Please help prevent Creeping Blandness
As I’ve previously mentioned my friend Andrew will be driving to Mongolia next month. His team is called The Creeping Blandess Prevention Group and they could really use some sponsorship help. Every little bit counts.
Why I don’t own a Kindle
I would love to own a Kindle. I borrowed one for a week and even bought a book. It was easy enough to read and the convenience of having dozens of books in a single object. The battery life was good and although the UI wasn’t perfect it was good at staying out of the way.
The most obvious downside is the DRM. On so many levels I cannot countenance supporting any DRM regime. Experience has shown that sooner or later everyone will get screwed by DRM. Philosophically I cannot countenance supporting or encouraging any DRM regime although pragmatically it has been impossible to be entirely free of DRM. I also understand that Amazon is walking a tight line here. They want to establish the market and must appease the greedy and paranoid delusional publishers and author’s guild. Roy Blount Jr. this means you.
The other major downside was the relative fragility of the physical device. A printed book is a remarkably robust thing. It can get somewhat wet, it can sustain intense shock, it never runs out of power. The Kindle is pretty solid but it’s no book.
In the week that I tried the Kindle I realized that I would probably trade the relative hardware fragility for the convenience. After all, it’s only a few hundred and if a device is damaged one can always buy another and re-download all the content. Right? It turns that the answer is a DRM infested “not so much.” How tragic that two weaknesses join forces to undermine the product entirely. The utter lack of transparency by Amazon about download limits is at best an embarrassed omission and at worst a bald faced deception. Even Apple did a better job of this. I found out a little while ago that Apple let’s you reset your device count once per year. In this case we’re talking about authorized computers but there’s no difference That’s really smart. It covers all kinds of legitimate scenarios but is nowhere near enough for any practical form of abuse.
Looking for wireframing and site map tools
I’ve been looking for tools to help with site maps and wireframing. Visio is not the answer here. I’m much more interested in the functional architecture of the page and site than pretty layouts.
In no particular order, here’s what I’ve found so far:
- Oversite
- DENIM (warning the link has moved around in the past)
- Balsamiq
- Jumpchart (not really what I’m looking for)
A few months ago I stumbled across something that looked great (and was open source) but now I can’t remember. This is definitely an ongoing research project. Please comment with other ideas.
Alternatives to DNS
While researching BigTable for the previous post about Hammers and nails and the rise of search engines over relational databases I came across mention of Google’s Chubby Lock Service. This was inside an article about distributed lock managers and points out how they are in effect simple distributed file systems. The article then goes on to suggest that Chubby has supplanted DNS inside Google.
I presume this to mean that instead of using the existing DNS protocol to distribute information they using Chubby (where the value of the “lock” is the address of its name). Do they have a custom DNS client stack? I doubt it, more likely they have local DNS servers that act as proxies.
I wonder what actual gains they derive from this architecture.
Of hammers and nails
I’ve been a busy boy lately. I’m in the early phases of two different projects, one of which is taking up all of my time and the other of which is taking up the rest of my time. :)
One of my projects involved faceted search. This is also known as search directed navigation. What’s interesting is how this approach is becoming the new hotness. Not only are multiple clients broaching the topic but as I become familiar with it I see faceted search as a solution to other projects as well.
Given how popular faceted search has become it’s surprising how few solutions are available. The king of the hill these days appears to be Endeca. I’ve been getting to know this quite a bit and while it is quite expensive it’s also really good. Most people should be going this route. If you’re building a platform then something like Solr is an option but if you plan to keep changing your search configuration, Endeca is hard to beat. Do you really want to develop and maintain your own search system? What business are you in? Spread over a five to six year period, the cost of a commercially supported product like Endeca is a pretty easy sell.
I think we’re finally seeing the beginning of the end of the relational database era. Relational databases will always have their place but developers are now able to apply other solutions. Search based applications and BigTable like distributed stores are coming to the fore. Even when you need transactional behaviour there are interesting locking models that are akin to row locking that cover many common scenarios.
When will the Rails of search based apps emerge?
Awkward photos
My wife has a well developed sense of the absurd. There are some things out there that just crack her up. Sometimes I just don’t get it but today she found a real gem.
