So I’m just plain jonesing to do the podcast. That means bandwidth and that means storage. And the desire to play with stuff that TextDrive* just won’t support means that I’m going down the dedicated server route. Given that I’m an ex-Rackspace customer this really isn’t surprising at all to me. I just like having a box which is dedicated to my whacky adventures. Example: The ability to install MySQL 5 and start using it in Python. My TextDrive won’t give me that since its shared hosting. And given that I’m a true MySQL believer and my other buddy Mike says its ready then I want to be all over it. Stored procedures here I come!
So Kevin thinks I should go ServerBeach and Nick thinks I should go XLHost. XLHost is cheaper and offers remote reboot via the web which is, imho, important. XLHost also does a better job on the “Sucks” test:

• Sucks Test on ServerBeach
• Sucks Test on XLHost

So anyone out there have any direct experience with either of these guys ? Thanks in advance.
*TextDrive which both Mike and Niall recommended is actually excellent.

Recommended.

So I’m on like Day 3 or so of Google desktop.   Overall I’m still happy.  Some things have changed:

• I really want Google desktop to index my Gaim logs.  Sadly it won’t and the plug in for it has gone missing (site offline). If the owner of Wickdev.com could put their web page back I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants it and if anyone has the whole source for this (it seems like it was open source at one point), I’d be interested in stepping up and maintaining it (yes I really want IM indexing that bad)
• I’ve reduced the sidebar applets to mostly just the Scratch Pad and the Todo list.
• The Photos widget can be embarassing if you have any photos on your machine that aren’t work safe (or you have kids around).  Oops.
• I discovered that double clicking the size of a sidebar panel increases its size (basically the equivalent of maximizing the window but in a vertical context).  Its very, very nice actually.

Overall I’m hugely pleased with Google Desktop.  Its small, light, fast and “feels right”.  Bravo guys.

Just go here.  And change ‘foo’ to whatever your account name is (there’s a form field; you don’t have to do it manually at the link level).

When I was speaking at search engine strategies a few days ago, I had this wonderful discussion about podcasting with Randall (Hi Randall; hope all is well; sorry I can’t link to you but I lost your business card).  Randall is in the real estate business and they want to do a podcast.  Like a lot of real internet businesses, they own their own hardware and want to do podcasts but are concerned about the bandwidth.  Yeah I could argue about how bandwidth is cheap, etc but the simple fact is that he was right and I was wrong.

Regardless of how bandwidth is priced, the fact is that he feels its expensive so the question became to me:

How do I make him realize that there is cheap bandwidth out there?

And then, in a flash of clarity like a bolt from above, it struck me: The answer is in DNS.  DNS or “domain name system” is what matches up Internet IP addresses to Internet hostnames.  And, like many geeks, I often thing that the answer is in DNS.  And what he really needs is to do this:

1. Start podcasting
2. Create podcasts.FOO.com where FOO.com is the company’s real DNS name.
3. Set up an alias for podcast.FOO.com  because people will get the singular versus plural wrong anyway.
4. Store all of your podcast media files whether video or audio on a cheap server like TextDrive or ServerBeach or whatever.    You don’t need expensive bandwidth and 5 9s of reliablity for media files.  As different companies come out and are cheap then rotate your DNS entries onto some new hosting place.

See?  Wasn’t that simple?  Seriously tho if you’ve got a real data center and you want to experiment with something like podcasting, don’t store the data files on your SAN or use up bandwidth at in your real NOC.  Just get some cheap hosting and get on it.  DNS can isolate you from all but very temporary breakages.

ls /var/www/apache2-default/

tail -f  /var/log/apache2/error.log

/etc/apache2

or in my VI centric little world:

vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

So I’ve decided to go with Django as my 1st python web framework.  The documentation is basically spot on but I hit a typically bizarre setup error about not being able to find make files under the python directory so I loaded up Synaptic Package manager and selected Autoconf and then did a search for python and basically selected close to everything and clicked update and it just plain worked.  Outstanding!

So here’s the report on the 1st day of the 30 days. Here’s what it looks like on my system:

And here are some details:

• I moved it from the far right hand edge of the screen to the far left. That feels more right for what its worth.
• I’ve seen a few window redraw issues and my windows programming experience says that that’s tied to applications grabbing the wrong screen contexts / sizes and making assumptions that they had the whole display area. Given that I didn’t see any of that before I moved it, there must be some bad fu associated with left hand side of the screen (and that’s likly why Google put it on the right). Still I read from left to right so having it on the left feels right.
• The internal notepad, “Scratch Pad”, is brilliant. All of my machines since 1995 have had a single file, todo.txt, launched at startup into notepad.exe or another editor. Why? Well its my equivalent of a sticky pad / writing on the screen. This is better since its moderately visual and I can always see it.
• So that’s great BUT their own search engine can’t find text you type into it. I started by entering “where doth these notes go” into the Scratch Pad but now 12 hours after I typed it in, its still not indexed. Consistency thy name is engineer!
• Not knowing where the data is stored for Scratch Pad bothers me a lot but that’s just me.
• The little todo list widget is nice. Very nice. I’m the classically disorganized guy who focuses hugely on what’s in front of him so having this is cool.
• The email widget is really, really nice but I don’t understand the filters UI at all. Here’s what it looks like:

