Earlier tonight I have been examining my food intakes in my current diet, and trying to figure out why for the last 12 months I haven’t been able to make a significant dent in the 8-10kg of midriff fat I have remaining.

At the end of it, something interesting emerged from crunching the approximate caloric numbers and may serve to explain the discrepancy - coffee.

The coffee machine I use in work actually outputs two serves per (massive) cup, at around 500ml. With the milk we use, standard milk, not full cream, it’s around 200 calories per shot which means per cup is around 400 calories simply in milk calories. If I have 2-3 of these cups every day, I’ve added around 2-3 standard meals to my diet simply by drinking these, or 800-1200 calories.

With other foods consumed throughout the day, 3 days out of 7, I consume a bit more than I am burning. It means I’m not losing, I’m very slowly gaining.

I guess the lesson is, if you’re trying to lose weight, the cardinal rule is to output more than you consume and create a nutritional track record. Hence, if you do let yourself go, without realizing, the maths can show you the holes.

A brand new dedicated (non-official) Friendfeed podcast has begun, hosted by Friendfeed users John Worthington, Mark Wilson and Josh Haley.

FFundercats promises to bring the best of the madcap chaos that is the Mona-era Friendfeed, and they’ve just completed their first ‘cast. Check it out over at FFundercats: A FriendFeedic Convergence Of FFunderous Proportions

The benefits of the new feature are exciting. If so inclined, you can “real-time” any list or room you’re in, instantly giving it a kind of chat functionality within that container (though replies to comments are not yet threaded in real-time mode), so rooms are now multimedia chat rooms. Unlike a chat room however, each item doesn’t just consist of text, but items such as video, pictures, links and feeds. Additionally, communication happens instantly, but is also pushed to the top of the regular FriendFeed page making updates accessible to all “static” users, not just the “Real-Time” users. It’s even possible to see the real time updates of a particular user and their friends!

There are a few problems with this basic version of the new feature. Firstly is the classic problem of networks like Friendfeed, which is having many subscriptions. Although this can be managed in many ways on Friendfeed, with “Real-Time” it becomes worse if you’ve neglected lists and leave all your subscribers inside the “home feed”, you will get rapidly flooded with updates.

I wasn’t actually able to like or comment on many updates because they scrolled by too fast, pushed ever downward by the flood. Lists do help with this problem, but also are a detriment if you don’t want to isolate subscribers into secondary or tertiary lists.

Secondly, there’s no way to drill down or filter comments from standard posts, so updates are just a deluge of mixed content. This makes it difficult to follow the thread of conversation and comment on comments themselves, leading to confusion.

Several features I’d like to see added to the Real-Time standard/mini-window:

• Keyword filtering, e.g show only updates containing the word ‘lego’ and so on
• Service filtering, eg. show me only Twitter updates, Last.fm updates
• Stickies, eg. dock a thread of interest to the top of the window, so it’s not just pushed down as new updates occur, and also show a count of comments/likes as they occur on that stickied thread
• Threaded comments, allowing me to reply to a commenter directly.
• Noise control, say, show me only a certain amount of live updates per given time. Let me control this with a slider, AKA Socialmedian style.

All in all, it’s a great new feature. I can forsee Friendfeed rooms for TV shows, debates, and events finding this feature particularly useful. Give it a whirl over here.

I’ve learned that things take time. Gaining skills takes time, earning things takes time. Even learning about yourself is something done over a great deal of time. Sure, you can say, ‘Ahh, but Mo, this is self-evident’, but I disagree.

I have been brought up in the now classic, money-centric, Western culture. An instant-gratification society, where everything is expected to happen ‘now’, as we want it; where battles to earn love, character and material objects are removed in the name of convenience, and hence are diminished in value. However, life has not been so rigid, the natural world doesn’t support it.

I used to think in straight lines, from A to B, courtesy of my upbringing. But like driving a car, the path is never from one goal to another is littered with detours, hazards, traffic. Leap-frogging these challenges, these personal battles, enforces a detrimental frame of mind - I’d call it ‘unwarranted expectation’. When my innate expectations weren’t met, I’d be depressed, confused, rejected and angry.

Time after time, this led to missed opportunities, bad moods and even self loathing, but looking back I’ve learned my lesson. Dropping ridiculous expectations, learning the value of earning and enjoying the journey is far more fulfilling.

Sweetcron, an open source lifestreaming blog software package developed by Yong Fook, has been released.

Sweetcron is a simple package you can use to aggregate your socical networking and blog services together, such as Twitter and Plurk. Prominent features include a neat default theme, a basic blog function, easily customized php/css themes, tagging, and a simple to use administration interface.

Sweetcron is simple enough to leave alone. It will happily aggregate your feeds together in a neat visual fashion and is tidy enough to be used as a simple blog.

View my 30 minutes of Sweetcron customization here at RD
Download Sweetcron (Currently version 1.02 beta)
Installation instructions
Further Support

Go on, conform. You know you want to. Faceyourmanga.com

Ever wanted more than just dumping the content of the node you’re in, or it’s additional variables? In Drupal you can still do this using a basic PHP command, get_defined_vars() .

Open up any of your template files and paste the following code in (generally just page.tpl.php).

print '<pre>';
print_r(get_defined_vars());
print '</pre>';

The result is a dump of all variables available to you in your theming work!

