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Travels, Trials, and Browser Tribulations
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I this week's Technometria podcast, Scott, Ben, and I are joined by Tyler Whitaker and Dion Almaer, who both discuss some of their recent technology activities.
Ben and Dion have recently been hired at Mozilla, where the company is working on new open web tools for developers. They talk about some of their long-term and short-term goals, including plans on ways to make it easier to deal with browser differences. In addition, Tyler discusses some of his recent internet connectivity problems and Scott talks about his recent delayed flight and how a website helped him better understand the cause of the problem, as well as quickly inform him when his flight would be arriving at the airport.
Related articles by Zemanta- Joining Mozilla to create new developer tools for the Web ... (Dion Almaer/techno.blog)
- Mozilla launches Developer Tools Lab for the open Web
- Mozilla Taps Ajaxian Co-Founders for Developer Tool Group
Tags: itconversations mozilla firefox
What's on My Desktop? Four New Apps for Staying Connected
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One of the things I love about going to conferences is that there are usually a lot of Mac users there and that means getting the goods on what new Mac software people are using. My last trips to Defrag and IIW were good in that regard as I found out about a few new things that I'm enjoying.
The first, and probably the most useful, is Snackr. Snackr is an RSS reader that displays the most recent articles from feeds you subscribe to as a rolling ticker on the bottom, top, or side of your display. Want to focus on something? Just click the "hide" icon and it scrolls up. Click on a headline and the article appears. It's made RSS feeds an interstitial activity instead of something I have to remember to do and consequently I'm reading a lot more interesting things.
Another tool I discovered was Tweetdeck. I've been a longtime (if anything associated with Twitter can be termed "longtime") Twitterific user, but Tweetdeck seduced me with it's ability to create panels for Twitter searches. I wanted to follow all the tweets about IIW and Tweetdeck allowed me an easy way to do that. Along the way I got hooked on it's built-in URL shortening panel. I went back to Twitterific and missed that, so I went back. Some people complain that Tweetdeck is too heavyweight and it can be. I run it in single pane mode a lot when I'm on a single monitor.
I like Delicios, but frequently fail to bookmark things. I don't know why, but Pukka has helped. A little scriplet in the browser bar pushes data to Pukka and it does the rest of the work after I enter tags. I know, the bookmark page will do all of this, but it disrupts my browser flow. And I like the sound Pukka makes.
The last app (actually a service) that I discovered was Dropbox. Yeah maybe I'm the last to the block on this. Dropbox's integration with OS X is what sold me (it also works in Windows and Linux). I get a folder that I just put things in and they get synced to the cloud. Right-clicking on them gives me the public URL I can send out to people in email or Twitter for sharing.
That's all it takes: four new apps and I'm a happy camper.
Related articles by ZemantaRetailers Struggle to Join the 21st Century: Instant Price Match
This ReadWriteWeb story reports that barcode scanning applications on devices like the iPhone and the G1 are causing a stir among offline retailers.
I've seen such an app on the G1, but don't remember what it's called. On the iPhone there are apps like Checkout and Snappr. The big announcement today was that Amazon is releasing their own app called "Amazon Remembers" that's supposed to work from a picture of the product--not just a barcode.
The story on ReadWriteWeb reports:
Although consumers may be catching on to this barcode-scanning trend, some stores are still in the dark. For example, a Target store in Michigan recently requested a shopper to stop scanning merchandise, saying it went against store policy. The customer reported the event to the application's makers, Big in Japan, whose app Shop Savvy is a popular download for Android handsets.
Big in Japan called the Target store in question and spoke to the manager, who indicated that she was not aware of the policy. We also contacted Target's corporate headquarters to confirm Target's policy, or lack thereof, but we first had to explain the application to the company representative. They had never heard of such a thing before! (As it turns out, Target has no policy whatsoever on barcode scanning their merchandise.)
The same customer also noted they had visited Sam's Club, where they demonstrated the application to a store employee who seemed "confounded that such technology even existed," wrote the user.
From Stores Clueless About Mobile Barcode Scanning Applications? - ReadWriteWebReferenced Wed Dec 03 2008 15:07:57 GMT-0700 (MST)
Trying to fight instant price match is like trying to hold back the Mississippi. Retailers aren't going to be able to support artificially high prices based on information asymmetry anymore. I don't have an answer for them. But telling people they can't use their phone inside the store isn't going to cut it.
Related articles by ZemantaCTO Breakfast this Friday: Dec 5
The CTO Breakfast for November and December will be on Friday December 5, at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria (Building H, Provo Campus). If you are interested in technology and especially it's use in building high-tech products, then you're invited--you don't have to be a CTO, just have aspirations!
