shimonolog: Shimon Rura's Blog

BarCamp Boston is this weekend!

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 22:37:21 EST

BarCamp Boston is this weekend at Monster Worldwide in Maynard. Over 150 people have registered to participate, and I'm sure it's going to be stimulating and fun. I've been so busy working on it as an organizer that I've hardly had a chance to write about it... but keep an eye on Geeks in Boston for updates.

Network Neutrality: WTF?

Thu, 04 May 2006 12:42:46 EST

You may have seen the MoveOn petition for Congress to preserve network neutrality. The major broadband internet providers — Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T (SBC) — have been lobbying Congress for something. What have they been lobbying for? Abolish "network neutrality"? Write a law so they can do something legal that they already do?

There's a good chance you get your home broadband internet connection through a cable line (especially if your provider is Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, RCN, or Adelphia). You may also get cable TV through the same wire into your house. The cable TV is quite possibly digital. It is sent over the same wire into your home but frequency-decoded by your cable box. Comcast pushes regular internet bits through one frequency and special "cable TV" bits through another. Are the big evil companies asking for something different?

I think it's quite just for Comcast to sell two kinds of service on its network in this case. Are they, Verizon, and AT&T asking for a power they don't already have? What are their motives? What are the specific implications? The debate on "network neutrality" is woefully underinformed on any of these points.

I don't think any of these companies are trying to be nice. They are huge corporations that earn slimming margins providing a commodity service. I have no doubt that they would love to work out some deal with the government that guarantees them a comfy profit margin. But are they doing that here?

If you have any clue, let me know. This whole debate is utterly confusing.

[Thanks to my coworker Todd Underwood for giving me the digital cable TV example.]

Where Frassle Went Wrong, and How to Make a Zillion Dollars Doing it Right

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:24:36 EST

A few months ago I gave up working on Frassle, the experimental blogging platform that hosts my blog and a few others. Frassle was a fun and rewarding project: it put me in touch with the very vibrant world of bloggers and social software development, it gave me a reason to present at OSCOM in Switzerland, and it even earned a few passionate users. But I ultimately decided to cease working on frassle. A couple of people have recently expressed interest in picking up where I left off, and that's given me reason to reflect on what I've learned and where it might lead next.

The main reason I stopped working on frassle is that I started putting my time into other projects like voo2do (an easy-to-use online task management application, much more popular than frassle ever was) and my day job. Frassle also has some performance problems: the database structure has too many triggers and a seriously slow full-text search system. The frassle studio—which I think is a good idea that still hasn't been done well—turned out to be perform incredibly badly when implemented on top of a relational database, but could perform wonderfully on a custom sort of publish-subscribe DB. These issues left me in a spot where I felt I'd need to do a lot of rebuilding before I could add nifty, user-visible features.

Yet overall, the core problem with frassle is that it tries to do too many things. It makes conceptual sense to integrate blog publishing, aggregators, republishing, and semantic correlation. But it doesn't make practical sense. In trying to tackle all of these issues at once, I was never able to be the best at any of them. That weakness almost completely prevented users who tried frassle from ever coming back, because when a user is trying a web app, they're not looking for long-term conceptual potential. They're looking for tools that solve a specific problem or make life noticeably better in a matter of minutes. If an app doesn't walk a user through a pleasant experience in the first 5 minutes, that user will not come back. And if you can complete the experience in less than 5 minutes, you will roughly double user retention for each minute saved. I didn't fully appreciate this adage until voo2do, which took a lot less novel thinking and implementation time than frassle, got more users in a week than frassle had in two years.

So what would I do differently if I could do it again? Probably one of the following three mutually exclusive goals:

1. Focus on the inter-blog category mapping feature set only. Create a form where you can paste a blog URL and get content from other blogs that is relevant to the given blog, or specifically relevant to categories within that blog. Use the algorithms from
http://frassle.net/help/welcome and a huge database of RSS feeds with a custom aggregator/analysis layer; a relational database would even work OK.

2. Build a better Frassle studio. Everyone produces RSS now; sites like Pageflakes and Netvibes and Google Customized Homepage are a dime a dozen; but none of these sites let you weave content from multiple sources into a new community website. At some point the people making these tools are going to realize that they're awfully close to fulfilling a non-solipsistic need, and Google Customized Community Website will be born (or bought). Just mix together the tiles-of-content model with the ability to create custom message boards, and you'll have a community website contruction system that offers more power than the average blog, but isn't much harder to user.

3. Social intranet in a box. Now let me partially retract my earlier advice. The one market that *would* be well served by an integrated suite of blogging/sharing tools, even if they weren't all best-in-class apps, is the intranet market. There are tons of LAN-connected collaborative organizations whose members don't want to communicate on the public internet. If you can give these people a bootable CD that they can pop into a spare PC, turn on, and instantly start using as a collaborative intranet server, they would line up around the block to worship you. Nobody gives much thought to usability in intranet applications because the sales cycle is slow, expensive, and managed by IT departments who never use the software and thus don't care if it's excruciating. But if you made bootable CDs that tech-savvy non-IT folks could pop into a spare PC, you could seed a revolution in intranet apps that don't suck.

Sometimes I feel like frassle was my big chance. It had some of the ideas of tagging and social bookmarking even before del.icio.us, and if I'd thought to focus on those parts, maybe I'd have a top 500 site, a yacht from Yahoo!, and 15 million blog groupies. But if frassle fell short because my practical skill didn't match my creative vision, I can only hope that I've learned enough to be get things done without sacrificing much of that vision. I'll just have to work and see.

MicroMagic RAM scam

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:20:50 EST

MicroMagic.us is a scam! Read all about it!

I've been scammed by an online computer parts store called MicroMagic.us (a.k.a. MicroMagicPC). I'm not the only one — reports abound at review sites I should have checked before pulling out the credit card. Today I spoke with a detective in MicroMagic's claimed hometown of El Monte, CA, and he is investigating.

It's an interesting story, so if you want to learn more about my MicroMagic.us aka MicroMagicPC.net RAM Scam, I've written all about it on a special web page.

A geek dinner I didn't organize

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:41:11 EST

Yesterday I went to a dinner at RSS Labs organized in part by my friend Pito Salas. As Bela Labovitch pointed out, Brian Del Vecchio took some photos. Am I supposed to look that asymmetrical when speaking?

A good time was had by all, or at least most.

Frassle is back!

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 18:51:50 EST

Sorry for the extended (and extended, and extended) downtime.

Frassle is back, and voo2do is on a different server now so Frassle's overly slow design won't impact that (much more popular) application. Now to make with the blogging...

Savage Chickens on Blogging

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 14:38:26 EST

If you haven't seen Savage Chickens yet, you probably want to have a look. Cartoons featuring chickens drawn on post-it notes. Hilarious.

Renesys Launches Market Intelligence

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 11:13:23 EST

About six weeks ago, I started a new job at Renesys. I've been working on a really cool product, but I've been so busy working on it that I've hardly had time to tell people what it's all about.

First, my executive summary: Renesys Market Intelligence is a web-based application that helps sales, marketing, and peering staff at internet service carriers do better business. Renesys gathers a vast amount of intelligence about the network structure on the global internet using real-time BGP analysis. We process this data (the Internet Index) and determine who's connected to whom, why, and since when. We follow customer and provider relationships, peering, and help growing providers find potential new customers. We also generate real-time, localizable rankings that show top ISPs for customer loyalty in Lithuania, and other objective rankings worldwide or within any country, US state, or US metro area.

Still interested? The product launches today so I can finally point you at:

If you have more questions, let me know. Especially if you work at a big telecom firm. :)

Happy Thanksgiving

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 23:44:33 EST

I'm thankful for a loving girlfriend; fun, caring friends and family; my health; my job; voo2do and all its users; the good old US of A; and the zillions of other things that make my life great. Like the small but excellent group of people who read my blog! :)

How the Universe Really Works

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:12:06 EST

Finally, a unified theory of everything.

Startup School, Part 1: The Reception

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 01:10:37 EST

I spent this evening in a big room full of geeks. The room belonged to Y Combinator, Paul Graham's venture/incubator firm, and the geeks were assembled for the Startup School reception. Startup School is a chance for amibitious geeks to get together and learn about business from a number of experienced folks in tech companies, venture capital firms, law firms, etc. It's also not-so-secretly a huge recruiting event for Y Combinator's upcoming Winter Founders Program, which hopes to continue on the success of the just-ended Summer Founders Program. Most of the younger geeks are at Startup School because they want to build and work in startups. Most people over 25 (there aren't lots) — excluding speakers — seem to be there to recruit partners and staff.

The conversations you have in a party filled with geeks are much more challenging than normal party talk. First of all, virtually everyone there is male (maybe 5 women among the crowd of ~150) so flirting doesn't get you by. Secondly, the protocol for meeting a new person is to inquire about what they're doing with the most insightful questions possible. Thirdly, they ask you the same thing and you have to have a spiel about who you are and what you do that keeps interesting people wanting to talk with you.

In case you're wondering, here's my spiel in condesnsed form: today was my last day at a 400-engineer software firm where I started 2 years ago after college. I'm taking a week off and then starting at Renesys, a company that tracks internet router activity around the globe and assembles a minute-by-minute map of how the internet is structured. I'm not a networking expert— at Renesys I'll be working on web application development, making the huge pile of interesting data into valuable visualizations and analyses. This continues to develop my focus on usable, responsive, and pleasant web applications; a focus I've first learned in making Voo2do, a web-based to-do list manager that has grown to 3800 users in 3 months. I'm excited about my new job and also hope to someday found a startup.

Most other people have spiels of comparable complexity and room for conversation. The goal is to listen to what they say, explore those parts that are interesting from a technological or business standpoint, and ask some questions or make suggestions that will twist their brains around. The most interesting people to talk to will not only tell you about a spiffy project, but will also listen when you suggest they automatically extract metadata from RSS feeds and work that into further discussion. The least interesting people tell you how smart they are, and then state that they're finally solving natural language processing without giving any comprehensibly specific examples of what their system actually does. But even those people can be somewhat interesting, if as nothing more than studies in the sort of hubris required to create a company out of nothing but ideas and sweat.

I had about 6 or 7 conversations like this tonight. I met some fun and smart people. I told Joel Spolsky about Voo2do (which is inspired by his technique). And Joel told me how freaking smart my soon-to-be-boss Jim Cowie is. That's a pretty fun little coincidence.

Magazine Subscriptions are Weird

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 10:50:11 EST

Suppose you finally admit to yourself that you like reading the New Yorker and decide to get yourself a subscription. You could get a year for $46 at newyorker.com or amazon.com; just $1 an issue equalling 72% off cover price. Not bad. Or you could do a Google search for "new yorker discount subscription" and choose among vendors like SpeedyMags.com, which sells a year for $19.05, a savings of 89%.

These cheaper vendors will probably send you more junk mail, but the savings seem worth it. Why is it that the price differential here is so high? Are many New Yorker readers so lazy or fearful that they can be expected to pay $27 instead of doing a google search?

A Javascript First-Person Shooter by 2006

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:03:43 EST

If you were impressed by GMail, prepare for a surprise. Some very talented individuals have been creating demos that push the graphical power of Javascript and DHTML into the realm of 3D games. Of particular note are redbug (online demo, IE recommended) and neja.

Bonus: The author of neja, P01, has a brilliant technique for drawing lines, and explains it in a very lucid tutorial.

It's funny, but I'm still impressed as I watch browser-based apps pick up functions we used to think were limited to desktop software. This isn't going to stop, though, and pretty soon the web will be a platform that blends the best of client-server software and the best of desktop software. When that happens, Microsoft is going to be pissed off.

Dynamic Languages Make O-R Mapping OK, or How I learned to stop worrying and love Rails

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:38:30 EST

I have a confession to make: I'm learning Ruby and Rails. And I dig it. It is, as it claims, a great leap forward in productivity compared to complex frameworks like J2EE, Struts, or even ASP.NET. I was always prepared to believe this— I would say the same for the PageKit framework for Perl, which I've been using for 4 years, and has been pretty stable for at least 5. But until recently, I wasn't believing the hype that Rails could be much better than PageKit.

After all, both PageKit and Rails had the whole MVC thing going, which is the most important advantage. (MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, a pattern whose incarnation in web apps generally means that you have HTML-like files describing page layout, and Perl (or Ruby or Java or whatever) modules containing program code that provides data for that view.) The difference seemed to be mainly that Rails included an object-relational mapping tool.

I am not a fan of object-relational mapping tools. I consider them a special case (no pun intended... well not originally at least) of CASE tools. CASE stands for Computer Assisted Software Engineering, and is based around the idea that you can write programs to do part of the job of software engineering, and thereby make humans more productive.

CASE tools are bullshit. It's not that productive tools aren't helpful to hackers — they certainly are. But tools that write code necessarily degrade the design of your software in a very severe way. If you can't just write the code in an appropriately uncomplicated way, the solution isn't to have a fancy program produce the complicated code. The solution is to change the language you're using so you can express exactly what you need to express, concisely.

That is basically why I like dynamic languages. They remove a large set of restrictions on how you can redefine the meaning of utterances in the languages, so if you decide that looking up the key sasquatch in an associative array has a special meaning anywhere in your program, then damnit, you can have it work in a special way. Easily.

For those who argue that this enables sloppy code, I have two answers:

With great power comes great responsibility. Not everyone is capable of accepting the responsibility of programming in a wide-open language, and if you think you need the sort of guidance that the Java wizards at Sun can produce (aimed at a target market of all application programmers in the world), you should use Java. I'm not going to say great programmers don't need guidelines or rules, because they do— they are constantly both affecting them and affected by them— but their rules are crafted and evolved around the subtle needs of their partners and customers, not pronouncements from language priests.
The alternatives are still sloppy code or code generation. If your language won't let you say things elegantly, you can either buy/invent a new language that will, or you can write inelegant code.

Anyway... back on topic: Object-Relational Mappers. First a definition: an O-R Mapper is a gadget that bridges the divide between your relational database's idea of the important data types in your application, and your programming system's idea of the important data types in your application. Your DB will be relational (stuff goes in tables, powerful querying is built-in) and normally persistent (saved to disk), while your programming system's data will be object-oriented (data is abstracted within object interfaces, querying has to be custom-built) and normally transient (in memory only).

I have so far been doing my web applications in a pretty traditional way, database-wise: my Perl code contains strings of SQL. Then the Perl code processes the results of the SQL query and munges it into data structures (lists of hashes or something) that my templates can handle. This is OK; I've gotten pretty good at dashing out SQL. But:

it's hard to reuse code for queries needed in multiple places
Perl may not be the most visually clean language, but it has a style, and dropping a fat SQL string into the middle of it is like carpeting the floor of a rainforest
each data structure is specifically designed to match the template where it is used, so changes in what details are displayed require changes to SQL and to SQL-result-processing code
there isn't an obvious place to put common functions relating to a certain data type.

Well, that list is exactly what O-R Mappers are supposed to solve. Unfortunately, I thought none of them actually worked, mostly because code generation produces very brittle code and it's not OK for code that depends on my (rapidly evolving) database design to be brittle.

Thanks to Rails' ActiveRecord, I now realize O-R mappers aren't doomed. ActiveRecord creates the mapping at runtime, which is possible because it's running in a dynamic language, all of which means that I can add a column to some table and then just program with it. And because things are just expected to have the same name convention everywhere, there's no need for bloated configuration files that tell you totally obvious crap, eg. that the DB's people table's birthday column goes into the Person object's birthday field. And you can still write SQL if you must, though AR will do most of the joins you need.

This O-R stuff isn't as huge a productivity gain as moving from J2EE to anything dynamic and MVC. So the PageKit to Rails transition isn't as huge as most transitions to Rails. But the benefit, though marginal, is significant. Consider me impressed.

[Of course, if someone had done this in Perl it would have been faster! —ed.]

Frassle is Back!

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 00:39:06 EST

I've cleaned up some data, and frassle is back online. Sorry it took longer than expected, but I think my gardening is enough to allow me to keep running the service. Welcome back!

Wired News: Barring None, Geek Camp Rocks

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:09:23 EST

Starting with a meeting six days prior to the start of Bar Camp, the crew managed to find free office space, design a logo, start a wiki, print free T-shirts for all attendees, convince Etheric Networks to donate and install a wireless hookup on a neighboring business's roof, line up enough sponsors to make the event free for everyone, and convince over 100 geeks to give up a summer weekend for hours of indoor geek talk.

Current Voo2do User Tally: 1027

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 17:26:09 EST

Pretty un-frigging-believable, if you ask me.

Numero Uno

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:03:14 EST

Amazing... my little application is more popular than "Babes of Flickr". This is either a huge compliment for me or a terrible sign of our work-obsessed economy.

Voo2do in the News

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 09:02:27 EST

Voo2do, my recent project, is up to #2 on del.icio.us/popular—just below a site that contains photos of hot girls from flickr. In order to avoid dying under the huge burden of my own ego, I am going to attribute this to the recent trendiness of task tracker applications. But it's nice to see mentions of it around the web, my favorite so far being one written in Portuguese at meiobit.com, which Google translates as:

Plus a website that can improve my productivity. Still I did not find the skill that more pleases me to keep my lists of tasks. But the Voo2do seems a good attempt. It has a light and pleasant interface, with AJAX, categories, priorities, notes and all more what it has right. Lack to only integrate with the Gmail: -)

Other mentions include Worcester-based entrepreneur Pete Caputa and my coworker Girish Bharadwaj who is hacking a windows tray client for Voo2do.

Gangbusters

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:04:32 EST

voo2do: web-based todo lists

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 23:36:43 EST

My latest project, voo2do, is now available. If you have too much work to track it all in your head, try it out.

It's got task tracking with projects, time estimates, and priorities, plus fancy editing and sorting and colors pretty enough that you won't dread looking at your to-do list day after day. I've been using voo2do (pronounced voo-to-do) for a few months now and I'm convinced it's made me more productive.

Now let me reflect a bit on how I approached this project, and how it differed from frassle and other stuff I've done.

In voo2do, my priority from the beginning was to make something highly attractive and usable. As part of this, I wanted it to shine from the first moment you laid your hands on it, so I didn't announce it until it was fairly polished (i.e. now). This was very much unlike frassle, which focused on testing new ideas, has an excessively confusing interface, and was released piecemeal as I worked on it—and still isn't shiny.

Because the genre of voo2do—task tracking—is hardly new, the challenge was in making the tool easy to absorb and fun. I spent way more time than I ever thought I would crafting little 16x16 icons, experimenting with different color schemes, and fiddling with javascript fade effects. I made general attractiveness, ease of use, and ease of learning key goals in this project, and focused on those challenges. I also used this project as an excuse to teach myself about Ajax and other "web 2.0" gobbledeygook, so you'd better be using a recent browser.

I think I hit my target of creating an app that's useful, fun, and responsive, because I use it every single day and I don't cringe at anything. Of course, I'm biased, and I hope the early voo2do users will point out many areas for potential improvement. My own list of voo2do tasks has plenty of possible next steps.

Try it!

COLOURlovers

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 09:29:33 EST

For a while, I thought I needed to subscribe to some sort of design magazine in order to see beautiful examples to help me choose colors for website designs. But COLOURlovers skips the plotline and gets right to the point.

Frassle Progress Report

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 16:38:29 EST

Geez. You'd think that with 1488 registered users, nearly two years of service, dozens of del.icio.us references, and all the hype about weblogs that any decent weblogging service would inspire more than 264 people to post more than once. Clearly, it's time for me to get back to work.

Footnote of the Week

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 09:24:22 EST

OK, I'm not really going to publish a favorite footnote every week. But if I did, this one on David Weinberger's blog would be it:

*For the moment we're pretending that telecommunication services are offered in a free market. Haha.

An Email Leak in Frassle

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 18:13:34 EST

An astute user helped me uncover a problem in Frassle today. Unfortunately, the problem was that frassle made registration email addresses public by default, and spammers were harvesting these addresses. If you signed up for frassle, your email address may have been read by spammers. This has been fixed for the future but some addresses may have already been leaked.

The problem was that frassle published <managingEditor> and <webmaster> elements in its RSS feeds. These elements are required by the RSS 2.0 spec to contain email addresses, and frassle used your registration email address as the initial value for these. So your email address became public by default... whoops.

This was due to my negligence and I'm sorry if I've contributed to your spam problem. Since Derik emailed me, I've changed the RSS generation so that these two elements are omitted. The RSS feed should no longer disclose your email address, and I don't believe this information is disclosed anywhere else in the system. Derik also commented that he'll be changing his blog post, "Frassle Sells Your Email" (update: now "The Dangers of Email Addresses in RSS Feeds"), to clarify that this is a mistake that's been corrected. I stand by my promise to never sell your email address or personal information.

Back from California

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 02:41:33 EST

On Sunday afternoon, I returned to Boston after a fun week of roadtripping in California. While the nature and climate in California were stunning, and I had a great time, I did miss Boston: my friends, my routine, my work, and the preponderance of type-A personalities that allows me to indulge my impatient and confrontational sides.

A more detailed, day-by-day recap of my trip is under development and will be posted soon.

Travel California vicariously through me!

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:08:12 EST

Next week, I'll be taking a roadtrip in California (after a friend's wedding in Kansas). I need your advice on people to visit and places to see! My friend and I are still quite flexible in our travel plans.

Currently the approximate plan is this:

Sun 7/24: arrive in San Diego

Mon 7/25: San Diego beaches, zoo??

Tue 7/26: drive to San Francisco

Wed 7/27: hang out in SF with Coleman, Jesse

Thu 7/28: more SF: the city, or some Silicon valley, or beaches, Monterey Aquarium, museuems, etc.

Fri 7/29: down to LA; see Jenny in Pasadena and Beth in Santa Monica

Sat 7/30: LA; drive back to SD

Sun 7/31: catch 7:45am flight back to Boston

Offers of places to sleep and specific non-city things to do along the way (Napa Valley is intriguing) are especially appreciated. I'd also like to meet some interesting new people, especially some Silicon Valley types who could help me figure out whether or not a geek like me should be living there instead of Boston.

News is Irrelevant

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 16:48:57 EST

In his book Beyond Fear, security expert Bruce Schneier writes:

“Slices of life with immediate visual impact get magnified; those with no visual component, or that can't be immediately and viscerally comprehended, get downplayed. Rarities and anomalies, like terrorism, are endlessly discussed and debated, while common risks like heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, and suicide are minimized.
“The global reach of today's news further exacerbates this problem. If a child is kidnapped in Salt Lake City during the summer, mothers all over the country suddenly worry about the risk to their children. If there are a few shark attacks in Florida — and a graphic movie — suddenly every swimmer is worried. (More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.)”

One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. By definition, “news” means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it's probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported — automobile deaths, domestic violence — when it's so common that it's not news, then you should start worrying.

(quoted in Crypto-Gram, May 2005)

Schneier points out that watching the news doesn't help us assess risk more accurately. But this is just one case of our larger, erroneous assumption that the news is important and relevant. Do you expect someone who reads the New York Times every day to have a better grip on what's going on around her? To be more engaged with society? If so, you don't realize quite how irrelevant the news is.

The news is like broadcast sports: entertainment, not education. Some people read the news and then debate other people who read similar news about the meaning and implications of such news. The news serves as a shared experience, something that is greatly useful in supporting interaction between people and enabling them to socialize and learn. But it's still entertainment. In fact, it functions much like professional sports: for the players and coaches, knowing the range of teams, strategies, and performance statistics is vital to doing their work; but for most people it's just a prerequisite to sitting around at lunch, establishing an allegiance around shared interests, and allowing us to explore our connections with the people around us, an urge all humans have.

And that's what's really important: your connections with the people around you. That's where you have power to effect change. Unless you're a lobbyist or diplomat or close personal friend of Someone Very Important, your influence over national policy is very, very tiny. Your influence on a lover, friend, family member, coworker, or neighbor is much higher. Your potential influence on a new friend, business partner, blog reader, or even random passerby is also high. Knowledge that supports your relationships with these people is relevant and important to you, but will never make it onto TV because it's rarely thrilling, exotic, and novel.

This doesn't mean you're not allowed to care about what countries the US invades. A lot of that far-away stuff will affect you and those you care about, especially years and years down the line. But even in those cases, having an impact requires a social force comprised of many individuals. And the intimate bonds that foster loyalty and trust come from helping your buddy fix his broken down car, or sharing a grill-out with friends, or discussing an interesting book. Nothing fit to print, but damned important.

Boston fireworks: On the river

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 13:16:27 EST

I'm not a huge fan of fireworks. Although fire is cool, expanding smiley faces in the sky don't impress me anymore. But when my girlfriend Nicole proposed that we watch the world-class Boston fireworks from a two-person kayak on the Charles river, as close to the launching barge as police would allow, it seemed like the superlative fireworks experience. Besides, even if the fireworks sucked, I'd get to zip around the Charles on a kayak and take some pictures.

We started at Charles River Canoe and Kayak, whose Boston (Brighton) location is about 7 minutes away from my house. We got there kinda late, but not late enough. After waiting in line, indemnifying CRCK from responsibility for our certain deaths, and receiving a quick lesson on how to paddle, we set off into the Charles from their dock.

Kayaking requires a lot of arm and shoulder work. Unlike a canoe, your legs lie straight along the bottom of the kayak, and do nothing except anchor your butt to the plastic seat. But for these drawbacks, you get a fairly fast and maneuverable little boat. A two-person kayak sacrifices some of the speed and maneuverability of the singular variant, but in return you get help with paddling and, depending on where you sit, either the ability to hear your companion's voice or stare at the back of her head.

It's also important to paddle in a coordinated fashion. "Whoever can steer best should be in back, and the person in front sets the pace," they taught us after we selected a $1000 plastic pod to spend the next 5 hours in. After about hour 4.2, I think these lessons clicked in and we mostly went straight and didn't have any jarring paddle collisions. (It turns out the secret is to pay attention to what's going on right in front of you. That was never an issue on the single kayaks I've used before, because mostly you want to look away from the canoes you're ramming as their inhabitants may be tempted to splash you... while they still can.)

On our way to the fireworks barge, I got rather hungry and we came to a live-parking-only dock so I could get a hot dog. The dock was seething with young men and women, in little clusters mostly discernable by shared seating towels and spoken languages. I climbed over them, still wearing my silly little life vest (seriously, the water of the Charles is great stability control) and eventually found the sausage stand. I shuddered as the last tentacles of yuppiedom clasped around my neck, and paid seven dollars yes seven whole American dollars for a sausage with peppers on a bun. Oh well, at least it was a tasty sausage. And I could return to Nicole, who was sitting pretty on a kayak in front of hundreds of increasingly drunk folks ("does that thing have a V-8? heh heh heh"). On the way out, an hispanic guy offered us some seating space and vodka, and it seemed genuinely kind and friendly, harkening to a society and culture where young strangers don't need to be afraid of each other. Of course, we already had better seats planned.

Here's where we planted ourselves: video 1, 3.6MB .avi: In front of the barge.

The fireworks themselves were surreal. Closer than I'd ever been: the explosions filled my entire field of vision, and then some. Shockingly loud. And there we were, floating in the middle of hundreds of thousand of people, paddling backward so the current didn't draw us into the restricted zone. I don't have any more words for it, so instead see video 2, 14.5MB .avi: The most amazing fireworks I've ever seen.

How did it end? Two hours of strenous paddling, strapping a kayak on foam blocks to the roof of my coupe, and 5 hours of sleep before returning the boat and heading to work. In other words, a perfect urban adventure.

RSS extensions using category element

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 09:20:54 EST

FinancialContent is using the RSS <category> element as the basis for a spec expressing information useful to financial analysts. Dave says he hasn't seen this approach before, but look at the RSS 2.0 spec, the category element has a stock symbol under a financial news site's domain as an example! So the novel part might be someone actually publishing a spec about this.

This seems like an excellent way to extend RSS. If the form of the <category> element can possibly express what you need, why prevent your feed from being intelligently handled by all the existing category-aware aggregators? Compatibility is courteous.

Song of the Day

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 10:33:34 EST

Brookline by Jonathan Coulton.

Now I'm rich and smart,
my home is charming.
Sense of irony well-honed.
I buy used books and Britas,
I snack on nuts and wine.
I have been imprisoned in Brookline.

Listen to the mp3 and read the lyrics.

Brilliant Visualization

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:00:49 EST

Check out the recipe visualization at the end of this clam chowder recipe. It compactly combines ingredients, sequence, dependencies, and actions. As someone rightfully quipped, this is how Edward Tufte would do recipes.

Medieval Boston and Urban Renewal

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:17:58 EST

Here's a fascinating photo essay on "urban renewal" in Boston. It shows "Medieval Boston" (1920s) and the dramatic changes it has suffered in automobile-induced destruction projects since. It's heartbreaking to think what Boston, still one of America's most livable and walkable cities, could have been were it not for the wholesale demolition that allowed us to build things like... the evil, crushing new city hall.

Thanks to Ben for the pointer.

Microsoft's RSS Plans

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 17:18:15 EST

Dave has an interesting story:

The first clue that something weird was happening at Microsoft around RSS was when Sean Lyndersay picked me up for dinner on the first night of my visit. I asked what part of Microsoft he worked for. He said he was on the RSS Team. I gulped. You mean there's an RSS Team at Microsoft? Yeah there is.

Update: You know what's ridiculous? CNET publishing this story about Dave's scoop. The story is inferior to Dave's post in every way: longer, less informative, uncontextualized, less fun to read, and surrounded by ads. Yet it contains only a tiny excerpt and one nearly-invisible link to Dave's story. Since Dave is the source, why not just link prominently and quote without worthless wholesale paraphrasing?

I know. The answer has something to do with the reporter's training and other cultural experience in a medium that rewards novelty, where scoops and angles made sense.

This sort of writing is not useful anymore. Writers, figure this out.

Information Quality

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:01:26 EST

I'm here at the Berkman Thursday meeting listening to Urs Gasser speak about what he calls "information quality". He started out talking about a few cases where the implicit meaning of quality with respect to information meant accuracy. While this made sense for some fairly straightforward issues (e.g. fake herbal medicines or lies in the news), I found it a pretty simple and obvious definition.

Then he talked about information as being relational between communicating entities. That makes more sense, because different individuals will have different goals for a piece of information. And now he's pulling in transnational legal issues that arise when stuff published on the internet gets delivered in a place that has different libel or hate speech laws.

At this point, the definition of information quality seems so broad that we couldn't possibly conclude anything about it in general. And Urs pauses for questions; I ask this (bluntly). First answer: yes, there are many aspects. Second answer: there are some internet-specific issues in information quality, like Wikipedia edit wars (I don't quite believe this). Thirdly, these issues are not just theoretical but also relevant in practice.

I am still not convinced, but I am listening.

Urs thinks there are three approaches worth considering:

Laissez-faire. We don't want to even think about internet info quality regulation; no one has the power to regulate quality. The problem with this argument, in my opinion, is that information quality is fundamentally dependent on social exchanges and there is a power balance in those which will always serve to regulate it in the context of that social structure. Good and bad fight it out over time and the good lives (J.S. Mill).
I asked about why this is even possible. Mal asks a similar question: info quality is transactional, so just producing more information without adding more informed transactions implies a vacuous definition of information. As if you want produce information by adding speakers. Bah.
Information order model. An authority, like China but also possible a democratic society, making choices about information quality regulation. Also consider the BBC and internet forums with a moderator.
A decentralized model. Starts with the assumption "information quality is imporant" but admits it's hard to define and there are fundamental reasons we cannot produce a valuable shared normative definition of information quality.

Now we go off on a tangent and talk about markets for a while. Google seems like a sort of information market in the sense that it values each website. There are different approaches (reputation systems, etc.) and they have different advantages and disadvantages. I think this is what Urs' paper is about, so I'm hoping that means this will get more specific.

I want to ask: what problems are you trying to solve?

I don't really think there is such a thing as information quality. There are such things as trust, lies, information availability, listening, speaking, publishing, believing, regulation, communication, relationships, and censorship. But is there some meaningful common ground?

On blogs, Urs notes, that we don't have laws to establish social contracts for information-related transactions. Some bloggers explicitly state poilicies. On top of this, I think that all bloggers take part in implicit social contracts, unwritten assumptions that underlie communities and cultures and help people communicate.

Urs has to leave... which I think is kinda lame, but quite forgivable. I'm still not sure he's talked about anything specific enough to be meaningful.

Chrysler Firepower

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:05:20 EST

I'm not a big fan of Chrysler's recent bling-ified production designs. But the Chrysler Firepower show car is just gorgeous. Check out that interior! This car has style far beyond the ugly agglomerations of doodads one expects from Detroit.

New Century Voices Concert, Sunday 6/19 4pm in Harvard Sq

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:03:46 EST

The choir I'm in, New Century Voices, has a concert coming up this Sunday 6/19. It's at the Swedenborg Chapel in Cambridge, MA. Swedenborg Chapel is located at the corner of Quincy and Kirkland streets near Harvard Square. The suggested donation is $10.

New Century Voices is dedicated to performing new works by local composers. The performance will include the premier of Michael Veloso's "All Natural Male Enhancement," a piece written on texts from e-mail Spam. Other local composers represented will include Elizabeth Knight, who is a student at Longy, Krishan Oberoi from Rhode Island and Jeremy Jennings. We also include works of some better known composers, Randall Thompson, Edward Elgar and Paul Hindemith; the "Six Chansons," on texts by Rainer Maria Rilke.

If you like choral music, there is definitely something here you'll like; if not, there are a few things you'll at least laugh at. I hope to see many of you there.

A reception will follow the concert. All proceeds go to the Swedenborg Chapel. (The Swedenborg Chapel is the stone church on the corner of Quincy and Kirkland streets, across the road from Memorial Hall and Sanders Theatre.)

David Ramos on What's Wrong with New England

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 09:40:30 EST

David has a long, thoughtful post on the pathology of this region:

After a decade of living here, I see the reactionary narrow-mindedness that lies under New England's progressive face. This region still votes Democratic and champions liberal causes, certainly. But the landscape, so seeded with history and the evidence of past successes, breeds a poisonous conservatism that never looks beyond its own feet, and never thinks past yesterday.

This is a deep and scary observation. It puts Boston somewhere on the scale between Silicon Valley (where a “conservative” might wish it was 1999) and Paris (where someone is always frowning at you for violating some ancient rule of etiquette). I find it personally threatening because a conservative, hidebound environment is the worst place to write software; it's important to leverage the malleability of program code to try out new ideas and back out of the stupid ones. On the other hand, maybe the growing generation of hackers will carry an attraction to change into the halls of power.

This is all very interesting because it combines questions of industry development and city (vs. suburb) growth with broad cultural analysis. One of America's pivotal characteristics—a lack of history—is self-effacing, and as this plays out, the implications will touch just about everyone.

Boston area ice cream: capsule reviews

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 11:15:37 EST

Ice cream in the Boston area, ordered roughly by quality.

Toscanini's: some of the most delicious ice cream available anywhere, period. This is serious, classy ice cream—well, as serious and classy as it gets. Their Belgian Chocolate is undeniably sumptuous, even for a chocolate non-addict like me. Other wonderful flavors include the buttery Cake Batter, a respectable interpretation of Indian Kulfi, and my personal favorite, Ginger Snap Molasses. Stores in hip city locations such as Harvard Sq and Central Sq.

Bedford Farms: what Tosci's is to hipster city ice cream, Bedford Farms is to candylike country goodness. My experience here is less comprehensive, but their White River Junction was so delicious that I rank it very highly. Sadly, their cookie dough was unremarkable except for its low dough nugget density, but I did sample their PB&J which was both authentic in flavor and delicious. Very generous portions, comparatively cheap; two stores (too far away!) in Bedford and Concord.

Herrell's: the ice cream of my youth, if by youth you mean the summers I spent at Williams College trying to convince my officemates to hold a "meeting" at Herrell's vendor Lickety Split on Spring St. Luckily, several Herrell's stores grace other parts of Massachusetts, including a convenient location in Harvard Square. Their flavors are generally excellent, and their peanut butter and, dear lord, Malted Vanilla is not to be missed.

Steve's Famous Ice Cream: legend has it that Steve Herrell founded this ice cream chain, had a quibble with his co-founders, and sold it to go off to found Herrell's (see history). The only Steve's location I know is downtown at Faneuil Hall. They sport the best waffle cones I've found locally; incredibly tall and with a softer texture than most. The ice cream is on par with Herrel's and perfect on a hot day in the city. Or a day when it barely gets to room temperature indoors. Whatever.

Brigham's: although their world headquarters and two retail stores are in Arlington, five minutes from my house, I'm ashamed to say I've never been to a Brigham's store. But I have sampled their flavors from the grocer's freezer with delight. Their Big Dig ice cream—vanilla with caramel, brownie chunks, and chocolate chunks, is one of the best things in Stop-n-Shop and goes wonderfully with almost any hot baked thing. They have a real, and utterly delicious Strawberry, and their Peppermint is also one of the finest examples of that flavor I've ever sampled.

Cabot's: this diner in Newton is the Boston area's best place to go for a greasy dinner and a sundae. Decor out of the 60s, and it's real: that place has been around a long time. Their sundaes come in two sizes, which should really be called "for two" and "y'all ain't ever gonna finish this." Surprisingly, you will eat a burger, fries, and a whole sundae at Cabot's, and come back for more after you spend several hundred years digesting. (I'm not sure whether Cabot's makes their ice cream, or if they order it from somewhere, but they definitely assemble a mean sundae.)

Lizzy's: this shop in Waltham gets pretty crowded at night, and with good reason. I've only been once, but it will definitely be on the plan for my next Waltham restaurant excursion.

J.P. Licks: I want to love this local chain of four stores, but when I go it's mostly for proximity rather than taste. JP has remarkable ability to recreate a flavor in ice cream form—the first time I went, I couldn't resist trying the Cucumber—but the results are uninspiring. You can get a tasty ice cream here, but there are usually only a couple of flavors I like on the menu. Locations in at least Arlington, Davis Sq, Newton Centre, and JP (Jamaica Plain).

Cold Stone Creamery: this national chain wants to be the Starbucks of ice cream. They have wide waffle cones that are more like bowls, and offer smoosh-in services so you can create your own flavor. Which you'll really want to do, because the ice cream base flavors are simply not that good. But if you've gotta have gummi bears and peanuts in white chocolate ice cream, try it. There's a store in the Fenway area near the AMC movie theatre.

