Technologist ran geek blog is looking for guest article writers

If your into machinima, video games, Otaku, Anime, Geek culture, digital art, urban art, Electronica music, or just looking for a place to rant contact us with a 500 word meme(self written interview about yourself) and a few links of prior posts, if any.

This is non-paying, though may turn paying if/when subscriptions and sponsorships grows

We can be contacted at hDc1337 _at_ gmail.com, http://myspace.com/denzuko, or Yahoo IM: aka_thv

The Digital Sensei’s Guru Predictions - ‘08

So I’ve been reading up on technorati, TechCrunch, CNET, and even PC Magazine along with a few other top blogs. And all of them are showing the same following signs:

1. Yahoo and Google are working together, but yahoo is going to become bedfellows with AOL and end up the next MSN(dragged and droped into the “recycle bin”)
2. By the turn of the decade, we will see more Linux powered desktops that are going to become common place in the non-gamer homes. All of which are powered by the Ubuntu Linux distro.
3. With the faillings of Vista and the drop of XP Support. Microsoft’s push for the Windows 7 OS will be the smoking gun to they’re bullet in the head.
4. Gamers will be fed up with the lack of support on the favorite games from the Windows 7 and Vista that they will reluctenly move to Macs, expecially after realizing all the great gaming frendly hardware already installed. Thus creating a hug surge in Mac sales but also a larger winging user base do to the fact that gamers are so use to windows.
5. Linux’s rise to fame will be the popularization of Open Source, Enterprise computing(i.e servers), and secure business systems. Mac’s potent clam will be it won the desktop wars even after losing back in 1996 to Windows 4.0(aka Win95).
6. Bloggers will become the new internet stars pushing old media out to pasture. But, will also give rise to a new bubble 2.0 since so many of them will start to follow the way of the “Internet marketer” and “Web 2.0 Entrepreneur” all the while forgetting why they where blogging in the first place.
7. And all the while, more and more true hacker culture will be mistaken as geek culture as we push even futher on the new media broadband-wagon

Now these are just my observations, with a few options, but then again I was one of the first few to see Window’s demise to Linux and Mac. That video on the internet was the way things are gong to be and that blogs are the next e-zines. Just never went public with it outside select IRC channels of the time. And no, I’m not one of the technologist writers of the blogosphere, I like to think I am though my hit count isn’t even close to enough and Scoble has never asked me “Who are you?”…

So if any of this happens( or doesn’t) then chock it up to some quick insites and be glad that you feed you head before hand.
Social Bookmarking

TweetStat Mashup

In lew of my review of TweetStat I decided to do an interview with the head developer of the web service. Just before I started to type up the article for the service review I sent a private message to @TweetStat on twitter. As luck would have it Damon agreed to the interview. We then settled up the time for April 10, 2008 at 3:30 MST. The transcript goes as follows:

3:37 TweetStat

Hello

3:37 Dwight Spencer

Hi

I’m glad that you agreed to the interview

3:38 TweetStat

Not a problem at all - what are you looking to chat about?

3:39 Dwight Spencer

its mainly about the site. So to start off what inspired you to create TweetStats?

3:40 TweetStat

Well it was just before my 2000th tweet and as a fairly recent Twitter-holic, I was curious how I had used the service over time.

So I sat down with some perl, Excel pivot tables, and Numbers charts and in a couple hours had a script to download all my tweets and graph them over time

I eventually posted the script to my blog and after a surprising number of downloads and seeing that other people were interested in graphing their timeline, I had the desire to make it a web service.

3:43 Dwight Spencer

very nice. which that brings up what development environment did you decide to use in development of TweetStat?

3:52 TweetStat

Short answer - Ruby on Rails.

Long answer - it was important to me that the charts looked good. I had seen some other implementations online but they had some things I didn’t like whether it was as simple as an ugly chart or more complicated as not being able to gracefully handle a large amount of traffic.

So I researched charts and seeing as how I wanted to site to have a clean web 2.0-ish look, I figured Ruby on Rails was a suitable language - I’ve also been wanting to learn Rails for a while.