Here are the scheduled dates for future breakfasts:
- Jan 30, 2009 (Friday)
- Feb 26, 2009 (Thursday)
- Mar 27, 2009 (Friday)
There's a Google Calendar with dates for the CTO breakfast that you can subscribe to if you like.
If you'd like to be reminded by email, just sign up for the (low volume) mailing list here:
I'll see you on Friday!
Verizon Calendar Math
When I started up VZAccess Manager (the software that connects my V640 3G modem to the cloud) today, it showed me how many megabytes I'd used and when it would be reset:
Apparently at Verizon the years have 13 months.
Tags: verizon dates calendar+math bugs
Reactivating Vista in Parallels 4.0
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Windows Vista (oops, can I still call it that?) has "Windows Genuine Advantage" and so when it's moved to new hardware have having been installed somewhere else, it needs to be "reactivated."
Parallels Desktop was recently updated to version 4.0. This apparently involved some changes to the virtualized hardware presented to the OS since machines created with older versions of Parallels have to be upgraded.
You can see where this is going. The conversion process "fails" with a message that something has to be done manually. When you get into the machine, Vista is asking to reactivated. Here's the kicker. The reactivation process wants to use the network. But you haven't installed the drivers for the virtualized hardware yet, so it isn't available.
You've got a Catch-22. To reactivate you need the network, but you can't install the drivers until you reactivate. What to do?
Microsoft thought of this scenario. There are folks (2 somewhere in Iowa) who don't have Internet connections. So Microsoft provides an automated phone activation system. It works like this:
After you enter in your product activation key, and click "phone activation" you see this screen:
Call the number and the automated system asks you to read or type in the numbers from each of the 9 groups--54 numbers. Then the system reads back 56 numbers to you, which you type in the boxes in 9 groups. Click next and if you didn't make any mistakes, you're done. Vista comes up, birds sing, and the sun shines. Well, Vista comes up anyway.
So, the advantage clearly wasn't to me since WGA cost me 30 minutes of my life. Sigh.
Related articles by ZemantaTechnometria Podcast No. 100: Elias Torres and Ben Adida on RDFa
Today I published the 100th Technometria podcast on IT Conversations. The show was a conversation with Elias Torres and Ben Adida about RDFa. I learned about RDFa from Elias and Ben when we were in Beijing for WWW2007 last April. The idea is simple: RDF is nice but requires people write metadata separate from the content it describes. Why not embed that semantic information inside the HTML as attributes? This is a pretty cool idea--complimentary to the idea of microformats, I think--that just might make the semantic web palatable enough that it actually happens.
Bonus: Here's an RDFa Primer
Related articles by ZemantaA Member of Eastern Standard Tribe
Yesterday during a minor scheduling snafu with an IT Conversations interview Scott Lemon remarked that we all ought to just use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and forget about it. Cory Doctorow had a book with a title evocative of that idea: Eastern Standard Tribe.
This morning, someone else mentioned the same kind of scheduling problem to me and I started thinking that we really ought to have just one timezone for the entire US. Maybe the whole world. China, after all, runs the whole country on Beijing time. You might think "those poor people in western China--having to get up at 4am!" but their body doesn't know that some random number on a clock is "early." They get up in the morning and go to bed at night, like everyone else.
Timezones, of course were invented with the railways. You can't have a schedule if 8:30 in one town isn't the same as 8:30 in the town 30 miles down the track. Size was a compromise on giving people times that felt somewhat natural based on their past solartime existence.
With increased globalization, however, I think it's time to just throw the whole time zone thing in the trash and have one universal time. We'd all have to do it though. As a first step, I propose that the Obama administration not just get rid of daylight savings time, but get rid of timezones too and put the entire US on Eastern Standard Time (EST). I'm fine with getting up at 3:30am everyday as long as I can go to bed at 8:30pm!
Tags: time scheduling
TwitterCards: Grabbing Contact Data from Twitter with Microformats
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This morning @dberlind and @kevinmarks were tweeting about microformats in Twitter. David was positing something he called the "TwitterCard." Kevin points out that unbeknownest to me, and I suspect almost everyone else, Twitter supports the hCard microformat.
If you'd like to make use of them, you need a client that supports microformats. Fortunately for Firefox users, Mike Kaply has an addon that does just that called Operator. Simply install operator, go to a Twitter page and use the handy pulldown menus under the toolbar to export any hCard data as a vCard. The OS X picked it right up and offered to add it. Very nice.
