This morning marked the official deprecation of Twitter's basic authentication system. I had been working toward the changeover, and at about 8 am I switched iTweet.net over to OAuth-based authentication.

Things went pretty smoothly, I hope. Most people seem to have been able to refresh, authenticate with Twitter, and start tweeting again right away. Even aside from the improved security, the nicest immediate benefit is the API rate limit of 350 calls per hour instead of the 150/hour available through basic authentication. This will allow me to do some fun stuff that wasn't possible before.

The people who were most affected by this change were those who use iTweet because twitter.com is blocked due to a company firewall/filter or censorship. These folks are not able to sign in via OAuth, just due to the nature of what OAuth is. I'm bummed that this is the case, but don't immediately see a way around it - however I am open to ideas from any direction.

For the time being I've put a basic-authentication version of iTweet up at:

http://itweet.net/basic/ - and you can use it at that address for the next two weeks.

However, please note that Twitter is going to be cutting down the number of available API requests by 10% every business day until August 31, when basic authentication will be switched off entirely. You can read about this in the twitter-development Google group. If you're one of the folks who use iTweet to get around a filter, this is a bummer.

So by the end of the month people needing a proxy for twitter.com will be out of luck. I'm open to suggestions as to how this inconvenience could be avoided, as this change will happen for all apps, not just iTweet.net - feel free to post ideas in the comments.

I've been setting up a new dedicated server at Go Daddy running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).  I was following The Perfect Server guide at HowToForge, and it was very helpful, especially in the area of setting up email using Postfix, which is new to me.

I did run into an unexpected problem with outgoing email - it wasn't going out, or anywhere for that matter!  Taking a look in /var/log/mail.log showed an error saying "No route to host".  Trying to telnet to any other domain would give me the same error.  A little Googling dug up the fact that Godaddy blocks outgoing traffic on port 25, which is used for SMTP.  However they do provide a relay server that you can use for your outgoing mail.

The relay server is k2smtpout.secureserver.net.  To use it, edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and set the relayhost line to look like this:

relayhost = [k2smtpout.secureserver.net]

Then restart Postfix with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

And that should do it!  I had a lot of trouble diagnosing the problem and then finding the solution, so I thought I would post it here to help anyone else experiencing this problem.

I'm going to be giving a presentation at the WebMapSocial meetup on Tuesday, Nov. 17. Want to come?  Find out all the info right here.  It's at the Google campus in Mountain View - I'm excited for an excuse to go visit!

I think I'll be talking about iTweet.net and the upcoming Local Trends API that Twitter is going to be releasing soon.  I also may be talking about the SaaS product I've been building, NetConference.tv.  It's only kinda-sorta map-related, but it IS shiny and new, so I'm excited to show it off.

Thanks to my friend Catherine Burton, host of this group, for the invite. She is an avid mapster and innovator - check out her unique company Endpoint Environmental.

For one long year, my fiancée and I lived in different states (before we were engaged and parents and stuff). I don't recommend the long-distance relationship to anybody who likes the person they are with, but sometimes it's unavoidable. We found that it took a LOT of telephone time, and we also explored some creative solutions to spend time together as well. One of our favorites was the long-distance movie date - while talking on the phone we would rent the same movie and watch it together while we talked on the phone. The trick to it was starting the movie at the exact same time, so we could share the laughs and surprises without annoying each other. You can picture how this went:

"One... two... three... press play!"
"Did you start it?"
"Yeah. How close did we get?"
"Umm... OK the credits are starting..."

And so on. If we had done it correctly, we could comfortably watch the movie together while talking on the phone. If we had done it incorrectly, we started over. It was kind of fun, if you looked past the hassle of trying to sync the movie.

Enter nxtgen.tv: Shared Video on Demand. This video sharing site allows you to share video with people, in realtime, online. The syncing of the video is handled automagically, and you can actually discuss the action live, via webcams and/or group text chat.

Sign up and send your personalized channel URL to your friends along with a time to meet there. Then you control the action: when you start a video, or pause it, your friends see the same thing in real time!

The patented core technology of the app was invented by a couple sharp individuals who brought it to The Illusion Factory along with a Facebook app and their great idea. Since then we have hammered it into a working demo app and started to show it off a little bit. Enough interest has been raised that I've recently been given the OK to "go nuts" with the project, wheeeee!

A "movie date" between two people is just one application of this technology; I am also working on some different configurations, for giving presentations, providing unique customer service, and collaborating on video editing. I am also building out the social aspects of the site. Soon I hope to launch a new version with full-fledged social and sharing features! So stay tuned for lots more from nxtgen.tv ... but until then I would invite anyone who is interested to sign up for our demo site and give it a try! We are always interested in user feedback, especially from you, web-savvy individual that you are.

This technology is available for license in any custom format, be it entertainment, service, media, or enterprise. We think nxtgen.tv is a lot of fun and there are many possibilities for the technology... if you can imagine shared video having any synergy with your product or service, drop me a line!

I have been building my first site using the Python-based development framework Django and it is really fantastic! I am picking up some of it very fast (the concept of templates and template tags, for example) because of my experience with the PHP-based CMS ExpressionEngine, and some of it is totally foreign to me... but as I muddle through it, I can tell that I've begun to learn some very powerful tools, especially once I got Django working with the jQuery javascript library.

When working with images such as profile avatars, you need to have the Python Imaging Library installed, which also means installing the libjpeg library to compile PIL. I found a couple articles here and here but it seemed that only part of each worked for me. Last night I installed everything again on my PowerBook running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4, so I recorded the combination that worked for me:

1. If you haven't already, you must install the Apple Development Tools (XCode).
2. Download and install the Unix software installer Fink. The binary installers for the Mac worked great, both on my Intel and PowerPC machines.
3. Open a Terminal window and type:

fink install libjpeg
curl -O http://effbot.org/media/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz
tar -xzf Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz
cd Imaging-1.1.6
sudo python setup.py install

And that's it!