3:54 Dwight Spencer

quite a good way for it too.

3:56 TweetStat

Hehe definitely - Fortunately there are a ton of good tutorials/howtos/etc.

3:56 Dwight Spencer

that there is.

As many who have used the twitter client, Twhirl have know one can use your service from it. will there be a published API for other app writers to use?

3:57 TweetStat

haha, good question.

I am hoping to provide some sort of badge or other JavaScript-fu that people can query or display on their site. I hadn’t considered a full-fledged API as this is really just a hobby project for me.

4:02 Dwight Spencer

How long did it take you to develope the site?

4:03 TweetStat

All told, probably a couple weeks time. I announced/released it one month after I put out the perl script. It was mostly coded in the space of two very sleep-deprived weekends, though.

4:04 Dwight Spencer

very nice. I’m impressed.

4:04 TweetStat

Hehe, thanks. I got oddly motivated and ignored everything else.

4:05 Dwight Spencer

I know the feeling, its the same way for me with many of my oss projects.

4:06 TweetStat

yea, I def wish I could put more time into it, but alas…have to pay the bills somehow.

4:06 Dwight Spencer

very true. and that brings me to my next question.

Why did you deside to use a donation model for the site revenue?

4:07 TweetStat

Well I’m not incurring any extra expense as the site is on a server that I already own. I was never hoping to make any money on it, but am definitely appreciative of any donations people make.

That being said…

I would definitely like to be able to make the site perform better and am considering ways to do that. I, personally, am not a big fan of ads although I do realize they are a primary means of generating revenue on the net these days.

I made TweetStats because I enjoyed doing so, not because I wanted to rake in cash - call me naive.

4:10 Dwight Spencer

nah, I’ve found that’s usually how it goes for developers that’s not from Silicon valley. Its nice and refreshing in these days.

4:12 TweetStat

Yea, as I mentioned - my motivation was to have fun, enjoy learning a new language and if people liked it then so be it.

4:12 Dwight Spencer

Very nice indeed. How do you see the site growing in the new future(features, users, traffic)?

4:13 TweetStat

I’ve gotten a number of feature requests for different types of stats - more detailed, % of replies that are @’s, etc.

Right now I’m trying to focus on some more detailed stats and helping users identify their followers better. For example:

1) The ability to see your activity over a specific period of time. The past x days, etc. This is in “alpha” at the moment.

2) Try to incorporate JavaScript charts as well (current charting component is flash-based) so they can be embedded on web pages/blogs and work on the iPHone.

3) Branch out into other areas where I see a need in Twitter such as the ability to visualize your followers better, find intersections and see who else you might be interested in following.

It’s not the most “useful” site, I’ll admit - but it’s definitely fun. I’ve gotten some spikes when big names on Twitter mention it or it gets blog, but the traffic usually hovers pretty low.

Of course - the above is all based on the assumption that I am able to add extra hours into our current 24-hour based days. I’m working on that as a side project too, hehe.

I think there’s a lot of room for Twitter to grow in the statistics area to improve the user experience (see http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/31376570) and while I would love to further that goal…my time is limited.

That of course offers the question - should I open source it and allow others to contribute?

4:18 Dwight Spencer

hey, that’s my next question.. hehe

Would you ever consider offering up the project to the open source community?

4:21 TweetStat

I’ve gotten a couple requests to do so and I am considering it in order to make the site better. As a novice Ruby coder, I’m sure others code do a much better job.

4:22 Dwight Spencer

well it would be nice to see it opened up. I know I have a few ideas for RSS output and xml API already.

4:23 TweetStat

I would also like to set up a Jabber server so I can pull from the public timeline instead of having to go back and scrape tweets - but again, that full-time job keeps getting in the way.

4:24 Dwight Spencer

so true. heehe

that’s about it, other than Who holds the credit for the service? or as Scoble puts it bluntly, Who are you?

4:27 TweetStat

Daunting question.