Ben & Jerry's: outlandishly overrated. This is one step from the sort of ice cream you'd get out of a screw-drive vending machines in a polyethylene bag. Too much sugar, horrid texture, careless smooshing-in of whatever sounds good without sufficient attention to comprehensive flavor, and astroturfed grass-roots appeal when you're really buying from Unilever. Edible, but pretty much the best way to overpay for ice cream whether you get it from your grocer or one of their stores.

I am urged to try Christina's, Emack and Bolio, and probably several others in many lists. Sadly, I missed the Scooper Bowl downtown because it closes at 6 on workdays. Next year I'll schedule a vacation day. :)

Initial reaction to "Getting Emotional"

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 11:02:11 EST

Tonight the Berkman Blog Group is going on a field trip. We'll visit Boston's Institute for Contemporary Arts, and each blog about their exhibit Getting Emotional. The exhibit is about works that depict emotion.

Take a look at the ICA's page on the exhibit. Take a look right now, then come back and read the rest.

The two photographs on the ICA's page were extremely jarring for me. The photo on the left, of a woman on hands and knees apparently screaming, was very moving for me. Maybe my avoidance of television is re-sensitizing me. But that's not all.

The photo on the right, of a basketball player either cheering or freaking out, isn't on its own as moving as the screaming woman. It does strike a chord, though.

Alarmingly, what's really freaky is the emotional dissonance evoked by the presentation of these two pictures together. Part of that is their appearance on my tiny little screen, catching me unaware because I was expecting, like, jumbles of paint representing "confusion", not actual photos of real live people actually freaking out.

The effect of this was so strong that I couldn't look at that page. I switched away from it very quickly. And I had the oddest feeling, not sadness or fear or pride in connection with the individual photographs, but a mental (not emotional; my mind hurt!) pain at the simultaneous evocation of such dischordant emotions. I think it actually gave me a bit of a headache, and I am prone neither to strong emotional reactions to pictures nor to headaches.

I wonder whether I will experience the same pain at the exhibit tonight. I am worried about that. But also intrigued.

Silicon Valley is a Cash-mad Boy's Club Pissing Contest

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 13:07:37 EST

Should have been an alternate title for this New York Times article. Not to imply that I don't think the valley's cool.

Emotion and Design

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 16:51:49 EST

Here's a wonderfully insightful article, explaining that positive and negative affect condition the mind to approach challenges in different ways. Consequently, pretty things can be more usable.

Tonight at Harvard: Tagging - Brilliant or Bullshit?

Thu, 26 May 2005 10:22:48 EST

Tonight at the Berkman Thursday Blog Meeting I'll be facilitating a discussion about tagging. Tagging is the hot phenomenon of user-supplied labels, used on popular sites like del.icio.us and flickr, and on my own frassle. Why is tagging so popular? What makes it interesting? And is it an innovation or just a short-lived fad that will soon be destroyed by confusion and spam?

Berkman Thursday blog meetings are free, public weekly meetings for people interested in weblogs. We discuss technology along with its social effects and influences, and it's also a chance to complement your online community with some face-to-face meetings, learn the latest tricks, and ask questions—there is no expertise requirement. The meetings, Thursdays at 7pm at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, are also streamed online and have an IRC (chat) channel for participants who can't come to Cambridge, MA. More information is available on our weblog.

Here's the plan for tonight's tagging discussion:

May 26: Tagging is Fabulous! It's Also Crap!

Moderator: Shimon Rura (Weblog: Shimonolog)

Shimon Rura will lead a discussion on "tagging" — using subject-oriented links to distribute and discover information across blogs and websites using services such as Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Flickr. From Shimon's high-speed summary:

Part 1: 5 minutes on what tagging is, and some of the major services incorporating tagging
Part 2: 10 minutes on why tagging is totally amazing and what new forms of community discourse and organization it will create, and how it will inevitably pervade all information systems and knowledge structures within 5 years
Part 3: 10 minutes on why tagging is a lame hack with no future, that will never succeed past the early adopters and in the end will prove to be a huge waste of everyone's time
Part 4: 15-30 minutes group discussion

Hope to see you there! I expect the group to provide some very interesting discussion and debate.

Mapping: Not a solved problem

Mon, 23 May 2005 14:43:02 EST

Looking for directions between my house and the Boston airport shows a surprising degree of variation between map services. Check this out:

Route	Google Maps	Yahoo Maps	Mapquest
home to BOS	7.6mi, 12min	7.5mi, 16min	10.5mi, 19min
verdict	optimal route, timing should be ~15min	same route as Google, fewere pointless "continue on" directions	ridiculous, and "avoid highways" option does not help
BOS to home	10mi, 16min	8.6mi, 19min	10.3mi, 18min
verdict	possibly silly use of highway	slow, stoplight-ridden trek through Cambridge	optimal until entering Somerville, then just as ridiculous

This is a tricky example. As the crow flies, the Boston airport is rather close to my house— probably 6 miles. The airport is in East Boston, which is accessible via underwater tunnels from downtown Boston (there is a bridge from Chelsea but that's far out of the way). There are at least two different possible tunnels to East Boston, each of which connects to a different highway out of downtown (I-93 or I-90), neither of which is especially convenient to my place. There is also the option of exiting the tunnels onto a fast non-interstate road (Storrow Dr.), which is scenic but not direct, or to drive on city streets, which is geographically direct but involves slower traffic and more stoplights. On top of this, while I'm fairly confident the Yahoo/Google route to the airport is optimal, I'm not sure how reversible this route is because the tunnel away from the airport is not exactly adjacent to the one coming in.

In other words, the mapping services disagree on the return path, but so do I— I've taken at least 3 different, reasonable paths home as well as getting lost a few times. Times have ranged from 18 minutes to over 30 (with a jaunt through the industrial areas of Medford; whoops).

I wonder, is the route to my house from Logan Airport just a damned tricky route to optimize? Or are the different services needlessly stupid and divergent?

Family Names for a New Generation

Fri, 20 May 2005 14:00:49 EST

A friend of mine who is getting married asked for some advice about changing (or not changing) her name. Here is my take on it, with names changed to protect the innocent. The couple shall herein be known as Emilia Gambino and Lucas Gustaffson.

As interbreeding becomes the norm, we should expect family names to increasingly lose their ethnic significance. In a couple of generations, people will find it so much harder to pin their family tree to a specific country, and there will probably be redheaded brown-skinned people named Gambino (who knows?). So, at least on a theoretical level, I think we should bite the bullet now and give up on the historical/ethnic significance of last names.

Given that, what good is a last name?

helps to uniquely identify a person
identifies membership in a family group
very frequently associated with an individual bearing it

In other words, your last name is a huge branding opportunity. As it is used for identification, frequently associated with the people it includes, and denotes group membership, it is not at all unlike a company name. I am not kidding.

What does one want in a company name? Well, it has to be unique. You'd never call a new company or a new family "Smith". Second, you have to be able to register a sensible domain name; that's why my Rura is so convenient, because it's short and phonetically reasonable, yet unusual enough to have been available in y2k. Your name should be easy to say and spell (perhaps easier than "Rura", but I'm still thankful family names pass partilineally and I don't have an 8:2 consonant:vowel ratio in my last name). Finally, it can be used to communicate part of the mission or culture of the group (e.g. Microsoft, New Balance) but it needn't do so (e.g. GoDaddy, Nike). This last exception is especially important in the case of something as long-lasting and non-goal-specific as a family name.

Note also that in family names, there is a small, probably temporary incentive to use certain traditional-sounding names if you live in the United States or Canada and desire admission for your children to elite colleges. If your child's last name is distinctly Hispanic, it may trigger poorly calibrated affirmative action features in the college admissions process. For this reason, you should consider changing your names to "Emilia Rodriguez" or "Lucas Hernandez". However, a child named LaKeysha Rodriguez-Hernandez might be unduly scrutinized for her uncanny combination of affirmative-action-triggering name archetypes with the characteristically yuppie hyphen, so beware.

Short-term admissions strategizing aside, I recommend that you invent a new family name and use it for yourselves and your children. You might consider something that blends "Gustaffson" and "Gambino", such as "Gambison" or "Gusbino". However, if you are serious about achieving a lasting brand for your family, it may be worth bringing in a full-fledged naming/branding agency. While these guys mostly sit around thinking of names like "Verizon", there is no reason they couldn't expand into family names. In fact, the idea may be novel enough that an agency might be happy to donate their services if you let them write a few press releases about it. Just imagine the envy of the "Joneses" when their Tommy has his first play date with your young Mr. Campione or the way boys will melt for the on-demand attractiveness of Ms. SeducTiVo.

Scripting News: "It Worked!"

Wed, 18 May 2005 09:43:20 EST

This blog post by Dave Winer is a gem. Often when people say something like that it's a thinly veiled euphemism for "Dave is a caustic asshole", but not here. As soon as I read this I knew it would be one of my favorite blog posts ever, by anyone.

Why? It just perfectly sums up my favorite parts of Dave's personality. It's funny, creative, and highlights Dave's incredible courage and competence to fuck with things that need to be fucked with. It's well written, personal, and historical. It made me smile and it made me think.

Intimacy and the Internet

Mon, 16 May 2005 15:58:47 EST

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
— Amy Bloom

At a discussion led by David Weinberger a few months ago, I realized that I find social software appealing because, like many structures and conventions in offline discourse, it fosters development of a certain honest closeness between people. The word to describe this is intimacy, and one of my favorite things about online discussion is the diversity of ways that intimacy arises.

In meatspace, intimacy comes from family relations, friendship, working relationships, and romance. The patterns that establish intimacy are characterized by repeated interaction with increasing ability to reveal oneself without inhibition. In our most intimate relationships, we tend to be generous, forgiving, attentive, and considerate. We are rewarded for these efforts by partners who weild significant emotional and intellectual leverage over our selves, yet exercise this leverage with care that ensures help, not hurt.

By these definitions, a blog is obviously an intimacy engine. I openly share my opinions, values, joys, sorrows, etc.; and you respond with specific criticism, forgive my occassional idiocy or inconsideration, and share in my happiness and my pain. Some bloggers and blog readers have become friends and colleagues, but all take part in a process of intimacy development at a novel, wonderful pace and scale.

What the MIT Technology Review should be

Wed, 11 May 2005 15:32:41 EST

I recently subscribed to the MIT Technology Review magazine. It promised to be something like Wired but smarter, thanks to its long history and university affiliation.

While it's certainly an improvement over Wired, it doesn't go quite far enough. The April Tech Review is an amorphous stack of short, shallow articles, with only two stories over 4 pages long (there is also a series of one-page articles on technology in various countries, each written by a different author). Most of the content consists of single-page or sub-single-page vignettes, many of which smell like products of the PR machine. I wonder if they'd do better publishing "emerging technology" index cards so VPs can take them into meetings and quote buzzwords until their boss is sufficiently impressed.

Where is the reporting? As close as we get in April's issue is a story by Bryant Urstadt (apparently a freelancer) on oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. It summarizes the cases for and against drilling, concluding that while the technology to drill cleanly exists, we shouldn't count on the oil industry to use it. This piece is under three pages long. As a short, topical report, it's fine, but I'd expect to see 5-10 of these short reports amid 4-7 serious stories.

Compare this with the New York Times Magazine. NYTM publishes a lot of junk too, but it is also a place for long, deep stories. Every once in a while they'll have a multi-part series that gives you remarkable perspective into e.g. what it's like to be an illegal immigrant or African refugee orphan. Couldn't we do something like this for technology? Rather than publish half-page overviews that amount to saying "Will Wright is working on an even bigger Sim" or "Mena Trott says blogging isn't just for would-be large-audience editorialists", why not do a longer interview? Sit down with Will Wright and have him comment on the state of the games industry. On developing and selling his company. On having the rare power to "propose crazy ideas" and pursue them. I've heard Will Wright speak, and he has plenty to say on all of these topics. It wouldn't even require much editing.

Or, taking the concept of embedded reporting closer to home, why not plant a journalist inside a university lab or corporate research division? Sure, there would be some confidentiality issues to negotiate, but I think many companies would welcome the opportunity to have their most interesting projects profiled in such a prestigious publication. Of course, the reporters would have to be insightfully critical as well, so that it doesn't just turn into an advertisement. Over time, reporters could develop their understanding of an industry segment, and use that to provide real insight about emerging trends.

If I had to boil it down to one request, it would be for longer stories. I'm not expecting a Believer Magazine for geeks, but some progress toward that end would be much appreciated.

Wink - flash software tutorials

Fri, 06 May 2005 16:05:23 EST

Wink looks like a very handy application for demonstrating usage of software. Unfortunately for would-be screencasters, it doesn't record audio, though it does have handy text bubbles. [via Lifehacker]

Venture Capital 101: Decision-Making and Economics at a VC

Wed, 04 May 2005 14:49:23 EST

Jeff Busgang, who writes an excellent blog on venture capital with an entrepreneur's perspective, has a surprisingly lucid explanation of how VCs get paid and how financial tensions and a firm's power structure can affect decisions.

If you had to change one thing

Wed, 04 May 2005 10:38:28 EST

It's hard to confront problems. Whether you need to honestly evaluate the status of a project, understand where someone has difficulty working with you, or just reflect on ways things could be better, it's hard to call out something as bad.

My favorite technique for working around this is to ask "if you had to change one thing, what would you change?" This makes it feel somehow more theoretical: you're under this hypothetical compulsion to call something out, without having to judge whether it's actually bad or just not quite as great. That is important in and of itself, because you want to think in terms of what alternatives and improvements may be available to you, not in absolute terms of good or bad.

So next time you want honest criticism, try asking this question. I'm especially fond of using it in job interviews and other judgment-focused situations to defuse the worry that honesty will offend.

Feel free to comment: if you could change one thing about yourself or your company, what would you change?

Genius is the aspiration

Tue, 03 May 2005 16:01:24 EST

Yesterday we held the second dinner gathering of the Boston Genius Workshop. It was great! About 30 people showed up. I met a bunch of new people — and I organized the damn thing (with co-host Susan Kaup). I heard about a lot of cool things people are working on, and participated in some pretty interesting arguments. We had three big tables in a private room at Christopher's in Porter Square, which was an excellent setting. And the Salmon Fettucine I had was delicious.

The Genius Workshop has a pretentious-sounding name, and I've taken to explaining that genius is an aspiration, not some qualification we think we already have under our belts. Ingenious ideas arise when you get smart people talking to each other. Or at least they have fun. This is just one attempt to smush together a few of the smarties I know.

One thing we did differently this time around was tell everyone we invited to suggest some new attendees. This worked wonderfully; at least a third of our attendees were people Susan and I hadn't met before. And it's safe to say that nobody went the whole evening without talking to someone they'd never before met. A nice complement to that was a couple of folks who were acquainted, but hadn't seen each other in 3 years until last night.

Here's something I'm puzzled about: should we open up Genius Workshop gatherings? So far, we've been trying to grow through existing social networks rather than public advertising. On one hand, this troubles the geek in me, who would have found this exclusivity intimidating just a year or two ago. On the other hand, I want a core of the group to be recognizable and intimate. Genius Workshop attendees: what do you think? Non-attendees: would you be more interested if it were an open event, or if you received an invitation from someone you knew? Note that in either case, if we are to have dinner gatherings at restaurants, we'll still need serious RSVPs so that we can make accurate reservations.

Update: photos from the 2 May dinner!

Coming soon: a mailing list for our attendees. And should we publish a roster (with short bios) on the web?

VC WTF

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 11:27:57 EST

If I ever say anything like this, smack me.

Quite simply, Greenplum is using an open source database optimized with supercomputing architecture to bring terabyte scale datawarehousing to enterprises.
— Ed Sim, BeyondVC Blog

I mean it. It should hurt.

MIT World

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 15:32:43 EST

This wonderful site has streaming video and audio of lots of talks at MIT! How did I not find this earlier?

It just needs podcasts.

Emacs Outline-mode

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 11:41:58 EST

Emacs comes with a handy mode for writing and editing structured text. You type things like this:

* Big Idea 1
Maybe we should sell fish over the internet, because who wouldn't want to cut out the middleman when ordering Chilean Seabass?
* Big Idea 2
Let's hire hundreds of people to go around town writing about things that happen, then put their writings into a two-pound stack of papers we can sell for $1.
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure
It is a lot of work to produce hundreds of articles a day, print them in the early morning, and deliver them to thousands of readers.
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?
Would we be wasting a lot of people's time?

Outline-mode interprets the asterisks as heading indicators, and automatically colorizes them. And then you just hit C-c C-t and get a headings-only view:

* Big Idea 1...
* Big Idea 2...
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure...
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?...

Of course, there are also shortcuts for jumping between headings, expanding and collapsing individual subtrees, and more. Best of all, outline-mode is packaged with GNU Emacs and works as a minor mode with other modes, so you can use it to navigate HTML documents or source code too.

More resources:

FLOSS Usability Sprint

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:02:48 EST

Usability attention for Free/Libre/Open Source software projects. Very valuable, and these folks have a good format. See also: Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement.

Washington Post: Clicking To Steal

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 13:27:17 EST

Jessie Stricchiola, a click fraud expert who frequently represents advertisers seeking refunds from Google and Yahoo, estimates that click fraud accounts for as much as 20 percent of the clicks in some industry sectors. The president of AlchemistMedia.com, Stricchiola said tens of thousands of advertisers, who pay Google and Yahoo by credit card, are being overcharged daily, adding that neither search engine has a large enough staff devoted to monitoring the problem or fielding complaints.

Hyperbole from selfish lawyers aside, click fraud is an interesting problem. It may never be fully solved, but can advertisers tolerate it like retailers tolerate (some) theft? I think it will eventually be accepted as a cost of doing business, with enforcers at ad syndicates in a contant arms race against this next wave of organized crime.

YCombinator Fan Club: Update

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 10:45:30 EST

For those following the Summer Founders Program at YCombinator, a new venture company backed by Paul Graham and friends, Aaron Swartz has a detailed review of his visit. Aaron will start something blog-related, code name Infogami. Let the speculation begin.

According to the SFP Announcements page, YCombinator will be funding 9 startups (out of 227 applications). As Aaron reveals, they didn't accept anyone outright—all applications were either rejected or called to Cambridge for interviews.

pc4media: From Bookmarks to Blog Posts to Search

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 16:58:31 EST

Pete finally realizes that blogs can form a basis for personalized web search. In other news from Pete, Gmail is adding an aggregator, Feedmesh still seems like a good idea that is only alive thanks to Bob Wyman, and AllConsuming is tagging for books.

Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 13:45:03 EST

Frassle is noted (and even pictured!) in this excellent survey of social bookmarking applications.

Firefox Extensions to Check Out

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 13:09:24 EST

The Mozilla Update site has lots and lots of extensions for Mozilla browsers. Here are my picks:

Autocopy - automatically copy any selected text to clipboard
Tabbrowser Preferences - tweak tab settings (includes putting an X on each tab label, not just on the right)
AdBlock
ForecastFox - weather forecasts in your toolbar
DictionarySearch - get definitions via context menu
Web Developer Toolbar - highly recommended if you develop websites
ConQuery - query web services from the context menu; good for fiddling around with server-side scripts
GooglePreview - adds thumbnails of result webpages to Google and Yahoo search results
Javascript Debugger - aka Venkman
Nuke Anything - probably superceded by AdBlock, but more straightforward. And perhaps you like advertisements...
EditCSS - modify stylesheets, live
AutoForm - automatically fills data into forms, such as your name and email address.

Potentially interesting:

ieview - preview a page or link in MSIE
SmoothWheel - smooth scrolling when using mouse wheel
QuickNote - make annotations on web pages

I've tried a bunch of these and they work as advertised. It's great that Mozilla's extension system makes it possible for so many people to improve the product.

JavaScript Shell

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 11:44:36 EST

Awesome web-based shell for trying out/debugging javascript. Even has tab completion.

Blogger gets Frassle-style autosave

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 09:37:30 EST

Google's Blogger.com has implemented autosave for posts, using a cookie-based approach just like frassle's. Their announcement also has an update that mentions they've disabled autosave because it causes an annoying problem for some users. I wonder if this is the same issue some frassle users have reported, where they are always prompted to restore a post—even if it was successfully posted? I still haven't figured out what's going on there... do any readers suffer from this problem?

(Perhaps it only happens when you edit? I just got it on editing this post.)

WordPress 1.5 Released

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:06:03 EST

This new version has a number of cool features, like smarter moderation and support for static pages so you can build a whole website.

tagging.pagina.nl

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 10:03:33 EST

A simple listing of tagging/folksonomy tools, including big lists of del.icio.us and flickr derivatives.

UserCSS.org

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 10:35:53 EST

Someone should build a standard vocabulary of CSS elements for site customization. That has probably been said before, but for web apps to become even more integrated with user desktops, they need to be as easily themable as their desktop environment. This is not just a question of making everything pretty and slick, but a real usability issue. Needless change is distracting to users and makes new tools hard to learn.

I think this can be accomplished using the right blend of technology and advocacy. From the technology end, participating websites can include a stylesheet reference to http://usercss.org/my.css which would send the user's chosen theme (stored in a browser cookie). If the user hasn't yet registered with usercss.org, it should send the default theme for the referring site. Each site can provide a "choose theme" link that would display a co-branded, but consistently-designed configuration tool.

On the other hand, this usercss.org would also be in a great position to collect site viewing statistics and provide single sign-on, and thus subject to much of the same skepticism. Maybe it really isn't feasible.

The Joys of Fast Prototyping

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 09:56:08 EST

Kudos to the MIT student who wrote the Technology Review's order processing system at 4am after finishing a monster programming project.

Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 10:19:36 EST

If it weren't for that god-awful dock, I might have actually considered buying a Macintosh. Unfortunately for Apple (OK, they seem to have done alright anyway) I just couldn't get past the repugnant uselessness of this apparatus. With the cool floating effect, I had to scrub the icons to reveal names and pick the one I wanted. Without the effect, it was just a bunch of big icons I rarely used, with some ambiguous facility for switching between already-running applications.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Gmane

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 11:48:11 EST

Gmane is a mailing-list-to-news gateway. News here means good old USENET news, accessed via NNTP. Mail-to-news gateways have been built before, but gmane is interesting because it is bidirectional—you can post via usenet and have it funneled into the mailing list. You can also read and post via a the web using a threaded interface (example) or a blog-style interface (example) complete with RSS.

Gmane is focused on communications about free software, but it's also the most comprehensive cross-media threading system I've seen. The world will be a better place when conversations can start in email, move into mailing lists, web forums, and blogs, and provide access to the whole thread from any entry point.

Going Pro

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 20:06:42 EST

Del.icio.us is getting a little less home-brewed. Its founder, Josh Schachter, is taking on some outside investment.

After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work on del.icio.us full time. I've given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment. I've taken this step because it lets me continue to grow del.icio.us while keeping it independent. I am excited to finally be able to devote all of my energy to working on and improving this site, and I'll also be able to acquire some much-needed infrastructure. I'm still in charge of the site and still committed to making it as good as it can be. I think what sets del.icio.us apart is the passion of the community that has organized around it, and I hope I can continue to rely on your ideas, help, and goodwill. Together we have made the site the success it is today.

-j
—
joshua schachter joshua at burri.to http://del.icio.us

I don't think this spells gloom and doom for del.icio.us' hacker ethos. Josh probably knows what made del.icio.us popular and won't trade it away.

I hope. But in any case, del.icio.us would be really easy to replace if things went wrong.

The Future of Ajax: Offline Web Apps

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 15:00:17 EST

Ajax stands for asynchronous Javascript and XML. It's a set of techniques for building web applications that don't need full page refreshes to transfer data to and from the server. Instead, they package it up as XML, send it in the background using the XmlHttpRequest object, and use the Javascript DOM to load the new data into the page. The result is a web-based application that can support fine-grained interface changes as well as larger-scale page changes, more like a desktop application.

What just struck me is just how similar this really is to a desktop application. The UI runs in code on the client, and only relevant data moves to/from the server. You could almost describe the server as a disk storage abstraction layer.

As soon as web application developers start to realize this, look for some of them to leverage their investments in ajax to turn this web apps into desktop apps. If you're sending a bunch of asynchronous requests, why not just queue them up and send them later when you're connected? If internet bandwidth isn't literally ubiquitous in a couple of years, this will still be a problem worth solving.

If you're a programmer, you are probably at this point thinking, "Shimon, you eeeeeeeeeeediot, you can't run ajax apps offline and queue things up because javascript can't save files." This is really an arcane technical reason, and one that could probably be worked around, but that doesn't actually matter. Javascript can store persistent data on your disk, in the form of cookies. Sure, there are limits to the size of cookies, but you could just generate lots of them—with little cookie allocation tables and parity checksums, like a little cookie RAID storing your to-do list items. Kluge? Hell yeah! This is javascript, after all.

So... keep an eye out for the next big thing: Save-As deployment!

Software Business Reading Roundup

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:42:15 EST

Some interesting articles linked from the Y Combinator resources page:

I've only started reading these but they're an interesting crop. And Y Combinator is an interesting group; I wonder how many applications they got for their summer founders program.

Feld Thoughts: Venture Capital Deal Algebra

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:03:41 EST

How VC math works.

FSF Associates Meeting

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 12:00:53 EST

Today I'm at MIT for the 2005 FSF Associate Member's meeting. The Free Software Foundation is a group that advocates for Free software on legal and technological bases, and they do an amazing job — I encourage you to donate and become a member.

Today's schedule is filled with some pretty interesting talks. This morning we've had a few speeches on the current state of the FSF, its recent new executive director appointment, and some upcoming goals/challenges for Free software. I've never heard Eben Moglen speak before but he gave some really interesting insight while responding to a question from the audience — exploring the intersection of goals in the legal, technological, and financial challenges for freedom. I'm looking forward to his talk later on. Larry Lessig's talk should also be good, and I think with this audience he can assume we know the basics and give a speech that I won't have already heard or read about.

The audience is about 65 people, and they're very engaged in software freedom. Awesome! Time to get back into the classroom.

Vacation and Javascript

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:57:33 EST

My frassle activity has been light lately. I took a small vacation and didn't think much about blogging. Instead, I ate well, slept soundly, and enjoyed the warm (compared to Boston) Cincinnati weather. When I wasn't fully engaged in laziness or family, I was either moving furniture with my California-bound friend Coleman, or programming Javascript.

Yesterday I told Ingo Muschenetz that I had been programming a lot of Javascript, and he offered his sympathies. This is a common reaction: "real programmers" look down on scripting languages, and scripters don't even associate with the losers who write Javascript. Of course, with cool apps and new buzzwords, people are once again stunned at what you can do in the browser, and Javascript is reaching a status not unlike illegal immigrant labor: shameful and abused, but vital to the great stuff coming out of California.

But Javascript isn't all that bad. It's actually kinda nice. While its syntax mostly mimics its namesake, Java, it is in spirit just another dynamic functional language. My personal programming style, developed through Perl hacking and Java schooling, is a blend of object-oriented and functional/dynamic styles. Meaning that I use classes to support modularity and hold state, but use a lot of hashes, lists, and closures.*

It turns out Javascript is excellent for this. In Javascript, the hash (a map from arbitrarily-valued keys to values) occupies a position like the list does in Lisp. Every object in Javascript is a hash, including regular arrays. An object is a hash whose values are either variables or function references. myObj.getFoo() is equivalent to myObj["getFoo"]().

I am not without complaints about Javascript. With some syntactic sugar my programs could be 40% shorter and 20% easier to read, as they would be in Perl or Lisp. With a better and more stable spec from ECMA, cross-browser compatibility wouldn't be as hard. But I also respect that Javascript's priority should be coverage and consistency rather than elegance. Considering that the next feasible choice is Microsoft's VBScript, which would make my programs ten times longer and force me to write sort routines instead of novel UI, I'm impressed. That puts me in the corner with Douglas Crockford, who wrote a wonderful exposition of Javascript way back in 2001.

* Footnote: If you're a Lisp hacker, or just someone who thinks Perl is dirty, I want to understand why you feel that way. Perl has all the important functional features I'm aware of, and if I should really be using Lisp instead I'd like to know. Of course you can write hideous crap in Perl, but it gives the programmer amazing leverage over the language, which translates into huge productivity gains. Is it the punctuation? The diversity supported by the Perl's huge vocabulary? The hackish user community? Or are you just being lazy?

Drooling on Ruby

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 14:30:04 EST

I keep on hearing good stuff about the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It's like the Republican party—one of the highest values of its supporters is to tout its greatness. But the Rubyblicans have evidence: cool projects like Basecamp and sibling Tadalist, wiki+hierarchy tool Hieraki, and the aforementioned Web Collaborator. Not to mention very nice documentation, such as this tutorial on making, guess what, a to-do list.

Perhaps it's too late to turn my own (upcoming) to-do list application into an experiment with Ruby on Rails, but my beloved Perl on PageKit still let me get a prototype of voo2do kicking in about a day. Definitely, the vast majority of my time on v2 has been spent tweaking CSS and Javascript to make the interface work.

But I'll save the rest of the hype until you can actually visit and try voo2do...

Streaming Audio from your Mac

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 14:06:04 EST

God help me, but I might have to set up a shoutcast/icecast stream from a macintosh this evening. Bookmarks:

Update: Ben sent a link to this howto, which seems useful if you're a unix geek stuck in mac-land.

Web Collaborator

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 13:57:57 EST

Free wikis for workgroups.

Summer Founders Program

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 14:16:27 EST

Paul Graham's new early stage venture firm is running a novel kind of summer program for people interesting in starting companies. Just reading their application is pretty educational if you're contemplating that possibility.

Microsoft buys Groove; Now, Will They Screw it Up?

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:03:00 EST

As widely reported, Microsoft is buying collaboration software maker Groove Networks and making Groove co-founder Ray Ozzie Microsoft's CTO.

Groove offers an interesting platform for collaboration. Sold as "peer-to-peer", the key advantage is asynchronous communication. Which just means that you can catch up on what happened and send out a bunch of memos while sitting in a plane, and then get them all sent when you have network connection at the hotel. An unexpected but rich market for this has been Iraq reconstruction, an intensely collaborative environment where a stable network cannot be assumed. In concrete terms, it appears that Groove lets you share files, IM & hold virtual meeting with your coworkers, and track project statuses. Amusingly, their comparison sheets still highlight a cost advantage over... Microsoft.

Where does it fit in with Microsoft? Well, MS has been pushing groupware for years, especially in their cash-cow Office suite. In the past two revisions of Office, almost all significant features were to support networked collaboration. Of all Office applications, Outlook—email and calendaring—is the only one that hasn't become static. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint still come out with new versions, but the differences vary between judicious tweaks and tasteless augmentation of useless features.

For example, did you know that Office 2002 includes a discussions server that let your workgroup exchange comments on a central "Active Documents" server? Internet Explorer on my machine has a little post-it note icon that brings up an extra frame for this purpose—whose content is ironically blocked by the security features in Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is a potentially handy little feature, but it's utterly lost in the sea of gadgets and doodads that is MS Office.

Groove, however—because it wasn't developed under the tyrrany of Office's bottom line—stands on its own. It has enough features organized in a coherent way that IT departments might take it seriously, unlike an "Active Documents Repository" for a bunch of silly web comments. And it has lots of potentially valuable integration points with Outlook, which is by far the most ubiquitous manager of email, contacts, and calendars.

So Microsoft's challenge is to give future Office customers the power of Groove without saddling the program with lots of useless baggage. If they succeed, millions of Outlook users (including myself) will have a shot at a collaboration environment that doesn't suck. I think I wish them success. :)

Zniff.com - the human search engine

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:46:19 EST

This new search engine uses the pages bookmarked by users of spurl.net. It's pretty nifty.

bramcohen: Talk at Stanford

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:23:45 EST

Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, gave a talk about BitTorrent's design at Stanford. He links to the video from his blog.

How to set up streaming audio using no-cost software

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:14:47 EST

How to set up streaming audio for a meeting using no-cost software

What you'll need

mic (omnidirectional) & laptop (windows XP)
streaming audio server (fedora core 2 gnu/linux box in CA)
test mp3 client (desktop machine with net connection & MP3 player)

Server setup

prerequisites (libtheora)
get & install RPM
emacs /etc/shoutcast.xml
ensure iptables are open
start the server: icecast -c /etc/icecast.xml

Audio source setup

get & install SHOUTcast DSP plugin for Winamp 5
start Winamp
configure SHOUTcast plugin
connect to server

Listener setup

http://myserver:8000/stream

Screencast of the above coming soon...

gazingus.org - Using Lists for DHTML Menus

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 12:00:35 EST

These are some really nice DHTML menus. What makes the design great is that the same <UL> markup is used to generate a drop-down menu and an expandable menu. (The category selection widget in frassle is an expandable menu.)

Frassle in Release 1.0

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:30:26 EST

Yesterday I received my sample copy of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 Newsletter. This issue is about tagging and folksonomies, and was written by David Weinberger; he interviewed me and produced a few paragraphs about frassle in the context of a 20-page survey of organizational systems through time, from trees through tags.

David has kindly shared some of the text on his website. If you're made of money you can buy the issue or a (gulp) subscription, but who am I kidding: why don't you just ask me or Josh if you can borrow our complimentary issue.

French Army World War Photos - in color

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 12:55:47 EST

The color photo was invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers, and the French army was the only one taking color photos during the course of the war.

A really fascinating set of pictures.

Harpers Weekly: Out of Iraq

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:08:34 EST

A fascinating story about one American correspondent's real estate experience in Iraq.

Silicon Valley Gossip

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:13:27 EST

Yahoo is buying Flickr (Ludicorp), and Evan Williams (formerly of Blogger) is starting a podcasting company called Odeo. And it's a 60-degree weekend in San Francisco.

Re: What's this Alpha 9a business?

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 09:13:12 EST

Frassle alpha 9a: Consider it a bit of de-whoops-ification.

How to Fold a Shirt

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:19:48 EST

How many of Shimon's friends does it take to fold a shirt?

XML.com: XML on the Web Has Failed

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:09:24 EST

An excessively depressing but informative article by Mark Pilgrim.

Frassle downtime last night

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:06:54 EST

I fixed a few bugs over the weekend. While deploying the new version, I noticed that some studio pages didn't work. (The web server was crashing shortly after serving my page.) In the course of investigating that I upgraded some software, rebooted, and... the machine didn't come back up.

Thanks to the technicians at my hosting provider, that got sorted out this morning. It was a minor network configuration issue — the name for my machine in /etc/hosts didn't match the name in /etc/sysconfig/network. It was a big scare (shit; what if the machine died? when was my last backup?) but luckily it turned out to be relatively simple.

Regarding the original problem that caused crashing, I haven't fixed it, but I disabled the category tree widget which seemed to be the source. So if you use that in your studio pages it will simply not show up for now.

Steve Garfield: On the Record: Berkman Bloggers

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:21:28 EST

Steve produced a nice 10-minute version of our Thursday meeting. It's a lot easier to watch than the meeting, which I found a little annoying.

How Nightline fucked up our blog meeting

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 11:45:58 EST

The only logical conclusion that a crew from ABC Nightline can draw from yesterday's Berkman Blog Meeting is that bloggers are a bunch of screaming monkeys jockeying among themselves to produce a statement so quotable it will be on television.

That is the spectacle we experienced last night, when a record number of people converged on the Baker House conference room to discuss issue of blogging and on/off the record. It was an interesting topic, but seeing this many people demonstrate their overarching desire to get their mug on television was just... depressing.

I honestly didn't have all that much to say on this topic, but there was one question the Nightline correspondent asked that I would have liked to answer. (Mostly the crew just filmed, but at the end Mr. Donovan (?) asked a couple of questions.) He asked simply, why do we come here?

That's an interesting question because the motivations behind the Berkman Thursday meetings are so different from the motivations behind the meetings many of us corporate worker bees are used to. At work, a meeting that sucks is one with no agenda, where you spend most of the time getting to know the other people in the room, reach no actionable decisions, and come out with 15 different understandings. But this is pretty much what we do every week at Berkman.

Why? Because we're not corporate worker bees. We're a bunch of friends who learn a lot from each other. Normally, a Berkman meeting makes me smarter. Not because I convinced some newbies that wrangling Movable Type is so easy only a moron could screw it up, but because I asked one newbie to explain her struggle getting some piece of software to work. I develop software, and I want that software to be usable by humans who not only are not me but are people I may have not even met. It's hard enough to design software my own coworkers can use, so I need all the help I can get.

I come to Berkman Thursday meetings to listen, so I can be a better software developer.

Yesterday's meeting sucked because there wasn't much to listen to, just a bunch of people competing for best sounding paraphrase of something witty someone else said. That's why the dinner afterwards was such a relief; there were no cameras, and the screaming egotists were not at my end of the table. I sat next to a traveller named Andy, a Nightline producer named Alissa (Elissa? Alyssa?), Rebecca MacKinnon, Ingo Muschenetz, Ann House (blog?), and Jennifer Stoner. And I learned some stuff, like if the cops in China catch you taping something you shouldn't, a high speed chase is a viable option because they often get lazy. And that if you're setting up Movable Type and you're almost there but you have to give up and pay for TypePad instead, it's frustrating.

And then the Nightline correspondent decided to buy us all dinner. That was nice.

I love my neighborhood; I RAM ASSE

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 09:58:40 EST

About this Page

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 15:53:40 EST

This page is an aggregator of useful information for people interested in the weekly weblogger meetings hosted by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Below are the latest posts on our Agenda Blog, and at left are recent posts by some regulars.

jwz: Groupware Bad

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:01:39 EST

And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

A fun and poignant read.

Genius Workshop Roundup

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 23:50:57 EST

The Genius Workshop dinner Sooz and I hosted went wonderfully. I'll write more about it soon but in the meantime I took some pictures and Peter Caputa compiled a handy list of attendees' websites.

How to do you write Frassle in Chinese/Japanese/Korean?

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:58:10 EST

An almost-user of frassle sent us this email:

It seems that Frassle's weblog doesn't support Asian characters. When I post a note with Chinese charactors in the body, it becomes something unreadable. An error occurs if the title or the category contains non-English text! So I'm not going to try Frassle until you've added Asian language support. I wish it realize soon. And thanks for the great work!

Sadly, this is one area where we don't know what we're doing:

Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, we're not experts in software internationalization. We'd like to make frassle more useful to people who write in non-latin languages, but aren't sure how. If you know anyone who'd like to help an open source software project get international, please point them my way. Especially if they have Perl or PostgreSQL experience.
Shimon Rura

I thought I'd repeat that call for help here. Anyone?

