biztos

How Third-Party Apps Should Use Siri

2012-01-11T03:15:00.001-08:00

Apple’s Siri is a “digital assistant” for iPhone 4S and, presumably, various other products to be released in the future. I expect it will come to the Mac at some point too.

I haven’t used Siri, but I have been following the developments because I think she (in the UK, apparently a he) will become a very big deal once there is an easy way for third-party applications (App Store apps) to take advantage of the voice recognition and natural-language processing Apple runs on its servers.

There has been a lot of discussion online about how this could be done without various apps stepping on each other’s toes. If I say “Siri, remind me at six about Tarkan’s birthday party,” which calendar program will it use for the reminder?

In this case, it will obviously use Apple’s. You could make that configurable but I really doubt Apple would.

I think the answer is as easy as it is obvious, and easier than it is awkward. Apple controls (approves) the name of every app in the App Store. It can easily allow developers to choose a “Siri Name” for an app, also subject to central approval. Keeping these unique should not be hard.

Then you simply tell Siri whom to tell (or ask) what. Much like you did in Applescript, if you had a Mac in the 90’s (or are a total masochist today).

For an app named “Candy Store,” it might go like this:

HUMAN TO SIRI: Siri, ask Candy Store if they have blue gumdrops.
SIRI TO CLOUD: <...sends audio...>
CLOUD TO SIRI: Parsed OK for "Candy Store" : "find 'blue gumdrops'"
SIRI TO APP:   find 'blue gumdrops'
APP TO SIRI:   OK, in stock, $6/dozen.  Options: order, view.
SIRI TO HUMAN: Candy Store has blue gumdrops for six dollars per dozen.
               You can view them or order them if you like.
HUMAN TO SIRI: Order six dozen please.

Siri would of course know the context of that last command, because Siri is tracking a conversation and not just individual commands. You could also be very direct:

HUMAN TO SIRI: Siri, tell Candy Store to cancel next week's shipment.
...
SIRI TO HUMAN: Your Candy Store shipment of four hundred mixed jellybeans
               for Monday, January 16 has been canceled.

If I were Apple I would start this with a very, very simple API, supporting only the simplest directives like “find” and “order” and “do,” but also sending the original text to the app in case the app wants to do its own parsing.

But that’s probably way too utopian of me. Apple will no doubt wait until there is a huge NSDigitalAssistantRequest API and statically-typed conversations and 30% of any digitally-assisted sale going to Cupertino, and start with three hand-picked third-party apps for a year-long trial run before mere mortals are allowed in.

Even then, it could of course be huge.

Meta: old comments published, sorry.

2011-11-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

I just realized I had not moderated comments in six million years.

So I did, and published the non-spammy ones. In case there is some kind of notification system and you get an e-mail that your comment from 1932 has been published on this blog: my apologies for the tardiness.

UITapGestureRecognizer and “unrecognized selector sent to instance” errors.

2011-11-20T05:22:00.000-08:00

This is just a very quick note for search engine posterity, in case anybody has the same frustrating problem I had today.

I am implementing some gestures for an iOS art app (as in a work of media art, the "medium" of which is an iPhone/iPad application). I was following the "Event Handling Guide for iOS" from Apple.

After much Googling and some very informative stops at StackOverflow, I had got basically nowhere. Everything seemed right, my code conformed tightly to the tutorial and to everyone else’s, and everybody else who found a solution had obviously solved a very different core problem than I was facing. What could be wrong?!

It turns out the problem was as simple as:

-(void) handleTap
{
    NSLog(@"*** GOT A TAP ***");
}

Now, in real life you would almost never use a method as dumb and simple as that, but when setting up your classes for initial hacking and debugging you just might. According to the tutorial, it should work:

The action methods for handling gestures—and the selector for identifying them—are expected to conform to one of two signatures:
- (void)handleGesture
- (void)handleGesture:(UIGestureRecognizer *)sender

Silly programmer, tricks are for kids! The standard-issue selector looks for only the second signature, and if it doesn’t find it you get the error whenever you tap: unrecognized selector sent to instance! boo!

The solution, then, is to declare and implement the method with the argument. That works fine.

-(void) handleTap: (UIGestureRecognizer *)sender
{
    NSLog(@"*** GOT A TAP ***");
}

To be fair, Apple has an enormous amount of documentation available online, and it’s not so shocking that a tutorial is out of date. For us iOS newbies it’s frustrating, but I don’t think anybody else is doing a better job of this at the moment.

Rough Draft Epitaph

2011-10-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

So many important people have died this year, I thought it best to have at least a rough draft of an epitaph on record in case I need one. I feel fine, but you never know. Ergo:

HERE LIES THE FROST
man under ground.
His hair was long,
his belly round.
He lived quite long
for the risks he took,
but never did manage
to write that book.

Perl ExtUtils::MakeMaker test overrides (for Makefile.PL).

2011-08-05T14:22:00.001-07:00

Nerd post follows; non-nerds, move along.

This took me a while to figure out, and in the end I had to dig around in the source code to figure out just what was going on, so here’s a quick note for posterity since I’m sure somebody else will have exactly this problem at some point. Caveat lector: I’m probably making a bunch of mistakes here. And thanks to brian d foy for showing us how to use test_via_harness.

Basically what it boils down to is this: you are going to have either a bunch of test files in a t directory, or a single test.pl file in the main directory. Or possibly both.

The thing you need to override is different in each case. You might just want to do both in case you change your mind later about the test setup.

Let’s say, for instance, that my special little requirement is that I can get at some shared libraries in the /opt/special/lib directory. The examples below should be understood as code inside your Makefile.PL file. And yes, they are almost identical in this case.

For `test.pl` override test_via_script.

sub MY::test_via_script {

    my ( $self, $perl, $script ) = @_;

    # Here is some special sauce for the environment:
    my $env_setup = 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/special/lib';

    # Here are some Makefile variables that are handled by `make`:
    my $harness_args =
      '"$(TEST_VERBOSE)", "$(INST_LIB)", "$(INST_ARCHLIB)"';

    # Here's the command that will create the target:
    my $command =
      sprintf "\t%s %s -MExtUtils::Command::MM -e 'test_harness(%s)' %s",
      $env_setup,
      $perl,
      $harness_args,
      $script;

    return $command;

}

For `t/*.t` override test_via_harness.

sub MY::test_via_harness {

    my ( $self, $perl, $tests ) = @_;

    # Here is some special sauce for the environment:
    my $env_setup = 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/special/lib';

    # Here are some Makefile variables that are handled by `make`:
    my $harness_args =
      '"$(TEST_VERBOSE)", "$(INST_LIB)", "$(INST_ARCHLIB)"';

    # Here's the command that will create the target:
    my $command =
      sprintf "\t%s %s -MExtUtils::Command::MM -e 'test_harness(%s)' %s",
      $env_setup,
      $perl,
      $harness_args,
      $tests;

    return $command;

}

Etc. & So On

I think it’s a much better practice to keep your test files in t/ anyway, and to always run with the test harness. In fact I usually skip the explicit test harness altogether and run everything with the appropriate prove command (the one that belongs to the Perl I’m using).

However, if you’re dealing with legacy code or not interested in doing real Perl stuff or otherwise just need to “get on with it” then you might well need a test.pl – and remember, test_via_script for that guy!

Here are the obvious links you should follow if you want to know more about this:

ExtUtils::MakeMaker
ExtUtils::MakeMaker::FAQ
Chapter 10 of Mastering Perl by brian d foy.

And finally, for anyone nerdier than I who is reading this: I know about package MY and I agree it’s probably the better solution, but I think it’s (even more) confusing for novices; and I assume at least some people trying to do this aren’t even Perl programmers.

Seen Today

2011-05-02T13:37:00.001-07:00

A 200HUF cappuccino.
Szamoca vs. Eper.
A mini-skirt! 'Tis the season!
Bright sunlight through green glass socialist balconies.
Prolis, pornósmellü, rövidlábú daughter of the café proprietress.
A one-legged man walking a husky.
Public-service street art sampling both Star Wars and Red Robot.
A giant pink Hello Kitty poster at the optometrist's.
Written on the Bortársaság delivery van, the optimistic take on modern Hungary: “MINDEN RENDBEN A BOR FINOM.”

Buying Art (for cheap) is Fun

2011-04-21T12:14:00.001-07:00

I recently attended a silent auction, the modest proceeds of which went to the IFRC. The things being auctioned were artworks, mostly on paper. I got three, about which more in a future post after I photograph them. But I will at least give a sort of preview: Two by Ryuta Suzuki and one by Kati Verebics.

It’s a safe bet that I got all three well under market value. I almost got into a little bidding war with someone, but he mysteriously declined to bid on the things I wanted, perhaps intimidated by my hovering around waiting to double down. And I had passer’s remorse about not having bid on something, until I found out the winning bid belonged to a very nice guy.

I don’t often buy art. Very rarely in fact. And not because it’s expensive; while it can be very costly there’s always something you can afford, however minor. The thing is, if you’re collecting art you have to put it somewhere, and you feel sort of bad if that somewhere isn’t a wall.

I suppose you know you’re actually collecting art when you no longer feel bad about not displaying it. I could imagine getting to that point, or if you like falling into that trap, but not soon. I’ve got a sweet little apartment with more windows than walls, and a lot of geographic instability in the mix, and I’m not yet ready to invest in another flat file. Not quite yet.

It’s probably not an easy thing putting together a charity auction. This one had some local artists I’d heard of (including a few I know personally); and some I hadn’t heard of; and some strangers from far afield, whose contributions were sometimes relevant and sometimes not. The quality was very uneven, but in Budapest the quality of a museum show can be just as uneven (I’m lookin’ at you, MüPa!).

Some good things about the auction: admirable transparency about the finances; no hidden reserves; good art on the cheap for a good cause.

Some less-good things: no alcohol (what were they thinking?); a rather, shall we say, distant house staff; no real PR about the artists or works (remember, most people at a charity auction know nothing about art); and, sadly, not enough people wanting to spend money.

As one of the modestly solvent people in the room, I definitely would have spent more on the works I bought if there had been enemy bids. I wouldn’t have gone to the moon, but I definitely would have gone to double what I spent. In one case I almost felt like bidding against myself but part of the adrenalin kick of an auction, even a noncompetitive one, is the tension between wanting what you want, and wanting to get it at the lowest price going.

I know these things are easier said than done, but it seems to me that there are some obvious steps to help raise more money at a charity auction. So I shall play Lucy for a moment and offer...

Cheap Advice for Silent Charity Auctions

Work your connections and get every well-off person you know to attend.
“Well-off” means “able to place the lowest available minimum bid without pain.”
Have plentiful, non-shitty free booze. Get it sponsored of course.
Have a friendly, attractive staff serving the plentiful free booze.
Flatter people unnecessarily.
Make it easy to bid competitively and anonymously.
Have professional promotional materials on hand about your cause, your beneficiary, and every artist.
Include take-home materials, e.g. a high-production-value flyer.
If you don’t know how to do that yourself, get somebody who does know to do it for free for the good cause.
Apply the rule above to every aspect of the auction. You’re already a hero for organizing it in the first place.

In short, it was fun, I totally scored, and I think I’ll try this sort of thing again. But first I have to find a good framer.

A Parting Thought On the Arts and the Web

Why is it that artists and cultural institutions, much like restaurants, generally have not heard the news that Flash-only websites are broken and reflect badly on their owners?

In the case of individual artists, I’m inclined to think of it as similar to the restaurant problem. Creative people get talked into some gimmicky animation and don’t know any better, so up it goes. But when a well-funded Palace of the Arts hires some clueless two-bit company to rain misery on its potential ticket buyers, then I have no choice but to smell a rat.

An example of the first: Mr. Suzuki’s portfolio. Of the second: MuPa.hu, a study in inaccessibility.

Notes on Apple’s Subscription Billing

2011-02-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

Update: Read Tim O’Reilly’s take.

Tech publisher Tim O’Reilly has just posted a very thoughtful case against the 30% number in Apple’s subscription model. He thinks it should be more like 5%.

The post and the comment thread are very informative, and I highly recommend reading them if any of this interests you. Here it is on Google Buzz, incidentally proving that Google Buzz has a few actual users. Who knew?

One minor point on which I disagree with O’Reilly, but in which we’re both just wildly speculating: I don’t think Apple is arrogantly trying to price the competition off its platform (e.g. Netflix vs. iTunes). Rather, I think they have considered those businesses and, perhaps just as arrogantly, assumed they should be smart enough to make a profit while still coughing up 30%. I sort of imagine Tim Cook saying, “Well I could do it in a weekend, so why shouldn’t Reed Hastings?”

Apple, which still has nothing like a viable competitor to its ragingly popular iPad tablet device and happens to also make most of the profit in the smartphone world, recently announced new rules for in-app content purchasing, particularly for magazine and newspaper subscriptions.

In a nutshell, they are:

For anything bought inside the app, Apple gets a 30% cut.
You can’t sell anything outside the app that you don’t also sell inside the app.
You can’t charge more for in-app purchases than for their out-of-app equivalents.
Collection of subscriber data is limited, optional (opt-in), and revokable (by the user).
Subscriptions may be cancelled at any time, inside the app.

I’ve been following the reaction online for a while now. As you might expect, publishers and various other middlemen, as well as a typical assortment of irrational Apple-bashers, are raising a stink. Or at least trying to; with Rupert Murdoch on board, it’s hard to argue there isn’t money to be made by publishers.

I see the arguments against Apple’s new policy falling into three main categories, which I will briefly address below. My gut feeling is that this new model will work in most instances, and in a few instances will fail so utterly that exceptions will soon be made.

“Apple Will Destroy Publishing”

This argument usually has little to do with the 30%, which after all isn’t that much compared to traditional printing and distribution costs. Instead, the big fear is that publishers have built a business on selling subscriber data – usually to people who turn around and try to sell crap back to the subscribers. Ever wonder where all those catalogs come from?

If Apple limits what data you can collect, and requires it be easy to opt out, what becomes of this revenue stream?

Well, in fact a good part of it will probably go away. I expect people will still happily provide enough personal data that you can reasonably prove the value of your “demographic” to the advertisers.

But according to what logic, exactly, should a business be allowed to harvest as much of my personal data as their little database elves know how to, without my consent and directly against my better interest? I understand that this helps keep subscription prices low, but then making sandwiches out of your customers’ own flesh would keep sandwich prices low. How is that good?

So Apple is in effect forcing the publishers to be honest if they want to be on Apple’s platform. We’ll see how it goes, but I mostly expect that they’ll grumble but give in, exactly as far as they absolutely must and no further.

There is also some minor echo on the Innernets suggesting that easy subscription cancellation is an unfair burden for publishers, to which the only reasonable response is a much simpler blow me.

“Apple Will Destroy Kindle”

Here the argument is very much about the 30% cut. Content resellers tend to have fairly low margins, thanks in no small part to Amazon. I would expect that a large portion of a la carte content sales, particularly books and essays, simply can not survive a 30% reduction in sales.

This would effectively force someone like Amazon to raise prices, but how will the market react to that?

On the one hand, the market probably wouldn’t much care. Books in Europe cost a lot more than books in the US, and people don’t read less as a result. Steep discounts are not a requirement to secure readership, at least not if your content is any good.

However, with the same-price stipulation for in-app and out-of-app purchases, Apple is sending a very clear message: if you want to sell content on our platform, the content had better be of sufficiently high quality to be priced above a 30% cut in revenue.

Or it had better be sufficiently dirt-cheap that all the money’s in the resale. This is probably not what Apple has in mind, and it’s already a problem in the iBookStore as well as the App Store.

I expect some retailers, and especially Amazon, will feel their backs are to the wall, and will try to find a way out. That might well be regulatory: changing the contract terms on your direct competitor, effectively denying them shelf space in your store, may not go over well at all in the EU, especially regarding cultural goods.

But I think it’s more likely that some folks will try to give you an upside to purchasing outside the app, and Apple will generally not approve those apps except in the cases where they sorta-kinda have to. For example, what does Apple do if Amazon lets you buy content in-app that is tied to that app (i.e. to your various iDevices), but lets you "buy once read anywhere" if you purchase outside the app?

A lot of publishers also bundle digital and dead-tree editions. In Germany, publishers charge a lot for subscriptions but usually offer gifts (a toaster, a Zune, whatever) for new subscribers. (Jetzt Prämie sichern! they shout at the consumption sheep.) Does that mean physical items purchased through the app also have to give Apple a 30% cut? Or that you can’t run a different promotion in each store? What about eBay? Does Apple get 30% of your auction price, or 30% of eBay’s premium?

Here I think Apple has once again failed to address the inevitable grey areas that exist or will soon exist in the app ecosystem. I expect that a combination of regulatory challenges, untenable implications of rules (e.g. the eBay case), and market nuances will force Apple to revise the rules, and possibly the percentage, several times over the next year.

If I had to guess at an outcome, I would guess they’ll allow you to sweeten the deal however you like as long as the part that goes on your iDevice costs the same in-app or out. And I think they will clarify that they don’t expect a cut of anything that doesn’t go on the device; and maybe even clarify that you can sell Kindle for iPad for $20 while giving away Kindle for Android free, if that’s your best solution. And finally that yes, you can sell your newspaper for half price on Android as long as the Android subscription doesn’t give you iPad download rights (at which point I think most smart product managers would give up the 30% instead of taking on the engineering challenge).

“Apple Will Destroy My As-Yet-Unproven Business Model”

This argument is really fascinating, and is being applied not only to fly-by-night startups trying to fill some app market niche that was miraculously still empty an hour ago (e.g. subscription aggregators). The interesting ones here are the purveyors of digital media.

The gist is that streaming media services are built on such impossibly thin margins that it’s completely absurd to give up 30%. The only way to survive that and not go bust is to raise prices, and that’s like raising taxes, and so on.

The problem with this argument is that most streaming media services are built on such impossibly thin margins that they are not, by themselves, viable businesses. That doesn’t mean the 30% cut isn’t onerous, but when the people who created the work in the first place are getting as small a cut as they are from the streaming services, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the middlemen.

I expect this will be a tempest in a teapot at most. The additional charge won’t invalidate anybody’s fake valid business model, nor will it put any real business in the red. Some startups may go belly-up as a result, but isn’t that why they call it venture capital?

iAds might both “fail” and “succeed.”

2010-09-11T18:36:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting blog post by Mac developer Manton Reece titled I hope iAds fails (via DF).

He makes two very good points:

“If you are not paying for it, you‘re not the customer; you‘re the product being sold.”
“I don‘t want to see ads in my apps, and I don‘t want Apple to ever lose even a little of what it means to be a product-driven company.”

I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but I think he’s missing an important part of the picture.

