hello, typepad

Years

Run Some Old Web Browsers Day is today (was celebrates the tenth anniversary of Mosaic Communications/Netscape - obviously not! I'm old.). JWZ celebrates by sharing a few bits of incredible trivia from the early releases. Among them:

home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist because the early browsers did client-side load-balancing: the browser itself had a special case where if it was loading "home.mcom.com" it would actually pick a random number from 1 to 32 and instead load "homeN.mcom.com"! Those were physically different servers in the Netscape data center.

JWZ also offers his archive of Netscape versions and shares the story of his attempt to reacquire the mcom.com domain from AOL. Screenshots of the old Mosaic & Netscape versions feel much older than 10 years to me.

My First Kottke

kottke.org, circa late 1999
Originally uploaded by jkottke.

I'd like a "single service site" that just let you log in and pick which kottke.org version was your first or favorite.

Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting....

Some folks think Postmodernism means little more than the Empowerment of the Vulgar. Some folks think the same about Perl.

But I take Postmodernism to mean that a Text, whether spoken or written, is an act of communication requiring intelligence on both ends, and sometimes in the middle too. I don't want to talk to a stupid computer language. I want my computer language to understand the strings I type.

Lifehacker:

When we say 'stalk,' we're exaggerating, not recommending.

I love that Gina still has a sense of humor on Lifehacker. A lesser editrix would have broken down and become serious and plodding, sticking us with keyboard shortcut upon keyboard shortcut.

Make me rich, you follow-fashion monkeys.
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.

Spotty Dock

Gio from Technological Supernova speaks truth to the Dock whingers:

But the whole thing about the Dock looking stupid while on the left or right side is... well... stupid. If you think that gravity is an argument against the Leopard's Dock appearance, then why don't you argue that gravity is an argument against being able to position your windows wherever you want them -- why don't your windows always fall to the bottom of the screen? Furthermore, who says Tiger's Dock doesn't have any gravity? In that case, Tiger's Dock also looks stupid when positioned on the side of the screen.

The amount of blog inches (bytes?) that's been devoted to Leopard's dock is silly, and I'm a little sad to pile on. But I've been using that Dock, and I like it. It never made sense for 3d icons to be sitting in a 2d space, or for Finder's otherwise 2 dimensional metaphor to suddenly have texture. I use the dock as little as possible, which is how I believe it was meant to be used. But Leopard's dock (with stacks) is a big step forward.

Hoefler & Frere-Jones on InterCapping:

Suddenly, intercaps have a genuine purpose: invisible to machines, they aid human comprehension, which is ultimately the goal of all typography.

A few years ago, urban legends began to circulate about the accidentally funny URLs of Powergen Italia, Pen Island, and Therapist Finder (you do the math.) To this day, those hoping to connect with their favorite Hollywood starlets can do so at the alarming website whorepresents.com. All of these mixups could have been avoided — or amplified — by a little creative intercapping.

So along with mayonnaise, diesel engines, and high-waisted pants, we think it's time to bring back the intercap.

Happy iPod Day

If you're bored of the usual apple rumors, may I humbly suggest iPhone @ home, the "superset of all Apple rumors, ever."

Scripting News' Readers' Meetup

Click here to check out
The Scripting News' Readers Meetup!

The meetup is tomorrow (Wednesday) night at Otto. Please join us!

Will a laptop power connector kill you if you put the end in your mouth?

It was a very mild shock, like licking a 9-volt battery. Just a tingle. - jjg

From the metafilter podcast.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: The music industry nobs have finally figured out what we're doing:

The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them.

Keynote Bingo!

Today Steve is going to announce the "iPhone@home." It's an ultra-portable tablet running a thin-client version of Leopard (like the iPhone), syncing through an iPod dock connector (the only port on the device) to a 30GB "NAND drive" which shares documents over wifi using Apple's new Google-backed .Mac service and sports a multi-touch 10" screen as it's primary interface. This rumor is objectively perfect, the superset of all Apple rumors ever. And it's a Newton! We'll see this, and also the network-focused Finder that Apple blogger Anil Dash anticipated in August 2002:

The dock could easily be represented with a touch-sensitive panel that could be detached from the keyboard and clipped alongside a pretty LCD. In an OS that used to be, and is slowly returning to being, focused on direct manipulation, it doesn't get more intuitive than touching an icon to activate it. .... Even something as simple as minimizing, maximizing, or closing a window has no single-key equivalent. It's been almost twenty years since these things went mainstream, people!

iTunes is no longer allowing users to burn DRMed songs to mp3.
Daring Fireball says:

Apparently the problem only occurs when you try to rip to MP3 format, specifically – if you rip from CD back to plain (non-DRM) AAC, it still works just fine. This really sounds like a bug, not a deliberate limitation.

We know that they are leaving username and email information in the AAC headers, so it makes perfect sense to me that this would be done intentionally. There's no way Apple let's a bug like this out the door. I like that grey blog, but sometimes Gruber gives Apple the benefit of the doubt to the extreme. It seems like he's writing from the point of view of an Apple corporate advocate, not an Apple user advocate. (Disclaimer: I am an Apple shareholder, and my small business has spent ~30K this year on Apple computers).

