Links for 07-31-2008

• Xobni Can Make Good Old Email Even More Useful | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD - I'm still on the fence about this. Some useful features, a lot of useless analytical stuff that tends to get in the way.
• The Long Tail: How big is the free economy? - Interesting numbers here. So online game revenue about the same as all non-Linux Open Source (c. $1B)?
• Coding Horror: Alpha, Beta, and Sometimes Gamma - "there are two clear trends: The definition of beta grows more all-encompassing and elastic every year. We are awfully eager to throw alpha quality code over the wall to external users and testers."
• Call Me Fishmeal.: “The Mojave Experiment:” Bad Science, Bad Marketing - Great line: "Vista is known for people initially liking it, then after a while discovering it’s not working for them, and “downgrading” to XP. This study has told us exactly what we already knew: that, initially, people like Vista. (Initially, people like having sex without condoms, too... it’s simply not a very good criterion all by itself.)"
• Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » Using your browser URL history to estimate gender - No question there (92% male). And it's not like I visit porn sites. Drivers seem to include digg (popular headlines), noaa (weather??!), newegg (ok, I build computers). Does suggest how powerful even high-level data mining can be.
• A Windows-Based Bar Exam Policy: No Macs Allowed - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog - I get hand cramps writing more than a few sentences these days. I'd be at a huge disadvantage if I had to write a time-limited essay by hand. Plus I'm not sure even I would be able to read it.
• Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Blog Archive » Journalists and Communities: What I Told AJR - The bigger theme is that local is one area that the Web does, at best, inconsistently. (But more traditional media could better leverage what is there.)

Links for 07-30-2008

• SarahLacy.com: Hey, You, Get Off Of My Cloud! - "I've been vocal in my criticism of Yahoo's bungling of excellent services they've acquired, most notably Delicious. While they managed not to screw up the beauty that is Flickr, they've done absolutely nothing in over three years of delicious ownership." I've made the same comments about del.icio.us though I hink Sarah is a bit kind WRT flickr.
• tecosystems » OSCON is People - I concur with Stephen's sense of OSCON. Lots of interesting sessions and discussions but no obvious single center of gravity. (Which, as he says, is just fine.)
• louisgray.com: Facebook Still Banning Aliases to Avoid Becoming Fakebook - I'm generally sympathetic to the point of view that it's eminently reasonable under a lot of circumstances to have an Internet nom de plume that's not associated with a real world identity. One problem though is that once you allow fake, there's no way to draw the line at a single consistent online identity.
• Marginal Revolution: Why isn't Asian music more popular? - One of the many things that I'd never stopped to think about. And an interesting discussion of same.
• Iron Mountain's Natural Cooling Advantage - Data Center Knowledge - Interesting discussion and list of how going underground saves on datacenter cooling costs.
• Megan McArdle (July 30, 2008) - It's a small world after all - "I suspect that Twitter, Facebook, and whatever comes after them will mean denser, richer social networks in the future. Already, email is holding people together after college a lot more tightly than the people I graduated with--the last graduating class, basically, before the Web. "
• Rails Envy: Oscon Videos - OSCON2008 in 37 minutes.
• Adobe - Lightroom Developer Center - Lightroom SDK information.

Links for 07-29-2008

• Adobe Lightroom - What's New in Lightroom 2.0 final release? - What's new in Lightroom 2.
• Marginal Revolution: Are books overwritten? - Interesting discussion on the length of books. I've often felt that a lot of business books could probably fit well in a long magazine article--with perhaps some more supporting background.
• Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends' - Fascinating article. via @bfr3nch
• Consultants Love Life (New Format) 30 Jan08 - This is hilarious. Thanks @jpuppet.
• Novell-developer Michael Meeks interview - Whether or not Sun is handling this perfectly or not, it’s hard to see how there’s any real justification to their funding development of OpenOffice. The ODF wars are largely over for better or worse. Sun is not a fat client company in any sense. And, of course, they’re not exactly Google with all sorts of resources to fritter on non-strategic efforts.
• Sun may or may not be about to obliterate Oracle and Microsoft | The Register - "What I would have learned had I been more dedicated to my education were the two fundamental facts about multi-threading with locks: 1. You’re going to fuck it up. 2. If you think that you haven’t fucked it up, you have. You just don’t know it yet."