  

• I know that’s hard to see but the idea is that you put in terms of what you don’t want to see in your list of emails.  I like that because I don’t want a list of 10,000 messages in here.  But what I don’t understand is how to use this dialog.  Subject is a text field as is From and To.  So do I put the words in the subject field or the Has the Words field.  I suspect that what they wanted was a checkbox or radio button here.  Recommendation: See Thunderbird’s filters dialog box.  While I have many, many issues with Thunderbird, they really did get filters right.
• It seems hard to do filename searches or perhaps it was still indexing my disc.  I wanted to hack the iPodder / Juice code a wee bit to help my snaky goodness (Python) and was looking for xrced and all it found was a mail message containing a reference to xrced but not the xrced script.
• I’m hugely biased towards currency in search results.  Hey I founded Feedster right?  For me currency is often all that matters.  If I’m searching for *.doc what I want are the latest *.doc files NOT everything on my blasted hard disc.  I’d strongly recommend to whoever writes this absolute gem of a piece of software that they read Gelertner’s papers on the Timestream / Lifestream approach to organizing data.  Gelertner rocks.

But overall I still love this little beast.  Its actually gotten me to respond to emails which any long time reader knows I generally don’t do.

My oh my. I’m just plain astonished at the rich, frothy goodness that is Google Sidebar / Google Desktop 2.0 / whatever the heck they call it. This thing is bloody well rocking my world. Yes I know that I’m the last person on the planet to try this new thing from Google which came out more than 6 months ago. And I agree, like Inluminent says so well, that there need to be Mac versions of Google stuff. That said, given that I’m a professional search guy, I’ve seen this type of thing before. Verity did it. Fulcrum did it. DTSearch did it. Others have done it. None of them seem to have done the overall issues of local search as well (note — I haven’t looked at Yahoo’s stuff or MSN’s stuff yet; when I have time). Google really nailed this one well.

So here’s my committment. I’m notorious for NOT using new technology. I still copy files with a DOS shell. I use notepad even tho I’ve gotten 25 other tools, etc. I’m going to give Google Desktop 30 days and not turn it off, not minimize it and see how it shakes out. If I have to give it screen real estate for 30 days then I’ll definitely use it.
The clock starts … now!

technorati tags: search

Ever hear a podcast that just called to you?  So much so that you actually called up the Podcaster and said “Thanks Dude”?  Well if not then I recommend you do so. What creative person doesn’t enjoy getting thanked for their work?  Well, for me last night (post SES sleep woes have made this now “last night”) it was the Om and Niall show from OnPodSessions.  Part of it what was good for me was that the two of them just plain riffed on each other in a flavor akin to a Jazz improv session.  Part of what was good for me is that it had an inherently high trust factor — I know both Niall and Om fairly well (Niall more so; Om less so).  Just as I inherently trust a Steve Gillmor podcast, I trust Niall and Om.

Nice work guys.  Thanks.

Having read much of Defensive Design, the new 37 Signals book, today during SES travel, I found my experiences downloading a new Linksys driver for my old WPC11 v3 card interesting.  Here’s the download page.  The 1st download link is, unhelpfully, for the Windows CE version of the driver.  The second is for the Linux driver.  Now I’m all for multiplatform and all but put the most common platform at the top.  Sigh.

So I just got my 1st ever USB keychain drive. $20 at Walmart for 256 mb of storage. I plug it in and it just works. I copy* my PowerPoint for SES over to it and it just works. *StillAstonishedAmI*. I mean how often does a hardware doo hickey just plain work? No drivers, no nothing. That’s just plain awesome.

So here’s the question of the day:

Why don’t any Digital Cameras have a USB port on them to accept a keychain drive? Wouldn’t that just be an awesome answer to the problem of running out of storage and not being able to synch (bad weather; no laptop, etc). Am I nuts to want this or is it now a standard camera feature and I’m just clue free and proud of it.

*Yes Virginia, I started a DOS Window and copied feedster-ses*.ppt onto it. Old habits die hard and old geek dogs all too rarely learn new tricks.

I actually asked my wife for 12 Weeks with Geeks for  Christmas.

Wow.  I was just looking for this today when I was thinking about Jeremy:

Roughly 60 days ago, I began My 30 Day Gmail and Yahoo! Mail Challenge. Obviously it lasted longer than 30 days, but the experience has been very, very useful. I’ve learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of both services.

Part of me wonders how many Gmail engineers have forced themselves to live off of Yahoo! Mail for a month. And I wonder how many Yahoo! Mail hackers spent a month exclusively on Gmail.

Anyway, here’s the lowdown.

More….