I continue to be amazed — and more than a little disappointed — in the lack of imagination people have about web-based applications.

You have to read all of My kind of gutsy for context.

Hating your Customers

Jason's experience with SiteKey reminded me a little bit of my Windows Vista experience.

Sadly, there's no option reading "our product sucks and it took you seven attempts to install it, move right along." I know that's a reach. Alternatively, I'd like to see a single option, "This Vista will self destruct." People are not going to enjoy using this software.

Major Redux Redux

There's quite a kerfuffle brewing around the Apple's "inspiration" for the iPhone commercial.

We've covered this ground before, repeatedly. I'm looking forward to surveying blogistan when all is said and done to compare results and opinions.

Meanwhile - do kerfuffles brew? If not, what do they do?

Ruminations on the iPhone

Like many warm-blooded geeks, I've been thinking about the iPhone for the past week since Apple announced it. I'm kind of cool on it (more on the that later) but I'm happy people are thinking and talking about mobile, since I am obsessed with the mobile application space and I'm always happy to sit in the corner add my kibitz to the chatter.

Right now phone apps are written in Java and C libraries which differ on nearly every single make and model of phone shipped today, this makes development testing and deployment a nightmare. This why phones today do not offer a good user experience, and this is also why enterprising curious souls are attracted to the web before they are attracted to phones. I'm extremely skeptical that the iPhone runs any kind of Objective C, even Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection, as has been speculated. The overhead involved in this development makes phones feel sluggish, and it would be way too hard to support and debug over the family of processors that will run not just the iPhone family, but also the new iPods and long-rumored tablet Mac (maclet?). Javascript, CSS and XHTML all run the same on webkit, and porting webkit is easier than porting Objective-C.

There is a lot of negative buzz surrounding developers not being allowed to install applications on the iPhone, which I believe is a red herring. Developers won't be allowed to install applications, but they will be allowed to install widgets, which is just as good. Hit F12 - that's what your iPhone "dock" will look like. I've got stocks, a nice Flickr slideshow, a Vox widget, Magnolia bookmarks, package and flight tracking, and much more. It's far more useful (and beautiful) than the applications shipped with any phone today. Webkit runs greeat right now on my Nokia N73¹, and since it's the same webkit², I'm sure it will run great on the iPhone.

I'll probably hold off on the iPhone for a while, since unlike Matt Haughey, I love my phone. Actually I should say "phones," since I have two: a "home" mobile (the aforementioned N73) and a "work" mobile, a Treo 700p. I love them both. The Nokia N73 has a 3+ megapixel camera, and I basically use it as a Vox appliance. Since the Vox mobile application sits at such a low level on the phone, it certainly won't work on the iPhone, which will certainly feature similarly deep iLife and .Mac integration (as it should). The Treo is basically a voice, email and calendaring appliance, and it's nearly perfect for that. Plus, it runs on Sprint's 3G network, which is lightning fast in the city.

Having said that, syncing is still the great unsolved problem for phones. It's very telling that Apple is using iTunes to sync instead of iSync, and what that basically says to me is that iSync is actually never going to get better. The Missing Sync is actually really good at syncing photos (pictures go right from the treo to iPhoto). For PC users, Lifeblog is very good at syncing pictures and text messages into a nice timeline, but it doesn't work under OS X. If Apple really, really nails this, and unifies the address book, voicemail, text messaging, picture messaging and email into a single stream that is nicely indexable and sortable, that will be a product worth looking at. But I doubt Apple will get this right, because iSync is still terrible.

¹ Disclaimer: I have done some work for Nokia in the past, specifically on the Lifeblog project, and I had a wee bit of input on the way this stuff works. If not real input, at least an influence of an occasional thought by people who have real input.

² Why is that relevant, you ask? It's the same browser, see Infoworld, Engadget, and Surfin' Safari. (Who says Apple doesn't blog?)

Our Long Notional Nightmare

*:first-child+html div.class { burger: medium-rare; }

And with that, Matt gave birth to Apperceptive's first (and definitely not last) IE7 hack.

You're on notice, Henry!

You're on notice, Henry!
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.

Also, from Rhizome: While not necessarily created as an artwork, the piece speaks to the immediate nature of online collaboration and the fleeting kinds of community that can develop. (via Anil Dash)

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard Sneak Peek - Xcode 3.0

Is it just me, or is this copy on Apple's site about the new Xcode 3.0 a little... off?

Focus is about saying no

Today’s coding environments are simply more distracting than those of yesteryear. Mail notifications, chat status beeps, the barista bussing your table, dual cores and multithreading letting you do more without running out of resources — all this adds up. While you can do so much more today, sometimes, you just need help concentrating on the smallest loop. Enter the new Xcode 3.0 text editor that offers an elegant ribbon to highlight scope.

iChat-like message bubbles provide a snazzy way to read build errors, breakpoint definitions, and debug values — all displayed inline with the relevant source code, so you know just where you your colleagues went so very, very wrong. Staying focused in one window lets you stay focused. You’ll also enjoy snappier performance, as Xcode 3.0 loads source files four times more quickly than previous versions.