When Apple first announced its iAds advertising program, I joined the nerd herd and assumed they were trying to head Google off at the pass. Google clearly thinks that in-app advertising is going to be a big deal, and as the dominant advertising-engineering company (AdEng? AE?) they want to control that market. Google paid $750 Million for AdMob, a company pursuing exactly that aim and one which Apple reportedly also wanted to buy.

Yes, that would be a terrible outcome for users and indie developers alike. If people get used to ad-supported apps, it will be much harder to sell small apps, and small apps are the foundation of the ecosystem. And, of course, the user experience will be severely degraded for most types of application.

But I now think that’s unlikely, and I further think Apple is on to something more interesting (and arguably more innovative) than Google’s subtlety-of-napalm approach to advertising.

There are, I believe, three interesting scenarios where in-app advertising is essential to the very concept, and by no means a bad thing for users. Whether it destroys user experience in these cases depends on the interaction design, not the concept itself.

First: Apps that are really about shopping.

Take, if you will, BabyCenter. Here is a web site that is sort of about community (an online network of people expecting or having or raising children). Maybe it’s even good at that. But this is undeniably also a site that aims to aggregate people who need and want to buy stuff of a certain sort. The web site makes it very clear that this is what they’re about, and they even have an online store of their own. There is nothing wrong with this, and BabyCenter is very open about it.

How should a BabyCenter App make its money? By charging people to download it — people who, after all, are just as likely to go there because they need stuff as for any other reason? Or should they help connect eager purchasers to eager sellers? (The BabyCentrists have two iPhone apps in the App Store already, one paid and one free, but no BabyCenter app per se.)

Have you looked at LookBook? There’s a concept that would be great as an iPad app, and it would be almost criminally negligent to exclude the advertisers. And for their demographic, it’d be smart to make it a free app: the kids need to save money for clothes!

There are many more, but you get the idea already. Some things are simply about shopping, even if they might be complexly about something else too.

Now the question is: what sort of ads should those be? Should they be high-quality, unobtrusive, Apple-style ads? Or should they be ugly, creepily prescient, Google-style ads?

Second: Apps that are ads themselves.

More and more Hollywood movies, TV shows, and other entertainment products have supporting apps these days. It seems to be the horrifically bloated interactive Flash site of the new era. And the kids, apparently, will download such stuff.

It seems obvious that the ad-as-app should also have in-app ads. You already have the brand loyalty, since after all they downloaded your ad-as-app. Why not make an extra buck selling them something else?

The only catch is that you probably don‘t want to sell your competitor‘s stuff. I assume Apple will give you some control over that.

This category of app may seem superfluous, but remember when you were young and fannish yourself. There‘s nothing new about hawking and extra bauble to the already-sated shopper.

Third: Newspapers and Magazines.

Of the three areas where I see in-app ads as essential, one stands out as both obvious and difficult: ”print“ ads.

Consider this: you can subscribe to the New Yorker for under a buck an issue. They sell about a million copies each week. And this would be completely unsustainable without ad revenue.

I think the App Store gives us a chance to finally have high-quality magazines on portable devices, and I‘m impressed with some of the early efforts (cf. Popular Mechanics). But even though I‘m happy to pay for them, I can‘t imagine that business working without ads.

That‘s the obvious part. The difficult part is that, thus far, nobody has made this work. I would even argue that it has not worked for magazine web sites, though the Wall Street Journal has apparently done pretty well with a subscriptions-and-ads model.

This has got me thinking. If you remember the iPad introduction, you will remember that Apple is very keen on the iPad being used as a platform for high-quality publishing. The New York Times had an app available at launch, but it turned out to be a strange and indecisive beast: the ”Editor‘s Choice“ offers very little content, and has highly obtrusive, poorly designed, in-house ads, and costs nothing even though this is the strongest brand in American periodicals.

I believe there are two big reasons why this hasn‘t yet worked out as planned. First, magazine publishers generally lack the technical expertise to make good technology choices (let alone develop software). Second, they have no idea how to approach the new ad market. Their traditional approach is simply too inefficient; and yet they are reluctant to cede any control.

Of these, the first problem will solve itself with time, as there are more people who can design and build a solid app. The Guardian, for example, has a good iPhone app and a good web site, even though they‘re not yet on the iPad.

The second problem, though, requires major partners for the major print media. Google has not yet established itself as a good partner for high-quality ads, and Apple is attacking that market as opposed to the long-tail advertising market Google effectively monopolizes.

It‘s starting to seem obvious, at least to me, that Apple is much more interested in using its ad platform as a profitable carrot with which to bring serious publishers to its devices. I think Apple believes the numbers will speak for themselves, and publishers will be happy with Apple‘s cut if it gives them Apple‘s quality. This is especially important for major lifestyle brands. And if they go in-house or switch to another ad provider later, Apple still wins, with more and better content on iPad.

If small publishers can also benefit from this, so much the better. And if people are going to put ads in random apps, Apple wants to at least have a shot at mitigating the user-experience failure and getting a bit of cash along the way. But I really do not believe Apple is trying for an ad in every app.

Plenty of room left for innovation.

Apple and Google are going to be the big players in app ads out the gate, but there is still room for innovation.

Apple doesn‘t play the long-tail game with any seriousness. And Google doesn‘t do aesthetic quality (in fact they are virulently indifferent to it).

That suggests one clear niche market. And because you can plug in ad content in apps though a variety of technologies, neither Apple nor Google can establish any technical barrier to entry.

Another place I see startups, or at least studios, emerging is around truly interactive ads. Call them ads-as-games. The iPad, and perhaps some day its competitors, give you an amazing level of creative freedom. And that means you can push boundaries, if you know how. The publishers don‘t know how, nor do the traditional ad agencies.

While some people will just churn out multi-platform content from their publishing workflow and use whatever is easiest or that, user experience be damned (cf. Wired), others (cf. Pop Mech) will try to lead the pack through innovation. And they will want advertising content that helps them keep that lead.

The danger & the seduction.

As a loyal Apple customer, I want them to stay focused on products, not ads.

As a potential app developer, I want the App Store ecosystem to remain healthy and profitable for independents who want to sell their best work to real customers.

But as a potential iPad publisher — I‘m thinking seriously about starting an iPad magazine for fun and profit — I want a one-stop shop if possible. I would have to deal with Apple anyway for all financials and metrics of the distribution process. I could save a lot of headache by just plugging into their ad network and having it all integrated.

I‘m still not sure that‘s any better for the consumer. I trust Apple to have high-quality ads, but I don‘t trust them at all to have depth. I definitely trust Google to have the depth, because they will find a way for Aunt Minnie‘s Tin-Can Cookie Cutters to get into the stream at $3 a click, but of course their quality will be uneven. I hope that innovative startups will bridge this gap.

I do think there is already a precedent for high-quality, ad-free, reasonably-priced paid apps in the App Store. And I think there is enough momentum behind that, and so much potential in this class of devices, that it will not be broken by ad-riddled crapware any time soon.

Thus I think it‘s possible, and maybe desirable, for iAds to "fail" in terms of undermining paid apps, while also succeeding for both Apple and publishers in helping finally port the print-magazine revenue paradigm to the digital world.

And I think there are other things besides traditional publishing that would benefit, and whose users would benefit, from a high-quality in-app advertising system.

A Really Scary Gulf of Mexico Scenario That Might Be Plausible.

2010-06-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

I followed a blog link - I already forgot whence - to an "article" on Mother Jones magazine doing several things Mother Jones is good at:

Pointing us to something really interesting elsewhere.
Quoting extensively without bothering to follow up.
Sensationalizing a bit to increase page views.
Adding no other value whatsoever to the discussion.
Attracting commenters who engage in passionate meta-arguments.
Attracting commenters who wish for the apocalyptic end to everything, somehow naively assuming they will not be eaten by my livestock weasels when Anarchy finally descends.

I realize the burden of passionate leftism is hard to bear if you don't happen to be South American, but hey, since when did Communists believe in Journalism? And who cares, if the end is nigh? Seriously, it might be.

Are you curious yet? Have you already gone and googled it?

OK, so let's have some more background. But only a bit. I've been thinking lately about scale as it applies to our current British Petroleum-induced nightmare. In short, we're thinking about the wrong sort of scale. A bunch of corporate geologists punched a hole in the bottom of the ocean, and it's leaking oil. We need to think in terms of geologic scale.

What if our little corporate geologist hole keeps leaking for four more years, nonstop, without any sign of abating? Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Four years? WTF?!

Go ask the folks in East Java how they like their mud. MUD. Oh yeah, and the mud is freely accessible, open-air mud, not five thousand feet below the friggin' ocean mud.

So, my point, which I freely admit I wouldn't be qualified to make if BP and the US Government weren't lying through their clenched teeth and enforcing a data blackout, is that we may be radically overestimating our ability to control this situation. And the scale on which it works itself out may be deeply uncomfortable for us: think hundreds of years without any fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, think permanent abandonment of all the relevant shorelines and as far inland as the hurricanes drop their black oily rain.

Even if I pretend BP is telling something resembling the truth, I think that all sounds eminently possible.

But here's a way scarier idea: What if the BP well is broken deep under the sea bed, and it's going to turn into some kind of massive expanding undersea gusher in the highly likely event that BP fails to relieve the pressure? What if the most optimistic version of success would still vastly increase the amount of oil being spilled? What if "bleeding" the well at, say, double the current release rate, for the rest of our lives, is the absolute best we can hope for?

Yep, that's the conjecture I ran into on the Innernets.

Here's the link you've been waiting so patiently for, thanks to the source, The Oil Drum.

Read the comments. Keep in mind that it's a largely anonymous forum in which both experts and paranoid cranks can be found. But of course also keep in mind that Tony Hayward is going to have to shoot his way out of the bank if he wants to live in anything other than infamy, and he's controlling your access to the truth accordingly.

I can see two potential upsides to this: first, it might maybe be the wake-up call to the dangers of our petroleum addiction, and thus trigger a real energy revolution; and second, there's no way in Hell we can fight two foreign wars while we deal with this.

A strange feeling about Google.

2010-05-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

I have this strange feeling about Google. About how they seem dead-set on competing with Apple everywhere they can, even though they're really terrible at the things Apple is good at. And even though Apple isn't particularly good at the things Google is good at. And even though Google has such a mind-numbingly large head start in their two crucial technologies - search and contextual ads - that a company like Apple most likely can't pose any kind of existential threat any time soon, even if they do end up dominating the "rich mobile ad" market. Google was never any good at rich media ads to begin with.

The feeling: it's as if Schmidt went to a board meeting at Apple one day and a lightbulb went on above his confused little head, and he heard a choir of angels on a stack of pinheads say: they're making serious money with this shit! We can do that too!

But the thing is, on the evidence they actually can't.

Google has already proven, with YouTube, that it's perfectly willing to lose billions of dollars, and possibly never recover them, preventing someone else from dominating a potentially lucrative market that might be a good match to Google's talents. But in this case you already have a leader, the market's already proven very lucrative for that leader just as it was for the pack that leader just displaced, and there's very little overlap - possibly none at all - with Google's in-house talent. Not to mention there's a little company up in Redmond that's going to take its gloves off as soon as it can find the laces; and there's a little company in Palo Alto that just placed a small bet on following Apple's lead.

I'm curious what's going to become of Google's efforts here. I could easily see them spending many billions of dollars, which they do of course have, just to somehow stay in the game. But remember, Google makes money on advertising. It would be so much cheaper for them to simply extend their domination of that market into the mobile world.

I suppose it's at least theoretically possible to beat Microsoft and Apple at the same time, each on their home turf. But it's a little like racing your sailboat against Larry Ellison: are you really sure you've got the silicon cojones for that?

Early iPad Impressions

2010-05-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a trip to Italy. While there I ate a lot of salted pig parts and picked up a shiny new iPad - and by shiny of course I mean smudgy. No, the Italians have not figured out now to make iPads out of salted pig parts and finely worked leather: I had a private courier bring it over. Here now are some initial impressions of the Jesus Tablet.

Smudgy and Reflective

The first two things I noticed about the iPad - literally before I turned it on - were its oleophilic qualities and the mad reflectiveness of its screen. As a MacBook user I long ago made peace with the reflectiveness, though I do wonder whether there isn't some kind of overlay one could use to make that go away, for example when writing in anything other than a dark tunnel. The iPad continues this Apple trend, and seemingly pushes it further. But then, the backlight is so powerful your experience is usually one of "wow this screen is gorgeous," except when it's not, and then you're shading the thing and trying angles like a geometry teacher and seeing little but your own self.

Oh, but did I say oleophilic? Isn't that supposed to be oleophobic as in repelling the oil of your dirty, dirty fingers? Isn't a single wipe across your equally dirty jeans all that's needed to make the iPad all shiny and hygienic again?

In a word: no.

This thing is a fingerprint magnet, a smudge magnet, and as such quite unsettling at certain angles. And while it's relatively easy to get it nice and clean, it's not a one-wipe operation: with a good glasses cloth it took me about 30 seconds to get the bugger fully clean. Clean enough to not bother me is another story: I get there in about 5-10 seconds with any old cotton cloth. Except of course the one I keep soaked in turpentine: don't want to mix any finger oil in there.

Fortunately, with the brightness of the screen you usually don't even notice the smudges. But even though I have no plans to share this iPad - mine mine mine! - I have a feeling I'll be giving it a good scrubbing once a week and also whenever I take it out of the house. Otherwise it just looks... icky.

As my private courier was testing the device in the US and is a mysophobe, I'm very lucky the iPad wasn't soaked in hand sanitizer for an hour after sneaking through customs.

And Yet So Much The Future

Smudges and reflections pretty much complete my complaints about the iPad's industrial design, and I even think the reflection problem is probably beatable. Beyond that, I think this is so obviously the mid-term future of general-purpose computing devices that it's laughable to think of "normal" people using anything else for their immediate computing needs.

The lack of a camera is puzzling only until you have an iPad in hand. Then you realize you'd never really want to take pictures with it. Video chat would of course be grand. We all expect a front-facing camera in the next version, and I strongly suspect they only left it out in order to have a single "must-have" upgrade feature in a year.

I encounter quite a lot of people, mostly online, asking "why not a Netbook?" Well, for me of course, and for my class of user - tech professionals, basically - it's really about which thing is the more useful extra computer. I have three laptops, two of them professional-grade; access to hundreds of servers at work; two smartphones and one dumbphone; and an iPad. This is by no means unusual in my line of work. And weirdly, the loudest anti-iPad, pro-Netbook voices are coming from people like me, for whom the issue is only about replacing the last in a chain of devices. Yes, it's true: you're never going to compile a Linux kernel in your hotel room on an iPad. But why would you want to? Ever heard of AWS?

So that leaves the other 99.5% of the developed world, for whom the iPad seems a great option as a second, portable computer (where the first might also be portable actually); and for many of whom it's more than sufficient as an only computer.

Remember that almost everything you're not satisfied with can be improved by Apple and provided in a free update. Including the need for another computer through which to get the updates. And I think that's the future: an iPad, or if you like an HP WebOSPad or an HTC DroidPad; and basta if you are not an actual professional producer of either code or some other crazily CPU-intensive product such as video. Even casual videographers will one day just have a tablet and a camera. Whatever they call "HTML Programmers" now, they'll need only an iPad. Ditto every garage bandista.

People Who Need No Computer Other Than a 2011 iPad

A partial list, assuming the iPad is fully untethered and has a videochat camera and a year's worth of software updates. Other devices might also fit the bill; I really hope they do, but I'm not holding my breath for five years.

Journalists, including Bloggers
Salespeople
System Administrators
Chefs
Doctors
University Students
Clinical Researchers
"HTML Programmers"
Editors
Tour Guides
Senators, MPs et al.
Zookeepers
Teachers
Kids
Astronauts

The Keyboard

First let me say that I love my iPhone's virtual keyboard, and I also love my Apple Wireless Keyboard. So the iPad should be that much better, right?

Not quite. I haven't tried Apple's Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad yet but I expect it to be just fine - at a cost, of course, of portability. I've also seen some other interesting Bluetooth keyboards in use. But the virtual keyboard - really two keyboards, one slightly too wide in portrait orientation and one almost right in landscape - take a lot of getting used to.

I can touch-type a bit faster with large virtual keyboard than I can hunt and peck. With the small one I hunt and peck reasonably fast with two hands, but with one hand it gets very slow. I haven't clocked it yet but I strongly suspect I type faster with one hand on my iPhone virtual keyboard than with two on the smaller of the iPad keyboards (portrait orientation).

I imagine this will just take some getting used to. And maybe a little Mavis Beacon along the way. Dan Moren wrote a nice little MacWorld article on the keyboard situation, after using his iPad for a whole month.

While I don't expect Apple will change anything about the keypad, I do expect that a lot of people will start making highly portable Bluetooth keyboards in the next year or so. Why now, when so many have tried and, er, discontinued before? Well, we've long had mobile devices that could somehow talk to external keyboards. But this is the first one with which you can actually do serious shit. Sorry Palm, it's true. Good luck with the acquisition.

The Forming Apposphere

I was more than a little surprised to find that, despite Apple's practically taunting us with the 200,000 iPad/iPhone apps, there really isn't that much of high quality available yet.

Maybe my quality expectations are high. But no Facebook? No proper editor of Office files? (Pages is nice, but it isn't that.) No really serious photo editor? No full-featured blogging app?

All of these have apps either close to release or released and close to serious, but a month into it none of these fairly predictable needs has been met.

Of course, for me, a software guy, lack of iPad apps is an opportunity. I'm actually thrilled by the dearth of compelling apps, simply because it's going to take quite a while for me to learn how to make my own and become even slightly competitive. But I can also imagining it slowing the adoption rate, especially in conservative countries like Germany, where I currently live.

The Brushes app deserves special mention as a fun, creative, and very iPadesque program. In short, it's a finger-painting program, but it's a very very good one. It's been around for a long time for the iPhone, but that was more of an affair for fetishists. With the iPad it's a much more realistic proposition.

And even if you're not an artist, I recommend Brushes for two needs you will definitely encounter over the next year or so: giving the iPad up to kids (supervised of course), and showing it off to strangers. For the latter case you need something that "does something" without, say, showing off your e-mail. Brushes will play back your drawings as they were made, and with the bright iPad screen that's a hell of a demo.

I'll discuss more specific apps and app categories in depth at a later date, but in short there are a few categories I thought would be very well served out of the gate but were not:

Newspapers - there are few dedicated apps, and what there are suck, with the New York Times giving the most egregious face-plant.
Magazines - same story, plus no consensus on whether to sell issues as new apps or do them in-app (the latter being the obvious solution).
News aggregators - yep, no good ones for iPad yet. WTF?!
Social networking - duh. Double-WTF?!
General informational apps, like... wait for it... weather. There's buggy WeatherBug, but not much else.
Professional productivity.