Heh.  I was leafing through my copy of the Pragmatic Programmer while taking my shower (what’s that you say; you don’t shower at 3 am?  Then you don’t have an absolutely wonderful Australian web consultant like Mike that you’re time synched with) and I found this little gem:

find . -name ‘*.php’ -mtime +7 -print | xargs grep ‘v2db.php’

Yeah I know I should know it off the top of my head but I generally look these up until I memorize it.  And, if you think I’m blogging this because I **know** I’ll need it again then please pass Go, collect $200 and get a Krispy Kreme.  Oh wait.  Here you go:

My buddy “Mike Down Under” has an interesting post on Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 – $9.95 per month

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for some time now and today I saw a post from Michael Arrington that touched on what I’ve been thinking for a while.

So it’s Web 2.0. we’re all pretty much decided on that. We’re seeing lots of very cool things popping up,  mashups of services and access to technologies that are really quite awe inspiring. We are fast reaching the point where we feel we *must* have these sorts of tools to conduct our daily internet use.

Still, what I find glaring me in the eyes is that there is still a very strong mentality that we shouldn’t have to pay for things on the internet.

…

More…

Well clearly people don’t like to pay for things.  That’s obvious but I don’t think its all of it.  I think a big part of of it is:

• Simplicity of transaction
• Trust

Simplicity.  One of the main reasons why I use Amazon is that I **generally** don’t have to re-enter shipping info, credit card, etc.  And it keeps your shopping cart across sessions.  That makes commerce so simple.  At least it used to.  I used Amazon yesterday to buy the new 37 Signals book and I lost my shopping cart twice, had to re-enter my address and my credit card info.  It was so **jarring** that it didn’t even feel like Amazon.  One of the main reasons why I no longer like to buy from PC Connection is that they idiotically persist in using a session based shopping cart.  And that’s saying something since in 2000 I spent well over $1,000,000 with them at the height of the dot com boom.  80 proliants, EMC storage, cisco gear, etc.

Trust.  Now I founded a web 2.0 company and let me ask you this — who among the Web 2.0 crowd would you think will be here in a year? Now for me trust breaks down to:

• If I use it can I get my data back?
• If I give them $$$ will I get my value out of it?

I could go on and on about this one but trust is one of those fundamental things that is:

• Hard to get
• Easy to lose
• Damn near impossible to recover from

Let me give you an example of a web service that I would gladly pay $20 per month for: Photo Backup. Yes there lots of online backup services but I wouldn’t pay any of them for the privilege.  But if Google or Yahoo offered it?  **Damn**.  Yeah I know intellectually that these guys can screw me over just as well as anyone else.  And I also know that I’m likely to get better customer service from a web 2.0 company (test this — IM one of the Feedster founders, me, at Feedster2003 with a Feedster problem and see if you get a response).  But that’s largely irrelevant unfortunately.  There’s simply a trust factor that both Yahoo and Google will be around a long time.

So if you can’t solve the trust issue maybe you can make the transaction process easier.  And I know that Dave McClure would say “Paypal”.  I’m starting to be a bit dubious on this actually.  The constant phishing attacks and paypal spam I get EVERY day bit by bit make me scared of paypal.  And I strongly doubt I’m the only one.  Perhaps there’s an opportunity for a Web 2.0 version of PayPal.

My darling wife Shelley contributed this audio clip in tribute to Marcia Brady and in complaint of my current work focus.

Thanks to Nick setting up blogs, we’ve now got 3 delighted WordPress users at Feedster:

• Nick (crawler engineering)
• James (sales)
• Rachel (sales and marketing)

*Smile*.  Now this makes the founder of a blogging company proud.  Thanks guys.

Oh my. A comment from Dewayne who has, if my memory is correct, been reading me since my days of Radio Blogging. Here it is:

Scott -

Would you mind letting us in on your thought process for learning Python as opposed to something else? Is this a new part of feedster or just a personal goal? I am asking because I too am seeking the next step in my personal education and right now I am leaning towards learning Ruby on Rails.
Thanks,

Dewayne Mikkelson

Heh.  That’s like the best question anyone’s asked me in weeks.  There are several answers:

1. Personal. Yes it can be used for Feedster but I can’t blog about how so I can’t talk about *censored* where we might use *snakelanguage*.  So if I’m going to blog the learning process, which I’ve found is the best way to force myself to actually do something, then I’ve got to have a personal project.
2. Support System.  Whenever you learn a new language, the support system you have around you makes a huge difference.  I know one person doing Ruby and he’s busy as all heck so his ability to answer dumb ass questions is limited.  I know 3 Python programmers, one superb / world class, one damn good if not superb and one learning.  So I view my chance of “dumb question” help as 3x greater than with Ruby.
3. I need some local tools.  PHP is a wonderful server side tool and its outstanding at what it does.  When you develop in PHP the way I do at Feedster many of the traditional scalibility issues go away.  But, what PHP isn’t good at, is local apps.  Yes there’s php-gtk but that feels like a hack to me.  Python is damn good even at Gui apps.  I’m astonished beyond measure that iPodder / Juice was developed in Python.  Given that my pre-web background was in traditional software development, I know just how hard cross platform GUI apps are and here’s this little Open Source effort doing absolutely rocking work.  I want to understand better how the heck they do it.
4. Its a More Advanced Language.  In Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, he argues fiercely for the language’s inherent “advancedness” (for lack of a better word) as being a more efficient problem solving tool.  I.e. you’re more efficient (at least for some tasks) in VB over straight C and Perl over Fortran and so on.  Its a damn interesting argument and having read over the 1st part of a Python reference book, I’d have to agree that syntactically Python is more advanced than PHP. I’m curious to see if my immersion in PHP for 3 plus years either helps me learn Python or prevents me entirely.  I did a line count on the number of lines of code I’ve written to date in Feedster and its shockingly high.  If you assume that LOC measures are inaccurate even by 50% its shockingly high.
5. It May Be Better Suited to Certain Types of Computing.  As I read through the Python stuff so far, I’m easily seeing that its a powerful language and I can see that its good for GUI programming and server side programming.  At least to me it appears to be less well suited to PHP’s forte — web apps.  Now this is interesting to me since most of 2005 I spent using PHP to do things it really wasn’t meant to do — back end data processing and job crunching.  Yes it worked and I was fine with it but I wonder if a better language might have done the job a little better.  This is a good opportunity to investigate it.
   Note: Simon will no doubt disagree with me.  I’m still learning and I could very well be wrong here..
6. The Rails Question.  Ah yes.  Ruby.  I find Ruby very, very interesting and the advent of 37signals is clear that Ruby has powerful Geek Fu.  That said I feel a little bit like “Well I know how to develop web apps and Feedster has lots and lots of powerful libraries and constructs for it.  Do I really want to start from scratch?”.  Not to mention the concerns you have with a large scale site regarding security, coexistence with other apps, etc.  I actually asked our lead admin to install Ruby on Rails on our dev box a few weeks ago and he’s still making sure that he’s comfortable with it being on there.  And I wonder if the lesson for all of us from 37 Signals isn’t “use ruby” but “do what we do”?  We can develop crappy web apps in Ruby just like we can in PHP.  That said I did just order the new 37 Signals book.

So that’s my thinking Dewayne.  If I was purely doing Web Apps then it would be different but I’m not just thinking that way.

Scott

Sigh. But on OSX the WordPress rich editor doesn’t seem to work in it. Big sigh.

I normally don’t blog things like this but since BoingBoing is a very trusted source (at least to me; your mileage may vary).  Shocking:

PriceRitePhoto rip-off artists exposed

Boing Boing stalwart Thomas Hawk tried to order a camera from PriceRitePhoto, and discovered that they company was fraudulently offering the camera at a low price, responding to orders by calling up customers and hard-selling them for overpriced accessories, and if they declined, refusing to fill the order because the camera was “out of stock.”When Thomas called to complain and threatened to blog about the incident, the manager of the store, Steve Phillips, was threatening and abusive. He claimed that he would have Thomas visited by the police, that he’d harass Thomas’s boss, that he’d charge Thomas’s credit card for the full amount and then not ship the camera, and so on. He did, in fact, call Thomas’s boss and scream at him, too.

…
Link

I hope people blog this all over the place and establish a definitive Google pagerank for this posting for PriceRitePhoto so the BoingBoing article floats to the top.

I thought a lot about 1st projects to learn Python and, well, my first idea was overly ambitious.  So I thought more about computing problems I have every single day and one came to me: Gaim IM Logs, well, suck.  I mean the log format is fine but the search is deadly slow I often need access to them when I’m not at the machine where the log was created.  So why not write a Python app that:

1. Runs as a service in the background.
2. Monitors the Gaim log directory structure
3. When it finds a new log file upload it to gmail adding whatever metadata it can find to make it better searchable
4. Extract all embedded urls from the IM logs (hey I’m processing them anyway) to a local “IM Catalog”, time sorted newest at the top — how often do you need a url someone sent you and you can’t remember exactly who or which account you had but you’d know it if you saw it.  This is a feature I had in my late, lamented only by me, Inbox Buddy product and it rocked.

If you think about it, this project covers:

1. Overall application structure
2. Application configuration since you need to know where to look to find the user’s specific IM logs, their gmail account name, mail server, etc
3. Data parsing
4. Network IO in the form of mail sending
5. HTML generation

That’s a lot of the basic primitives I use every single day in PHP.  It’ll be interesting to see how Python compares.

Step 1 – a basic recursive directory scanner looking for log files.

Its that whole Zen Koan thing:

If a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to see, did it fall at all ?

The Web 2.0 developer version of this would be:

If a feature fell in the forest and you were the only one awake in the company to know you just did something wicked cool, was it really cool ?  Or were you just a stressed out geek ?

Sigh.  Anyway.  Ajax is **interesting**.  Hopefully coolness to come soon.  And I figured out my first Python project to boot.

Its time to become a P^3 person. I mean I know Perl, I know PHP. Why not *drum roll* Python?

1. Download Python 2.4. Done.
2. Ask knowledgeable Python Person “What Gui Framework?”. “WxWindows”. Download. Done.
3. Open obligatory 2 year old Python book that my wonderful wife gave me as a present back in 2003. Read first chapter. Done.
4. Type “Hello World” into Idle. Done.
5. Plan first project. Make it something I need. Ah yes. Got it. Need to research if its viable in Python. Requires a tree control, launching external apps under Windows, getting a process ID and an edit control. Should be viable.
6. Write first blog entry about Learning Python to force myself to follow through on it. Done.