They even said "snappier."

From Makeup to Markup

NBC Names New Chief for iVillage Unit:

At privately held Conde Nast, Fine had served as publisher of Glamour and Bride's, two of the company's biggest magazines. She also worked in senior roles at Avon Products Inc. and headed up a fashion line called Pink at Victoria's Secret, a unit of Intimate Brands, which is owned by Limited Brands Inc.

This hire oozes synergy.

Apple's Intel Transition: A Brief Developer's Guide

A few of my friends have been making the OS X/Intel transition, and I have been kicking around some notes while I learn what works and what doesn't. Here's a brain dump of some of the advice I've been giving people.

• If you have more than one Mac, .Mac is the best $80 a year you can spend. The syncing alone is worth it over and over and over.
• Jumpcut, Steve Cook's clipboard management app, is really hitting it's stride.
• TextWrangler is still free, but I always end the day with both SubethaEdit and Textmate both open. For smaller text files, Yojimbo works the way you always wanted stickies to work. I love the .Mac syncing - my notes and PDFs are always where I want them to be. It's also very smart about encrypting passwords, serial numbers and notes you want to keep private.
• Fence is still a work in progress, but it's a very slick Cocoa/Atom uploader that works best with Typepad and Vox.
• This is a little exorbitant, but I also check a lot of configuration files into an svn repository, which TextDrive makes very easy.
• If you do any perl at all, it's worth it to blow away /System/Library/Perl and just reinstall all your XML modules. I install Plagger and Catalyst and all the good ones get picked up along the way.
• Lightroom Beta 3 is Universal (from Adobe).
• Macsaber (of course).
• I also have my Activity Log on all the time, so that when a PowerPC app pops up I can upgrade or replace it immediately. I notice a performance hit when Rosetta comes on.

Google Maps v. Thinkpad

Miyagawa has released a hack to allow the Thinkpad's accelerometer to control Google Maps. You can check the source out of his svn repository.

Miyagawa writes:

My recommendation is to choose Satellite mode, with the 3rd Zoom level. It makes me feel like flying in the sky, just as birds. Because of Google Maps JS library prefetching images, sometimes you have a delay (latency) moving, but other than that, it is quite fantastic.

randomwalks/dj

The front page of my my reblog is currently "fantastic". Today you'll find that the army is lifeblogging, how to judge asparagus, a rocketboom interview with Negativland, the craziest (best) use of bluetooth I've ever seen, and Star Wars bookends.

Here are the Star Wars Bookends, because it is really important that you see them:

I also finally dropped that garish layout. It's better now.

Uncle Mule says...

Respect The Process. That is all we are saying.

Apple G6

The Apple fan community (mob?) is whipped into a tizzy over this bootleg "G6" being sold with a pirated version of OS X for Intel. I don't get the animosity. This thing looks pretty cool to me. This is probably exactly what a low-end Mac would look like if Steve Jobs hadn't put the kibosh (kibbosh?) on clones when he came back to Apple.

I'm still waiting for the "Google OS" to to emerge in a similar manner, which could simply be a nice Ubuntu box with the Google bookmarks and APIs baked into Gnome.

Wordpress Wank

No, really, Wordpress Wank is a Wordpress tough love fan blog. Today he insults Six Apart's Style Contest and Wordpress.com's lack of search for security updates. But then Arvind (one-third of the team behind the Style Contest) and Matt (who puts the MATT in autoMATTic, the company behind Wordpress) show up to talk shop. Good times.

Our Wankette also takes some time to compare and contrast Wordpress and Movable Type's template methods:

The $ is moderately scary, but we need it because it distinguishes the tag from the surrounding HTML. The MT is only there because Blogger did it first, that could be scrapped if designing from scratch. The CamelCase sucks, but at least there’s no unnecessary underscores. The MT user has to get used to the $, and that really won’t take long. The Wordpress user has a whole bunch of unrelated characters to come to terms with. Every time you want to code a theme you need to cut and paste massive chunks of code because if you try typing out that shit stuff is going to go missing and break. There is basic stuff, like blog descriptions, which don’t even have tags of their own but live in parameters; what’s up with that? Why can’t I just bang in <? blogdescription ?> and be done?

It's still mind boggling to me that wordpress folk tolerate needing to know PHP to create templates. It would be analogous to typepad or Movable Type requiring knowledge of HTML::Template or Template::Toolkit.

Typepad Uploader

Nick Gerakines says

Today at work I created an open source cocoa application that lets you upload images directly from your desktop to TypePad. It is rightly named 'TypePad-Uploader' and now has its own project blog. It also has more information on how to download and use it.