That last category deserves a separate note. Pages is very interesting, and a steal at $10, and a good first cut of a document composer. But it's fairly unpolished on the usability end - no doubt because of the necessarily limited pre-launch testing - and it's not at all suited to serious composition. It's great for making a good-looking, short document in a hurry on the go, but you'd be a little crazy to try to write anything serious with it. I've read similar things about Numbers, though I haven't tried it yet; and Keynote is said to be quite awesome but with serious compatibility and sync issues.

I see no reason why Microsoft doesn't come in here and offer Office for iPad for $99. OmniGroup has already successfully (so far) set the price bar for software with which you actually get professional work done: $50 for OmniGraffle. I think a real, almost-fully-compatible package of Word, Excel and Powerpoint would fetch double that. Hell, I'd pay that much for Word and Excel.

Oh wait, I can think of one reason why they're not there. They're not agile enough to come up with plausible names for their products at the moment, so breaking this sort of new ground is asking a bit much of Redmond. Well, OK, I believe they'll get there within two years, and I'm patient - but I'm not sure they'll be able to charge $99 if they wait that long. I paid $30 for OmniFocus for iPhone way back when, and then saw the market drop to dollar apps.

Price Wars?

Lurking around the App Store I discovered an interesting thing. No, it's not that there are thousands of apps that are made of duct tape and sawdust for an audience of three; we both knew that already. It's that the magic price point is $4.99.

I think Apple moved the needle there by charging $10 each for Pages and Numbers and Keynote. They had the bully pulpit and could have charged more - I certainly wish they'd moved the needle higher, but I'm not sure they could have. iPhone apps have mostly been a race to the bottom both in price and in quality.

So if you want to charge more than $10, you have to either be very coveted (maybe a popular video game) or have a case for why you're "worth more" than something like Pages. Not that you could ever break even investing an iWork-like amount of software development into an app you sell for $10, but never mind: people have to think it's "worth more."

OmniGraffle can make this claim pretty easily: it's a tool used by professionals, for whom the convenience of doing even a small part of their diagramming on a plane or a train is worth radically more. If you use an app like that for work, $50 is a steal.

But others can't. If you don't have a very obvious selling point for well-compensated professionals, you're pretty much doomed to be called too expensive if you charge more than $4.99.

The good news, of course, is that you can charge $4.99 for anything bigger than a throwaway app. Remember, probably 99% of the Apposphere is throwaway apps, for which free is the only reasonable price but $0.99 is a commonly acceptable approximation of free.

It appears that $10 is also a key price point: the basic professional app. If you have something that's not earth-shattering, that won't necessarily make people money nor save the time of highly paid individuals, but is at least a professional tool - even for aspiring professionals - then $10 is your price point. But be prepared for some negative comments.

And the bad news is that if you charge $10.99 you might as well charge $50, since people will complain all day that you're too expensive unless you're obviously not.

I don't mind, but I find it interesting. Why that price exactly? And will it hold? Or will $0.99 be the new "cheap" with $4.99 the new "expensive" and anything above that only appealing to the pros?

The Awkwardness of Holding

Another thing that has surprised me about my iPad: it's rather awkward to hold the thing. I have not yet found a good angle at which to hold it even for watching videos, much less for surfing the web or reading an iBook or typing an email.

I predict this will create a huge, lucrative and hopefully also innovative market for accessories: stands, holders, cases, the like.

I also predict that over time it will influence Apple to make the thing lighter. It's already much lighter than a laptop, but it's also much heavier than a normal book: that is, it's a bit awkward to hold it in bed or on the couch, and your hand tends to get tired interacting with it. If I'm right and most people find this the defining ergonomic hitch, I believe Apple will be strongly motivated to go lighter before they go more powerful (or go for longer battery). Once the competition wakes up, there will be competitors who will try to offer more raw power and more battery, but I have a very hard time seeing anyone get close to the power/battery/weight ratio the iPad already has. Making it lighter would be a much faster way to increase the distance from the competition.

When and if there is competition, of course. At the moment there is none. Nothing. Nobody. Not even close.

HP, with its acquisition of Palm, is the most likely contender. Google's Android OS and/or Chrome OS (designed for Netbooks) still needs a credible hardware partner, and neither Nokia nor Sony has it together right now (they could though, soon, if they wake up).

Mine Mine Mine!

One truly glaring deficiency in the operating system itself has been noted elsewhere, and I'll note it again: we need a way to either have multiple user accounts on one iPad or, better, to lock the thing into a single app.

Even in a world where every man, woman and child has their own iPad, you're still going to hand your iPad to someone else to check out that one app or that one photo album. And then you're stuck in an awkward position: you don't want to hover over them and watch what they're doing, but you also don't want them to stumble into your email (or other important document), let alone trigger one of the juicy porn links in your browser history.

And I think I really have the One True Profitable Answer to this problem. Instead of having multiple accounts on an iPad - and thus an incentive to buy fewer, and a nightmare of resource management - simply have a fast and easy way for a user to lock to one app.

There's already a bit of a precedent for this: the Picture Frame app doesn't require login, it runs - if you like - instead of the normal iPhone home screen, until and unless you enter your PIN code.

So I envision an easy way to lock an iPad into a single, running app. Say, double-click the Sleep button and you get a dialog asking if you want to lock into the current app. Once locked, the Home button just gets you the PIN-code entry option. If the app crashes, the iPad goes to sleep. And you can put it to sleep in the normal way, and if you really want to quit an app but don't have the PIN code, just hold that Home button for a bit.

I'm sure if they did this, people would immediately start screaming for the ability to lock to a drawer full of apps instead of just one. But my problem would be completely solved if I could lock to one app. I don't even want multiple accounts on my iPad: it's mine mine mine, but I'll let you use it for this oooone little app, just don't break it.

Parting Thoughts

I've had my iPad for just over a week. Yes, it's magical. Yes, it's revolutionary. Yes, it's a steal for the price. Yes, it's much more - or at least much different - than a big iPhone. No, it's not fully baked. No, the keyboard isn't easy to use. No, the App Store isn't a magical repository of life-changing software. No, we don't quite know what we're going to use it for.

But I'm old enough to remember when we figured out what to use home computers for. You felt the potential in the machines, you were sure it was a turning point in history, and of course it was. You just had to figure out what to do with them, and write or build the software or hardware or accessory to make it possible.

Ever since the iPhone came out, I've had that same feeling about mobile computers. And now I feel it with the iPad - as if Apple were trying to pull the world of "home computing" into its iPhonetastic realm of the future - the Magical Jesus Tablet Future™ but hey, it was this or flying cars, right?

Robert Hughes: Charismatic, fun, sloppy - and out of touch?

2009-12-18T18:07:00.000-08:00

I was recently pointed to Robert Hughes' Mona Lisa Curse, which is available in 12 parts on YouTube. It's a documentary about the influence of the modern market on the art world. It's also something of a polemic against that influence.

Hughes sees the Mona Lisa's American tour in the 1960's as the starting point, or at least the symbolic kickoff, of an historic realignment of art collecting. Art has come to be seen by its collectors primarily as an investment, and that activity has both priced art museums out of the market and had undue influence on the public perception of relative artistic quality.

Unfortunately, for all his gruff style and contrarian hipness even at 70, Hughes only makes half an argument.

The high prices of blue-chip contemporary art today undoubtably make high-stakes collecting a game for the rich. And it certainly is beautiful to think of a postal clerk and a librarian amassing a major collection, which was once possible and now apparently not.

At least it's not possible if you look to the activities of the rich as your arbiter of artistic quality, which Hughes of course suggests we should not. But at the same time an enormous number of people are making contemporary art, and most of them sell, if they sell at all, at prices quite compatible with a modest income dedicated to collecting.

The same argument can be made for museums: if the rich collectors are skewing the meritocracy of art, why should the museums buy what they collect? And they are not then where exactly is the problem?

Hughes doesn't tell us how this world of the rich setting the public art agenda is any different than it always was. I would argue that it's more democratic by far, even if it's more crass: a Farnese wielded far more power over the art world than a Cohen ever will.

But Hughes argues that the Cohens are lacking taste, whereas the Farnese had it. This may be true, though it could also have to do with the fact that contemporary artists are fairly autonomous and don't do their best work on commission, whereas the Pope could once upon a time tell a Tiziano to paint and the painter would give it his all.

The Mona Lisa Curse also has nothing to say about the personal enrichment of the artists themselves. Much is made of the feelings of betrayal in the early days of aggressive dealership in the US, but that was long ago. Bob Rauschenberg was already a very wealthy man by the time I first saw his work. There is a scene in which Rauschenberg confronts Mr. Scull, who has just made a tremendous profit on work by Rauschenberg and Johns. The dealer tells him, in effect, that he's just made him permanently rich, since his prices will now be much higher.

Scull is right. Rauschenberg is an ingrate. At the moment it probably seemed like precisely the opposite was true, but watching the scene in 2009 it's glaringly apparent how symbiotic that relationship was. Hughes seems to wish it weren't.

And what about the artists?

Hughes spends a fair amount of energy airing his contempt for Andy Warhol, both the man and his work. While quoting him on the Mona Lisa tour, Hughes also calls him stupid. And when discussing a collector who owned 800 Warhols, Hughes is clearly disgusted by the very concept. You can't miss the point of Warhol by a wider margin than that.

Some of the anti-Warhol tirade may also be personal. Considering how central Rauschenberg is to the Hughes canon, and considering how famously Rauschenberg disliked Warhol and his queeny tribe, there is a whif of argumentum ad hominem about the whole thing.

Another artist who takes a beating in the documentary is Damien Hirst. But here it's more deserved: the shark really hasn't aged well, neither physically nor conceptually. And the big visible woman scultpure is truly, breathtakingly awful; freshman work with an industrial budget.

However, I remember being quite inspired by some of Hirst's work when I was studying. Particularly One Thousand Years is still a strong idea. And of course For the Love of God is held up as the ultimate example of the depraved art market, but - Earth to Critic! - it's a work specifically about the depravity of the art market. He might as well have titled it For the Love of Bob.

There are plenty of other artists who have made a lot of money from the modern collecting machine. Would the world somehow be better if they hadn't? Would their art be more pure? Maybe - maybe Brice Marden would make a new picture instead of painting the same old one over and over again. But shouldn't the artists have something to say about that?

And as for the museums being priced out of the game, I see no reason why that matters or is particularly new. Collectors are not the only people who can donate artwork: if major artists don't themselves keep major works for public collections, that's hardly the art market's fault.

Finally there is a segment in which Hughes bullies a rich but clueless collector. This comes across as an utterly unfair fight. And I think Hughes enjoys it precisely because it's unfair, which is sad. The collector has already been shown earlier in the show to be no great thinker on art.

It could have been left at that, but Hughes corners him and effectively requires him to prove that he isn't very bright but thinks his possessions matter anyway. Congratulations. Having now proved, against all odds, that dumb people can also inherit great wealth, which universal conundrum shall the Critic tackle next?

So what is it that Hughes wants artists, collectors and museums to do?

As far as I can tell he wants artists to use their own hands to make works that have to do with contemporary society, as long as it's still recognizably "art."

Collectors ought perhaps to spend less and be less competitive. Less, you know, >new money.< Right, I'll get back to you on that, or my people will.

Museums should be less commercial, less sponsored, less in thrall to their donors and less crowded. I suppose the Getty has achieved that, by having the One Greater Donor and being hard to reach. I'll take crowded, exciting, whorish and available any day. And a knock-off Murakami bag from China.

Hughes is a tough and charismatic contrarian. I highly recommend the documentary. But I can't help thinking he's out of touch.

iTunes Store: Purchase HD, Download Kitchen Sink

2009-12-18T16:19:00.001-08:00

Weird: I just purchased a full season of a TV show in "High Definition" on iTunes for the first time, and it kicks off downloads for both the high-def and normal-def versions of every episode. I'm curious whether I'll be charged for both. If not then it's no big deal, but I still have some trouble imagining what having both versions is good for.

Two cool (and underreported) things about Snow Leopard.

2009-10-21T10:51:00.001-07:00

I recently upgraded my various Macs to Snow Leopard, Apple's streamlined new operating system. So far two things have caught my eye, both of them very nice surprises.

System Perl is now version 5.10.
The Activity Monitor now shows Safari Plug-Ins such as the disastrous resource-hog Adobe Flash as separate processes.

So now when your fans start going nuts over a YouTube video, you can see exactly who's to blame. As usual, Adobe is to blame. I have yet to try killing the Flash process to see if it can be done without affecting the rest of Safari, but I'm hopeful it might. As for the Perl, here are the geeky details:

kfrost@mbp ~/bloc $ perl -V
Summary of my perl5 (revision 5 version 10 subversion 0) configuration:
 Platform:
   osname=darwin, osvers=10.0, archname=darwin-thread-multi-2level
   uname='darwin neige.apple.com 10.0 darwin kernel version 10.0.0d8: tue may 5 19:29:59 pdt 2009; root:xnu-1437.2~2release_i386 i386 '
   config_args='-ds -e -Dprefix=/usr -Dccflags=-g  -pipe  -Dldflags= -Dman3ext=3pm -Duseithreads -Duseshrplib -Dinc_version_list=none -Dcc=gcc-4.2'
   hint=recommended, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define
   useithreads=define, usemultiplicity=define
   useperlio=define, d_sfio=undef, uselargefiles=define, usesocks=undef
   use64bitint=define, use64bitall=define, uselongdouble=undef
   usemymalloc=n, bincompat5005=undef
 Compiler:
   cc='gcc-4.2', ccflags ='-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include',
   optimize='-Os',
   cppflags='-g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include'
   ccversion='', gccversion='4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)', gccosandvers=''
   intsize=4, longsize=8, ptrsize=8, doublesize=8, byteorder=12345678
   d_longlong=define, longlongsize=8, d_longdbl=define, longdblsize=16
   ivtype='long', ivsize=8, nvtype='double', nvsize=8, Off_t='off_t', lseeksize=8
   alignbytes=8, prototype=define
 Linker and Libraries:
   ld='gcc-4.2 -mmacosx-version-min=10.6', ldflags ='-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -L/usr/local/lib'
   libpth=/usr/local/lib /usr/lib
   libs=-ldbm -ldl -lm -lutil -lc
   perllibs=-ldl -lm -lutil -lc
   libc=/usr/lib/libc.dylib, so=dylib, useshrplib=true, libperl=libperl.dylib
   gnulibc_version=''
 Dynamic Linking:
   dlsrc=dl_dlopen.xs, dlext=bundle, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags=' '
   cccdlflags=' ', lddlflags='-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup -L/usr/local/lib'


Characteristics of this binary (from libperl):
 Compile-time options: MULTIPLICITY PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV
                       PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT PERL_MALLOC_WRAP USE_64_BIT_ALL
                       USE_64_BIT_INT USE_ITHREADS USE_LARGE_FILES
                       USE_PERLIO USE_REENTRANT_API
 Locally applied patches:
       /Library/Perl/Updates/ comes before system perl directories
       installprivlib and installarchlib points to the Updates directory
 Built under darwin
 Compiled at Jun 24 2009 00:35:27
 %ENV:
   PERL5LIB=""
 @INC:
   /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0
   /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0
   /Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /Library/Perl/5.10.0
   /Network/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /Network/Library/Perl/5.10.0
   /Network/Library/Perl
   /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.10.0
   .

Cha-Ya: Ja ja, naja, chacha-yaya.

2009-04-14T23:50:00.000-07:00

If you're not a vegan yourself, it's easy to forget that vegans must consume their body weight in vegetable matter every four hours just to survive.

Fortunately, places like Cha-Ya are here to remind you.

Cha-Ya is a little Japanese veggie joint near my home in the Mission District. I've walked by a million times, and today I finally overcame my annoyance at their inappropriately prominent indoor cash machine and stopped in for lunch.

The first bit of good news is that there was no discernible hippie infestation. Granted, I was probably the only one there not the proud owner of a yoga mat, but my immediate neighbors were a charming and very urban lesbian couple, and a lawyer having lunch with a soldier.

The next bit of good news is that the food is actually quite yummy, if perhaps a bit more attached to the deep-fryer than I'd like. And the portions are almost intimidatingly large, until you remember it's all just flowers and leaves.

I had the lunch combo with an excellent pot of green tea (bagged, for you snobs) for $15 with tip. For that I had a very nice miso soup, a very filling and well-presented plate of deep-fried tempura veggie sticks, a large spring roll with mushrooms and more, also deep-fried, and a bowl of rice.

About half way through I thought it would defeat me, but then I remembered there are twice the nutrients in the severed head of a single sea kitten, and found the strength to continue. I didn't finish the rice, which was just plain white rice, but I polished off the rest and went waddling up the street to buy wine.

The tempura was very light. The veg sticks included carrots, yams, asparagus, something potato-like that probably wasn't, and mushrooms that might have been tofu. It came with a tasty "Tempura sauce" which was not in itself battered nor fried. It was very hot at first, and by the end was perhaps a bit too cooled, so I think there's an art to scarfing it all at the right moment.

The warm spring roll was very veggie, with tofu and mushrooms and green beans and more, served with a sweetish dipping sauce. This one actually got better as I ate more of it.

I didn't take a camera, as I'm still working up the courage to pose as a famous restaurant critic and intimidate the owners into giving me free booze. Maybe next time; for now, no pics. Unfortunately it's not that easy to find any online, as vegans generally don't use technology, are invisible, and are said to lack the opposable thumbs necessary for camera operation; in addition, Cha-Ya apparently just means "tree-spinach."

I'd recommend Cha-Ya to anyone compelled to veganism by the usual weaknesses of digestion or logic, but I'd also recommend it to ordinary foodies. I thought my selection was, as mentioned, a little on the fried side, and it could have been happier après dégustation, but I look forward to going back for some soba with mushrooms and tofu.

NOTE: Cha-Ya the Japanese Mission Vegan Joint is not to be confused with Chaya Brasserie. The former is a sedate little veg diner with no web site; the latter is an upscale Japanese Fusion chain in LA and SF with a really annoying Flash website. I go by that one pretty often too, and may yet drop in.

Do you like catfish?

2009-03-02T02:10:00.001-08:00

If you think catfish are cuddly little things, some freakish combination of cat and fish -- and who wouldn't think that? -- then think again!

Feast your eyes on this monster of a catfish caught in Lake Bileca (Bilecko Jezero) in Republika Srpska aka the Serb Republic aka Serbian Herzegovina.

