Scripting News

TechJunk picking up steam

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:46:15 GMT

Tech.NewsJunk.Com was born on the 4th of July, just like the United States of America. I chose a holiday so the expectations wouldn't be too high, cause I knew at first it would be hard to find the kinds of stories I was looking for, news about products. Not interested in mergers or trends or personnel changes at tech companies. Just product news and reviews, that's all.

http://tech.newsjunk.com/

Well, it's starting to pick up. Maybe we're learning where to look.

And the flow is up. It's not even remotely in the ballpark of TechMeme, but a link from Tech might get you 250 page reads. That's not bad. I'd take it.

And now we have the JavaScript include, so if you want to include the latest links from TJ in your blog you can. Just add this bit of script into your page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tech.newsjunk.com/js/recent5.js">

And if you know a good source of tech product news, please post a comment or send me an email. Thanks!

PS: A frequently asked question is does the news have to come from a famous blog or blogger -- and the answer is an emphatic no way! I want to hear from real users, and when possible from the designer of the product. I care about what people think. Now, that said, it's okay if you write for a big publication too. There's just no bias against individual bloggers.

Poster for Obama rally in Berlin

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:01:06 GMT

Future-safe archives, again

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:13:39 GMT

I was on a cleanup and backup binge today, and came across a folder on one of my disks entitled Trade Secrets in a place where it didn't belong. I did a search on my LAN and found it was my only copy, not just here, but on the net too.

I had made a point of blogging about this folder in October 2006, that much showed up in Google, but the folder was on a machine that I shut down some months later, and it pointed to a folder on the new owner of the IP address's machine. There was no evidence of the files anywhere on the net.

So I'm rescuing it again. Back shortly with more info.

The links work again.

http://secrets.podcatch.com/ is the folder.

And http://secrets.podcatch.com/tradeSecrets.zip is the archive.

But this highlights something. Even when you make an effort to make something permanently available, less than two years later, it's gone again.

If we want the web that we're creating to last, we're going to have to be deliberate and systematic about it. It's not easy.

Time for an EVDO sidegrade

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:38:36 GMT

One of the benefits of writing this blog is that when it's time to make a technology decision, I get advice from the best informed most opinionated and smartest people in the business -- you!

Anyway, last year I got a Sprint EVDO card for my MacBook laptop. It was probably the wrong decision, I figured the card version would be faster, but then I wanted to use it with my new Asus EEE PC that of course just has USB.

So the question is this...

What should I get to replace the card?

I want something that works with both Mac and Windows. USB-based. Reasonable price and performance, for the occasions that I'm out of range of wifi but want to connect to the net.

Here are the products the 3GStore is recommending.

1. Sierra Compass 597 USB Modem.

2. Sprint Novatel U720 Rev A USB Refurbished Upgrade.

3. Cradlepoint CTR500 Cellular Travel Router.

I think they all look pretty interesting esp #3.

We won in Iraq, a long time ago

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:14:30 GMT

I know this goes without saying, but it keeps coming up.

Remember when our troops marched into Baghdad, took the place over, drove Saddam into a hole and arrested or killed the government. Then we disbanded their army.

When you go to war that's what victory looks like.

Then came the occupation. There is no such thing as winning an occupation. You either continue to occupy or withdraw. It's semantic nonsense to apply the verb "win" to the noun "occupation."

Winning in war or sport is not vague or ill-defined. When the clock runs out in football the team that's ahead wins. When two runners are in a race the first to cross the finish line wins. When you fight a war, when you take the other guys' capital and disband their government and army, that's winning.

As I said it goes without saying, but it keeps coming up in the news, this weird idea that there is such a thing as winning an occuption, when there isn't.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Vanity Fair covers The New Yorker

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:54:05 GMT

Click here for the story.

He'll make a cool president

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:25:09 GMT

How to for Time Machine?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:32:16 GMT

I have a surplus of disk space, so I decided to give Time Machine a try.

I have a 500GB disk that's empty. I designated it as the Time Machine disk.

I have one external disk that I want to keep backed up. I don't care about the internal disk, but there doesn't seem to be a way to tell Time Machine not to back it up.

The internal disk has 95GB of data on it.