Today at work I downloaded Typepad-Uploader and used it to archive this image of Larry David in agony behind the Phoenix Suns' bench as the epic game 6 was winding down.

BLOOD ON YOUR ROOMBA

Turns out the US Navy is the iRobots' largest customer. I'm not surprised or particularly worried, but it's a funny juxtaposition with some other news today: US government "intelligence" is investigating Lenovo for fear that "Lenovo [could] equip its PCs so that the U.S. can be spied on." Too bad the TALON doesn't dust surfaces, because then the military industrial complex would pwn my home even more than it already does.

You can read more about iRobot godfather Isaac Asimov over on the occasionally updated snarkout.org.

Which robot do you fear more? Thinkpad or Roomba?

Ask Mr. Computer

Hello, Typepad: What is the best way to create a secure password?

Izzle Pfaff!: Nurture it, and while being firm, treat it with respect. Most insecure passwords are the result of neglect or maltreatment. Healthy, robust passwords have a strong, loving carer behind them: be that carer, and your password will never betray you.

Mars Rover Update

"Our current focus is to drive like hell … and try to get [Spirit] to safe winter havens before the power situation gets really bad," said Steve Squyres, lead Mars Rover Exploration scientist at Cornell University.

Spirit is trying to get to safe ground before the Mars Winter, so its solar plates can keep it chugging along until next year. The Mars Rovers were supposed to have been long since broken down and left for dead by now, so of course this is an eventuality that Spirit was not designed for. Good luck, my rover friend!

Opportunity is out of danger, apparently on the other side of Mars. In my dreams I see them driving side by side, not on opposite sides of the planet.

The Mars Rovers have even outlasted the Space.com "Best of Mars Rover" images site, which appears broken. You can still view their top 20 rated Mars Rover images, but that's all for now, maybe until the Apache winter is over.

Juxtapositions

CNN.com: "Federal judge says he will require Google to turn over some data to Department of Justice."

Amazon.com: "Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web."

A distributed, encrypted backup would get a lot of traction right now. Something like like duplicity or boxbackup but baked into the Operating System at the filesystem level. Sure, it's hard, but having no control over what the government does with your email, pictures and movies is even harder.

click! click! click!

click! click! click!
Originally uploaded by featherbed.

Thank you Alaina!

Good Accounting (In which I Become a Corporate Schill for American Express)

Since I started working for myself in the middle of last year, I've had to change my entire approach to how I approach and arrange my finances. I've fastidiously kept almost every receipt and missive from cable, mobile, credit card, student loan companies and anything that could remotely approach relevance come the Ides of April. Despite this, the pile of paper and impending math is intimidating, and I am constantly afraid of the mess that is my accounting "system." Since I do so much banking on-line, I'd been frustrated that my credit card companies couldn't offer me a spreadsheet of all my purchases, which would make all of this math much easier. I still get mail every week from American Express addressed to $$FIRST_NAME$$ $$LAST_NAME$$.

This week they offered $$FIRST_NAME$$ a "Year End Summary." Curious, I clicked through, and my dreams were answered. Here are all my purchases, not only in PDF, CSV or XLS, but broken down by category. I am floored! There's even an "interactive" version where you can re-categorize misfiled items, although it appears they did a great job. And they should, it's what they do!

Highs and Lows:

• $2000 in "travel" expenses, broken down into airfare, lodging, and other. "Other," the largest chunk, consists entirely of Subway and Amtrak fares. South By Southwest accommodations and three plane trips account for the balance. It would be nice if they could connect the name on the reservations, in two cases Adriana's, into the spreadsheet since I can't write off her tickets on my taxes.


• $1300 in restaurants - less than I would have guessed, but probably because it's so common to pay with cash in New York.


• $0 automobile related charge, account related charges and late fees.


• $[embarrassingly large number] in "Merchandise," the vast majority of which is mobile phone and server costs that I passed on to clients and co-workers. The rest is video games and books. Why did I make three trips to H&M in July? And Apple - wow. Just, wow. Five trips to Whole Foods: $474. Got to get that under control this year!

Best of CNN++

In exceptional circumstances, graphics from other news sites sneak into the Best of CNN series. This is one such circumstance.

Look at those beautiful bars. Does that count as desecrating the flag? (Yes.)

Rest vs. XML-RPC

(Mom, you can skip this one).

XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) and REST (Representational State Transfer) are two different architectures for enabling conversations between web sites and robots. People argue to the point of tragedy over which is "better," "simpler," "easier," and "more correct."

While perusing the Weblogs.com API, I was impressed that they had made their data available over both XML-RPC and REST, and also that the two formats were functionally equivalent.The explanation of their XML-RPC API takes two and a half pages and 364 words. The documentation of their REST API takes 80 words and two and a half paragraphs.

I bet Skynet uses REST.

The Internet is Full of Good People

Earlier this month Mr. Sun gave me a top compliment: "I read a bunch of [hello, typepad] posts and I know a lot of things he likes and not much about what he hates. That's nice." Thank you, Mr. Sun. When the giver of life (and lyric) compliments you for being positive, you run with it.