Russell Beattie: Tagsurf: Tagged Hyperforum

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 10:46:07 EST

Russell Beattie points to a cool project, TagSurf, which has some resemblance to Frassle. It's all links, tags, and messages. In Frassle, the organizing principle is links: you make a comment by creating a blog post whose title links to my blog post; two categories or blogs are associated when they link to a lot of the same stuff. TagSurf, as its name would imply, is organized around (shared) tags. But also around links - you can get a set of responses to a given URL.

I should spend some more time grokking TagSurf and seeing whether it's worthwhile to copy some of its features.

NewsGator platform roadmap

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:15:38 EST

Re: Obfuscation Station

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 11:37:15 EST

It's true that Google obfuscates their Javascript to make it small, but with a feature as popular as google suggest, people are bound to reverse engineer it into something readable. Not to mention write Perl modules for the backend functionality.

By the way, it would be quite nice if one way to add frassle categories was using a text field with autocomplete. You could type fragments of names and see what's already there, or simply type a new category to create it. No XMLHttp would be needed, because the user's categories are already listed on the page.

Peerflix is a great idea

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:20:00 EST

Rather than renting DVDs to you, the Peerflix company facilitates trades among members. Brilliant.

Salon.com on Tags

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:01:52 EST

Katharine Mieszkowski has a short story about tagging in Salon.com. She interviewed me for it, but unfortunately frassle didn't get a mention. It's a pretty light piece but has a nice illustration.

Beercasted

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 14:53:08 EST

On 3 Feb 2005, a few Berkmanites including myself joined Greg Narain for some Beercasting — a podcast recording of people telling stories at a pub. It was fun. I think I'm on the topics titled Love At First Sight, Or Almost and Traveller's Tales: Stories From Near and Far.

Update: Steve Garfield has a cool video post about this.

JeevesLines: It's Official

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:19:07 EST

John Battelle follows up on the Bloglines acquisition by Ask Jeeves. The companies made their official announcements today.

Google Maps

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:02:47 EST

OK, that's just schweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

Re: Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 09:59:27 EST

Bloglines has a pretty mild level of lock-in, it's true. Thanks to export OPML, it's fairly easy to take your data to another aggregator. Even this hassle, however, is not negligible. If Bloglines has cornered the market for people seeking a simple, easy-to-access, no-installation-required aggregator, many of their customers might indeed not care to figure out what OPML means. Additionally, they have the usual lock-in that results from users being accustomed to a certain interface.

Also, as Mary points out, the historical archive of blog posts that Bloglines has is pretty valuable. I would say especially so for a search engine.

Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 14:16:47 EST

Mary Hodder has the scoop. This is an interesting story for two reasons: it could have strong effects on the blog dot-coms, and it's a great example of a company that was built to be sold.

Effects on the blog dot-coms: Bloglines has a large user base, rivalled in size and service lock-in only by LiveJournal. Although the interface emphasizes the aggregator, Bloglines is also designed to support a fast and excellent blog search engine. Coupled with the extensive data Bloglines has about who reads what, Ask Jeeves has just acquired a wealth of information that can help them produce better search results.

Built to be sold: Mark Fletcher, who previously built and sold ONEList (now Yahoo! groups), knows something about acquisitions. He built Bloglines to be scalable from the start; I've never heard of it being slow or inaccessible. I'd guess it's not going to be hard to tweak its interfaces to the new brand. I am curious about the Bloglines (or parent company, Trustic) employees—are they mostly contractors, with no promise of long-term employment? Have they been compensated with equity in anticipation of a liquidity event? Did they just move to Ask Jeeves? Or did they just get laid off while Fletcher pocketed $N million dollars?

Oh yeah, it would be interesting to know how much Mr. Jeeves paid. I'm pretty sure Bloglines wasn't in any hurry to get sold, and I think it's worth a lot to a search engine company. Yahoo bought ONEList for $432M in stock, but that was in 2000; that stock would now be worth about $277M. Adjusting for hype and a hazy notion of comparative value, I'd guess Bloglines garnered $30-50M. But I'm hoping we'll get more information.

Is Ruby Hot or Not?

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 11:08:44 EST

A friend emailed me asking what I thought about Ruby. I've only recently picked up a book on Ruby and am charmed by its comprehensive non-annoyingness. Here's what I wrote back to him. What do you think?

Will it take off? I doubt it. I think it has been steadily gaining over the past few years, but there isn't anything so revolutionary about its design or its culture that I think will let it dethrone Perl, PHP, and Python (perhaps it's the lack of a letter P). At least not in the US. Ruby originated in Japan, and may well be a leading scripting language there. It's well-enough known, it has its O'Reilly books, but I don't see it becoming THE HOT THING. It certainly has little traction in big software companies.

There is a web application framework for Ruby called Rails [here's a promising recent article], which is rumored to be a very lightweight, easy-to-start-with framework. Their website has a 10 minute video where someone installs it and builds a sample site. This is highly laudable in a world where suits insist on web applications written in J2EE, a framework so byzantine that it makes Software Architects confident they cannot understand the details of programming, while making Programmers confident they cannot understand the scope of design.

Alpha 9

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 11:26:42 EST

Frassle alpha 9 was placed into production last night. It contains a number of enhancements, including:

fully redesigned frassle content studio (replaces publisher), including:
- themable dynamic pages
- interactive stream editor: lets you construct complex content queries without so much as typing a parenthesis
- programmatic widgets: blogroll, category tree, and more
autosave in post editor
minor interface improvements to aggregator
numerous bug fixes and performance improvements

Does anyone else experience j's bug? I'm not able to replicate it. j—what browser are you using? Does it happen in other browsers too?
Correction: I can replicate this. I'll take a look at it later today. I thought I had it fixed... sigh.

Whoa

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 16:18:44 EST

I'm the top Shimon in MSN search. I look forward to seeing Google's response to this exciting competitive threat.

Lincoln Town Car, Ballistic Protection Series

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 11:34:15 EST

When choosing an armored vehicle, it's important to keep in mind how badly someone wants you dead.

A very well written article. Especially if they're out to get you.

Hrmph... not quite yet...

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:59:38 EST

I meant to release alpha 9 tonight, but it's not going to happen. I found and fixed a couple of simple bugs, but then I found a much tougher one. I wouldn't normally hold things up for a bug like this, but since it affects studio pages created automatically when a user registers, I think it would be very confusing to new users.

Also, I tried to fix my computer with the fried motherboard and it looks like it was actually the power supply. Anyone need an Athlon motherboard for cheap?

Delicious Furled Tea Bookmarklet Maker

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 16:05:45 EST

This multi-system bookmarklet factory lets you easily make a bookmark in multiple systems, including frassle!
[thanks Fiona]

Interesting stuff roundup

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:45:12 EST

Steven Johnson on software that works well with his mind: in NY Times Book Review and his own weblog.

David Weinberger points to a brilliant del.icio.us site integration hack by Matt Biddulph made with a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey. I wonder if it would make sense for sites to leave dedicated spaces for client-side DHTML extensions... <div id="__extendme__"/> anyone?

Re: OK So Frassle.net is group publishing

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 23:59:34 EST

Hi Mike!

Frassle's not supposed to be group publishing. The fact that it gives you little control over the appearance of your posts is due to incompleteness, not by design. The URLs being all under the frassle.net space is not intended to group all posts together, but to keep permalinks short (still, having user-specific names under frassle.net would be better).

On the other hand, you're right that when you use frassle, you're dumping your posts into a common database. One major goal of frassle is to maintain a single, easy-to-query database of blog posts—including both frassle blogs and sources aggregated via RSS. The frassle studio, which will be replacing the publisher soon, makes these sorts of uses a lot easier. You can blend content from your blog and other sources in order to make your own google news, or just make websites that many people can contribute to—even from their far-away blogs.

This is all made a lot easier in frassle alpha 9, which will be out tomorrow.

(It would have been out today, but my desktop PC's motherboard shorted and broke this evening. I should have switched to the laptop and deployed a9 anyway, but I wasted some time figuring out what was going on and then got as far as the gas station before realizing that Micro Center wasn't open that late anyway. Damn you Murphy! You win this time...)

Timothy Burke Takes a Strong Stand on Scholarly Overproduction

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:28:16 EST

Counting votes

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:16:02 EST

It's mostly off topic now, but I was wondering why (as this article suggests) we are still having problems counting votes. In particular, if the polling place has incomplete or incorrect information about you, you may be stuck with a provisional ballot. After you vote your provisional ballot, you'll never know if your vote was counted; you just have to trust the election authorities. What if we did something like this:

All ballots have a serial number.
When you vote, you keep a chit with your ballot's serial number.
Serial numbers are distributed at random so that your ballot cannot be associated with you solely by knowing the serial number. (Preserves secret ballot.)
At end of election, elections board publishes a text file that lists each ballot serial number and the votes counted for that serial number. This must be public and can be because serial numbers are anonymous.
Voters, or organizations acting on their behalf, can verify that their votes have been counted as intended by searching the published list for their serial number.

A number of organizations that support this behavior could take down your information right outside the polling place (like an exit poll) and verify it later for you automatically. You'd pick an organization that you trust and has some incentive for arguing that your votes were counted.

Wouldn't this solve the provisional ballots problem? Are there any problems with it that I haven't foreseen?

Re: How "Comment without registering" works

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:46:13 EST

Dear Other J,

I'm not 100% sure what prevented this from working, but one possibility is that your comments used a frassle.rura.org cookie, while your registration was on frassle.net. Although it's the same site behind these two addresses, your browser will only send the cookie to frassle when you access it via the same name as when the cookie was sent.* But if you want your comments to be merged into your new blog, just let me know the URL of your comment blog and I will be happy to move them into your registered blog.

thanks,
shimon.

* I could have worked around this problem if I had thought of it in time, but it's kinda too late now. Well, kinda.

P.S. It looks like Lena succeeded in upgrading a comment-blog into a registered blog, judging by the timing of her posts.

How "Comment without registering" works

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:47:37 EST

For those who don't know: when you comment on frassle it's the same as a blog post on your own blog, along with a link that references the item you're responding to. To make commenting easy for people who aren't registered with frassle, we offer a "comment without registering" option where a user can enter a name, website, and email address along with her comment, much like other blog systems.

The difference is that when she submits her comment and personal information, frassle automatically creates a blog in her name. When she comments later on, frassle will notice a cookie in her browser — a little note we've pinned to your computer that says I'm the person in charge of comment blog #312. Using this cookie, we automatically load her next post into the same automatic blog, so that you can see a history of someone's comments even if they're not a registered frassle user. Provided they are using the same browser and that browser supports cookies, all the user's comments will become part of their (automatic) blog.

Later on, if the same user decides to register for real, frassle will seamlessly "upgrade" their comment blog. In other words, their comments will still be there, but now the user will be able to edit them, make new posts that are not comments, change the title of her weblog, etc. This works because the new user registration also looks for the "I'm in charge of comment blog #312" cookie and upgrades that blog rather than creating a new one.

I rather like this design and wonder why other online community systems don't have something similar.

Skiing tips for fellow beginners

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:35:32 EST

The goal in downhill skiing is to move down a slope quickly, but without getting hurt. If not for the latter condition, you could just try going downhill in a straight line. However, if you want to live to see tomorrow, you must incorporate turns into your descent.

When you turn on skis, you use the edges of the skis to carve a path for yourself. Whereas the flat bottom of your ski will happily glide straight down the slope, an edge is like a rung in a ladder and will provide some resistance. By offering some resistance against the straight-down path, you can push yourself into a turn. You can translate your downward momentum into leftward momentum, and then your leftward momentum into upward momentum, which is how you stop. It might make sense to think of it like flying an airplane or hang-gliding: you leverage gravity the way an airplane leverages its jet propulsion. And you have to expect to gradually influence where you go, not completely control it.

That is the theoretical part; here is the practical part. You turn by pushing on your forward ski. That is, you push down on the ski that's going to be in front of you. To turn left, push on your right ski. To turn right, push on your left ski. Imagine that you are crushing a grape under the ball of your foot. Expect to work your quadriceps, hold your hands outward somewhat to help you balance, and consider how far apart you're holding your feet. Try early on to get used to leaning forward in your boots, because this gives you better leverage and more precise control, and then perhaps it won't be as scary to lean forward on the very steep slopes. Plan on falling a lot!

Long time, no post

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:43:23 EST

I vanished from Boston this blizzardy weekend, and went to Lincoln, NH to learn how to ski at Loon Mountain. I really enjoyed skiing, and although I fell a lot I think I ended up a pretty good skier for two days total experience.

Then we got home and shovelled two feet of snow out of the driveway. Which was nice, because it had been such a lazy, sedentary weekend.

Oh! I took my laptop with me in hope of finishing some of alpha 9's finishing touches, but I only got a little bit done. It's very close, but I think I need some clamoring users to help me overcome whatever bits of programmer's block remain...

Strindberg & helium

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 15:35:16 EST

Um, this is weird.

Car Service!

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 11:04:29 EST

I'm surprisingly excited about taking my car in for service for the first time. It's in the hands of the highly-recommended Colonial Auto Service. It's been having trouble starting, and also needs an oil change and probably new brake pads.

The trouble with starting was illustrated today in the mechanic's driveway. I drove in past a snow plow and parked where I thought he had already plowed. Once the mechanic explained that I had parked in the way, I gave him the keys and... rev rev *click*.

While I went inside to give my information to the other guy, the first mechanic was getting my car started. I think he hooked a jumper battery up to my car's battery, and eventually got the thing started. Then I watched him pull the car around, with the hood still up, with lots of wheel spinning and some sliding.

Now, this would probably scare some people, but I am quite happy to see the experts at work. What's making me feel great right now is the expectation that this evening, my car will once again be running perfectly. Probably with a new starter motor.

Update: The car has been fixed. Turns out it was the battery, not starter motor, which is good. Also, the brakes are in fine shape.

Windows Marketplace: Item specs for The GIMP

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:16:05 EST

Did two hundred thousand people download the GIMP because of Microsoft's Windows Marketplace? Even stranger: 1.7 million have downloaded Firefox, whose IE-killer marketing message is reinforced in every user review on that page.

I'm going chalk this up as progress toward fulfilling my prediction that Microsoft will turn its internet channel to Windows users into an iTunes for software. Now they just need the software equivalent of white earphones...

Announcing the Apple iProduct

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:36:55 EST

Blogging Policy

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:11:14 EST

Lisa Williams is at Berkman talking about blog policies. She says they're important and useful to have before they become necessary. So here's mine:

I write about the Free software I write (frassle, this blogging system), various more and less nerdy things that interest me, and my life as a geek in Boston. Don't get all uppity about it, if that's even possible.
Blogs (comments) that are spam will be deleted without notice.
I do not speak for my employer (Kronos Incorporated).
I make minor spelling, grammar, formatting, and link corrections to posts without notice. Changes that significantly affect the meaning of a post are either clearly separated from the original post as an addendum, or are their own post.
I hope you'll correct me and share your insight after listening to what I say.
I screw up.
You're welcome to quote or otherwise make use of material I post here. It's probably best for you to link to me when you do that, but it's not required.
I don't get paid; I'm a little guy. But if I were paid by anyone for writing anything here, it will be obvious.
I try to do the right thing and if you're unhappy about my blog, or about other frassle content, you can always contact me and I will try honestly to resolve the situation to your and my satisfaction.

Re: Things On My Mind

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:30:50 EST

Want Python-style "generators" in Perl? You can always use a closure as a generator. Example:

sub something {
  ...
  my $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT * FROM somewhere');
  $sth->execute;

  consume(sub { $sth->fetchrow_arrayref });
}

sub consume {
  my($generator) = @_;

  while(my @results = $generator->()) {
    # process @results
  }
}

Closures are the bomb. Of course, this is not a perfect solution. If you just wanted to generate the numbers from 1 to 99, you could pass a closure to generate one number, but it would have to store its state externally. I believe Perl 6 has a yield command that would allow you to do this easily (see a more thorough discussion).

Re: Things On My Mind

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 09:35:20 EST

Hi Toph! I'm excited to know you'll be using frassle. Your feedback and code contributions are quite welcome. :)

All of frassle's content generation is dynamic, including the RSS feeds. That is what noteset expressions are for: they're a compact query language. You can query frassle blogs on any boolean combination of:

feed URL (this identifies the blog something comes from)
permalink (in case you want to pull out one specific note)
category membership
relevance to a certain category (by percentage)
word or character count
text search

You can also request all notes that respond to a set of notes. For example, to track the latest comments on your blog, you'd want all things that respond to your feed, except for your own posts. All of this can be expressed with frassle's noteset expressions.

Currently, if you want a feed based on a noteset expression, you have to do the following convoluted dance:

Create a publisher page.
Create a block in that page, using the noteset expression you want.
Copy the XML link for that block from the publisher page.

This is a lot of work, on top of the fact that you have to figure out the noteset expression language based on a pathetic grammar. As a simpler alternative, if you just want feeds for different categories, you can simply fetch

http://frassle.net/rss?cat=28397

which is the feed for your computers category. The number after cat= in the RSS URL should be the same as when you browse. These feeds are also available by browsing to any category and clicking the orange XML icon at the bottom of the page.

But it gets better

In the upcoming (this weekend?) alpha 9 release, frassle's publisher is being replaced by the frassle studio, which lets you build streams of content, format those streams into reusable displays called blocks, and build web pages from those blocks. A content stream is just a noteset expression with a name, but rather than writing a nsexpr yourself, there is an easier javascript editor. Each content stream has a feed, so you could just go into the studio, create a bunch of content streams, and use their RSS feeds.

The other enhancements in the studio include pages with customizable themes, programmatic widgets including a blogroll, calendar, and category tree, and many overall speedups and UI improvements.

Responding to a previous post

By the way, in your previous post where you discuss the efficiency of Python generators, you can actually very easily do the same thing in Perl. Instead of saving the result of $sth->fetchall_arrayref() and passing a reference to that, just pass $sth. The consumer subroutine can just call $sth->fetchrow_arrayref() over and over again, just like the generator you describe.

Perfect Bitterness

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:50:30 EST

Found in the comments on a post about choosing a college by Philip Greenspun:

Ersatz intellectuals in fields other than biology read The Selfish Gene or equivalent popular biology book and imagine biological research as witty British academes exchanging verbal jabs, unlocking the mysteries of life, and receiving millions of royalty pounds from their cloned maize patents . In reality biology is a windowless lab above the food court in Longwood, with 3 chinese guys, an indian, and a russian, packed into a 6x8 space, trying to do just enough work so that they don't lose funding and get deported. One autistic asian girl does all the wet lab for the entire department and a team of shell-shocked dot com losers are responsible for absorbing all the grant money still being allocated to various dead-end "informatics" programmes. The female doctoral candidates all decide to abandon ship and go to optometry school or manage a pet shop after their thesis defense whilst the male PhDs seem more inclined to waste even more life with endless journal clubs, data sharing, journal sharing, data clubs, and so forth for the rest of $20K/yr post-doc eternity.
Medical school is a (not much) duller , but far more fiscally sensible. If you get bored making $300K a year prescribing acne cream, you could always use your income to set up a lab in your basement. Even post docs have to figure out how to pay rent, so a lot of prime equipment ends up on ebay.
comment by half empty ⋅ 12/24/04; 12:28:44 AM

If you're under 60 and have problems mustering sufficient bitterness in a variety of social situations, a Ph.D. may be the way to go.

Re: The year after

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 16:58:31 EST

Welcome back, Francois! I look forward to reading more from you.

Frassle's been kinda steady for a couple of months now, but we're nearing completion of alpha 9. This is relevant because it will make it easy for you to put a blogroll on your blog. The blogroll will be automatically created based on the subscriptions in your frassle aggregator. Coming up Real Soon Now...

(Oh, and there are also the beginnings of user and developer manuals.)

Lost Boy: From Lists to Social Content Engines

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 16:24:43 EST

Great idea from this article: use Firefox Live Bookmarks to hold your to read list.

RFC: Really Simple Discoverability 1.0

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 13:41:14 EST

Something to look at when we get around to adding various API support to frassle. Found on the excellent Tucows Developer blog, The Farm.

Learning the JavaScript debugger Venkman

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 00:40:32 EST

Handy tool for web app hackers.

Re: Identity Crisis in Frassle

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 09:50:13 EST

Jessica,

This kind of cookie behavior is highly browser-dependent, as far as I know. If what you see now is different, could it be because you've switched browsers?

If you experience something strange, could you tell us exactly what steps you took? Something like:

Open web browser.
Already logged in to moose's orchard thanks to persistent cookie.
Open new empty tab. (The distinction between opening a link in a new tab and and creating a new tab and then loading a link may be important.)
Load frassle homepage in new empty tab.
Click logout in new tab.
Login as Knitalong in new tab.
Go to frassle home page in each tab.
Top of page shows moose logged in in original tab, knitalong logged in in second tab.

Thanks for helping make frassle better.

How many users does frassle have?

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 19:25:11 EST

Today, a milestone:

frassle=> select count(*) from pkit_user; count ——- 600 (1 row)

Thank you, 600 intrepid explorers!

Thoughts on Information Overload

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 11:57:04 EST

My friend Todd wrote about information overload and linked to this Seattle Times article. Is it possible to do good work when there are constant interruptions from inside and outside your head? When there is more interesting stuff in your RSS aggregator than you could possibly read? When friends and coworkers constantly interrupt you?

I would say that if you contrast my average and best work, this is one of the most striking differences.

At my paying work, I sit in a cubicle. I listen to music on headphones continuously because it covers up the noise of people talking around me, which is far more distracting. I believe this environment subtly discourages focused thinking. That is bad because in programming, a well-considered design decision can replace hundreds of lines of code—you can reach an equivalent or better solution with less work for yourself, your testers, and your successors; but not if you're never able to concentrate for more than two minutes. Consequently, there is a subtle, subconscious motivation to be a bad programmer. This reinforces the cultural misperceptions that programming is a rote activity and that programmers are commodity workers.* Another consequence is that any person not content with doing a mediocre job is urged to go into management. This makes the environmental problems self-reinforcing, because managers—whose daily business is primarily communication, not prolonged focus—both favor an interruption-friendly workplace and hold positions of power.

* Although I call the belief that programmers are a commodity a misperception, this isn't always true. In some cases, such as projects for which offshored development is successful, programmers are a commodity. If you are running a software development project, you should be honest with yourself about what you building and whether it's better to have a brilliant team or a cheap, mediocre one.

By contrast, in the programming I do in my spare time, I am rarely interrupted. I would estimate my average time spent focused is on the order of 5 minutes, with peak focus lengths of 30-60 minutes. By contrast, at work average time spent focused is probably about 2 minutes, with peaks of around 10 minutes. I focus more at home for a few reasons:

I personally love the project.
I sit alone, in my attic office with nobody around. Or I sit downstairs on the couch, but I can easily ask people to not interrupt me (or to stop interrupting) and they honor my request.
I never have to wait for my editor or compiler. This means I am not given lots of 30-second gaps perfectly suited to going off and reading stupid websites.
Because the edit-test-success/failure cycle is so tight, I don't get distracted enough to wonder if I have any email. So I reduce my checking from once every 5 minutes to about once every hour (I just instrumented my mail checker to measure this, so I should have real data to back this up in the near future).
I don't have to work on it if I'm tired, upset, or preoccupied.
I know the project better because I did most of it myself.
Because I designed the software, I can understand its design and I don't feel held hostage to idiotic design or technology decisions. (I.e. I feel more ourness.)

Of course, not all of these are luxuries employers would want, or be able, to afford their employees. All the more reason to push the feasible ones.

Question for audience participation: Businesses are inclined toward productivity improvements that are measurable. I think businesses could realize productivity gains if they understood some of stuff I just wrote, but I don't know how they would measure progress. Can you think of a way?

Re: Identity Crisis in Frassle

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:38:18 EST

Jessica-
The cookie thing is exactly right. You might be able to keep two frassle logins going if you run a separate window. You can almost certainly keep two frassle logins going if you run separate web browser instances, although you might be prevented from doing that by your operating system or web browser. Worst case, you can run two different web browsers (e.g. Safari and Firefox).

FreeMind

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:55:53 EST

Found on del.icio.us lifehacks: FreeMind is an open source mind mapping tool. You draw cool outlines of thoughts and links. I've been wanting to try one of these for a while, but haven't gotten around to it; perhaps a good free one will motivate me.

Re: The uncertain future of feed 317

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:37:06 EST

Dear Person-behind-feed 317,

As much as we, your faithful readers, will miss your blog, it's much more important that you stay healthy. I hope you emerge from the threat of illness quickly and completely.

—person-behind-feed 1.

GMail Drive shell extension

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 16:50:38 EST

Access your gigabyte of GMail storage as if it were a drive in Windows.

Free Culture Future

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 15:03:12 EST

Larry Lessig was on WBUR Radio's The Connection this morning.

Frassle on PassingNotes.com

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 11:13:58 EST

Dave Carpe of PassingNotes.com, a site for researchers, points out frassle to his readers. Cool!

Taggle

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 16:51:56 EST

Peter Caputa linked to this post by Brian Dear suggesting Taggle, a search engine for tags across various folksonomy systems such as del.icio.us and flickr. Philipp Lenssen gave it a shot at Find Forward.

Stringing together this series of ideas and consequences is one of the most rewarding parts of blogging.

43 Things

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 16:45:08 EST

A new site from The Robot Co-op where you can keep and share a list of life goals.

Welcome to MusicBrainz!

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 09:21:29 EST

It's like CDDB on crack, with richer metadata and the ability to tag your disorganized MP3 collection...

What's next for Google?

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 11:36:14 EST

A great article on the upcoming Google/Microsoft architecture war, by Charles Ferguson of High Stakes, No Prisoners fame.

I won an iPod!

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:38:31 EST

Thanks to feedster, I have won an iPod mini in their developer contest. My winning entry was a feedster memory game, like the game you used to play as a child. Cards are arrayed in a grid in front of you, and you can flip over any two. If they match, you remove them from play.

The difference is that unlike the normal memory game, the flip-side of each card doesn't have a picture. It has a search result, based on a query you type in. And you don't match literal results, you match the blog they came from. And finally, if you are clicking repeatedly on an item and can't figure out what blog it came from, the feedster memory game reveals more information: first, the blog's icon from feedster (if it has one), and then the actual title of the blog.

Play a round »

Re: The Uno Game

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 13:42:57 EST

I rather like these abstract, almost poetic postlets that the moose has been leaving on her blog.

RSS Digest

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 13:31:41 EST

RSS Digest will show or syndicate an Atom or RSS feed on any web page. This is a feature many people want for their blogs. Many more than know of services like RSS Digest.

Incidentally, this is also a feature that frassle offers. Although in the current version of frassle, it's mired within the difficult-to-use publisher.

Announcing Wixonomy

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 23:06:39 EST

What's been distracting me from frassle for a week or so: a new site for collaboratively building taxonomies, so you can use them in any search engine you want. For you inner list-making nerd. More info soon.

Re: frassle.net homepage now speedier

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 22:54:25 EST

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your interest in my SQL optimizations. I'm gradually making the review of all frassle pages and timing the queries, so I can speed up the worst offenders and make the system snappier.

The main page was an easy place to start. Its slow query was the one that shows recent update times. Previously, it used a subquery to calculate the latest update time for each row. Something like:

SELECT feed_id, blog_title, (SELECT MAX(note_time) FROM fa_notes n WHERE n.feed_id = f.feed_id) as last_post_time FROM fa_feeds f ORDER BY last_post_time DESC LIMIT 15;

One problem was in the way the fake last_post_time column was being generated. Although the fa_notes table has an index on the feed_id column, PostgreSQL was doing a sequential scan of that table in order to find the maximum (latest) post time. But even with the use of the index on the subquery, it was uselessly slow to calculate the last_post_time for each feed and then throw away all but the top 15.

The solution was fairly simple: instead of recalculating it with every page load, store the last_post_time for each feed in the feeds table. I added this column, populated it once using something like the query above, and then added an update trigger to the fa_notes table. The trigger runs whenever a blog post is inserted or updated, and if that post's time is greater than its feed's last_post_time, the last_post_time is updated.

Lesson: In retrospect, this inefficiency seems obvious. But early in the design of a system, it's hard to know which parts of it will be too slow. Sometimes, the database is smart enough to optimize things that would take any reasonable piece of software 14.7 days. Other times, it does exactly the opposite of the smart thing and your clever design succeeds only in confusing the database (and probably yourself and your colleagues). On the balance, I think it's best to stay flexible and react once you have some actual data:

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM fa_notes;
(wait 5 minutes)
363488

Hmm... I guess optimization is never finished.

frassle.net homepage now speedier

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 18:25:01 EST

I messed around with some SQL, and I think the home page should load a lot faster now.

Re: Woe!

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:54:40 EST

Sadly, frassle's autosave feature has not yet debuted for the public world. Perhaps I can get it out of the lab this weekend, with some encouragement. Would anyone like to not lose posts anymore?

Re: Can Chinese hackers do creative technical work?

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:39:47 EST

Cool story, Jennifer! Thanks.

Do I think this would work? I'm not sure. It does seem that some Chinese programmers have immigrated to the US and work successfully as hackers in companies here, so there must be some individuals of sufficient creativity to do at least that work. It is a challenge of building and communicating corporate culture, but I think that creativity *can* be nurtured in the right kind of institution. You're right in saying that it can't be built and budgeted like other products, but I think leveraging the competitive structure that people might already be used to could help it work. Ultimately, though, the real assurance is that China will someday need creativity in its economy. Perhaps not as much as the US does, but globalization will push China a little bit in that direction—for sure.

Can Chinese hackers do creative technical work?

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 14:58:03 EST

Philip Greenspun asked, "what kind of business should one start given that one already has a person on the ground in Shanghai?" Here's my response.

You should start a firm that, rather than doing commodity IT outsourcing, generates solutions to hard problems using a high-volume competition model. The goal is to drive creativity through competition: a customer provides a high-level challenge (I need to improve the efficiency of our widget manufacturing process), and you bring many different minds to bear on that challenge.

This is contrary to the conventional wisdom that Chinese offshoring is for uncreative work, but I think that (1) it has a chance of actually working, and if does work it will be huge and (2) it can exploit the population size advantage. The key is the competition model. In a nation as populous yet per-capita poor as China, those who get as far as technical school have made the cut over and over again. They are ruthlessly competitive, expert in doing things exactly right.

This has the unfortunate consequence of making them somewhat less creative, focusing on efficiency and correctness of product rather than originality. Still, out of a hundred top Chinese programmers, there must be a handful of already creative ones. In the right environment, others around them can learn to appreciate creativity. And if you want to motivate those others to learn faster, why not use the same motivator that has pushed them through years of difficult schooling? You can even recruit by inviting solutions to open research problems and offering a cash prize. Within the corporation, give the most creative employees a higher status (but do not stratify too much within these ranks in order to encourage mixing, freeform discussion, and serendipity).

Think of it as the marriage of Silicon Valley risk-taking and Chinese labor costs.

Culture and Commodity

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:59:17 EST

Speculative, up-for-discussion definition of "commodity": A commodity service or product is something for which you can (1) clearly communicate the requirements to (2) a third party who can be cheaply yet reasonably trusted to understand and implement those requirements and (3) produce the commodity itself, which can be easily tested against the requirements.

Therefore, whether a good or service can be a commodity depends not only on the proto-commodity itself but also on the culture between the producer and consumer. This is because the major aspects of culture are framing communications (language, common experiences captured by literature and art, etc.) and enabling trust (rule of law, institutions, media).

Betsy Devine's Blog: Nobel Category

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:03:41 EST

Betsy Devine has an inside view of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, in her own unusually endearing style. Perhaps one of the happiest weeks for one of the happiest people I know!

[via Jim Moore]

AppRocket

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:13:05 EST

A google search for "quicksilver clone for windows" turned up the so-far very impressive AppRocket. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Jeremy Zawodny: A Personal del.icio.us

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:01:55 EST

Jeremy Zawodny describes a personal tagging system in the style of del.icio.us. It reminds me of Quicksilver, which absolutely knocked my socks off when Stefano demoed it for me at dinner last night.

Social bookmarks - die Alternativen

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 16:20:39 EST

I think I saw this site's mention of frassle a couple of months ago, but I didn't see Google's goofy attempt at translation:

The egg-laying woolly milch sow wants to be Frassle this service falls therefore here rather from the row. Beside a feed Aggregator (similar as Bloglines) a Blog and a link collection (with RSS feed) are ordered for free organization. The project still is in the alpha stage.

What is this, Google funny mistakes day or something?

Hilarious ads by eBay affiliates

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 13:22:59 EST

Joel Spolsky posted a funny contest:

Ebay affiliates are going completely nuts abusing Google sponsored links. Let's have a little blogger fun before Larry & Sergei (or ebay) figure out how to shut them down.
I'm proposing a little contest. Who can find the most horrifying genuine affiliate advertisement on Google? Here's my entry:
Post your screen capture on your own blog and link back to here.
(A quick explanation, before you freak out: people who think they are extraordinarily clever sign up as ebay affiliates and then buy entire dictionaries full of keywords on Google. These keywords link back to their site, so they can track it, and then on to ebay. They pay Google a small fee for each clickthrough and earn a small fee from ebay for each sale made on ebay, and profit on the difference.)

Mysteriously, this posting has disappeared from Joel's site, as has the image of his search (which suggested a great selection of African slaves). I got the text from my aggregator. Whatever the explanation from that may be, I probably set off some alarms while digging up the following searches.

Illicit Goods and Services

(MDMA is another name for the drug Ecstasy)

Stuff You Might Not Actually Want

Wouldn't you love to meet these singles?

Dictatorship and Coups d'Etat

Read these headlines in order:

Finally, If Only it were So Easy...

Cliff's Notes for A Pattern Language

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 16:11:37 EST

Summaries of all 253 patterns in Christopher Alexander's book. Found via Brian Foote's blog, Catfish in the Memepool.

Stupid Idea: IBM buying Apple

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 11:33:10 EST

Tech journalists, excited by IBM's sale of its PC division to Chinese computer giant Lenovo, are trying to guess what IBM will do next. This guy thinks they should buy Apple.

It's not an original suggestion, but it is especially hilarious. Apple succeeds in a business that other tech companies fail at, and fail horrendously. What sets it apart is taste. Apple has taste because of egomaniac CEO Steve Jobs. Does IBM have taste? Well, the thinkpad is a nice machine, but it's clear Big Blue has never garnered the same customer devotion as Apple.

The most obvious way to break Apple would be to make its products bland and uncreative. IBM, especially since Lou Gerstner took over, is all about making and marketing products and services at low risk and high scale, milking existing brands for all they're worth. The only IBM product I use on a regular basis is Lotus Notes, and starting that program is like hitting a magical 1992 button on my PC.

An obvious way to achieve blandness and uncreativity is to fire Steve Jobs. As if the theory of this option weren't compelling enough, there is actually historical precedent that Apple sucks without Steve Jobs. And yet, the author of this piece actually contemplates that, in order to make an acquisition by IBM work, Jobs might be fired.

Just ask yourself: when was the last time a bunch of engineers started a site to collect genuinely interesting personal stories about working with John Sculley or Lou Gerstner?

A Modest Player in Open Source

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 10:47:52 EST

A short story about the creation of SourceFire, a company that sells a proprietary GUI admin tool for an open source network intrusion monitor system whose development it leads.

An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 16:45:03 EST

Pretty rantastic. See also: 10 Reasons to Shy Away from Venture Capital from Anti Venture Capital.

Introduction to the Semantic Web and RDF

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 14:39:36 EST

Apparently this is the "short and sweet" version.

How to make frassle easy to try

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 10:08:05 EST

Once frassle gets out of alpha, it would be nice to make it super-easy to try on your own machine. Since I think one of frassle's most compelling uses is behind a firewall, we should make it easy for any networked PC to become a frassle server. Here's the process I think might work well:

Download a 200MB ISO image and burn a CD.
Find an unused PC with a network connection.
Insert CD, turn on PC.
The PC displays a screen that says something like "You can now connect to frassle at http://192.168.1.114/" in big letters across the screen. Clicking that would launch a web browser right there.

Something like LAMPPIX would be a good basis for this. By default, the ISO could be configured to use a RAM disk for testing, but ideally you'd have other choices. For example, you could choose to store frassle data in a standard place on an existing Windows or Linux partition, or create a new partition; and the frassle ISO would autodetect this data after rebooting. That way you could put frassle on your intranet by finding an unused PC, popping in the CD, and turning it on. When a new version of frassle came out, you could shut down, pop in a new CD, throw away the old one, reboot, and bam! All set.

Going further, it would be great to have easy-to-install packages for Windows (like EasyPHP) and various Linux distros too.

Sounds like a good project for a summer intern, no?

Baby's First Comment Spam

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:21:12 EST

The other day Josh spotted the first known instance of comment spam on frassle. I just deleted the spam blog, but you can see Google's snapshot here.

Strangely enough, it seemed like a certain small rite of passage. Someone actually found frassle and decided to click and add spam to lots of posts. Amazing!

The Company and Kindness of Strangers

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 01:19:05 EST

I just arrived home from a delayed and delayed and delayed flight. I was returning to Boston from Thanksgiving with my family in Cincinnati. Originally scheduled to leave at 6:55pm, my flight ended up leaving at around 9:55, putting us in Boston just before midnight.

But the delays weren't that bad. I sat at gate B34 in Cincinnati with Becky and Colleen, two other friendly young Bostonians. After the delay time was updated and we had two hours to kill, we started watching Monsters, Inc. on my laptop. We didn't finish the movie before boarding, but I caught the rest in the air. Good stuff.

Finally, after arriving in Boston to gargantuan lines for taxis, Becky's friends, who lived not far from me, offered me a ride home. For almost nothing, I got a ride home at a late hour with a fun, friendly atmosphere. So for all that, guys, thanks.

Re: Just for fun!

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 01:51:38 EST

Hi Small Business Guru, and welcome to frassle! One thing I'm definitely thankful for is the core of active, appreciative users that help Josh and me to make frassle better all the time. Your patient and attentive feedback make frassle a better place.

Aspect-oriented Refactoring Series

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 15:14:08 EST

This is what I did my undergraduate thesis (2003) on, and now it's showing up in trade publications. I don't think the author, Ramnivas Laddad, knew about my thesis, but perhaps he'd be interested in its large catalog of aspect-oriented refactorings.

Hooray for Users!

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 17:43:04 EST

Last night, I fixed a bug which was preventing new users from registering successfully with frassle. Since then, 5 new users! Thanks to all users, especially the ones who email me bug reports...