The external disk has 193GB. Its name is Ohio. This is the only disk I want backed up. I don't mind copying things onto it to be sure they're backed up.

Yet Time Machine reports that there is 1.4 terabytes of data that it wants to back up.

Of course it fails when it tries to do this. (Only 500GB on the backup disk.)

The Help docs don't cover this circumstance, nor do any of the articles I have found on Google. What gives. Hasn't anyone had this problem yet? Where is it finding the 1.4TB of data to back up and how do I tell it not to bother.

Here's a screen shot of the Options panel for Time Machine.

Never mind. I didn't understand the UI. The + in the UI means exclude something from the backup. Dumb old Dave. I thought a plus would mean "add it." Why would I think that? (Sorry for the sarcasm.)

Credit where credit is due

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:01:56 GMT

It was very gratifying to see Twhirl support Identi.ca yesterday. They got some glowing press for it, but let's make sure a fair amount of the credit goes to the two companies that went for compatibility and helped create what's beginning to look like a standard -- the Twitter API.

First, to Twitter for having the guts to put an API on Twitter, and making it open and clonable. And second, to the team it Identi.ca who made complete compatibility the goal, so much so that you just need to change the address in a client and everything "just works." My initial testing showed that they did attain that level of compatibility, and it was confirmed by the experiences of the developers.

When people say they don't care about APIs, they miss the point that if developers do it the right way, as these guys did, then compatibility is not a competitive issue, users have choices, and products compete on virtue: performance, features and economics, not lock-in. It's the exception not the rule in the tech business that APIs and format compatibility is respected by the vendors, and it should be celebrated when it happens, as it did here.

Bravo! Everybody who made this happen. Good show.

MacBook Touch coming soon!?!?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:48:30 GMT

There's much speculation about a refresh on Apple's laptop line, a permanent thread in tech bloggerland, we've been waiting for it for a long time. Here's my bet. The MacBook Air was the leading edge of a new form factor at Apple, the low-end of a new lineup of super-thin laptops.

In the next round you'll see one with two or three USB ports and a removable battery as well as a tablet version. Both will run the iPhone software at least as an option. The tablet might run it as its only option.

Mike & Nik will have what they want but it won't cost $200.

BTW, my guess is they extrapolated the same thing, and their challenge is a clever way of getting an I Told You So when Apple announces the tablet MacBook Touch™ in Sept.

VPs coming soon

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:29:20 GMT

Friends close to both campaigns say the announcements of the Republican and Democratic choices for vice-president are likely coming within the week. At that the announcements will be unusually late.

No speculation on the choices from the sources, however -- I have a strong feeling that McCain will pick Romney. Seems like an obvious balance to McCain. Younger, but not too young. Tall and healthy, conservative. He might be smarter than McC, but not by too much.

Obama will pick someone safe, not too famous, not flamboyant. Easy on the eyes and easy to forget.

McCain, who is the full-hour guest on This Week on Sunday may choose that venue to make his announcement, opposite Obama who is the full-hour guest on Meet the Press.

April Fool in July?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:51:05 GMT

I don't know about those guys over at TechCrunch, they always get me with their April Fools jokes. Now here comes this piece that announces they're getting into the hardware business! Could it be for real? I don't know!!

I'm reminded of this post by Mike this weekend where he reviewed a service by the former editors of Uncov, and said, quite accurately that you always understimate how hard something is when you look in from the outside. Making something easy to use is a lot more work than making soemthing that's not, although to the non-engineer this seems counter-intuitive.

Now, Nik is an engineer, so I don't want to be appearing to talk down to him, cause that wouldn't be appropriate. But this does either seem completely utterly unrealistic or a damned good off-season April Fool joke.

PS: This post suggests that it's serious. In which case it's a good thing -- thinking big is how you get big things done. Best of luck. I'll buy one for $200 for sure. Maybe even more.

Catching up with the Junks

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:20:03 GMT

A couple of minor updates from the Land of Junks.

1. NewsJunk and TechJunk are now available on identi.ca, thanks to its new wonderful API.

2. Both feeds are available in OPML as well, for applications that like OPML.

Amazon S3 down all day

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:38:00 GMT

As you can see, we host most of our images on Amazon S3. As do many other sites.