I've been reblogging quite a bit (last Tuesday was a highlight), but it doesn't take the place of regular old blogging, so I'm going to try and pick up the pace again. This last week was full of drama (Sudama - was it the stars?) but I was struck by the good, rather than the bad, behavior of folks on the Internet.

Rogers Cadenhead stepped into a snake pit of xml pedantry and nearly a decade of failed ideas and nasty politics, in hopes of making software better. Some people in the tech community grouse about the "back channel" and then send private email messages around trying to intimidate people out of their ideas. These same people call for the end of venture capital as we know it, and then lean on friendly investors to lay out even more dire threats. Rogers' responses have been measured and reasonable. I trust him and the rest of the RSS advisory board to make software better.

In a similar vein, my friend Judith lost her camera in Hawaii. When Canadian tourists stumbled upon it, they did the right thing by alerting the park ranger, but then did the wrong thing by telling Judith they were not going to return it. Judith knows their name, phone number and address, but has refused to release that information even to the press. She could have their names dragged through the mud - honestly, she could probably have their house burned to the ground in twenty minutes - but instead she is patiently plodding through legal channels hoping the family decides to do the right thing. If you have something that's not yours you return it, right?

And finally, my friend Jason Kottke ended his year long micropatronage experiment. Jason's design and content is the gold standard of weblogs, and has been for years.

At some point last year I was sitting near Jason at Eyebeam, and he offered to show me some ideas he was working on for kottke.org. He opened up a photoshop document, and proceeded to zoom through 15-20 different styles and color schemes. The layouts were all top notch, obviously, but I was most struck by the thoroughness and level of detail in his own mockups. The layers were all logically named and grouped, so he could fly through ideas almost as fast as he could talk about them. If you know photoshop well, you know what I'm talking about.

It was really at that moment I realized how seriously Jason took his work - here was a document that less than five or ten people would even see or know existed, but it was of a higher quality than 95% of the work that professional web designers hand over to their clients. Jason took an enormous pay cut last year in hopes of making his blog better, a great gift to his readers. I think he succeeded, albeit maybe not at to the lofty levels he set for himself. I am sure kottke.org will continue to be outstanding, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

People like Rogers, Judith and Jason that make the Internet great.

The Gang Rule of Four Fourteen Four Four Four Four Four

True friend Meg tagged me with four things. Kenyatta almost did, but apparently he was worried about a self induced overdose of vitamin M(eme). Nonsense!

Four Jobs I've Had:

1. Perl Programmer - From the first iteration of nea.org in the summer of 1994 to my current work as a full time software architect and programmer, I've always been a programmer at heart. Also at the NEA, I built a link sharing program from teachers in the summer of 1996. There was no auth (or tags) but it did have comments. (I should have kept going with that. :) The search was a regular expression, and the "view all" button was simply a search on the letter 'e.' I'm pretty good at this, but after 12 years I should be even better!
2. MediaRights - Director of Technology and Distribution. The "and distribution" was only added to my title in the last year I was there, but I loved my job at MediaRights helping filmmakers get their messages further. It was my boss Nicole who gave the folks at Netflix the idea of releasing films from PBS/POV to Netflix subscribers the day they were broadcast, and now that distribution model is all the rage.
3. Teacher - Both at SEI and the House of Umoja in Portland, Oregon. Both my parents are life long teachers, so it seemed completely natural for me to take teaching jobs in Portland during a semester off from school and again after I graduated. It actually never occurred to me to look for programming jobs after college, although obviously I came back to it.
4. Odd jobs at Oberlin - I had a million jobs at Oberlin, including working at conference services and in the student union.

Four_{teen +2} movies I can watch over and over:

• The Celebration
• The Chungking Express
• Contact
• Fireworks
• The Fugitive
• The Hulk
• In the Mood for Love
• The Incredibles
• The Iron Giant
• Mullholland Drive
• Rear Window
• Rushmore
• Tampopo
• Star Trek VI
• The Third Man
• Toy Story 2

Four places I've lived:

1. Fairfax, Virginia
2. Oberlin, Ohio
3. Portland, Oregon
4. New York City

Four TV Shows I love:

1. The Wire - All 4 entries could be Wire episodes, especially the last half of the third season.
2. Monk - I'm monkish.
3. Deadwood
4. Mets Baseball

Four Places I've vacationed:

• London, England
• Paris, France
• Tokyo, Japan
• Vancouver, Canada

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Pepperoni Pizza - I'm vegan, but this is still my favorite food.
2. Adriana's Beans and Rice
3. Dumplings (regular old fried dumplings are fine for me.
4. Dosa (hopefully from the Dosa Cart)

Four sites I visit daily:

• http://davidjacobs.livejournal.com/friends/
• http://dj.riceweevil.com/
• http://google.com/ig/
• http://flickr.com/photos/friends/

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Montreal (never been!)
2. Alaska
3. Portland, OR
4. Houseboat

Who's next???