Links for 07-28-2008

• People Over Process » The Return of Paying for Software - Cote wonders if we're seeing an increased willingness to pay for (consumer) software in some contexts, e.g. "App Stor"-type frameworks.
• Real Dan Lyons Web Site » Blog Archive PR Rule #1: People who are telling the truth about themselves do not insist on being ‘off the record’ « - "One of the many ironies and contradictions about Apple is that while the company presents this hip, open, cool image to the world, its PR machine is the most secretive, locked-down, hard-assed and disciplined of any company in tech, including IBM."

Links for 07-24-2008

• Amazon Web Services Blog: Can Scanning as a Service Clean Your Desk Off? - Interesting-sounding service--and it uses AWS.
• Farewell, Bill Gates - Forbes.com - "I think Microsoft will play defense from here on out. Its army of M.B.A.s will milk the monstrous franchise around Windows and Office for all it's worth and try to cushion a decline in originality and create a soft landing. The future for Microsoft looks lucrative, predictable and boring."
• louisgray.com: The Hubris of the Twitterati and Twitterati Wannabes - "I'm depressed at the hubris of what seems to be a number of users, who find the loss of followers damaging to their egos."
• 451 CAOS Theory » On open source and cloud computing - More cloud providers.
• tecosystems » Drizzle from the Clouds - Good writeup on Drizzle--essentially an Open Source project that aims to create a "version" of MySQL optimized for cloud computing.
• Coding Horror: Building Tiny, Ultra Low Power PCs - I've wanted to build a mini-/nano-ITX system for a while.
• The Long Now Foundation - Essays - Feynman and the Connection Machine [via @werner]

Links for 07-21-2008

• louisgray.com: The Talk About Rules for Social Following Is Getting Out of Hand - Using twitter like this seems a lot like using IM. Nothing wrong with that, and there are some advantages (and disadvantages) to using twitter as a sort of convergence platform, but effectively more of a 1:1 communications method than many:many.
• The Hard Part of SaaS - I think this is an important point. Web 2.0ish-created expectations notwithstanding, there's no reason to think that enterprise SaaS apps should be free or even especially cheap.
• Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: Are Web 2.0 startups wasting their time with Web 2.0 early adopters? - Remember that "early adopters" vary depending upon your target mainstream audience.
• Marginal Revolution: NFL Player IQ by Position Played - This is interesting and I find the results only about 50 percent intuitive.

Links for 07-18-2008

• Media: Bloomberg sale spells profitable future of journalism by numbers - Measurement of reportage output getting more common.
• U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission fireworks safety video - Very Short List - Unintentional dark humor. I love it.
• Alison on the Behance Network - [via VSL]
• Megan McArdle (July 17, 2008) - Macaroni and Cheese - From the comments: "I don't know how someone can make an insanely fatty mac and cheese recipe sound elitist, (maybe the snide comments about freshly crushed pepper, nutmeg, and Japanese bread crumbs), but you pulled it off."
• Dueling Definitions for Cloud Computing - Data Center Knowledge - Various definitional work for cloud computing
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The cloud's not-so-silver lining - As with open source, Nick Carr suggests that, while there's certainly evidence that customers save money, that doesn't mean it's good for the vendors too.
• Kitchen Myths - "Urban legends" about cooking.

Links for -7-17-2008

• Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Building GrepTheWeb in the Cloud, Part 1: Cloud Architectures - Best practices for AWS.
• Linux Hater's Blog: The fallacy of choice - "Let's look at the server side. Why does Linux succeed here? One of the big reasons is that there is a working baseline. Everyone knows what it's called: LAMP. If in doubt, start with LAMP."
• The Long Tail: What he said - "Which is going to be worth more in ten years: the leaky boat of a network TV franchise or the relentlessly growing collection of long tail video at YouTube?" Not always clear (especially in the general case). It depends if there's a path to monetizing the long tail or not.
• Scaling Flickr, and Other Huge Databases - Data Center Knowledge - Pointer to a good collection of scalability war stories.
• Xbox 360: Turn Your Xbox 360 into a Streaming Netflix Player - Sounds potentially cool in advance of official support but couldn't get this to work properly. Definitely still a work in progress.
• Sourcing Innovation: Where the Brain gives Pinky a Lesson in Statistics - Short version: doing good surveys is hard (and, therefore, expensive). And, in many cases, almost impossible to execute. (And, besides, the sponsors often don't want the "truth.")
• DVPmysqlucFederation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day - Scaling at flickr presentation. via stshank.