All's I can say is: yummy! And I wish I'd been there. And next time I go to Bileca I'm bringing a fancy camera just in case we catch a ten zillion pound fish. Or cat.

Here's the giant catfish link: http://biztos.com/bileca/catfish/

Sync early, sync often.

2009-02-25T00:56:00.001-08:00

Update: the phone wasn't stolen after all, I somehow lost it and it somehow didn't ring when called. But this post has some interesting ideas anyway.

It's entirely my own fault. I had my iPhone in an outside jacket pocket, without being aware of this fact, in a bar, at night, in a not-so-great neighborhood, in big city in a recession, while speaking a foreign language.

So I deserve no sympathy. iPhones are stolen from better people every day.

However, it does get me thinking about a few things.

Always remember you have no automatic sync.

Of course you know that you have to connect your iPhone to your computer in order to synchronize your contacts and such. And of course it's annoying, so of course you put it out of your mind.

I just lost a week's worth of vacation pictures, and one very important phone number. I can recover about three of the pictures, which I had e-mailed to people, and I'm pretty sure I can get the phone number through a mutual friend.

But if I'd just bothered to sync once a day I would be in much better shape. And I did charge the phone, so I have no excuse: I was simply too lazy to bother with a daily sync.

Identity theft: what to do about the risk?

I was using a PIN code to prevent easy access to my iPhone. I was able to deactivate the number and reset my e-mail password without incident.

But there's still a large amount of personal data on that phone, most of it unencrypted. E-mail, address book, photos, bookmarks...

I think it's reasonably safe to assume the thieves will reset it, hardware unlock it, and sell it for about $500 on the local grey market. There's plenty of demand, and identity theft is hard work.

On the other hand there's no way to be sure somebody won't do the work and have acces to that frighteningly detailed archive of your life.

In principle this is no different than having your notebook stolen. And that's a good reminder: always encrypt your home directory and always back up your important data. (Note to self: use FileVault on the private Mac just like I do on the work Mac, as soon as I get home.)

But the iPhone doesn't have FileFault, at least not that I'm aware of. I never gave it much thought, but now it strikes me as a really bad idea to not encrypt application data in (at least) Mail and Notes.

The lack of unlocked iPhones makes theft worse, not better.

Finally, I'm convinced that theft would be a much smaller problem if provider-neutral (SIM-unlocked) iPhones were readily available.

I am quite sure that most of the gray market in iPhones is for people who want to use them with other carriers. This is particularly true in Europe, where the entire network is GSM and 3G coverage is excellent, but Apple only partners with (usually) a single carrier in each country.

It would also make life a lot easier for the theft victim. I'm still traveling for two weeks, and now I have to travel iPhonelessly.

If I could easily buy an unlocked iPhone, I could use it for the rest of my trip and then get my SIM card replaced as soon as I return to the US. It would vastly reduce the inconvenience to me, the customer, and it would make money for Apple.

But of course it would make less money for AT&T.

*Sigh* - off to ebay to look for my stolen phone.

Apple is behind the social networking curve.

2009-02-02T00:03:00.000-08:00

I know Apple isn't a "social network" and I know it's not a "Web 2.0" company (the ongoing slow-motion train wreck that is MobileMe notwithstanding).

I don't care. Apple is still my favorite technology company.

But I just had an experience that illustrated just how far behind the Web curve Steve, Tim &co are.

I was using NetNewsWire to read the latest computerite news on my iPhone. This is, I'm informed, a fairly standard way of staying informed.

I came across a post on Daring Fireball that really wanted to be opened in Safari. And so I did. And indeed, it was awesome. And I wanted to post it to Facebook, and --

This is not possible.

Fine. I went to the laptop and made it happen. Voila, just like in 1998, use the computer for the computer things and don't forget who's who.

How sad. How absurd. How simple to add a "Share Link" option after "Mail Link to this Page." Let the user configure it to use Facebook or MySpace or both or something else, as long as the (public) API is respected.

Cost to Apple: $0.00 (I guarantee Facebook would send them a dozen engineers to do the work).

I would say it's not Apple's problem, but there is a precedent: Google Maps links open in Google Maps, and YouTube links open in YouTube, and of course I would never imply anything like a conflict of interest with Apple's valued board member and competitor-on-many-fronts Mr. Schmidt.

I hope to see this soon. And if Apple really doesn't want to keep Safari up to date in these things, fine: as long as they give us the option of choosing our default browser in the iPhone Preferences.

Easy to Book.

2009-01-29T03:47:00.000-08:00

I just booked a hotel, which is something I don't do terribly often.

And while researching hotels on the wonderfully informative, horrendously designed TripAdvisor I found someone mentioning easytobook.com.

Off I went, and I was very pleasantly surprised. I ended up booking through them. It was easy.

http://www.easytobook.com/

And I got a very good deal. I recommend it.

Modernism is still better.

2009-01-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

There, I said it. It had to be said.

Twitter Train Traffic

2008-12-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

I still haven't quite talked myself into using Twitter but I suppose I'm inching towards it.

Today I ran across a really cool use of the service, but one that also shows the flaw in its enforced brevity: Swiss rail delays are posted at http://twitter.com/oev.

This is a great idea, and apparently the PR folks at Burson-Marsteller had something to do with it. The only problem is that the cornerstone of Twitter is a 140-character limit on posts ("tweets" to the kids).

So you get things like this:

Zwischen Ramsei und Langnau auf der 
Linie Burgdorf - Langnau ist die
Strecke für den Bahnverkehr un...
#sbb #cff #ffs

...which translates loosely as "Between Ramsei and Langnau on the Burgdorf-Langnau line, train traffic is un..."

Of course you could always hire a programmer to condense all that into txt-ese bt nobdy likes u thn. Or you could break it into multiple "tweets," but that breaks the paradigm.

Instead, I think Twitter should allow longer "tweets" in cases where all of the following conditions are met:

The twitterer is a robot.
The information is also available elsewhere (i.e. it's not someone just asking for special Twitter treatment).
The feed is clearly a public service.
Information would clearly be lost at 140 characters.

Traffic reports of all kinds would qualify. Updates from your political party, television show, or church would not.

Giving up on a local WordPress install on Mac.

2008-11-29T21:04:00.000-08:00

Summary

WordPress is nice, but setting up a local instance in a nonstandard environment is more trouble than it's worth. WordPress was designed for shared-hosting environments that have a classic "LAMP" application stack preconfigured (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP). It was specifically not designed to run on a wide variety of server environments.

Fortunately, for the kind of work I want to do (blog template design) there are acceptable workarounds. But this latest encounter with the MySQL and PHP ecosystems has left me, once again, sorely tempted to just build my own blogging system.

Read on if you want to geek out on some of the details. If you just want the conclusion, it is: use a standard virtual machine (VM) or set up a sandbox blog in a shared environment. Either one of those will work well enough, and the VM approach is probably the closest you'll get to a "safe" install. Unless you're being paid for the setup time, I strongly advise against trying to make it work locally in anything but a stock configuration.

Motivation

A while ago I set up a blog with a friend of mine: Migratorium. It's an outlet for our travel writing, or at least it will be.

It runs on WordPress in a shared-hosting environment over at Dreamhost: bang, meet buck, at least for small projects. I really like the WordPress user interface, but even with great templates like veryplaintxt I quickly became frustrated with the design possibilities.

In short, you have to learn some PHP (painful but not so hard) and the arcane, under-documented WordPress templating system (ditto) in order to do any meaningful design. Since I already know HTML, CSS, Perl, and Template Toolkit, I thought I'd be much happier building my own sites using those technologies. And it would keep me away from PHP, which I dislike, and MySQL, which I abhor.

Then I thought about setting up an RSS feed. No biggie, just another afternoon. Then I thought about setting up a decent editing UI. No biggie, just another weekend. Then I thought about making it easy for my non-computer-geek friends to use. Uh-oh... that started to sound like real work.

So I decided to make at least one serious effort to teach myself enough WordPress Templatese to either do serious design in that ecosystem or give it up from an informed position. And for that I need a local copy of WordPress in which to hack the templates.

Technical Goals

I'm doing this on an Intel Mac running the latest version of Leopard (OS X 10.5.5 as of this writing). I use lighttpd as my local web server and would prefer to use that, but I will use the built-in Apache if I must. I have MacPorts installed, but I would prefer to run this under the system default PHP. I also want this to run on SQLite if at all possible, since I want to hack templates, not databases.

Trying to Get There

I checked Google first.

Oh-oh. The first thing I found is that only MySQL is supported, as WordPress doesn't have a database abstraction layer. That's a shame, but it seems like an absolute.

There is one plug-in that gets you close: PDO, but its limitations make it sound just about as onerous for my purposes as MySQL itself.
Install MySQL

OK, let's see if this can be done with minimal exposure to MySQL. 2 tablespoons has some instructions for getting MySQL running under MacPorts. That almost worked, but not quite. Following more info under the comments I found I had to set the socket file in /opt/local/etc/mysql5/my.cnf:
```
[mysqld_safe]
socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
[mysqld]
socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
            
```
I also had to create the run directory:
```
sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/run/mysql5
            
```
Now I was able to start the system, but everything complained about the socket file location. I fixed that in my aliases in .bash_profile:
```
# evil mysql is required for local wordpress
alias mysql5='mysql5 --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock'
alias mysqladmin5='mysqladmin5 --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock'
alias mysqlstart='sudo /opt/local/bin/mysqld_safe5 &'
alias mysqlstop='/opt/local/bin/mysqladmin5 -u root -p shutdown \
--socket=/tmp/mysql.sock'
            
```
Backgrounding your startup command with & is a Very Bad Practice but it seems like that's what mysqld wants; I may be using the wrong command altogether. Also note that you will almost certainly have to set that socket location explicitly in other commands/configs as well. Once you have the above aliases in effect don't forget to set your MySQL "root" password (not to be confused with the system root password). Press RETURN at the Password prompt, or enter whatever the previous password was.
```
mysqladmin5 -u root -p password MYSECRETPW                
            
```
At this point I'm able to connect to the database server with mysql5 and issue some simple commands, so I consider it done-ish after about two hours of work. Further tweaks will be listed below.
Pour another glass of tasty Basque wine; do not give up yet!

This little exercise is already confirming my various prejudices against MySQL and PHP and all sloppy engineering everywhere in the universe. But man, I do love that editing UI. Must... persist! Thank you Xarmant Txakolina!
Install PHP from source. Ouch.

I'd actually gotten far enough to have the PHP running, more or less, though without valid HTTP headers and without a successful database connection. And then I hit the php-cgi wall. Turns out you have to install from source, the standard install doesn't work properly with lighttpd.

Fortunately Simplistic Complexity had a helpful blog post.

Unfortunately that doesn't work with MySQL installed via MacPorts.

I tried a few of the obvious tweaks to the make process and realized I would have to reinstall MySQL. And that's where I hit the wall.

Hitting the Wall

Having spent most of the day on this and gotten very close, I had to ask myself: Is it worth it to push on through?

Since I make software for a living I'm always tempted to put on my Big Fat Engineer's Hat and complain about the quality gaps in whatever piece of software I'm pounding my head against at the moment. But that wouldn't be even close to fair in the WordPress case: here is a product I really like as long as I don't have to look under the hood; and its content-management UI is frankly more usable than any equivalent thing I've ever built, and even if it is finicky on the server side I think the proof of its value is in the client experience.

I love WordPress for its content-management UI, and there's no special reason why its installation prerequisites or developer documentation should be tailored to my needs. If I cared that much I could contribute to the project, or fork it, or write my own.

So in the interest of fairness to a justly popular blogging system, and also in the interest of my own sanity, I gave up on my little snowflake of a local WordPress installation.

Instead, I'll try it their way and see if I can make some headway with the templates. A lot of generous people have given a lot of their time to this open-source product, and I still hold onto the hope that I can more easily beef up my WordPress templates than use (or write) a different blogging system.

To be continued (perhaps virtually).

I think the most sensible thing to do now is install a VMWare image with a recent version of WordPress. It looks like rPath has one.

That has the advantage of still being more or less "local" even if a bit resource-intensive; and if it doesn't work, it's always possible to just set up a sandbox WordPress account with an obfuscated URL.

I'll be sure to update the blog with the results of that operation when I have time for it.

Heavy web dev: TechCrunch is a 2MB page.

2008-11-26T15:37:00.001-08:00

One of the blogs I read all the time is TechCrunch: it covers the high-tech startup scene.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

You could argue that it's more than a blog since it's a full-fledged business with multiple partner sites and paid writers, but I still think of it as a blog because if its focus on immediacy. Everything is reported fast and off-the-cuff, with even the more ponderous, essay-like posts obviously written in haste.

As I was looking at it today I started wondering how big, in terms of data size and bandwidth, a site like that is. The answer: almost two megabytes for the home page.

Folks, that is a lot. Yahoo's front page, which also takes a long time to load and is also full of Flash adverts, clocks in at 445K today. The chart view on Google Finance, which has light ads but very heavy (and feature-rich) Flash, is 680K.

I'm not trying to pick on TechCrunch here: the fact is that the acceptable size of any web page has grown phenomenally in the last year or so. As an iPhone user and a Web developer I find the trend worrisome.

Of course you want to make the page as rich as possible for the user, and of course you want to maximize your ad revenue. But you have to balance that against a fundamental aspect of usability: if the page takes too long to load, or puts too great a burden on low-power devices, you are leaving a lot of potential users out in the cold.

For my part, I plan to take page size and load time very seriously in my next Web project. I doubt I'll be able to hit my Web 1.0 gold standard of 15K per page, since a decent JavaScript toolkit and a bit of Google Analytics already breaks the 100K barrier, but it's still an important consideration.

(As for TechCrunch specifically, they're very good about publishing a full RSS feed. I read that on my phone most of the time, and read the site a bit during the day since there are often embedded videos and links to other heavyweight sites that aren't as usable on a mobile device.)

Hungarian iPhone data cost

2008-10-11T19:45:00.000-07:00

It seems the iPhone is finally available in Hungary.

The bad news is that the local T-Mobile goonery thinks it's a good idea to bleed the heavy users for data charges.

This is so short-sighted it's comical: you have the one and only revolutionary convergence device in your stores, and you're trying to make an extra buck (Forint) on any unsuspecting schmuck who uses it as intended.

Being more than fair, let's look at the option with the most data, which will cost you about $90 plus tax, more or less what you would pay in America.

That gives you 4GB "data traffic" included in the price -- so we should probably assume that includes all data, Web and Mail and app and SMS and GPS and whatever else might touch the network, in both directions. Go over that and it's 0.1 HUF per 10 kilobytes.

Honestly, I think I wouldn't hit the 4GB border in a month, and I probably use my iPhone on the 3G or Edge network a bit more than average for a late-30s professional but probably a lot less than a teenager would (WiFi doesn't count towards the limit).

So how much money is that really? Let's assume you use 6GB per month, which would seem to be 50% more than T-Mobile thinks the average user would (giving them the benefit of the doubt here on ethics, even at the risk of credulity).

Let's assume they think a GB is 1000 x 1000 KB, which is incorrect but almost certainly the calculation they'd use. That means your extra 2GB are an extra 4,000MB or an extra 4,000,000 kilobytes which is 400000 10KB chunks at 0.1 HUF per.

OK, now you owe the Germans 40,000 HUF. That's about $200.00 US, a bit more than tripling your bill. For exceeding the limit by half in one month at today's (favorable) dollar rate.

This is exactly what smells bad about the arrangement. T-Mobile says 4GB is fine -- but that burns fast if you're much into YouTube, and if their prices were honest they'd be spotting you the equivalent of $400.

We know that's not the case. We know, in fact, that this is a regressive price structure directly aimed at teenagers whose parents will bail them out the first time, much to T-Mobile's benefit.

Make no mistake: business users like me won't get caught by this ruse. We're unlikely to get close to the limit, we're likely to pay attention to the contract, and we can write it off and correct the course if we go a little bit over. But the kids are not going to be so attentive, and they're also vastly more likely to spend a lot of time on YouTube and other data-intensive applications; and further, they're most likely to opt for the $50/mo plan which only gives them 2GB before the evil kicks in. That means a user in the above scenario could see a $500 monthly bill when they expected to pay $50.

This cost structure is a direct and aggressive attempt to exploit the naive and young among T-Mobile's new customer base. To take advantage of those who want to bring the future into their pockets, and who want to pay T-Mobile a hundred bucks a month for the privelege.

Shame on you, Hamid Akhavan. You had a chance to take the moral high ground, and you're fucking your customers instead. Specifically, you're fucking your customers with families..

Google Analytics log-in fails in Safari, succeeds in Firefox.

2008-09-24T02:04:00.000-07:00

Gentil Hugel - a pleasant white wine from Alsace.

2008-09-23T02:38:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been drinking some tasty and inexpensive white wine from Alsace, which you might remember as the place Tomi Ungerer comes from.

This is called Gentil "Hugel" - by itself a fun multilingual mix, like Alsace/Elsaß itself. A link where links do well:

http://www.hugel.com/en/

The web site is actually pretty charming, with things like pictures of the hotel in Macau where they went to (presumably) sell wine.

Anyhow, this wine was imported by Frederick Wildman & Sons - a pretty reliable importer, in my experience. The single bit of marketing copy that really struck me as true (from the hugel.com site) is the description of the wine as grapey.

Yes, it's very grapey. It tastes like Autumn. I recommend it. I paid twelve bucks US.

Bank of America Online is down down down...

2008-09-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sure it's just a minor, temporary glitch, but in these scary times it's unsettling when your online banking is unavailable without any explanation. At least the ATM worked... um, five hours ago...

Fun surfing: Alltop Design News

2008-09-11T03:11:00.000-07:00

I more or less randomly stopped over at http://design.alltop.com/ tonight and found lots of good design links to surf through. All of it very high-bandwidth stuff, but cool. I'm not sure what to make of alltop per se - besides better aesthetics, I don't quite get what they give me that the likes of Google and a couple good blogs don't already - but there you have it, variety is the life of spice.

fail@me.com

2008-09-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

I've been a loyal mac.com customer for years.

I recognized the Mobile Me rollout as a travesty from the start, but as a software engineer I knew what the problem was: technically oblivious upper management had forced the release of half-baked software over the authors' objections.

So far I've held on as a loyal customer, and I have no plans to leave. For me, the price is easily worth it -- if the software works. And I genuinely believe Steve Jobs was caught off guard by the rank incompetence of his web-app management, and has cracked the whip unambiguously.

I'm not going anywhere in 2008. But hey, Steve: you promised it would get good this year, and it's already September, and:

Mail I've handled on my iPhone or on me.com still doesn't "push" to my Mac 12 hours later.
The "reply" function on me.com routinely throws the web-app into a bad state ("action not allowed").
Sync from my Mac to me.com to the iPhone is basically nonexistent.

