The Moodgeist Blog tag:moodgeist.com,2007-12-17:/blog//12 2007-12-17T01:45:11Z From makers of moodgeist.com about our experiment and other stuff. Movable Type Publishing Platform 4.01 Future plans for Moodgeist as of Nov 2007 tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2695 2007-11-08T00:26:32Z 2007-12-17T01:45:11Z You may have noticed that not much has been happening with Moodgeist recently. That’s because it remains what it originally started out: a personal research project around Skype mood messages. It remains so. My original goal was to find out... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ You may have noticed that not much has been happening with Moodgeist recently. That’s because it remains what it originally started out: a personal research project around Skype mood messages. It remains so.

My original goal was to find out how it is to build a server and clients for such service. This goal was fulfilled a long time ago. So it has continued to run fine as it was with zero maintenance… until this last hosting problem where I had to disable the display part of the site.

]]> I continue to be interested in Moodgeist. Here are some themes that I’d like to work on at some point (beyond just fixing the site and bringing it back online). Many of them, though, are pending because of external factors, so I may get back to it when those factors get resolved.

Rich mood messages

Since a long time ago, Skype supports rich mood messages. This is actually a competitive advantage, since none of the other IM services or web-based mood-type things (Facebook statuses, Twitter) do that. I must say I haven’t looked into Skype’s rich moods yet, but collecting and redisplaying them online could be interesting.

Personalized feeds

The original objective of Moodgeist was to provide personalized mood feeds to people who opt in, but this assumes that Skype provides an API for developers to implement this — either running a headless Skype client on the server, or providing a web authentication API. As of Nov 2007, neither has happened. There is a roadmap that covers some of these things, but this is no good to me until things actually materialize. When they do, I may revisit this and implement this whole personal moods thing.

OpenSocial

I haven’t yet looked into Google’s OpenSocial, but it may be relevant to Moodgeist. (Honestly… I have a million blog posts pending to read about all this, I just physically don’t have the time in Q4 2007 due to me being busy at school… but this won’t last forever and I’ll have breaks in a few months, so I’ll get back to this.) OpenSocial lets Moodgeist be a consumer as well as producer of data from/to other apps. I find implementing various API-s to be an intellectually enriching experience, I’ve always learned something when I do this. So I may get back to OpenSocial at some point. (See also above point about rich moods.)

Core Animation on Leopard

I want to learn about Core Animation on Mac OS X Leopard. Moodgeist Client on Mac is an excellent opportunity to do just this, so I may end up implementing some fun stuff around Core Animation when I get around to installing Leopard.

]]> The displaying part of moodgeist.com temporarily disabled tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2694 2007-11-08T00:23:12Z 2007-12-17T01:45:11Z As the title says. I just posted a bulletin on Moodgeist.com. Here’s a copy of it. Hi. I have some news about Moodgeist. It’s not that great, but what can you do. I’ve run into a bit of hosting trouble... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ As the title says. I just posted a bulletin on Moodgeist.com. Here’s a copy of it.

Hi. I have some news about Moodgeist. It’s not that great, but what can you do.

I’ve run into a bit of hosting trouble with the site. It does not really work that well in a shared hosting environment where I’m running it, and I don’t at this time have time or energy to put into fixing it.

So I had to turn off the part of the site that displays things.

In a short and sweet format, here’s what’s the current state of the site and service.

  • It continues to accept mood pings from compliant clients.
  • The wiki continues to be available. You can still download and run the clients and they’ll happily send mood pings. I just don’t display the pings at this time. (Funnily enough, the part that accepts pings is much easier to run than the displaying part.)
  • The site code is intact and fine. I could reactivate it at any time after either fixing it or finding better hosting for it. I just don’t have enough motivation at this time to make the site into a better shape and spend my time or money getting better hosting.
  • Also the data collected throughout the site’s life is intact and sits fine in the database, awaiting better opportunities.
  • I continue to like Moodgeist as a personal research/experiment project and I still may some things with it at some point. This is why I didn’t just nuke the whole site, but just deactivated a part of it for the time being. (But note that the previous sentence says “may” not “will”, and does not give any time frame. I have no idea if/when I will actually get back to it.)