I'm not sure this is everything David wanted a TwitterCard to be. But it's a start. As a bonus, the tool will also alert you to events, locations, tags, and other microformat, RDF, and RDFa data in a page. I'll be posting an interview Scott Lemon and I did with Elias Torres and Ben Adidas about RDFa on IT Conversations tomorrow.
Related articles by ZemantaBroken: Debit Card Rebates
Last week I got a rebate from ATT for a recent purchase of a cell phone. On one hand debit cards are convenient, but a check is better:
- They're more fungible. I can't use a check to pay off another card or part of my rent, for example.
- The money ends up in your account immediately rather than sitting in ATT's account.
- I can cash the check and wait to use the funds until later. The debit cards expire in 60-90 days.
I tweeted some of this and got a few good responses, but the one I enjoyed most was from @tinjaw. He pointed me to this talk by Seth Godin on the Seven Kinds of Broken. He mentions debit card rebates right at the start as a bad marketing move. In essence, the company wants to trick you into thinking you're getting a break without actually giving you one. They're designing a system that breaks on purpose to take advantage of their customers.
Black Friday was Good to Ecommerce
According to comScore, Black Friday shopping was up by 1% this year over last. That's good news given that rest of November showed a drop of 4%. Today, CyberMonday, has typically been a good predictor of holiday ecommerce sales.
Related articles by ZemantaTail Optimized Mutual Recursion in Clojure
Clojure, a LISP-dialect dynamic language that targets the JVM has been generating some interest in the programming language community lately. By targeting the JVM, Clojure gets speedy performance in a cross platform way.
One of the problems with targeting the JVM with a dynamic language that relies heavily on recursion is that the JVM doesn't support tail recursion (also called tail call optimization). The idea is pretty simple: for some common patterns of recursion the function call can be removed and the recursive function be optimized to a loop. The result is not only programs that run faster, but in some cases where the recursion goes deep programs that run period.
So you might imagine that this is a problem for a language like Clojure. For simple recursion, the recur special form takes care of the problem, but wouldn't work for mutual recursion.
Via Lambda the Ultimate, I learned of Rich Hinkey's implementation of trampolining in Clojure to make tail optimized mutual recursion possible. He gives an example.
"Here's how it works. Normally, if you have mutual recursion (i.e. which can't be replaced with recur), you can blow the stack:"
(declare bar)
(defn foo [n]
(if (pos? n)
(bar (dec n))
:done-foo))
(defn bar [n]
(if (pos? n)
(foo (dec n))
:done-bar))
(foo 1000000)
-> java.lang.StackOverflowError
"To convert to a trampoline, simply return closures over your tail calls, rather than direct calls. This is as simple as prepending #"
(declare bar)
(defn foo [n]
(if (pos? n)
#(bar (dec n))
:done-foo))
(defn bar [n]
(if (pos? n)
#(foo (dec n))
:done-bar))
"Then make the top-level call via trampoline:"
(trampoline #(foo 1000000)) -> :done-foo
On LtU, someone asked:
That there is "buzz" around a non-TCO LISP dialect in 2008 is utterly incomprehensible to me. I'm all for a modern/practical LISP, but come on...
Is there something specific about the JVM that makes it impossible, or is it just a naive implementation?
To which James Iry gave a great response:
Native instruction sets often let you do whatever you want with the stack. C doesn't in the ANSI standard, but you can do it with a bit of assembly. .NET IL has an explicit instruction for tail calls. The JVM, on the other hand, is very strict about how you use its stack and has no tail call instruction.
There are full TCO implementations in a couple of Scheme's for the JVM. Kawa uses trampolining and SISC uses a heap based custom stack. Either solution has performance implications as well as implications regarding Java interoperability. Java interop is a major design goal for Clojure.
Hickey's choice to make the programmer indicate when the trade-off is desirable is a pragmatic workaround. There's been some talk in the Scala mailing list about offering trampolining in the standard library - I wouldn't be surprised to see it in 2.8.0.
Well said. In the meantime, if you're familiar with SICP, the you might find Chris Rathman's first chapter of SICP in Clojure a useful way to see how the language differs from Scheme.