Message from me to me.com: I still love you and I believe in you, even if you made a catastrophically bad call on SproutCore. But if you don't make it work@me.com by January, I'm out. Sure, you might still keep my money, since $100 for non-mail sync and not changing my email address seems like a good deal to an old fogey like me, but still: I'll find my escape hatch and sing its praises to the world, and that would be sad.

You were never exactly the best, but you always cared. Please, me dot mac dot mobile sprout dot oops dot com, pleeease don't fail.

YouTube ads for porn?

2008-08-24T06:05:00.000-07:00

Since I don't live under a rock, I know there's a lot of crossover between pornography and YouTube. But today I saw it manifest in a brave new way.

Having followed a link from Seth Godin to YouTubeSunshine.com I semi-accidentally clicked on this video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPhgv6VrVHQ

Which got me the screenshot above. Fascinating.

(And no, I didn't click on the porn link. Could be, um, a Trojan.)

Psychedelic Cattle

2008-08-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

It's morning again, and again I'm washing my shoes. This is the ritual. This is how summer passes wraithlike through San Francisco, in a barely perceptible, stubbornly sticky coat of red-brown dust. In pitchers of Radeberger, in Porta-Potties full of bats.

The word Zeitgeist, a good German word with more than a hint of the Enlightenment about it, is almost translatable, and what it can almost be translated to in English is the spirit of the times. It's one of those words we know or pretend to know if we read the New York Times on Sunday, and pretend to not know if we really like motorcycles. But if the Zeitgeist was ever a spirit of the times, it would have to be the times of a soaring NASDAQ and resurgent cocaine chic and that glorious self-delusional high of not quite winning in the Boom. Of having more than you should, but less than you could, and in any case having it all built on a tower of some flat, syrupy artisanal homage to England.

But that wasn't really the moment. Zeitgeist was full every day then, even on the fog-bitten cold nights, and everyone could always afford enough artisanal British Columbian weed to tough it out. Some of those people still go, but the easy money's gone and the people who got theirs have bought houses and acquired offspring and a habit of not taking them to bars. The Zeitgeist is a spirit, that's as clear as Everclear, but it's not the spirit of the times.

The bartenders, mostly, are still the same. The modern primitive Webmonkey addicts have moved on, and the tattoos have settled back to the honest pedigree of a drunken night out. The ugly people have sway again, and on those warm afternoons when a breeze of gorgeous hipsters wafts over the benches you can close your eyes and remember that the crowd was pretty ugly during the dot-boom as well; it was just much better off.

Now it's back to basics, in a way. Back to people who like to ride bikes; does anyone even remember the bike-messenger fashion? Back to people who like their motorcycles more than their Ducati-branded leather jackets. Back to the rest of us too, loving it and hating it at the same time, thrilled to be drinking a fine Ossi beer in the sun in a cold town, thrilled at the focus on conversation, at the constant pickup that's rarely more than a flirt, at this tiny drop of down-market European civility in such an unlikely place - and in the same heartbeat appalled at the blandness, the lack of ambition, the hesher grunts and the standing water breeding unknown tropical diseases - and terrified, always terrified of those bats.

So maybe Zeitgeist is the spirit of timelessness, or of San Francisco's way of letting a beer sit through two generations of newcomers and still drinking it. Or maybe it's just psychedelic cattle.

(I wrote this for Brice, probably over a year ago, and mailed it to him, but his e-mail was broken that day. I just ran across it again, and I don't think I posted it anywhere, so here it is. And the bats idea was from James. )

Your camera's cell phone.

2008-08-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

Gasps of a dying brand? Or stealth futurism?

Apple's movie rental service is an insult.

2008-08-13T01:18:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been buying TV shows off iTunes. Dexter, The Wire... cool stuff, almost (but not quite) enough to make me want a TiVo or whatever the TV-watchers use these days.

Then I tried to rent a movie, just for kicks. I knew Apple had this idea that a rental is only for one day, which is straight out of 1985, but I wanted to give it a shot. Because even if the selection is clearly not aimed at people like me, the price point is: I pay $3 for a movie six blocks away, so $2.99 is a strong temptation to not take the walk, especially at night.

So I downloaded The Passenger, and watched about a third of it before falling asleep. Now, about an hour past the 24-hour mark (I was warned!) I'm lost in a confusion-profusion of shitty app development worthy of Vista Premium Super Edition.

When I enter iTunes where the movie was playing, I see it's expired. Bummer, bad business model, strong incentive to visit the Pirate Bay, but hey -- I was warned, and I ponied up my $2.99 anyway. But wait, there's more!

When I try to play the movie anyway, it sorta-kinda plays. The small preview window shows a still of what I think is the spot I left off, and the large window shows me a field of grey... but gives me the full audio. Awesome. I can spoil the plot without straining my eyes! But wait, it gets even better!

If I try to pause the movie, I'm told that stopping it is going to erase it, but that I can resume it if I like. And resuming it gives me the grey screen with the audio. Thrilling.

I finally gave up. And next time around, I'll either hit the video store or, if it's too late, maybe the Bay, or maybe -- just maybe -- pay the $10 to "buy" the movie for a single use (iTunes DRM makes it impractical to do much more, at least in my world).

It's a shame, because Apple is pretty close on this one, they just seem to have made their plans without consulting anyone who actually rents movies. Maybe they only talked to Netflix and Disney, and split what they thought was the difference.

Hey Steve, it's simple: let me watch the movie once through, no matter how long it takes, and no matter how many times I stop, start, rewind (within reason) and even quit iTunes. Let me watch it as many times as I want within 3 days of finishing the first time. Bingo, with that you will have my corner videotheque beat: they only do 3 days from the rental, and they close at 11. Of course, they have a much better selection than iTunes, but I think that's a different issue.

Honestly, it baffles me that they screwed this one up so bad. But then they completely blew the "Mobile Me" launch and I still have to wait six hours to buy an iPhone, so it does rather look like Steve's perfectionist grip is not so tight these days. Sad.

Omega Recoil at the Fire Arts Festival

2008-07-13T02:20:00.001-07:00

Tonight I went over to West Oakland to see the Fire Arts Festival, and particularly to see Omega Recoil's "Rat Scientists" performance.

It's a really fun bit of absurdist theater, in which giant rats in lab coats conduct experiments on "human" subjects beneath a giant upside-down Tesla coil. That's right, monkey boy: beneath an upside-down Tesla coil!

Beyond that, the amazing thing about the festival is all the fire. Fire looks really good. Really big flames look really good. But I actually didn't see much of anything that I'd call "fire art." Not because the art itself is the typical aesthetically immature Burning-Man-Outsider-Art sort of thing - of course it's that, and more power to it.

The reason is that it's "art with fire" instead of "fire art."

Ooh, what about a giant metal tricycle... WITH FIRE?

How about large-breasted women standing in front of.... FIRE?

Or maybe a big meditating Buddha made out of scrap metal.... WITH FIRE?

Or how about some flying trapeze artists, risking life and limb on a giant scaffolding... WITH FIRE?

To be fair, I did see a couple things that seemed to deserve the name Fire Art. There was one thing that seemed to be just a metal bucket with a flame in it. Assuming it didn't later turn into a whirlygig machine-art dingleberry WITH FIRE, then it's probably in the clear. And there was a guy who had a square column about a meter high, on a pedestal, with a fire in it, melting something on the outside. That probably qualifies too.

In that sense, the Omega Recoil show really stood out. It was fun, it wasn't self-important, it was frankly a whole lot more death-defying than any of the fire games, and it was actually about Electricity and the Tesla coil. (Presumably as a condition of participation, some wooden chairs caught fire while the hu-man subjects were basking in their electroshock mating ritual.)

(Disclosure: I live with John Behrens and Fearghal O'Dea, so I probably would have said something nice about the Rat Scientists even if I didn't like the show.)

The coil at rest.

Art With Fire.

Double your IQ or no money back.

2008-07-09T01:27:00.000-07:00

I saw this today on Facebook. I wonder if Mr. Gate is really that smart.

Thao

2008-07-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down deserve as many blog posts as there are bloggers to post them, so here's one more.

I bought the two albums available on iTunes and have been listening to them a lot lately, and they continue to grow on me, especially the earlier one. There's no way I could ever stop digging "Big Kid Table" -- in addition to being awesome, it was my introduction to Thao, when I saw her perform it solo at the Utah over a year ago.

But lately I find myself listening to both albums back to back while working, and I think I have a new favorite. But it's a secret, in case I change my mind.

If you're looking for some good new music, and above all smart, witty music, check out Thao. Plus she's smokin' hot, which is always a nice complement to talent.

Printing with TextMate, vim and Friends.

2008-06-25T03:26:00.000-07:00

TextMate and vim are my favorite text editors. Unfortunately, TextMate has very little support for printing. It's a nightmare, really, and unlikely to be fixed any time soon. The author simply isn't particularly interested in printing.

Fortunately, vim is really good at printing, at least to PostScript, and does syntax highlighting better than just about anything else. And fortunately, TextMate is designed to let its users easily hack together their own supplementary solutions, called Bundles.

My solution to the printing problem is, in short:

Print from vim to PostScript.
Convert the PostScript to PDF.
Open the PDF in Preview.
Do all this with the standard command-P shortcut.

First, here's the bundle item:

    [ -n "$TM_FILEPATH" ] && \
    PDF_FILE=~/Desktop/`basename "$TM_FILEPATH"`.pdf
    PS_FILE=/tmp/`basename "$TM_FILEPATH"`.ps
    vim \
        "+set number" "+syntax on" "+color slate" \
        "+set printoptions=number:y" \
        "+set printfont=courier:h9" \
        "+hardcopy > $PS_FILE" "+q" \
        $TM_FILEPATH &>/dev/null && \
        ps2pdf $PS_FILE $PDF_FILE && \
        rm $PS_FILE && \
        open $PDF_FILE

And here's a screenshot to make it even easier:

To get this working on your own Mac, you need to install the xpdf package from MacPorts, and then find a suitable color scheme for vim printing if you don't like the default. There's a great write-up on that last bit over on the Vim Tips Wiki. Once you've installed/tweaked/tested your scheme, just replace the "slate" reference in the bundle text above.

LIMITATIONS, QUIRKS AND BUGS

This prints in 9pt Courier, with line numbers and wrapping, because that's how I think code should be printed.
Only saved files are printed; your "buffer" is not. I may change that later.
It will probably break if the slate color scheme is not installed. That was the best scheme installed by default on my Mac, hence the choice.
The PDF is saved to your Desktop, overwriting any like-named PDF, e.g. MyModule.pm.pdf. I like having the thing on my desktop, but I may make it clobberproof later.
YMMV, it's probably buggy, and so on. If you aren't comfortable hacking UNIX, don't try this at home. I actually don't think it's good enough yet to submit to the bundle repository, so don't make any assumptions.

Az a bajom van, hogy majom van, de nem bajor, se baján.

2008-06-22T21:47:00.000-07:00

No idea why the monkeys are in my brain tonight. I ate too many bananas, that's why. http://mynameisniki.com/archives/3

I want a Facebook app...

2008-06-20T02:36:00.001-07:00

...that aggregates the notifications and "feeds" from the other, crappy, can't-be-bothered-to-try social networks I'm still on. Actually what I really want is for that functionality to be built in to the Facebook iPhone app. Because I still have a bunch of non-technical friends who joined networks like MySpace or iWiW (in Hungary) back before those networks threw their hands up and stopped caring, and I still want to know what they're up to, but I don't want to log on to those train-wreck sites to find out. (I'm lookin' at you, iWiW, selling out your home culture, and I don't mean the sale to T-Mobile. Sajnálom, de ezek a programmozók rossz gyerekek. Az üzletemberek is. You can't just screw your friends when you get a little money.) I still love LinkedIn but mostly because I like the idea of keeping business networking and social networking separate. I'm one of the few people who can see the logic of their recent $1B valuation, but they're still very vulnerable. Their viability as a business essentially depends on Facebook considering that market too small to be worth the distraction. So that's my main wish. Social networks want to be monopolies, and since we know (or think we know) that's bad for the economy we'll settle for a short list of them. My money's on Facebook, LinkedIn, and a revived Orkut (since Google can just spend its way to innovation). Meanwhile, memo to Zuck: let me give you ad feedback. I'll do it for free, just to not see ads I dislike; and I don't need to explain to you how much more valuable it will make your ad space. On behalf of everyone over 30 on Facebook, I swear this will work. Because anyone who knows me knows the following ad was a complete and utter waste, in fact borderline offensive to my sensibility. And yet I spend bushels of money online every year, much of it on random things "gaming pros" would find trivial, like books and clothes and (no, really) tennis racquets. All they need is a "this is stupid" button to motivate me (not a "close" link which is passive and will be ignored) -- and boom, you make more money. Mine is the generation of participatory permission marketing. I know how the game works, I know the technology, I know the business - and I'm willing to spend a little of my time helping you win, because I believe that better ad targeting systems are in my best interest as well. (For the record: I'm not against making a buck on video games, and I have friends who do. I'm against pretending it's something other than a simple entertainment business. Memo to head office: you're not the new Film.)

Welcome to the Clowd

2008-06-10T01:45:00.001-07:00

Seth Godin just coined a brilliant new term: "the clowd."
His post is here:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/the-clowd.html
As usual it's pretty insightful, and of course your privacy has been an illusion for a long time now anyway, but there's one thing I disagree with.
The clowd isn't the "crowd-cloud," it's the "clown-cloud."
Don't be afraid. The clown's afraid too.

Firefox: Remove from Dock

2008-05-13T00:33:00.000-07:00

Firefox 3 Beta on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) is so horrifically unstable, I finally had to remove it from my Dock.

It makes me sad. I loved the idea of Firefox, and I'm in debt to the developers in a round-about way as their once-upon-a-time best-of-breed browser helped me become a better web architect.

But now... now I'm seething. This is a small shop making over $70 Million a year, and their software crashes several times a day. I just can't take the risk anymore: I find I've been doing things in Firefox half-expecting it'll crash and I'll be able to recover from a page reload. But that's often not the case, and anyway isn't this supposed to be the Future? I don't need the Windows 98 flashbacks.

Guys (and Mitchell) - why the hate? I always loved you, I beta-tested your browsers since pre-1.0, I fought the good fight inside major corporations for your acceptance back when you were poor... and now this-- this rat-faced crashtopia.

On the bright side:

Firebug's Joe Hewitt works for Facebook and is hopefully getting rich, one of the few to deserve it.
Yahoo is hiring a Firebug developer, and this has Job Security written all over it.
Safari is significantly outpacing Firefox in new browser development.
Opera is back from the (comfy Euro-)grave with an interesting JS debugger.
Firefox 2 with Firebug on Windows XP is still stable enough I can do all my WinXP sanity-checking there (except for MSIE of course, for which I need to consult the Quirksmode Oracle every ten seconds).

So now I find myself trying to readjust to Safari as my primary browser, since Firefox is so unreliable. And I like it fine, but for two things that have always bugged me, and for which I believe I have fixes.

First, I don't like that Safari doesn't tell me the URL of a link I'm about to click on. I guess Apple must have asked around and found people generally don't care. But I'm just geek enough to care, so I'm going to make it do that again.

Second, I think Apple made a horrific (and uncharacteristic) usability mistake when they decided that command-1 through command-0 (10) would open the cardinal bookmarks in the current tab, instead of doing what every other power application does and switch among the first 10 tabs.

I already fixed that in Tiger, so it's not a big deal. But I remain slightly frustrated that Apple still doesn't quite get tabbed browsing. I'll be sure to post the fixes back here; and Apple, my dear, if you disagree on the tab navigation item then bring it on, I love you but I'll kick your ass on this one.

That's all for now, I have another hour of playing with KeyNote before I can crash in my own right.

The palaver is (temporarily) finished.

Lines on a Plane

2008-05-10T22:45:00.000-07:00

It's been almost two years since Snakes on a Plane. A good, fun, low-mental-energy B movie, and in fact a meta-movie if you know the back story. At its heart is one very good line, delivered by the inimitable Samuel L. Jackson: I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!

I saw that one on the big screen and almost immediately had an idea for a fun little web project. I spent a very long weekend tweaking some fairly complicated CSS to get just the look I wanted; and I made sure at every step that it worked in Firefox and Safari.

I figured I could just conform it to Internet Explorer at the end, with a little help from Quirksmode. What was I thinking? When I looked at it in IE, I wanted to cry. Partly because I realized it would take another whole weekend to make it work, and partly because I was reminded that wed designers still have to worry about that scourge, that rat-faced imbecile of a browser.

Anyway, long story short: I didn't make any noise about the project because I thought I'd eventually get around to making it work in IE. But now I don't care: it's a funny little project and Internet Explorer is the devil anyway. It still seems to work in Safari and Firefox, and is probably broken in Explorer.

The project:

Lines on a Plane - what should Samuel L. Jackson say in the sequel to Snakes on a Plane?

Check it out. Be funny.

Firefox Beta 3.05 for Mac: Crash me a River.

2008-04-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

I've been trying out the latest Firefox 3 beta (Beta 5) on my various Macs. In many ways this is a huge improvement, but in one pretty important way it's a step backwards: I now get many, many crashes per day. So many that I'm starting to have a Windows flashback. Today, for example, I can't work with it at all. Every second time (approximately) that I enter a search term in on Google, it crashes. Looks like I'll have to reinstall, which is a bummer. This is all par for the course, after all I'm voluntarily testing software. What scares me, though, is a rumor I heard that Beta 5 is the release candidate. It is very far from stable enough to be the release candidate, and I'd hate to see the Firefox Corporation damage their reputation by releasing beta software as final.

Bank of America (BofA) Screws Up Your Taxes

2008-04-13T23:50:00.000-07:00

Update: after wasting a bunch more time talking to robots and robot-like people on the phone, I got half an answer. The 1099-INT was, correctly, not filed for my savings account. However, what happened to the "Keep the Change" 1099, if it exists, is a mystery. I could not find any reference to it beyond the blanket statement that a 1099 gets filed on "Keep the Change" refunds. I had to file without that information. And oddly enough, as far as the savings account goes, the robot on the phone was perfectly happy to tell me what the robot on the website kept secret. So this may all come down to bugs, bugs, bugs. I bank with BofA, and in general I'm pretty happy with them. They screwed up once and charged me an incorrect late fee, but then I was too lazy to call them on it so I can't complain too much ($40 doesn't buy a lot of my time these days). But outside of that, they've been about as pleasant as you could expect from a bank. However, for a procrastinator like me, their tax service is simply horrible. It turns out that if you receive more than $10 in interest, you bank is supposed to send you a 1099-INT form. Except of course I've opted into "paperless" service from BofA, so I never get any statements etc. in the mail. Nor did I get a 1099-INT. So, doing my taxes at the last moment, I went looking for the information online. You know, electronic banking and all that. Quoth the bank:

How can I get a copy of my 1099 form? IRS 1099 forms (also called "Year-end interest-paid statements") are mailed out by the end of January. You should expect to receive your statement in early February. If you have not received your form by February 15, please contact us at the number found on your statement. Your 1099 form is not available online.

