Archive for March, 2009

Tech Tips: Display TwitPic Images in Flex & AIR

Problem:
The TwitPic API does not currently support outgoing requests and the image source from amazon aws contains an AWS AccessKeyId, expiration time stamp, and signature. This would normally require a regular expression to rip the source JPG path out of the HTML. Ripping the source out of the HTML is a bit of a pain and is not a long term solution. It is possible to use the following shortened url to gain access to the full image path using the TwitPic image id.
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One more thing to crow about, Luke Bucklin named to Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s 40 under 40

What a week! First Skimmer, then iMapWeather, and now this! Our president, Luke Bucklin has been named to Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s 40 under 40. This list spotlights some of the region’s most talented and successful young leaders, and we couldn’t be prouder of Luke for making the list.

iMapWeather addictive, timely social network about weather

Yesterday the Balcom Agency launched iMapWeather,. The Nerdery had the fine, fine pleasure of helping them build this social network that lets people connect about all things weather related.

It seems like an odd bit of magical synchronicity that iMapWeather launches while North Dakota faces the worst floods they’ve seen since 1997, in fact the Red River is expected to crest this weekend more than a foot above 1997′s record-setting level. The Nerdery is keeping a close eye on the situation in ND. In fact, Tom O’Neill has rustled up a gang of nerds to head up to Fargo this weekend and help with the sandbagging efforts.

Now, thanks to iMapWeather, I can’t seem to stop watching a live shot of the river in Grand Forks that a user posted.

And this is just what the creators of iMapWeather were going for.

“We looked around and said, ‘All right there’s nothing out there that offers people a real way to connect through the weather,’” Chip Hanna, Interactive Account Director at Balcom Agency, said. “There’s nowhere else that you can upload photos, share video and other information all related to the weather.”

iMapWeather is a joint venture between Balcolm Agency and Weather Decision Technologies, The Nerdery helped them bring their vision to life.

Next week we’ll tell you about how that vision came about and what we did to help it along.

Profiles in Nerdery: Mike Woods, seriously.

• Astrological Sign: Cancer: shy, assertive, and loyal.
• Time at the Nerdery: ~1 year.
• Area of expertise: Getting it done.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I shrug.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: All of them.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have this annoying blogger who bugs me to do things that I really don’t want to do.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1.) Twitter(@woods); 2.) Bug or Feature; 3.) Conversations you should never have over IM; 4.) Things that won’t work in IE6; 5.) @wiley_the_dog twitter status; 6.) Seriously you want to work on my team. Seriously.; and 7.) Apple.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Lisa Simpson.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: Of course I do.

A calm before the next storm, a few Skimmer fun facts

Picture by @shreshta

It’s been an entire day since Fallon unleashed Skimmer on the world, and some of the nerds are still recovering. As you can see it was a long, long process. I asked Mike Woods, who led our team of nerds on this project for a few numbers regarding Skimmer.

While I’m not sure if I’m at liberty to release official download numbers, I will tell you that there were thousands and thousands of people who registered yesterday and that on average each Skimmer user registered more than two service accounts (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), and every user avergaed at least one friend using Skimmer (cute!).

What I can tell you is this:
Beers had in celebration of launch = 24 + two bottles of champagne
Hours spent in meetings = ~400
Number of curse words uttered during testing = Woods stopped counting at 1,000
Hours of sleep lost to project = 800

Woods also said Brenda Fogg had the honor of submitting Trac bug ticket #500 the night of launch.

As you can see by the picture above The Nerdery never sleeps. Tomorrow we’ll tell you all about an another amazing project we completed with one of our agency partners. Trust me on this one, it’s pretty cool.

Look what we helped Fallon build

Today, Fallon launched Skimmer, a life streaming thing that lets the social-networking butterfly in you keep track of all your friends.

Skimmer collates updates from your connections on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, and YouTube. While that’s pretty cool and all, the best part of it is it opens things like TwitPics right in the app, you can also watch your pals’ YouTube videos, and see their Flickr photos right in the desktop client.

This is a project the nerds have been working on for months and months. Mashing up all those technologies in an Adobe AIR app is not an easy task. Of course, they made it work. In the coming days we’ll be taking a peek into the Skimmer project and you’ll learn all about how this awesome new tool came into existence. Right now, you can visit Chris Black’s blog to see some of the challenges the team faced working on Skimmer.

In the meantime, you should give it a try, it’s free and you can download it on Fallon’s site.

Chuck Jones film fest tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies

This a short film called “The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics” and it was the thing I remember most about any math class I ever took. I think I first saw it as a preview for Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land, a movie our math teacher showed instead of teaching on that day before Christmas vacation.

This movie is based on a book by Norton Juster (who also wrote The Phantom Tollbooth. The film was animated by the legendary artist Chuck Jones, who helped create Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and a bunch of other Looney Tunes characters.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, March 24) night Turner Classic Movies is having a mini-film fest featuring some Jones’ most memorable characters and short films. The festival kicks off with a 30-minute documentary about Jones and his career. It is sure to rule.

‘Really smart about stuff we’re not smart about’

Matt Hester has posted a kickass interview he did down at SXSW with Christian Erickson from Zeus Jones, and our own Tom O’Neill and Greg Wurm. This video is the bomb, and here’s why, at about 3 minutes or so Christian and Tom have a great conversation about how Zeus Jones and Sierra Bravo work together.

And I love Christian’s quote, “They’re really smart about stuff we’re not smart about or not paying attention to, the deep technical details and new technologies and things like that.”

If you listen closely you can hear songs by the Beastie Boys and Foo Fighters in the background, and if you watch until the end you can laugh when Tom has a bit of a problem spelling.


Visit Matt’s site to catch a video of Social Wendy interviewing the Phizzpop champs.

Profiles in Nerdery: Dan Shugarts, doesn’t work in an ivory tower (or a cage, really)

• Astrological Sign: That is a ridiculous question.
• Time at the Nerdery: Almost eight months.
• Area of expertise: NSFW.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I’m training to become a cage fighter.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: What’s the client’s budget.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: Our building really isn’t an ivory tower.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1) Americans in the NHL; 2) Name that Shakespeare; 3) Boy Bands of the late 90s; 4) The GOP: Coincidence. . .or Voldemort?; 5) Qualities of a Hipster; 6) My Stylish Wardrobe; 7) The Charlestown Chiefs.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: The Comic Book Guy.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: Of course I do.

Delivering Happiness, Zappos keynote at SXSW

Yesterday, Tom O’Neill sent out a tweet encouraging all the the nerds to take a gander at Tony Hsieh’s slides from his SXSW keynote. There’s also a very cute graphical representation of his speech you can look at.

I thought I’d post it here for all our readers. It’s probably one of those things we can all learn from. It’s about more than Zappo’s magical customer service (and it is magical, I know this from experience), it’s about branding, corporate culture, and vision. Take a look, I guarantee you’ll learn something.