Last month, I started a new web site, www.FluentEveryYear.com, and I am excited to report that I have already started to gain subscribed readers and Facebook fans!

There will be plenty of tips and tricks for learning any language, and even more useful information if you’re interested in learning Italian — or whatever the language of the year is — so go check it out!

I wanted to burn a DVD containing AVIs of Russian video, and I had given the Burn Folder a Russian name. Every time I tried to burn, I was greeted with error 0×80020022, and the media was immediately ejected.

Remembering the days of CD-R media and the compatibility hassles I once experienced, my first thought was to go buy a different brand of DVD media. But I experienced the error with the new media as well.

After stumbling onto a Mac support forum in which users blindly suggested that renaming a file had fixed the problem, I realized that I was probably trying to use forbidden characters in the volume name. Spelling my Russian words out in a Latin alphabet did the trick, and I am now burning the files.

My career had basically stalled at the company I was working for, but out of comfort I didn’t want to leave. Amazingly, I spend the majority of last year getting paid to sit on my hands. My company actively ensured that I (like most of my coworkers) did no real work since fall of 2008. Would I like to have been more productive career-wise? Yes. But overall, I think I used that dead time effectively.

For starters, I did manage to do some work-related work, and with a wealth of free time to do it in, I made the choice to learn more advanced languages, tools, and architectures. Using those more advanced development strategies was almost certainly overkill for the tasks I performed, but the knowledge I gained was valuable for my career. And frankly, when a company isn’t interested in using my talents effectively, I’m going to use their resources to improve my marketability toward finding a better company to work for.

Next, I managed to use a lot of my free time, both at work and at home, to study Russian. I began 2009 knowing perhaps 10 useful phrases in the Russian language. A year later, I am beyond conversational and close to fluent. I understand 70-80% of what I hear, and have a vocabulary of approximately 3500 words. I can read, write, speak, listen, search the web, order dinner, and withdraw money from my bank in Russian.

But I didn’t stop there… I’ve also begun learning Italian, Ukrainian, and Polish. Admittedly, Italian is easiest for me, being a fluent Spanish-speaker… but I can successfully read and understand Ukrainian and Polish, and I have even followed a few simple recipes written in Polish on food packages.

On finances, I dropped more than $10,000 in debt last year and paid off all but one of my credit cards. I might have done even better — maybe even completely paid it all off — but supporting two additional people, paying for repairs from a house fire, covering high medicine expenses for a Medicare donut-hole, and a handful of other large purchases prevented me from complete success. I will complete this, however within the first couple of months this year.

That financial progress was boosted toward the end of the year as I changed jobs not once, but twice in November — in spite of all the horror stories about our economy. I’ve upgraded my career to one that is thoroughly enjoyable and far more fulfilling, and I manage to bring home more money too. All of this leaves me with good prospects for what’s to come in 2010.

And with regard to my photographic passions and goals, I was contacted last year by an editor compiling a book of photography, and I will have my work published. While it won’t actually be published until this year, I count this as recognition given last year for the amazing progress my artwork saw in 2009.

And 2009 was also a year filled with new experiences. I had many firsts, including seeing a symphony, going to the ballet, attending a master piano recital, riding a train across country, seeing showgirls dance in Las Vegas, and learning to make crepes.

So what’s on tap for 2010? There’s no knowing for sure, but here are my thoughts at present:

I had intended to do international travel last year and I failed that. Partially due to poor planning, but mostly due to a new economic situation for the world, and for myself. This year, those excuses won’t work. My finances are completely under control, and my plans are more specific: For my two (minimum) international trips, I want to drive to Canada to see Niagara Falls, and I want to fly to Russia and ride the Trans-Siberian express cross-country.

While continuing to study and improve in Russian, I intend to achieve at least conversational level in Polish and fluency in Italian. This is an aggressive goal, but one which I feel I can achieve. I will measure my success in Polish by shopping in the many Polish stores here in Chicago while not using English. And I will measure my success in Italian by finding Italians with whom to converse… perhaps by Skype, or perhaps by finding a local group… or perhaps by traveling to Italy.