Please track the blog for updates and future plans.

regards,
Jaanus

]]> Removed the latest mood spam tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2693 2007-06-10T15:32:42Z 2007-12-17T01:45:11Z A bot user was spamming Moodgeist with nonsensical moods. I guess it’s some statistical data, but it’s not relevant in Moodgeist. So I quickly did a feature to exclude certain users’ moods from being captured or displayed and now we’re... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ A bot user was spamming Moodgeist with nonsensical moods. I guess it’s some statistical data, but it’s not relevant in Moodgeist. So I quickly did a feature to exclude certain users’ moods from being captured or displayed and now we’re nicely back to more sensical human-generated content :) and the latest moods and popular keywords look good again.

]]> Emoticons tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2692 2007-04-05T21:17:33Z 2007-12-17T01:45:11Z We now do emoticons. If you have put an emoticon in your Skype mood message, moodgeist.com knows how to display it. This means both the regular emoticion as well as the (flag:zz) type of country flags. Although I could do... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ We now do emoticons. If you have put an emoticon in your Skype mood message, moodgeist.com knows how to display it. This means both the regular emoticion as well as the (flag:zz) type of country flags.

Although I could do animated emoticons as well, I’ve hardcoded it to static for now, as too many animated emoticons on a page can be really obnoxious. And so now it’s hardcoded to static. Perhaps in the future we’ll have per-user preferences so that you could also switch it to animated if you wanted to.

]]> Moodgeist public chat tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2691 2007-03-21T18:51:13Z 2007-12-17T01:45:11Z Since a month ago or so, we have a public chat for Moodgeist. You are very welcome to come and say anything you like or don’t like and discuss straight with us :)... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ Since a month ago or so, we have a public chat for Moodgeist. You are very welcome to come and say anything you like or don’t like and discuss straight with us :)

]]> "www" removed from hostnames tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2690 2007-03-13T21:55:43Z 2007-12-17T01:45:11Z We have removed “www.” from all hostnames on Moodgeist. It saves four bytes/characters of typing and just looks nicer this also affects the ping API. If you had a Pinger client running, update it to ping against the new endpoint... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ We have removed “www.” from all hostnames on Moodgeist. It saves four bytes/characters of typing and just looks nicer :) this also affects the ping API. If you had a Pinger client running, update it to ping against the new endpoint without “www.” in it. (UPDATE: actually the old URL-s still remain working for now… but you may want to update anyway, as the ones without “www” are just nicer.)

]]> March updates: Mac "fire-and-forget" client, and hi to Ross tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2689 2007-03-13T17:09:11Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z We got a new Mac pinger that you can now run in “fire-and-forget” mode and also load on startup. It won’t die when Skype quits but rather sits around waiting for Skype to become available when it isn’t. I didn’t... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ We got a new Mac pinger that you can now run in “fire-and-forget” mode and also load on startup. It won’t die when Skype quits but rather sits around waiting for Skype to become available when it isn’t. I didn’t get the Twitter pinging part done yet but that’s next on my list.

Also hi to my friend Ross Mayfield who did a post on us :)

]]> Recent updates: Mac pinger, fixed Windows pinger, project wiki tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2688 2007-02-10T00:37:27Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z Just a quick note that we have had quite a few updates to Moodgeist over the past few weeks. We now have a project wiki. And there you can find a pinger for Mac as well as an updated Windows... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ Just a quick note that we have had quite a few updates to Moodgeist over the past few weeks.

We now have a project wiki. And there you can find a pinger for Mac as well as an updated Windows Pinger. The old Pinger was reported to be crashing with newer Skype for Windows version, and this new one seems to have fixed it.

Coming up: we need to shift all the documentation to wiki, most notably the ping API and feed docs. And brush up the server side with some bugfixes as well as new features. Plus perhaps add some things like Twitter pinging to the clients.

The wiki is initially read-only to regular users due to spam concerns and keeping things tidy, but if you have an idea for a good edit or bugfix or whatever, let me (Jaanus) know and I’ll add you to the list.

]]> Downtime tag:moodgeist.com,2007:/blog//12.2687 2007-01-08T21:31:49Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z This site was down for the past few weeks. We kept accepting pings, but the display interface was messed up. But apparently no one noticed and/or bothered to tell me :) fixed now.... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ This site was down for the past few weeks. We kept accepting pings, but the display interface was messed up. But apparently no one noticed and/or bothered to tell me :) fixed now.