Awesome. Of course it's April 13th, two days before the deadline, and I'd really like to get this done. More specifically, I'd really like them to honor their promise of a paperless account. We're talking about a whopping $70 or so, and they can't add that up for me and present it in a "Tax Info" box by my account summary? Oh, but it gets worse. You probably wonder why I don't just add it up myself. I would, except BofA only keeps one year's worth of records. I realize disk space costs money, even if it isn't much money. But must I honestly accept that nobody at the nation's largest bank thought about the fact that one does one's taxes, at the earliest, in the 13th month? Is it really so hard to save two years' worth? Are your valued online customers not worth the extra few pennies a year? Sorry, BofA. This all fairly reeks of incompetence. You have no excuse, really, none. And you know what? You can keep your $70, I'd rather opt out of the interest than have to file for a tax extension just to get you to send me this simple bit of arithmetic. Now I have to make the odd choice of guessing (and overpaying) on my taxes, or putting them down to the wire in the hope of getting my information over the phone tomorrow, or requesting an annoying extension due to the shortsightedness of some bone-headed luddite manager at Bank of America. I'm more or less locked into BofA for payroll reasons, so I can't just ditch them. But I will certainly take a good look around this year and see if I can't find someone else to handle the rest of my banking. Someone, perhaps, who can do sums online; someone, perhaps, who can be bothered to live up to their own hype about "paperless" accounting. Maybe it's time to at least sign up for Mint, where I bet they keep your records for as long as their capital holds out. It's sad, really. They're pretty good at other things, and I didn't expect them to drop this ball so badly.

Support the Idea Tax

2008-04-12T21:52:00.001-07:00

The music industry is pushing for a "music tax" -- that is, they propose that essentially everyone in the US should pay to support the companies that support musicians. This is stupid on many levels, from the exclusion of non-signed musicians to the assumption that the government should shore up a very rich industry's lack of business-model agility to the notion that commercially viable musicians are somehow more "artists" than we painters. However, I have an even better idea, an extension of the same theme only with Logic on its side: the Idea Tax. It's simple. Lots of people have good Ideas. Some of those people share them freely with the world, others patent them in an attempt to intimidate their fellow-thinkers and make a buck without doing any real work. But as more and more people choose to simply share -- for example, on blogs -- less money accrues to the Idea Artists. And since the overwhelming majority of verifiable, registered Idea Artists have placed their Ideas in the care of corporations, those corporations suffer disproportionately: in short, the amount of money they make through intimidation as opposed to effort might be decreasing, and if you ask them they will happily provide statistics proving that case. No corporation, no matter how lacking in initiative or creativity or viable business models, should be forced to give up the money it takes away from the public good. So the public should make up for the difference. And the public, as they say, is us. The Idea Tax works just like the proposed Music Tax: everyone who uses Ideas, no matter what the source, puts $10 per month into a common fund. This fund is then distributed quarterly to the holders of patents, on a simple per-patent basis, so the more patents a corporation (or, in rare cases, an individual) has, the greater their share of the fund. This tax is completely voluntary. Nobody will force you to pay. The cost will simply be added to your phone bill, and your phone company will pay on your behalf. If your phone company doesn't pay it will be barred from using Ideas of any kind, so of course it will pay. (Since it's impossible to know exactly uses Ideas and who just muddles along without them, we'll just assume that people who communicate by phone use Ideas, that's close enough.) If you really don't want to pay, you can opt out for a simple, annual processing fee of $120. Support the Idea Tax: because without Ideas, you'd be dumb! For more on the music tax, see: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/28/the-music-tax-details-of-the-plan-they-dont-want-you-to-know/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/12/sorry-im-not-buying-this-new-touchy-feely-approach-to-the-music-tax/

Google Blogspot UI Failure -- sigh business as usual.

2008-04-01T00:16:00.001-07:00

The big G has my cookie. I'm OK with that. I figure the day they mishandle the Gookie they'll take down so many Senators nobody will notice what I was up to. But the funny thing is that they still, still screw up the Blogger UI. Shall I enter your CAPTCHA? Or shall I enter my login credentials on your blog-hosting site? Or shall I do both? Answer: to post a comment on blogspot.com you must do both. At least if they already have your cookie. Because Google, being itself a multi-billion-dollar robot, thinks its users must also be robots. Better check on that.

More Apache2::Cookie hackery

2008-02-16T22:14:00.000-08:00

It turns out I forgot one thing in my previous post. You need to explicitly load the module in apache (in your httpd.conf) or some of the stuff will fail (though some of it will work fine). What you need is this line, or its local equivalent, in your config file (I use httpd.conf, I'm so old): LoadModule apreq_module modules/mod_apreq2.so That assumes your modules are in a directory called "modules" under your ServerRoot, which in my experience is so much the common arrangement as to be effectively mandatory. That means the ServerRoot should be the real, standard server installed root directory, such as /usr/lib/apache2. Ah, but then HTML::Mason will try to cache things in your ServerRoot, which is not good; remedy that with: PerlSetVar MasonDataDir /var/whatever/cache/space So, OK, I guess I forgot two things.

Installing Apache2::Cookie (and friends) on Ubuntu Server

2008-02-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

Eureka! It worketh! Hopefully. After a few hours of dismal struggle, I finally got libapreq2 with its Perl libraries to install on Ubuntu Server. I need them for Apache2::Cookie, so the default apt-get install of libapreq2 didn't do it for me (don't even get me started on Ubuntu's spaghetti packaging). Anyhow, I still can't get the thing to install via cpan, and looking at all the failures in its test reports I'm not surprised. But I did get it to build from source, and pass all its tests, and install, though I haven't checked yet that it actually works (I'm naively trusting the unit tests). Here's how I got it working. 1) Get the source and unpack it, since cpan (and -MCPAN) probably won't be able to install it for you. 2) Double-check the Perl modules listed in the PREREQUISITES file. The dependencies aren't handled gracefully, so you'll want to install those before trying anything else. 3) Make sure you have the following dev packages installed, in addition to the normal packages that got your server up and running. This isn't covered in the instructions, and you'll get somewhat cryptic error messages if you don't do this stuff first. sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-perl2-dev 4) Configure the Perl way (./configure failed for me) thus (the option is MANDATORY): perl Makefile.PL --with-apache2-apxs=/usr/bin/apxs2 5) Build away, from here out it was smooth sailing with just some mysterious (but presumably valid) skips. make make test # if all tests passed, then: sudo make install While I was slogging through this I was collecting some info that might be useful to the developer, and I was going to file a bug. But now that I'm through it, it seems like the bug is pretty vague ("sloppy build, possibly not cpan-compatible") unless I spend a few more hours investigating, and I don't have the hours. There are already several open build bugs and a pretty scary failure report on the testing service, so I'm hopeful that when/if this code gets out of purgatory my problems will go away too. Now it's off to the races, and hoping that the code itself is as solid as the build was shaky.

Installing apxs2 on Ubuntu Server

2008-02-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

Ah, another happy Saturday doing sysadmin crap. I had a lot of trouble scaring this information up, so maybe a blog post will help the next person. In order to get apxs2 installed on Ubuntu (and probably Debian) you must install apache2-threaded-dev (or possibly a non-threaded equivalent). You will start to care about that if, for example, you want to install Apache2::Cookie, which depends on APR::Request, which is messy. But oh, wait, that module is broken and won't install anyway. If I figure out how to fix it, I'll probably post again for the same imagined posterity... currently the thing says my perfectly good apache2 binary is bad. Anyway, regardless of that problem, you will also be unable to install APR::Request without an apxs2 binary, and you'll have a hard time finding that on Ubuntu unless you sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev (or equivalent).

R.I.P. Ernesto Illy

2008-02-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

Ernesto Illy, coffee scientist and friend to espresso lovers everywhere, has died. He was 82 years old, and from the sound of it he lived them well. From Hungary through Trieste to the world, the Illy family has done well by doing good. Rest in peace, Dr. Illy. Coffee Geek obit 2005 interview Business Week obit

I am 46% likely to eat my buddies in a blizzard.

2008-02-02T17:15:00.000-08:00

46%

This Like That

2008-01-23T14:49:00.000-08:00

Another little project I threw together recently: This Like That What's it do? Simple: it collects your associations, similes, counterintuitive connections. It's anonymous, but I'll delete anything too annoying (unless it's really funny). It works like this: A toothless gear is like a root canal. A root canal is like __________________. That's it. Great things can grow from simple structures. Now go enter a few, it's fun! It's at http://www.thislikethat.com/ naturally enough.

TextMate Bundle Installer

2008-01-23T14:37:00.000-08:00

In a nutshell: if you want to install new TextMate bundles with a minimum of aggravation, you need GetBundle. I was just searching for this for the third time recently as I'd forgotten the name of the relevant bundle, and it was really annoying how hard it was to find. So here's hoping the situation improves for the next person with Yet Another Blog Post about how to install TextMate bundles without mucking around with subversion and the shell. Again, folks, the TextMate GUI Bundle Installer Bundle is called GetBundle and it's on Valicode here: http://projects.validcode.net/getbundle Enjoy!

Steve Kirsch Solves the Spam Problem Once and For All, Dammit.

2007-12-03T23:38:00.000-08:00

Steve Kirsch, a successful hardware and software entrepreneur and pretty rich dude, is the latest to have come up with the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem. This places him in good company, including other rich dudes like Paul Graham and sadly still un-rich dudes like me. He's put up at least $5M, which sounds like a lot but is in fact a smaller portion of his net worth than my quarterly bar tab is of mine. Not that that's unimpressive; I drink a lot of beer. In honor of his entry into this elite (*cough* not *cough*) club, I offer up The Form. Original author unknown. (Disclaimer: I work for the competition.)

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have
other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was
passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Firefox 2.0.11.12.13.14... still a shit-show.

2007-12-03T23:05:00.000-08:00

The well-heeled open-sourcerers over at the Firefox Corporation have been releasing ultra-minor updates at a furious pace lately. Just days on the heels of 2.0.10, they shot me 2.0.11. And just minutes after that, my MacBook CPU spiked to >=100%, fans whirring, on a total of 8 open tabs, none of them exotic, in a single window. And the icing on this particular turd-cake: I use a Flash blocker because Adobe can't clean up Macromedia's code enough for it to run properly on a Mac. Yes, I click every single little Flash animation that I actually want to see, and yes, it's a pain, but it generally saves me from force-quitting my browser. So if Firefox blows so hard lately, why do I still use it as my primary browser? One word: Firebug. It's still the best JavaScript developer's tool anywhere... possibly the best client-side web developer's tool, period. The fact that a lot of the dumber webmasters of the universe still don't support Safari is a growing annoyance now that I'm one of the many people browsing via iPhone. Using Firefox as my primary browser was generally a safer bet. And yet, lately, with every expectation that 2.0.12 and 2.0.13 will be buggy as well, But is it buggy enough to make me give up my Firebug? It might be, at least for everyday browsing. I finally got around to AppleScripting command-number shortcuts for tab selection in Safari (a thing Apple, for some reason, doesn't get), so it's really just an acclimation question. Besides, Firefox renders fonts in Ugly-Sans no matter what you do. PS, why am I being so hard on the poor Firefox crew? Because when you make 74 million bucks a year and you're the number-one browser for even semi-clueful people around the world, you can afford to spend on engineering and QA. And you have, frankly, having built that lucrative business on the goodwill and technical help of your users, an obligation to not screw it up.

Is your giant dirty?

2007-09-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

Firefox goes to 11.

2007-07-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

It's pretty well known that Firefox 2 for the Mac has some CPU and memory issues. It's also pretty well known that Adobe's Flash Player for Mac is a bloated, processor-hogging swine that wouldn't know an optimization if it were bit on the ass by one. In case you have a Mac and were wondering why everything would slow down and your browser might even lock up if you were on a page with more than one YouTube video, that's the reason. But today it got out of control. I loaded a background tab that probably had a bunch of Flash embedded in it, but I'll never know as the app locked up so fast I couldn't get to the tab. And then I saw why: Firefox was using over one hundred percent of the CPU! It was fluctuating between 102% and 104%. Before any of you heavy math types get all huffy with your talk of impossibility, let me just say that my iPhone was docked at the time, and I think its processor can probably just about handle an extra 5% of my Macbook.

ATT needs 10 business days to execute two SQL updates.

2007-07-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

I just had an amusing phone conversation with AT&T. It turns out that in order to transfer a DSL account - with permission and cooperation from both parties -- they need ten business days. As every computer geek knows, this should be matter of two statements issued to a database. I already have an AT&T account (for my iPhone) so, if my customer_id were 12345 and the land line 123-555-1212, it would be something like:

UPDATE residential
   SET customer_id = 12345
   WHERE phone_number = '123-555-1212';
UPDATE dsl
   SET customer_id = 12345, contract_start = current_time()
   WHERE phone_number = '123-555-1212';

Granted, I'm joking a little bit -- but only a little bit. Presumably there would be a few more INSERT or UPDATE statements to make note of the fact that the previous owner gave up his service, and that I'm an iPhone customer, and so on. But presumably that would all be nicely hidden away behind a pretty little web application for the customer service representatives who are now kept busy explaining that it all takes 10 business days and there is nothing, oh nothing they can do about it. Like hire competent programmers for example. The representative understood why I found it frustrating, but assured me it had gotten much better: it used to take 30 days. Even now, they turn the thing off, wait for it to be really-really off, take a break, eat a sandwich, have a beer, then turn it on again. And furthering the irony: I'm reasonably sure I'm going to end up with a second account, and they will be unable to consolidate billing onto my existing AT&T account. So why bother with all this anyway? I happen to be going on vacation exactly when the 10 days should happen. And while Speakeasy has much better service, it's probably not worth the money for my expected use of the line.

Blogger can't parse HTML entities.

2007-07-14T15:38:00.000-07:00

I was just setting up a post about the company formerly known as Ma Bell, and Blogger informs me:

ERROR
These characters are not allowed: &

Presumably they're worried about the dense jungle of HTML entities. The dense, well-documented, utterly predictable, routinely parsed jungle. Of course they can parse them in some places, just not in others. And of course the big G. makes it really really hard to file bugs, so we just have to blog about it.

To: Sergey
From: Frosty
Subject: Again with the Google problems!

Sergey,

You can make four billion dollars a year on text ads, you can map the
known universe, you could probably put a man on the friggin' moon;
but you can't write a regular expression.

What gives?  Is it the coke, or the bloated HR apparatus?

Get Eric on this one, it's embarrassing!

static.google.com

2007-07-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

If you're a web developer, you probably get the whole idea just from the title of this post. It's not my idea; it's probably been had by a lot of other folks to, but I ran across it first on Richard Tallent's blog: http://www.tallent.us/blog/?p=7 In a nutshell:

"I think it’d be spiffy if Google hosted a few FOSS Javascript, CSS, and image resources, and encouraged all web designers to link to them rather than hosting the files themselves."

Things like Prototype, MochiKit, various icons and so on. The main upside for Google is that give a really big push to rich web apps, just at the moment when they're starting to really break through (witness iPhone). The big win for everyone else is that rich web apps load a whole lot faster (effectively centralizing the caching, and serving from the fastest servers anywhere). Potential downsides? Google knows more about your visitors, but do you care? Aren't you using Analytics and AdSense already? Also, your site's availability is tied to Google's. Again, do you care? At this point the Internet is down if Google is down, at least as far as normal users are concerned (and this is all about normal users). The other really cool thing I could see coming out of this is a general increase in the quality of free graphics (icons, backgrounds, etc.). It would be a very serious mark of prestige to have Google hosting your icons; and it would mean enormous exposure (assuming they're good). There are already some very good free icons out there, but this would be the incentive to bring that to the next level. And then everyone wins: talented designers get fame and lucrative contracts, developers and users get fast-loading high-quality graphics, Google helps push the Online App experience. Well, maybe Microsoft doesn't win. But hey, they have Vista, right?

Budapest Tour Guides and Apartments

2007-06-10T18:48:00.000-07:00

Some people, when they go to Budapest, get to stay with my friends and pretty much have the time of their lives. Now you can have essentially the same experience even if you don't know me! ;-) My buddy Pál (as in Paul) has teamed up with some awesome people to offer very personal tours of Budapest as well as downtown Budapest apartments for short-term rental. Lots of people do the rental thing, and I'm sure his are as good as anybody's (I can vouch for the locations). But the thing that makes this special is that Pál knows everyone in that town. No, seriously, everyone. He knows more people in Budapest than I do, which is something. (He has the advantage of being Hungarian, but still...) When he says he'll take you to meet artists and vintners, he really means it, and they'll actually be good artists and vintners, not the Váci utca tourist crap. So there you have it. If you're going to Budapest, or for that matter anywhere in Hungary, and you want to have a great time and see the real insider's version, but you don't already have friends there -- then ditch that stupid guidebook and send Pál an e-mail (or just call him, he speaks English). They offer prearranged tours and creative as-you-like-it accompaniment in English, German and Spanish (Gina is a native speaker, which is not very common in those parts). I would especially recommend them to people who are interested in the authentic cultural and culinary delights of Budapest (yes, including bars). Here's the URL, pretty easy to remember if you can remember that Paul is Pál in Hungarian (plus he's totally a pal): http://www.palsapartments.eu/

VernissageTV Art Video Blog

2007-06-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

I just found a cool new art blog called VernissageTV. "Verissage" means "art opening" and that's largely what the blog is about. Or should I say vlog? No, I don't like saying vlog, it sounds dumb. VernissageTV, as its name implies, has a lot of video content available for free download. Beyond that, they also have your standard link-to-stuff blogging (you're soaking in it!) and a PDF virtual magazine, which is mostly pictures and hard to manage at a whopping 10MB for one issue. They're based out of Basel, the Swiss center of art and pharmaceuticals, but almost all the content is in English. Some of the stuff is obviously only of interest to us art geeks, but they also have virtual tours of major shows you might not otherwise get to see, as well as some pretty fascinating interviews. What they don't have much of is server capacity. Downloading the videos was sloooow. And the funny thing is that they're also selling the content on DVD, presumably in high quality. Note to VernissageTV: that's what YouTube is for. Put the low-quality version there and let Google worry about the bandwidth, then sell the high quality version (ideally on the iTunes store, but that's another topic). Likewise, their hosted PDFs feature gargantuan images poorly compressed. I get the general impression they aren't very tech-savvy, and I hope that situation improves. One of their people has a Flickr page that's much, much easier to play with than the PDFs, so you should start there if you want more "illustration" than the blog provides. I've tossed this one into my "ART" bookmarks folder, and I recommend a visit. Just don't go on dial-up.