(And yes, I mean that.)

Refactoring Aspect-Oriented Software

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 08:48:17 EST

I've posted my undergraduate computer science thesis on the web, finally. It's on refactoring AspectJ programs. Here's the abstract:

This thesis extends the state of the art in refactoring to Aspect-Oriented Programming. Refactorings are specific code transformations that improve the design of existing code without changing its observable behavior. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) offers a new approach to software design by encapsulating crosscutting concerns. The novel contributions of this thesis are a recasting of existing refactorings to preserve program behavior in aspect-oriented code, and several new refactorings that can improve the design of code by deploying AOP techniques. The refactorings are described in reference to AspectJ, an AOP extension of Java, and are amenable to partial or full automation.

It is necessary to reevaluate existing OO refactorings because the constructs of AOP programming languages significantly affect what changes can be meaning-preserving. To this end, new preconditions and steps are introduced to about 20 fundamental refactorings (from Opdyke, 1992) such as renaming a class and inlining a method. These extended refactorings can form the basis for an AOP-aware refactoring tool.

About thirty new AOP-specific refactorings are proposed. These refactorings include both fundamental refactorings and more complex refactorings built from these that address specific design problems. For example, a simple refactoring possible in AOP is to move the definition of a method from within a class to an aspect. A more complex refactoring that includes this is moving all code responsible for implementing a particular interface into an aspect. The focus is primarily on accomplishing the desired changes once the involved program parts are identified. These new refactorings can form the basis for a truly AOP-focused refactoring tool.

My feedster developer contest entry is done!

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 22:43:23 EST

Steal this Feedster Developer Contest Idea

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:52:40 EST

Feedster is giving away 12 iPod minis in a developer (and writer) contest. Here's an idea for a feedster-powered service that would be really cool, but I don't have the time to implement myself.

Find Related Blog Posts with Feedster Searches and Statistics
If your blog has statistics (all frassle users do now, thanks to Josh) you probably enjoy learning what search queries bring users to your site. You might even sometimes try looking at those search results yourself. Perhaps you find that people are coming up with some pretty interesting search queries, and those websites appearing next to yours in the results are worth reading.

There is no need for this to be a manual process.

Your blog software records what search terms lead viewers to a given post. Perhaps for this post, a day's queries might be "free ipod mini" and "feedster contest".
Every night, your blog goes to feedster and records the top 10 results for each of those search terms.
If a given blog posts appears as a result for more than one of the search queries, it is ranked as especially relevant.
Related posts on other blogs are automatically displayed with your post. Best of all, they're found based on what people have actually been looking for.

I think this would make an excellent plugin for a blog publishing system. I'm not certain it would actually produce useful information, but it's probably worth trying.

(Incidentally, I first thought of automating this while chatting on the phone with Bill Ives a few months ago. I'm not sure how we got onto the topic, but he told me how he sometimes finds useful material in this manner.)

Re: Hacker Languages Weekend

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 15:07:08 EST

If you actually want to learn Befunge (Wikipedia: "an attempt to devise a language as hard to compile as possible") and write a web application in it, go for it!

Hacker Languages Weekend

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 11:04:43 EST

I've been itching for some time to learn Python and Ruby. I doubt they'll replace my unabated adoration for Perl, and I love learning new languages, but it's hard to divert myself from a day of productive Perl hacking to learn some new language. So I propose to make this a group event.

For one day, several hackers will get together with the sole goal of learning some new programming languages. We'll each purchase and bring a book, and spend the first half-day reading about a language we don't yet know. The second half will be spent attempting to implement a cool web application of some sort using that language. Ideally, the hackers' existing knowledge will overlap such that at least one person in the room will know each language being learned.

For example, suppose you had three hackers, A, B, and C. Here would be a pretty good mesh of knowledge and ambition:

Hacker	Knows	Wants to learn
A	Perl, Java	Python, Ruby
B	Python, Perl	Ruby, PHP
C	Ruby, PHP	Perl, Python

I think the collaborative atmosphere would keep us focused, as well as being tons of fun. Requisite infrastructure: a linux server, wifi, couches, and available pizza delivery.

If you'd be interested in doing something like this in the Boston area in the near future, leave a comment on this post.

Slippery Slope Arguments

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:44:47 EST

Within an ongoing discussion about politics:

Person 1: "That's dangerous. I mean, you do that, and then you have blah, and then foo, and eventually bar.

Person 2: "I don't buy slippery slope arguments."

Person 3: "Good point. I mean, you buy one, and then another, and eventually you're just mindlessly accepting all slippery slope arguments."

Attention.XML

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:16:17 EST

Probably a spec worth learning about.

Don't use super glue on shoe insoles...

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 23:02:18 EST

The fabric on top of my loafer's insole has been coming loose, so today I decided to try and reglue it. And what better than super glue? After I finally got the clogged lid off of the tiny tube, I squeezed glue generously onto the rubbery insole, and... it got hot and gave off some fumes (probably toxic). Perhaps this will contribute to a stronger bond.

Update: the bond seems to be holding well.

Botcast Network

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 16:44:01 EST

Ted Gilchrist makes podcasts using synthesized robot voices. It's... well... interesting.

See also RS3, a tool that combines RSS aggregation, automatic text summarization, and speech synthesis.

Windows Media Encoder 9 Series

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:39:37 EST

This program (download is gratis) can make compact .WMV videos of stuff on your screen, along with microphone input. Like, just to take a stab at something, a demo of some software you wrote.

Arlington Advocate on Blogs

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:40:06 EST

Wow, very local bloggers! (Shimon lives in Arlington, MA but wasn't interviewed for this article. Maybe next time!)

from Jarrett House North

Re: Frassle Hacks - Aggregator is Back!

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:38:19 EST

The use of the numbering at the bottom of pages is not just for vanity. It's also so that you can page backwards in time to browse old posts. I just used it this morning while reading another blog on frassle.

Frassle Hacks - Aggregator is Back!

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 07:43:54 EST

I finally figured out how to make the aggregator work efficiently enough again! While I was at it, I fixed another thing. Josh fixed something too. So now frassle has functioning:

aggregator
statistics for your weblog
pagination of your weblog (mine has 742 posts as of before this writing)

Hooray!

Re: Accelerating Change 2004

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:31:27 EST

Recordings of the talks at Accelerating Change will apparently be available on ITConversations in the near future. The BloggerCon III recordings are already beginning to trickle in.

Mechanisms of Innovation: Invention and Evolution

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 18:17:04 EST

I'm still thinking over Doug Engelbart's speech at Accelerating Change. Like the speech, his Bootstrap Institute website describes the greatest challenges the world now faces:

Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale.
The rate, scale, and complex nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one person, organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to.
Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy of a commensurate scale at a cooperative cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level.

If that didn't make sense to you, let me try to interpret. Engelbart is considering how innovation happens in response to large-scale problems. For some problems, a talented individual can figure out a solution—great. But other problems, those of a global scale, are too large for inventors to solve. Moving from the individual scale to the organizational or even national scale, there are still problems that are beyond the reach of these larger and larger institutions that might perhaps be solvable if additional entities could contribute.

The process for solving problems that cannot be solved by invention is evolution. In biology, the problem might be stated as "what form of life survives best?" But evolution happens in other environments too. In product markets, companies design products and compete with each other, some lasting and some failing. But the evolution metaphor doesn't end there. Evolution makes progress by chance—random mutations. A strand of DNA doesn't know whether a mutation is good or bad—it doesn't even have an opinion. But without even understanding the larger questions, its mutation contributes to the solution of an incredibly complex problem. Similarly, product developers don't always know how their product will be used, but leaving it out there for experiemental, even random combination with other objects and ideas permits it to participate in the evolution.

Furthermore, the mutations need not be random. The power still lies in the gradual overall progress despite potential individual failures. But with some cleverness, the individual "mutations" can do much better than random; if our attempts are vaguely in the right direction, they can accelerate useful evolution. On the other hand, if the agents of knowledge mutation—inventors—are overly constrained in their choices, they may actually do worse than random.

Solving problems in this fashion is what I think Engelbart means by the third bullet point above. He then sets out criteria for building and improving that mechanism:

We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale.
The grand challenge is to boost the collective IQ of organizations and of society. A successful effort brings about an improved capacity for addressing any other grand challenge.
The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy.
Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success.

I don't feel I understand these points as well as the first batch. But I think when Engelbart writes "collective IQ", he is actually talking about a collective capacity for the execution of the evolutionary mechanisms. This is in part about building lots of clever inventors, but that part is severely overshadowed by the need to rapidly conceive and test lots and lots of mutations. But what about this bootstrapping business?

Well, perhaps this means that each solution reached by an evolutionary system produces not just an answer but also a new state of the evolutionary system itself. This indicates a different conception of problems and solutions: whereas an inventor might eliminate a problem by some clever invention, an evolutionary process connects the solution not only to previous solutions but to future problems and solutions. Therefore the process sets the course for its own increased productivity.

Are we witnessing the opening of a new frontier for evolution?

Accelerating Change 2004

Sun, 07 Nov 2004 13:18:33 EST

I'm writing this from a panel talk at accelerating change, a tech/culture conference at Stanford. BloggerCon was great fun yesterday, and I'm crashing a few sessions of A.C. before Sam drives me to the airport. In fact, I'm using Sam's Ipaq, which is kinda blowing my mind. Frassle mostly works! :)

BloggerCon Reflection

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 20:49:58 EST

I'm in the closing session of BloggerCon. It's been an unbelievable conference, so many interesting people working on fascinating problems. I didn't get to meet a huge array of people, but I did get to meet and talk in depth with several people. Some of these conversations will continue tonight. Despite some roadbumps, it's an amazing experience.

What's an API? A quick explanation for non-techies

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 20:40:45 EST

An API is an Application Programming Interface. It is a specification for how applications can be programmed to utilize the functions of a piece of software. Examples:

Your operating system provides a device driver API, so that people who make hardware peripherals can write code to let you use them.
Google and other search engines provide an API so that applications can incorporate search results.

What is an API? Primarily, it's a set of instructions for other programmers. It may be more or less formal. On the informal end, it might be an English document that describes where a plug-in piece of software fits into the bigger picture. More formally, it may specify specific class structures, function signatures, network transports, data structures, and other technical requirements.

Emotional Life Blogroll, first draft

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 19:45:00 EST

Here's a list of blogs belonging to participants in BloggerCon's emotional life of weblogs session. I really enjoyed this session, much more than I expected, and thought it would be nice to have an aggregator for the group. As a first step, here's a blogroll, as transcribed in order from the whiteboard.

http://kokochi.com
http://2020hindsight.org
http://momentshowing.typepad.com
http://enochchoi.com/thoughts
http://minadeletras.us
http://cmuncey.manilasites.com
http://scrinson.blogspot.com
http://theredactor.blogspot.com
http://julieleung.com
http://rura.org/shimon
http://www.cadence90.com/wp/
http://www.tansey.net/towel
http://flutterby.com
http://susanmernit.blogspot.com

Hi from BloggerCon!

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 15:49:20 EST

I'm at a great catered lunch at BloggerCon, on the outrageously gorgeous campus of Stanford University. It's been a very exciting morning, and I'll be writing down my thoughts on the sessions and people I've met in the near future. But for now, a funny story.

Yesterday I was at Williams College, my alma mater, participating in a panel session on careers in computer science. I left Boston for Williamstown in the morning, hung out at Williams until about 4pm, and then drove to the nearby Albany, NY airport for my weekend at Stanford. My friend Sam, also from Boston and attending BloggerCon, was going to get a rental car and meet me at the airport.

My plane arrived a bit early, so I called Sam to let him know. He was still picking up the rental car, so we decided I should head toward him and meet him there. "Hop on a shuttle."

Well, hopping on a shuttle took a while. I was starving (no dinner!) so I stopped at Subway. Then I looked around for the shuttle buses. Whoops, wrong level! The shuttle to the rental car center is on the third level and is a tram. The tram goes for 20 minutes across the huge airport, and lets me off on level three of the rental car center.

"Hi Sam. I'm staring at the Hertz counter and you're not here."

"Oh, I just got the car, you can just step outside and meet me."

"OK, I guess I have to go down to the first level to do that."

"Huh?"

"You know, the first level. Sorry it took so long by the way, the tram travels for a long time. This airport is so huge! It makes the big dig look simple."

"Oh, you're at the San Francisco airport!"

"Eh?"

Apparently, I gave Sam my airline and flight number, but not the destination airport. In case you're wondering, a trip from Oakland to SFO at 1:15am on Saturday morning takes about 20 minutes. :)

Frassle Plugin Architecture

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 14:45:56 EST

[This is a draft chapter in the as-yet-nonexistent Frassle Developer's Manual.]

The frassle studio allows users to build and customize dynamic websites without any programming. But what if the options the studio gives you don't meet your needs? Frassle provides a plugin API so that you can build custom page elements.

There are currently three kinds of plugins in frassle:

block display styles, which define a format for a set of notes. The content of each block comes from a content stream specified by the user, and the block display style controls how the query results are displayed: headlines, full text, etc.
widgets, which are programmatic elements that do not necessarily display a set of notes. A widget may display the current time, or some user's category tree, or just a static piece of text.
themes, which provide a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for use in studio pages and sites.

Although these plugin types serve different purposes, they have some common structure:

Don't call us, we'll call you. When it's time to render a page that includes your plugin, frassle loads your files and invokes the appropriate functions.
Drop-in deployment. Simply put plugin files into the appropriate frassle/plugins directory, and you're ready to start using them. No need to restart your server.
Separate code and template files. Each plugin has a template file, interpreted using the HTML::Template system, and optionally a program code file written in Perl.
Full API access. Because your plugin code runs within the same Perl environment as frassle itself, you have full access to frassle's Perl interfaces and the attached database. This is powerful but dangerous; because a plugin can potentially harm your data or expose security vulnerabilities, you should not run untrusted plugins.
Automatic options interface. You specify what configuration options are available for your plugin, and frassle automatically generates the interface for users to edit these options. When your plugin is called to render, frassle tells you what options apply.
[coming soon] Caching. Concisely specify caching options for the output of your plugin. Frassle handles the mechanics of storing and serving the cached output, as well as expiring the cache as soon as it is invalidated.

If you know the basics of HTML and Perl, you can create plugins that customize the appearance and functionality of your frassle sites. In the following sections, we'll look at each plugin type and go through the code of an example plugin.

1. Themes

2. Widgets

3. Block Display Styles

[To be continued...]

My new shure E2C earphones - first impressions

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 18:24:02 EST

I finally received my pair of Shure E2C earphones. These are some strange puppies: in ear-canal phones. You put on silicone or foam sleeves and shove them right in. In addition to giving you added incentive to use Q-Tips every morning, this tight seal is supposed to improve sound isolation. Mainly, I bought them because I seem to be travelling a lot and read that they have superior sound isolation to noise-cancelling headphones. Also, I have a pair of Aiwa noise-cancelling headphones and when you turn on the noise cancellation the left phone gets very quiet and the right phone whistles.

So the idea of earplugs with a transducer attached sounded pretty good. Do they measure up?

They sound decent, but are not the best sounding headphones I've ever tried (I once sampled a pair of $900 Sony electrostatic phones; they are on the short list of stuff to buy when I make my zillions). To be fair, I haven't yet tried them on any truly high-quality audio sources. These are for travel, so the important quality is that they're well-insulated and comfortable. I'm still getting used to the comfort, but fairly certain I will get used to it.

The. Sound. Isolation. Is. Amazing.

Josh is ten feet away yelling obscenities or something—I can't tell. I am in a happy quiet place where I cannot even hear the sound of my own typing. I can't wait to try it on a plane this weekend.

Highly recommended.

More info: Shure E2C, list $99; paid $65 via Froogle. Feedster should have vertical search for product reviews. One review with pictures.

What if Bush Wins?

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:23:45 EST

Few of my friends will be happy to see Bush win. But on the other hand, Kerry is a rather pathetic candidate too. Assuming that Bush does win, what's going to happen? It's time to make some predictions.

With the assistance of a bold Republican congress, Bush will get additional steam for the continued occupation of Iraq. This is badly needed, but will not be enough. The election win will only bolster Bush's overconfidence on Iraq, and the administration will hardly even try to strike the deals we need with India, China, and Russia to bring 100,000 non-American troops into Iraq. After two years, Russia will pledge some troops but not enough. Near the end of Bush's second term, China will begin to consider some sort of military partnership with the US to bring the middle east out of total chaos, and it will be up to the next president to develop the partnership.

Increased spending on Iraq will further balloon the budget deficit. I believe improving world security is a worthwhile infrastructure investment, so I'm not freaked out about this. Additionally, the administration will come close to neglect of the domestic economy, which is probably the best possible outcome. Without a reelection to worry about, we're likely to get ~~lied to~~ spoken to less.

Where Bush does damage domestically may be Social Security. The risk here is not exactly privatization itself, which could be done without harm, but that whatever changes they have in mind will create a domestic budget crisis. By characterizing the crisis in terms of "welfare spending," Bush could strike a powerful political triple-play:

reunite fiscally conservative Republicans with the Christian right
distract nation from ongoing costs of reconstruction in Iraq
actually cut welfare spending.

Pulling off this sort of thing would be huge political win for the Republicans. It is likely to make many domestic issues marginally worse, including healthcare (especially for the poor).

A new generation of voters is outraged at the secretive and deceptive manners of our nation's leadership. Looking for a leader, we will probably not find anyone actually good. But the process of looking will set out our values as a political bloc, and these values will guide the mainstream voters in 20 years. The foremost will state that leaders must be communicators. A good politician cleverly leverages the media, including websites/weblogs she directly authors, to communicate with voters and constituents.

John Kerry will not be doing Viagra advertisements, and it will be possible to take a walk around Beacon Hill without being accosted by the Secret Service.

I voted!

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 09:06:52 EST

I voted for the first time today. If you can vote, do!

Malcolm Gladwell: The Naked Face

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 11:12:49 EST

Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them?

Fascinating.

SLA Blog Panel Photos

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:05:28 EST

Walt Howe posted photos of yesterday's Special Librarians' Association meeting. Josh, Jessica, Garrett, and I presented there on blogging.

The audience was wonderful: they asked lots of insightful questions and continued to pay attention after many hours in a stuffy room. And they forgave me for demonstrating a software crash! Exactly the qualities we look for in frassle users...

Hey, I can blog from the SLA meeting too!

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 15:22:18 EST

Josh and Jessica have both made blog entries from our Special Libraries Association panel today. I'm just jumping on the bandwagon!

User Experience Resource Collection, compiled by Dey Alexander

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 11:15:24 EST

A remarkable collection of links on User Experience topics.

Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 09:39:25 EST

How Microsoft tests ASP.NET 2.0. Hint: it involves 105,000 automated test cases, which are run on 1200 dedicated machines.

ASP.NET is probably the best web development framework out there—at least for the corporate market. This is one reason why; not a lot of companies other than Microsoft can invest that much in quality.

(After writing, Shimon checks the back of his neck. Hmm, no chip.)

What is frassle?

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:14:14 EST

Frassle has a lot of different stuff in it. I'm searching for a short explanation that explains the unifying themes. Here's attempt #1:

Frassle is an interpersonal content management system—a connection point for conversations you're engaged in. It is designed to help you find relevant discource, participate in it, and share it with others.

All of this is made possible by the content of your blog and other blogs that hook into frassle via RSS. Frassle's aggregator helps you follow news sources you care about. Your blog collects thoughts (soon including private ones). Throughout, frassle threads each post in context—whether it's a comment, a response in a frassle blog, or a response aggregated from an external source. Finally, the frassle content studio lets you build dynamic web pages and RSS feeds that present content from sources you choose.

None of frassle's functions are brand new, but the coherent way that these functions are integrated is new.

defective yeti: jokes

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:36:12 EST

A huge colleciton of jokes from hundreds of commentors and the yeti himself.

Q: Why can't engineers tell jokes timing?

autopano-sift: making panoramas fun

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:44:57 EST

Handy mono program for stitching together digital panorama images.

Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 16:58:43 EST

Philip Greenspun's classic, originally published in the ArsDigita Systems Journal.

First the Olsen Twins, Now eBay: T-Shirt Hell.com Told to Cease and Desist Selling Their New Christopher Reeve T-Shirt

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 16:55:08 EST

Launched in October 2001, www.tshirthell.com is the most visited t-shirt website on the Internet. The site averages over 75,000 unique visitors and over 400,000 page views daily (source Alexa.com).

Re: Emacs require-final-newline on fedora: How to kill it!

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 15:28:13 EST

Toph wondered why I, a Debian GNU/Linux lover through and through, would be bitching about a Fedora Core 2 issue.

The server that hosts frassle is a dedicated machine running FC2. Unfortunately, my provider didn't offer Debian. But did you know they now have apt-get for fedora? With that little perk, it's keeping me pretty happy.

Emacs require-final-newline on fedora: How to kill it!

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 09:41:40 EST

I have been annoyed that emacs21 on a fedora core 2 machine keeps asking me:

(This file) does not end in newline. Add one?

Of course I don't want to add one. If I wanted to add a new line I'd just hit Alt-Shift-. Enter like every sane person. Right? Shut up, emacs.

OK, simple enough. Just set require-final-newline to nil. Just put that setting into my .emacs file.

This didn't work: (setq require-final-newline nil)

This also didn't work: (setq-default require-final-newline nil)

Using emacs' own customization system, it still didn't work. I could set the variable in a session, but after quitting and starting again the setting didn't stick.

I started to worry. Then I tracked it down.

The non-nil setting comes from /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el. This apparently runs after your .emacs and, on FC2, sets require-final-newline to 'query. So to stop this atrocity, you have two options:

Become root, and edit /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el.
Avoid running this silly default.el file by putting into your .emacs:
(setq inhibit-default-init t)

I chose the latter option. Perhaps this post will help future Google searchers do the right thing even faster.

If computer fails to boot, open case and touch all cables once

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:10:45 EST

There was a major computer scare this morning with my desktop computer system. I had booted it into Windows to play with some ASP.NET stuff, and just after it finished booting I got the message:

Unknown Hard Error; please save your work. Machine will reboot in 55 seconds.

What the hell is a Hard Error? Is that tougher than an Easy Error? Anyway, after I clicked OK on the one dialog box that remained, the machine rebooted... almost.

In fact, it started rebooting, and stopped at the motherboard's splash screen. As I sat there watching that frozen screen for minutes and minutes, and the hard disk light blinked on and off and on and off—trying to communicate some message of lost hope that I didn't understand—I started to question myself. Maybe it wasn't wise to always buy the cheapest available computer components? If I had spent more than $40 on a motherboard, perhaps it wouldn't have crapped out in so devastating a fashion? Would I be spending my Sunday driving to and from Micro Center and hoping that the data on my hard disks remained alive?

In a last measure of desperation, I slid the cover off of the computer. Perhaps a cable had gone loose. Perhaps some dust landed in a bad spot, shorting some circuit. So I tapped all the important cable connections, and I huffed, puffed, and blew out a LOT of dust.

And miraculously, it worked. I turned the machine back on, and it booted without complaint. I guess I can continue buying the cheapest possible equipment... if I keep my fingers crossed...

R. Buckminster Fuller

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 15:29:36 EST

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
- R. Buckminster Fuller

Good Morning!

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 10:55:32 EST

On the way to work this morning, just over Arlington, Massachusetts, there was a huge gorgeous 180-degree rainbow. It was nice not having a camera and just wiggling around the car, moving my eyes from one end to the other.

It wasn't quite as good as this rainbow over the Baltic Sea, pictured here with my friend Chris Holmes.

For all mothers in the audience: don't worry, I wasn't driving.

Live Notes from Berkman Thursday

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:18:32 EST

Josh starts off the discussion with a question about what blogging tools and applications might interest information professionals. Randy mentions Air America radio, which has huge comment threads. Lisa mentions office knowledge sharing systems: the ideal, back in her analyst days, would have been a system like del.icio.us with the ability to selectively share things with clients.

New people! Meghan of Megastyles, Erica (new to the Berkman Center), and Adam Gaffin. Regulars include Vernica, Sun, Randy, Josh, Michael, Wendy, Gregor, Lisa, and j.

New topic: Marc Canter, who is interested in "Digital Lifestyle Aggregators," which gather all sorts of microcontent and media. He's currently on a tour promoting these standards and trying to get social network sites to standardize on FOAF. This will give us a chance to invite a speaker to speak for us, nail down a date (Nov 18), set up our audio streaming, etc.

Adam tells us a little bit about how blog comments are weak and incapable of sustaining community. I agree (of course). Meghan talks about how she got a job from blogging(!) and Boston is nice because you can walk around in your pajamas.

Web Crossing

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:09:46 EST

According to Adam Gaffin, this piece of software offers blog, forum, and wiki interfaces to the same content. Perhaps a good place to steal ideas gather inspiration.

Re: WWF Report Finds We're Living Beyond Earth's Means

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:18:23 EST

According to this Earth Day Network quiz, if everyone lived like me we would need 4.2 Earths. Apparently I'm even below average for America. I've heard similar assertions from my friends, usually wealthy, well-educated Americans, that we are living beyond the resources available to us on Earth.

It's a shocking statistic, but so what? Wouldn't you expect the wealthiest, most prosperous fraction of the Earth's population to consume more than their fair share of the resources? As long as the whole population of Earth isn't living like I am, it's not a problem, is it?

Of course, there is still plenty to object to in a world where the wealthy have so much and the poor have no peace, no food, no clean water, and no medical care. As living standards improve for the world's poor, we'll have to take care not to place too heavy a burden on our Earth. I'd be really worried if I didn't think the incentives to keep growth in check weren't there—but they are. For example, it's going to be extremely rewarding to develop more energy-efficient vehicles if when gasoline becomes 50 times more expensive.

But really, I'm more curious about a different issue. Why do so many people believe that by not eating meat, and buying organic citrus fruits at Whole Foods for twice the price of conventional fruits at Stop-n-Shop, that they are making a meaningful difference to the planet? Isn't the extra $0.30 per orange just going to fund some executive's yacht, or a longer commute for your cashier? Isn't a lot of the environmentalist rhetoric just a way of buying the false hope that you can make a difference in a world we're eager to make sense of, but truly can't understand?

Re: Frassle feeds have new URLs, too.

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:01:12 EST

The old URLs should now work, even in broken aggregators. Any reasonable aggregator (this might exclude frassle's, sadly, but of course frassle doesn't actually fetch its own feeds over HTTP) would respond to the redirection code and get the feed from frassle.net instead of frassle.rura.org. But since apparently some aggregators can't handle that, this server will now respond as frassle.rura.org or as frassle.net without any redirect. Welcome back, subscribers!

WebNote: An amazing feat of Javascript/DHTML

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 16:19:00 EST

WebNote is an online note-taking program. It lets you create a tableau, where you can create and edit notes in various colors. You can interactively drag and resize notes, make whatever edits you want, and then save the tableau.

What makes WebNote amazing is that it's web-based. Try it here. The coolest upshot is that you can use WebNote as a collaborative workspace like a Wiki, but giving users more powerful visual hints in the form of colored notes arranged in space.

Still, while I think the idea and code is neat, I'm not sure this is that valuable as a standalone application. I think these notes are most useful as annontative elements on an existing, larger piece of content. In particular, I think it would be a useful piece of interface in a writing workshop. Readers could position notes around a document in order to share questions and suggestions.

Another cool idea would be a collaborative whiteboard space. Here it would be most interesting to combine the annotated tableau with some sort of periodically updating interface. Maybe the notes slide down over time, and fade into a regular blog. But when something is important, you can make a big note and put it right on top. Perhaps a few people can share this and use it as an efficient way to share bits of more and less transient information during the workday. Or you could use it for your own note list. If something important is about to slide off screen, just drag it back to the top of your attention!

It doesn't do most of this stuff yet, but luckily, WebNote is open source too. An inspiring piece of interface work.

[via Napsterization]

Life With Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 14:04:14 EST

Christopher Allen has a wonderful article tracing social software from its foundational ideas (Engelbart and Licklider) to its current and future goals.

Blogs and Libraries

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 11:42:17 EST

On Saturday, October 30 from 1-5pm, Josh and I will be speaking at a panel called Blogging and Feeds: What Every Information Professional Needs to Know. The panel is sponsored by the Boston chapter of the Special Libraries Association. We'll be preceded by Jessica Baumgart and Garret Eastman. Kris Liberman will moderate.

Though at first we thought we might give a less technical version of our OSCOM presentation [slides], it now seems that we'll be delivering two separate talks.

Josh will first give a survey of how blogs are used across the universe—from business marketing to topical news to personal journals.
I'll give a demo of how blogging works, using frassle. In addition to showing off basic blogging, aggregator, and categorization features, I'll show how you can use frassle to build and publish an aggregator for other people to read. For example, you might hand-pick a few feeds of interest to your patrons and feature them on your library homepage. Or you might use frassle's topic-based organization features to automatically select relevant content based on what you and other bloggers read.

It looks like this panel will be a good introduction to what blogs are good for, and how to use that in your organization. Unfortunately, it's not free: $30 for SLA members, $40 for non-members, and $20 for students, retirees, and folks between jobs. Let me know if you're coming from the Boston area and want a ride.

More resources for librarians/information professionals and blogging:

Weblogs in the LIS Environment, Dr. L. Anne Clyde (talk slides)
General and LIS Weblog info, Dr. L. Anne Clyde

Re: Is anyone else having problems applying categories?

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 19:14:52 EST

That's odd. I use MSIE5 (on Windows) and have no problems editing categories. Perhaps you could show me on a mac sometime?

LAMPPIX - Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl bootable demo CD

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:51:12 EST

LAMPPIX allows you to burn your web projects (i.e. PHP presentations or Perl scripts) onto a CD-ROM and give them away to others. They will only have to insert the CD and reboot — if you configured LAMPPIX right (and this is really easy!) they can view your project

If we ever want to market frassle for intranets, this is the way to do it. Download a 200MB CD image, burn, boot, and you've got your very own frassle to play with. As they say in car sales, the feel of the wheel will seal the deal.

First Thoughts on JetBrains Omea Reader

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 14:41:17 EST

Including a link to API documentation.

Omea: JetBrains, I bow before thee

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 11:27:30 EST

While reading a somewhat interesting post about how the Google Desktop Search works, I saw a very curt comment:

Why not replace Google Desktop with Intellij Omea

Why not? Well, Google Desktop search was from Google, and Omea was... not a word. What is this strange beast?

Omea is an extremely powerful yet simple to use Integrated Information Environment. With Omea, you can access, organize, and quickly search all your digital resources, including e-mails, syndicated Web feeds, instant messaging conversations, newsgroup articles, favorite web sites, personal contacts, and even locally stored files (.doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.), all in one easy to use composite interface that's well organized and efficient to navigate.

Sounds nice, but I've heard this all before. So I download it, and it impresses the hell out of me. As in, it's my new email client and RSS aggregator. It's fast. It's got a complex but usable interface. It synchronizes instantaneously with Outlook.

Let me be blunt: this software raises the bar for frassle. Try it! They also have a simpler RSS Reader and bookmark manager that anyone using an aggregator should try. Windows only.

Downtime last night...

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 08:44:45 EST

The new frassle server crashed last night, and was rebooted and restored this morning. The machine ran out of memory. I believe I have made a configuration change that should prevent the problem, but it's possible there is a memory leak somewhere on the system—probably not in frassle itself, but in one of the underlying components or in the operating system. We'll be keeping a close watch on it, but please let me know by email to shimon@rura.org or AIM shimonrura if things seem broken.

New server!

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 00:35:26 EST

Frassle is finally running off of a new, more powerful server. Although the favored addresses are now at frassle.net, all existing URLs should continue to work (forever). Enjoy, and let me know if there are any bugs!

Henri Bergius - Last day of OSCOM 4

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 15:54:26 EST

Ideas for hooking frassle into Planet OSCOM's aggregator.

Hernando de Soto on the rule of law

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 13:15:53 EST

What is the infrastructure that makes self-sustaining, healthy capitalist economies work? It's as much the sociopolitical systems as the roads, buildings, and phone lines:

That said, I think that developed countries can do more to raise awareness of the problem. There is a tendency for them to think that concrete things like building materials are more important than the law; there is a tendency on their part to forget that it was law that brought them peace and prosperity. For hundreds of years, Europe was a battlefield, and the last two battles that took place — World War I and II — left over 70 million dead. So Europe may have enjoyed prosperity, but it was prosperity with a very high cost. Europeans solved the problem of establishing a peaceful economy only recently, through what is now the European Union. They came up with various conventions and treaties to unite them economically and to create a wide and secure market.
These were all legal changes — just as in the United States, it was law that brought the nation together. Law enabled everybody in the United States to prosper within a governable economy. This is the very stuff of nation building and what needs to take place throughout the developing world.
Developed countries tend to put emphasis on concrete things that make them morally happy — I am transferring hospitals, I am transferring medicine — all of which is very well; but it is nothing compared to the size of the problem developing countries face, and nothing compared to the resources within developing countries themselves.

A couple of essays by Paul Graham

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 13:25:58 EST

I'm sure many geek bloggers are pointing at Paul Graham's latest, What the Bubble Got Right. But I am more moved by The Age of the Essay.

It's rare to see the value of innocent, sensitive meandering articulated so compellingly.

I'm going to BloggerCon III

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 20:59:01 EST

I just bought my plane tickets for BloggerCon III, which will be happening in Palo Alto, CA at Stanford University. That same weekend, I'll be visiting my alma mater, Williams College, to talk in a panel about careers in computer science. So it'll be busy:

Friday, Nov 5

morning: drive to Williamstown (3h)
afternoon: lunch and discussion
evening: drive to Albany airport and get on a plane

Saturday, Nov 6

12:29am: arrive at San Francisco Airport
taxi or public transit to my host's apartment
sleep
morning, afternoon, evening: BloggerCon

Sunday, Nov 7

morning: go to SFO, catch 8:40am plane
evening: arrive at Albany airport, drive (3h) home

That's a lot of travelling. I think it will be worth it to meet all those blog mavens in the Bay area. There are some smart ones.

My couch-space host is excellent with one exception: he is in Berkeley. If any reader wants to loan me some space on a floor nearer to Stanford, I would definitely consider it! :)

Wendy and Joey are tying the knot!

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 10:20:08 EST

Congratulations to the blogging world's favorite couple. Don't forget to mention on your wedding invitations whether wifi will be available. :)

Back at Home

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 17:10:53 EST

After a pleasant flight, I'm now safely and comfortably back at home near Boston. The weather here has kindly turned beautiful for my arrival. I hope to see more of you Boston types real soon now!

Yow, the downtime!

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 03:57:14 EST

I've had scant internet access lately (experiencing severe withdrawal) and thus was unable to notice/fix the frassle server when it crashed—looks like it was down about 2 days. Clearly I need to automate this part of the sysadmin experience. For now, I am sitting in the Zurich airport at my gate and will be boarding my plane to Boston in a few minutes. If you're one of those Bostonish types, see you soon!

Huge & Beautiful

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 16:08:17 EST

Now that I've been here for a couple of days, I can claim a certain understanding of how Paris feels. There are two salient points: Paris is huge, and Paris is beautiful.

To an American, these points seem contradictory. Huge things may be awe-inspiring, they may be wonderful feats of engineering, they may be testaments to efficient capitalism, but they are not beautiful. Beauty comes from exquisite attention to detail, the laborious arrangement of each part in relation to the whole. What we're used to is either a mess made of the details— the dirty or distasteful— or a trivial order as in the modern skyscraper. The beauty of Paris is one of no shortcuts. And the result of it is that here there is a coexistence of bustle and sensitivity. There is always room to pause, ponder, and rest in the awe and comfort of fine civilization, before you have to take your life in your hands by trying to actually cross the street.

Anyone in Paris?

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 20:09:49 EST

By the way, are any of you readers in Paris? I need some dinner companions. Come on, don't be shy. My treat.

Notre Dame de Paris

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 20:00:33 EST

I never fancied myself a devout Jew, but I still didn't anticipate that entering the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris would nearly convert me to Catholicism that very instant. Seriously, I actually thought about entering a confession booth and telling the preist that I had clearly made a mistake early on and really belonged in this church.

Seeing Notre Dame is not like seeing other cathedrals. I've seen a few— the one in Uppsala, Sweden being perhaps the grandest— but Notre Dame blows them all away. First, it is in Paris. Because of this, your aesthetic senses are already aroused before you begin your approach. And you will approach gradually: you begin by seeing its spires over the neighboring buildings and river. Then you start to follow the curves and points of its elaborate ironwork. You enter an adjacent park, where a central fountain is flanked by dozens of benches, each row shaded by a line of trees whose canopies have been trimmed flat on six sides that meet at right angles.

At this point, you will spend several minutes attempting to reconcile the fact that Notre Dame's flying buttresses are just big ass stone supports for big ass stone walls with their incredibe aesthetic effect. You might walk around to the front, where a statue of Charlemagne on his horse will distract you momentarily. And then you'll stare at the doorways. In each of these doorway arches there is more art than the average person will meaningfully take in within twenty years.

But this is all just window dressing for the interior. Outside it is all roughly grey; inside the stained glass streams color richer than Poussin's draperies.

These days, it's easy to avoid being religious, because we see so few miracles. Science and literacy and communication and art have become so ubiquitous outside political circles, that we are hardly touched or shocked by anything. Past a certain age, we've all seen the photographs, read the stories, and heard the music from Bach to Biggie. But long ago, our destinies were not thought to be so much within our comprehension, let alone within our control. To stand in Notre Dame, with its dozen alcove chapels and statues and paintings and carved stone and confessionals and 300-foot vaulted ceilings and, my god, two rose windows that actually literally gave me goosebumps— well, then you start to believe in miracles.

I can only imagine how it would have affected one in the 13th century.

Hello from Paris

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 19:14:53 EST

It's my first night in Paris. Ever.

I'm rather tired from travelling, but I'm still very excited to be here. I'm staying with some family in their apartment near the Bastille, which enables the visit to remind me that both my French and my Russian are in tragic disrepair.

After meeting my uncle (technically, my dad's cousin, but they were very close) at the Gare de l'Est train station and taking a shower at his place, we went out for Sushi. Then we took a little walk around the neighborhood and returned home for tea.

But the highlight of the evening was a car ride around Paris. We drove along Place de la Concorde and Trocadero (rue? place? j'ai oublie), stopped briefly by the Eiffel tower, passed the amazingly vast Louvre... it was too much to take in on my first night and after travelling all day, but it was still pretty amazing.