Links for 07-16-2008

• Internet Evolution - Marc Canter - The Dawn of the PKB (Personal Knowledge Base) - Good point. I have emails (several), local files, various Web 2.0 services, bookmarks, and a saved Knowledge Base (Surfulater) that are all largely disjoint from each other. (To say nothing of some things that are just on paper.)
• ssd-usenix08.pdf (application/pdf Object) - Detailed look at SSD design tradeoffs.
• It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's.... The Burj Dubai! - Shoot The Blog - Amazing pic!
• EBays Pyrrhic Victory - Business, Power and Deals – Executive Suite blog – NYTimes.com - I only agree with some of the points in this piece. What I think is true, however, is that eBay is shifting its focus from the auction business and customer satisfaction (from both buyer and seller side) with that auction business is at least anecdotally in steady decline.

Links for 07-15-2008

• Do problems with Wikipedia presage social networking’s end? | Paul Murphy | ZDNet.com - While I've often been critical of Wikipedia, I think the truth is more along the lines that Wikipedia does some things well and some things badly.
• Citrix versus the Xen community | Virtually Speaking | ZDNet.com - Dan argues that Citrix is trying to turn Xen relationship into full-on competition.
• Hotel Internet Access - Business Travel Column - Joe Brancatelli - Seat 2B - Portfolio.com - Of course, higher-end hotels charge insane prices for lots of add-ons. I've seen a $9 bottle of water at an NYC hotel.
• Cloud Computing; the Invisible Infostructure | CTO Blog | Capgemini | Consulting, Technology, Outsourcing - Good Cap Gemini CTO thoughts on cloud computing.

Some thinking about twitter clients from RSS

Along with a variety of my analyst relations, public relations, and analyst colleagues (among others), I've gotten into the twitter "micro-blogging" service of late. Although it's still early days, my current assessment is that this service--or one of its competitors--is more likely to maintain a long-standing place in my toolbox than, say, Facebook--which I find I use pretty sporadically.

My current client of choice is twhirl, an Adobe AIR application that I generally keep open in a column running down the left-hand side of one of my monitors. I keep this monitor as sort of a communications center. Along with twhirl, it displays my email and instant messaging clients (Outlook and Trillian respectively).

I also took a look at TweetDeck, another AIR application, this morning. It can be set to display all your twitter traffic in a single column in a way that's pretty similar to twhirl. It can also display multiple columns with replies, direct messages, or a selected subset of the users you're following. Interesting idea but I'd like to see a somewhat different take on the groups concept (and more control of resizing windows and columns).

Let me explain in the context of how I handle RSS feeds in my client. I divide my RSS feeds into several categories. One I call "A-priority." This is basically the stuff that I really want to skim through even if I'm on the road or have a busy day. Doesn't always work that way, of course, but that's the goal. Then I have various other groups for general technology, miscellaneous, tips and tricks, and so forth. This is stuff that I like to flip through but often don't have time for. It also includes some sources that may have interesting stuff but pump out so much material that I don't want it all ending up in my "must read" pile.

I'd like to see a similar concept in twitter clients. Let me create a group A, B, and so forth. That would give me the option to follow some people, especially those who post a lot, on a sort of secondary basis as time permits without diluting my main list. (TweetDeck doesn't quite do this in that you can't turn off "All Tweets" and doesn't provide any way to make sure that a user is in only one group.)

My colleague Jonathan Eunice has also wished for a way to stop displaying read posts. I would envision this also working similarly to the way it does on my RSS client. Just hit a "Mark All Read" button and the display clears. This would be useful when you scroll back to read older tweets and avoids the mental energy with figuring out "Did I read this?"