Online Stores Crowded on Black Friday
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The Business Technology blog at the Wall Street Journal reported last night that several ecommerce merchants experienced slowdowns and in some cases service disruptions due to higher than expected demand.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that people are shopping online Friday. This year, retailers have been promoting online sales more heavily than in the past. In the case of Sears.com, the promotions seem to have worked too well: The site was unavailable for many visitors between 10 am and 12:40 pm EST Friday, according to Keynote. (It was also down when we tried to access to access the site at 3:30 EST.) A spokesman for Sears said that traffic was "higher than anticipated" and that the company was taking steps to ensure the site would be available on Monday---another popular online-shopping day. From Business Technology : Retail Sites Crash as Shopping Season OpensReferenced Sat Nov 29 2008 10:56:56 GMT-0700 (MST)
One of the realities of the online retail world is that most online retailers lock down their sites sometime in late October and don't make code changes and sometimes even template changes until after Christmas. There's just no point taking a chance during the time you collect a disproportionate chunk of your revenue. For ecommerce tool vendors, that means that the fourth quarter can be slim.
I have a feeling that most retailers aren't taking advantage of cloud resources to scale with demand. I'd love to see more data on that. With this years failings and the increasing popularity of cloud computing, maybe next year will be different.
Related articles by ZemantaKynetx Puppet Update
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Pat Eyler sent me a note asking if we were still using puppet. In the spirit of trying to leverage my response to him for the widest possible audience, I thought I'd blog the answer.
Kynetx has been using Puppet (and a little Capistrano) to automate our infrastructure since this summer. While we haven't gotten everything as automated as we'd like, we're quite a ways down the road and it's making life as a small startup bearable.
My ultimate goal is to register a node in the system that delivers Kynetx Network Services (KNS) to the machine database (iClassify) and have it come up, configure itself, and be ready to put in production in less than 15 minutes. While there are still a number of manual steps in that process we are remarkably close and getting closer all the time.
I haven't found learning puppet to be difficult. There's plenty of documentation, including recipes that if not usable as is, are great resources for figuring out best practices. Also, there's a very helpful group on IRC (#puppet on irc.freenode.net) that I've turned from time to time.
The best thing about Puppet is that I can count on nodes under puppet management to be consistently configured and the puppet recipes represent an unambiguous record of what should be happening.
A recent example, we needed to ensure that data files from an OEM partner were on all of our initialization servers. I used Puppet in two ways:
- Puppet is used to distribute the data files from the ops server to each of the initialization servers.
- Puppet is used to manage the cron job that grabs updated data from the partner and put it in the right directory for distribution.
If I add another initialization node puppet will make sure it has the right data files just because I declare it to be an initialization node. Nothing else need occur.
I recently released Kynetx's operational procedures. For a small company with no fulltime engineering staff other than me, I think we do a pretty good job operationally. Much of that we owe to Puppet.
Needless to say, I remain, more than ever, a Puppet fan.
Bring You Own Context
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Om Malik writes about the recent terrorist attacks in India and the torrent of information on Twitter. He says:
Despite the tremendous volume of information --- and its immediacy --- coming from Mumbai via Twitter, getting context about the situation has been a struggle. While a few people have been tweeting firsthand accounts, much of the information has been re-tweets or just rambling, reaction-based tweets. Maybe I was overcome with emotion, but the sheer volume of tweets and lack of clarity only fed my frustration with Twitter. (I'm sure it's the same kind of frustration people feel with blogs at times as well.) From With Twitter, a Desperate Need for Context - GigaOMReferenced Fri Nov 28 2008 12:14:11 GMT-0700 (MST)
Trying to figure out what's happening from a stream of rather random comments and commentary on Twitter is indeed frustrating. It's like being in the middle of a crowd that you can't see over and you know something's happening on the edge, but you can't tell what and you're trying to figure it out from what people around you are saying. In many cases, they can't see either-it's mostly hearsay.
That said, Twitter did a great job last week of telling me that something was happening and the general idea of what it was. Details, of course, are another matter.
Web technologies, in general, aren't real good at giving us context. Users manage, build, and maintain their own context in most situations. Threaded email is maybe the best example I can think of where something on the 'Net helps manage context.
Even a simple shopping experience is mostly context-free. You search for the product in Google, read reviews, on a few sites, look at prices and ultimately make a purchase. You're responsible for managing all the context of that transaction by yourself.
One of the themes I picked up on at Defrag is that there are any number of early stage companies who've realized this and are creating tools that help Web users with context. We're a long way from solving the problem, but it's a fun area to think about because there are tremendous productivity gains to be had from building tools that help users do something they've been doing ad hoc for years.
Related articles by ZemantaRocket Geeks
For anyone who grew up in the 60's, watched the space program move from satellites to men on the moon, and built model rockets while dreaming of going into space, this Wired article on homebrew rockts and the rocket geek who build them is a must read.
My kids do model rockets and have varying levels of interest, but it isn't anything like what my friends and I had. We lived for the next mission and news of every flight. Launching model rockets was, for us, a way of participating in that grand endeavor, even on a small, small scale. I'm happy to see that serious amateurs are building amazing rockets and it's not all left to NASA's pathetic shuttle program.