I suppose I wrote the original twitter_stats.pl script, but TweetStats wouldn’t be what it is without the work of many others in the community such as backgroundrb developers, Fusion Charts developers, @kejadlen who wrote a ruby port of the twitter stats script that got some use and the awesome rails tutorials that are available on the net…

oh, and I guess I should mention I’m @dacort on Twitter and my personal blog can be found at http://dcortesi.com.

4:31 Dwight Spencer

smashing. Well unless you have an questions for me? I think that’s about it for the interview

4:32 TweetStat

Just wondering where the interview will be posted and when I suppose?

4:32 Dwight Spencer

great question

its going to be at The Teachings of Master Den Zuko(denzuko.wordpress.com) and I’ll have it up by tomorrow morning

4:33 TweetStat

awesome!

4:33 Dwight Spencer

I usually do a tweet when I post a new article

4:33 TweetStat

Well thanks for the interview, I definitely appreciate the interest in TweetStats!

4:34 Dwight Spencer

your welcome. and I appreciate you taking the time out for me to do the interview.

4:34 TweetStat

Of course, anytime.

And now I’m off to pick up @MarinaMartin (who, as luck would have it…I met on Twitter lol)

4:35 Dwight Spencer

nice. have fun mate. cheerio

All in all it was a very good interview and I still can’t thank Damon for agreeing to the interview. Though, there was some network hiccups there on my end, but those where edited out for readability.

New deviantART Post: Just finished Lithium Flower

So here it is, a bit late but better than never, a piece for all of you that helped making 500 hits to my DA Profile. Thank you. This is one of many pieces I’ve been working up to for a while now and I hope you enjoy it.
<img src=”http://flickr.com/denzuko/pictures/Lithium Flower by ~Denzuko on deviantART

The Day the Tweets Went Silent, Using Twitter Metrics and Blogger Resources

There has been tons of buzz on the web about micro blogging, in particular about twitter. If you haven’t heard about twitter by now then where have you been for at lease the past 6 months? At macworld the service went down do to all the flood of tweets. Then along came SXSW and in anticipation they quickly upgraded and was well prepared for the influx of tweets on the service. Then there was Monday April 7th, 2008(Twittergate), the live stream of the internet marketing gurus Ed Dale and Dan Raine’s Thirty Day Challenge vodcast. Their goal was to get as many people to sign up for twitter as possible. A part of me thinks that they’re only half right on this as there are several other services for micro blogging with a social network out there, just not with the same community of geeks and application writers whom seemingly can’t get enough of being bombarded with information overload. But I digress, in the course of minutes the web server hosting twitter died, so much for lighttpd ehh??, and for a good hour and a half at the very lease, didn’t bother to count the mintues being too busy with ustream.tv at that moment, twitter was dead. Though in the misted of the slience and how rare it is with the web these days. Your digital sensi and master cyberlord found the one thing that just about every blogger from CenterNetworks’ YouTube Adds Full Video Metrics; Where Are Twitter’s Metrics? to big name blogger Robert Scoble himself complaining about not being there.

Its called TweetStats, and its a great way to keep track of your stats and usage metrics or anyone on twitter for that matter of fact. I’ve tested out the service and its great. Its got a nice clean interface, quick and ease usage. Plus, you don’t have to sign up for anything, there’s not even an advert or click tracking on any page. You just simply enter in the twitter user name and with in a few moments, depending now much the service has to gather, you’ll have a nice graph of all the tweets that have been done. Though, I will say this since it hasn’t even broken the Alexa top 100,000 barrier and its clear tnat Damon aka dacort has put a lot of effort into the site. Before, bookmarking or graphing any tweets, please do click on the donate button. Then rush off to enjoy all the new graphs and metrics that where previously hidden away on someone’s web server access log.

Never heard of twitter? Play the video and find out what the buzz is about.