The number of Twitter services and applications continues to increase as more individual developers, software houses and businesses come online. Here’s a few interesting ones:

Services

1. Twitterfeed - Twitterfeed brings RSS to Twitter. Used to notify twitter of updates to your sites feed.
2. Summize - Search twitter conversations of points of interest
3. Twittergram - Twittergram enables sending a small mp3 via twitter. Also includes an API.
4. TwitsLikeMe - TwitsLikeMe claims to be able to find people based on similarities in tweet history
5. TwitterMail - Enables posting to Twitter via a special email address. Has neat functions like scheduling.
6. TwitterStats - Keep an eye on your Twitter use here
7. Twittervision - Connecting tweets to a physical location with Google maps
8. Twist - Examine trends on Twitter
9. TwitterCal - Send events to Google Calendar via twitter.
10. Remember the Milk - A great Twitter enabled reminder service! Build entire to-do lists, update them from Twitter, and recieve them anywhere!

Applications

1. Twhirl - A popular Twitter client for your computer. Uses Adobe Air.
2. Twitterfox - A Firefox addon that notifies of tweets, replies and messages. Formerly TwitterNotifier.
3. Power Twitter - Another addon plugin that enhances Twitter with video, flickr embedding, Tinyurl unwinding and more.
4. Twitterbar - A Firefox addon that enables tweets right from the address bar of Firefox.
5. Twitterlicious - A Windows Twitter client. x86 and x64 versions available.
6. Twadget - A Windows Vista Twitter client that enables posting from the Vista Sidebar
7. Twitterific - A Mac OSX Twitter client, also available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
8. TwitterPod - A Mac OSX Twitter client with the ability to store messages.
9. gTwitter - A simple GTK+ based Linux Twitter client
10. Pwytter - A multi-OS Twitter client. Supports Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows with support for 14 languages.

In recent months, Twitter has got something of a beating from bloggers worldwide about frequent downtime, feature reductions and timeouts.

Originally, I was dismayed and somewhat (perhaps irrationally) angry at the ongoing Twitter problems, but strangely, and unlike many bad services in the past, I didn’t drop Twitter. It was only after a long think about why I’m still on Twitter.

Then it hit me. I’m on Twitter still because of it’s ease of use, the 3rd party tools around it, and the people I follow that encapsulate my interest. Identi.ca is conceptually just as good, being an open platform, but there’s something not quite as interesting as Twitter about it, and I guess it boils down to the myriad following Twitter has.

Twitter has gained a massive following, from bread and butter users, to businesses, government, and developers. Followers using the service remain closer to the individuals/activist groups/news outlets/brands/companies/bands or whatever else they enjoy. Useful services have been built on it’s API, which although suffering from Twitter’s problems, is robust enough to accommodate development, giving back far more than Twitter itself and adding value to the community.

Think of all the services that revolve around or add to Twitter. There’s Summize (recently acquired by Twitter), Tweetstats, Twitterfeed, amongst many, many others. Through clever use of these tools, businesses can use Twitter to analyze trends online, position themselves appropriately, and hear what people are saying about them.

These points are why people remain on Twitter, not just for the personal frippery, but for the relationships between individuals and business that can and are built on the system. It’s not perfect, but it works. For now.

There has been a lot of criticism dumped on new (formerly ’stealth’) search engine ‘Cuil‘ (pronounced ‘Cool’, meaning ‘Knowledge’ in Irish) with prolific bloggers, analysts and experts the world over giving it an overwhelmingly negative rap.

The Good

Cuil presents search results in a nice, neatly formatted way (perhaps falling short of truly intuitive), with a categorical breakdown of search results, called ‘Drilldowns’. It’s fast, for an index of a claimed 120 billion pages, and as yet is (as far as I can tell) free from ads and sponsored search results. The interface encompasses useful, modern navigation elements such as tabs, and neat AJAX auto-suggest that supplies permutations of common search terms. The in-line thumbnails are potentially a great feature, as they could enable users to find what they’re looking for quicker being a visual aid rather than just text.

The Not So Good

However, where Cuil shines well on the arguably superficial interface standpoint, it falls pretty heavily on what should be (and what they state is) their most important feature. General relevancy.

It may be that I’m simply too used to Google style results being close to what I’m searching for, not always exactly correct, but pretty close. However with Cuil, I’m often presented with a list of results that don’t seem to come close to what I’m searching for, and even the thumbnails that could help me, are quite wrong.

For example, if I enter the term ‘Mount Gambier‘, a specific and unique place, the search results are quite well done, especially the “drilldowns” which ooze good relevancy. I’m given a list of South Australian regions, nearby South Australian towns, cities and wine related links for which the regions around Mount Gambier are known for.

However, if I make my search term more general, lets say ‘monkey‘ the results are very different to what I’d expect. I’m hit with pop-culture references, movies, and mostly strange “drilldowns”. I would be expecting a Google-esque search, which provides me with a link to Wikipedia, telling me what a monkey is. Much better in this case.

My Issue With The Negativity

My problem with it all is the ultimate, and unavoidable comparison between Cuil and Google.  Google began in an age where there wasn’t the sort of instant web we have today. Word didn’t get around as quickly for Google’s problems till far, far later in the game. With Cuil, where scorn could be heaped on and seen by interested parties immediately - instantly and perhaps unfortunately damaging Cuil’s reputation.

I think Cuil’s problems are intrinsically it’s own, but also feel it doesn’t deserve to be written off. It’s specific results with unique-ish terms such as people and places aren’t bad, I’ve definitely got worse from Google and even Yahoo.

Summary

Done right:

• Interface is simple, modern and effective
• Speed is very good
• Large index, theoretically means more results.
• Decent new take on the age old web search
• No ads

Done wrong:

• Search relevance needs work, both in results in general and images returned
• Failure to take into account the effects of social media community rejection across the board
• Failure to undergo extensive (and necessary) staged development (alpha, beta, and consultation with users and tech experts on expected search relevancy)
• Branding is soft, slightly clichéd, Web 2.0 logo that is prone to misspelling
• Perhaps should have purchased Cool.com