I would caution everyone to check their parents’ photo albums before casting the first stone. I’m pretty sure we’ve all got a few awkward photo skeletons in the closet.
Lollypop
This is one of those songs that I’ll always just love. Tonight, courtesy once again of Boing Boing, Courtney Woolsey with her own multi-track version of this classic.
There’s lots to like with the video and Courtney. She has a nice voice, a great smile and the playful way she performs each of the tracks fits just so. Solo performances of harmonies aren’t new but this is the first I’ve seen as a video.
It’s also interesting to reflect upon all the magic (good and bad) behind the scenes.
The video was made by a 19 year old girl at college on a personal computer. Think about that. That is why I love personal computers.
The video was made available to the entire world by a single person. Think about that too. That is why I love the Internet. The Internet isn’t about ABC joining hulu.com it’s about personal publishing and Courtney’s wonderful unique, personal voice.
The video was published on YouTube but it could have (and may have) been published on many different video sharing sites. Although YouTube has a strong market position, the underlying technology has become commoditized to the point where different video sharing sites have a very hard time differentiating themselves. But, they exist anyway and that is a good thing. If YouTube were to become the only video portal then it’s corporate overlords would be unable to help themselves. They’d get greedy and stupid and ruin it for everyone. Unfortunately that kind of behaviour is all too common and takes decades to fix.
The odds are good that some automated music recognition system is trying to figure out what intellectual property was used and whether to issue a DMCA takedown notice or to send YouTube the bill. It would be a crying shame if Courtney’s voice were to be stifled by fear of a new medium and greed. We desperately need a new approach to intellectual property.
More Hallowe’en fodder for John
This year I really hope I can be in the Seattle area to see John’s Hallowe’en extravaganza. Whenever I see fake gore I think of him (I’m sure he’s thrilled). The latest discovery is how to make your own entrails. (Via Boing Boing).
A roundup of Mac tools
Over time I am gradually mastering the finer aspects of Mac OS X. As with any system a lot of value comes from third party utilities.
One recent discovery is something called sleepwatcher. It will automatically run ~/.sleep and ~/.wakeup as your Mac goes to sleep and wakes up. The first application of this is the following command:
hdiutil eject /Volumes/Encrypted
This unmounts my encrypted volume. What’s the point of an encrypted volume if it’s always available? The act of sleeping my Mac ensures that the encrypted data is locked tight.
Another useful tool is something called DropScript that wraps a file oriented shell command to a Mac app. I’ve used this to create the Mac equivalent of the wonderful open command. Why do I need this? Because Firefox, Thunderbird and Postbox all insist on maintaining their own mappings between MIME types and applications to open them. This almost makes sense but is quite annoying when all I really want to do is to defer the decision to the Mac default. I currently do this quite naively with the following script:
open “$*”
Looking at the manual page it’s clear that there’s opportunity for refinement. One minor benefit is that when I need to create a new association I’m always going to the same place (~/bin/open.sh).
Finally there’s Tomboy. Although I don’t use it all the time I like having it around. It finally runs on the Mac although the port is somewhat simplistic so operations like copy and paste use Control-C and Control-V instead of Command-C and Command-V.
Got any cool tweaks for your Mac?
The death of the Internet poll
This was long predicted and actually happened a long time ago but now the mainstream media is starting to figure it out.
Time magazine just found out that 4chan’s moot is the world’s most influential person. One wonders if Time really understands how comprehensively they were hacked. They went as far as to write about Will this stop them from using polls on the net? I doubt it. Polls seem to be the highest form of interactive news out there (sad indeed).
About once a week a silly poll surfaces on reddit (or some other community). The latest is the Des Moines Register asking about gay marriage. The community then mobs the poll. This is the power of the slashdot effect. It doesn’t require clever hacking like Anonymous did for the Time poll.
Some systems try to improve the value of voting by having some kind of registration. This prevents trivial spoofing but is still very weak. Large active online communities like reddit and 4chan can utterly swamp any voting system. The more embarrassing the outcome for the poll sponsor the more likely that someone will mob it.
Ultimately this all comes back to the fact that identity is a remarkably vague concept. The only reason “real” voting works is because it requires multiple factors and most importantly physical presence.