Overall, a service that I'm finding most useful and fun. Twitter's own infrastructure has ongoing growing pains but some incremental work on the client side would help too.

Links for 07-14-2007

• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Promise and Reality of Cloud Computing - Typically thoughtful piece by Irving on Cloud Computing. "In other words, something big and profound seems to be going on, although we are not totally sure what it is yet."
• Riding the Hype Cycle | Velocity - the marketing acceleration agency for B2B technology companies - Interesting paper about the intersection of marketing and the hype cycle. Like the author implies, I think the hype cycle can be over-analyzed and applied, but I find it often rather true at a conceptual level.
• ABBA songs have staying power - The Boston Globe - I find this whole question of what makes certain songs hits/"good"/popular/etc. a really interesting question.
• BlueSam Blog: Hacking The Zune Podcast Feature To Give You Bookmarks For Your Audio Books - Looks like a handy hack. I ran into this limitation and was wondering if there were any workarounds.
• Why There Aren't More Googles - I think this is the money quote: "Startups have gotten cheaper. That means they want less money, but also that there are more of them. So you can still get large returns on large amounts of money; you just have to spread it more broadly."

Links for 07-11-2008

• Twin Peaks: Interesting Thing of the Day - This was a fun series at the time.
• Megan McArdle (July 11, 2008) - Notes from the line - From the comments: "What the eff is so great about the iPhone that you would go through all this?" It's not the product, it's the preening.
• 50 Remarkable Nature Wallpapers | Graphics | Smashing Magazine - They're not really all nature and many are highly manipulated, but striking all the same.
• Your Corporate Homepage is Really Google.com - The title says it.
• Liars, Damn Liars and Statistics: Gartner Goofs on Server Numbers - Rob Enderle - An interesting look at the dark underbelly of market share data.
• America The Dissonant: Seven Movies That Send Mixed Messages About U.S. - The Screengrab - The description of Forrest Gump here is brilliant.
• Criminal Probe of Apple Options Is Ended - WSJ.com - Fairly or not it certainly perpetuates the idea of a Steve Jobs reality distortion field.
• Data Center Strategies: VMware: Welcome to the Game. - I can't really agree with ignoring the EMC relationship factor wrt what went down. But there are a lot of other good thoughts to ponder herein.
• Why VMware's Greene was pushed off a cliff | Computerworld Blogs - Profoundly disagree. "The removal of Diane Greene is probably VMware's best hope for survival."
• Enterprise 2.0 and the 90-9-1 rule | Jon Mell - Web 2.0 ideas and strategy - Very true: "It is only after the first person asks a question (the 1%) that the flood gates open and others (about 9% of the audience) feel safe enough to ask theirs. The other 90% wish everyone would stop asking questions so they can get to the buffet lunch."
• Dilbert.com Live Performance - Funny. Mean. But Funny.
• The Long Tail: The Long Tail of Baby Names - I thought this was sort of an interesting statistic when I saw it yesterday. To the degree that there's a decline of, say, viewers of the top-rated TV programs there probably are some common causes: a more heterogeneous population, fewer shared cultural touchstones, and so forth.
• How Getty Is Killing the Stock Photo Industry - A Picture's Worth - "As much as Getty would like to position this move as an open embrace of the community, it's not. Instead, it's a way to lock out competition, and allow them to continue with status quo. They're hopeful that this infusion of content can somehow staunch the flat/declining growth of their traditional licensing revenue, and why not? Their growth has historically been predicated on acquisition of boutique agency content until they bought virtually everyone up, and alienated thousands of photographers and buyers in the process."
• Simkl and IM History: Two services that spy on your IM conversations (for you) | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET - I've been looking for something like this--although I've also considered just writing something that works with Trillian and stores my logs on a private server.
• HP Moving Defense Department Into The Cloud - Data Center Knowledge - I'm not a huge fan of using "cloud" to refer to a general datacenter architecture style. This seems to mask the on-premises vs. off-premises distinction which is important for a variety of reasons.
• Go Big Always - 10 ROI charts you can’t live without - This is funny/cute. But there are also some interesting thought embedded herein (e.g. the blogosphere one).

