Scripting News

I've got a problem with Firefox 3

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:21:51 GMT

Now that the tool I use to manage S3 is available for Firefox 3, I have been able to switch to it, and I have. But there's a real problem with how search works in this browser. It could be there's a simple solution if so, let me know what it is. But right now, it's broken.

Here's the problem -- I go to the search box in the upper right corner of the window and enter a phrase, and click Return. What I expect to happen is that Google opens with results for that search term. What actually happens is that cuil.com opens with results for that search term. Okay, I figure it's a matter of switching the default, when I go to the popup I expect to see the same choices as in Firefox 2, with Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, Google, etc. But Cuil is the only choice, and there's no way to delete it. Okay, there's a link to Get More Search Engines, but Google is not on the list. Huh? WTF is going on here?

The answer better be realllly good. I'm pissed. I don't want to use cuil.com, sorry.

Update: I got hacked. Re-installed Firefox. Fixed. Better.

Catholic League wants offensive bloggers nixed by Dems

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:15:23 GMT

This is really ignorant and crude.

There's a misunderstanding that bloggers somehow must have the same politics or even standards as the party who's throwing the convention.

I think we should have the Catholic League nixed for being ignorant and crude, and offensive.

Thank G-d no one listens to me!

A taste of FlickrFan

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:27:12 GMT

FlickrFan, like all rivers of news, is about flow. In this case it's a flow of pictures, from your contacts on Flickr, from AP and AFP, and from anyone else that you know that provides a feed of high-def pictures.

I like to view the pictures on a big-screen TV that's hooked up to a Mac Mini, but I also use it on my desktop, and various laptops -- no matter where or how you watch, it's an interesting way to view the news.

Then I thought, why not scroll the pictures through a web page, one every few seconds? So last night I put it together, on an experimental basis, and it's pretty interesting! It's just a taste of what you get with FlickrFan, but it doesn't require any software other than a web browser.

http://show.flickrfan.org/

Click on the link and kick back for a few and let the pics scroll by. Today the news is mostly the Olympics and General Musharraf of Pakistan (he resigned). Last week there were lots of Russian tanks. Tomorrow I bet there will be hurricane pics from Florida. Watch out cause sometimes the pics are not work-safe, usually not because of sex, rather because of blood, even death. But that reflects what's actually happening in the world.

Thanks to two very fine organizations for their support: AFP for their fire-hose of wonderful news pictures, and WordPress.com for hosting the pictures and providing bandwidth. I couldn't afford the hosting myself.

Hope you like it!

Update: Interesting to see Boston.Com going in this direction too.

Bear Hug Camp (click on the bear)

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:43:43 GMT

Dare left something out (and it's important)

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:50:10 GMT

I'm in the middle of a complex project or I'd take more time out to explain, but Dare Obasanjo left out the one thing in the history of SOAP vs REST that guys like him always leave out. I don't know why they do it, because it's the most important bit, it's the point between the complexity of SOAP as it evolved through the interests of the BigCos and the incompleteness of REST.

It's called XML-RPC and it's what SOAP was before the BigCo's made it complex.

Really ought to include it in your thinking, Dare and everyone else. You're missing out on something that works really well. You should at least learn the lessons and add to REST what it needs to catch up with XML-RPC. Seriously.

What's missing in REST, btw, is a standard method of serializing structs, lists and scalar types. The languages we use have a lot more in common than you might think. We're all writing code, again and again, every time we support a new interface that could be written once and then baked into the kernels of our languages, and then our operating systems. Apple actually did this with Mac OS, XML-RPC support is baked in. So did Python. So if you think it's just me saying this, you should take another look.

More movement in TwitterLand

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:45:14 GMT

I love it when things change!

And so far it looks like the Twitter folk did a good job with the features to support threading.

This is a very lightweight feature on the server side, lots more work in the client, and very similar to the effort required to support payloads. Just three new fields in the struct that represents a status. A pointer to the payload, its MIME type and size so clients know what to display to represent the payload.

I love that identi.ca is matching Twitter feature-for-feature in the API, where it counts; continuing what Steve Gillmor calls their bearhug. Good term.

I also love that Twitter's API seems more responsive since the last time I worked on code that ran against it. Seems all the outages had a payoff, faster service for API calls.

I'm in a good mood, that's for sure, and then I heard that Obamaman raised $51 million in July. I love how they waited to announce theirs until after McSame announced he raised a mere $27 million. Heh. I love it when Dems play nasty. It's about fcuking time.