1. Adriana
2. Angela
3. Mr. Sun!
4. Claire

/Root markets

I've been wondering what /Root Markets are for a while now, since so many people I respect from vastly different markets are involved. Now "r0ml" (r0ml?) has finally posted his What do I do? post, so I can begin to grok what they're doing. And it sounds great.Makes me wonder what else Mike Frumin, Lew Ranieri and Ed Batista are up to over there.

update: Just saw this News "2.0" feature: Everybody else is spying on me," [Goldstein] says, "so I want to spy on myself.

"Oh, really? Because I happen to have Mr. Bray right here."

In his latest A List Apart column, "Web 3.0," Jeffrey Zeldman perfectly nails the tension between style and substance that is poisoning the well for many of us web people.

At first I tolerated the pain by mentally modifying the famous scene from Annie Hall:

HIM: "I teach a venture capitalist workshop, so I think my insights into XML have a great deal of validity."

ME: "Oh, really? Because I happen to have Mr. Bray right here."

Later I gnawed my knuckles. At some point, in a kind of fever, I may have moaned. Blessedly, at last the lights dimmed and the night's real speakers redeemed the evening.

But the ass whose braying I'd endured left a bad taste.

Don Quijote Day / Tips for Reblogging

Over at Reblog (where I've been a having little too much fun) it's Don Quijote day.

We Make Money Not Art and Eyeteeth pointed me to X Reloaded, a parade of "proposed new readings" of the classic story. Regine's highlights are the best.

Jason pointed out the story of a French Monk who bound an edition of Don Quijote in the skin of his dead dog. Marcus Trimble, who originally blogged the story writes: "Funny, I happen to be reading Don Quixote at the moment/last eight months, so now all i need is a pet..."

And since I'm probably going to have stop hogging the Eyebeam Mic soon, I thought I'd offer a few observations about reblogging. Reblogging is nothing more than fast blogging, so it's no coincidence that making your content friendlier for rebloggers has the pleasant side effect of making the user experience more pleasant for all of your readers.

new powerbooks!

new powerbooks
Originally uploaded by adampsyche.

Yahoo/Microsoft merger rumors

John Battelle on the Stock Market Predicting That YHOO and MSFT Will Hook up: "it's not clear what Microsoft brings to Yahoo's party that the company does not already have." What a preposterous statement! Here's a short list of what Microsoft brings to "Yahoo's Party:" MSN Spaces, XBox 360, OneNote, Exchange Server, 90% of the browser market (with Internet Explorer 7 due this Summer) and live.com. And - oh yeah - an Operating System or two.

For what it's worth, I think this merger makes perfect sense, and I never think these big mergers make any sense. Yahoo and Microsoft aren't good at any of the same things, and GAOgle vs. Microhoo! would be a death match worth buying ringside tickets for.

Re: Hello, 2006

I'm ending this year happier and more content than I started it. All in all, a success. I feel great about the relationships in my life and work, and I'm enthusiastic for the new year. Some of my ambitions for this blog haven't come to fruition, but I think they will in 2006.

In the spirit of holiday giving, here are all my open tabs with commentary. I'll start with what I think are my smartest comments, so when you get bored you can just stop reading.

Of all the "2006 predictions" I've read, none of them have much to do with the one laptop per child initiative. If it's even one quarter as successful as it is ambitious, it's going to change the face of the education forever. Counter-intuitively, it's going to make Google even more powerful than Yahoo and Microsoft, since Google is stronger in infrastructure and internationalization than it's competitors. It's also going to force a real business model to emerge around micropayments, since that's more in tune with the way third world economies already operate. Also, Google's Blogger is still the best completely free blogging option.

I'm reblogging at Eyebeam for the next couple of weeks. (Thanks for the kind words, Michael.) I love Eyebeam, and their projects. Part of my motivation for becoming a consultant was so that I could carve out more time to explore the more creative side of computer science, and Eyebeam's doing some of the best work out there right now. Reblogging makes reading and writing easier, which is the essence of blogging. And please submit links if there's anything you think I should see.

My buddy Charlie wonders if is Google behind T-mobile's Web 'n' Walk. My answer "it doesn't matter." Check out Christian Lindholm's remote (mobile???) contribution to Les Blogs 2.0:

The mobile industry is in a stalemate. The handset vendors are desperately trying to escape the “phone” legacy, a wonderful legacy in many ways, but the mobile phone we all love to talk on is perfected.

I've been playing around with the N70 and N90 a bit - and they are phenomenal phones. I didn't think the phone experience could get much better, but Nokia really nailed the details in a way they haven't done in a long time. But going forward, the real innovations are going to come from devices like the Nokia 770, which is one iteration away from challenging the low-end laptop market. I'm not sure if Lenovo, Nokia, Apple or wal-mart are going to get there first, but someone is. In two years we'll all be carrying around an iPod, a 770-like tablet, and a Nokia N-series style phone.

