It’s time to switch to GIT. For the last years I’ve worked with CVS and with SVN. Both systems are great and every system has got their disadvantages. But after using GIT I come to the conclusion that this is the best versioning system I have every used Good work Linus!
A little reference for my daily work:

# git init
# git add readme
# git commit -m "initial import"
# git remote add origin git@github.com:ledil/xxx.git
# git push origin master
# git pull origin master

Last day Ive read an interesting post about 7 lessons Olympians can teach internet entrepreneurs. I believe that these lessons are also valid for other groups or companies. Here there are:

1. Great talent means nothing without great teamwork
2. Endorsement deals are great, but don’t let them distract you
3. Finish
4. When you are injured, you need to work even harder to reach your goals
5. Know your competition
6. Nothing worth accomplishing comes quick and easy
7. Remember what’s really important

Ive been using the python-twitter for some stuff and Ive noticed that the actual version doesnt support the "source" parameter and also doenst support identi.ca. For this reason Ive spent some minutes to do a hack. This version includes a new function named "SetSource" that allows you to define your source "…from blabla" that will be display on twitter and introduces the new parameter "twitterserver" to __init__. This parameter is optional and the default value is twitter.com. identi.ca is another microblogging service based on laconica that supports the entire twitter API. Great step!!

e.g. for SetSource:

# import twitter
# api = twitter.Api(username=’me’,password=’secret’,twitterserver=’identi.ca/api’)     // for identi.ca, default=twitter.com
# api.SetSource(’dilella’)
# api.PostUpdate(’it works’)

Download twitter.py!

It’s have been a long time when Ive made my last blog entry So back from the holiday and full of enthusiasm I modified the great multibox 1.3.1 library to make it run with the MooTools 1.2. The new version can be found here:

Multibox 1.3.1 - MooTools 1.2
Overlay 1.2 - MooTools 1.2

Please dont write me mails for additional information but contact the author of multibox. (phatfusion)

The problem when you use mktime is that it converts your python datetime (with/without dst) to your localtime. But if you want to convert it only to a normal unixdatetime without tz you need to create an own function. Here is an example that Ive used for a project:

def dt2ut(date):
    total = ((date.year-1970)*365) + int(float((date.year-1970))/4.0)
    monthdays=[31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31]
    for i in range(1,date.month):
        total = total + monthdays[i-1]
    total = total + date.day
    total = total*86400 + 3600*date.hour + 60*date.minute + date.second + 1e-6*date.microsecond
    return int(total*100)*10

While surfing around and reading news I discovered an interesting project named fonie. To make it short it offers an voice tel within your browser. You dont need to install a plugin or other software. From the technology part what are they doing ? Fonie.de is using adobe flash to grant access to your microphone and webcam for their webbrowser video-telephony.
If you want to test it just visit their homepage and start a new call. You will receive a link that you can send to your friend … The sound quality is not the best but I believe that this will be changed soon if a big Investor will help them

Songza is the brainchild of 23-year-old Aza Raskin — the president of Chicago-based software company Humanized, Inc., and the son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin. Over the course of a month, he and Humanized’s Web/Systems Architect Scott Robbin worked weekends to bring the idea to life. The site launched on November 8, 2007 and instantly generated significant buzz around the world. Hundreds of bloggers and news writers have praised its elegant user interface, beautiful design, and all-around utility. Like all good ideas, both the concept and design came to Aza while he was in the shower…. Songza’s primary purpose is to illustrate how to provide content using a “humane interface” — the term used by Jef Raskin to describe interfaces that reflect how people actually use software. Songza presents this concept through its clean, clutter-free design and transparent remote control. New features will be added in time.

www.songza.com

"meebo.com is a website for instant messaging from absolutely anywhere. Whether you’re at home, on campus, at work, or traveling foreign lands, hop over to meebo.com on any computer to access all of your buddies (on AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber) and chat with them, no downloads or installs required, for free!"

There is also a firefox addon available.

A heuristic graph-search algorithm for finding shortest paths. The input to A* is a starting node, the goal node, plus a heuristic function h that returns an estimate of the distance from a given node to the goal node. If the heuristic h never overestimates the distance to the goal, then it is called an admissible heuristic. A* search with an admissible heuristic is guaranteed to find the shortest path between the starting node and the goal node. A* is the darling of ArtificialIntelligence courses, probably mostly because it’s relatively easy to understand the proof of this fact. Furthermore, it can be shown that an algorithm which visits fewer nodes then A* could potentially miss the shortest path.

A* works by visiting one new node at time. It keeps a PriorityQueue full of nodes, and always "expands" the node with the lowest priority (sometimes called its f-value, or expected cost) which is computed as cost(node) + h(node), where cost(node) is the distance travelled so far, and h(node) is the heuristic estimate of the remaining distance to the goal node. Every time a node is "expanded", its unexplored neighbours are added to the queue. The result is that A* keeps track of a large number of potential paths radiating from the start node, and it extends these paths one node at time, always extending the one with the smallest cost(node) + h(node) value.

A* is an example of a GreedyAlgorithm. It is very similar to DijkstrasAlgorithm, the difference being that DijkstrasAlgorithm uses no heuristic, and so when deciding which node to expand next it only considers the cost from the start node.

Please mail to get a copy of the delphi unit.