One thing I can definitely take away: Paris driving is insane. It makes Boston driving look like steering a shopping cart through a yuppie supermarket. Paris highlights its hugeness with swarms of people much more than I had expected, and many of these people are driving cars or (more crazily) motorcycles. Thanks to Zurich's walkability, I haven't been in a car in about a week, which is very rare for me; the ride, though fun, didn't exactly give me the best taste of what I was missing.

Personal Service Annoucement - What should I do in Paris?
Readers, if you have any suggestions for what I should do as long as I'm in Paris, send them my way. My favorite suggestion will win something cool and French.

Interpersonal Content Management - Slides

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 21:03:57 EST

Here are the slides from our OSCOM 4 talk, Interpersonal Content Management. As usual, they don't stand on their own apart from our speaking and demonstration, but they might be useful.

Frassle Talk Report

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 05:54:07 EST

Josh and I did our talk on frassle this morning at 9:15am (central european time). The talk went extremely well, with no major flukes or omissions. It was a little tough to get the audience to wake up after OSCOM's likely rowdiest night, but I think we generated some interest.

Those who saw our talk at Berkman would likely be pleased to know we shortened our time-to-demo by quite a bit, and delivered the whole talk roughly within the allotted time. Thanks again for your help in tuning our presentation!

OpenOffice Kills Babies

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:03:39 EST

Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration of OpenOffice's evils, but it did just lost about two hours of my work on tomorrow's presentation.

Luckily it only takes about a fifth of the time to re-do work. But it's still frustrating.

Two Days in Zurich

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 15:53:00 EST

I'm nearing the end of my second day in Zurich, Switzerland. Josh and I are in town for OSCOM 4, a conference where we will present a talk about frassle. Zurich has impressed me as a practical town: good cultural, shopping, and eating opportunities, especially if you're rich, but little to fall in love with. There is some tourism, but not too much. People are extremely helpful and polite, there are no bums on the streets, and so far the weather has been cold and rainy.

I have been able to enjoy myself in Zurich, though. Despite being Switzerland's largest city, it's not at all crowded, has an excellent tram system, and one can walk all around it with ease. Josh and I have been spending our time mostly walking and eating. Yesterday we took our time getting oriented to the city and visited some cathedrals and chocolate shops. It's true, by the way—Swiss chocolate is wonderful. Even I, not normally a chocolate lover, can appreciate it. The Swiss consume more chocolate per capita than anyone else—11.5 kg per person—and Josh says he's ready to get started on his share. The best chocolate shops we've been to are called Sprungli.

Zurich has lots and lots of shops. Especially abundant are women's clothing stores, while men's clothing seems surprisingly rare. Everything is very expensive, which shocks Josh even more because he thinks of one Swiss Franc as about a dollar, and persistently underwhelms me because I think of one Swiss Franc as about two-thirds of a dollar. (The reality as of this writing is that one Swiss Franc is about USD 0.79.)

Yesterday (Saturday) evening we asked at the tourist office in the main train station (Hauptbanhof) about local concerts and found a wonderful early music choral program at the Wasserkirche (an old church on the Limmat river). The performers were the Winterthurer Vokalensemble, and the concert called "What is our life?" after one of the Gibbons songs in it. Though it was at times difficult to stay awake during this 8pm concert as we struggled to adjust to European time, the chorus was excellent and presented some of my favorite music from Monteverdi, de Rore, Marenzio, and Gibbons. They also did a spectacular performance of Clement Jannequin's La Guerre, which is perhaps the most fun piece of music written in the early 1500s. I also loved the two pieces they did by Leonhard Lechner (1553-1606), whose music I hadn't heard before.

Peculiarly, the audience did not clap during the performance. A similar thing happened at my own New Century Voices concert in Boston this June, and while there it was definitely not the desired effect, I was reluctant to start clapping on my first evening in a different culture. After the amazing performance of La Guerre, there was much clapping, but I'm still uncertain whether that means clapping is appropriate after every song or reserved for particularly exceptional performances. Perhaps I'll try my luck with another few concerts.

After the concert Saturday night, we returned to the home of our excellent host, who has a gargantuan projector and pull-down screen in his living room. Some friends were over for a screening of Pirates of the Caribbean, and having missed only a few minutes of it we joined in. Josh couldn't stay awake—he's been down a bit with a cold—and went to sleep around 10:30 or so. I didn't doze off for more than a few minutes at a time until the movie ended, about 11:30.

And then we slept until 2pm, proving we were still mentally on Boston time. Our verdict? It feels pretty good sleeping 14-16 hours, but we had a hard time getting to the Kunsthaus museum and seeing its tiny collection before it closed. Following up on Saturday's delightful lunch at the Italian restaurant Pulcino, we went to the Swiss Chuchi next door for a pricy but enormous dinner of fondue and Raclette. The Raclette is a Swiss dish where you grill meat and melt cheese at the table, and we had the mixed Raclette with beef, veal, and chicken, a cute sack of small potatoes, and assorted vegetables from tomatoes to mushrooms. The idea is to toss some meat on the grill, cut up some potatoes, and pour some melted cheese over the ensemble. This was the most delicious cheese I have ever tasted.

Tomorrow morning, we're taking a train South to Davos, where it will be beatiful, rural, and perhaps not severely blisteringly cold. We will stay at a hostel, and I will wish strongly that I had brought better hiking shoes and a warm hat.

Re: One for the book.

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 09:03:20 EST

You got that sign from my blog? I've never seen it before.

Frassle Source Code Package, Now on Sourceforge

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 03:17:48 EST

Hackers of the world: try our code, fix our bugs!

'Facetop' Blends Screen and Video Images

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 11:23:02 EST

A cool collaboration tool that puts a translucent picture of your collaborator on your screen. When they move, the image gets more opaque.

Frassle talk at Berkman this Thursday

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:57:05 EST

This Thursday at 7pm at the Berkman Blog meeting at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Josh and I will be presenting a test run of our presentation on frassle. The presentation develops a sociological and technological understanding of how blogs facilitate the construction of shared meaning and trust, and explores how technology might be used to advance the utility and scale of these benefits. We call these phenomena Interpersonal Content Management. Then we demonstrate our own prototype Interpersonal Content Management System, frassle.

Everyone is welcome to attend. It should be entertaining and we hope you'll be able to come and offer us some feedback before our presentation a week later at OSCOM 4 in Zurich.

Re: How to Begin

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:09:57 EST

There are surely lots of good ideas. Could you tell us a little more about what your company is doing right now?

Several bugfixes have been applied.

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 00:22:58 EST

For instance, I should be able to categorize this post when editing, and have those categorizations stick (like they used too (whoops)).

Social Software Design Pattern: The Privacy Palette

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:05:18 EST

This is the first post in a series where I will discuss challenges in social software design and potential solutions.

Problem: In social software, how can you decide what to disclose to whom?

Attempts: One common approach is to divide relationships into classes, like LiveJournal's "friends" list or FOAF's relationship types. Another approach is to use your existing articulated social network and choose by degree: some items are open to your immediate friends, some to their friends too, some to the entire network.

Failures: Both of these approaches are broken, precisely because they are automatic. Human relationships are both finely nuanced and ever changing, and any automatic system effectively moves the question of "to whom should this be sent" up to the point of content creation. This is reasonable for a party invitation or personal ad, but inspires no confidence for the sharing of actual secrets. One could argue that this is because current a priori neftwork specifications are too coarse, but any style of relationship specification even close to the required level of complexity would be far too difficult to articulate—and then far too brittle. So until computers can read minds, if we want to facilitate the sharing of truly privileged information, we have to do it differently.

Solution: Rather than attempt to predict disclosure from the context of content creation, facilitate disclosure from the context of existing interpersonal contact. This reflects real life: you won't send updates on your romantic life to your old girlfriends, but when you see one at a party you might discuss that for a while. You might do this for some ex-girlfriends but not all. You might want to discuss this and change your mind when you hear she's just been dumped. But you can almost picture going up to her with a big list of potential things to talk about, and then screening some away as you communicate.

The software should provide a similar interface. In the context of authoring a message or other piece of content with a known audience, offer the author a way of reaching into his palette of private content and tossing something special into the communication. Select potentially relevant items based on data mining of past, similar interactions; and offer full-text search. Present this alongside the ongoing dialogue:

This way, the author can pick and choose what to disclose at the time of disclosure. The challenge is thus not to develop more powerful ways to express relationships before authoring content, but to support with flexible, intuitive tools the retrieval of private content when the author may actually need it.

Google into grid computing - worldwide?

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 02:02:23 EST

I noticed this interesting idea while browsing around on Google's site:

[A business goal is] Using millions of computers to solve important problems requiring substantial CPU resources, such as cancer and disease research. For example, we have recently begun small-scale tests with the Folding at Home project at Stanford University with a few thousand selected Google Toolbar users, in preparation for a much larger scale system that would enable our millions of Google Toolbar users to opt-in to contributing their CPU cycles to solving important problems.

A company like Google investing its substantial brand recognition and technical know-how to enable world-wide grid computing would be an interesting adventure indeed. That would be a good way to grow beyond search but advance further in their other, behind-the-scenes competency: running lots of computers together. Possibilities boggle the mind.

Aggregator vs. Aggregator

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:13:27 EST

There are two conflicting designs for RSS aggregators. On one hand are email-style three-pane readers, typically found in desktop aggregators such as SharpReader, RSS Bandit, and others. On the other hand are blended-feeds aggregators, like Userland's Manila and Radio, which take the latest news from all of your subscriptions and blend it into one big time-sorted page.

Dave Winer strongly advocates for the blended-feeds style. When I first heard him rant about this, in person at a Berkman Thursday meeting, I didn't know why he cared so much. I had used both styles of aggregators, and I thought the difference was really just an issue of taste.

That was when I had a small number of subscriptions, around 30 or 50. Now that I have over 200, there is a major difference. In a three-pane aggregator, when you can't read all the news, you skip feeds that aren't often of interest. In a blended-feeds aggregator, you skip postings that are older, or have boring-sounding titles and no pictures.

While the latter seems like a more arbitrary way to prioritize your reading, it actually has some advantages. If you have a big set of feeds that you kinda-sorta read, but aren't devoted to tracking every last post, it works better. With a three-pane aggregator, there is some point where you just give up on a feed—it gathers messages for months, but you can't remember what the hell it is, so you never click it. After a while you can't remember what it's there for and the 312 unread posts makes skimming it too intimidating. Unless you regularly schedule time to organize your subscription list, it just sits there. (Maybe we need a way for computers to emit smells, so you can actually notice it rotting?)

On the contrary, with a blended-feeds aggregator, you'll occassionally see a message from that feed. Either you'll like it and keep the feed, or you'll realize what crap it is and unsubscribe altogether. You're less likely to maintain a meaningless subscription. And the subscriptions you do maintain will all be given a fair shot: your existing preferences for a certain core set of feeds don't preclude everything else to the dustbin.

There's a reason this advantage isn't evident to new aggregator users: it depends on a particular memory threshold. For a while, it's easy to (implicitly) rank a bunch of feeds in your head. Some you check every time they go bold, and that's great, because you never miss or wait for news from the sources you care about. Others you check at specific times, like the comics I read every morning. Others you might save for when a certain topic crosses your mind, or simply for when you're bored.

Up to a certain number of feeds, your mind is capable of telling you when to read what with pretty good accuracy. But at a certain point, the accuracy starts falling off. It becomes risky to subscribe to a new feed because either (1) you will love it and it might push off something else you care about, or (2) you'll not love it enough at first and it will fade into the abyss. But what if it starts to be interesting again? You're not giving it even partial continuous attention, so you miss it.

That's right: in an aggregator that seems designed to help you read every post, you actually miss all sorts of interesting posts. In one that seems to make it difficult to ensure you've read all you care about, you're relieved of caring—and in the process, you're more flexible and open to exploring.

Nonetheless, both approaches have their advantages. Thus the problem is that you're forced to pick one or the other for your whole aggregator. No fair! I have feeds from friends, colleagues I respect, serial publications I want to follow every bit of. I also have feeds from a gazillion social software nerds where I often want an update but can't possibly follow everything.

So my aggregator should let me put the most important feeds on watch lists. It should make sure I've read every post on my watched feeds. And it should let me quickly skim everything else in the more flexible, more efficient blended-feeds format.

Alpha 8 Released!

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:47:17 EST

After a whole night of database churning (we need a faster server), alpha 8 is here. Send your bug reports and/or compliments to frassle@rura.org.

From yesterday:

Josh and I have been working hard on the next version of frassle. The scope of this release has sprawled; it started with a couple of features, ballooned into many more features and bugfixes, and then into bugfixes on the bugfixes. There's also the impending open source release, now with a somewhat barren SourceForge project page.

But tonight, features will be frozen. Bugs (OK, noncritical bugs) will be pushed aside. For this will be the evening of our deployment.

New features in alpha 8:

major usability improvements to the publisher, including a wizard to shield you from the horrid complexity of noteset expressions
an all-new aggregator, styled like Bloglines — and it actually works!
an all-new full text search system — and it actually works fast!
OPML import, so you can copy subscriptions from your favorite aggregator (so far) into frassle
a smattering of icons, thanks to David
pagination of the recent posts page, so you can go back in history
many more small improvements and bugfixes

Joel on Software - Painless Bug Tracking

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 13:47:44 EST

This is really more of a quick howto on the software development process focused around bug-fixing and feature implementation. A good read for aspiring testers. :)

LearningLanguages.Net - French Educational Links

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 10:16:26 EST

A bounty of links to French learning resources.

BBC Languages: Learn French

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 10:04:56 EST

The BBC site has an amazing collection of French learning materials online. I can listen while in the office, but I'll probably have to save speaking the thirty different example responses to comment ca va until I get home. :)

Christopher Alexander: The Origins of Pattern Theory, the Future of the Theory, And The Generation of a Living World

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 01:27:48 EST

Transcript of Alexander's OOPSLA speech.

Re: Frassle Testing

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:48:58 EST

Rachelle, and anyone else: You're always allowed to talk about frassle! That's what being an open source project is all about: there aren't lots of secrets and restrictions and secret restrictions.

Speaking of open source, the alpha 8 release continues to be held up by my excessively social schedule. I may even skip today's Berkman blog meeting (although Rebecca MacKinnon and Bill Ives are likely to attend) in order to catch up on things. This weekend, Josh and I are going to focus on our upcoming OSCOM presentation.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 18:49:50 EST

There has been a very interesting thread among some frasslers recently. It started out with a question by a blogging newbie—Jennifer—about the basic motivations for blogging, but escalated into a discussion between Josh and MySQL-Wikipedia-dude (hereinafter MWd) on the relative merits of Wikis and blogs.

I like both Wikis and blogs, and I don't think they are distinct islands. I agree with MWd that many of the features common in Wikis—like photo and file uploading, version tracking, and multi-user editing—would be important for collaborative work (and often lone work, too). These kinds of features don't seem tied to either Wikis or blogs. They are all on the long list of desiderata for frassle.

So, if all these little features aren't intrisically tied to blogs or wikis, what are the differences between the tools? I want to look at three points:

The prominence of order in time as an organizing principle.
The ease with which a user can directly edit a piece of content she did not create.
The ease with which new relevant content can be found based on the context of an ongoing discussion or long-lived page.

1. The prominence of order in time as an organizing principle. Blogs push it; Wikis don't. On one hand, this makes blogs seem more fleeting—there is lots of stuff scribbled in that drifts off the screen after a little while. Frassle tries to straddle this line by offering another organizational system—categories. But reverse-chronological is still the primary view.

I would argue that, for all its downsides, time-ordering has two huge upsides: it's simple, and it works. For most people, it is too much work to decide upon an organizing principle for a growing body of work. On the other hand, without an organizing principle, one experiences what I'll call the existential quandary of wikis. What came first, the Wiki or its organizing principles? It's hard to add content when you don't know where it might fit in, so many people are reluctant to contribute to a Wiki. Although Wiki designers have included revision history in order to counteract that reluctance, revision control is way harder to understand than "it's a stack of posts ordered by time". With reverse-chron ordering, you might lose some stuff in the pile, but at least you know how the pile works. And hey, it's not so hard to find stuff either, what with all the linking and great search engines. So blogs bypass the existential quandary and yet retain many of the same benefits.

2. The ease with which a user can directly edit a piece of content she did not create. Wikis offer a new user more potential power. But not without a cost: despite impressive Wikipedia vandalism-recovery experiments, people still feel protective of the work they create. Additionally, when people who view the work you've made can easily associate it with you, it's possible to develop a reputation. The permanence and presence of this reputation is what incents people to sometimes compromise their immediate self-interest because of longer-term engagements and opportunities. Humans are socially evolved to put their stamp on the things they create, and the interactions they participate in. Few can contribute to the common good without wishing for at least some recognition. Blogs, on the other hand, are built around people; they even encourage some self-indulgence.

3. The ease with which new relevant content can be found based on the context of an ongoing discussion or long-lived page. The chief way of organizing a wiki is by linking. When there is a small collection of highly-interlinked content (e.g. a wiki for a single project), or a large collection of lightly-interlinked content (wikipedia), linking is either easy and necessary or hard but unneccessary. However, for many medium-sized Wikis, I find linking to be both hard and neccessary. Hard because there is a lot of new content, but neccessary because when something new comes in, if its useful period is to last beyond its time in the recent changes list, it must be linked from more established, related pages.

For this (large) class of challenges, I think Wikis offer only the illusion of simple, flexible organization. In fact, they tend to fall back to the reverse-chronological views typical of blogs, and the few relevant pages are drowned in a sea of mixed-topic recent-updaters.

By contrast, weblogs are really stupid. Nobody who has anything serious to organize or preserve will ever be satisfied with it appearing on her homepage for a day or two, then getting stuck in some calendar archive. This is why blogs offer tools like categories, search engines, technorati inbound links, subscriptions, subscribable egosearches, and so forth. While I think the most competently maintained Wiki can probably beat the best blog, in general the combination of organizing tools available for blogs earns them the win. It's a lot easier to find information relevant to the average weblog post than the average Wiki page.

Finally, although some of what I've written here seems to pit blogs against wikis, I don't think they are so opposite. I think that mainly, the tools we've seen so far have specialized on one end of these scales or the other, but that is a question of the tool designs, not conceptual constraints. Ultimately, I hope we can have tools that incorporate the range of features from blogs through wikis, and allow writers to select the right blend of features at every turn.

Re: Frassle alpha 7 irritations

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:12:21 EST

Thanks for these design hints. Right now, I'm fairly certain frassle won't appeal to the average AOL/Compuserve/Walmart user. As an alpha-stage application, its expected audience is the blog-loving early adopter. This person is likely to have a nice computer and a fast internet connection. That doesn't mean we should ignore the needs of such users, but at this point in frassle's development I think it is more important to make the basics of the interface usable. It's crucial we get the user experience right, because the powerful features of this system won't do anyone (but me) any good if there's no way to figure out how to use them. This is a challenge though, because frassle is premised on some ideas for which there isn't much user interface history.

So, if anyone has any interface ideas, I would love to see mockups, page flow diagrams, prototypes, etc. My personal preference is to start with pencil sketches in a notebook of a sequence of pages, then move onto the screen.

Re: Hmm

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:05:24 EST

Andy, sorry about the bug where, if you attempt to post a note without a title, your post body is erased. This is fixed in the upcoming version.

"frassle continues to suck"

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 00:52:56 EST

Amid much ranting, this person (who I think I know) has a few good points about what in frassle is hard to understand. Some of these are addressed in the upcoming version, but others aren't. A lot of his points refer to categorization. Are you listening, Josh?

Progress Report for Tonight

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 23:45:47 EST

I've been working on frassle a lot. One of the major things I need to wrap up is a new backend for the aggregator. This sounds important but isn't much fun; I basically just want to do the bare minimum needed to make it work. I was going to work on it tonight but instead I procrastinated. Here's how I summed it up in an IM conversation:

It's like I went and painted racing stripes on my car instead of replacing a cracked exhaust manifold. Sure, a cracked exhaust manifold means you are more likely to die from carbon monoxide poisoning, but who wants to spend an evening replacing an exhaust manifold when you could have *racing stripes*!?

Dedicated frassle fans, see if you can pick out the racing stripes in alpha 8 when it is released in the next few days!

Boston Nerd Events Heat Up as Fall Arrives

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 16:08:42 EST

Lisa illustrates the need to integrate calendaring and social software with blogs.

Reset Button

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 14:08:22 EST

It's labor day, but I thought I'd show off my iconoclasm by working anyway. (Actually, I missed a deadline and am in rapid-recovery mode.) I'm sitting at home, loving the simple workingness of broadband internet and Windows Remote Desktop Sharing, and then boom.

No, really it was more of a squeak, creak, groan. The software has gone out of control and the computer no longer has time to pay attention to me. Network packets fall into the abyss. The door is open but there's nobody home.

It needs to snap out of it. It needs a little chiropractic attention on its reset button. And I am here, after a pleasant 21 mile drive, to provide that attention.

At least the commute to work today is guaranteed not to include traffic.

Re: Random Frassle Bugs and Suggestions

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 13:21:00 EST

Some answers to j's bug reports.

I think showing the full thread of comments/discussion from the publisher page instead of threading them is an excellent idea.

Huh? That didn't make sense to me.

However, I think it's a little odd that someone can't comment on a post from a publisher page. At least I don't see any link to reply or add a comment. I don't think it's intuitive that if someone clicks comment(s), they'll go to a page where they will be able to reply to the post.

Agreed—I will add a direct comment link.

Since a number of Frasslers would like to use the publisher as their main site, i.e. direct readers there instead of to the regular Frassle blog, having the features listed on the posts in regular Frassle would be beneficial, like reply, categorize, email, edit, and delete.

I'm not sure about categorize, since I think that categorization is a fundamental reason to use the frassle reader/writer application rather than the web-facing publisher. Reply, email, edit, and delete are OK though.

Also, a better name than "the frassle reader/writer application" would be helpful. This refers to the non-publisher application.

Shimon explained to me offblog why the feeds for the blocks in the publisher won't work if someone subscribes to them in Frassle, like as a feed directed to a publisher block or in the aggregator. (I've been meaning to blog a bit about that, but haven't. Bear with me here while I don't blog it again for the sake of time and brevity.) I understand why they d/won't work, but I'm still frustrated by it. One of the magic things a blogger can do with the publisher is set up a block showing comments on her blog. If a Frassler could subscribe to that feed using Frassle's aggregator, it would be very convenient. It seems silly to force someone to use another aggregator to get that feed when Frassle has a built-in aggregator. That's dream big stuff maybe that isn't going to happen soon.

Yeah... this can be fixed, but it is going to require some cleverness that stretches beyond the aggregator as it is envisioned right now. Actually it provides a good opportunity to make the aggregator into a more customizable, flexible tool. Basically though, the problem is that the aggregator reads a set of feeds, whereas the publisher blocks are searches (that may select a subset of notes from one or many feeds).

Now that many people are using the publisher, I think Frassle's front page would work better if the two lists are swapped and the list showing which blogs have updated recently is at the top and the publisher list is at the bottom of the page. I suppose the order is based on where people reading these blogs should go.

Done in alpha 8.

What would also be really cool is if Frasslers could have a choice as to whether their publisher or regular Frassle blog is on the list. Some users have expressed a desire to only have people look at their publisher site and not "find" their blog at all. Others would like to be omitted from the list entirely.

Hmm... I'll think about this one.

Actually, what about reworking the front page so people's blogs and publisher sites are listed together along with the time of last blog update (as the time is indicated now)? I know people can create publisher sites independent of their Frassle blog, so maybe that's not a brilliant idea.
Is there some way to do a better index of the publisher sites so people know what kinds of pages there are, like the fab Frassle page?

I don't neccessarily want to list all pages, but perhaps some kind of popularity index on the front page might be helpful. I should also see how other sites, like livejournal and typepad, do this.

Is it possible to do a feed of recently updated blogs on the front page or somewhere else on the site maybe? Then instead of getting a list of blog titles, which might not necessarily be useful to someone not familiar with Frassle and those who blog here, someone can read some things that are being written. It could help a lot with blog discovery (people finding blogs to read) and help sell Frassle to a prospective user.

Good idea. This is a quick hack and can be done for the next version.

At some point, perhaps there will be more Block style options. If this isn't going to happen any time soon, would it make sense to combine the one option that's there, which toggles the publisher showing the title of the feed in its blocks, with the other options on the Edit a block page? It seems a little clunky to go to that extra page for that option.

Actually, that separate page is needed. The block style options actually vary depending on the block style. For the "Basic Blog Entries" style, there is indeed only that one option. But other styles, such as "Quick Links List", have lots of options. Because you can select a different style on the first page, you have to submit and go to a different page in order to see options for that style.

Is there a way I can make it clearer that there are different styles and each style can have its own style options?

I think some of the language on the block editing screens could be a little clearer to better reflect what the options are.
Perhaps "Show title" should say "Show block title" to indicate that option is connected to the title of the block and not, say, the titles of blog posts or blogs appearing in that block. The heading "Block display style" implies it, but it could be clearer.
The buttons saving the choices and moving between style and basic options don't completely indicate what they do. Both seem to save the selections, but save actually changes modes from editing the block to editing the publisher page. In many systems, when someone clicks save, there's some kind of message indicating changes have been saved and the person remains on the same page. It isn't clear that save will exit the mode with saved changes and moving from the different option pages will save the changes. How about altering the text to "Save and Exit" or "Save and [change mode]" to clarify the actions? That might be easier than adding a third button and separating the actions, which could be another possibility to work around the potential confusion. Since there's already another button for returning to editing the publisher page, maybe "Save" should just save and not exit, also.

Good ideas. Will incorporate into alpha 8.

Is it possible to have a preview of the publisher page during the editing process, like it's possible to preview a blog post? I often find that I have one window looking at the page and another open for editing and I hop between the two, refreshing the page as I edit to see the changes.

Doubtful for a whole publisher page, but for individual blocks, it's on the todo list.

It's a little confusing to me that when I change the width of the table columns, they don't actually change on the editing page. The numbers do, but the columns don't. Sometimes it's difficult to gauge what the page will look like without actually seeing the width of the columns. Maybe that's a browser issue, not a Frassle issue, but I have a feeling that it isn't.

This is actually intentional, so if you enter some absolutely wacky values you can easily change them back.

The position of the add a column button seems strange at the bottom of the page when the other options are nicely grouped near the top. It's easy to miss on a page with lots of content.

Will move to top in alpha 8.

In a few places, like the pop-up Frassle Noteset Reference page, it says to send comments to shimon@ and in others frassle@. The inconsistency can be a bit confusing for new users, especially if it's unintentional and all Frassle comments should go to the same address (or blogged under the category Frassle).

Fixed in alpha 8.

I much prefer the page with noteset expression examples to the Frassle Noteset Reference page, though they both have their utility, and think it might be useful to combine the two or link them together or something.

To fix in alpha 8 or next version.

It's annoying that when I'm categorizing things, the category tree collapses when I click on the head category. Most of the time, I remember to click on whatever I want in the expanded tree first, but sometimes I forget. Would it be better to start from an expanded category tree anyway?

This behavior actually varies between browsers. I will try to get Josh to fix this.

In Netscape 7 on a Mac running OSX (I haven't tried this in other browsers yet), the frassle it! (pop) window is too small.

I'll see if I can change the bookmarklet so it loads a new window of an unspecified size. This way perhaps your browser will be smart about what looks good on your screen. If that doesn't work, maybe I'll let you specify the size on the bookmarklet page. Next version.

Aggregator (mostly) down

Thu, 02 Sep 2004 15:40:11 EST

Due to some technical problems, I have stopped automatic feed updates. I now run the feed updates about once a day so I can keep an eye on how they go. Obviously, this makes the aggreagator a lot less useful. I'm sorry about that.

Although I hate to make my users wait, I can promise relief from this in the near future. Frassle alpha 8 is coming this weekend, with a totally redesigned aggregator. That means frontend and backend. It will sport a whole new interface, similar to Bloglines but a bit simpler, and support new features such as OPML import and feed autodiscovery. Though the interface will be more powerful, it will also show up in your browser much faster than the current one thanks to optimized database queries. The backend will be smart enough to find an RSS feed on most blogs that actually have one, and scalable enough to keep a few thousand feeds updated.

Here's a picture of the new aggregator interface. Click to enlarge:

Thanks for your patience as I hammer out this new version.

Jon Udell: Meta-mail

Thu, 02 Sep 2004 14:49:45 EST

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Shimons

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 20:13:44 EST

Here's the short list of what makes me so great. Or maybe just so great at spending a lot of time in front of a computer.

type really fast
never take your hands off the keyboard: virtual desktops, alt+tab, command lines, emacs
get a handful of conscientious users—i.e. the kind that constantly pester you to do things
don't stress over day-to-day deadlines; let long-term goals motivate you
Perl
sleep as much as possible
ride bicycle at least once a week (sadly, I'm struggling with this one)

This is a silly, cursory list, but if the secrets of being me could fit into 7 bullet points I'd have to be a real moron. How about my readers? Can I start a new meme? The Thursday Seven?

Re: Freedom is bad.

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 14:27:30 EST

Thanks Randy! Am I mistaken or did you just volunteer to write documentation, and otherwise explore how we can keep frassle's publisher powerful but also make it accessible? This is a major challenge and your input would be highly appreciated.

Frassle/HTMLArea relative links bug

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 11:14:36 EST

This bug is due to the use of a relative link in the post body. Particularly in syndication, only absolute links should be used. I think this is normally not a problem, but perhaps sometimes the HTMLarea component tries to be smart and translate absolute links into relative ones? I'll have to test this out.

How to do file management in blogs, with an especially clever example

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 14:50:49 EST

After much background thought, I believe I know how to best add file management to frassle. (This is a long-term goal, but has been getting some attention recently.) It's simple.

Each file is a blog post, just like any other content fragment in frassle.

The note body, when viewing the blog on a web page or RSS feed, shows an HTML representation of that content fragment. There is also a link to the original file. So if you uploaded a PDF, it would get converted to HTML for the note body. A photo would be represented as a thumbnail. An XML document would apply any appropriate XSLT transformations and display as XHTML or just a document tree. A text file would become preformatted HTML. An unknown format would just give you file name and size.

This approach has some significant advantages over email-style attachments. In no particular order:

you can categorize individual files
you automatically get the same renaming, editing, deleting, and sharing/privacy options as anything else in your blog
you can easily browse by timestamp or category
you can subscribe to updates
you can use the regular search to search the HTML representations of files; i.e. you get to do text searches of PDFs and MS Word documents.

On the other hand, if you're used to handling files as attachments, this seems a little weird. Some files just don't stand on their own: photos are part of an album; PDFs are final print-ready renderings of a long-term effort; source code files are parts of complicated projects. If we just treat them all like time-ordered blog posts, won't it just be chaos?

Yes. And that's a good thing.

See, this problem is orthogonal to file uploading. Any piece of content has a context that is more or less important to properly understanding what it means. Showing you that context is one of frassle's most fundamental goals. Time, categorizations, and inter-feed threading of conversations are the basic tools we use to accomplish that goal. Why not expand the challenge? Detecting and expressing more meaningful relationships between content will make all of frassle more powerful.

And hey, I have the feeling categories and timestamps will prevent a lot of chaos by themselves.

Example: One of the first applications of the multimedia post framework can be a tool to help you show posts in context. The scrapbook is a simple list of blog posts (notes in frassle parlance), chosen from any blog. Each note is identified by permalink, and can be included in whole, selectively excerpted, or simply referenced. You can also add text anywhere in the scrapbook. As you browse through frassle, each note has an "add to scrapbook" button.

I like the way this sounds. You could not only use the scrapbook to, say, collect a number of related discussions from around the web—you could actually build photo albums with it! The same concept—a binder with pages covered in taped-on papers in real life, a list of permalinks online—works to gather and share related pieces of content.

Still better, the scrapbook itself can be a piece of content. Under the multimedia post framework, we could represent the scrapbook as an XML document, probably in OPML. Then you can share scrapbooks easily, rename/delete/edit them in the standard way, and even incorporate one scrapbook into another!

RasterWeb! Aggregator Ideas

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 11:58:53 EST

A great list of ideas for aggregator features. I think a lot of them can be done better with aggregator/blog authoring software integration.

Is it too private? Send email

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 11:44:27 EST

I think applications that allow you to restrict access to some resource are generally missing something. What they're missing is a way for people who don't have access to ask for it. You can't read that file? Send email. Can't subscribe to that list? Send email. Can't book that conference room? Send email.

Email itself isn't the problem. But by forcing users to go out-of-band to request permissions, we at least double the person-time required to grant a new permission. The software, in rejecting a person's request, already knows the user, desired resource, and what permissions are requested. In an email, the user will say "I need to be able to reserve conference room X on Monday afternoon." The recipient needs to then translate that into the permissions system of the application. First, you must map a user's email-sending identity to her application-using identity; many apps have their own user database which you'll have to search by last name. Second, you need to look up the record for conference room X. Finally, you need to decide which permissions to add. Is the user allowed to book conferences already, but just needs to be added to a special list for room X? Is she allowed to book room X, just not on Mondays? Depending on the application's permissions model, there could be a lot of different options here.

The last step, choosing the specific permissions to grant, is the only part of this that requires input from the application administrator. So the ideal approach would allow the administrator to grant a permissioning request without entering any other data.

So, emails are right out.

The user who desires permission should request permissions through the application. Any "you can't do that" messages should be accompanied by a "request permission to do that" button.

Pressing that button should notify the administrator of the request. Rather than translating an email into applicationese, he should be able to choose from the available permissioning options (or denial) right in the notification.

Re: Frassle with a File Management Component

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 10:20:26 EST

Jessica has some interesting thoughts on combining blogs with file management. I think she has the right idea, but she's finding it hard to elaborate the details of how it would work because she's so used to using software that was just built wrong.

Here's what I mean: the concept of a "file manager" as a business/collaboration tool is broken. A file manager focuses on files, which tend to have different formats and byte lengths and gobble up disk quotas and sit in one folder and can only be viewed by certain software. So the file manager's job is to help you navigate each of these things.

None of these capabilities, emphatically not a single one, belongs in frassle or any other blog community system.

Files contain information. Blogs are about sharing information. However, sharing files is a lot harder than sharing information in blogs. This is because:

1. Files come in a variety of incompatible formats.

you often can't view them in your web browser
they might not be easy to read for all of your users
they're hard to excerpt and republish
they're hard to search

2. If you have a file, it's difficult to find out:

who created it
who's in charge of it
if you're looking at the latest version
if any discussion has flowed from this information

3. Files expose you to some major risks and annoyances:

you might get a virus
you might run out of disk space
you might copy this somewhere and forget about it, and years later be unable to decide if this is a crucial document or just some cruft you decided to hold temporarily.

If you invert each item in this list, you see the major strengths of blogging over other information sharing approaches. Specifically:

thanks to the personal focus of blogs, you can always tell who is in charge of some post
thanks to permalinks, you can always ensure you're looking at the latest version
thanks to the simplicity of HTML and RSS, you can always easily excerpt, republish, and search blog posts
thanks to comments, trackback, and technorati/feedster/google, you can find out what discussion has flowed from any post
thanks to the ubiquity and architecture of the web, you never have to risk viruses, running out of disk space, etc.

So I think the requirements for integrating file management into a blog community system are simple. Take all the things that make blogging so valuable and easy, and support a few additional input formats.

Analysis

That is an easily stated but profound requirement. Let's consider the example of the PDF format, which is used for printable multi-page documents. PDF is about your best bet for preserving exact print formatting in a document while still displaying OK on screen. You've probably already viewed PDF documents in your web browser, using Adobe's excellent Acrobat Reader. This gives you some things for free:

you can view documents through your browser without saving files (of course, you must have the plugin, which is not quite as ubiquitous as web browsers)
you probably can't get a virus from reading a PDF file

But a few challenges remain. Let's go through the positive features of blogs and speculate on how to integrate PDF files.

you can always tell who is in charge of some post
One way to do this with a PDF file is to link it to a particular blog post. Ideally, the blog community system would actually edit the PDF file and insert that entry's permalink at the top of the first page. This should be clickable (to load the blog post page in your browser) but should not automatically be printed in hard copy.
you can always ensure you're looking at the latest version
PDF files may include a mechanism for checking for alternate versions in some sort of repository. If so, it should be used. If not, the link approach described above is a suitable workaround.
you can always easily excerpt, republish, and search blog posts
It's really hard to do any of these on PDFs. The likely solution is to just convert them into HTML, and make the actual PDF file a secondary format primarily useful for printing. But while extracting the text from a PDF file is easy, translating the meaning of a page's design to a non-paginated medium like HTML is not something computers can do perfectly. If you're not convinced, try out Google's impression of IRS tax form 1040. Keep in mind that Google is a wealthy company with some of the best engineers in the world. They have a fairly readable HTML rendering of the form, but commentary on a form like this really requires post-it notes, highlighters, and drawings in red ink—none of which we can do or emulate well on the web.
you can find out what discussion has flowed from any post
PDFs are bad for discussion because they are one step removed from immutable hard copy. Therefore there are few responses, but those that exist are likely to be in emails or other inaccessible media (phone calls, face-to-face meetings). So there probably isn't much discussion to be found, but we can likely just divert people onto the standard comment/response system.
you never have to risk viruses, running out of disk space, etc.
This is mostly free with PDF files when you use the browser plugin.

Hmm. That's not so bad. The other question is, can we do all of these things without compromising the rest of the blogging experience? Clearly, despite our best efforts, a PDF will never be as easy to work with as a plain HTML blog post. It will waste more time and cause more frustration. What about more complex/proprietary formats, like MS Word? What about video? audio? source code? executable software?

Actually, I suspect many of these will have their own holistic community collaboration platforms, using the metaphors for authority, discussion, republication, and convenient use that apply in that medium. Cool.

glassdog: "What's Wrong With: Feed Readers"

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 22:47:15 EST

A pretty great rant about the sorry state of aggregators. I mostly agree, and am amused by the tone of the writing.

But unless you're some anal-retentive Asperger's Syndrome poster child, you're only going to care about a sub-set of the endless sea of crap out there, and the software should help you filter it down to manageable, crunchy chunks.

Also has a link to decafbad, who has more good ideas for making aggregators more useful.

Digital Vision Program - Meet the Fellows

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 18:44:32 EST

Just had an interesting chat with this fellow. I hope he'll become a frassle user, and perhaps even a developer.