Links for 07-10-2008

• More DTrace envy [LWN.net] - Interesting discussion (including in the comments) about DTrace and SystemTap. via @jonathaneunice.
• louisgray.com: How Silicon Valley Heavy Are Web 2.0 Consumers? - Google Trends is an interesting tool for this sort of thing. Not definitive but definitely suggestive.
• Testing the Long Tail's First Test - O'Reilly Radar - We're starting to see pushback wrt the "Long Tail." It's starting to seem that it's not a wrongheaded idea exactly, but may well be less broadly applicable than proponents have suggested.
• Phil Clevenger - Lightroom Interface Designer :: Photography by FrederickVan - Good video interview with Phil Clevenger - Lightroom Interface Designer.

Ship Harbor Trail, Acadia NP

Ship Harbor Trail, Acadia NP
Originally uploaded by ghaff

I spent the week of July 4th at my dad's near Acadia National park in Maine. My photos from the week are now online: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/tags/2008july4/

Links for 07-09-2008

• Linux Hater's Blog: Turn your head and KOffice - Good one: "Maybe someone thinks that if Linux has like 3 billion office suites, then it can finally take over MS Office? I mean, there's so much choice. Who could possibly resist?"
• William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » A nice place to stay in Standardstown - A very funny take on standards bodies.
• Food Notebook: Arcadia - Is it worth the price? [San Jose] - French fries in duck fat, via @carterlusher.
• EMC CEO's ego has cost investors billions | The Register - I'm not sure to what degree I lay this, well, fiasco at Joe Tucci's feet personally as opposed to many of his execs--but he is CEO after all.
• Oil Rig Photos | Home - I used to work in the offshore drilling biz. Maybe I'll put up some pics.
• One Subpoena Is All It Takes to Reveal Your Online Life - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - "in the United States, one of the biggest privacy issues is what information about people can be revealed through a court process, either as part of a criminal investigation or in some sort of civil dispute." This is essentially one of the issues that Eben Moglen has been making about what we now call "cloud computing" for a while.
• VMware's Diane Greene is the toast of Silicon Valley - October 15, 2007 - This is an interesting background article on Diane Greene and VMware that I missed originally.

Links for 07-08-2008

• Anyone bothering to teach 35mm photography classes anymore? | Education IT | ZDNet.com - The real question is whether it makes sense to teach photographic wet chemical processes. (IMO, probably not.) The downside isn't so much digital (the instant feedback is great) but that today's inexpensive cameras are so heavily automated.
• SAP’s TV budget: more waste | Irregular Enterprise | ZDNet.com - A general problem with a lot of online advertising: is the content appropriate for your brand?
  
• California's Continuing Fires - The Big Picture - Boston.com - Great photos of California wildfires.
• Cool Tool: It's All Too Much - I've been trying.
• Drip by drip, Starbucks lost what made it shine -- chicagotribune.com - I've wondered myself whether the fact that "Starbucks is now found in hospitals, nearly every airport and countless corporate cafeterias." (where it's often god-awful) isn't selling out their brand.
• Anarchogeek: The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities - This is another example of how Metcalfe's Law doesn't apply to social networks. There's a value maxima (at least from the perspective of some) after which it begins to decrease.
• tecosystems » Hey You, Standarize My Cloud - More thoughts from Stephen on cloud standards.
• ๑۩۞۩๑ PHOTO-VINC ๑۩۞۩๑ - Article on flatbed scanner photography - Taking photos using a flatbed scanner.
• Lensmateonline - Specialty Digital Photo Products - Lots of interesting accessories for Canon G9 etc. although I hesitate to put a lot of money into a relatively disposable pocket camera.
• Some critics are hatching ways to fight Google's influence - The Boston Globe - A lot of the complaints in this article would seem to apply to the Web and search in general, rather than specific to Google. "Google's hidden algorithms have the power to make or break reputations and fortunes, to shape public debates, and to change our view of the world." Well, maybe, but so do Microsoft's and any other minimally competent search engine--of which there are a number.