While I found that little gem, I also found another web service that puts my article on using google hacks to find twitters to shame. its Tweet Scan. This gem is a real-time Twitter search engine. Its free to use, there is a free member subscription for keeping track of your favorite searches in much the same way as Google Alerts or any top meta-search engine does. Plus, a wiki area for users and a blog from the behind it. The also do offer up a clickthru advertisment to its members to help generate traffic from the site’s sidebar. Which is a single link, at 140 charactures for $10 USD a week. I don’t know about you, but that does sound like a very tempting way of generating traffic to any given site.

Mashing Twitter and Google to find new people to follow

After a bit of surfing the web what’s the best thing to do? Well for me its hearing what’s going on around the world and the best way that’s done is with twitter. Now we’ve all heard about it or at lease most of us. Its the micro web logging software at twitter.com, and no its not something you download or pay for; its free and leverages open source technologies to bring a really great web service.

You’ll probibabley saying right now, “o… k…?!?”. Well lets put it this way, if you’ve been on facebook or myspace lately then you’ll already have something like twitter there, but only for people logged in to that social network and are already on your friends list. What it is a short up date of what you are doing, or well where doing at the time of the post. This is the internet after all and when something goes up online its only a snap shot of the moment.

So basicically, twitter is just that, what your doing or what you want to tell the global at that moment what your are doing or have a quick thought of at that time. Now for those of you that have already known about twitter then I shout joyious sumomo powered happy dances to you, and ask that you go follow me on twitter.

Now, what if you really haven’t had any one cool to follow on there or if your like me you get bombarded by the ramblings of Scoble, Leo Laporte, Dan Raine and Ed Dale but hey there’ great podcasters and bloggers as well so follow them too. So, if your following only a few your not really going to have a lot to get out of twitter. How to fix this? Well doesn’t twitter have a search.. yes, it does but not a browse. Basically you do a keyword search on twitter and hope you fish something good out then start going through all the people that person is following and start digging out new people to follow that way. This is all fine and dandy but its well lets face it. Twitter is new and most of the people out there are very boring or don’t have many people to branch out to. So what can be done is a simple hack from google that allows you to find all these cool people with really interesting blogs that also read other blogs, and by blogs I don’t mean the simple posts or updates to your myspace journal, whom of which also have this great new thing that we call twitter.

So we covered the what and the why.. now what? How do we do it? Simple, type this into your url and you’ll get back a list of everyone you can browse through and may just find interesting.

http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&q=inurl%3Awww.twitter.com%2F+%2BTwitter+%2Bon+%2BTechnorati&btnG=Search&filter=0

http://google.com/search?q=inurl:twitter.com+Technorati

Now what that does is it searches google’s database of sites, checks in the site url for “twitter.com” and limits it by what’s found on Technorati.

Hackers a good name from the media

Well guess what, for once hackers are shown in a good light in the media. A group of professional hackers and video bloggers come together to show a good side to hackers and what they really do to get paid. Thanks Current Tv and Charlotte Buchen.

View the video at http://current.com/items/88858799_the_happy_hacker

Dream Angel by Denzuko on deviantART

So I wanted to finally use one of my stocks from from *mjranum-stock. The goal was to make her very surreal and ethereal, even a bit Fae touched. I hope you enjoy it.

(C)2008 Denzuko.deviantart.com

View or download the original at http://denzuko.deviantart.com/art/Dream-Angel-78142978

read more | digg story

Machinima as stock imagery

So, as you may not know I perfer to use machinima as a means to render stock imagery. This can be a very challenging experence, as to many games don’t allow for full access of the images either because of the game’s user interface or because other reasons(bad graphic sub layer in the game engine or the like).

 Now the pain really gets down to when your using a non blue screen of death system to do your machinima. 

New deviantART journal: Current Happenings and The Whoa Factor

Lately I’ve been surfing DA for some amazing artwork. Though after the last two I’ve seen its got me thinking, what the frag.. everyone has been getting on me about being more involved with the DA community and I figured that I should start a list of the most amazing stuff that’s on deviantART. This list is way beyond the standard norm of amazing art, four and five star stuff that makes you say Whoa!

Go read the journal entry at Denzuko’s deviantART Journal for more information.