Greg Wolff
Ricoh Innovations, Inc.

Community Ventures for the creation and exchange of digital goods

Shared purpose and social contracts provide the economic and social framework for cooperation in the production of value that greatly exceeds the sum of individual efforts. Building on the success of Linux, Apache, and the Public Library of Science in the production of intangible goods, and the traditions of Ashoka and ThinkCycle.org, I seek to provide practical models for successful community ventures that address economic incentives, social contracts, and intellectual-property. These models will be tested and demonstrated through pilot ventures focused on creating sustainable solutions for currently underserved communities including a "documentation kiosk" to support the exchange of social services information, and "open informatics" methods to gather clinical data while preserving control over personal information.

Christopher Allen gets it: Trust

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:37:00 EST

In this excellent post on Progressive Trust, Christopher Allen describes how trust develops between humans and how this meshes with technological notions of trust. When choosing how to divide our attention, we make use of numerous conventional credentials: are you at a professional conference I attend? Are you well spoken and polite? As we continue to interact, and develop a greater body of shared experience and understanding, we refine our trust in each other.

I'm a little surprised, though, that Christopher didn't mention blogs. What makes blogs (and the RSS-powered subscription mechanism) so powerful for getting you information you care about is trust. Specifically, you can think of a blog subscription as an indication of trust that some feed will contain items of interest. It is a rather coarse-grained indication of trust, but is quite effective. Especially when I the reader have my own blog, and participate in the common practice of linking and excerpting the especially interesting content from my subscribed feeds. When I do that, I am delegating trust—the trust placed in me by my readers can connect to Christopher because of the trust I have for him.

This is exactly what happens in social situations. Suppose you're at a party and meet someone new. What's the first thing you ask them? "So, how do you know Bob?" Now suppose you know Bob has despicable taste in music, but he makes the world's best cheesecake. You'll spend a lot less time talking with someone who answers "I played in a grunge band with Bob in 1992" than someone who answers "I'm a pastry chef instructor at the local culinary institute where Bob took night classes." This example, ubiquitous in our social lives, illustrates how powerful and adaptable trust is. Even without being consciously considered.

The amazing thing about blogs is that they can reflect this kind of nuance. Almost every blogger has a variety of interests, sometimes spread among multiple blogs, a blog and a livejournal, or categories within a blog. Furthermore, blogs cluster into communities based on shared interests, such that if you subscribe to any of the blogs in the community you are unlikely to miss any major news within the community. This redundancy permits individual bloggers to specialize in the details, and offers readers a chance to adjust who they trust, over time, as they learn more about their options. Just like if you're first interested in an academic field, you can work with any professor who's involved and learn a lot from them; but if you want to do a PhD thesis you'd better find someone who not only is interested in something you want to study, but is also easy for you to get along with.

Frassle, my blogging platform, is an attempt to emphasize and scale up the trust mechanisms already informally used throughout blogs. Another smart take on this situation is Robin Good's discussion of the NewsMaster.

Alex Halavais quotes C. Wright Mills on... blogging

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 08:59:44 EST

In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.
— C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

There's more of this quotation, uncannily in context for blogging, in Alex's post.

Marilyn Ferguson

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 14:24:23 EST

"Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them."
—Marilyn Ferguson

HTML/CSS: Tables too wide in MSIE

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:32:53 EST

Useful thread on MSIE's table and div width bugs/quirks.

Cesar Brea: "Brain-Stem" Sales & Marketing Tactics

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 17:00:51 EST

BusinessWeek interviews Jeff Bezos, "Blind-Alley" Explorer

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 14:02:04 EST

Interesting, short interview with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Mostly about innovation, and how Amazon prospers because of their focus on improving the customer experience. Innovation makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

WTF-8 - Confusion about Unicode, and a possible answer

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 23:19:07 EST

Update: I think I figured this out. See bottom.

Quick semi-technical explanation: a character encoding is the way that letters and glyphs are represented in a computer. For example, you might decide that in order to convert a chunk of binary data into letters, you'd first split it into byte-long chunks. Since a byte has 256 possible values, you'd then map each of these to different glyphs, such as capital letter A or m dash.

I've been served pretty well by the belief that character encodings were things I'd never have to actually worry about myself; they'd always be so low-level that the operating system, or web server, or database server would just take care of it.

Well, not today.

It turns out that frassle pages that are filled with weird characters—like spaces and a Euro symbol where a dash should be—should show up correctly now, because I've configured my web server to serve them as UTF-8. The reasoning behind this, however, makes no sense.

Here is the experimental data. The first two rows are the old and new configuration on the server you're using right now. The only difference is that HTTP responses are now sent with a UTF-8 charset header. The last 4 rows are testing I've done on my own development server.

The columns from and to describe how the webserver is re-coding each page. Where these say none, I have tested disabling the recoding.

Machine	DB Coding	from	to	served	Result
production	ISO-8859-1	UTF-8?	ISO-8859-1	UTF-8	Good
"	"	"	"	ISO-8859-1	BAD
development	UTF-8 (Unicode)	UTF-8	ISO-8859-1	UTF-8	Good
"	"	"	"	ISO-8859-1	BAD
"	"	none	none	UTF-8	BAD
"	"	none	none	ISO-8859-1	BAD

Why, oh why does the page get converted to ISO-8859-1 and then get properly processed only as UTF-8? The conversion isn't just faking it; the length of the string actually changes as you'd expect in a conversion.

I'm guessing that something is wrong with the way I've been loading data into my DB. But what possible format could I actually be storing the data in such that treating it as UTF-8 and converting to ISO-8859-1 would produce correct UTF-8 encoded data?

Based on this experience, I suggest UTF-8 be renamed WTF-8. The new acronym has a structure that reminds experienced Unicode users of the original, yet includes a helpful hint to newbies that they are about to enter a world of pain and frustration.

Update later that evening: Joel on Software has an essay on this that has helped to clear my mind. Check out The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Still later: I think I know why the conversion didn't work. The text I was testing with was picked up by my aggregator. Since I was in the "what you don't know can't hurt you" camp when I wrote the aggregator, it simply took the text from RSS (it was UTF-8) and dumped it into my database (pretending it's ISO-8859-1). Something like this must have happened:

Start with UTF-8 text.
Put it through a totally inappropriate filter, like ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
Now you have some incoherent garbage.
But if you run that garbage through a UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 filter, you end up with your original text, in UTF-8.

This can explain the mystery of valid UTF-8 pouring out of a UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 filter. I still need to find out where the first, invalid filter is; and I need to make the aggregator encoding-aware. But at least there might be a plausible explanation.

Jeez, I feel so dirty having written all that software without even thinking about character encodings.

Editing is reliable again -- Even for long notes!

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:59:42 EST

I know I am tempting Murphy's law with a title like that, but if anything's wrong, I want to know. Well, unless it's the sort of thing that just goes away if you ignore it. Then I just want to ignore it.

So, I just applied a patch to a piece of frassle's infrastructure. I am hoping it has fixed a severe problem I and other users have experienced: losing the text of long posts.

Details: Intermittently, frassle would lose the text of posts when you tried to post. You'd hit post (or even preview) and frassle would save an empty message! This was the worst kind of bug, because it had terrible consequences and, because it was intermittent, I couldn't isolate it enough to test it properly.

I still can't test it properly, but I tested it as best possible and will be keeping my fingers crossed.

By the way, I can't believe I didn't do this sooner. I know some users have lost their work because of this, and am genuinely sorry for that.

j's scratchpad: Frassle on an Intranet

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 11:20:04 EST

Jessica has some interesting thoughts on using frassle within an intranet, which is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Particularly important is her list of crucial features that frassle is missing. I'll let you know my plans for each below.

file/picture posting

I think I could start this with a simple file attachment mechanism, and perhaps later expand it to e.g. be smarter about handling photos. Still, this is at least one version away.

user documentation

I have started writing a lot of this, and over the next 2 months I think we will be in much better shape in this regard.

privacy options

I think I have a simple but reasonable design for this and am going to try it tonight.

trackback

I haven't quite figured out the design for this. Sending trackbacks is easy — frassle can just look at all your links and try to find trackback URLs at each one. But receiving trackbacks is tricky. Ideally, a received trackback would tell frassle where to get that blog's RSS feed, and then frassle would simlply start aggregating that feed and properly threading its notes with other notes in frassle. Trackback provides a lot of this information, but I have the feeling trying this will show me some unexpected difficulties and limitations. Therefore, I've been procrastinating until I can set aside a good chunk of time to experiment and back down if something goes dreadfully wrong.

Re: Unfavorable Scoring Denies Gymnasts

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 13:20:44 EST

That didn't show up as a reply because you changed with Link URL when you were entering the comment. Frassle uses that to thread discussions together, so if you change it, frassle assumes you are responding to something else.

local-i: greater boston restaurant search

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:43:04 EST

A handy search engine that offers local information; seems to have a lot of useful detail in a consistent format. This is especially useful and unusual for restaurants, where the internet might have a lot of reviews, but they are scattered through lots of different sites; and not each site has the restaurants you care about.

Re: Frassle Publisher Work

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:31:12 EST

Currently, you can't use a feed from a block in a noteset expression. For example, if you write the noteset expression:

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/rss?block=1"

which points at recent comments on my blog, your block will contain nothing. Nothing, Lebowski.

What you really need to do in order to get the contents of another block is copy over that other block's noteset expression. This is kind of hard to do unless you actually own that other block.

However, this trick you tried is the logical thing to attempt. So in the future, I'll have the publisher recognize what you're doing and replace that feed="..." expression with the original block's expression when feed you're referring to comes from a frassle block.

Here's a sloppy workaround, though:

Open, in your browser, the RSS feed for the block you want to duplicate. Example.
Near the top of the RSS file, you'll see an XML element called <description> which contains a description of the feed you're looking at. It looks something like this:

<description>This feed is generated dynamically by frassle. See http://frassle.rura.org for more information. The noteset expression used is: responds_to( feed = "http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" ) & not ( feed = "http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" )</description>
Copy the underlined part, which is a noteset expression, into the noteset expr box in the block you're creating.

Note that if the block's owner changes its definition, your block will not change since you've copied the original search expression.

Failure is Normal

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 11:45:45 EST

One thing I like about building software is that failure is normal. You have to try so many different approaches, and so many of them don't work. Some approaches fail at the idea stage; a few fail after you've spent days or weeks seemingly close to making them work. Each failure is painful.

If you were building a bridge or a putting out a fire, failure would be a total loss: materials wasted, property destroyed. But in making software, failure is actually a form of progress. When you're exploring the boundaries of what's possible, you're often going to set your sights beyond those boundaries. In making software, you're constantly reminded of this. As a result, you either get disparaged and start doing less risky, less creative work—or you learn to treat failure as an experimental result that confirms the value of the endeavor.

People who really care about making software know this. It's spread throughout the culture: good programmers, managers, execs, and even venture capitalists know the value of failure. For all the shortcomings of techie culture, it is this courage that redeems us. And because technology is an ever-increasing part of the world economy, the world is on a cultural path toward valuing failure and away from denigrating it. The effects ripple far beyond technology, making now a better time than ever to be creative.

The Atlasphere

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 09:57:45 EST

A social networking and dating site for Ayn Rand devotees. Let me not presume to speak for its members:

Felicia - 18, single
I am in my senior year in high school and I am an Objectivist. I absolutely love self confidence. It is extremely important to me that any friend or significant other be as comfortable with himself as I am with myself.

[via Todd Gamblin]

Digitalyst: Cashing that check from the venture capitalist

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 09:36:29 EST

Nice overview of the VC funding process from search to cashing the check.

Knowledge Work is Personal; or Why blogging should be part of every KM tool

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 14:47:34 EST

Lilia Efimova believes knowledge work is all about unique individuals:

knowledge worker is someone who creates value by being subjective

I think she's onto something. Blogs, unlike other "knowledge management" tools, center around a person. This is important because it gives individuals the freedom to post whatever they want. By eliminating the fear that something you care about doesn't belong in the system somewhere, the act of posting is always much closer at hand. You don't even have to ask yourself if something belongs—you get so used to writing things down on your blog that you instead have to wonder, when wouldn't I want to share this {idea, feeling, picture, tip, joke} with other people?

And so people simply care more about blogs than other KM tools. The boat of knowledge written down on the blog is lifted by the tide of person-centered writing and discussion.

You might think that if you wanted to help your people sell widgets, you could just give them a widget-sale-data-sharing system and forget about the family pictures, stupid jokes, and indulgent ramblings you see on blogs all the time. At the very least, they could still record and exchange the same knowledge about widget-selling, which is all you care about. Right?

Perhaps not. Will your widget salespeople feel as comfortable writing about their sales failures in this task-centered environment? In a blog, a reader sees many sides of the author, automatically triggering empathy. Some people think they can do well in a constrained communications channel, optimizing their life to become the top widget sales performer in the northeast region. But the more your company's success depends on people doing their best work cooperatively, truly caring about organizational goals, and maintaining a deep company culture, the less a constrained channel can offer.

Getting people to open up and build relationships between each other is risky and complicated. Mistakes are made and feelings can be hurt. But the accelerated spread of knowledge, loyalty, help, and love is well worth it.

Attention passengers, we are expecting light turbulence for the next 2 days

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 14:43:24 EST

Frassle has been getting some more usage recently, both in terms of web hits and subscriptions being fetched by frassle's aggregator. The latter has been causing some trouble, as the aggregator's RSS fetcher is rather inefficient. I'm working behind the scenes to (1) keep things from blowing up and (2) actually fix things for the long term. In the mean time, frassle may have occassional spots of downtime. Feel free to IM me (shimonrura) if you notice one so I can fix it ASAP, or perhaps just tell you I'm working on it.

Dvorak on Disruptive Technology

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 17:00:47 EST

John Dvorak: "The concept of disruptive technology goes to the top of my list as the biggest crock of the new millennium."

Why Frassle is Feasible

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 11:47:41 EST

Today a friend invited me into a social network site called Multiply. It has some nice features, like photo albums, review sharing, and even a built-in journal. But the incentive isn't there for me to use it, because for it to be useful I have to get some critical mass of friends on it. The ones that aren't already on Friendster or Orkut are probably averse to the whole idea of telling a computer who their friends are. And the ones that are on Friendster and Orkut are unlikely to want to re-enter all that same data onto some other site, in hope that more of their friends will come. The barriers to entry are so high that any new entrant to the market has to do something really novel, or the market leaders have to really, really suck.

It's easy to see the logic behind an endeavor like Multiply: if we build services that are greatly enhanced by a social network, people will join the social network. Unfortunately, since people can't see the magic of your services until the social network exists, each potential user has to solve a frustrating chicken-and-egg problem. This exact problem will be pervasive in the social networking tools market until standards for data interchange are worked out.

Frassle escapes this problem. Because of RSS syndication, you don't need to convince a dozen friends to switch blogging platforms in order to use frassle's magic on their content. Because of OPML subscriptions import (it will be in the next version, I swear), you can easily try out frassle's aggregator on your familiar subscriptions list.

Now here's the kicker: I bet I can leverage this flexibility to work around the lack of a standard in the social networking space. I don't expect thousands of users to flock to frassle—and I couldn't support them if they did. But I do think that frassle will support a social network system that delivers more value, in easy-to-sample, titillating increments, than other systems.

Consider the procedure for getting value out of yet another social network system:

Sign up
Paste in email addresses of a dozen friends
Wait for them to join; probably 3 of them do
Wait a few more days for them to invite some friends
Assuming you know a lot of their friends, you have a social network with 10 people in it. Unfortunately, this network doesn't map to any real-life community; it's an arbitrary grouping based primarily on how bored people were.
Now you can realign your friendships based on how capable people are of using Yet Another Social Network System^TM. Over time, those 10 people might become a coherent community of friends, so that YASN^TM might make sense.

Needless to say, I don't think many people will have the naievete or wherewithal to restructure their actual network of friends based on YASN^TM. Therefore, Friendster and Orkut have a great deal of lock-in because they have a mass of users.

Worst of all, even if you've entered this data into another social network tool, you have to re-enter it. Later, you have to maintain the same information in two different places. This is ridiculous, but none of the companies that have the power to change this situation actually want to, because it would reduce their lock-in.

Now, contrast the steps it takes for a new user to get value out of frassle's social features. Note that most of these features are in the design phase right now—they don't yet actually exist. But they ~~could~~ will.

Sign up
Upload an OPML file from your aggregator.

Right away, get access to related content in feeds you haven't seen using the taxonomies of blogs you read.

Frassle will make up a random number and ask you to put it inside of a blog entry. Once frassle sees this number in your feed, it knows you are in control of that feed—much like how some sites verify your email address. You can then delete that blog entry, if you like.
Right away, you can browse all of the content inside frassle via your own categories. You didn't have to type them in to frassle.

If a frassle user has already subscribed to your blog, you're in luck! Not only are we likely to have hundreds of entries from your blog, rather than just the latest ten, but there are probably lots of recommendations in frassle, just waiting for you to show up and read them!

Right away, you can enrich frassle's understanding of your categories by categorizing other people's posts. You get to use frassle's excellent categorization interface, and categories in your RSS are automatically copied into frassle—no need to re-enter data.You can also re-syndicate data from frassle, so your data is never just stuck. Frassle gives you RSS for everything and helps you put dynamic data on your own web pages.Keep on using the blog and aggregator tools you're comfortable with, and frassle will keep on

finding relevant material for you
supporting personalized search
tracking emergent communities of interest based on what you write about and categorize
using your content to support these enhanced services for other frassle users and readers of your blog.

For someone who already has a blog and aggregator habit, not only does frassle eliminate redundant data entry, it also gives you more deeply personalized information—and all in fewer steps!

And that's why, even if frassle doesn't make it, someone will figure out how to support all of this. And they will finally bring us a social network system that's not only nice in theory but also, and more important, feasible.

Re: Category Problems

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 10:38:48 EST

This bug, where doing a preview and then clicking "Good Enough" (rather than "Post") to save your note would lose your categorizations, should now be fixed. Thanks to Jessica for finding and reporting this.

Mathemagenic: A blog conversation threading tool

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 16:28:54 EST

Lilia Efimova is looking for a tool to automatically reconstruct conversation threads. Frassle comes close, though it's not quite as ambitious as what she requests. Interesting.

Note: Although I sometimes read Lilia's blog, Mathemagenic, I actually found out about this post from a couple of other frassle users. Here's the thread of relevant posts.

Re: Frassle It! (Pop)

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:15:38 EST

Jessica, the window that the popup bookmarklet creates is intentionally without toolbars. Do you think I should instead have it keep the toolbars? I usually just use it to make a quick post and then close the window, so I'd rather not have the toolbars around just to save space.

The other thing seems like a netscape bug though.

DICK CHENEY'S ALIVE!

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 11:38:23 EST

(... as of the time of this recording.)

Optical illusions

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 11:34:46 EST

Blow your mind.

ThreadsML - QuickTopic bulletin board

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 20:05:39 EST

David Weinberger says I should support this, even though it doesn't exist. I'll look into it.

Plakaty.Ru: Russian Posters

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 16:57:48 EST

Plakaty.ru has a huge selection of images of Russian posters, including some cool historical ones from films, advertisements, and propoganda. I really like this one for Brilliantovaya Ruka (The Diamond Arm), a comedy filmed in 1968 that my grandmother used to show me. It turns out Brilliantovaya Ruka is a still-popular classic of Soviet film, with a variety of sites offering such things as a collection of sound bites and a mobile phone ring tone. You can also buy it on DVD from Amazon.

Is frassle for smaller blog communities?

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 16:30:58 EST

Bill Ives pointed at this post from Louis Rosenfeld. He reflects on the possible use of blogs in an educational context (business school):

But the "real" blogosphere—the one we're using to interact as you read this—isn't just blogs. In addition to tools that help us say stuff (e.g., blogs), there are tools that help us find other people's stuff (e.g., aggregators like Bloglines) and, perhaps most compelling, tools that help us find out what other people are saying about our own stuff (e.g., Technorati). If a student blogosphere included similar "add-on" tools, students might constantly monitor their content's "performance" just as we all obsessively do in the open blogosphere (and hey, come on, I'm sure I'm not the only one).
Understanding how one's content performed in a competitive, if local, information marketplace would surely be quite instructive. Through trial, error, and emulating others' successes, students would learn to write more effectively for the medium, which meets one of Bud's original goals. And students would arrive at their own understanding of the blogosphere as not just a collection of tools and content, but a fuller information ecology, complete with rules, incentives and disincentives, social agreements, boundaries, and metrics to help make sense of it all.

Frassle might be a good fit for this kind of user scenario (when it's ready to be released, in a couple of months). Frassle along can support a small blog ecosystem, complete with its own search, relevance tracking, and aggregator. It has the basic functionality of bloglines, feedburner, feedster, and (almost) technorati, along with a pretty powerful personal blogging platform. It has a publishing system too, though that part is currently impossible to use.

I suppose it's time for me to start focusing on the user manual. :)

Re: Editing Text on the Publisher Pages

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 14:31:27 EST

Jessica,
You're right about a sensible edit link being an important feature that's currently missing. It will be in the next version. Good catch, and thanks for experimenting with the publisher.

Re: unable to use target="_blank"?

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:50:47 EST

Frassle actually restricts, a little bit, what HTML is allowed in a post. This is mostly to prevent insertion of scripts and other risky stuff. I suppose the filter block target="_blank". However I don't consider the target tag particularly risky, so I'll see about changing the filter so it's allowed.

Perl, the first postmodern computer language

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:46:16 EST

The classic talk by Larry Wall.

Layoutomatic

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 09:31:01 EST

Easily generates multi-column layouts that are compatible with lots of browsers. Neato.

See us talk about frassle at OSCOM 4

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 11:16:05 EST

Great news! Our proposal for a talk called Interpersonal Content Management has been accepted into the 4th conference on Open-Source Content Management. Josh and I will be speaking at 10:15am on Friday, October 1 at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland.

In addition to providing me with a great excuse to travel to Europe, this conference will give me an opportunity to meet many interesting people. On the work end of things, it implies a few tasks for Josh and me to finish before leaving the country:

Write a user/developer/administrator's manual for frassle.
Set up a version control system.
Release frassle under the GPL.
Write the actual talk!

The talk will be about an emerging genre of content management we call Interpersonal Content Management. Here's the talk proposal:

Content management systems have found two compelling applications. The organizational CMS focuses many contributors around common business goals. The personal CMS, typically a blog, eliminates barriers to individual publishing. While organizational CMS recreates its social structures based on existing business relationships, personal CMS leaves its users to develop relationships from the ground up.
Bloggers express these relationships using simple mechanisms like linking and republishing. Because blogs provide a lasting, personal identity, they make it possible for social phenomena like reputation and trust to develop online. These in turn support informal communities of interest, offering their members ad hoc ways to collaborate without establishing a typical business relationship. We call this blossoming new usage Interpersonal Content Management. It is characterized by a fusion of content consumer and producer roles. By contributing incremental commentary on others' content—even by the implicit endorsement of linking—individuals make connections between their own interests and the interests of others.
Readers already use these connections informally to evaluate the meaning and relevance of new content. But by designing software to make the creation and discovery of such connections easier, we can make interpersonal content management more practical and scalable. First, users are empowered to quickly bookmark, rate, categorize, and remix content from anywhere on the web. Second, the associations they form in these actions are tracked by the interpersonal CMS, which then automatically suggests ratings and categorizations for new content. By making personally meaningful judgments about content, individuals not only prioritize items within their own CMS, but help those who trust them do the same.
This presentation explains Interpersonal CMS in terms of its technological features, the relationships it supports between people, the goals that drive its deployment, and the challenges it will face in the future. In each of these aspects, we contrast iCMS with existing notions of personal and organizational CMS. Specific references will be made to our proof-of-concept iCMS, frassle (frassle.rura.org), which will be open-sourced this summer.

Berkman Thursday Notes, 5 Aug 04

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 22:26:19 EST

First, some stuff about the DNC.

A few Berkman-Thursday folks might go to a meeting of the WWW working group of Harvard's ABCD Committee.

Blog group visitors to come at some point: Ethan Zuckerman, David Weinberger.

Dinner... somewhere. Not Cambridge Common, not Bombay club, here we come.

Shortest meeting ever!

Update: Wendy, Sun, and I went to Pho Pasteur. It was a short, uneventful meeting but I did manage to get a parking space right in front of the Berkman center. And the food and company was pleasant.

Building a Balancing Scooter

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 13:39:50 EST

Trevor Blackwell built a balancing two-wheeled scooter, his own version of a Segway, in about a week. The two wheels seemed redundant, so later he built a one-wheeled balancing scooter called the Eunicycle.

Great Hackers

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 11:22:41 EST

Another nice article by Paul Graham. This one's about attracting, retaining, and managing Great Hackers.

Because you can't tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can't tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I've met who do great work rarely think that they're doing great work. They generally feel that they're stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it's only a matter of time until they're found out.

To the Circus

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 10:50:12 EST

Last night I accompanied Josh, Rachelle, and Josh's mother to Cirque du Soleil's new show, Varekai. I've never been to a circus of any kind before, but of course I'd heard great things about du Soleil. I was not disappointed.

The scene was being set from the moment we took our seats. A big green lizard slithered across the stage in the fog. In the back of the stage stood a forest of tall sticks, like bamboo. A small creature climbed and jumped around the stalks. Then suddenly, dozens more appeared from backstage, offstage, and through holes in the stage floor.

Of course, these weren't actual critters as you might expect in a circus, but human performers dressed in fantastic costumes. They danced, they bounced, they flirted, they frightened and they welcomed each other. And then we got to meet the first clowns.

While the feats of strength and flexibility in the other performers were certainly awe-inspiring, the clowns were probably the most fun and memorable characters. Like any circus, the clowns are there to introduce and transition between acts. But the variety of clowns in Varekai was much richer than the typical big-shoes, red-nose, unicycle-riding stereotype. The clowns were primnarily differentiated from the other performers by appearing more human. While one was more of a potted plant with funnel ears, and another was a dark, almost robotic being with a light bulb growing out of his head, their conversational manner and repeated appearances allowed them to develop an intimate connection with the audience.

One particular clown duet that I loved involved a tall, thin man with slicked-back hair and a squat, clumsy woman with a horrendous blond wig. These two lampooned a few Vegas acts. The first was an amusing routine with a magician and his assistant—both incompetent. They even selected a volunteer from the audience—and then embroiled him in a love triangle. Their second act was a play on the typical romantic singer in the spotlight. As he sang "ne me quite pas", the spotlight moved. And moved. And turned off, only to appear on the far wall of the circus tent. He was forced to run around, climb the bamboo (pathetically; he's just a Vegas hack, remember?), even pause in the lap of an audience member. Who was driving him crazy with the spotlight? His cute assistant, the brunt of earlier jokes. And much to her amusement.

Enough about the clowns? OK: the main acts were amazing. My favorites were the pairs of men who did amazing feats of strength and balance together, one spinning the other around using his legs and feet. And I don't mean face up, spin left and right. I mean stand up, face forward, and spin backwards so the back of your head would hit the floor. But don't hit the floor; bounce back up somehow, roll your butt back onto your partner's feet, and spin again. Dozens of times. Really fast. Now I'm impressed.

Another act I enjoyed involved three small Asian boys. They danced around the stage twirling ropes with weights at each end. Their ropes flew from one boy to another, around the stage, in a complex three-person juggling act. In between throwing and catching, they did amazing jumps and flips. I had the feeling of watching a very precisely tuned engine, where each weight and force of momentum had been measured. I can hardly imagine the depth of understanding and focus required of performers to achieve a synchrony of action that accurate.

I won't spoil the finale for you, but let me say that I think it blends the best aspects of the pair-spinners and the boys with rope-thingies. There was also an amazing contortionist. And several more terrific acts. A most excellent and wondrous evening.

CNN: Web addiction excuses conscripts

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 10:40:46 EST

"For people who play (Internet) games all night and don't have any friends, don't have any hobbies, to come into the army is a very big shock," said Commander-Captain Jyrki Kivela at the military conscription unit.

Are you saying playing on the internet isn't a hobby?

Erm, I mean, you scandinavian wimps, toughen up! The strength of your armed forces is essential to... to... national solidarity. Yeah, that's it.

James Earl Jones, Step Aside

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 08:26:07 EST

I am soooooo hoarse.

Recovering from a cold that ruined my plans Sunday through Tuesday, I am now feeling much better but sounding as bad as ever. I'm like a radio annoucer with the bass way up and the treble way down. I rumble like a train in the distance. If I try to hum, it sounds like a drumroll.

Luckily I seem to be recovering quickly and it is good to get back into the normal swing of things, even if I do scare my coworkers because I... growl like Satan. Sorry 'bout that.

CNet: Breaking the rules with open source

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 22:50:58 EST

In the space of five months, John Roberts started a software company and delivered its first product to thousands of potential customers—a process that could easily have taken years. His secret? Open-source development.

Re: When I found this post under a category it doesn't have,

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 01:35:27 EST

Jessica— this was indeed a bug and will be fixed in the next version of frassle. That post won't show up under 7/2004 anymore. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Bruce Bawer: Hating America

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 15:57:23 EST

Wide-ranging exploration of why Anti-Americanism is rampant in Europe, from an American expatriate in Norway. Is European media really this pathetic?

Major Directions in Interpersonal Content Management

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 23:12:17 EST

I was travelling a bit this weekend, to my old college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts. While there I met up with many friends, most of whom asked what I like to do in my spare time. Which led to me explaining frassle, in pretty abstract terms, to a bunch of smart people that weren't all familiar with blogs.

While explaining frassle five times in a day isn't exactly continuous entertainment, it did let me get a few interesting, big-picture perspectives on frassle. Which got me thinking: where could frassle go? Dreaming big now—what ideas that are in frassle today could grow into major new kinds of tools and services? Here are a few answers.

1. The most accurately targeted advertising ever
Frassle defines shared understanding in a computable, measurable way. It can quickly give you an explanation of what one of my categories means, delivered in your own terms. It can probably be scaled to do this across multi-level social networks. To the point, frassle can give you a pretty good idea of who (among a very large network) would be interested in a particular thing, given only a small sample.

That is exactly what advertisers want to do. Given a product, they want to make the people who are likely to buy it aware of how great it is. The nature of mass media favors advertising that pushes products almost everyone needs, because the message always goes to everyone. Products that are likely to be highly useful only to a smaller group of people are therefore underserved by mass media advertising. Google knows this and delivers a higher clickthrough rate on ads hosted through their AdWords program because they keep track of how successful different ads are on different websites.

Frassle's inter-category mappings would simply be another way to track the same kind of correlations. Since frassle delivers a publishing and authoring interface to individual users, not just to website with a box on the right for ads, you could even target ads based on data about the viewer herself, rather than the particular website she is currently viewing.

Could it work as well as Google's AdWords? Could it work better?

2. A personalized search engine

The same kind of data frassle would collect for targeted advertising would also make for a much smarter search engine. First, search could be contextualized for each user, based on their category structure and recent interests. Second, relevance data could be used to better rank search results. The right stuff, right at the top of the list.

3. Integrated knowledge management for workgroups
While it may be very hard to make all of frassle's features usable for the general internet-using public, it might be a lot easier to set it up within an existing organization. Companies have oodles of documents, scattered all over the place; they have oodles of people, struggling to communicate through overloaded tools like email and insufficient physical spaces; they have oddles of shared projects that ought to involve certain people but can't make those people aware they even exist. The ideas in frassle could help with all of these, and might find excellent uptake in a small, close-knit community of knowledge workers.

Is it scalable? When I first discussed the ideas behind frassle with Scott Johnson, founder of feedster, he seemed skeptical that it could scale enough to cover a significant part of the internet or even just the blogosphere. I have a lot of respect for Scott's opinion—he's been building search engines for a long, long time. So I know a system that tracks hundreds of category systems and thousands of inter-category relationships probably can't be scaled to millions and trillions just by adding off-the-shelf software. This is still the big question. Do we need a Google-style cluster of thousands of machines? Can we make it a distributed, peer-to-peer application?

Is anyone else doing this? Some related ventures are under way from Technorati, Amazon.com and A9, and certainly others. How do I find them?

Re: Notes on Frassle

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 18:31:23 EST

Frassle doesn't have Atom support, yet. I'm planning on adding it to the aggregator, but not to add publishing in Atom. (I see no benefit to offering another output format.)

I'm not sure what you mean by separating your posts from syndicated posts. Syndicated stuff is viewable under the aggregator. Only your posts are displayed in other places. Is there a place where they are blended that isn't clear?

It's System Administrator Appreciation Day

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 11:48:51 EST

Don't forget to thank your sysadmins today! What they do normally doesn't get any attention until something goes wrong. Buck the trend and go tell them how happy you are that they've been able to prevent all the Rube Goldberg machinery that powers your business from collapsing in an enormous steaming heap.

Note: I'm not trying to get frassle users to thank me. Instead of thanking me, keep using frassle and helping me find and fix bugs and confusing bits.

Berkman Thursday Notes, 29 Jul 04

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 20:26:36 EST

Lisa wants to invite local software makers and blogging luminaries. She characterizes it as part of an all-encompassing quest for schwag, but truly her intentions are more noble. She wants to use this group to get at new knowledge. She mentioned a book called Regional Advantage, which compares the tech successes of Boston's Rt 128 corridor and Silicon Valley.

Josh brought up this question, and thinks we need a clearer purpose in order to avoid getting lost without a leader. Some possibilities:

blog enable the 7th congressional district election (Lisa)
bring in more nerds
bring in newbie bloggers and teach them
bring in blogging luminaries (Rebecca and David Weinberger can help here)
Crazy ideas for people: Bono, Scoble, (god help us for these two possibilities), Ethan Zuckerman, David Weinberger, Howard Dean, Margaret Cho, Jennifer Weiner, Kos, Moby, Lessig, Cosmo Massero, Dave Barry, Dan Kennedy from the Phoenix, folks from MoveOn, or TrueMajority, Joi Ito, techdirt, FuckedCompany, Kevin Marks, Bryan Briggs of BBSpot, Chris Pirillo, Cameron Marlowe, Ben and Mena Trott, etc. To be continued on the list. (Addendum: Jeneane Garofalo.)

The question in my mind is, how do we get people to step up and take more of a personal stake in these issues? It's too easy for me to just assume that someone else will provide interesting stuff to talk about or recruit new members. I'll try to think about this if I don't convince myself that someone else is.

Then I gave a fairly long demonstration of frassle. Lisa seemed intrigued by the publisher's javascript syndication features. Time to go to dinner (Cambrige Common)!

Free iPod mini for signing up online

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 19:43:40 EST

it seems to be legit

This is a demonstration for my friends at the Berkman center.

Lisa: "If we could harvest the power of flying shit, we wouldn't be dependent on foreign oil anymore!"

101.Ru - Russian streaming radio

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 15:53:14 EST

Maybe I can reawaken the Russian-speaking parts of my brain just by listening to lots of mediocre Russian music?

Flying to Cincinnati for a weekend, Aug 13-15

Wed, 28 Jul 2004 22:42:23 EST

I'm taking a trip to visit my family in Cincinnati in a couple of weeks. Flight plan:

Fri 13-Aug-04: BOS -> CVG, 7:25 pm — 9:41 pm
Sun 15-Aug-04 CVG -> BOS, 6:55 pm — 8:59 pm

I look forward to seeing the mom, the grandmothers, the dog, the cats, and a few friends who happen to be in town.

Robin Good on Frassle

Wed, 28 Jul 2004 14:03:16 EST

I have been intending for some time to tell interaction designer Robin Good about frassle. His writing has been right up frassle's alley—making mutually-beneficial order out of selfish chaos and such. I guess he went and found it on his own, and has excerpted some of the documentation on his blog. Thanks to his link, we have a few new users. To whom I say, welcome!

But I must also say that frassle is an ongoing experiment, not a finished product. It's written mostly by me and my friend Josh in our spare time. So while the writing is ambitious, the actual product isn't there. Yet. Still, I invite your comments and suggestions. Progress is made every day that someone uses frassle, contributes a bug report, or reads what little documentation we've provided. Thank you all!

frassle blips

Tue, 27 Jul 2004 18:11:17 EST

There have been a few outages in frassle service this afternoon. I hope things have straightened out. If you find frassle not working, contact me on IM at shimonrura or by phone or email.

Buzz Aldrin punches moon-landing conspiracy theorist

Tue, 27 Jul 2004 14:58:19 EST

Perhaps immature, but still TOTALLY AWESOME

DBI::ProfileDumper::Apache

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:13:16 EST

Funny, I was almost ready to sit down and write a module to do exactly this.

Rollup

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 01:22:36 EST

A rollup is an automated blog that aggregates (rolls up) a number of different sources. Using RSS feeds you can create your own rollup for any topic.

A rating is just another kind of categorization

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 15:07:15 EST

Jessica asks:

I guess my whole thing with the rating system is that I don't understand what Shimon thinks it will add to the Frassle community. I don't understand what I would get out of rating someone else's blog posts. I don't understand what someone would get by looking at my ratings. I don't understand why my blog has to be rated by its readers.

I wasn't talking about just rating blog posts of other frassle users. One of the ideas that I started with when making frassle is that you could look at what URLs people link to, and how they categorize them, and use that information to classify those URLs. Frassle does indeed keep track of when different people categorize the same things, and uses this information to track correlation between categories. You can see these relationships in the outline view.

Why do you categorize things in frassle? I do it because I like to have my writings and my links organized. I'd like to be able to go back to my blog and find out everything I've written about Google. Because of frassle's correlation-tracking technique, I can also leverage those categorizations I've already made to get Google-related news from other blogs. (This system still has some bugs, is slow as dirt, and the interface stinks, but these are getting fixed and I believe in the concept.)

Well, a rating is just another kind of categorization. I have categories for things that are great, good, average, poor, and bad. If, for example, you and I have totally opposite tastes, then frassle will learn that things you call "bad" are related to my "good" category. The hope is that by using this sort of information, I can prioritize items by quality and skip over the deluge of stuff I won't like anyway.

A final note—I think I've set aside my quest for a frassle reputation system. By reputation system I mean something that measures an individual's reputation in a community, like eBay's reputation measure. In eBay, that measure provides an accurate way to judge whether someone you're considering doing business with is trustworthy. It also gives sellers an incentive to behave well, because a better reputation makes buyers more comfortable. I had speculated about whether something like this might make sense for frassle, but I don't currently see how it could work.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

Fri, 23 Jul 2004 10:23:01 EST

Why organisations need some structure to ensure they are democratic

Re: The Frassle Aggregator, Revamped

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 15:36:01 EST

Thanks for the bug reports, Jessica. FYI, it is possible to unsubscribe from a feed— just remove it from all categories, and it won't show up in your aggregator.

