Scripting News for 6/10/2007

Brief comment on Sopranos finale 

Okay, I saw the finale at 6PM, the east coast feed.

I don’t want to spoil it, but if you saw it too, you’ll understand my one word comment.

Jeff Jarvis thought it was an appropriate end.

Interesting theory. The blackout at the end was Tony’s death. Remember the conversation with Bobby in episode 1. It is interesting, and tempting, but the show was never shot in the first person, not from Tony’s point of view. It seems if Tony was killed, we’d see it, even if he didn’t.

More Flickr API stuff works 

Here’s an image that was uploaded through the API, and was located through the API.

It works! 

Man, that was a lot harder than I thought it was.

Flickr chose to use a multipart forms to upload pictures, and my knowledge of those is pretty rusty. I’ve only used them in programs once, and that was in 1999, when we were working on Manila. The docs on the web on stuff like this really suck, but I stared at it long enough and took a long break, and got it to work.

So my screen shot was uploaded by the code that the screen shot made possible.

How about that!

I love this shit, I admit it 

I’ve wanted to play with the Flickr API for quite some time, so I woke up in the middle of the night (my body clock is still in Europe) and dug into the docs, which are pretty dense, but they make sense if you take it a step at a time.

As a result I’ve now got the OPML Editor authorized to talk to Flickr on my behalf, and of course it’s coded in such a way that it’ll work for all users of the OPML Editor (and Frontier and Radio) once the code is released.

I have some apps in mind, but as usual, this glue is there to make it possible for others to build on the connection, much as we connect with Google, Amazon, WordPress and other Internet-based services.

I spent a bunch of time talking with friends in Europe about connecting our desktop environment with web services in this way. It’s a callback, to the early part of the decade when I was excited about all these things that now are starting to mature. Yeah, I took a few years off, but the lights are coming back on.

What am I working on, well recent experience has taught me it’s better to hold my cards a little closer to my chest. There are people who think I am working for them, but it’s time for me to be working for me. Tired of being other people’s business model. Actually more like fed up with it. 🙂

You’d be surprised at how rich some of the people are who think I like to work for free while they make millions from my work.

Anyway, I’ll have a screen shot of Flickr working with the OPML Editor once I have code that uploads the screen shot to Flickr. In programming we call that one of two things: 1. Recursion or 2. Eating the dog food.