I was going to reblog unmediated's pointer to the flickr mobile API how-to. Then I realized they reblogged it out of MY delicious links. Talk about a closed loop

I'd buy the new ReadyMade book in a heartbeat, but there's a new order on our bookshelves - for us to buy a new book we have to read a book AND reduce another book. There are some low hanging fruit (Lego Mindstorms manual, old textbooks) but it's going to be a challenge. But hopefully Adriana and I can do some good book blogging this year.

Jason's lists of the best links of the year and the rest of the best more than justify my micropatron dollars, not that he had to justify anything. This is the kind of idea that crosses a lot of people's minds but no one finishes the job quite like Kottke.

In Steal from Google, a Businessweek columnist proposes that local newspapers should try and saturate the print market the same way google did the on-line space, by giving away ad space for virtually nothing to build eyeballs. The difference is, newspapers don't have built in search, the number of "eyeballs" in a few zip codes is limited, and the cost of paper is going up, while the cost of servers is going down.

Stale tabs I meant to spend more time with but probably won't: thoughts on Language Design, complete list of delicious tools, and yet another way to annotate images with CSS. (Now they're closed. Buh-bye!)

Fetching tags produces funny little tags for your dog. And people say our economy is hurting. The dooce claims Salma Hayek doesn't exercise, she just takes multi-vitamins. No way.

I was going to cut my hair, but now that Andy Samberg is hitting it big I'm going to let it grow out.

Google Feeds API

Niall's reverse engineering of Google's feeds API is a fantastic scoop. A few quick responses:

• Developing the API first and the apps later puts Mobile developers on equal footing.


• The #1 feature that I want RIGHT NOW is to sync my NetNewsWire subscriptions with my Google Reader subscriptions. Google Reader has been the near-perfect complement to NetNewsWire for me - since I will eventually return to NNW I won't miss a post, but I can still keep reasonably up to date when I'm away from a Mac. NewsGator subscriptions for NetNewsWire readers were rumored, but still haven't been delivered.


• Love, love, love the conversion to valid Atom 1.0 feeds. That Unicode headache you had in your home grown feed reading/publish app? It's gone, or at least different. But hopefully it's gone.


• Love, love, love, LOVE the subscription list in Atom 1.0 Here's my google reader subscriptions list.


• I really hope there's no security problems with sharing google "_USER_ID"s between apps. If there is, it will effectively kill the ability of third-party apps to develop on top of the google feeds API.


• This brings up another point - some of what google knows about me I WANT shared. What Blogger blogs I write, what I upload to Google base, some (but not all) of my google search history, and so on. Will I get to control that? No other API does this. For instance, I can't not let you subscribe to my flickr feed, nor can I constrain what shows up in it.


• If they allowed me to selectively share and cross-reference my feeds with my search history, then we'd really be getting somewhere.


• Google is going to win the API "war" with a thousand little APIs, rather than one big one.

More later. I'm kind of surprised how excited I am about this.

Nerds!

Brad Fitzpatrick:

I'm sitting in an all-day meeting and I made a joke to our business manager about posting to LiveJournal from Excel.

So to complete the joke, I had to implement it for him. [excel download]

(via anil.)

Watch these amazing videos of someone banging out a perfect combo of the William Tell Overture on Taiko's hardest mode. Last time I tried "Oni" I literally threw the drum up in the air and cried. Watching this video fills me with joy. Expect to see this on rocketboom soon!

And while I'm offering links to rocketboom, I'll steal one. DIY paper bookmarks fold over the corner of pages. Perfect for use on moleskines or just as a regular bookmark. You can download the template and print some of your favorite photos, or if you're super GTD (OCD?) then you can print your most pressing items on the bookmarks. Expect to see this on 43 folders soon! (update: maybe not! Mr. 43 Folders just eloped, so he may be busy for a while with other things. Congrats!)

BREAKING NEWS

The story of a judge ruling mentions of Intelligent Design to be unconstituational is notable enough on it's own. But all this talk of "intelligent" "design" seems to have lit a fire under the butt of CNN's "designers." Witness The evolving bubble people and this DNA helix that appears to dwarf the earth in size. It's almost... threatening. And what's the light up near the North Pole? Is God in the DNA?

Silence Of The Blogs

Silence Of The Blogs (Forbes):

"'The only people you get mad at are the people you care about,' he [Anil Dash] says. 'It's the holiday season, it's the time for fighting with family.'"

Exactly. People wonder why I love Anil (do they?) That's why, at any rate. I also love the headline: "Silence of the Blogs." Many, many dimensions of double entendres there. A sudoku of entendres, if you will. (I understand if you won't.)

.Mac 2.0

I love my new Apple. My old ones (yikes, plural) are fine, but once I sat down at a G5, I knew I didn't want to do the majority of my work on a G4 anymore. Configuring a new machine used to be a pain that could take days, but with OS X it's almost instantaneous. I'm usually pretty quiet about how much I love Apple (on this blog, at least) so please forgive me this moment of fanitude.