Steve Garfield on Fox 25

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:15:20 EST

Local video blogger Steve Garfield, who will be "a guy with a videocamera" at the DNC next week, was featured on Fox 25 news. Watch the excellent report.

Blog Meetup

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 20:53:04 EST

I'm at the blog meetup at Marche Movenpick in downtown Boston. About half the people have their laptops out, while the more sociable half is, well, socializing. This is my token blog post.

How to design an interactive RSS scraper

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 10:21:58 EST

If you've been using a desktop RSS aggregator, you know how great it feels to find an RSS feed for a site you frequent. Suppose there's a certain club you like, and you want to know who's playing there most weekends. You could check the site each week, but it'd be much simpler if your aggregator simply showed you whenever a new event was published.

You could ask them to publish a feed. That would be the ideal solution, but it's not likely to happen. Most people still don't know what a feed is good for. If the publisher can't provide a feed on their own, you can use a tool called a scraper to automatically turn their web pages into an RSS feed. One such scraper is MyRSS, which claims to allow non-programmers to easily scrape any web page. I used MyRSS once, and not only did it have an annoying advertising model, but the feed it produced was terrible. It contained only some of the titles, mistook links on the side of the page for new content, and failed to update when new content arrived. In short, it just didn't work.

It's hard to blame MyRSS for this. People don't format their pages to make them simple for a computer to scrape. People format pages for other people to read. A scraper that works only by automatic means, without guidance from a person, is doomed to fail somewhere.

I'd like to propose an alternative. Instead of hoping to make the software smart enough to figure out any page on its own, let's make software that's good at listening to people. Setting up a scraper for your favorite page should be an interactive process.

First, you enter a URL. The first thing the scraper does is fetch that URL and show it to you. To make things challenging, let's suppose you want to scrape Boston.com's event listing for today, which includes event date and event location in addition to some standard RSS fields.

Second, the scraper shows you the page, but marked clearly to show what fields would be scraped. This gives you an opportunity to look at specific examples and correct the scraper before it begins the long cycle of producing beautiful scraped RSS feeds. It might look like this:

All the fields to be scraped are identified by colored borders. Pink indicates event date, green is title, and blue is the list of categories.

The yellow block at the left of each field indicates that this is a guess by the scraper. To confirm the scraper's guess, you click the yellow block and it turns into a green check-mark, as illustrated on the first date. To remove an incorrect guess, you click the red X at right.

At each correction, the scraper adjusts what it looks for before and after each field. The scraper may also want to let the user correct other values, like the total number of items currently on the page. That way the scraper could make sure it is being flexible enough to notice all the relevant stuff on the page, but not so flexible that it picks up garbage.

The best part about this design, in my not-so-humble opinion, is that it's doable. All you need to do is inject a few <span>s and images into the existing web page. If you're making a scraper anyway, you had to have a parser and some ways of guessing what parts of the web page correspond to fields in the feed.

I hope this motivates someone to build a better scraper. We could use one! And if you want my input/assistance on such a project, let me know.

Re: frassle bugs

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 01:12:21 EST

Hey, just as I was typing that response about frassle bugs, and actually checking off my "bugs" category, a little summer insect landed on my screen. Right next to the "bugs" label in fact. He even stood still long enough for me to take a picture. I hereby christen thee the official frassle bug bug.

Oooh, he just walked a bit! He must like the backlight.

Re: frassle bugs

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 01:01:53 EST

The title is a required field.
This is by design; frassle often displays only the title of a note. It would be possible to default to using the first few words of the body, but requiring the title is not unusual.
If the title is left empty, an error is displayed and the link and body of the post are not preserved.
This is a bug.
In the publisher, if I add a block, and go to advanced style options, then click save, I get a pagekit error
This is a bug. Fixed.
If I specify a category for a block, then later rename that category through manage categories, the block no longer works correctly — I assume.
Your assumption is correct and points to an interesting problem. The interactive noteset builder, when ready, will reference categories by ID# rather than by name, avoiding this problem.
Tree pane does not expand correctly on the post page in firefox when you expand the tree with +s
Is this a firefox bug? Or can we work around it by setting a width for the div that contains the category tree?
How do I use more than the ten most recent items in publisher?
Prepend the noteset expression with something like: !limit=50
I cannot make any aggregated content from my LJ site appear on the my blog in the publisher
Fixed in this specific instance. This was an instance of subtle bug having to do with the use of a space at the end of the URI for that feed. To be fixed in future by stripping trailing spaces from URIs.

The Abolition of Grandparents by Gary North

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:48:24 EST

In the comments to Philip's post on teenage pregnancy is a link to this wide-ranging article on the consequences of Americans' willingness to move:

The positive aspect of social and geographical mobility is obvious to most Americans: more freedom to choose and more choices. Our society is the envy of the world. Almost every other society on earth wants to imitate us. This is a worldwide social revolution in a way that Communists dreamed of but could not attain through force. But the acids of modernity do eat away at the foundations of every social order, including ours. There are no free lunches in life. There are trade-offs. There are winners and losers. The great losers in America are grandparents. In second place are grandchildren, especially those ages three to ten.

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 11:40:03 EST

Provocative article by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, on humankind's transition to agriculture from hunting and gathering.

Maybe teenage pregnancy is a good thing?

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 08:50:23 EST

Philip Greenspun has a thought-provoking post, Maybe teenage pregnancy is a good thing:

Now that I'm 40 years old most of my friends are in their riper years. The women who are trying to have children in their late 30s and early 40s are going through torture. Hormones, needles, in-vitro fertilization, miscarriages, etc. Maybe teenage pregnancy isn't such a bad idea after all. I wonder if in pre-industrial societies it wasn't the case that the grandparents did most of the child-rearing that required judgement and experience. The teenage girl did the child-bearing but was still living surrounded by extended family so that her 30-35-year-old mom and mother-in-law could provide adult guidance for the baby. Perhaps we believe that teenage pregnancy is bad only because our family structures have been broken up.

This follows up on another insightful post on the problems with high school, one speculating that home-schooled kids have better manners, and a few others. I tried to find a unifying thread for this recurring source of rant. Here's the comment I left:

Actually, you're onto something here. Teenage pregnancy is risky in modern Western society because it reduces the opportunity for a girl to become a productive participant in the economy. But with child-rearing, you can easily spread out the work if you have a geographically clustered, trustworthy group. This is traditionally the extended family, a structure which is now rare but can perhaps be replaced by a more geographically convenient "adopted" family (as Christopher Alexander suggests in A Pattern Language).
Similarly, the abomination that is the factory high school is also mandated by the combination of nuclear families and economic convention. Proper consumer living requires both parents to work, which is only feasible when the kids can be supervised during the workday. It's no wonder that teenagers, restrained in the artificial world of the suburban high school, often fail to learn that their actions have consequences and act out with violent music or crime. They don't need to get the best tutors in India; just doing real work in any real town could teach them important practical and social skills far better than the years of health and speech classes.
Oh, you can also blame the disintegration of the extended family for suburban sprawl, the SUV, exploding health care costs, and epidemic overdependence on psychiatrists. Funny that the "family values" types are so worried now, as if there's much more to lose.
Shimon Rura - 7/18/04; 11:39:58 PM

I was delighted to tie together so many of Philip's favorite topics.

About Shimon

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 01:39:38 EST

Shimon is a geek living in the Boston area, and the author of frassle. This page is a demonstration of what you can do with frassle's new publisher.

shimon's unfiltered blog

frassle news from developers and users

shimon's contact info and such

About Frassle

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 01:33:26 EST

Frassle is a multi-user weblog community. It does lots of great stuff, but I'm too tired to explain it in this little box right now. Maybe I'll fill it in later.

By the way, if you're getting this over the "I want to see everything Shimon writes" syndication channel, it is probably inexplicably boring. Try looking at the page, http://frassle.rura.org/shimon/frassle.

Frassle alpha 6

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 00:36:06 EST

Welcome to the newest release of frassle! This one has been a long time coming, and has some major new features. One disclaimer though: the most important new feature, the publisher, is hard to use. Sorry. It's getting better real soon now, though. But really, there are a lot of new features:

frassle publisher allows you to create fully dynamic websites based on any content written in or aggregated into frassle
it's now almost easy to subscribe to a new RSS feed
you can categorize a note when posting
you can email any note
aggregator now saves feed download status and provides a link to original website of aggregated feeds (example); also supports cache headers and 304 to preserve bandwidth
tutorials system guides you through frassle features (just one tutorial for now; more coming soon)
if you forget your password, frassle can now email it to you
several speed and user interface improvements
improved "manage categories" page for editing your categories

Now that this major release is out, we can turn our attention to squashing bugs, readying to release frassle as an open-source project, and most importantly, making frassle's advanced features reliable and easy to use.

Frassle Feedback, part 0

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 14:40:28 EST

A while ago my friend Evan Miller tried out frassle and sent me some comments. Turns out he'll be coming to Boston this weekend to join Josh, Dave, and me for frassle development bootcamp this weekend. That means I have to release version 6 tonight!

Anyway, this is a good time to go over Evan's original comments and talk about what's been done, or what we might work on this weekend. I'll go through Evan's points one by one.

A bookmarklet for Safari that mostly works is this:
javascript:window.location.href=%22http://frassle.rura.org/
Directory/note_add?uri=%22%20+%20escape(window.location.href)
%20+%20%22&title=%22%20+%20escape(document.title)%20+
%20%22&body=%22%20+%20escape(%22%3Cblockquote%3E%22%20+
%20getSelection()%20+%20%22%3C/blockquote%3E%3Cbr%3E%22);
It gives me an error about versions, but it works anyway.

We should create a new page for bookmarklets that offers them for IE, Mozilla, and Safari browsers. For each browser, we should also offer a version that pops up frassle in a new window.

I find the "edit categories" link under each post to be confusing. The main purpose of clicking this link is to file a link somewhere in my hierarchy; changing that hierarchy is secondary. I think it would be more clear to say "file this link" or something along those lines. Also, it is unclear to me what happens when I do "Save" someone else's post somewhere in my hierarchy. Does it save the link itself or the post about the link? Where can I find this link later? It's not in "recent posts", and although "outline" implies that this link is in my category, clicking my category just brings me back to "recent posts". I'm mystified.

The link has been changed to "categorize" in alpha 6. The mystery about categorizing another person's post is still there. The link should show up under "related posts" in your category, but this is not clear.

"Related items" takes a long time to load.

This is because I use a slow view on the database end of this page. I will optimize it soon.

It might make sense to let me file a post as I'm creating it, rather than after the fact. I don't like to fill out multiple forms regarding one post. On the other hand, I imagine that a single, unified form could get unwieldy, and so I can see why you could also leave things the way they are.

In alpha 6 you can categorize on the note post/edit form.

Frassle Feedback, Part 1.5

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 14:39:20 EST

The aggregator tells me how many subscriptions are in a directory and its subdirectories, but it only tells me what the subscriptions are if I go to the subdirectory. I'd like to see links to all the subscriptions in the current directory and its subdirectories. Also, I'd like to give my subscriptions aliases so that they don't take up so much room on the left.

I haven't thought about either of these possibilities much, but they wouldn't be too hard to implement.

I don't like that Frassle keeps logging me out after just a few minutes of inactivity. Maybe this is the fault of my semi-functional browsers, but it's annoying me.

Actually this was a bug in Apache's libapreq2, and I have worked around it. I suspect frassle's unfortunate tendency to occassionally lose posts when I hit the "Preview" or "Post" button may also be a libapreq bug, so I should upgrade libapreq on the production server this weekend. Also, remember to select all and copy before you hit "Post".

When I remove a post from a category, it redirects me to /Directory/item. When I add a post to a category, it redirects me to /Directory/index. This behavior should be consistent.

I don't really believe these two opposite actions should be consistent, but posting a new note now takes you to that specific note instead of your index.

This post was apparently too long for frassle to digest, so it's continued in this follow-up post.

Frassle Feedback, Part 1

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 14:38:42 EST

The drop-down box of actions should be much more prominent. It was several minutes before I realized I could post something without using a bookmarklet. Perhaps you want a label that says "actions" or something less lame than that. Also, the actions related to categories should be grouped together. For some reason, "add a category" is a few spaces away from "manage categories" and "delete this category".

In alpha 6, there is a more prominent box around the drop-down, with an icon and the bold text This is your feed. at its left. I should check on the order (very easy to change).

The aggregator gives me an error when I try to add a top-level subscription. Also, when I create a subscription and then click the link to it, it takes me to the "Everything" category and says "No feeds within this category." I'm guessing it shouldn't behave that way.

This still sucks. What should happen is you enter a URL, frassle itself subscribes to that feed, then frassle takes you to that feed's page. On that feed page (like any feed), you can subscribe by checking off categories. In this case, frassle should display a message that tells you to check some categories in order to subscribe. You should also get an intermediary page that reports progress as frassle downloads and parses the feed. (If frassle was already subscribed, you'd go right to the feed?id=123 page for that RSS URL.)

Some of that I might do tonight.

Re: Frassle Feedback

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 21:21:37 EST

Wait... you mean you don't get a plain textarea if the HTMLArea is not supported on your browser? That would be a bug. We'll see if we can recreate it tomorrow when Dave is here with his Macintosh. But I think he's been actually using frassle from Safari, so I'd be surprised if this was a persistent bug.

Also, I've edited the post you mentioned so that it can word-wrap better.

Frassle Feedback, part 2

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 11:58:55 EST

(continued from a previous post)

It took me a while to figure out what searching "cats" meant. At first, I thought it was some sort of joke. Especially since you can also search for "feeds".
Search is weak. I'd like to collapse the results so I don't see the text of every result. It should tell me how many total results there were.

The search box now reads "categories" instead of "cats". The search for feeds is gone, since the whole feed recommendations engine is (temporarily (?)) disabled. The search is really slow, due to crappy underlying technology—an upgrade is on the agenda for this weekend. Improving result layout is important too.

The similarity scores are not commutative. For example, Bob Stepno's Useful Software is 100% similar to your useful software, but the other way around yields a score of under 5%. This calculation is counter-intuitive. Perhaps you should average the two to make a composite score?

The calculation is intentionally not commutative. Consider this scenario: Alice has a category called "great stuff" and Bob has two categories, "Good Stuff" and "Bad Stuff". Alice is an optimist so she categorizes items 1 and 2 under "great stuff". Bob, however, categorizes 1 as "Good Stuff" and 2 as "Bad Stuff". Suppose there is nothing else in any of the categories.

In this case, Bob's "Good Stuff" has 100% relevance to Alice's "great stuff". Bob's "Bad Stuff" is also 100% relevant to "great stuff". However, Alice's "great stuff" is only 50% relevant to Bob's "Good Stuff" and 50% relevant to "Bad Stuff".

Taking an average would overstate the relevance of Alice's categorizations to Bob. The simple fact is that Alice is just not as discriminating as Bob; based on what we know of the two of them there is a 50-50 chance something she calls "great" is good or bad. You could argue that stating both as 75% is equivalent, since those relevances are still comparable. However, if you look at the reverse, we're just reducing what would be a 100% relevance to 75% without compensating anywhere.

The calculation is perhaps a bit counterintuitive, but I think it enables more accurate representations of trust. If someone trusts you a lot, that doesn't mean you should trust them a lot.

I'm not a regular blogger, so it's hard for me to say how effective frassle is as a blogging tool. Frassle seems like a good way to comment on web sites, but I'm concerned that its blogging features conflict with Frassle's goal of organizing the web. Blogs tend to be opinionated, news-related, and personal; in order to be a successful librarian of the web, Frassle should encourage impartiality and a certain remove from the content. If people are using frassle to document their lives and comment on news items, then having groups of links is not all that helpful. Finding similar categories means finding more news about Israel or finding other people who are having problems with the green line. Selling Frassle as a blog gives it instant credibility as software, but it might undermine its potential as an organizer of content.

Actually, I think it's imperative that we embrace subjectivity and opinionation in organizing the web. Directories that strive for objectivity are no good; they're generic and bland. If you don't care much about someone's personal life, you won't read their blog and frassle won't suggest new posts from them into your categories. Some people ride the Green Line every day but others will never hear of it. The goal is to build a community that supports thousands of subtly and precisely differentiated internet directories, not one directory to rule them all.

But even if it were used strictly for categorizing and making sense of the web, there's one limitation I'd like you to think about. From what I can tell, Frassle does not examine links inside of posts when it calculates similarity scores. Therefore, if someone makes a post that synthesizes information about several sites, most of that linkage is lost. Frassle seems to prefer one entry per external URL; it could be missing some of the most effective groupings of links, that is, long blog entries about a particular topic. Computers should not be doing all of the synthesis.

Yes, in order to beat Google we'll have to scan links in the body, not just the <link> element.

I read your long introduction to Frassle. I'm intrigued by your discussion of social networking, but there's another social dimension that I would find useful. It'd be nice to get a little profile of the other Frasslers out there. Outfitting a Friendster-like service for Frassle would be overkill, but I think room for more personal information and touches would encourage the idea of the Frassle community and make the site more likable. Human faces have an ancient power of attraction; even though I find Frassle more useful than Friendster, I spend more time on Friendster because it offers a visible connection to people I know, and instant connections to strangers. Creating a large Frassle hierarchy takes patience, and in the absence of social rewards, the task will attract only librarian types: those who work well alone, like ideas, and have a penchant for organization. The blogging and commenting features add some social rewards, but I wonder whether more could be implemented: profiles that tell a little bit about a person, a mechanism for recommending links to your friends, or even a list of people whose hierarchies resemble your own. These sorts of additions could greatly broaden Frassle's appeal, and, as a consequence, make its database more comprehensive and useful.

There are some jumping-off points for finding people with categories like yours, thanks to the intercategory relevance tracking system. You can see this in action on the outline page. But this functionality is lost on most users (and even on me) due to (1) a bug in the design that fails to take a lot of relevant linkage into account, and (2) poor user interface design. These are major agenda items for this weekend.

The idea of user profiles is very interesting. I for one would love to know who some of my users are! I think the publisher might offer some good ways to approach this problem. We will definitely discuss this.

If you've made it this far, you must care about frassle! That's great! Now, tell me how you'd like it to be better. Send your feedback to frassle@rura.org.

Another Thursday Evening

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:28:16 EST

We start off talking about blogging the DNC. This bores the pants off of me. Actually, if it did anything to my pants, it would probably more interesting. OK, it's not so bad. Rick Heller and Michael Feldman have credentials. Rebecca MacKinnon will be out of town that weekend and has given up her credentials to some lucky waitlister.

Now a break while I record the meeting attendance.

New person: Randy, from a Harvard Library.
Vernica
Lisa
Josh
Sun
Rick Heller
Michael Feldman
Rebecca MacKinnon
Scott Johnson of feedster
Jessica Baumgart
Wendy Koslow
Steve Pomeroy
Andrew Grumet
me, Shimon Rura

A whopping 14 people! Wow. I think that's even more than last week.

Now we're all brainstorming on how bloggers can cover the DNC in a unique way. Detailed focus on people? Reporting on the 15,000 reporters covering a puny 5000 delegates? Interesting possibilities.

Adam Curry has an aggregated DNC feed. We'll also invite some people to the berkman-thursday yahoo group.

Good news! John Palfrey has offered to pay for a microphone and streaming audio software from Berkman funds. I've just emailed a link for a Sony ECM-R100.

The Berkman center is considering offering some additional blogging software options besides Manila. Andrew suggests that the Berkman center measure how much pain they are experiencing with Manila today and use that to judge the value of switching. I think he's got a good point, because organizations are often tempted to assume that a new piece of software solves all ills without introducing its own problems. Unfortunately, all software has bugs.

Michael suggests that perhaps those who are involved with the Berkman group could be given blog accounts. Wendy says that this is an option, and if there are any cases where this might be desired we can talk about it.

Scott mentions that what the software needs is a "provisioning layer"—a function in the software that allows the creation of blogs for people who we don't even know yet. According to Scott, there isn't a good open source blogging package with this feature. I hope someday frassle will change this!

Rebecca is going to a conference where she will be in a panel on blogs and media, with Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis. There's also an event about convergence of news and internet media, participatory journalism, etc. Rebecca will be at a rountable about international blogging and news, and a closing plenary dinner/session that she will moderate with a focus on blogging as a global phenomenon. Hoder, the Iranian blogger, will be there — since it's in Canada! Lisa suggests making audio recordings.

Guest speakers: no progress, no updates. Perhaps another week of waiting will bring miracles.

The meeting next week will be replaced by a meetup at Marche Movenpick on Wednesday.

Lisa suggests blog-enabling the campaign against Congressman Ed Markey. His opponents include Republican Ken Chase (note: Republican = snowball's chance in hell) and independent Jim Hall. Hall also has no chance. On the other hand, these non-lifetime-political-hack-types might have an actual chance of say, showing up here. Lisa's going to invite them.

End of meeting! We're going to Smile Thai.

Update: Smile Thai (next door to Tanjore) was actually really tasty, quite affordable, and able to seat 10 of us with little difficulty. Jessica has some notes too. And the Shimon chauffeur service safely delivered Wendy and Andrew (and Josh and Shimon) home.

Flickr and FeedBurner partner

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:18:26 EST

Looks like photo album service Flickr and the syndication wizards at FeedBurner are teaming up to develop a standard for including photo attributes in a feed. Excellent!

A new feedster!

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:14:39 EST

Scott Johnson announces (and releases) a bunch of new features on the world's finest RSS search engine, feedster. Congratulations, Scott!

Simple, Visual Rating Cues

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 11:49:59 EST

Frassle alpha 6 is on the very verge of rolling out. But now, I'm going to take a break from thinking about all the little bugs I still have to squash. Instead, I'm going to ponder the future, and the wonderful things that will come in the next feature release of frassle, whenever that will be.

Simple, visual rating cues. Frassle will allow all users to quickly rate any note. Next to each title, you'll see ratings buttons—from left to right, a thumbs up, thumb horizontal, and thumbs down. These will initially be dim outlines, but if you click one it will light up. This allows three settings, corresponding to good, neutral, or poor.

To allow a bit finer control, a double-click on the thumbs up will add a glowing star, singalling a rating of excellent. A double-click on thumbs down adds a crumpled ball of trash, or perhaps a steaming turd, signalling exceptional badness.

Behind the scenes, ratings will be implemented as categories. Here's how this will work: you'll have a category called rating in the root of your category hierarchy. Within that category will be numerically-valued subcategories. You might choose 1: bad, 2: poor, 3: average, 4: good, 5: excellent; or perhaps center around 0 or use different values.

The ratings category is special. Because it has numerically-valued subcategories, it's possible to compute a rating for any item that has been categorized under some rating. For example, if you put my website under "2: poor" and "4: good" it would get average rating of 3. But why would you ever rate something two different ways? Kind of pointless.

The interesting stuff happens when you let frassle do its interpersonal category relationship magic. When you rate or categorize stuff on other peoples' blogs, frassle tracks the relationship between their categories and yours. So if you consistent give a ranking of "5: excellent" to anything from my Google category, frassle will suggest a ranking of excellent for my next post in that category, even before you've read it.

Well, I'm just off base this week and have written some real crap. You haven't read it yet, but it's the sort of thing that will make you wish for your 2 minutes back.

But perhaps other people have read it. Suppose one person categorizes it under his "waste of time" category, which has a 30% correlation with your rating of 1: bad. Another person's categorization suggests a 67% correlation with 2—someone whose tastes you mostly agree with. And another suggests a rating of 3 with 54% confidence. Finally, there is some sycophant who always rates whatever I write as excellent. Since you rarely agree with him, that leaves only a 2%-confident suggestion for a rating of 5. We take the weighted average:

suggestedRating = (30%*1 + 67%*2 + 54%*3 + 2%*5) / (30% + 67% + 54% + 2%)

suggestedRating = 336% / 153%

suggestedRating = 2.196

Frassle suggests you'd probably rate this post about a 2. You can safely ignore it.

Many-to-Many: Social link management

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 15:48:06 EST

Clay Shirky lists some link managers. There are some impressive offerings in this mix.

Tim O'Reilly: The Open Source Paradigm Shift

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 11:33:18 EST

There are some great observations in this overly long essay.

One interesting trend is the shift of value away from software and toward the network effects surrounding software-based services. What this means is that while the software of ebay or amazon or orkut is fairly easy to clone, each of these businesses has its competitive advantage in the scale and involvement of its user base. The advantage is not in writing software, but in developing self-sustaining communities that invite and reward effective participation. This is dependent on software in roughly the same way that good cities are dependent on the layout of public spaces, roads, parks, transit networks, and buildings. Given enough money, you could clone all of these aspects of a city, but your clone wouldn't have any life until it was full of people constantly occupying the physical space and gradually reshaping it to fit their own lives.

In other words, skills now crucial in making software aren't taught in The Art of Computer Programming. If you want to make software, read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, or better yet, A Pattern Language.

There is also some grist for the prediction mill in this essay. Here are mine:

Microsoft will ship open-source software within 10 years. Leading up to this point, they will transition to a business focused primarily on helping people find and use content (including software) created by third parties. Their software margins will crumble during this time period, but they may be able to sustain a profitable software business by driving quality up and cost down due to explosive growth in the number of devices that use software.
Some interesting stuff is going to happen when people start figuring out how to commoditize network effects. This problem will require figuring out how to make software more responsive to user intentions, and less brittle at the mercy of incompatible formal interfaces. The driving forces in the next generation of programming systems will be social, not technical.

Life Hacks - pre-Alpha

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:18:15 EST

There are some useful links on this site, maintained by NotCon '04 speaker Danny O'Brien.

invisiblog.com - anonymous weblog publishing

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:06:44 EST

invisiblog.com lets you publish a weblog using GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network. You don't ever have to reveal your identity - not even to us. You don't have to trust us, because we'll never know who you are.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions - outline

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 09:19:05 EST

If I don't have time to get and read this book, perhaps I'll have time to skim this outline instead.

Metadata for the desktop

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 09:17:53 EST

Maybe this article will help me understand why RDF is so great.

Frassle Development Boot Camp

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 12:02:56 EST

This weekend, Josh and I will host a frassle development boot camp at our house. It will be a weekend devoted to utterly geeking out on frassle, and bringing two new developers into the fold: David Ramos and (hopefully) Evan Miller.

Some things have to get done before boot camp:

finish some new features in the aggregator (OPML import, on-subscribe and on-demand refresh of a feed,
elaborate noteset documentation with some examples
roll out frassle alpha 6 to the public server
setup CVS (or another version control system) repository for frassle development
(optional) write block API documentation

And specific goals for bootcamp:

review and improve visual/interactive design of frassle
write some more tutorials
put some screenshots on the home page (teasers)
figure out how categorizations should apply to subject/permalink (ask Shimon what this means if you care)
design the user experience for publisher customizations — what degree of customization do we want to allow? Can users customize block templates? Can they create a custom template for permalink pages? How can we make this easy to use? Do we need publisher scripts so that users can answer a few questions and have a site created for them according to a template designed by frassle programmers?
Data model: should fa_memberships put fa_notes into fa_cats, rather than fa_items?
Some amount of little things from Shimon's Big Green Notebook, such as:

backup/export your data
GeoURL support
implement the intercat_explain page
hide inter-category relationships on outline page by default
"post to this category" bookmarklet
pings, trackback, and pingback
switch to a less ass-slow full text search
the frassle shopping basket
frassle sidebar
date/time ranges in noteset expressions
- with arithmetic, so I can have an automatic "on this day in..." feature?
noteset builder (an interactive, simple way to construct noteset expressions)
hostname support for sites—e.g. put my blog at shimon.frassle.net
autosave note content when posting (using Javascript timers and cookies)

Clearly not all of this will get done, but I'm looking forward to bringing some new perspectives into frassle development.

Sweet Chili Chicken Salad

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 20:44:52 EST

A few days ago, my roommates brought home a big bottle of sweet chili sauce from an Asian grocery store. I've been experimenting with using it as a garnish on various dishes and have loved it, so tonight I tried using it in a more planned fashion. It turned out great.

Sweet Chili Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Romaine lettuce
1 tomato
4-5 pepperoncini
1 green pepper
2-3 chicken breasts
2 tsp sesame oil
Sweet Chili Sauce
salt
1 Tbsp white or rice vinegar
2 tsp lemon juice
a dash of Fines Herbs (just Thyme will suffice)
if extra spice is desired, an iota of chili oil

Slice the chicken into bite-size pieces. Heat sesame oil in skillet with high flame. Add chicken and 1 tbsp sweet chili sauce. Saute, stirring frequently. When nearly cooked, add Fines Herbs, chili oil if desired, and a bit of salt. Add some more sweet chili sauce, cook to completion, and dash on vinegar and lemon juice.

Allow to cool a bit, toss with sliced lettuce, tomato, pepperoncini, and green pepper, and serve. For extra flavor, pour a bit of pickling liquid from pepperoncini onto salad. Croutons also recommended.

Serves 3 as entree or 5-6 as side.

Re: Just for the Record

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 13:06:37 EST

Who do you think we are, abusive, criticism-fearing sociopaths who believe everything we do is perfect? Picky (but polite) users are our best friends!

NYT: Search Results Are In, All on the Same Page

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 11:59:16 EST

The New York times has a Circuits piece on Amplify, a tool that lets you easily combine stuff from multiple websites on a single page. So you can create a tiled view of different wallpaper and furniture patterns, or combine info from several sites on the same topic. Here's an example.

Sounds like blogging, eh? Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, and Rafat Ali deride it as a weak attempt to do blogging in a proprietary format. I guess they're right. But to the extent that Amplify is useful or successful, what can we learn from it? What can we learn from it suckage?

First the successes—or anticipated successes. The frames design is horrid for most things, like the Bushisms example linked above, but it is good for some things. Sometime you want to compare things side-by-side. Doing this with frames might work for some people.

Getting in the New York Times is good. Perhaps it's paid placement, but in any case it is a good way to reach out to thousands of people likely to be interested in a high-tech product.

Now the suckage. Frames-based design is usually bad. People are good at using scrollbars. The site has some classic design flaws, but the chief problem is that there are lots of links with vague feel-good titles that nobody will ever click on. Consider the seven things in the HUGE Amplify bar at the top of each amp page, from left to right:

Cone-shaped doohickey. Turns out this just goes to Amplify homepage, as does the huge logo on the right. It almost looks like some sort of magical control widget that allows you to set the volume, but that metaphor makes no sense here.
Back button. BACK button? What the fuck? It's just like the back button in my browser except it's in the wrong place and doesn't work.
"What is Amplify?". Another link to the homepage. Brilliant!
"Get Amplify". Download for MSIE/Windows. The most straightforward item of the bunch, though not something you'd click more than once.
"Amplify Community". Links to a collection of hierarchically categorized pages by other amp users. This is a reasonable features, but if it said "see 5 other amps about animals having sex" instead of something totally generic maybe people could be interested enough to click on it. Comment links on every fragment of an amp page would be better.
"Share this amp". Send a link via email. Useful enough, but why not just say "email this amp"?
Huge amplify logo. Goes to, shockingly, the home page.

Oh, and I found out what the back button does. It takes you to the previous amp you were at. Rather than just letting your browser's back button work, it introduces a puzzling UI behavior by opening any amps on top of each other in the same window. If you use your browser's back button, it goes to some intermediate page momentarily and then forwards you to the page you were just viewing. Lame.

Well, I guess I turned from taking an optimistic look at Amplify to ragging on it hard Jarvis-style. Sorry Amplify, but maybe these suggestions can help you improve your interface. I'll leave you with some wisdom from Strongbad, whose love for scrolling could serve as a good lesson for the frames-addicted amplify developers.

Every day you come a-scrollin' back, scroll buttons gettin' ill like a heart-attack. Uh!

Berkman Thursday Notes, 8 Jul 04

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 09:48:26 EST

First topic: guest speakers. Not many thoughts, though Wendy mentions that David Weinberger will come sometimes but he has kids so evenings are tough. Michael suggests we invite people after vetting the invite at a meeting. Rebecca will ask around and try to find an local professional journalist so we can compare journalist and blogger approaches to covering the DNC (this would have to happen at next week's meeting or we'll miss the convention). Bob recommends a speaker remotely but I was too distracted to listen to who it was, so perhaps it will show up on list.

Sooz suggests introductions, so she goes first. Then Rick Heller, John Stafford, Elin Sjursen, me, Wendy, j (yesterday's feedster feed of the day), Rebecca MacKinnon, Michael Feldman, Jared Dunn (first time here, freelance design, works at MIT), Vernica, Sun. That's 12 people if I can count properly (odds of that are grim).

Recap (since I came in late) of webcasting: this is a priority for the group. Wendy will ask Berkman higher-ups for some funding but that isn't likely. We need perhaps $200 for RealOne and $100 for a good mic. I suggested perhaps using free MP3 streaming instead. I should talk to Jay McCarthy about setting up this software - probably it will fall to one of us to do the setup.

Marketing: some Harvard people will spread the word around Harvard. We should run another intro to weblogging course, using the materials Michael and Andrew used. For recruiting outside Harvard, our best bets are probably our blogs. Jared suggests upcoming.com; also craigslist, socialweb, etc. Dave has also said he would plug the blog group on scripting news.

Michael suggests we discuss a reason for the group to exist: if we can agree to focus on a goal, we have the talent to achieve it. Wendy thinks we're missing Lisa; also Jay, and Andrew. Michael suggests (and I agree) that we start discussing this on list. Taking our time to think about this away from a live meeting will be helpful.

What about different blogging software? In the past, Dave's oversight has limited discussion of blogging tools other than Manila. We'd like to get a broader range of tools, although the question of what Berkman can support is still open.

On that point, there was some funny dialogue that went something like this:

"We're not sure Berkman is capable of administering the Manila server," says Wendy.
"Or anything else," says Shimon, stating in a fashion that seemed totally obvious to him at the time that any multi-user blogging software is going to take some effort and expertise to maintain.
At which point Wendy, administrative uber-goddess of the Berkman center, gave Shimon a look that—you know this one—is a blend of nurtuting generosity, caricatured scorn, and sheer pity that only women can produce. With the raised-but-tensed eyebrows and the looking down the nose.

Now on to the topic of fun non-meeting activities: brunch, dim sum; barbeque went well last week and we should try it again. Jessica is the de-facto chairperson of these matters.

Wendy thinks moving the meeting to Wednesday is a bad idea. I too like it on Thursday. It ain't broke so we won't fix it.

Lists - the process of getting control is under control.

Wendy will talk to the tech folks about getting us internet access via Harvard for us non-Harvardites. Though today we have a pleasantly snappy open gateway.

Dinner: Chang Sho or Cambridge Common? Only time will tell...
(time said Cambridge Common)

(this post was updated on Friday 7/9 with some clarifications and elaboration and that reconstructed Wendy/Shimon dialogue)

Firehouse.com: Photo Stories: Car vs. Telephone Wires in Texas

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 08:32:06 EST

Via the Autoblog, here's something you should try to avoid doing even though it looks pretty cool. Still, that's some pretty good air for a Mercury Sable.

Brunch at my place this Saturday

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 21:24:32 EST

I just emailed 43 brunch invitations for this Saturday. If you'll be in the Boston area, and I like you, or I should like you, let me know! If a small fraction of the invitees show up, it should be a great time. Going over the list, I realized how many great people I know.

That is part blatant attempt to flatter any potential brunchers who followed the link to my weblog at the bottom of the email, but mostly honest observation. :)

Re: Frassle sketches C and D

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 16:11:15 EST

Wow! Great stuff, Dave!

I really like sketch D. It instantly reminds me of a product called BaseCamp, which is one of the best web applications out there—powerful, useful, and elegant in design. I don't understand the category column at left; why does "everything" and "international" show at left with a marker and the other stuff at right?

Like your previous design, I totally dig the icons. Especially the fish for the aggregator. I think there is a little too much empty space up top. I like the color scheme better, though I think it could be more interesting. I'm confused by the intersection of four corners in the masthead—where the red-background blog title meets the frassle title and page builder and blog editing controls. This 4-way intersection grabs my attention but doesn't teach me anything.

Perhaps we could see it with the red background dripping down to the blog editing actions, since they are logically associated with the blog, and perhaps some space between the your weblog - aggregator - page builder buttons and the red part?

Design C preserves some of the aspects of frassle's current layout that I like, but has no way to get to frassle's most important functional areas (your weblog, aggregator, site builder). It's hard to imagine how it would look with actual weblog text at the right, so for now I can see in it only incremental improvements to the current design.

Thanks so much for these sketches. We need to talk further about design, especially considering the upcoming split between frassle-the-reading-and-writing-application and frassle-the-backend-for-a-website-you-design. By the way, that is nearly done and alpha 6 will roll out any day now. Only a few changes to the aggregator and note posting/editing page remain. In addition to the new functionality of the page builder, I believe the user experience will be improved dramatically.

SnipSnap

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 15:33:21 EST

magazine: Introducing the Microcontent Client

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 15:32:18 EST

A two-year-old article on microcontent clients: programs that integrate reading, searching, sharing, and publishing all kinds of content. Looks very interesting and might offer some perspective around a project like frassle.

(Update 8/9/04): I read the article. To summarize, it argues that reading, searching, sharing, and publishing content should be integrated. I guess that's just what it seemed like from a cursory skim... well, not every article rewards a careful reading with deeper insight.

RhizomeStatus

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 15:31:40 EST

a personal tool to allow me to take notes in a wide variety of contexts — plain text files, blog entries, comments in source code, MS Word/Open Office documents, etc — and keep an archive that keeps track of locations and can automatically (based on metadata rules) republish the content in a variety of formats: e.g. assemble the notes into the outline of a formal document in DocBook, or as a collection of interlinked pages on a Wiki-like website.

Login problem fixed

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 13:55:16 EST

A frassle bug where you would be logged out after a few minutes has been fixed on this server. Checking "save login information on this computer" at the login screen will now leave you logged in for something like 10 years, whereas before it was incorrectly keeping you logged in for 5 minutes. If you didn't check this box, you would stay logged in for as long as you kept your web browser open, but of course you wouldn't get the convenience of staying logged in.

Thanks to Jessica for finding this bug (and many more). Thanks to Boris Zentner, maintainer of Apache::PageKit, for a prompt and helpful response.