]]> Pinger for Linux tag:moodgeist.com,2006:/blog//12.2686 2006-11-21T07:25:36Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z We now have a pinger for Linux, contributed by Berkus who also works as a Skype for Linux developer. Thanks!... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ We now have a pinger for Linux, contributed by Berkus who also works as a Skype for Linux developer. Thanks! :)

]]> Now showing videos on front page tag:moodgeist.com,2006:/blog//12.2685 2006-09-20T15:41:42Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z We now show YouTube videos extracted from mood messages on the front page. Just scroll down. If you want to get your own video here, just put the YouTube “watch” link in the mood, and we do the rest. The... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ We now show YouTube videos extracted from mood messages on the front page. Just scroll down. If you want to get your own video here, just put the YouTube “watch” link in the mood, and we do the rest.

The only sad part is that the embed YouTube code is not XHTML compliant and thus our frontpage no longer validates :(

]]> Site backend upgrade tag:moodgeist.com,2006:/blog//12.2684 2006-09-19T22:40:17Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z We upgraded the site view engine backend from Django 0.91 to 0.95 and there was a downtime of about 30 minutes. We still received pings but viewing was not available. All looks to have gone fine and we’re now back... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ We upgraded the site view engine backend from Django 0.91 to 0.95 and there was a downtime of about 30 minutes. We still received pings but viewing was not available. All looks to have gone fine and we’re now back up and running with the latest and greatest.

]]> Pinger for Windows 1.0.3.0 tag:moodgeist.com,2006:/blog//12.2683 2006-09-13T22:18:37Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z New version of Pinger has been out for a few days and it appears to work fine. Plus the code is correctly versioned now so I can go back to any change if needed. I documented the new Pinger birth... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ New version of Pinger has been out for a few days and it appears to work fine. Plus the code is correctly versioned now so I can go back to any change if needed.

I documented the new Pinger birth and so let’s look also at what’s changed in this version and how the changes came about. Here are the changelog entries with comments.

bugfix: no longer ping the mood of SkypeOut contacts (as they don’t have any)

This one’s easy, when pinging just verify if it is a SkypeOut contact or not and branch accordingly.

bugfix: “Run Pinger at Windows startup” option works now

This was a tough one. Everything seemed fine — I inserted the right information in registry at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, but nothing got run at login. Even though the other entries ran.

So finally I found the culprit. How I insert the registry key is that I just take the value of System.Environment.CommandLine, supposedly the full path to the executable program, and put it in the registry. As it turns out, this got a space appended to its end out of nowhere, and Mister Computer and Missis Windows decide they’re too picky to run the registry entries in the Run branch if the values have an extra space in the end. So a simple trim() call fixed that.

bugfix: smarter handling of “refused” and startup situations when starting Pinger, Skype and many other things at the same time (translation: it works now)

Yeah… just some more logic to wait until Skype initialization is complete until trying to connect to the contact list.

change: in addition to periodic “full pings”, listening to the “mood changed” event also works. When an incoming mood change event arrives, Pinger pings it instantly, so no moods are lost.

I got some strange COM library versioning bug a while ago so the mood change event just didn’t seem to exist in the Pinger project in Visual Basic, even though it existed elsewhere. After going to the new version of the COM, looks fixed and the mood events are happily flowing.

]]> Server code versioning and layout fixes tag:moodgeist.com,2006:/blog//12.2682 2006-09-13T22:15:44Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z We finally have server code versioning here so we can make changes again. How cool is that. So we fixed the layout bug that drove the pages nuts if someone was putting long URL-s in their moods. All URL-s are... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ We finally have server code versioning here so we can make changes again. How cool is that.

So we fixed the layout bug that drove the pages nuts if someone was putting long URL-s in their moods. All URL-s are truncated now, but still go to the right place, and it all looks nice.

]]> A new pinger for Windows tag:moodgeist.com,2006:/blog//12.2681 2006-07-03T23:32:45Z 2007-12-17T01:45:10Z After a long silence, we finally have a new Pinger for Windows. Still not fully optimal, but looks like it works mostly fine. Download and see more info. A major improvement is that this one works also for non-Administrator accounts... Jaanus http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/about/ After a long silence, we finally have a new Pinger for Windows. Still not fully optimal, but looks like it works mostly fine. Download and see more info. A major improvement is that this one works also for non-Administrator accounts in Windows. (Admin must still install it, but everyone can then run it.)

We still don’t have a Pinger for Mac or Linux :( contributions would be welcome. (I got a Mac and it would be fun to write one, but time, time, other matters keep pressing…)

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