• .Mac has a bad reputation, and I have no idea why. At any moment, I'm five minutes away from having all of my mail <sagan>gigabytes and gigabytes of messages<sagan>, my contacts, Transmit favorites, Netnewswire subscriptions, calendars and keychains up and running. There's always a hiccup, but it's never that bad. And .mac offered the first really good decent photo sharing software, before typepad and flickr.
• Apache is installed and running on every computer shipped, and it has been for years. For my money you can go from zero to running a modern web app - Movable Type, a java servlet, Rails, Catalyst, and so on. - as fast as any other platform, including most flavors of linux.
• All of the little UI touches that Ajax fans rave about are ripped right out of OS X's Aqua styling. Which in turn Apple ripped right out of Kai Krause's Power Tools. Kai, wherever he is, should be earning a nickel for each slow yellow fade on tadalist (and Paul Bausch should get a dime for each permalink (and I don't want to fall too far down this rabbit hole)). Likewise, we take big icons on the web for granted, but before the Dock (also unfairly maligned) we were squinting into the windows taskbar, and/or sorting our Apple menu by renaming applications to start with spaces and numbers. Remember that before you grouse about the dock (or Spotlight, for that matter).
• And speaking of spotlight, allow me to peer across the room at Tim Bray's Ongoing. His accomplishments are indisputable, but this weekend within the same 24 hours he dives deep into the internals of perl vs. java regular expressions but then offers a cursory insult to Tiger when he refers to it as "pretty lame."

  I love the Dashboard, it's more or less the perfect implementation of "push," and spotlight is the best search application on any platform - it runs circles around Google & MSN Desktop, with half the processing power. But besides those two features (and I agree with Tim, those are the biggest two), there's Quartz Composer, Automator, Core Data, new Safari, new Xcode and all the little things that Apple is known for. Some of these developer features (especially Core Data) may not see the common usage in mainstream apps until 10.5, because it's customary for developers to support the current operating system release and the last one, but the changes under the hood were substantial, and the fact that they don't always make themselves known is a feature, not a bug.

• Through a sort of contorted path, today I stumbled upon Michael Sippey's "three c's of computing" - creating, consuming and connecting. Apple already owns (at least in mindshare) creating and consuming, so connecting is the final piece of the puzzle. However, notice the date of Sippey's post - Apple is already 10 years and 8 days late!
• One more note about Dashboard and the third "C". We know that Nokia is releasing a browser for mobile phones based on KHTML. Dashboard apps are just little bundles of Javascript, CSS, and HTML (Ajax, anyone?), the mobile application market (despite the deafening hype) is still vastly underserved, and Apple is very good at syncing data with your Nokia phone. It's suddenly easy to see hundreds (thousands?) of dashboard apps running on millions of Nokia phones. Not just the flight tracker and the phone book, but also Ms. Pac Man, singing Jared, flickr uploader, google base search client and on and on. That's the microcontent thing I'm really excited about.

Related: Anil Dash's Blortal 2.0, Michael Sippey's tada list and Andrew Anker's last speech ever.

Blogging all Open Tabs

Today's Rocketboom is pretty exciting. Camera "2" is back!

we make money not art returns to form with Architecture for bicycles and Video-game rapid prototyping

The first fiction collection on Lulu that I actually think I'm going to buy: How to Leave a Place by Ariel Gore. (PubSubbing Erik Benson - you are going to like this too)

U.S. President George W. Bush shakes hands with Albert Hubo (robot). Apparently there are some bones from eyebeam in that skeleton.

Jeff Chang is Still Recovering From Hurricane Meters. I didn't even know they were touring! I'm a shadow of my former self (as I listen to a "leaked" copy of Shakira's new CD (I love it)).

And since I've got to have some vitamin geek in this post, here's John Siracusa on consumer RAID options and filesystem architecture. (Mom: He's worried about Dad's iMac crashing and losing all of Lauren's photos. So am I, but I'm not that worried. If we lose the photos, we lose them, right?)

randomWalks: Orchestra Pit

randomWalks: Orchestra Pit: "Want to play with Apple's Front Row without buying a new iMac? Check out the hack I'm calling 'Orchestra Pit'"

Adam's Orchestra Pit compilation is brilliant.

Friends 2.0

Kyle put together a Ning app to track Mario Kart friend IDs. No OpenID support yet, but it does have tags.

Tribes

Midwest Perl champ and friend Ed Summers wrote a nice summer of the most recent ruby-chicago meeting. One passage in particular resonated with me:

It’s been interesting watching local perl, python, ruby and java groups and how they regard each other. Chris mentioned that it’s unfortunate when discussion borders on digging at the other guy, and that the real thing that unites these groups is that everyone enjoys programming, and works on stuff on their own time.

And Ed doesn't even mentioned Javascript, which has been turning the web development world on it's head over the past year. The rest of the world must wonder what it takes for programmers to argue about "Catalyst" and "Rails." Ben touched on this in his aptly named post Rails developers kill kittens!

Fake Money

My blog is worth $12,342,392.12.