Wired talking about “instapreneurs”

Quick read article on wired.com about the new age internet trend of "get it fast out there" .

One example mentioned in the article was Zazzle, how they get Disney's brand out there in public so fast, that traditional retailer can not even think about unless traditional folks spin their chain to have good online presence. Some of the interesting numbers in the article Ian mount talks about

Disney has uploaded more than 3,500 of its designs to Zazzle, allowing the company to sell a wider range of products than just the blockbuster Mickey Mouse T-shirts favored by conventional retailers. The service also gives the Disney machine unprecedented agility. "Here, I can see that Hannah Montana is taking off, we can upload a design right into Zazzle's system, and in a day or two it's a product," says Patrick Haley, senior manager of customization for DisneyShopping.com.

On the side note, now I see the term "instapreneur" catching up and will be another one to toss around in your discussion with friends about modern trends and buzzwords.

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March 27, 2008 | Filed Under Ruby/Ruby On Rails | Leave a Comment

MessageDance - iPhone photo to Twitter, Facebook, WordPress

Another installment of How iPhone to Twitter/Facebook/MySpace/Wordpress/Xanga/LiVEJOURNAL/Blogger/TypePad/VOX.

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March 22, 2008 | Filed Under Ruby/Ruby On Rails | Leave a Comment

Issue with Facebook Java API’s photos upload with caption.

Context : Facebook-Java API usage for uploading photos.

Problem : You get error "Incorrect Signature" while doing client.photos_upload with caption as one of the parameter. This happens when you have caption with

more than one words or any special character.

Reason: In FacebookRestClient.java : postFileRequest method it encodes all the form data. So when you send caption with photo, it URL encodes the caption also. One word caption is fine , but if you have more than one word "my buddies" will be encoded and result will be "my%20buddies" which Facebook does not like at the receiving end. Have a look at their documentation for photos upload.

Solution: Simple brute force solution is not to send caption encoded. Drop following line in postFileRequest method

if (entry.getKey()!=null && entry.getKey().equals("caption"))

doEncode = false;

right before following line out.writeBytes(doEncode? encode(entry.getValue()): entry.getValue().toString());

compile the Facebook source again , bundle the jar file and you are done.

BTW, I have not really looked their bug list or discussion forum , they might have a better solution for this but thought would share this for people who want to know what the issue is when they see this error "Incorrect Signature" , which is completely misleading.

Another effort to save someone's day.

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March 22, 2008 | Filed Under Java | Leave a Comment

Coke Commercial “Sip Stealing”

“Sip Stealing”. A good ad. As always coke has interesting ad campaigns.

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March 19, 2008 | Filed Under Fun Stuff | Leave a Comment

Java ArrayList to Ruby Array

Java ArrayList toString would return something like [a, b, c, d]
Following method will get you Ruby array out of above String

def get_ruby_array_from_java_array_list(java_array_list)

java_array_list[1, java_array_list.length-2].split(", ")

end

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March 18, 2008 | Filed Under Ruby/Ruby On Rails | Leave a Comment

MessageDance - YouTube to Twitter

Look Ma!, We have video on YouTube, Now it is easy to share your favorite YouTube videos with your friends in few clicks.

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March 14, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Diet Mountain Dew Surprising Facts - Yo-Yo Spot

Did you know that?. I did not , Yo Yo ’s were invented as a tactical weapon ?. Now you know it. Well made advertisement to show facts and pushing that "Did you know"? factor Moutain Dew.

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March 12, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Blogging from Facebook to more than blog sites

So now you can blog (to more than one blogs if you like) using messgedance sitting right here within Facebook.

To all those Facebook lovers they do not have to get out of their comfort zone, open their message compose type the blog post and send it to blog @ messagedance.com and boom it will go to all the blog posts they configured within MessageDance’s Social profile.

It does not end here, the message can potentially go to all other destinations like Twitter (as 140 characters of your message), to other social destinations.

We will soon release blog channel to general audience, we are working on general UI so that users can configure settings to their blog.

Think about it. Possibilities are endless!.

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March 11, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment