up back in the center of the original screen.

Now, I don't care why it doesn't work. Really, I don't. I fiddled for about five minutes, and then went to see if there was anything better out there, when I stumbled across Mango Lassi. It was designed specifically to solve the suckitude of Synergy and x2x. Unfortunately, there's not a package for Ubuntu, so we have to do it the old fashioned way:

(following Marius Gedminas's instructions)

sudo apt-get install git-core curl build-essential intltool \
automake1.9 libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libxtst-dev \
libavahi-glib-dev libavahi-client-dev libavahi-ui-dev \
libnotify-dev libglade2-dev

git clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/mango-lassi.git/
cd mango-lassi
./bootstrap.sh
(acknowledge the prompt)
make
sudo make install

You get a nice little GUI:



I learned the hard way: don't try launching this remotely over ssh with X forwarding enabled -- not good things happen. I've got this running on Intrepid Ibex and Hardy Haron, and it works beautifully!

Quick DB2 Express-C 9.5 Update

A while pack, I started a post series about getting Drupal to work with DB2 Express-C 9.5 under Ubuntu. Unfortunately, right after jumping into this project, I updated my laptop from Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) to Hardy Heron (8.04). During this process, DB2 completely broke itself. Not only did it break itself, it broke itself in such a way that it couldn't even be un-installed through apt-get.

I recently found instructions for how to force removal of a broken DB2 package on Hardy Heron. This is good news, because it seems that about 6 months later, there's finally a working version of Express-C 9.5 for Hardy Heron!

Let's just hope that the db2exc package for Intrepid Ibex (8.10) comes out in a more timely manner :)