I also intend to experience some more “firsts”, including (but not limited to): riding in a hot air balloon, skydiving, and snowboarding. This is also a good year for me to cross of more states which I haven’t visited yet. I wonder if I could use Alaska as a jump-off point to Russia…

The best ones, though, are those that propose a list of ten must do strategies for using an unproven technology in an undocumented business sector in relation to a prediction of things that haven’t even happened yet.

For example:

• Top 10 priorities for online marketing in 2010
• Eight things you must do in order to succeed on Twitter
• 12 ways to be the better than everyone else, even the millions of other people who will also read this article
• 9 surefire ways to know that I’m a full-of-shit author and not an SEO expert
• The 8 keys to showing others that I’ve never actually done the thing I’m writing about

There’s an old saying that goes “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” Obviously, that phrase was coined before the internet came along and made experts out of everyone.

Personally, I like Apple’s app approval process. And I like the fact that it’s rigid and painful. In fact, I don’t think it’s rigid enough. I’d like to see them make it even harder to put apps like “iFart” online.

But, like it or not, iFart isn’t going to cause a system crash when you receive a phone call while using it. And that’s what’s important. The iPhone isn’t just a handheld computing platform…. it’s also a phone. And that means it has to work. It can’t be crashing all the time. And Apple’s process helps make that a reality.

A software team could implement a Twitter account for bug tracking, and include the API into their projects within various try-catch blocks around potential points of failure. Then, all the members of that team would just follow that twitter account. For more critical applications, they could turn on device updates. It seems like a more available version of the elderly developer’s standby of programmatically emailing bug reports.

For sensitive applications, the tweets could be “protected”… but for less critical uses, the visibility of the public timeline would seem to be an added incentive for developers to fix bugs quickly.

It’s an interesting thought.

Description

TweetPost is a multiuser plugin which allows wordpress publishers to automatically tweet their new posts to their Twitter account. Tweets consist of a message (“New post from @user”) including a reference to the author’s Twitter name, the title of the post, and a bit.ly shortened link to the post.

Currently, the Twitter Poster consists of the following features.

• Specify a Twitter username and password to associate with the site
• Specify a Bit.ly login and API key to associate with the site
• Adds a “Twitter” property to user details, so users can manage their own Twitter name
• Automatically submits the permalink to bit.ly and adds that to the tweet
• Adds a reference to the author’s Twitter account in the tweet
• Fits the tweet into Twitter’s 140-character limit.

License

This Twitter Poster plugin and Wordpress Plugin Framework are being developed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

[GNU General Public License, version 2](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/elderly-licenses/gpl-2.0.html “GNU General Public License, version 2″)

Download

The current version can be downloaded here: tweetpost

Installation

1. Unzip the archive file.
2. Verify the name of the unzipped folder to be “tweetpost”
3. Upload the “tweetpost” folder to the root of your Wordpress “plugins” folder.
4. Activate the “tweetpost” plugin in your website’s plugin administration page.
5. Navigate to the “Settings” ~ “TweetPost” administration page, to add account info.

Frequently Asked Questions

None.

Change Log

• 0.1
  • Initial version

I thought about it for a few minutes, going over the possibilities of regular expressions in my head, but finally settled on giving him a simple extension to Javascript’s String object.

String.prototype.format = function () {
	var str = this.toString();
	if (arguments.length == 0) return str;
	for (var i=0; i<arguments.length; i++) {
		str = str.replace('{'+i+'}', arguments[i]);
	}
	return str;
}

This simple function gives your Javascript strings the exact same formatting ability they would have in C#.

Test it out for yourself:

var s = 'Hello, {0}, I am {1}, and I am {2} to meet you.';
alert (s.format('foo','bar','baz'));

Scrolling through posts by keyboard may not be useful to everyone, but it makes a lot of sense for anyone with a photoblog. Users can quickly flip through your content without enlessly flicking a scroll wheel or clicking and dragging until they grab their wrists in pain.

Features:

• Press the “J” key to see the next post, and the “K” key takes you to the previous post.