Heh. Feels good to be geeky again. P^3 is the goal I say, P^3. Hm… Given that in another age I did prolog can that make me already P^3 or does code you last wrote in 1987 not count anymore ?

I’ve got a good friend, someone I know via IM, that wants to start a company.  He’s always asking me for advice, which is good of course, but I thought it would be better to just start blogging it since I know he’s a reader.  Anyway.  Here’s today’s “Advice Bit”:

Metrics

Now I’ve been through the startup mill a few times now and there’s one thing that’s starting to **finally** sink in: Metrics Matter to VCs.  I’ve spent a few bits of odd time lately revamping the Feedster internal stats system so I can better gauge how to manage what features on Feedster need improvement and its been illuminating.  One of the things that I’ve learned also is that, in a web environment, you can get metrics on ***anything***.  A product manager asks you for a tool?  That’s fine.  But start capturing usage metrics. Then, when you’re having trouble debugging the tool, see if Feature foo is actually being used.  If its not then just delete feature foo.

Now the true lessen here for new startups is that if you’re starting out and you have NO codebase then you can build metrics in from the ground floor.  Every engineer knows that if you know a constraint on a problem early its a lot easier to solve the problem.  Accept that you need metrics on every facet of the organization and build that in early.

iwas dmumb

Not only was I dumb but I couldn’t spell or type!

Here are some tips when caffeine starts to either not work or, well, make you want to vomit rats:

• Bright Light.  I’ve got a 300 watt halogen going in a 12 x 10 room and its having a noticable effect on my consciousness
• Loud Music.  Hopefully my neighbors appreciate a Beastie Boys / Quiet Riot / Def Leopard / Dead Milkmen combination.
• Cold.  I’ve got the window open and its chilly in here!  It works though.

If you find that VIM’s auto indenting makes pasting in text, well, suck then enter this:

:set paste

and

:set nopaste

to reverse it.

Source: VIM.ORG

And, yes, I rated it as life changing.  This one tip will make a huge difference in my use of VIM.  I used to sometimes exit VIM, edit the file with nano -w and then re-enter VIM.  This completely eliminates that so its huge.

I’ve been getting the serious urge to upgrade my digital camera lately.  Right now I’m using a 5 year old 3 megapixel Kodak which, while working wonderfully, makes me feel kinda lame truth to tell.  And I had an absolute blast taking lots and lots of pictures over the Thanksgiving Holiday at Shelley’s parent’s house.  Now I’ve always owned Kodak digital cameras and I, honestly, have no real desire to change.  I’m thinking about the Kodak P880:

I’ve also been thinking about the Canon S2:

They’re both 5+ megapixel which is more than enough for anyone who’s not a pro (imho).  They both seem to have good lenses.  My preference for the Kodak is that it will likely have a substantially better user interface and be much more usable.  My wife’s Canon A80 PowerShot is just plain painful.  They’re both SD media sadly relegating the Compact Flash slot on my Thinkpad into instant uselessness.  Sigh.

Update: A quick of DPReview makes me think that I should also look at the Kodak Z740:

So anyone have any thoughts about any of these?  I know that the first is much higher end but since I keep my gear for 5+ years in general, the price difference doesn’t feel that much.  And I have a little one who’s fast as the dickens so a fast acting camera is important (I missed several great images this past week).

Any developer has, at one point in his or her career, had this type of conversation between themselves and one or more other developers:

(04:31:39) mikeair888: and we’ve still got a full day US time
(04:32:01) fuzzygroup: more than that actually
(04:32:13) fuzzygroup: the board meeting is at 9 am pst which is 12 pm est
(04:32:26) mikeair888: oh cool
(04:32:29) fuzzygroup: and its 5 am here (ok 4:30 but lets make the math easy)
(04:32:33) mikeair888: yep
(04:32:35) fuzzygroup: so that’s 24 + 7 hours
(04:32:39) fuzzygroup: or 31 hours total

Seeing all the astonishing prices on home electronics over this Thanksgiving holiday has given my wife and I the incentive to “make our contribution to the global economy” with the purchase of a big screen TV.  We’re debating between a 32″ LCD to a 42″ plasma tv in the $1,500 to $2,000 price range.  We’re thinking about the Sharp Aquos but wondered if anyone had any input.  Thanks in advance.

Robert Scoble just chimed in on the XBox 360 shortage:

Lots of people are saying we did this on purpose. That we limited supplies to make hype bigger.

Yes, Microsoft has gotten its evil back! For a minute there, I thought Google had taken over our evil.

But, come on people. We’re making them as fast as we can. Our suppliers simply can’t make anymore. Have you ever worked on a manufacturing line? I have. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be made. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be shipped (ever study the world’s airline cargo capacity? We have.

More…

This basically matches up with what Greg Stein said and just plain makes sense.  My apologies for being aggressive on the posting earlier.

Surprisingly enough, Greg Stein, showed up in my blog comments with some very cogent thoughts on the XBox 360 shortage. Greg’s a serious gamer and the person who turned me onto the astounding zen experience that is Katamari (thx man I did actually buy it and we all love it). Anyway read what Greg has to say here.