BTW, back to tech politics, Steve Gillmor is absolutely correct to insist that identi.ca stick to the 140 character limit. If they didn't, users would have to remember to only type 140-character posts if they wanted them to be able to go over a bridge to Twitter. Imagine if all the rail in the US were the same gauge, how much easier things would have been (they're not even a consistent gauge in the NYC subway system). Engineers have a hard time accepting historic limits like this, but it's often a good idea (not always of course).

On a related topic DeWitt Clinton talks about the way FriendFeed handles general RSS sources.

This is a test

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 06:33:14 GMT

Hello.

Russian general threatens Poland

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:16:31 GMT

It sure is escalating quickly.

AP: "A top Russian general said Friday that Poland's agreement to accept a U.S. missile interceptor base exposes the ex-communist nation to attack, possibly by nuclear weapons, the Interfax news agency reported."

Almost as if the ~~Soviets~~ Russians had a plan.

Gotta wonder if Bush is up to this level of confrontation.

Hope he talks to his dad and Scowcroft, and listens.

And someone needs to tell McCain, seriously, STFU.

They picked the perfect time to challenge the US. (For them, worst for us.)

Hat-tip, I read about this first, of all places, on Powerline, a right-wing blog. I thought at first, oh yeah sure, they're blowing it out of proportion, but, unfortunately, they're not.

It's in Pravda too, whatever that is, these days. It used to be the house organ of the Soviet Union, when there was a Soviet Union. Seems pretty clear, the Russians want to reconstitute their old empire, at a minimum.

Follow the discussion on FriendFeed.

Perfect timing!

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:23:10 GMT

I just read this interesting post on Louis Gray's blog.

Essentially now any Twitter client can now associate another post as a reply to another existing post. This means that Twhirl or TweetDeck can allow a user to post a normal status update, and provide a "+" sign underneath and a new post can be appended as a reply to the previous post.

Hmmm. Where have I seen that before?

Oh yeah! Sounds like an outliner.

Update: I've got something working with a test account. You can actually walk the threading structure in the browser. Nice!

Here's what the threading looks like in the outliner.

Click on the pic for a larger image.

The beginnings of community

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:53:49 GMT

Yesterday an update of FlickrFan shipped for the Summer of OPML project, and as we hoped, new users popped up and all of a sudden it's a teeny little bit like a community!

So, of course it's time to put it in perspective, with a howto explaining how to report problems and ask for help.

http://editor.opml.org/community.html

Hope you enjoy, and you're free to repurpose it for other projects, but attribution is requested.

FlickrFan is converted

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:21:08 GMT

The Summer of OPML is rolling right along.

The next app to be converted is FlickrFan.

http://flickrfan.org/

Onward!

Which bank has the best online UI?

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:31:08 GMT

I had a huge problem last night with the online banking website at BofA. I needed to adjust a repeating monthly payment, the price had gone up, and I was getting nasty letters from the vendor. I couldn't figure out how to do it. This morning I chatted with one of their online support people, who told me I had to call the 800 number, and amazingly it took less than two hours to find the answer, which I never would have found just by navigating the site.

I did finally solve the problem but now I wonder if there are any great simple UIs for online banking out there? It would cost me nothing to switch. So I'm wondering if any of the readers of this blog have good experiences with their online banking service? I've heard good things about Citibank, Wells Fargo. Are there any that are just plain great??

Great comments here and on FriendFeed.

A brilliant idea at Harvard

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:07:24 GMT

Before I started blogging, I held many if not most of my good ideas in reserve because I thought some day I might do them as products. But as you get older, you realize that most of the things you think of are going to be outside your grasp, you're not going to get to do them, so rather than hold on to them, it's better to let them go. Maybe someone else will do them, and at least you'll have the pleasure of using the product before your time is up. That was one of the ideas that led me to write the first set of DaveNets, I was just dumping all the ideas I had pent up that I was never going to do.

Anyway...

When I was at Harvard, I came across a project called H2O, which was an abbreviation for Harvard 2.0, kind of like Web 2.0. Cute, eh? I believe it was the brain child of Charlie Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain.

At first glance it appears to be a discussion group, a way for a community of people to discuss something, but it's actually twice as clever, and represents a fundamentally different idea. Something new in discussion groups, you say? Cannot be. Everything's been done, everything's been thought of. Well unless I'm mistaken this is a new idea. It was for me.

Let's say you're in an online discussion. Someone asks a divisive question. Quickly the discussion devolves into personal attacks. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly it gets personal. Of course there's nothing interesting about that, the people don't know each other personally, so the attacks aren't even on target. And you get no new perspectives on the issues, no new information that might change your mind or at least help you see the other side of the argument.

