Me2 findoo.info

While looking around my favorite toy store, REI, I spotted the Timbuk2 Blogger Bag. I recalled hearing good things about it at Gizmodo and Laughing Squid. Although I usually go for backpacks since they're better suited to the long walks I often go on, I've been considering trying a vertical brief for those short trips to the coffee shop with the laptop. So I gave the Blogger Bag a lookover and decided to bring it home. The Blogger bag has a very simple layout. The single main compartment has a corduroy covered laptop sleeve toward the back leaving room for a power supply, a book or two, and other oddments in the rest of the compartment. A zippered exterior compartment houses an organizer. The exterior compartment has plenty of room for a camera, phone, wirleless mouse, and other small items. (Continued)

I recently added the Garmin StreetPilot c550 to my arsenal of gadgets. This is one of the nicest bits of consumer electronics I've ever used. It truly is plug-and-play. The UI is brain dead simple. Poke the touch screen with your finger to navigate to points-of-interest, addresses, and intersections. If you want to find the nearest Mexican restaurants, press Where to? > Food > Mexican. A list of the nearest Mexican restaurants will display. The list will update as you drive around so you can do some wardriving for Mexican food. If you press the name of a restaurant you can navigate to it or call it if the c550 is connected to your mobile phone via bluetooth. This hands-free calling is pretty nifty. With the press of a finger you can call the phone numbers for any of the included points-of-interest. You can program a call home number as well. If your phone supports it, you can access your phone's address book from the c550. The address book of my Blackberry 8700c shows up just fine. Incoming calls are displayed with your phone book information to provide better caller identification. (Continued)

Let’s ask Google:

1. Rice Crispy Cake - 75 results
2. Rice Crispy Bun - 17 results

That’s what the Internet says and I agree. ‘nuf said!

For completeness, it should be noted that

1. It’s Kelloggs Rice Krispies but that name is trademarked as Andy just reminded me so people are more likely to spell it with a C in their cookery books and sites lest the lawyers descend on them!
2. Kelloggs avoid the bun and cake controversy completely by calling them Rice Krispies Treats. Cowards!

Conversation on #linux leads to some confusion. I wonder if I should quote some of it. The Rice Krispies cakes and buns Irish people refer to are simply made of Rice Krispies and melted chocolate. No yucky marshallow, or whatever else. Chocolate all the way. Yum!

The development branch of WordPress now bundles Prototype 1.5. A number of themes and plugins have been bundling Prototype, so we decided to make it available out-of-the-box. We also use it internally for the new autosave feature. The development branch also has a nifty script loader from mdawaffe that makes including JS in a cacheable way very easy. For example, if you want to use Prototype in your theme, include it like so: wp_enqueue_script('prototype');

CNET has a video on “Install a WordPress blog”, this came up at WordCamp and I think more of these would be a great idea. Here are some intro videos from EduBlogs.

As posted on the FeedLounge blog, I’ve left FeedLounge.

Here are the quick bits:

• Last Wednesday, I sold my share of the company to Scott and he is continuing to run the service.
• I am no longer involved in anything FeedLounge related (except in a historical sense).
• Scott and I don’t hate each other and never got into any screaming at each other or mud-slinging or anything juicy (sorry rumormongers), we just couldn’t agree on how to move forward from the status quo. I consider Scott to be a friend and continue to tout him as one of the smartest and most capable engineers I’ve ever worked with.

For those who want more details, read on…

A Brief History

When Scott and I first discussed creating a feed reading service (in January 2005), we decided on a simple and proven model for the business: offer a basic free version and upsell a portion of our customers to a premium version that has a monthly fee.

Along the way, we discovered a whole mess of challenges in scaling the service and eventually decided to go live with only the paid service to start. This was a tough choice, and it annoyed a number of folks who were anxiously waiting for the doors to open.

In retrospect, I don’t know if this was a good idea or not. Once we were live as a paid service, maintaining the service and trying to scale it became job number one (slowing down our ability to innovate and execute new features). And even so, we struggled.

(Continued)

As posted on the FeedLounge blog, I’ve left FeedLounge.

Here are the quick bits:

• Last Wednesday, I sold my share of the company to Scott and he is continuing to run the service.
• I am no longer involved in anything FeedLounge related (except in a historical sense).
• Scott and I don’t hate each other and never got into any screaming at each other or mud-slinging or anything juicy (sorry rumormongers), we just couldn’t agree on how to move forward from the status quo. I consider Scott to be a friend and continue to tout him as one of the smartest and most capable engineers I’ve ever worked with.

