Scripting News

Nice to get support from the Guardian

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:03:46 GMT

We're all on our own when a BigCo decides to throw its weight at us, but being a well-read blogger has its advantages, esp when a columnist at a big newspaper believes you. Thanks to Charles Arthur for the air cover. Contrast this to the NY Times piece that describes bloggers as "complaining" and makes Comcast out to be a hero. The Times didn't do their homework, giving them the benefit of the doubt. Eliason isn't empowered to circumvent Comcast's native hostility to its customers.

Note: This time it wasn't about FlickrFan, as Arthur says, I had scaled down my home use of it. That was the cause of the first deliberate Comcast outage. This time it was probably because I was backing up lots of content from scripting.com on local hard drives and had made some mistakes and had to download stuff twice. Lots of gigabytes up there, I've done a fair amount of podcasting over the years.

The disruption caused by the outage is over, thanks in part to the fact that I planned for it, and had backup TV service and Internet service from DirecTV and AT&T respectively. I was able to configure the SlingBox to work with with DirecTV and now I have John McCain giving a speech on my second monitor (the sound is turned off, he's hard to listen to). The only difference is the image of a DirecTV remote control instead of one from Comcast. I also have to learn the new channels.

Chin-dropping photo

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:44:04 GMT

An astounding AP photo of Barack Obama waving to his fans in Berlin earlier today. I saw this one scroll by on a large HDTV and couldn't believe my eyes. There's so much detail in the picture, so many stories, so many cameras!

This is the really cool thing about FlickrFan, btw -- the best photographers in the world, with the best equipment, at the most interesting events. And lots of pixels. People who think it's just a screen saver must think that Obama is just a politician (and many do of course).

But when you see this picture, think about all the pixels your displays have today, and how much of the photography that comes to you takes advantage of it, and you'll realize why I pushed so hard to get the AP and AFP to partner with me to get these photos for you. Yet so few have taken advantage of it.

Anyway, this picture gives you some idea of what you're missing.

PS: All those American flags, in Germany, give me goosebumps.

A word about Comcast

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:48:20 GMT

Technology is fragile. Systems go down all the time because someone forgot to maintain something, or someone deleted a file or a variable that they thought no one was using. In other words with Murphy's Law there are plenty of opportunities to put all the pieces together again after all hell breaks loose. Just ask the Twitter folk, who are doing the best they can to hold it together.

But there's a special place in hell for vendors who deliberately knock their customers off the air, without warning, just to get them to call. The thought is as abhorrent to a computer professional as it would be for a surgeon to leave a scalpel in a patient to be sure they pay their bill.

Comcast is going to get sued some day for what they do, and they're going to lose billions because of it. I tend to be an outlier on the leading edge. If they're shitting on me today, you can bet they'll be shitting on hundreds of people next year, and thousands the year after that. One of those shittings is going to cause an oil spill or a nuclear accident, or some horrible thing we haven't imagined yet. Maybe soldiers will die because of their deliberate outages. Maybe children. You just don't fuck around with some things, the kinds of things Comcast is fucking with. If you're going to turn a paying customer off deliberately, it seems you should do it slowly and carefully and covering every part of your anatomy while you do it, not the roughshod way they do it now. (And what would be so hard about slowing down the connection so it's impossible for someone to use too much bandwidth?)

That there are engineers inside Comcast willing to do the bidding of some very poor thinking business people says we don't have adequate professional standards. Some professions don't allow their members to do harm. You can't find a doctor who will administer the death penalty, or even advise on what would be a humane form of the death penalty.

Comcast shut me down again

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:06:13 GMT

Oy. This is probably the end of the line for me and Comcast. About an hour before today's Obama speech, I was upstairs, with Slingplayer on the 2nd monitor, Audio HIjack Pro ready to record, when the net went down. I figured it was another outage, we had one here in Berkeley last week.

So I posted a twit to comcastcares, saying we had another outage. The response said it wasn't an outage.

Net-net, it's some kind of "security" thing, so says Frank Ellison, the comcastcares guy. I told him if this isn't a legitimate security issue, then please close my account, both Internet and TV (for which I now pay $183 per month). I have redundant service for both, with an AT&T DSL line and a DirecTV dish, I'm hardly watching any TV at all these days, other than MSNBC and a little CNN, and while their Internet sure is fast, if they keep taking it down and insisting that I grovel and listen to lectures to get it turned back on (or worse, who knows what they have planned for me this time) -- no thanks. I don't think groveling and being a valued customer go together.

Ellison also volunteered that he liked me. My response was you're a company rep, you don't get to like or not like me.

It's with a little bit of anger and frustration that I realize that Comcast paid $175 million to get Joseph Smarr to work on their network, and their answer to me is: 1. Pay $183 per month. 2. I should care whether they like me or not. 3. They'll shut me down when they want me to call. 4. They don't care if it's right before Obama's speech in Berlin or not. 5. Fcuk off Dave. (I threw #5 in there for attitude, they didn't literally tell me to fuck off, it's more in the body language.)

Oh yeah, they paid $75 million for a bunch of newsletters today. I'll end this piece the way I began it. Oy.

PS: Here's the writeup of the issue with Comcast in April.

Update: Their issue isn't with the security on my net, it has to do with how much bandwidth I use. Can't work with them when their method of getting me on the phone is to shut off my service, without any warning. I told them to close the account. I'm no longer a Comcast customer. I'm sure they'll send me another bill, adding insult to injury.

Inching toward federation

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:38:26 GMT

I have a problem that a lot more people are having.

I use three "micro-blogging" platforms.

1. Twitter

2. FriendFeed

3. Identi.ca

Each has strengths. FriendFeed can thread a discussion under each mini-post. It works better for me than the discussions on Twitter. Twitter is still where most of the people are, but -- well you know the rest. It's become unreliable. Leave it at that. And while Identi.ca has fewer of the people I care about, it's catching up, and its commitment to be open, and the fact that I can get Evan on the phone and he's easy to work with, well that makes me want to invest in it.

So in my mind, as of July 2008, Twitter is waning, Identi.ca is rising and FriendFeed is useful.

But using three systems presents a problem to which no one knows the solution. When I post on one of these systems, should the other two get the post too, and if so, how?

Right now, today I'm using an approximation to the ideal system. I try to enter my original post on FriendFeed, then I have an agent script running on one of my machines that routes it to Twitter and Identi.ca, with a pointer to the discussion thread on FriendFeed, shortened by bit.ly.

But this is temporary, it's not the last word in how this will work. Somewhere in here is nirvana, a system that makes sense, that makes it possible for people who base their work on one system to communicate effortlessly with people who base their work elsewhere. When we reach this nirvana, we will have the federated network of micro-blogging systems. To the extent that we're confused about this, and we are, is the extent that we're not ready yet to say what federation means in micro-blogging.

Losing followers on Twitter?

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:42:24 GMT

I stopped keeping track of the number of people following me on Twitter, I know it was pretty high, but I also know it wasn't a true measure of how many people were paying attention to what I said there.

Some of them, I assume, are people who tried Twitter and for some reason didn't become a regular user. I can tell beause when I post a pointer to a picture on Twitter, somewhere between 100 and 500 people click through. How many people are reading the stuff? I don't know, but it's less than the reported number would suggest.

A new kind of outage started on Twitter last night, it started losing track of the connections between users. I haven't seen this quantified yet, just various posts that indicate there's some kind of problem. I'm sure as the days goes on we'll learn more about it. I started this blog post in part to try to gather information.

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.