It's been a marvel of uptime, until it goes down. And today's outage is the worst so far (there have only been two others). I'm sure they're working their butts off to get it back on the air, but as probably a lot of others are doing today, I'm thinking of ways to avoid these outages in the future.

It seems there is a business opportunity here -- it would be easy to hook up an external service to S3, and for a fee, keep a mirror on another server. Then it would be a matter of redirecting domains to point at the other server when S3 goes down.

It would be a smart service to combine with a DNS service, or a registrar.

That solution would work for Scripting News, since all the images are hosted on Amazon through an alias called images.scripting.com. That could easily be pointed to a different server that hosts a mirror. Of course that will have to wait until Amazon comes back.

Update 6:30PM: S3 is working again.

Feature suggestion for Twitter

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:28:24 GMT

"Like" Is a FriendFeed feature that Twitter should have. It's a misnomer, it's not about liking something. When you like something that means you recommend it. Everyone who follows you gets the recommendation.

How it would work in Twitter.

1. You're reading something I wrote in Twitter.

2. You say you "like" it -- which is like adding it to your Favorites (same UI).

3. It goes on your output stream. All the people who follow you see it too.

People are doing this manually now -- "retweeting" -- but this is one click and the system remembers where it came from. If it were possible to hang stuff off a tweet (as it is in FF) then there would only be one place.

Twitter should have this. It's a very important feature.

PS: From now on when I say something should be in Twitter, it should also be in all Twitter clones, for now that's identi.ca.

PPS: I'm sure Twitter-only people are sick of hearing it, but FF has mystical qualities that I'm not sure anyone fully appreciates. It reveals little bits of itself to you slowly over time. Not sure it's always the best way, but it's like a puzzle, a story that you want to know how it will turn out. You can't get it from a quick look, you have to immerse yourself in it. Not saying everyone should, but I'm glad I did.

PPPS: I'm started to develop systems on top of FriendFeed that I initially thought I would develop on Twitter. Their reliability and performance make it thinkable, where Twitter has become flaky, not only technically, but also in the way it deals with developers. Could happen with FF too, but then my fallback is identi.ca, where worse comes to worse, I could operate my own net.

PPPPS: I am however using identi.ca for something I thought I would use Twitter for. As a lightweight identity system. For the project I'm working on, I'm requiring users to have an identi.ca login. This little thing has huge implications in the identity space. A lightweight low-security login that's accessible via API, it's something I've been asking Google and Yahoo to do for ages. They can't seem to wrap their minds around it. Along comes identi.ca and boom, problem solved.

Mini-blog posts

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:55:19 GMT

I never agreed that Twitter is what some people call a micro-blogging service. Just didn't feel much like blogging to me. But FriendFeed is another story. I am using it more like a blogging tool than Twitter. For example...

1. Yesterday I snuck out to see the new Batman movie on its opening day. I wrote my first review on FF. In the morning (now) I have more thoughts. If Heath Ledger hadn't died, and if there were two other big performances like his, it might have been on the same level as The Departed, and that's high praise. The other characters and the actors who portrayed them weren't anywhere near as interesting as Ledger's Joker, who unlike Nicholson's or Romero's -- wasn't funny, at least not in the normal way. He is a pathetic character, wonderfully pathetic. Really something to see. So my first impression last night was pretty lukewarm, but after a few hours it seems more masterful. You could have cut out most of the other scenes and made a movie just about the Joker and that would have been great. Too bad Ledger died. He was becoming a really fine actor.

2. As you may know I bought a cute little Windows laptop on impulse the other day. It was a good move. And on FF last night I asked for help networking it with my Macs. Glad i bought it. Gotta keep up on what the other guys are doing. Apple has been doing pretty well, the iPhone was risky, and they pulled it off, not easy to do. Microsoft usually takes three tries to get it right, Apple got it right the first time. But in ultra-portable laptops, Apple isn't cutting it. This little EEE PC thing is a marvel. There are some really crappy things about it, like the uncontrollable trackpad and the keypad is tiny, and squinting at the tiny screen hurts my eyes, but it really is a joy of a product. If only it ran Mac OS.