For those who want more details, read on…

A Brief History

When Scott and I first discussed creating a feed reading service (in January 2005), we decided on a simple and proven model for the business: offer a basic free version and upsell a portion of our customers to a premium version that has a monthly fee.

Along the way, we discovered a whole mess of challenges in scaling the service and eventually decided to go live with only the paid service to start. This was a tough choice, and it annoyed a number of folks who were anxiously waiting for the doors to open.

In retrospect, I don’t know if this was a good idea or not. Once we were live as a paid service, maintaining the service and trying to scale it became job number one (slowing down our ability to innovate and execute new features). And even so, we struggled.

Reality

Sometimes life gets in the way of what you want to do. Scott and I both had to take some time away from FeedLounge over the last year and a half. We both have mortgages and Scott just recently became a father, giving him a whole slew of new responsibilities.

When you’re making your living as an independant developer, you’ve got to make sure you get your bills paid. While we had attracted a number of loyal users, FeedLounge was far from paying 2 salaries plus operating costs.

Trouble Moving Forward

About a month ago, I approached Scott about changing the FeedLounge status quo. I didn’t feel that we were providing the level of service necessary for us to attract and retain users, and we were continuing to struggle with a variety of issues. I didn’t feel like we were moving forward as much as we were treading water.

In fact, I proposed a number of options that included temorarily halting billing, turning off registration and even shutting down the service entirely to allow us to address some of these issues.

I felt that we needed to:

1. Fix the bugs
2. Improve stability and uptime
3. Move forward quickly (and perhaps in different directions on the back-end) to offer a free version as originally planned

I believe that the little guy can beat the big guy, but has to do so by delivering a superior product and user experience. Small wins born from execution provide momentum, and you can grow from there. Failing to execute is something the little guy just can’t afford, and ultimately I feel it is where we came up short.

Unfortunately, Scott and I had a fundamental disagreement over where our major failings (as a business) were - and as a result, what needed the most attention. The more we discussed things, the more they boiled down to this single point of disagreement. If we couldn’t agree on how to move forward, how were we to move forward?

While I was willing to shut things down, Scott believes he can get things turned around with time. I hope that he does. FeedLounge is the best user interface and user experience I’ve ever built, and I’ve got a lot of blood, sweat and tears invested in it.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the choice for me to leave was very hard, but one I felt had to be made. Despite hard work and the best of intentions, the level of service we were providing to our FeedLounge customers was just not something I was comfortable putting my name behind.

Looking Ahead

For the time being, I’m going to concentrate on making the Tasks Pro™ 1.7 and Tasks 2.7 releases the best they can be (folks love tagging!) and get them out as soon as possible. But I still believe that the RSS/Atom/Feed space is one that is ripe with potential. I’m discussing a variety of possibilities with a variety of folks and weighing a number of options - don’t be surprised to see me playing in the RSS space again at some point.

A few weeks ago I moved this blog to this new location but left a 301 redirect on all URLs on the old site. That has worked great to direct traffic here but unfortunately it has also redirected all the spam attempts on my old site to here too. Thankfully they’re not much of an issue because the POST information is lost but it’s annoying seeing them appear in the logs.

Thanks to the wonders of mod_rewrite it’s possible to stop those guys before they hit any PHP script. My blog was originally at http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/ and of course, the new site is http://ocaoimh.ie/. There are two way of stopping those requests:

(Continued)

This is interesting. I’ve tried Google and Yahoo’s ad networks - is anyone seeing great returns from other options?

“Then, when someone wants to see any of the pages on your blog, those pages are created for them dynamically, on the fly.” Sounds familiar… The new Blogger doesn’t make users wait on rebuilding anymore, nice upgrade! (What happened to all those folks saying static was the only way to scale?) That and their other new features show a real respect and sensitivity to their users, the only thing missing is an exporter. Rebuilding is so 2004.

Google Strict vs Google Deprecated, where the size of the homepage is reduced using standards-compliant markup. I’m guessing this isn’t a religious issue, just a personal one with whoever owns that code at Google.