What if, instead, you couldn't see what other people said for 24 hours. Then the first responses are unveiled, and you can write a rebuttal, but once again, they stay hidden for 24 hours. You can write as much as you like, or as little, or edit or refine your position, but only you see it. It works, you learn a lot more this way.

And then you can tweak it from there. What if during the 24 hour period only one other person, chosen by the moderator, can see what you wrote? The moderator can be devilish or compassionate, he or she can choose someone who will agree with you, or show you the folly of your ways, or show you a perspective you've never considered. That's where people like Charlie and Jonathan really shine, they are always thinking of ways to bend your mind. Why not make an online platform that enables them, not just the idiotic pointless banter that most online discussions devolve into.

Anway that's the new idea for the day.

PS: Pretty sure H2O is open source.

PPS: The discussion software is called Rotisserie, the project is H2O.

The EFF position on Wikipedia

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:20:21 GMT

EFF: Wikipedia Wins Dismissal of Baseless Defamation Claims.

While it may have been a good defense in court, their position is nonsense. Wales et al promote Wikipedia as an authoritative encyclopedia. Wikipedia likes certain people, and dislikes others -- it tends to like people who say it's wonderful and utopian, and dislikes people who have mixed opinions about it. I believe it's used as a way to attack people they don't like. I bet the profiles of everyone who has ever given Jimmy Wales good press are positive. Show me one where they are trashed. (I was thinking about this watching Wales on a WNYC radio show the other day, I bet the interviewer, Brian Lehrer, has a great profile on Wikipedia, otherwise he might have asked some non-softball questions.)

I'm reminded of this when I see the glowing bios for Nesson and Zittrain and am reminded of the way they treat me. Just in their choice of pictures you can see their opinion.

So the court may have been convinced, but I am not. Let Wales disconnect, stop promoting the thing so much, let the Wikimedia Foundation fade into the background, and then let's start talking about how to make this thing really neutral and independent of these people's interests.

A memeplant that worked

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:42:27 GMT

Yesterday I pointed to a howto by Jay Ridgeway that showed how to connect two laconi.ca communities together. Today I'm going to try it myself.

I followed the instructions, and it worked. I have a new account on Jay's laconi.ca installation, and I subscribed it to Ars Technica on Evan's installation.

Obviously this is just a first hack at the problem -- there needs to be authorization on the other side, otherwise anyone could subscribe me to their feed and well, that's a pretty powerful tool for spammers. But we're off to a good start!!

Update: There's a piece on Louis Gray's blog that explains why this idea is so powerful.

Update: There's something about the word memeplant that I really like, but I can't put my finger on it.

Update: Phil Windley got the seed.

More random stuff

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:25:17 GMT

I admit I'm writing about some of this stuff so it'll get indexed by Google, then I'll be able to find it while I'm working. It's annoying not having Google know about something I wrote two weeks ago!

Daniel Ha confirmed that they have implemented XML export in Disqus. Not sure when this became available, but it's here now. An example of the XML it produces. Not a familiar format, but it looks very easy to work with. I'm going to do OPML Editor based tool that breaks it up into a folder of files, one per comment.

Tools in the Summer 2008 release of the OPML Editor now optionally have a top-level table named #installer which contains instructions to the Tool installer code (new) about services it wants to hook into.

The docs for the OPML Editor-based podcatcher are ready.

No kidding I really got this fortune cookie

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:04:02 GMT

New Disqus

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:09:49 GMT

Good to see lots of improvements in Disqus today.

Looking for docs that explain how you export comments for offline archiving.

Followups

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:13:50 GMT

Om Malik followed up with Evan Williams at Twitter and corrected the assumption behind my piece published yesterday about new limits in Twitter.

Also read the comments for more clarification.

In a conference call today with the bit.ly team, we have an instance of laconi.ca running so we can learn how it works, and I had relayed the news that they had federation up and running, and Jay verified that they do. He was able to follow his presence on identi.ca on our instance. He says it's difficult to find the magic bits you need to do it, but he's going to write a howto and I'm going to try to set this up myself. It's a big deal, as I've said before.

What goes around

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:23:15 GMT

On FriendFeed, Andrew Baron notes that, according to compete.com, Mahalo stopped growing six months ago.

Proof that the shut-them-up-with-flames approach to PR doesn't get you where you want to go.

Update: Google Trends confirms the compete.com data.