What about blogging?

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:44:00 GMT

Publishing keeps getting cheaper.

That's been the constant push, the practical application of Moore's Law in my neck of the woods. I've always been a publishing guy, and that's always been how I viewed computers, and it's why I got into them in the first place.

Most people don't get this, the real story of blogging is just the continuation of the process. You could just have easily focused on the laser printer, Aldus Pagemaker and local area networking in the 1980s, or the web browser and Netscape in the 1990s. Blogging is the leading edge in publishing in the first decade of this century.

Here's what Clay Shirky says on the subject. "Forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."

Well put, and definitely worth passing along.

Go read Marc's post now

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:06:18 GMT

Highly recommend this post by Marc Canter, it's filled with ideas. Much the same as my thinking. I have a post planned for tomorrow or Sunday that should blow out some assumptions about identity and federating these micro-blogging services. Low-tech, worse is better, re-use what's already out there, as Marc says it's all happening now, and I'm loving the way it's turning out.

Twitter connects to Gnip

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:16:57 GMT

More movement in micro-blogging!

Recall that Gnip is a ping syndicator, sort of weblogs.com on steroids. Not the simplest of APIs, but apparently quite powerful. I tried to get some code running with it, but hit a hard wall that I couldn't get past. No matter, others are successfully adapting to Gnip.

I just read this announcement on Twitter from Eric Marcoullier pointing to a TechCrunch piece. Eric says: "It's official: Twitter is pushing to Gnip and Gnip is pushing it the fuck out to everyone!" But this is kind of contradicted in the TC piece, which says you can only get updates from users you specify. You can't connect up on the same (firehose) basis that Summize was connecting before they were acquired by Twitter (earlier this week).

Like I said: So much movement. (There's more coming.)

One thing's for sure is that being open to developers is very much a competitive issue. This is why two-party systems work in technology and one-party systems stagnate. Why, when Netscape dominated browsers nothing moved, and it was fun while Microsoft and Netscape were competing, and why we returned to stagnation when Netscape folded, and why it's once again interesting now that Firefox is flourishing. Same thing in the competition betw Twitter and identi.ca.

When I talked with Evan Prodromou yesterday he said they would open up their XMPP back-end to anyone and everyone without limits. Now it's up to them to make good on that, and this shoudl give Twitter the incentive to go all the way with Gnip. BTW, Gnip should be agnostic, they should work with identi.ca as well as with Twitter.

Identi.ca implements the Twitter API

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:56:36 GMT

Recall that identi.ca is an open source Twitter-like "micro blogging" service. When it appeared, earlier this month, I wrote: "First thing --> looking for an API." I wanted to see an implementation of the Twitter API, so that all the code that I had written for Twitter would automatically work with identi.ca.

Being compatible with Twitter is the developer-friendly thing to do, it means we will only have one code base to maintain. It's good for users, because they have choice, they can use either Twitter or identi.ca, and not have to make a choice on tools. It's good for identi.ca because they instantly get a base of apps that work with their service. I'd argue that it's even good for Twitter, because it helps to solidify a standard with them as the market leader. The second guy into a market sets the standard, by ratifying the API designed and deployed by the first to market, who is in this case, obviously, Twitter. Had identi.ca blazed their own trail and made an API that did what Twitter's did, but was gratuitously incompatible, everyone would have suffered. Too often in the tech business, this is what happens, even though it's such a disrespectful and non-optimal thing to do.

Yesterday I got an email from Evan Prodromou at identi.ca saying that they had implemented the Twitter API; he asked if I would test my apps against their implementation. I did, and I'm happy to report that I was able to run all my code, unmodified, except for substituting identi.ca/api where ever twitter.com appears in an address. That's what I call compatible! It all "just worked" (so far, knock wood, I am not a lawyer, Murphy-willing, etc).

So we can check a very important item off identi.ca's to-do list. Next items: 1. Allow any developer to hook into the full flow of identi.ca through XMPP, and 2. Demonstrate interop across a federation of identi.ca deployments.

See also: The docs for the "Twitter-compatible API."

See also: How to think about identi.ca, Plan B.