• uwMike - WP-Cats “WP-Cats is a Wordpress plugin that aids in mass category management.”
• PGATOUR.com - Woods’ 50-win milestone leaves everyone in awe
• How To: Steal a Laptop - Gizmodo
• Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose - laugh or cry?
• ESPN.com - GOLF - Ryder Cup points: Minor win trumps British Open No. 2
• PGATOUR.com - Comparing Tiger’s 50 wins to other sports milestones - the thing that should really be highlighted here is the fact he did in 10 years what hardly anyone else has done in 20 or more.
• Open Thread: Leopard Preview - +1, c’mon - HTML e-mail is a new feature? Yuck!
• revver.com :: video :: Ze Frank Parody
• Ubuntu Linux now on my new Thinkpad T43p: Wow!
• [ECHENG.COM] Eric ChengÕs Journal È The Mac Pro: oh, how Apple tempts me
• Oh the stealthiness
• Rolling Stone : The Worst President in History?
• the show with zefrank - 08-08-06 - Ze hits the century mark, congrats.
• Haseenote’s JIVE W205R Core Duo MacBook clone for Korea - 2.7 pounds? Sounds good to me.
• Firefox Icon Touch-Up - small changes, big improvement.
• Kevin Burton’s Feed Blog: Technorati’s Numbers are Wrong
• Never Check Your Email First Or Last at LifeDev - I need to think about this.
• Ten Questions with “Dr. Evil”
• The Statistical King
• MySpace Blogger busted by Boulder City Council? (Blogs and the Blogosphere)
• Timbuk2 Blogger Bag: Hands All Over The Perfect Sack for Bloggers - Gizmodo - tempting, I love Timbuk2’s bags.
• the show with zefrank - 08-10-06 - go Ze!
• Zyb Backs Up Your Contacts Online - I’m really not that comfortable knowing my info is likely to end up in places like this.
• What we need is…
• alexander kirk - JavaScript Tricks And Good Programming Style
• YouTube - Honda Commercial with Crab - leetle pinch?

The BlackBerry interface is unapologetically a power user interface. Much of the functionality is only available through keyboard shortcuts or the click wheel (not immediately apparent via buttons, etc.). In contrast, the Palm OS presents almost all of its functionality in on-screen buttons - eschewing menus for the most part.

Once you take make the investment to learn it, you’ll enjoy the BlackBerry’s more efficient screen usage. Google Maps for the BlackBerry 8700 is a great example of this. The entire screen is used to display maps - no buttons, menus, etc. (though overlays are presented in “directions” mode).

I believe that BlackBerry has gotten away with this interface design style choice in part because the majority of their customers are corporate users. They don’t have to sell each user, they sell the company and the company provides the device to the user.

In contrast, the Treo has been a consumer device which has moved into the enterprise. The initial ease of use of the Palm OS helped sell individual consumers on the device.

Now that BlackBerry is creating more consumer direct devices and the Treo is being billed more as a business tool, I’m curious if their respective user interface styles will also begin to converge a little more.

The BlackBerry interface is unapologetically a power user interface. Much of the functionality is only available through keyboard shortcuts or the click wheel (not immediately apparent via buttons, etc.). In contrast, the Palm OS presents almost all of its functionality in on-screen buttons - eschewing menus for the most part.

Once you take make the investment to learn it, you’ll enjoy the BlackBerry’s more efficient screen usage. Google Maps for the BlackBerry 8700 is a great example of this. The entire screen is used to display maps - no buttons, menus, etc. (though overlays are presented in “directions” mode).

I believe that BlackBerry has gotten away with this interface design style choice in part because the majority of their customers are corporate users. They don’t have to sell each user, they sell the company and the company provides the device to the user.

In contrast, the Treo has been a consumer device which has moved into the enterprise. The initial ease of use of the Palm OS helped sell individual consumers on the device.

Now that BlackBerry is creating more consumer direct devices and the Treo is being billed more as a business tool, I’m curious if their respective user interface styles will also begin to converge a little more.

The VPS this site is hosted on has a tendancy to kernel panic since I upgraded the kernel to 2.6. I'm not sure why, and the ticket I opened requesting help was replied by someone saying I should check the console. Fat lot of good that did me when this site was down for a few hours. Help is at hand however in the shape of Mark Ferlatte who mentioned that adding the following to /etc/sysctl.conf and running sysctl -p will make Linux reboot after 5 seconds! Adjust to taste:

kernel.panic = 5

Hopefully we'll have less downtime here.

There have been a number of interesting suggestions on my post yesterday that attempt to solve the handheld-desktop sync and provide a web view of my calendars. However, many of these do not include editing via the web interface and none of them include a public free-busy only view¹ for my work week that combines all my calendars.

The lack of free-busy baffles me - the data is all there and this has been in Exchange/Outlook for as long as I can remember. Yahoo! Calendar has this too if I remember correctly. Why isn’t this a view people have added to every web calendar interface.

