Jeromakay

Happy new year, yes!!!! We’re in the next decade now

Hope you’ve got your new year’s resolution sorted, I’ve got lots of energy to spend wisely in this new year and I can see many good things ahead. Many of the things I’m focusing are around growing Loopthing and hopefully by summer there will be massive focus on the network we’re building here.

May all your wishes come true in 2010!

Vladimir

Hey everyone,

Just want to recap the latest happenings, I think this year has been a good one with lots of stuff to learn. I managed to understand things I wasn’t able to in the past, Loopthing managed to reach a decisive point which I hope it’s going to be all right, became a student, started learning Italian, and also went through many many small things that should help me in the future.

For now, this is it, I don’t have much to say, just to push things hard around us.

Happy holidays,
Vladimir Ghetau

Horrrraaaaay!

A quick video on Loopthing, the business networking website, where Joseph Kelly talks about what is Loopthing and how it can help your business.

The action happens in The Hub, in London, from what I’ve heard.

I’m busy today migrating files and settings from one machine to another plus sorting out some things which suppose to help Loopthing grow easier.

So far, we’re ON for finding the right investor to provide us with seed capital while code development is moving forward at a faster pace than last week. (there will be an update on this, soon)

These are the updates for now, keep an eye on my Twitter page for faster updates.

I’m happy to announce this. We’ve put great energy into this, and now the OpenScore it’s live for every of the 24k businesses on the site.

What is the OpenScore?

The OpenScore is a social media alalysis result that we provide, after analyzing different elements of a business, based on the feedback we have about it. In other words, we can tell how involved is a business in the online environment, from Twitter to YouTube and lots of other services in between.

For more information on this launch please read this blog post on the official site.

Join the live web presentation

If you’re around today (28th of October) at 2 PM GMT time, just drop by to see a quick presentation and ask questions.

The URL to join is: http://www.present.ie/loopthing1. We’d love to have you there.

Cheers!
Vladimir

You’ve probably noticed that the AUTO_INCREMENT ID of a column doesn’t change after deleting rows from a table, and this may not be what you want in some situations (maybe you are testing an application, and you want ID’s to reset from 1, rather than the last available ID).

First solution would be to use TRUNCATE when deleting the rows from the table, instead of doing a row by row deletion (which is also slower in this situation).  To achieve this, just type:

TRUNCATE TABLE t1;

This automatically rests the auto_increment id of any column which was set to automatically increment the last row’s value when a new row is inserted, no matter if the table (in case you’re using MySQL) is using MyISAM or InnoDB storage engines.

Another way to achieve this is by throwing the ALTER TABLE command:

ALTER TABLE t1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

While this solution is also great, it requires two WRITE operations over the t1 table:

1. you must delete the content
2. reset the auto_increment ID.

Because writes are expensive for high load databases, using TRUNCATE is highly recommended.

There would be a third option to achieve this, and just like the above ones, you may not have enough permissions to throw it in the command line: dropping the table, and adding it again.

This of course, will clean everything related to that table, including the auto_increment ID.

Here’s how it goes:


INSERT INTO t1 (c2) VALUES ('IE');
INSERT INTO t1 (c2) VALUES ('UK');

SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 't1';

After throwing the SHOW TABLE statement, we just look for the “auto_increment” value which should be 3.

Let’s reset the auto_increment value:


DROP TABLE t1;



CREATE TABLE t1 (
`c1` SMALLINT(2) unsigned auto_increment NOT NULL,
`c2` char(2) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`c1`)
) ENGINE="MyISAM";



SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 't1';


Now, the value of the auto_increment index is 1 again.

My conclusion: to reset the auto_increment index to 1, just go with the TRUNCATE command. It’s faster, especially if there’s content inside the table.

Now, as I was playing with Vimeo’s API, I stumbled across this video:

Now, I wonder what’s the connection between the dead animal singing and the lyrics which say “You are so beautiful…”.

LOL

Vimeo implemented OAuth support on their end, the announcement was made here.

Seems like the old web authentication methods are already marked as deprecated, however they still work 4 days later.  The deprecated methods are

• vimeo.auth.checkToken
• vimeo.auth.getFrob
• vimeo.auth.getToken

The new OAuth specific URLs are (Twitter alike):

Request Token: http://vimeo.com/oauth/request_token
User Authorization: http://vimeo.com/oauth/authorize
Access Token: http://vimeo.com/oauth/access_token

I noticed a big similarity between Vimeo’s and Flickr’s authentication API, and probably Flickr will do a switch soon as well, there’s no OAuth implementation on their end at the moment.

A thing I noticed is that the Vimeo API now requires the OAuth specific data and valid tokens which kind of forces everyone to switch to the OAuth tokens, instead of the old ones extracted via the deprecated methods.

Loopthing needs an unexpected code update because of this right after launching the authentication feature on our end last week, but I’m happy security has been tightened around the video hosting service.

Update: The OAuth specific URLs for Vimeo does not support SSL because of the improper setup of the  certificate and the weird redirects. In the best case you’ll get a 401 error with the message “Invalid nonce”.

I’m happy to announce that Loopthing is ready to take first round of funding, no matter the size of the investment.

Loopthing came a long way from where it was when we started, and we’re close to releasing the first business application next month.

If you’re interested into this, please have a look over the Loopthing official blog.

I’ve been playing with the Twitter  API again (authenticated REST requests this time), and kept getting this nasty 417 Expectation Failed HTTP error.

I checked the sent headers, there was no Expect header being sent, until I realised the requests I was making to twitter using POST HTTP method weren’t sending the variables I wanted to POST, or they were incorrectly formatted.

So, if you’re ever playing with Twitter’s API, make sure that when POSTing data, variables follow. This ate 30 minutes of my life.

Now, this happens only for requests where POSTed data is expected.  I guess the response Twitter sends is a general one, usually, the 417 HTTP Error shows up only when there’s an Expect header present.

I haven’t read the RFC specs for what can happen when no data is POSTed, but I guess a less ambiguous message than this, could be taken into account.