Planned features:

• Add “next” and “previous” keys for page-by-page navigation.
• Add an options page which allows the navigation keys to be customized.
• Automatically load the “next” or “previous” page when you hit the end.
• Detect the scrollable element in a site’s design. (Current version only scrolls the body.)

Download
The current version can be downloaded at WordPress.org.

Changelog

• 0.5
  • Added scroll event listener to make the navigation sensitive to your current scroll position
• 0.4
  • Continues to next/previous page when you navigate past the last (or first) post
• 0.3
  • Javascript has moved to a separate file and is now added through via wp_enqueue_script
  • jQuery has been implemented for all DOM functions
  • ScrollTop is now at the top of the screen, as expected
  • Tested on Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 3
• 0.2
  • Key navigation is no longer added on single posts
  • Keypress events are ignored inside of TEXTAREA and INPUT elements
• 0.1
  • Initial version

I’ve made no secret in the past about my dislike, even distrust, of eBook readers. Especially the Kindle, which I vow to never own after their 1984 debacle.

As I’ve discussed the subject with friends and colleagues, my opinion has refined quite a bit, and my basic points come down to:

1. The price of a book reflected heavy publishing costs, including equipment, materials, labor, and distribution… none of which apply to eBooks, making them rather expensive in comparison.
2. Real books can be shared with friends, given away, or re-sold, but while the format of data makes doing this even easier, the licensing applied to eBooks prohibits doing so.
3. Real books don’t stop working when a battery dies.
4. Dropping a book in a puddle, losing it while on the bus, are misfortunes that only cost a few dollars to correct, a far smaller amount than the cost of even the cheapest ebook reader.
5. Dropping a book on the floor, or accidentally sitting on it does nothing to reduce your ability to read it later… and in fact, people often use books to hold things up, to sit on, to stand on, etc.
6. None of the books I would most desire to replace are available as ebooks. I enjoy turning the pages of a novel, but I’d love to be able to carry around dozens or hundreds of reference books without breaking my back.
7. By that same measure, most students would also love to stop breaking their backs with textbooks, but no ebook reader yet has solved the problems of universal page numbers or of jotting notes in the margins.
8. And finally, they take away all those expected advantages of real books without giving any significant new adantages in return.

While the Nook offers many advantages over the Kindle, including built-in WiFi, direct loading and reading of PDFs, replacable batteries, and synchronized annotations, it only overcomes one of my stated hurdles, and only to a limited extent. Nook allows you “loan to a friend”, but it does not allow you to “give” to a friend. Nor does it allow you to re-sell to anyone.

As far as I can tell, all Barnes and Noble did was add a touch-sensitive LCD screen to the bottom of a Kindle, and add a half-baked book loaning mechanism. That may be enough to lure in people who want a Kindle but were scared off by the 1984 debacle… but I don’t believe it’s going to be enough to coax any book converts.

So what would it take to convert me — and lots of others like me — to ebooks? Pressure publishers to make searchable ebook versions of reference materials.

Working 9-to-5 in information technology, I have acquired a large library of reference books on programming languages, APIs, systems, data formats, and so on. If I could carry all of those (dozens of books) to work with me on a small device, I’d jump on the opportunity, but none of those materials are available in ebook format.

And when I’m not at work, my two most time-consuming activities are photography and language study. Admittedly, it will be a long time before photographic quality is available on ebook readers, but current readers are already capable of displaying language lessons… and most even support MP3 playback for the accompanying audio materials. I have an entire bookshelf at home dedicated to beginner, intermediate, and advanced books and CDs for Spanish, Russian, Italian, German, French, Ukrainian, and Portuguese, which I would happily trade for even a mostly disfunctional e-reader if I could, but unfortunately, those materials are simply not available in any other format at present.

For companies with the leverage of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, it should be a no-brainer to lean on those publishers. Today, all books are written in an electronic format to begin with. Why should it be so hard to simply run that original through some converter and do a little bit of editing, and produce the single most useful argument for a higher-profit, lower-overhead version of their product?