(Continued)

There have been a number of interesting suggestions on my post yesterday that attempt to solve the handheld-desktop sync and provide a web view of my calendars. However, many of these do not include editing via the web interface and none of them include a public free-busy only view¹ for my work week that combines all my calendars.

The lack of free-busy baffles me - the data is all there and this has been in Exchange/Outlook for as long as I can remember. Yahoo! Calendar has this too if I remember correctly. Why isn’t this a view people have added to every web calendar interface.

Ethan does his BlackBerry to multiple-desktop sync solution using a hosted exchange account. Maybe that is the best option at this point² - then the only missing piece of the puzzle is the public free-busy, which maybe I solve via some of my own code.

1. Remember, I do not want to share the calendar events, just the free-busy status. [back]
2. Assuming I’d have web outlook access. [back]

This morning 24 suspected terrorists were arrested in the UK as part of an investigation into attempts to takes bombs on board planes in hand luggage. The resulting disruption and restrictions almost made more news than the fact that firebombs with many hundreds of souls on-board could have been launched down on top of US cities!

I'm just glad I got home on Tuesday and I missed all this. It makes me wonder how much the authorities knew in advance - just after leaving Matt in SFO I walked up to the xray machine, unbundled the laptop and my bags and was then asked to step into a machine which blew little puffs of air into my clothes and under my shirt. It obviously sampled the chemicals on me. Lucky they didn't do it at the end of a 9 hour flight, 4 hour wait and 1 hour flight home!

On a brighter note, my luggage made it's way through security fine. I left my sandals in the bag, but took all the wires for the various chargers and devices out and carried them with me. Be warned, their machines are so sensitive that sandals with up to year old fertilizer on them and wires could be construed as a bomb!

(Continued)

I think I’ve got some pretty basic calendaring needs. I want to be able to access (view/add/edit) my calendar data from any computer including my handheld (using the native handheld app and sync, not a web interface - at least for now) and I want to publish a simple free/busy view of my workday schedule publicly.

I’ve looked at a number of options, but before tainting the discussion I thought I’d ask for suggestions.

Suggestions?

I think I’ve got some pretty basic calendaring needs. I want to be able to access (view/add/edit) my calendar data from any computer including my handheld (using the native handheld app and sync, not a web interface - at least for now) and I want to publish a simple free/busy view of my workday schedule publicly.

I’ve looked at a number of options, but before tainting the discussion I thought I’d ask for suggestions.

Suggestions?

SxSW has opened up panel voting for 2007, similar to how we did for WordCamp. Have they done this before? I've got one proposed called "Scaling Your Community."

Last week I went to San Francisco to meet up with the rest of Automattic and attend WordCamp 2006. There's plenty of coverage of WordCamp so I'm sure you're not interested in me telling you how great it was, who said what, what sucked, etc, etc!

What I would like to say is my heartfelt thanks to Matt and Toni and those who control the purse strings in Automattic who made last week possible. Podz, Andy and I stayed in a fabulous house where everyone gathered to work and brainstorm new features, work methods, discuss our strengths and weaknesses and work super-fast on finally getting the Upgrades feature of Wordpress.com out.

What are the guys in Automattic like? They're smart, they're enthusiastic, they're really driven by blogging and making things better. They live and breath blogs and tech but they really do worry about how a beginner views WordPress. They're also fun and great to be with and I look forward to the next Automattic get-together!

(Continued)

You're probably expecting a horror story given Dell's typically bad press, but I have a story with a happy ending. My D810 had problems powering up as of late. Sometimes it just refused to turn back on after being shutdown. After walking through the troubleshooting guides on Dell's support site, I sent them a support request describing the problem and the various remedies I had attempted. An hour later they replied saying that they needed to replace the motherboard and would arrange to have DHL come to my house to retrieve the laptop. The next day, DHL arrived to pack up the laptop and spirit it away. Four business days later my laptop is back in my hands and running nicely. I received email and phone notifications every step of the way as the laptop traveled from DHL to Dell, to the Dell technician, back to DHL, and finally to me. Props to Dell for fixing the problem promptly and without hassle.