Google, hire a copywriter already!

2007-06-03T02:51:00.000-07:00

Google has this new tech out called Sketchup (acquired of course, they don't seem to do new tech in-house anymore). The deal: 3D modeling for non-professionals. Pretty cool, and I think the Google angle is about improving Maps/Earth through user-generated content. But OMFG the writing...

Developed for the conceptual stages of design, Google SketchUp is a powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software. It combines a simple, yet robust tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design.

Yet yet what? Come on, big G! I know you're a kingdom of dorks, but you're a very rich kingdom. Would it be so tragic to hire someone who cares about the English language?

Google Analytics

2007-06-02T18:23:00.000-07:00

I have to say, I really like Google Analytics. It's a free site stats system based on Urchin, which Google bought a while back. It uses Javascript and is unobtrusive in modern browsers. You get really nice, clicky stats. There are a couple problems with it: first and most importantly, it doesn't give you any information on file downloads nor on errors. For that you still need your old-fashioned server logs. The other problem is that everything about it is geared towards sites making money with AdSense. But that's hardly surprising, and after all it's the reason Google can give the service away free: in addition to being useful for site owners, it helps them help Google help them make money. I'm trying it out on several sites for a little over a month now, and I'm very impressed. I just added it here as well - though I was a bit surprised Google hadn't already integrated that into Blogger, which they also own.

Google Maps: Awesome Europe

2007-05-26T15:43:00.001-07:00

I'm playing around with Google Maps lately. You can mark things on their global map and put information around your "pin" and make the whole thing public. This, I like. My first attempt at a "public map" is Awesome Europe, and the first entry is of course Bileca, where I hope to vacation again this summer. Unless I get too bored with it, this map will grow. I'm not giving away all my secrets, but I will highlight some places you probably haven't been to, and should check out if you're good company. ;-) Enjoy!

TypePad as CMS: Maybe the next time.

2007-05-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned earlier, I thought I could use TypePad Pro from Six Apart as a general-purpose content-management system (CMS) for a magazine-like web site. Short answer: no dice. There were a couple problems around the difference between blogging and content management; a couple issues of usability; and one show-stopping oversight I can't understand. Blogging is not CMS. I knew that, but I thought it was close enough. After all, the difference between an "online magazine" and a "multi-author blog" is very, very thin. And I don't doubt you could just change you notion of a magazine and be fine... or perhaps you shouldn't even be thinking of a magazine, you should be thinking of a blog. But I care a lot about how this thing will look, and I also care about easily playing around with monetizing options like Amazon Affiliates and Google Adsense. I don't expect to make money, but I do want to play with technologies that at least in theory could make me money. All of this, unfortunately, is really hard with TypePad. The default templates are gorgeous, but customization is a nightmare -- I'd really expected them to have radically improved that end of their business since my experience with Movable Type a couple years ago. But it's still about pulling teeth. There is of course a plug-in architecture, as befits a popular web service. But that too is difficult to install and administer. I know Six Apart knows their current ad offering is a joke; they're looking for a good programmer to make them a new one. And yes, they do have some minimal Amazon integration. What I missed, surprisingly, was tight integration with Google services and with other content (Flickr/Yahoo) and commercial (Adsense/Amazon) offerings. I do realize these are in some way Six Apart's competitors, but we've reached the point where not working with Google is like not working with e-mail. Incestuous Usability. Wow, what a phrase. It's not what you think! Seriously, TypePad has some very cool features, but it's overwhelmingly obvious that their UI team is stuck in a rut. It's natural enough: things are added, the large customer base gets used to them and gives feedback, things are refactored, and so on -- with the end result that you can do a whole lot, but unless you're a veteran user of the system it's shockingly non-obvious how to get your work done. That's what's incestuous about it: I'm sure it's the best thing ever for the people who've been there for years, but its objective quality is not very high. What it really needs is a complete UI overhaul, ideally with some usability experts from a good Mac house like Omni Group or Panic. Or even get Zeldman's team, they're smart enough to get you 95% there. I also had some general nits but they're more likely about personal preference than anything else. I'd mostly like a more application-like posting experience; Blogger is actually better in that, despite the asinine link layout. The show-stopper: stupid mod_redirect tricks. Still and all, I was really tempted to give it a go for a couple months and see if the zero-administration angle could make up for the lack of easy customization. But I found one thing I just couldn't accept: their domain hosting is broken. Quoth Six Apart:

The mapping sets up your http://www.example.com address. To enable the http://example.com address (without the www) to work with your site, you would use a redirect from http://example.com to http://www.example.com. How this is set exactly depends on your registrar. Some registrars will allow you to use the forwarding option to redirect your non-www address.

For non-technical readers: that means you have to fiddle with the technical hosting bullshit anyway, even if you just want to use your domain name for your blog, because you need people to be able to type "someblog.com" into the browser and get to you. I've thought about this quite a bit, and I can't figure out what Six Apart's mental block is. I can only guess it's a tricky scalability problem, since I know they have some really smart people working there, so they've probably already tried the five or six solutions I thought up in an afternoon. But at the end of the day, I'm sorry, there's no excuse. For that matter, I think Six Apart should lower the burden on their nontechnical users and just provide DNS and a decent webmail system (or use Gmail, see above). Imagine this: to make your domain your blog, just set the name servers to NS1.TYPEPAD.COM and so on; then connect the domain to your blog in your TypePad control panel, and optionally add some e-mail addresses which you can then access via webmail.typepad.com. Most hosting providers offer something similar if less well engineered. Hot San Francisco startup can't do better? Nope. Wrong answer. Why does this bug me so much? For me personally, it crosses a line: if I have to worry about any administrative thing outside of TypePad, I might as well host it myself. But I'm a big techie; the other thing that bugs me is the thought of all the people who are TypePad's more natural customers, who don't know much about computers or the Internet, and will waste hours of their time trying to set things up right, and most likely end up with a half-broken solution anyway. Are you listening, Barak? You guys should be the industry leaders on this point! OK, so I got all worked up about the technical part, now I might as well also note that the help text is technically incorrect; it may or may not have to do with your registrar. Nyah. Plan and Recommendation. I'd like to try WordPress next, but only if I find a very good hosted solution. I know half the point is that you don't need hosting, but I still like the idea of minimizing my administrative overhead. The other thing is that WordPress, for all its glory and following, requires two technologies I consider scourges of the Internet: PHP and MySQL. I'm a Perl guy, so I know what it is to take abuse; but I'll go out on a limb and say that anyone who likes MySQL doesn't understand the intrinsic beauty of databases; and don't even get me started on PHP. These technologies are no longer welcome anywhere I have sudo. So I may just roll my own, or I may fall back to that venerable technology known as "HTML." It would probably be more fun to write a TextMate publishing bundle than a blogging system anyway. However, for all my complaints I would still recommend TypePad to a broad class of users. If you need a blog, and you're not necessarily trying to do some super crazy geeky tricks, and you only kinda-sorta need it on your own domain name (or don't at all), I think the low administrative overhead and pretty good reliability and very friendly, helpful community of TypePad add up to a deal that's easily worth the small fees they charge. Some really influential people use it, including Seth Godin, though you'll notice he's not bothering with the domain mapping. I think the folks at Six Apart genuinely have their customer's best interests in mind, even if they occasionally fail to deliver. If "roll my own" isn't something you could or would consider anyway, and you don't want a big setup hassle, you should give TypePad a 30-day trial and you may find it suits your needs. My needs, it turns out, were more complicated.

Villa Teresa Prosecco Veneto

2007-05-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

This is a yummy, light, organic Italian prosecco that's perfect for breakfast, or a light lunch, or the hell of it. It's from the Veneto of course, a great place for white wines and Hemingway. It has exactly the "strohgelb" color advertised to its Germanic consumers, which is to say the crisp airy yellow of straw. And in another rare example of wine advertising being spot-on, it does indeed smell of unripe apples. (By the way, Germans are crazy about prosecco so it's normal that the German blurb is better-written than the English.) I had half a bottle with my huevos con chorizo today, and am finishing it off whilst surfing the net. Highly recommended. Cost: $10 at the corner store. The bottle has a nice shape to it, though oddly enough I had to use a screw to remove the cork: the top bit was insufficient to get a good grip. If you're buying a bottle late at night to drink on the street, or some sunny morning on your way to the park, factor that in. I'm sure it could be opened without a corkscrew, but it wouldn't be easy. Apparently the same folks make a Pinot Grigio, which is no surprise considering the region. I'll keep an eye out for it. Unfortunately I only have phone-cam pics as my proper camera is at the office. And here, in "fair use" mode, is a bottle shot I snagged online.

Python Blogging

2007-04-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

My fried Toby has switched from Ruby to Python, and he's blogging about it: http://blog.cbcg.net/articles/category/python His first Ruby vs. Python post got picked up by Reddit and attracted a lot of attention. Toby's a serious programmer and a pretty funny writer, so if you're curious about Python I suggest you bookmark the blog, or put it in your feed reader. And of course you can't not read something with the word "drizzdown" in the title. (For the non-geeky: Ruby and Python are computer programming languages.)

The vomitorium is not for vomiting.

2007-04-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

Who knew? http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021101.html

TypePad Pro as CMS

2007-04-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to wonder whether TypePad Pro from SixApart is the sweet-spot solution for a multi-author content management system (CMS) on the cheap.

Wait, you say -- isn't that just blogging?

Sort of. But I'm thinking of a project that's less like blogging and more like writing. As I mentioned in my little write-up Why Frostopolis is not a blog, I don't think the blogging paradigm works for all kinds of content sites. And TypePad Pro has a bunch of features that at least sound like as good a fit for that as for blogging: unlimited blogs, your own domains, full template control, multiple authors, and a decent amount of storage (1GB).

Full template control -- why not just design it from scratch?

Good question! I once did a complete custom Movable Type template set, and it was a godawful nightmare. I could have written a blogging system in less time. And since I was doing it in the context of the aesthetically challenged blogosphere, nobody cared about the design effort. But that's not really the point of hosted CMS. The point is that you have access to perfectly good templates to use for a while, and if you decide it's worth the effort later you can indeed customize them to a very great extent. Of course that's a giant pain in the ass; but you only have to do it if your project is working out. In other words, you postpone the real design work. My latest thinking is that the opportunity cost of your content waiting on the good design is in fact higher than the added cost of designing (maybe) around somebody's template system. The obvious problem with that, at least in the CMS context, is that your site will probably look exactly like a blog until you make time to do some real design. But again I think the agility advantage is worth it.

What about lock-in?

Sure, there's that. You build up the site and then your needs change, and you need to move your stuff, but your design is specific to their system and your content is stuck inside it. As a programmer, I am confident saying to myself: tough luck, self, be happy it's worth the effort and spend a weekend moving it. Exchange "some money" for "a weekend" and you have the non-technical answer. The point here is that the service is dirt cheap and if it lives up to its hype then the only reasons you'd have for moving are that you give up the project or that it grows into something very custom. In the first case, suck it up and just mirror the site onto your nearly-free shared server. In the second case, you find yourself either enjoying Success or practicing Stupidity, and both require a little capital outlay from time to time.

Cheap?!?! (WordPress|TextDrive|Blogger) is free!

True enough, and here I am using a free service for my trivial-rambling blog. And I have tons of server capacity sitting idle. But if you want more control, you have to either make it yourself or pay someone for it. Sure, as a software professional specializing in Perl and databases and web stuff I ought to just write my own. But I'm busy. I have a job. I have parties to go to. TypePad Pro costs fifteen bucks a month. Sometimes I pay more than that for a single drink. So as long as it doesn't cost me more time than setting up any other system on my own host then the $15 is basically as good as free. (Though I do think it's a good business model: offer a decent service for so little money that the cost is no barrier, but build it so it's super easy to administer, and make your money in aggregate. Basically the same model as web hosting.)

And now?

Now, we dance! Well, check out the free trial anyway. I'm particularly curious whether SixApart has anything to compete with Google Analytics (hint: doubt it), and in how their templating concept has evolved since I last worked with it. I'll post the link as soon as I have it set up.

goathead

2007-03-27T01:04:00.000-07:00

Ezt szeretem nagyon. Nem tom miert.

bullet@kafana

2007-03-27T00:57:00.000-07:00

That's Bullet at Kafana.

Long time gone, nyócker

2007-03-27T00:51:00.000-07:00

They tore this down years ago. Alberto took a picture then with the little Minox. I wonder if he still has it. I wonder if they'll ever finish.

Igor Obrovski by Francis Bacon

2007-03-27T00:48:00.000-07:00

If Francis Bacon had been a cheap camera in an unsteady hand.

Various and sundry things...

2007-03-27T00:40:00.000-07:00

I have a bunch of projects I never seem to have time to finish. But they're all pretty cool. There's ProCork dot EU, which is a cork importing operation run by some friends in Europe. Then there's my new super secret project which is alllmost done and has something to do with lists. And it will be funny (we all hope). And then there's my portfolio which I swear I'll get to some day, and the Secret Wine Society and the idea to do something more interesting than blogification on Frostopolis, and what else? Lots of things of course. But I have a day job and a social life and a bunch of other excuses. Oh yeah, and this is one of my favorite websites these days: Ironic Sans. But I suppose my fave is Fake Steve Jobs.

Another one from the studio...

2007-03-27T00:36:00.000-07:00

Actually this looks great in person... gotta getta betta camera...

something from the studio...

2006-09-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

...untitled still, but maybe i'll title it later.

Thoughts after something of a pause.

2006-04-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

So it's been quite a while since I did any real blogging. I haven't even posted on Frostopolis in ages. This is mostly because I've been very busy with my spiffy new job fighting spam. That and the parties. But in the meantime I've been thinking a lot about art and film and the future of the Web and all those other things. Google bought Writely, to which I say about f-in' time, guys. Writely is the sole reason I didn't create a web-based word processor. They already had one, and it's really good. They definitely deserve their Google payday; I just hope they don't have to work in Mountain View and drink Google-Aid all day. I finally signed on to Myspace and learned a valuable lesson about how little most people care about usability. Yeah, Myspace is terrible, the shame of the Web, and its owners should apologize to everyone and hire Zeldman to un-suckify it. On the other hand, everyone's already on it, so you sorta gotta be too. Myspace is to your online life as Amazon is to an author's: it's not very interesting to only be there, but you can't afford to ignore it. More later of course, and later could be much later or very soon. In the meantime, go read Seth, he's on a roll lately. (Oh, and the coulds are from Paris. Szia Zsolti!)

BlogPulse Trends: Kong Gaining on Iraq

2005-12-20T00:17:00.000-08:00

I just found something really fun and somewhat interesting: the BlogPulse Trend thingy. Graph blogospheroid trends (tags?) against each other over time. Just like stock charts. Here's a good example: Iraq, King Kong and Microsoft. The ape gaineth.

Far, får får får? Nej, får får lamm!

2005-12-19T23:08:00.000-08:00

I finally found a reason to learn Swedish. No, not the chef; rather, the simple fact that you can say things like: Far, får får får? Nej, får får lamm! Which, of course, means "Dad, do sheep get sheep? No, sheep get lamb!" But you knew that already. My newfound single-sentence Swedish expertise is courtesy of SLAY Radio's Mastering Swedish.

Frostopolis returns.

2005-12-12T09:27:00.000-08:00

Following a brief stint in domain-name purgatory, my main blog is back online: Frostopolis.com ...along with some new pictures and a meta-post about the things I've written here (how very bloggy of me). So now I return to the original mode of posting more "serious" things over there, and playing around a bit over here. Hopefully the playing around will be at least a little bit interesting to those of you who might have stumbled across this blog. But it won't be as frequent as my posts here have been in the last week or two. Thanks for stopping by!

Hey Yahoo, what's the deal with you guys lately?

2005-12-06T22:54:00.000-08:00

Come on, Terry! You're just down the street from me here in Sunnyvale. If you'd come over to the Bean Scene once in a while for a morning latte, you could run these things by me, and you'd avoid at least some of these embarrassing slip-ups. Like the one where you try to grab my mouse out of my hand. I just blogged that one today under the happy title The Desperation of Yahoo. And now comes this. The last time I saw somebody make it this easy for people to hijack their websites, it was some wanna-be journalist expats over in Hungary. Print media, Terry. They had an excuse, they thought the Internet lived in that little blue e. Hold on to your hats, boys and girls. Here it is: Yahoo Buzz Game Custom HTML. With bonus Custom Scripting. What can I say, Terry? I thought you guys had gotten with the whole clue program... So come on over next time, and save yourself the embarrassment. I'm easy to spot, buddy. I'm the guy reading the New York Times at the outside table. The coffee's good, by the way.

The desperation of Yahoo

2005-12-06T10:25:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else noticed the new, maximally-obtrusive ads on Yahoo.com? I use my.yahoo.com as a sort of news-and-information home page. It's nice: I have a few RSS feeds, the weather here and abroad, my currency cross-rates, and international news. Plus a few stocks. Unfortunately, I now also have these gigantic ads that take over the entire page whenever I accidentally move my mouse over the smaller version of the ad. They also suck up lots of memory, and don't always close properly when asked. Way to go, Yahoo. Are you guys really desperate now, or what? I was rather hoping Yahoo's text-based ads might become a serious competitor to Google's. Lord knows we need something better than AdSense, and even though I suspect it'll be Google that provides it, they're obviously done innovating on that front until they get some serious competition. But now, I'm beginning to think Yahoo is slipping back into don't-get-it mode. That statue incident might mean more than I originally thought... It's really pretty simple in the end. This is the Web. The barrier to entry is low. There is a lot of competition, large and small. If you treat your users with contempt, they will not be your users for long. And yes, Terry, screwing with my ability to move my mouse around counts as contempt.

Firefox 1.5 acting as a server?