Dave just had an awful iTunes experience:

Arrrgh, I plugged my new iPod into my old Mac and lost everything on it. Never got a confirmation dialog asking if it was okay if it wiped out the music and audiobooks that I painstakingly took hours of my time to set up. Never mind that the originals are on the other side of the United States. Honestly, how dare they design software that’s so brutal?

More…

Now I too just bought the 60 gig iPod Video.  And its a lovely device.  The odd thing though is that on Windows there is the confirmation dialog that there doesn’t seem to be on the Mac.  Interesting.  My main problem with the iPod on Windows is that it doesn’t seem to download and synch podcasts correctly.  For that I turned to iPodder / Juice.  And, while I find the UI a wee bit confusing, it definitely rocks.  Last Saturday it downloaded hundreds of megabytes of Dave, Adam, Steve, Dawn and Drew and others.

So I’m off in Texas in some suburb of Dallas, spending Turkey day with Shelley’s family.  And, naturally, I have to login and deal with issues of Top 500 tag spam, a new bug that cropped up, etc.  So I go over to Shelley’s Dad’s PC and type into the Run command “Putty”.  And it works.   Clearly I’ve been on this PC before.

(Putty is a SSH client that I use religiously for logging into Feedster servers).

Wow.  I just spoke with my wife who’s in the Dallas, Texas* area for Thanskgiving (I’m meeting her there) and her sister wanted to get Steve, her husband, an XBox 360 from the local Target.  And, after arriving on line at 5 am, she discovered that there the store only had 12.
The local Walmart only had 48.  And the biggest lot that anyone in the whole city had is reportedly 220 at the local Best Buy.

Looks like the reports of Microsoft limiting supply to maximize demand (and pricing) are completely true.

*That’s where her family is.

Heh.  We’re now closing in on the final steps of the Top 500.  1 ajax bug, a few output options and it’ll be ready to go.  I’m very, very pleased.  Everyone — me, Mike, Nick, James, Alan, Rachel and others all did a great job.  Kudos to each and every one.

As you may or may not know, I travel for Feedster to our San Francisco offices quite regularly.  And the hotel I’ve been staying at, the Hotel Milano, has, ahem, connectivity woes:

Ping statistics for 64.95.116.11:
    Packets: Sent = 102, Received = 67, Lost = 35 (34% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 10ms, Maximum =  90ms, Average =  9ms

Now, just to be fair, this is with my 1 laptop on which WIFI actually works.  So here’s the criteria for a hotel recommendation:

• Close (walkable) to the Feedster Offices at 116 New Montgomery
• Connectivity either wired or wireless (preferable) that just plain works
• Nothing monstrously expensive; one of the reasons that the Milano is attractive is that its not all that expensive ($140 / night)

Any recommendations out there?

Disclaimer: The author, Adam Kalsey, is a friend but this is still really, really cool: http://tagyu.com/

Distinct.  Thank the heavens for Distinct. 

Q: Why did the hacker cross the road?

A: To get back to the wifi on the other side.

–Scott

If you have to ask on this post, you likely don’t want to know …

Given that I’ve been holded up in Fresno for 2 nights now for Demitrious’ wedding whilst concurrently hacking out the Feedster 500, and that all Feedster mail is down for me, this post is solely to let any fellow Feedsterites / Feedster contractors (over in Australia, this means Mike …) that I’ll be offline for 4 hours or so whilst I drive back back to San Francisco but I will have my cell phone if anyone needs me.

Podcasts that will be heard on said drive will include the Gilmor Gang and Adam Curry.

*Chuckle*. I’ve been in massive crunch mode over the past week getting ready to launch quite a few new things and, as always happens, when you’re about to do a release, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Here’s a few of the things:

1. Last Minute Features. When I gave our lead VC a preview of one of the features, his comment was “Wow; but can you do *foo*�. Sigh. Of course we can do foo but I had already started to leak the news of this so, given that he was right and we needed to do that, foo was added to the project plan. But, of course, foo requires bar and bar requires cat and dog and lion and giraffe and etc. You’ll see how we did on that come Monday.
2. A Wedding. Of course this wouldn’t all be complete without a major life event, a wedding, to attend. And, of course, said wedding would involve 8 + hours of round trip travel in a car. Not a lot of coding productivity in a car although you can get some very amusing pictures of how you use an iPod. I’ll blog those tomorrow or Monday and you can all get a good laugh. But, and mark my words, I’d have gone to this wedding no matter what. Its for a Feedsterite, our lead Systems Administrator, and he’s worth it beyond by ability to describe it.
3. Torn Ligaments. I had originally planned this release to concur with my travel schedule so I’d be in our San Francisco offices for a full week; able to collaborate with out Feedsterites. Unfortunately my wife tore ligaments in her ankle last Monday so she wasn’t able to walk which completely delayed my trip and forced me into the combination Daddy / Mommy / Nurse roles. No gripes on my part — that’s what you do when the people you love are in trouble — but its an amusing wrinkle in a release crunch.
4. Loss of People. And no release crunch would be complete without losing a staff member or 2 along with the productivity hit that entails. Nothing like having to lock down every single server you have, rotate passwords, etc.
5. Network Connectivity Heck. I had a bad feeling about network connectivity for this trip so I brought not one but two Thinkpads and an extra WiFi card. My X31, true to form, executed its “I Hate All Wifi Except for My Home Networkâ€? behavior and persistently refused to stay connected to the Wayport Wifi in the Wedding Hotel. So I figured “Well I’ll change the wifi card and all will be good.â€? That gave me about 20 minutes of connectivity post reboot. So I’m back to working on my Thinkpad X20 – five + years old and with only a 5 gig hard drive. But, you know what? It works flawlessly. Oh but the battery has decided to not hold a charge so if I unplug, it dies completely.
6. Lack of Caffeine. When I called for room service this morning, I was told, astonishingly enough “I’m sorry we don’t serve soda with breakfast�. **OY**. How can you serve coffee as the ONLY caffeinated breakfast beverage? I mean Great GooglyMoogly.
7. A Singular Bizarro Connectivity Issue. Our beta site is Feedster.net and while it works fine, on my older laptop I am unable to connect to that box in any way. It must be a DNS issue since I can connect to its ip address 64.95.116.31 but I can’t get to our Intranet, our webmail, etc. since those are Apache vhosts on that same box (and, no, modifying my hosts file makes not the slightest difference).
8. No Left Mouse Button. The left mouse button on my older laptop has decided to, ahem, go missing. Its physically there but it never works anymore. So I’ve remapped the left and right but remapping my brain is a bit harder. Thankfully I’m a fast touch typist anyway.
9. Etc.

There’s more I could go into — but — I’ve got working hardware, working connectivity, a fabulous co-founder*, a really good web contractor who’s helping out and been essential in not letting the good work I’m doing look like *Scott’s Usual Less than Good Design*, a very good project plan to execute against, Flock to make blogging easier, great co workers like Nick and James who are going to come in on a Sunday and help out. But you know either the worst of this (or the best) not one of these things has surprised me. Not a single one. I’ve done at least one crunch mode a year since ‘87 and they’re always like this. *Insane Chuckle Here*

*Who, amusingly enough to me, asked for foo prime, a different last minute feature. When he did so, I was chuckled and said “Yes Sir� and proceeded to implement it since he was also right.

I have to send a great big Thank you to Andrew and the rest of the folks behind Juice the once and former iPodder.  I’m attending the 2nd Feedster Wedding* and I’ve downloaded ratloads of Podcasts using them to energize my development process.  iPodder just makes it damn near trivial to use podcasts so that’s great!  Thanks guys.

*Ok mine was the 1st ever Feedster wedding.

Just a test.  I’m gearing up to blog quite a few things so having a decent blog writing engine integrated into a browser is ***intriguing***.  *Clicks To Send the Test Post*  *Fingers Crossed*

*chuckle*.  Today is increasingly surreal.  Earlier today things were fine, I was grinding on code, made a presentation to our Japanese partners, writing tools to make sure that Feedster search results don’t run amok, etc.  Now there’s a fierce thunderstorm, lightning, high wind, horizontal rain and the sirens just went off (which in Indiana means “Stop Blogging and Get to the storm shelter if you can hear this”).   *going*.

Dear Chris,

I just decided to follow your advice and install Maxthon. And, while I applaud you for your enthusiasm for this product, after about 5 minutes of trying it, all I have to say is this:

Huh???

I’m really, really glad that Maxthon works for you but it just doesn’t work at all for me. Here’s why:

1. CTRL+T. No support for CTRL+T to create a new tab. Given that I’m hugely used to FireFox, when I tried Maxathon and found that CTRL+T did not create a new tab, I was just spooked from the beginning.  Yes I know that Maxthon predates Firefox but I’m kind of surprised that since it knows I had Firefox and offered to import my thousands of bookmarks that it didn’t automatically set CTRL+T for me.  (Ok this is a stretch but when you’re an alternative product struggling for market share wouldn’t this be a great approach?)

2. Feed Support. I know that I’ve seen you rave about its RSS support but when I went to Jeremy’s blog and clicked on one of his RSS icons, I get this. I’m sorry but having a feed displayed when you click on an RSS icon isn’t a good user experience. Shouldn’t Maxathon have recognized the feed and displayed it in its aggie ?
3. Refresh Button. I was testing some new Feedster Ajax features in Maxathon to see if they were compatible with IE’s XML model so I needed to regularly refresh the page. Where’s the Refresh icon or button? Here’s what Maxathon looks like on my System.
4. OPML Support. I couldn’t find it. Is it here?

Any thoughts? I do trust your opinion on stuff so I’m curious. It might be just that I’m so used to FireFox / Mozilla that I’m just not able to properly grok the Zen of Maxathon. So did I miss something when you raved about Maxathon ? Thanks man. Hope all is well with you and Ponzi.

– Scott

I believe that Robert had a link to Kayak, a travel meta search site, recently and I gave it a shot. Not only has it already saved me literally several hundred dollars in just a few trips but its also made the difference between my family and I having a rental car for our Thanksgiving excursion to Dallas.