The Storm Blows
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I had a friend who wanted an iPhone, but decided he'd wait and see how the Blackberry Storm stacked up. His son had an iPhone, so he took it into a Verizon office and played with them side by side. He tells me that in 5 minutes it was clear to him that he'd hate the Storm. He told me this as he was showing off his new iPhone.
David Pogue reviewed the Storm for the NY Times and reached the same conclusion.
I haven't found a soul who tried this machine who wasn't appalled, baffled or both. From No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?Referenced Wed Nov 26 2008 19:41:08 GMT-0700 (MST)
The keyboard doesn't work, navigation is awful, and there's no wi-fi. Hard to believe people waited in line for this.
Related articles by Zemanta- BlackBerry Storm: the aftermath
- Huge line and riots this morning at one NYC Verizon store?
- Pogue Trashes the BlackBerry Storm
Tags: blackberry iphone
EFail, not EMail
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Jeff Atwood has a longish post on the problems with email. Of course, the biggest problem with email is there's way too much of it. I used to try to respond to each (non-spam) email I got but now I can't keep up. Unfortunately, I can't let each email commit me to spend time.
Jeff references Tantek Çelik's excellent post on the subject and gives three pieces of advice:
- Channel that private email effort into a public outlet. Discussion boards, blog entries, comments, wikis, you name it. If it can be indexed by a web search engine, you're in the right place -- and many more people can potentially find, answer, and benefit from that information.
- If you must send email, make it as short as possible. Think of it as Strunk and White on speed. Can you reduce your email into a single paragraph? How about two sentences? How about just the title field with no body, even?
- Remember the theory of communication escalation. Email is just one communication tool in our toolkit; that doesn't mean it is always the right one for whatever situation is at hand. Take advantage of phone calls, instant messaging, text messages, and so forth, as appropriate. Scale your choice of communication method to the type of conversation you're having, and don't be afraid to escalate it (or demote it!) as the ebb and flow of the conversation shifts.
There are all kinds of ideas on how to effectively manage email and that's all well and good, but ultimately someone else (actually lots of someone else's) control how much is there. Any kind of management is going to fail as email volume grows.
Good Succeeds by Creating Useful Products
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An old friend from Excite@Home, Jeff Huber was quoted in the NY Times on Google's product marketing strategy and the issue of data privacy:
"We do have a philosophy that our products should speak for themselves. We tend not to make a lot of noise," said Jeff Huber, senior vice president for engineering at Google.
As always with Google, the price point is appealing: zero, if you don't count the amount of personal data that I am trading for all that utility. With Google, it is always simple, and any engineer will tell you that simple is hard. There had been a lot of talk within Google about creating video chat as a PC-only application, a much easier endeavor for the company, but it would not have been simple for the consumer.
If Google owns me, it's probably because I am in favor of what works.
"I'm glad to hear it," said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who was in New York last week. "We want a little bit of Google in many parts of your life."
Mission accomplished, at least on my desktop, but I asked Mr. Schmidt if I shouldn't be worried that I am putting all of my digital eggs in one multicolored, goofy-lettered basket.
"That depends on what you think of our company and our values," he said. "Do you believe we have good values?"
Mr. Schmidt seems nice enough, but I sometimes wonder if I will come to regret the easier, softer road I have chosen. A record of my surfing lives on its servers for 18 months --- not by name, but still. Google continues to insist that my IP address is not me, but a motivated government with a subpoena in hand could find me, lots of me, on Google's servers.
Most data privacy experts would call me a fool to index my life into any one company so deeply, and diversification in all matters is just common sense.
Mr. Huber countered that I am free to come and go as I wish.
"The nice thing is that we don't force you to use only our stuff," he said. "It is not tied tightly together, and the content is all easily exportable. If you feel like we are letting you down, or you don't like our products or we are failing to innovate, you can pick up and go where you want."
From The Media Equation - Google Seduces With Utility - NYTimes.comReferenced Mon Nov 24 2008 07:04:42 GMT-0700 (MST)
Interesting when your SVP of engineering is speaking about your marketing strategy to the Times.
Related articles by ZemantaThe Halting Problem, in Verse: Scooping the Loop Snooper
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Geoffrey K. Pullum, Professor of General Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences University of Edinburgh has written a marvelous verse, in the style of Dr. Suess, that explains the proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable in a clear and humorous way. The verse is called Scooping the Loop Snooper (PDF). If only all of Computational Theory were this easy to understand!
Tags: computational+theory halting+problem computer+science turing