2005-12-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

I just upgraded to Firefox 1.5 on my Windows laptop. When I launched the application, my software firewall told me the Firefox had requested permission to act as a server. That is, to listen on a port and accept incoming connections from the network (mine, or maybe the Internet). Of course I said no. If there had been a "F*** off" button I would have clicked that instead. Now, I know the good folks at the Mozilla Foundation really care about security, and I know that Firefox is their best-loved child. So what's going on here? It could be my firewall acting up, but I doubt it. The firewall has a pretty simple job. A quick web search showed that it might have something to do with the auto-update feature, but that doesn't sound convincing either. Why should auto-update be anything other than a pull through port 80? My best guess is that the Firefox crew simply missed this one and will correct the mistake in the near future. "Missed" could mean they carelessly designed in some kind of mostly-harmless server, or it could mean that they carelessly design in something that looks like a server but isn't. Or it could have to do with the quality feedback agent, although that seems odd as well. In any case, I don't think it's worth investigating further. I love Firefox and plan to keep using it as my primary browser, and I look forward to playing with the new features in 1.5. But if it actually needs to act as a server for something, I'll toss it faster than you can say "Opera."

Do not place localization in global variables.

2005-12-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

I was just viewing the source code for a page here at Blogger.com and found a gutbuster:

// Do not place hardcoded english grammar or sentences into JavaScript, 
// place them here.
var bold_tt = 'Bold';
var italic_tt = 'Italic';
var text_color_tt = 'Text Color';

...and so on. Mmm, tasty global variables for the localization crew! This one goes out to you again, Sergey. You've got $1.3 billion burning a hole in your pocket, so how about hiring someone to refactor that out of Blogger before it shows up on The Daily WTF?

Pennies.

2005-12-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

Brilliant rant from best-of-craigslist on Pennies. You know, those things you need five of to make a nickel. The rant is hilarious, and actually pretty insightful too. Go read it. Now.

Andy Hope

2005-12-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

Dammit Andy, it can be a pain in the ass Googling for you sometimes. Maybe this will help, since I always forget to use your other name and nobody can decide whether you're Andrew or Andy anyway. Here goes: a page full of art by contemporary artist Andy Hope. Casual readers, have a click and go look. Good art, and a nice simple page presenting it. And that hippie guy at the top, isn't that Miguel? Wasn't that him in the Harper's picture too? I'll get a proper post on Andy up on Frostopolis once I get the domain name out of purgatory.

The broken part of MIT's $100 laptop.

2005-12-02T10:05:00.000-08:00

Those well-heeled Boston geeks at MIT have been working hard to produce a $100 laptop aimed at kids in poor countries. The idea is to have governments (and such) buy lots of them and distribute them to the kids, who obviously couldn't afford the $100, and thus try to diminish the Digital Divide. But there's a fatal flaw in this scheme: they won't sell them to consumers. I remember once, a long time ago, when I was a kid and times were very tough financially, we got some free cheese from the government. It was cheese and we ate it. In a quesadilla it wasn't too awful. It didn't taste as good as the cheese you'd normally buy, but it was much better to have free cheese than no cheese at all. But in retrospect I think it would have been a lot better for all the families getting free cheese if that same cheese was available in the store, and just very cheap. Let's say it's the lowest-end cheese available and only poor people buy it, and if you're really poor you can get it free somewhere. Psychologically a whole lot better, and better in other ways too. For something like a computer, the same logic applies tenfold. First, by not letting people sell it MIT is telling us it's not really a $100 laptop, it's a laptop they decided to attach that number to no matter what it costs. If you can't make a profit selling the things for $100, then you're just playing with the numbers. The most important problem, though, is that if we can't get them in rich countries, they will suck. Uh-oh, I've committed the cardinal sin of insulting Mr. Negroponte's intelligence. Now Google won't buy this blog. Damn! Seriously, Mr. N, have you not heard of this Internet Thing? You want your $100 laptop to run Linux, but you don't seem to have given much thought to what makes Linux great. It's the hackers, stupid. I truly hope that one day it's every bit as normal for a hacker to come from Khartoum or Kandahar as from Moscow or Palo Alto. But you're going to get a lot further towards that goal if the hackers in Palo Alto and Moscow are playing with the same computer you're handing out to the kids in Kandahar and Khartoum. Granted, it may be more of a toy than a laptop to someone in Cambridge. But hackers love computing toys even more than they love fancy computers. Of course all the computing experts behind this project are helping, and of course you need to give it to people with good solid purpose-built software to get them started. But if you think your experts are better than all the basement hackers out there, you haven't been paying attention. Enough griping. Here's my solution to this problem. Apply with cluebat.

Figure out how much the things really cost, wholesale, with normal shipping etc., in reasonable numbers (not a million units at a time, guys).
Create a nonprofit to sell them.
Set a retail price that's as cheap as possible but truly covers all your costs.
Partner with someone (Amazon?) good at online sales and fulfillment.
Watch as the world of hackers saves your idea from oblivion.

A thought on the Google Factor for startups.

2005-12-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

In the Web startup world, the Google Factor is a large part of any business model today. The Google Factor works something like this: For any given WebWidget idea, you have to consider how much time is likely to pass before widgets.google.com enters "beta." If you think you can beat Google to the punch by a wide margin, you might be able to sell your WebWidgets to them. (Look at this Blogger thing here.) But it's a bit dangerous, since Google might already be working on their version, or they might just not like you, or they might be in a mood to build instead of acquire. Which leaves Yahoo, Microsoft, or going it alone. Going it alone is very tricky if you're going to end up competing with Google. Not impossible, but tricky. Most people already think of selling to one of the big three, either as a direct strategy or as a way to handle growth (see Flickr). If Gwidgets is already out, you should think seriously about doing something else. Just now I had an interesting thought on this subject. Maybe it's better to be faster than two of those three than to be faster than all three of them. If your WebWidgets are the first ones out, everybody will wonder what Google's going to do. (Do we seem a bit like ancient Greeks lately, worrying about capricious gods?) But if your WebWidgets are gaining popularity at exactly the same time as Gwidgets, Ywidgets!, or (marginally) MSWidgets - but only one of these - then the interest of the other two is likely to be strong indeed. Keep up with the Brins and so on. Even in this famously innovative territory, the big boys spend a lot of time sniffing each other's behinds. It's part of being big. If you smell familiar to them, you smell a little like fear, and then they're after you. This is off the cuff, but it seems to make sense this morning. Hey Vincenzo, file this idea away for your grad thesis!

Seth Godin on the Hobby Economy

2005-12-01T19:01:00.000-08:00

Seth Godin has lately climbed high on my Required Web Reading list. He's nominally a marketing guru of some sort, but I think he's at his best when he's riffing on general business themes. His main point is usually the same, and fairly predictable: you should strive to be great, and if you suck (and especially if you hate your customers) you are doomed. But he delivers it with enough style, and with enough truly thought-provoking examples, that I always go back for more. One of his newer riffs is on the hobby economy:

What the web is doing, though, is exposing lots of avenues for people to use to find satisfaction (but not necessarily cash).

As I sit here contemplating a notion to build a loss-making publishing empire, I catch the full resonance of this. Anyway, check it out. And bookmark Seth, you should stop in there at least once a week if you care at all about modern business and/or the Web. He's at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. (Aside: Eurified American that I am, I can't decide how to pronounce his last name. Seth, if you're reading this, post an audio sample!)

One more thing to make "next blog" suck less.

2005-11-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

I forgot one very big thing in my previous post about un-suckifying the blog browsing option here at Blogspot/Blogger. It's so important I'm prepending it to my list: 0. Get rid of the damned browser-hijacking blogs! And if you refuse to get rid of them, at least exclude them from the "next blog" matches. This is a general problem that has been much discussed around the web already. In short, Blogger's liberal content policy - allowing any Javascript and HTML you like - allows asshat bloggers to hijack your browser. One manifestation is the removal of some or all of the "BloggerBar" - thus generally ending a session of blog browsing, thus frustrating the user and generating Angry Thoughts about this whole "next blog" concept. Another very common manifestation is popup ads (and so-called "popunders") - including the full range of dirty tricks to get around popup-blockers. Today I saw a devilishly clever variation on this: the popup-generating script left the BloggerBar intact but removed the "Flag?" button, making it effectively impossible to complain about the offending blog. For the record, I suspect that was one from the weasels at MyBlogLog.com, but I can't prove it yet. Then we have the somewhat less common "shock and awe" variation: a complete effective takeover of your browser session using plenty of black-hat scripting magic. Ironically, those ones tend to be people showing off (to whom exactly?) and not spamming for dollars. With all these negatives, why allow scripts and embedded objects? I had occasion to think about this not too long ago, and I could only think of two reasons. First, this liberal content policy has presumably been here from the start, and Blogger/Google may be afraid of offending people by removing a "feature." Second, a lot of cool "Web Two Point Oh" goodies like the Flickr photograph I have on this blog require Javascript and/or Flash. A possible third reason: it's hard to automatically tell the difference between "good" and "bad" script content. Hard but not impossible, and Google isn't exactly short on PhD's nor on code monkeys nor on cash, so I can't really count that one. (Hey Sergey: if you don't know how to do this, drop me a line and I'll explain it to you free of charge.) So, in essence, as best I can fathom it, we're stuck with these evil blogs on Blogspot.com because Glogger can't figure out how to keep up with the Joneses on features without pissing off their core users. Unfortunate, but fair enough I suppose. However, I think they can do better in the here and now, at least for the rest of us. The solution is simple, as I noted above: exclude anything with scripts/embeds/etc. from the "next blog" browsing area. For people like me who just want to plug in our Flickr photos or somesuch, have approved, interpreted symbols you can drop in your template (and also have some clicky-type way to get them in there without touching the templates). Example: $FLICKR(user=frostman,size=M,stream=DEFAULT,count=1) Come on guys, was that hard? And you only need to do it for the Big Famous Sites. For all the rest, just publish a nice little API. You guys are good at the API thing! Something that updates live and actually needs scripting or Flash? Let them register it and be subject to a "don't piss off our customers" license: $EXTERNAL(id=some-registered-id,block=div,user=frostman,widgets=10) Something I threw together last night and put on my home server? No problem, just don't allow scripting there either: $EXTERNAL(src=http://www.medienkunst.com/genicht/,block=div,foo=bar) I could go on, but nobody's paying me to write their blogging software for them. If you read this far without your eyes glazing over, I'm sure you get the point. Introduce it slowly and get people excited about the possibilities. But in any case, start with the "next blog" exclusion for scripted and embedded content. If you don't do that much, "next blog" will remain broken, even if you follow all my other suggestions.

blood and guile (in ordinary places)

2005-11-30T17:39:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure whether it's deep or pretentious, but when I have some more time I'm coming back to check: blood and guile (in ordinary places) We appear to have caught a Writer.

Ramen Messenger!

2005-11-30T17:27:00.000-08:00

Ramen Messenger shows us our favorite noodle-like substance in various potentially compromising situations. Frinstance: That's from Big Time Ramensuality. Check it out.

Et tu, Blogger?

2005-11-30T16:45:00.000-08:00

Argh! Just a few short hours after posting on the difficulty in reporting a Google Base bug, I find myself surfing around Blogger.com looking for a place to make a suggestion. Blogger.com is behind Blogspot and therefore "powers" this blog, as they say. Or I power them. Whatever. Google owns Blogger. So here's my suggestion, guys. If I ever find your "suggestions" form I'll drop you a link. Or maybe you'll just find it on this blog. Wouldn't that be cool? OK OK, the suggestion: Please make the "next blog" thingy not suck. Right now it's a great idea and a little bit fun to use, but mostly it sucks. Here are some ways you could un-suckify it:

Get serious about the porn spam blogs. If I want porn, I know where to get it. The "next blog" button is not that place.
Have a smarter algorithm, or better yet: let me choose my algorithms. In my case, I'd want "next blog" to mean something like "next most recently updated blog that is similar in subject to my own or to other blogs I've deep-clicked on." Others might want to tune it differently, but it shouldn't be too hard to have an ordered set of options for what "next" means.
Um Gottes Willen, laßt mich meine Sprachen auswählen! That is to say, let me choose my languages, folks. I speak three, so I definitely want to see anything in those languages, but I can't do much with Esperanto or Morse Code. So why are you showing me those blogs?
Have a "bookmark" (blogmark?) button in the BloggerBar, and a dropdown menu of my thusly marked blogs. (Bonus points for letting me automatically add them to a blogroll on my own blog if I want to, and decide on a case-by-case basis otherwise.) That one is so obvious, guys! This and the next suggestion are not specific to the "next blog" function, but it should be pretty clear how they fit together.
Have an instant rating option in that same BloggerBar. Let me rate every blog, every blog post if I'm on a permalink, with, say, one to five stars. There are lots of fun things you can do with that data, and most of them make my blogsurfing experience better. Yes, of course I should be able to modify my rating at any time. Take a peek at iTunes for some examples.
Stop letting me get lost! "Next blog" is nice, but to really enjoy bloggersurfing I need something like "Previous blog" and, of course, "My own friggin' blog, where I started." I don't think it's very wise to leave those options up to my normal browser controls. If I need to break out to those in order to get value from blogstumbling at Blogspot, why should I bother with your toolbar at all?

That's it for starters. Now I have to figure out how to send you these suggestions, right? Or do you use Technorati? (And before you get all depressed by your BloggerBar shortcomings, I should tell you I'm growing very fond of the post composer under Posting->Create.)

Hey Sergey! How do I report a Google bug?

2005-11-30T14:27:00.000-08:00

I just ran into a very basic, very rookie bug at the Google Base. In short, it won't let me upload a picture, and returns a nonsensical error message (after actually uploading it to whatever passes for /tmp at Google). The error message tells me the image has an invalid format and must be of type .png, .gif, .some-other-stuff, or .jpg. The image is a JPEG with a nifty .jpg extension, and I'm positive there is no problem with it. (Yes, I double-checked, geek that I am.) The real problem, though, is that there's no obvious place at base.google.com to report the bug. On the one hand, considering Google's high profile and whatnot, I can understand that they want to keep their support to a minimum. On the other hand, they're swimming in cash, and they call everything a "Beta" - so when something actually behaves like Beta Software (as in, a bit buggy) you'd think they would be eager to get bug reports. I'm well aware that Google is one of the most arrogant companies in the history of companies. As a friend put it, that's an understandable position after you've revolutionized online searches and made yourselves billionaires in the process. But no matter how great you think you are, and no matter how much the stock market agrees with you, I still think you should want to know when your software is broken. (For the record, this happened on OS X Tiger with Firefox 1.07, a reasonably common combination and one Google should definitely be testing for - they love Firefox, and here in Silicon Valley most people understand that Apple's users are much more influential than their pure market share indicates.) So now I have a choice. I can spend some time tracking down a contact option for a beta-software bug report; I can try again with a different browser or operating system; or I can just forget the whole thing for now. Tell me again, why was I supposed to care about the GoogleBase? NOTE: This would normally be a Frostopolis post, but Frostopolis is in involuntary Domain Purgatory right now thanks to a very shady UK domain reseller (more on that later).

art muses: New Dimension: The Art Sailboat

2005-11-20T17:16:00.000-08:00

A cool new Kabakov project launches: art muses: New Dimension: The Art Sailboat

Comment spam in 3... 2.... 1...

2005-11-20T15:53:00.000-08:00

Amazing. After less than a day with this Blogger account, I just got a spam comment. On a post that was about a minute old. Insane. So, now I get to see what kind of anti-spam options Blogger has that aren't turned on by default.

Blogger.com first impressions

2005-11-20T14:52:00.000-08:00

Now that I've played around with Blogger/Blogspot some, here are my first impressions. This is based on about five hours with the system: two just playing around and three spent modifying the style to get the somewhat-better-than-average look you see here. Good Things

The posting interface is pretty good, with a nice array of rich-text formatting options that are applied in real time to the edit box. It's very simple to post, which is probably at least half the point of a service like this.
The default templates are attractive. I'm still amazed nobody has a good WYSIWYG blog template editor built into their publishing system, but in this Blogger isn't worse than others.
Modifying the template (assuming you know HTML and CSS) is easy. They made a few CSS and semantic mistakes, but not any more than other blog systems I've seen.
The "blogger bar" at the top is reasonably unobtrusive for a free service, and the "next blog" button is a nice way to explore other blogs.
It's easy to plug in AdSense ads (also owned by Google). This is a non-issue for pros, but for amateurs (presumably a lot of the membership here) it's a nice way to have a revenue stream available in the unlikely case you get popular. Of course it's also incredibly self-serving on Google's part, because one ad click on each grandmother's blog makes them money in aggregate, while Granny probably doesn't get more than a couple cents total. In their defense, Google made the ads optional - it's easy to imagine them being required.
The blog search in the blogger bar really does search "all blogs" (ie, all things Google currently considers blogs). It would have been easy for them to only search their own blogs, so kudos for making that feature actually useful.

Bad Things

There are a lot of spamblogs hosted here. Some of them are pornographic, with "Not Safe For Work" images. That's probably a Very Bad Thing for kids and for people browsing at work.
When exploring via the "next blog" button, there's no obvious way to get back to the blog you started from.
Some blogs, both spamblogs and normal ones, hijack the browser: take you to another site, for example, or hide the blogger bar, or mess with your browsing zen with obtrusive ads.
The HTML transformations for posts are amateur at best. On the one hand, the formatting you choose is preserved visually; on the other hand, much of it is lost semantically. It's not that hard to get this right (I've implemented it myself), so Blogger gets big fat demerits for that one.
Single-entry pages have, by default, very different sidebar content than the main page does. This could easily mess with your linking and advertising strategies. I'll probably find a way to fix it soon, but it's bad to have it this way out of the box.
The spell checker in the post editor uses a popup, which is of course blocked by modern browsers. That's another rookie move: there's no functional need for a popup of that sort. None whatsoever. Anyone who claims otherwise is a good couple years behind the curve on web development.
The editor needs more semantic markup buttons. "Bold" is nice, but you should also have "Heading" as well, and have the heading level automatically determined.

Who needs a second (third,fourth) blog anyway? That's one I'm not sure I have an answer to yet. I may just use this as a testing ground, who knows. Since the readership of Frostopolis is mostly people who know me in real life, I don't have much of an "SEO" need for any greater blog presence. Also, if the forums are correct, Google actively penalizes you in search results if you cross-post content between your blogs. Still, it might be fun to try out more "blog this" features without necessarily worrying about them muddying any of my more real sites. Or maybe I'll think up some other reason to keep this going. (Or maybe I won't, and this is the last post I'll ever make.) Conculsion All in all, Blogger seems to have its act together. There are two important exceptions, though: the rookie moves and the porno-spam. (I think "normal" spam blogs are not really stoppable, because there are too many border cases.) When you stop and think how much money is backing these guys up, it's really odd that Google/Blogger can't do better. I do think they'll at least get it together with some reasonable anti-porn-spam system, but until then you may want to think twice about that Blogger account. When Next Blog can be Porn Blog, you need to be careful handing out that address. If that's not an issue for you, then Blogger gives you a free, mostly easy-to-use publishing platform that is very likely to stay accessible.