Thank you Robert. This ends my use of Yahoo Travel I guess. Wonder if they’ll notice. Wonder if they’ll care ?

Hilarious: http://www.seuss.org/seuss/seuss.sttng.html Via Boing Boing via Bonnie

Heh.  Wonder if this is the first wordpress.com post to be on Memeorandum?

 This is for this post.

 

Lunch, for me, has long been nothing but a time offset. Think about it — if you wake at 7 and eat lunch at noon that’s a 5 hour offset.  Right ?  So if you think of lunch as a time delta from the period you wake then its completely appropriate to have Spicy Hot Shrimp Gumbo at 6:17 am.  Of course you have start working at roughly 1:43 am to pull this off.

And, if you think that this is nothing but a way for me to rationalize to my wife that I should get away with eating shrimp gumbo at 6:17 am then you get the bonus prize.  Thank you for playing.  Please come again.

I’m sorry for the delay but I’ve got a sick wife right now (sprained ankle) and I’m doing the combination Mom / Dad / Nurse / Software Engineer concurrency thing right now and its a bit draining.  Hopefully I can respond to them later tonight.

Ever typed in the wrong thing into the wrong IM window?  I’d love a Gaim plugin which said “restrict any of these words to only these contacts”.  Basically I’d love to be able to say to Gaim “I only want to curse at these people”.  Chuckle.  Oh Lazy Web please save me.

I just took a shot and installed FireFox 1.5 on my secondary laptop.  Its actually working quite nicely and seems to function correctly with WordPress.  Nice job guys.  Thanks Asa!

Note to self: Test the Asa search with the new relevance code coming from Feedster! 

Sigh.  Anyone who ever founded a company knows this scenario:

1. You go to sleep.
2. You wake up *knowing* something is wrong.
3. You get on email and IM and, indeed, something is wrong.
4. You squash actions of less than perfect planning and thought that are doomed to cause you endless hours of future work and recovery.
5. You fume.
6. You rant.
7. You drop the issue and see refuge in a hot shower.

But to make it all better, I prescribe International House of Pancakes and Vietnamese Iced Coffee (make iced coffee, add sweetened condensed milk).  $happiness++;

My buddy Mike has a good review of BlinkSale.  Its a typical example of how company’s screw up customer service — which happens — and is, statistically, a damn near certainty if your company is of any size and volume.  Just do the math — if you do enough transactions, you’re going to screw things up.  The sad thing is that even being, ostensibly, a web company, they’re apparently not monitoring the blogosphere — or will they?  He only posted this a little while ago.  It’ll be interesting to see if they ever comment on his blog.

New version of RSS Owl.

Noel, one of the sys admins here at Feedster, just let me know this:

If you minimize Firefox, it will (automagically) reclaim memory that it’s no longer using.

Apparently this is a workaround for the Firefox bug where it doesn’t reclaim memory for tabs that you’ve closed (a long time FireFox / Mozilla bug I’ve blogged about in the past). Now when Noel told me this, I immediately tried it and saw my memory usage go from 153 megs* to 52 megs. Awesome. Thanks Noel. (Oh and this works in Thunderbird also so I strongly recommend minimizing your Firefox and Thunderbird windows every few hours).

* Yes I’m a Tabaholic. I’m currently searching for a support group on this. Please contact me if you have suggestions.

Picture of a Tabaholic

(That’s like 25 tabs in one browser window and 5 browser windows open total; I do have issues)

Scoble has, once again, an insightful piece:

As I’ve been going around the world I’ve been meeting with many people who’ve built their companies on non-Microsoft stuff. Some of whom have companies worth billions of dollars now. Some of whom you’ve never heard about unless you read TechCrunch. Here’s 12 reasons Web 2.0 entrepreneurs like Ross tell me that they aren’t using Microsoft’s stuff:

More…  (link on Ross added by me)

Robert pretty much nailed it.  And they’re quite similar to several of the points I made when I was interviewed by Information Week back in October.  Good stuff. 

One thing that’s particularly true with respect to Web 2.0 companies is that Web 2.0 stuff often starts just as “science experiments” and, since you need to deploy things out on the Internet for people to play with (and give your experiment feedback), Web 2.0 stuff tends to be built on open source tools.  That’s what happened with Feedster — I had a cheap box in a hosting center with Apache, PHP and MySQL and I built a search engine since someone posted on a blog “Wouldn’t be cool to have a search engine for RSS content”.  Now if I had to worry about software licensing and such, I almost certainly wouldn’t have.  Now it wasn’t just that open source was free — it was also the whole ecology of cheap hosting, downloadable source code, great online docs, etc.  And its really, really hard to see how Microsoft competes with that.

Its been a while since I took a look at Pito Salas’ BlogBridge news aggregator and, I have to say, its just plain beautiful.  Wonderfully designed, easy to setup, cross platform and just plain nice.  There’s lots more good stuff inside but since I’m dashing for a plane, this is all I had time to post.  Thanks Pito.  Great stuff.

Screenshot showing the 50 odd feeds I setup in BlogBridge:

 

Thanks Mike!