Potential Problem with Google Friend Connect

I really like the potential of Google Friend Connect.  The ability to add social network features to any web site is pretty cool.  One problem that I have is that I have to change the way that I read information to take advantage of Friend Connect.

I normally read blogs through Google Reader.  When I do this, I miss all of the social enhancements provided by Friend Connect.  What would be cool would be if Google Reader could present a Google Connect widget if you are reading a feed where the main site has the widget installed.  Then you would be able to see what other users are reading.

Google Friend Connect

Google has released Friend Connect today. Friend Connect allows you to add social network features to any web site. 

 
http://www.youtube.com/v/N94s7ix0JPo

I have installed it on this blog, as I am curious on how it takes off.

[via Official Google Blog]

Outlook / Google Calendar Sync

As I have mentioned before, I have been playing with solutions to get my Google Calendars to sync with my iPhone.  I had settled on using NuevaSync to sync calendar events wirelessly to my phone.  I have gotten fed up with the fact that on my phone, all of the calendars got merged, so it is hard to look at events.

On my wife's computer, I had installed OggSync.  This syncs her calendar to Outlook.  Then from there, the calendars will can be sync'd to Mobile Me.

Yesterday, I found SyncMyCal.  This essentially has the same functionality as OggSync, but it seems more polished.  Both offer free and paid vesions.  I installed it on my computer, and it works well.  I think that I will uninstall OggSync from my wife's computer and install 

Digitial Commercial Transition Video

This is pretty funny.

 
http://www.youtube.com/v/iTSS8E7bKXg

[via EngadgetHD]

Audio mixing with VMWare on Linux host

Ever since I switched to VMware from VirtualBox I have had a problem with audio.  If I launch VMware after launching an application that has played some audio, the audio will not work from guest OS.  Also, if I launch VMware first, no Linux application will be able to play audio.

It looks like the problem is that VMware is using OSS for audio, while the sound mixer that Ubuntu uses is ALSA.  This forum has instructions to get this to work.  Essentially the solution is to use the alsa-oss library to have VMware audio go through alsa.

24 hours of Google Reader Shared Items

In this post, I decribed that I wasn't able to have Google Reader export a feed of the last 24 hours of shared items. The feed that is generated by Google reader uses the publish date from the original article as the pubDate of the item in the feed.  It would be great if Google embedded the "shared" date in the feed for each item.

In the mean time, I have created a Yahoo Pipe that will do this.  Unfortunately, this requires that the previous period's feed needs to be saved somewhere where this script can access.  I have set a cron job to fetch the feed once a day.  Then the yahoo pipe  uses that cached feed and compares it with the latest feed.

links for October 2, 2008

• PlayOn Media Server streams Netflix to PS3 / Xbox 360 today
• Google CEO: How to fix U.S. energy problems | Green Tech - CNET News