I'm still recovering from WordCamp in some ways, it was such a rush this week almost seems like a vacation. The best summary of posts regarding the event is on [gonzo]musings, The WordCamp 2006 Overview & Wrapup - from 7875 Miles Away. I'm very happy with how the event went, we had well over 300 brilliant and engaging make it a part of their day. There were a ton of great ideas and participation happening from all corners, especially the interaction during the State of the Word discussion. I also learned a ton and next year we will have a better sign-in process, naptime after BBQ, clearer tracks for devs vs. users, and a bit more lead time. Thank you so much to everyone who came out, it was a really magical day. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 20 pounds of Memphis Minnie's brisket in my fridge.

Apple’s WWDC keynote announcements yesterday about Leopard have been talked about pretty much everywhere, but there are a few things I wanted to touch on:

ToDos

I was asked, so I’ll answer. I don’t see the ToDos and Notes implementation in Mail.app as a competitor to Tasks. My target audience is generally “folks who want to access their task list from multiple computers (and even multiple OSes) and want a good interface and some sophisticated functionality”. I don’t see the ToDos feature satisfying this market. On the plus side, perhaps some new folks will try managing their task list on their computer, realize they need more, and find Tasks.

Time Machine

Do people realize the hard drive space implications here? Also, sad to see a number of small developers lose so much income as their products are essentially dead.

Spaces

There goes the major market for the existing virtual desktop apps. Hopefully some of them will stick around. I use You Control: Desktops for example because it has a single killer feature.

E-mail Stationary

I am actually really annoyed about this. HTML e-mail is generally bad. Giving people tools to do bad things more easily is worse.

Leopard Server (Calendaring)

Everything they’ve added in the server is fantastic. Open sourcing the calendar server gives it a real chance IMO. Niall has a nice summary post.

The comments are open…

Apple’s WWDC keynote announcements yesterday about Leopard have been talked about pretty much everywhere, but there are a few things I wanted to touch on:

ToDos

I was asked, so I’ll answer. I don’t see the ToDos and Notes implementation in Mail.app as a competitor to Tasks. My target audience is generally “folks who want to access their task list from multiple computers (and even multiple OSes) and want a good interface and some sophisticated functionality”. I don’t see the ToDos feature satisfying this market. On the plus side, perhaps some new folks will try managing their task list on their computer, realize they need more, and find Tasks.

Time Machine

Do people realize the hard drive space implications here? Also, sad to see a number of small developers lose so much income as their products are essentially dead.

Spaces

There goes the major market for the existing virtual desktop apps. Hopefully some of them will stick around. I use You Control: Desktops for example because it has a single killer feature.

E-mail Stationary

I am actually really annoyed about this. HTML e-mail is generally bad. Giving people tools to do bad things more easily is worse.

Leopard Server (Calendaring)

Everything they’ve added in the server is fantastic. Open sourcing the calendar server gives it a real chance IMO. Niall has a nice summary post.

The comments are open…

I’ve uploaded beta 4 of Tasks Pro™ 1.7 and Tasks 2.7. This release fixes a few bugs that were reported in the beta 3 releases including one in PHP Tag Engine that caused the install/upgrade to fail. Sorry about that.

I’ve uploaded beta 4 of Tasks Pro™ 1.7 and Tasks 2.7. This release fixes a few bugs that were reported in the beta 3 releases including one in PHP Tag Engine that caused the install/upgrade to fail. Sorry about that.

I'll be hanging out with my friend Meeta at the Blogging and Beyond event being held by SIPA this Wednesday. If you're attending, look me up and we can chat WordPress.

On a bit of a whim I bought a Sony VAIO VGN-SZ280P/C. The carbon fiber LCD bezel is crazy thin and light, and it runs Ubuntu. Pretty sexy. It received quite a few looks at WordCamp.

I was wrong when I said you can’t tether a BlackBerry as a modem in Parallels. You can tether in Parallels, you just have to disable your PocketMac drivers first.

Move the BlackberryUSB*.kext folders out of the /System/Library/Extensions folder, restart, then you can connect to your BlackBerry in Parallels with no problem.

This is great, until there is a solution for tethering in OS X (the bounty is up to $560), at least I don’t have to reboot into BootCamp to connect in a pinch.

We finally launched the store to the public at large after what seems like an eternity in development! Andy's Custom CSS Editor is the first product there, and priced at $15/year it's very reasonable. Feedback has been positive mostly, although mixed at times.

There does seem to be some confusion about the CSS Editor, you can modify the css of any of the existing themes by taking advantage of the "cascading" feature of CSS. The styles you define in the editor override those in the theme's stylesheet.

I can't wait to see what people do with this. I hope to see a lot of talent come out of the woodwork and make their blogs prettier and unique!