The problem was in the date calculation inside libapreq2 (look for "cookie expiration" in the changelog), which divided expiration time by 1000. I used a cruddy but safe workaround, which was to use CGI::Cookie instead of Apache::Cookie. My shoddy workaround and Boris' instructions for a real fix should be documented in today's pagekit-users list archives. The bug did not appear until recently in frassle because libapreq1, which was used until I upgraded the server to Apache 2.0, did not have this bug.

Re: New Comment Notification

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 09:58:34 EST

Jessica has asked for new comment notifications in frassle. I think most of what she wants will be possible with the frassle publisher. In the publisher, you can build pages out of elements called blocks that contain a list of frassle notes. A note in frassle is a blog post or comment, authored in frassle or read from an external source with the aggregator—we intentionally treat these all the same.

The way you choose which notes show up in a block is by writing a noteset expression. This is a little computer program that frassle reads. Here are a couple of examples.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1"
This selects the most recent 10 notes from my blog.

feed="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/xml/rss.xml" | feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1"
This takes the most recent 10 notes from both my blog and j's scratchpad. If I've been slacking and j's written 10 new entries in the last hour, it could be entirely from her blog. But probably it will be mixed. The "|" symbol is pronouced or.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" & body_word_count > 40
Selects the most recent 10 notes from my blog that have over 40 words in their body. This is good for differentiating pointers to random stuff on the web from deeper articles.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" & body_word_count > 40 & cat="/computers"
Articles I've written and categorized under computers.

feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" & body_word_count > 40 & not( cat="/computers" )
Articles I've written that might be of interest to people who aren't utter geeks.

Now the good part...

responds_to( feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" )
Recent responses to stuff on my blog! This will include notes where I respond to myself, which is probably not too useful for a "recent comments" list, so we can tweak it:

responds_to( feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" ) & not( feed="http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/rss?id=1" )
Now we get recent responses to stuff on my blog, but only stuff that I haven't written. I can put this is a block on the side of my page, with "Quick Links List" style to display the commenter's name, date, and the comment title.

NewsRanker - The RSS Aggregator that Prioritizes Your News

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 16:16:24 EST

I'll have to try out this aggregator.

The NewsRanker is an RSS aggregator that sorts news items by how interesting it thinks you'll find them. With the NewsRanker you can stay on top of hundreds of subscriptions without wasting time digging through the many items that you don't care about.

AmphetaRate

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 16:14:45 EST

AmphetaRate is a centralized ratings/recommendation service that provides personalized news and blog recommendations through a news aggregator interface. Using compatible aggregators, you can rate articles found in your subscribed feeds to discover articles and feeds that suit your taste, thus filling your news addiction.

Findory Blogory: Your personalized weblog reader

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 16:12:50 EST

Click on articles that interest you. Then come back to Findory Blogory. We'll find other weblogs articles for you and build you a personalized front page!

Customized RSS feeds. Coolness.

perl.com: Perl's Special Variables

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 09:44:36 EST

It's rare that a Perl article teaches me something new, but I must admit that I wasn't aware of what the .. operator does in scalar context. Neato.

Funding Surrogate Customers to Bootstrap Open Source Projects

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 12:10:52 EST

Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and ex-cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth has an article about his experience funding the development of SchoolTool, an open source school administration system. Mark first attempted to develop this software by funding a dedicated team, which failed as the developers pursued shiny geeky projects instead of producing working software. To counteract this problem, he will fund multiple, separate teams that collaborate over the internet. This will have two major effects on the project. First, the different teams will keep each other in check—focused on developing working parts of the software because other developers depend on them. Second, the separate teams will be forced to have their discussions on public forums like mailing lists and wikis. This will open up the development process to input and criticism from other developers and customers, as well as build a body of explicit knowledge that will help the community sustain itself without overdependence on the original team.

This seems like a good strategy and I hope that it continues to serve SchoolTool well. But I want to propose another approach: funding the surrogate customer. Open source projects can really take off only when there is a balance of management-style leaders, hardworking programmers, and conscientious end-users. It is the nature of open source that any individual need not fall neatly into one of these boxes, and one may indeed be all three—a person truly scratching his own itch. Mark's approach seems to start with getting some good programmers and building extra support for the leadership. But can we also go the other direction, funding the creation of users?

I think here the philanthropists can take a lesson from commercial software development. Most software development companies have dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) teams, whose job is to test the software being delivered by the development team and find bugs. Really, the purpose of QA is to serve as a surrogate customer—to keep developers in check by complaining the way a customer would, but before you've actually sold anything. Because QA staff are employed, they are also distinguished from regular customers by their willingness to work patiently with developers to sort out problems; they have a stake in the software's success.

This same relationship happens with the best users of open source software. When a user really wants a project to succeed because it will make her own life easier, and she knows she can contribute fruitfully to the project, she will be more patient and generous. If in her use of the software she finds a bug, she may not only report it, but report it in detail. She'll add an explanation of her motivations for using the software in this way, descriptions of workarounds that she's found, and an explanation of the ultimately desired behavior. Software developers can often fix a bug without much of this background information, but a thorough bug report is distinguished from a trivial one by its ability to trigger Aha! moments in the developers' minds. The most valuable bug reports both elucidate real project requirements, giving developers a more accurate direction, and pin that direction to an actual living person that the developer can truly help. They help developers stay effective.

This leads to an interesting question: if we had bags of money, could we ensure this benefit to an open source project by simple paying people? If we buy these surrogate customers for open source projects, how much faster can a project get rolling? How much better will their software be? In other words, is it worth it? Perhaps another philanthropic ex-cosmonaut will help us find out.

God Bless Wireless Internet

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 01:24:18 EST

My day today:

Work. Ends early thanks to holiday and departmental generosity.
Packing. For my trip this weekend to New York City. (*New* *York* City?)
Sailing. My first time ever, on the Charles River, in a hurry. But absolutely wonderful — thanks Josh.
Bus. 4.5 hours on the Fung Wah bus from Boston's Chinatown to New York's Chinatown. Highlights: overturned semi slows traffic on I-87(?); girl talking on cell phone accidentally gets abandoned at rest stop, forcing 15-minute panicked-girl retrieval operation; Spanish-speaking family with at least 4 children sitting directly behind me plays terrible Spanish-language rap songs on tinny little boombox the entire ride, yet somehow I not only manage to avoid strangling them but actually doze off a couple of times.
Arrival. New York's Chinatown is way dirtier than Boston's.
Subway. Miraculously, though I hop on trains with little actual clue where they will take me, I make my way through 3 lines to my desired stop on the upper West side.
Comfort. A quiet studio apartment, a good long shower, and a window AC unit that keeps it a comfy 78 degrees.
The Sublime. Free, reliable WiFi internet on the first try. The first try! I love this city.

monotone: distributed version control

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 12:04:53 EST

monotone is a free distributed version control system. it provides a simple, single-file transactional version store, with fully disconnected operation and an efficient peer-to-peer synchronization protocol. it understands history-sensitive merging, lightweight branches, integrated code review and 3rd party testing. it uses cryptographic version naming and client-side RSA certificates. it has good internationalization support, has no external dependencies, runs on linux, solaris, OSX, and windows, and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Arch for CVS Users

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 12:04:33 EST

Another version control system to consider.

Heading to NYC this weekend

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 10:15:09 EST

I'm going down to New York this weekend to enjoy the 4th of July in the company of my best old friend Ben. I will depart shortly after work by Chinatown bus, then attempt to make my way to a family friend's residence on Manhattan's upper west side. For future reference: the official MTA has a crowded real-geography map, while nycsubway.org has a much clearer map which distorts real shapes and sizes but emphasizes subway distance instead.

If you'll be in New York this weekend, give me a call on my mobile phone at (857) 928-3028.

Lyrics to "Mr. CIO Guy"

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 08:58:10 EST

An excellent parody to the tune of American Pie.

Bye, Bye Mr. CIO-Guy, Gonna outsource every resource `til the business runs dry.

Re: Bomb Scare

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 14:26:29 EST

Oh man, I was wondering where I left that little box. Damnit.

ASJ: Using CVS for Web Development

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 14:23:38 EST

that's right, frassle will get CVS, and I will once again be able to face my fellow programmers without shame...

Re: possible Frassle page layouts - Idea "B"

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 13:33:45 EST

Dave, thanks for this excellent frassle design mockup.

My favorite things in this design are the line-art icons for the different views and actions. They will help the viewer (especially the first-time viewer) get a feeling for what these other views are useful for quickly.

One thing I'd like to give higher billing in frassle is the aggregator. It is an important feature of frassle that you can look at someone else's aggregator. Of course, right now the aggregator is so hard to use that almost nobody actually uses it for reading. I am working on this.

Another confusing aspect of this design is that the current category appears above the weblog title. Since you're browsing categories within a weblog, this seems counterintuitive; at first glance one might think the weblog itself belongs in the category. Additionally, the editing actions appear above the category bar. Since these are special actions that you can only do to your own weblog, I think it makes sense to differentiate them somehow, but I'm not sure how. Perhaps they could show up listed vertically in the right column, in a subtly highlighted box with a title like "editing actions". Note that because there are lots of ways to introduce these functions on an as-needed basis—for example, you can add categories on the fly when you're categorizing a post—these editing actions are rarely used from this interface anyway.

By the way, I like the right column, and would like to put a blogroll there. However, this particular question brings to the forefront another issue: the distinction between frassle as backend and the frassle publisher. Currently, there is one interface that serves both the authors and the readers. The upcoming publisher forks off one of these audiences, allowing any frassle user to construct a view of any information in frassle.

To support this distinction, I am inclined not to make the "recent posts" page more personalized. The frassle-as-a-user-facing-application stuff should be there and should be optimized for people with frassle accounts. The publisher should help these users publish material in a format optimized for a particular reading audience. I don't want to tread further into the territory of one frassle application straddling the needs of these different audiences.

A few more nits to pick: I'm not a fan of the subdued orangish-greenish-and-blue color scheme. I think it's weird the way the orange category bar cuts off above the rightmost column. The use of different fonts for your weblog | aggregrator | publisher links and home | status is odd.

Google Search: shimon

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 00:56:21 EST

Here's some crazy news. This blog is now the second result for shimon in Google. That places me one Google-rung above Shimon Peres, former prime minister of Israel and accomplished statesman. If you ever wanted proof that Google rank is a stupid way to compare the cumulative lifetime achievements of people, here it is!

If I ever beat out experimental psychology researcher Shimon Edelman for the #1 spot, I'm having a party and you're all invited. In fact, I am having a brunch at my place on Saturday, July 10 and you're all invited. Except all you weirdos searching for shimon on google — you can just get your own brunch. :)

Re: More Thoughts on the Frassle Login Problems

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 23:22:37 EST

It looks like I am experiencing this login bug too. The good news is I can replicate the problem. The bad news is I have no friggin clue how to fix it. Time will tell...

Road Trip

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 23:57:36 EST

I'm writing this from my friend Cathy's house in Clinton, New York (near Syracuse). Cathy invited me up this weekend and the timing was just right. I've had a couple of fairly tough weeks—it seems like bad things have been happening to my friends—and also have a weekend without choir rehearsal thanks to our recent concert. I left my apartment at 5:30 and arrived here at 10pm, exactly as planned thanks to a lucky blend of speeding like crazy on I-90 and stopping at a couple of rest areas.

Cathy has a beatiful old place with excellent guest quarters and a happy orange cat named Norman. It's almost culture shock to be in a place where space and silence is so abundant. Fortunately there is a cable modem. I hope to get some work done on frassle from my laptop.

I forgot two things: my cell phone charger and contact lens solution. The latter has been procured but my extra rest stop didn't yield a charger. Therefore, I'm in communicado on the phone for a little while.

Oh, and if you're reading this and near Hamilton College, send me an email.

Microsoft still loses, but here's a win-win workaround

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 14:20:25 EST

Joe Beda, Microsoft's development lead for Avalon, has a response to the discussion around essays such as Joel Spolsky's How Microsoft lost the API war.

Why do people write web based client/server apps over writing rich client apps for Windows?
Frictionless deployment story
Cross platform interoperability
More fun to code — you can set up your own API system and abstract HTML to a large extent
Built in network/server awareness
You put all of these together and you have a pretty darn compelling story for many scenarios. How can the Windows client compete with this? The key is to take the good things of the web that we can (1, 3 and 4) and combine that with all of the goodness from having stuff run on the client. Don't get me wrong — I still believe in the web as a way to interoperate and exchange content and as a lowest common denominator for UI interaction. But we can do so much better than HTML with the horsepower that is sitting on our desk when it makes sense to do so.

The problem for Microsoft is that there is no compelling reason to remove #2 from this list. If you are making something that runs in a sandbox, does not depend on legacy windows APIs, is network-transparent, and uses high-level languages, you don't have to compile those languages into Win32 binaries. You might even be tempted to compile them to, say, Microsoft's .NET CLR, which is practically cross platform today.

If Microsoft figures out what features belong in Avalon and then makes it Windows-only, their features will quickly be cloned by cross-platform systems. Java will grow into this space quickly, and Novell will have plenty of time to develop a business here before Longhorn ever ships. These cross-platform clients will either support Avalon directly or provide a more appealing alternative (cross platform + free would beat Windows-only + expensive + bundled in Longhorn and thus taking 2 years to reach critical mass). The end result either way is that Microsoft will abstract away its most profitable market, the desktop OS.

So what's Microsoft to do? Go with the flow. The world is going to be deploying a lot more applications. They are going to have rich interfaces. They are going to be bought on-demand. They are going to evolve quickly. And there will be so many of them that consumers are going to need some way to shop around and take delivery from trusted sources.

To date, Microsoft has made one major step forward in improving the maintainability of their software. They created Windows Update. Windows update isn't novel; in fact, it's pretty primitive and limited to a single (though large) software product. But it is a huge win for both Microsoft and its customers: faster patch application means better security—good for customers and good for MS's reputation; a prolonged relationship with customers; more control of software even after it's shipped.

Windows Update could be even more useful if it applied to other products. Making Windows Update handle SQL Server service packs would certainly be considered an illegal anticompetitive practice, but it would be helpful to many. But opening Windows Update to other software vendors would be huge. Then, expanding Windows Update to support purchases of software—not unlike how Apple's iTunes supports purchases of music—would only be logical.

Like Apple with iTunes, Microsoft could take a cut of each sale; they could also charge for hosting patches. But also like Apple, they'd make their biggest cut selling more ~~iPods~~ Windows machines.

How to pitch to a VC

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 13:33:58 EST

A good series of questions to test whether a nascent business or business idea is viable.

Reminder: New Century Voices Concert, Wed June 23 8pm

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 08:50:02 EST

The choir I sing in, New Century Voices (our website has been updated!) has a concert coming up. It's going to be great. You should come. Let me know if you want to carpool or anything.

New Century Voices

performs music by local and well-known composers:
Stravinsky, Aguiar, Veloso, Tuggle, Hill, and others

Wednesday, June 23
8pm

Church of the Holy Name
1689 Centre St.
West Roxbury, MA

Admission is free, $5 suggested donation

My favorite pieces we'll be performing are a series called Rumors of an Aeolian Harp by local composer Elizabeth Knight, fellow chorister Scott Hill's Gloria, Stravinsky's Ave Maria, and local composer David Little's jazzy Jukebox Love Song.

Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 08:46:44 EST

OK, if you think frassle's current WYSIWYG editor is too heavy, you might like this rich text editor. Perhaps someday I'll add the ability for a frassle user to set a preferred editor: HTMLArea, this RTE, or a vanilla textarea.

Also interesting: a couple of highly interactive image and file managers.

Kansas Department of Revenue - Drug Tax Stamps

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 16:03:09 EST

The fact that dealing marijuana and controlled substances is illegal does not exempt it from taxation. Therefore drug dealers are required by law to purchase drug tax stamps.

Now here's a state that's really thought its tax code through. To outrageous consequences!

HTML::RSSAutodiscovery

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:07:10 EST

Perl code to do RSS autodiscovery. This is exactly what I need to add one-click subscribe to frassle's aggregator.

Docufrassletation

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 00:36:38 EST

I'm writing documentation for frassle. This Thursday, Dave impressed on me the importance of documentation. But as I work, I'm finding something surprising—it's not just for the users.

The documentation comes in the form of tutorials. Each tutorial takes you through the system with some specific goal: gettings started with posting and categories, installing bookmarklets, using the aggregator, link stacking, or building a custom site in frassle publisher. Each step of the tutorial shows in a small top frame while you do what the tutorial says in the lower frame. It goes step by simple step.

I chose the tutorial appraoch because I believe it's easiest to learn by example. It also give me a way to show you how I do it, so I can transmit not only details about how the system works but also my own tips on how I like using it. You could almost call it the blog-style approach to help.

It's not just for the users

The tutorial approach has other upsides. As I write the tutorial, I have to put myself in the mind of a newbie. I have to write without jargon. Therefore, if I write something and it sounds confusing, I have to ask why.

Often, the reason some text is confusing is that I wrote it poorly. But sometimes, the reason it's confusing is that frassle's design is confusing.

Uh oh! Abandon ship! Design fundamentally unsound—bewildered users running amok!

Deep breath. Ahh. Thankfully, it isn't that bad. I'm doing sanity checks and making little improvements. Why? Because, hey, a tutorial is the same thing as a use case!

That's why writing tutorials is as good for me as it will be for you.

Backbase is un-fucking-believable

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 21:19:54 EST
OK, this only applies to web developer nerds like me. But Backbase has a couple of demos of their web UI toolkit. It is like using an application, but it's inside your browser. Cross platform. Wow.

Latest Funny Thing

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 13:44:27 EST
The Onion horoscopes has a line I particularly like:
Taurus: (April. 20—May 20)
You'll be violated hundreds of times by out-of-control alcoholics, but it's to be expected, considering that you're the local ordinance against drunk and disorderly conduct.
In the frassle publisher, it is easy to feature a short funny thing somewhere on a page. To set up, you
create a category for it, say "short funny things";
add a block to your page that shows one note from "short funny things";
browse to "short funny things" and drag the post in this category bookmarklet to your toolbar.
Then when you see something funny, you just highlight the text in your browser and click your post to "short funny things" bookmarklet. You can edit the note text or select other categories, but all you really have to do is click Post. The note is posted to the category, and your frassle publisher pages automatically get that latest piece of content.

Usage summary: browse, select text, click bookmarklet, click Post button. It will be sweet! I'll have to build this scenario into the guided tour.

The challenges of contextual implicit search

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 15:18:48 EST

Here's a mop-up-the-drool review of BlinkX, a search sidebar product. This is an example of contextual, implicit search, not unlike dashboard. It certainly seems useful to have relevant information automatically made available to you. But there are two (non-technical) challenges with bringing this kind of software to market. First, data off the public internet is usually not useful—and most people know to use Google when it can be. Secondly, there is a trust barrier that prevents users from opening their own data to such a product.
In the first case, an automatic sidebar might save you some typing, but if you want to do a Google search it's often just a text-selection and right-click away. However, when you're looking to get something done—rather than just be distracted by random stuff to read—you don't need constant google results. If you sell Widgets, you probably already know that the company you work for makes Widgets and that effective selling requires courtesy. You need to know much more specific stuff, especially from your past successes and mistakes. The stuff you need isn't on the public internet.
On the other hand, an individual or company would be profoundly naieve to open confidential data to an internet startup offering to index it for your convenience. That smells like spyware. After years of web-based email, even Google found that privacy norms weren't universally understood. And I wouldn't trust even Google with the contents of my hard drive. Dashboard, which is an open source application, overcomes these problems because it doesn't depend on any central entity, but I don't think it's anywhere near production-ready yet.
So, what about selling to companies? I think there is some potential here, but even a great contextual search application isn't going to sell on its own. Enterprise buyers will, however, see it as a major benefit if integrated into a broader knowledge management framework. Crucially, the search must acquire context from specific business applications and data, and provide results in useful, structured formats. For example, it should notice if you're entering a sales prospect form for General Motors and show you all previous sales attempts with GM, organized into sucesses and failures. It should show you current data on GM's profit in the location you are targeting. It should show you the latest intelligence on which executives to pitch to, along with their personal tastes. Then you know that your best bet is to offer John Doe in Dearborn a ride to golf in your CTS-V, but best wait until Q2 financials are done.
If I were developing a product like BlinkX, I'd start by partnering with enterprise KM (knowledge management) and CMS (content management) vendors and consultants. These markets have some special advantages. First, you can sell to end users and not just advertisers. Second, the business context can trump individual privacy concerns, at least at the corporate purchasing level. Finally, the ubiquitous search sidebar is a great motivator to get people into the habit of using and contributing to knowledge repositories. It's a natural symbiosis.

Re: Big media in other situations

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 14:28:14 EST
The one is a small, growing company with a culture that appreciates challenges and risks. The other is an aged, terminally ill industry with a culture that expects gravy and cynically manipulates the opinions and tastes of a large portion of American society. I hope we get more of the former and put the latter out of their misery.

Re: Stupid rich text editor

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 14:17:29 EST

Josh, I rather enjoy this editor. It's called HTMLArea. It's Free, works in recent versions of both IE and Mozilla, is ridiculously easy to deploy, and offers a great interface.
If you want to type the markup, hit the <> button. It's fourth from the right in the lower row.
Could you be more specific about its interface problems? I think the interface works really well. If your browser users tabs for popup windows, it's a little clunky but that's what you get for living on the cutting edge.
It runs fine on my linux firefox installation. Any idea why yours would work differently?
Did the editor freeze or did your browser crash? I've used this editor extensively under MyIE and Firefox with 1 browser crash and 0 editor lockups.
This is a frassle bug, not an HTMLArea bug, and is fixed in the next version. Also you may be able to work around it by hitting the back button.

Lisa Williams: Free set of steak knives

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 11:11:02 EST
Lisa has a hilarious battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.

Re: Innovator's Dilemma

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 18:14:39 EST
I demand more! As promised!!!

bbspot: New Features in Office 2003

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:41:56 EST

Features buried much deeper
Average menu depth has been increased to 7.4/item across the entire Office 2003 line making sure you don't accidentally select something you didn't want to.

Bummer of a day

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 23:41:41 EST
Some bad news today. First I heard from a good friend of mine that his father died, suddenly, in his sleep. I wish I could be in Cincinnati to give my friend some support and consolation. But I know he's a strong, smart guy too and he'll be alright.

Then I heard from my mom that Misi, my favorite cat, died today aged 13 years. Misi was a loving cat who would lick me like a dog does—but with his sandpaper tongue. He was very fat, once measuring 27 pounds, but to me that only made him softer and cuddlier.

Once, sometime in high school or maybe in the summer after my first year of college, Misi attacked me in my sleep. He was sleeping right next to me, and I must have rolled over onto him. He scratched me across my chest leaving a scar of 3 parallel lines that is still quite visible.

Of course I was very startled and went to the bathroom to wash myself off. The shock must have held on a little longer than I expected, because on my way out of the bathroom I fainted, waking up an instant later to be puzzled by the sudden approach of the floor to my forehead. A kind of weird memory, but as it has left its evidence permanently on my body, at least it's something I can remember Misi by. Of course I forgave him immediately and he was always welcome to sleep in my bed.

The other cats, our dog, and my mom will miss you. I'll miss you too, "fatjigos".

My best wishes to my friend and his family. I know Tom had a happy, rich life with your love. We'll miss him.

MyStack -- Build your stacks here...

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 11:50:34 EST

MyStack.com lets you create "Stacks" - like the one you see on the right-hand side of the page. A stack is a list of links, like a blogroll, and can be inserted into a weblog or webpage. Unlike ordinary blogrolls, the list of links in a Stack changes. When you create a stack, you tell us what items you want us to stack for you. When the PubSub system finds new items that match your request, your Stack is immediately updated.

List of through-the-web WYSIWYG HTML editors

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:37:19 EST
Here at frassle, we love our HTMLArea. This is a comprehensive list of things like it.

OSCOM 4 RFP: Zurich 29 Sept - 1 Oct

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 14:49:43 EST
now to see if I can manage a second international trip in September...

What's up with Wikis?

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 17:03:39 EST

I'm trying to wrap my mind around Wikis. They seem to have some sort of conceptual barrier: a few people seem to love them but most are just bewildered. I'm not a skeptic—I like the idea that anyone can edit a page and I believe it can work civilly. In this post, which I've incrementally edited over the course of several hours, I hope to figure out what works and what's bewildering.
Consider collaboration at a workplace. A wiki would seem to work well here because people already have an etiquette for interacting with each other. There is a compelling need to share lots of information. It is beneficial when people not usually involved in a certain discussion can read it and contribute. It is a great time-saver when work documents have been saved in a shared, searchable system. Sounds wikilicious, no?
But the unconstrained form of the wiki implies some major limitations. Firstly, there is no way to keep up to date on new material. At work, information quickly becomes outdated and useless; but most Wikis do not provide a usable way to keep tabs on the latest developments. Perhaps this could be addressed by better-designed "latest changes" pages and publication of RSS feeds. I'm not sure because I haven't personally used these features in a wiki.
The two wikis I have used and enjoyed, Ward Cunningham's original (c2) Wiki and the Wikipedia, have chosen to focus on content that is not very time-sensitive. The c2 Wiki focuses on patterns in software development. The word pattern here refers to a specific literary form. Though it has been diluted somewhat from its original meaning (discussed, among other things, in Richard Gabriel's wonderful book Patterns of Software) it is a way of identifying a system of related events, actions, and people that occurs repeatedly in life. The pattern literary form identifies a pattern and describes a technique to help achieve it. There are also antipatterns that tell you what to avoid.
Patterns are well suited to collaborative development on a wiki. Firstly, patterns benefit from the input of many people—their different experiences can refine the pattern's definition, identify gotchas, and point to related information. Secondly, a large set of interrelated patterns comprise a pattern language. A pattern language is like a regular language—your familiarity with it should be broad, not focused; some redundancy is built in; and certain parts of it lead you naturally to other parts. This maps well to a wiki, because you can start at one place and go through at your own pace. If you need specific knowledge to understand the context of one pattern, it links to that knowledge. And finally, the patterns are a small set of related concepts that are being incrementally refined. It's not like a business enterprise where there are constantly new concepts being proposed and thrown away.
So maybe that is my beef with wikis at work: it's too easy for what was once the Team Foo Wiki to become Company X Wiki when others want to participate. But once there are so many different contributors, so much new material every day, and no clear purpose to the wiki, scalability problems arise. In certain cases like the c2 wiki and Wikipedia, the nature of the wiki content can mitigate or escape these problems.
Summary
My critical points in handy rule-of-thumb form:
Wikis are for small, purposeful, long-term collaborative efforts. If a wiki has over 20 participants and no clearly defined work-product—i.e. a type of document to be developed on the wiki itself, such as product specifications—it will bewilder new users due to its lack of simple organizing logic or obvious ways to acquire context.
Wikis do better to focus on a few work-products that evolve gradually than many work-products that are frequently obsoleted. Wikis save everything, and do not give priority to recent entires. Constant new entries dilute the purpose of the wiki and it's hard to evaluate which of two conflicting entires represents current thinking.
For Further Investigation
An interesting new wiki for Richard Gabriel's Extravagaria Workshop, exploring the intersections of art and science.
Bill Ives has some thoughts on Working with Wikis.

Try out WordPress at opensourcecms

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 11:53:07 EST
login: admin, password: demo

Philip Greenspun on why factory schools are broken

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 11:13:37 EST

From the comments on one of his own blog posts:
I'm in the middle of studying for my flight instructor's rating right now. It is interesting to note that the FAA would never approve any kind of flight training or certification if done the public school way. They would say that the groups are too large, that the instructor has no way of knowing how much the students have actually learned, and that the students aren't given enough opportunity to feel like they've accomplished something. Even ground school stuff is generally done in much smaller groups and with more hands-on learning relative to the amount of lecture time.
Right on. The factory school is not about education, it's about sustaining the American economy of nuclear families with two working parents. We often forget the consequences of this:
the forced submission of playful, creative youth to arbitrary discipline;
isolation of teenagers from meaningful participation in society, preventing gradual assumption of adult responsibilities;
weakening of community bonds between students, families, and teachers;
the corrupt notion that learning comes from teachers and is not a fundamental and ubiquitous part of all life;
and simply wasted opportunities for education.
What's a better model? Small, shopfront schools. Apprenticeships. Teaching as an open activity, not a unionized occupation. Only people, not standardized tests, can teach, measure the progress of, and motivate students.

Tim Bray evangelizes Test Driven Development

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 09:27:34 EST

If you already know about JUnit and TDD [Test-driven Development] and you're not using it, you should be waking up in the night in a cold sweat, because you're being less than professional.
He's right: test-driven development is enormously liberating. But there are two sticking points that exist primarily because you don't get the benefits of TDD unless you have very high test coverage. First, it is virtually impossible to retrofit tests onto an existing project, even for new code in that project. Second, TDD is obviously suited for cases where the input and output are easy to specify, but what about all that code involved in producing the user interface? Then again, this second concern might be obviated by better modularization. Which is of course again something you'll need to build into your project from the very beginning.

Cardboard - A Bliki

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 12:36:46 EST
Free software Bliki implementation. Looks good.

Also on that site:
Why "another" Blog and Wiki?
Link to Martin Fowler's thoughts on Blikis
Link to Wikipedia's definition & list of Blikis

Brief downtime this morning

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 12:21:58 EST
Frassle had under an hour of downtime this morning as I upgraded some software on the server. This included an upgrade to the Apache 2.0 web server, which I hope will yield improved performance.
P.S. I love my data center:
Get:68 http://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main openssl 0.9.7d-3 [903kB]
Get:69 http://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main psmisc 21.5-1 [44.2kB]
Get:70 http://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main tasksel 1.52 [164kB]
Get:71 http://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main libssl0.9.6 0.9.6l-2 [1755kB]
Fetched 27.9MB in 8s (3253kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...

Krzysztof Kowalczyk: Blikis

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 17:07:41 EST

Implementation idea: Publisher Scripts

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 09:44:47 EST

Frassle's upcoming Publisher (formerly Site Builder, formerly Page Builder) component makes it possible to create many types of web community sites using frassle in the backend. Unfortunately, it doesn't make it easy. If you want to make a weblog, you have to create a site, then create some pages, the add some blocks to those pages. To create the blocks you have to know your RSS feed's URL and write strange "noteset expressions" that aren't non-programmer-friendly. Frassle needs a way to make this really easy, particularly if you just want to make a weblog.
Here's an obvious idea I hadn't thought of before: publisher scripting. Frassle developers write some code that describes how to prompt the user and take actions based on those prompts. For a weblog, you might prompt for the user's name, a title and tagline for the weblog, a note about the author, and some RSS URLs of feeds that the user reads. Different publisher scripts could make different kinds of sites that show off a variety of frassle's strengths.
The scripts could be Perl code, but they should use a well-defined, stable vocabulary (API). The goal is that a programmer should be able to read about how publisher scripts work, then sit down and write one. That script should be easy to deploy in any frassle installation, much like the current page block system. (A page block is a template that renders a list of notes inside a page. For example, you might render the full or excerpted text of your most recent entries in a block in the center of your page, and show a list of titles in the right column.)
These types of modules — intermediate in complexity and easy to share — are crucial to my goal of opening frassle development to new contributors. Frassle desparately needs new authors and critics: I've gotten used to many of its quirks and deficiencies, and countless potential improvements escape my sight. But it's currently just impractical for others to contribute without my intimate involvement. There is no downloadable code, CVS repository, or documentation. But these are easy to fix. The important thing is that there be a gentle slope into development. Roughly:
Frassle piques your interest.
You start using frassle to bookmark some stuff, and perhaps use the aggregator.
You start using frassle to post some notes and participate in discussions.
You build a site using frassle publisher.
You want something unusual on your frassle site, so you develop a special page block.
Other people beg you to show them how you built your site. You write a publisher script that allows others to create something like it easily.
You want something I can't even imagine yet, so you make (or simply suggest) changes to frassle itself.
That's right... weblogs are just a gateway drug! (=

PictPress - Photo gallery for WordPress

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:45:27 EST
Josh and I have been talking about adding photo gallery features to frassle. Here's a plugin for wordpress that probably exhibits a few of the desired characteristics.

The Omniscient Debugger

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 16:53:33 EST

Awesome tool that records a complete trace of your (Java) program's actions, allowing you to debug by finding where something went wrong, then stepping backwards in your program to figure out why.
It's like a pause-and-rewind button for the world.

Seth Godin: Needles, haystacks & magnetism

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 09:43:57 EST

Seth Godin has plain & simple advice for how to get what you want in life.
Having met some successful people, I can assure you that they didn't get that way by deserving it.
Truer words...
[via gapingvoid]

Honoring True Genius: Alan Turing

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:55:42 EST

Today is the 50th anniversary of Alan Turing's death. Turing was a brilliant thinker who made pioneering, essential contributions in computer science and artificial intelligence. He was also an extremely successful codebreaker in World War II, assisting the allied victory tremendously. He died aged 42, committing suicide after being persecuted for being gay.
Ben Adida has a touching tribute.

Thanks for the linkage, Dave!

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 16:54:13 EST
Scripting news has mentioned frassle along with a few other bookmark manager tools. I hope the server and application treats our guests well.

iKeepBookmarks.com - A Web-Based Bookmark Manager.

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 16:27:29 EST

iTunes Playlist to RSS scraper

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 13:18:47 EST

Here's a cool RSS2.0 scraper for iTunes playlists. I don't use iTunes myself, but I've heard people suggest this kind of feature before, and Olav has coded it.

P h i l o s o m a t i k a | 100% Psychedelic Trance MP3 Stream

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 11:45:54 EST

How should frassle handle collaboration?

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 15:28:34 EST

The functionality and power in frassle is growing a lot right now, with the creation of the site builder and usability improvements in the aggregator. The site builder will keep me occupied for a while, but when it's done it will demand a new kind of feature: support for collaboration.
Collaboration is an interesting issue in frassle. On one hand, a fundamental assumption in frassle is that categories are personal and we need ways to gradually learn correlations between different organizational systems. On the other hand, there are some times when you want to work within an explicitly agreed-upon category hierarchy. This usually happens when you're working in a close-knit group with clear goals.
Right now I'm involved in starting this kind of group. It looks like our first project will be developing a comparison of aggregators. I think it would be useful to use frassle to build this comparison: a note would represent one aggregator, and we'd categorize that note according to what features that aggregator had. For example, we'd create a note for SharpReader and put in under /platform/Windows, /display style/3-pane, and /features/tracks which items you've read.
The category system here is something we want to all share. It probably won't be feasible for a single person to review every aggregator, but we have to stick to the same criteria.
Today frassle binds one user to one feed. So I may well have to start this project by creating a fake user account, giving the password to my colleagues, and (as far as frassle is concerned) all acting like one person.
This is kind of like stepping into a corporate role; you log out of the frassle user that normally catches all your writing—the personal role—and enter an entity that looks like a user but is actually the collective effort of whoever has the password. This is an appealing metaphor and I wonder if all frassle needs is a way to do this without the graceless kludge of sharing a password.
Other possibilities:
Shared categories. All users have access to a certain set of categories. They can each add things into one of these categories, as well as add, remove, move, or rename the categories themselves.
Subscribing to categories. All users subscribe to one user's category tree. When that user changes her tree, the changes are offered to each subscriber, who must accept them into their own tree. This is an interesting possibility, and could perhaps be a layer on top of shared categories. Also, it is not just one-way; if Alice and Bob wanted to fully share control of a tree, they would both subscribe to each other. The change approval system would be a good way to ensure that changes are made obvious to everyone involved.
Still, all of these approaches are pretty abstract. How do you think it should work?

wURLdBook: Personal Internet Intelligence

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 14:26:34 EST

Cringely on disruptive mesh networks

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 14:08:08 EST
Soon ubiquitous wireless networks will span the earth, and the internet will finally finish prying world culture from the cold, dead hands of the information intermediaries.

Your own private CVS repository

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 14:01:40 EST

simple instructions. frassle needs to get cvs soon, or something may go terribly wrong

Thursday at Berkman

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:21:11 EST
Ongoing discussion right now about solving RSS problems. Looks like the RSS advisory board, or some other group Dave is working with (I don't know whom exactly) is fixing some of the technical challenges around RSS, like how to expire comment feeds.

Lisa wants to develop some supplemental materials (graphs, charts, budgets) for IT departments to help make decisions about RSS. This is interesting but I don't know if it's what Dave is pushing for. I think what Dave is pushing for, and something I know I want, is an independent analysis of RSS tools. This would mean thorough, reliable reviews of aggregators and other blog software. This would mean questions and answers for newbies. Lots of introductory articles. Bob: "you want to teach him to fish."

Al points out http://mnot.net/rss/tutorial. Al likes the sound of his own voice.

Dave mentions an even more basic introduction by Dare Obasanjo.

Lisa has an idea: an easy, consistent way to suggest to people that their sites have an RSS feed. "I really like your site. I would like it even better if you had an RSS feed. If you don't know what that's about, you can find out here." When they're done, put a little flower icon next to their name.

Dave shows off that QuickSub javascript applet that lets you select which aggregator you want to subscribe in, and then it works. ~~I have an idea that's even simpler and even more flexible. Maybe I'll implement it this weekend. Or maybe tonight?~~ Update 6/4: nah, the approach I was thinking of doesn't have many advantages. I think the thing to do is wait for the browser makers (I suppose that means Microsoft) to add a subscribe button.

Coming in Frassle a6: The Site Builder

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 15:49:22 EST

The next version of frassle will be the biggest upgrade in a while. In addition to various bugfixes, performance improvements, and a bunch of small changes to the aggregator that will make it actually useful, frassle will have a major new feature called the site builder.
Previously called the pagebuilder, the site builder will offer all frassle users the ability to create community websites. First you choose a title and hostname (something.frassle.net) for your site. Then you create some pages.
You'll probably want to start with the home page. The home page should show members of your community what's happening in a variety of areas they care about. So you create a page, call it home. You'll see a blank page titled home with a little edit this page button in the upper left corner.
Press the button. In each of the page's three columns, you'll see a button that says add a block to this column. Blocks are the chunks you build each page from. A single block shows the latest messages in a set you describe. You gather this set of messages from a combination of specific feeds, categories, category relationships, searches, or specially selected notes. That means a block can show:
your latest blog posts
latest headlines from some relevant news sources
titles of blog posts by people in your blogroll
recent posts related to your "politics" category
one specific post, such as an "about this site" note
To create a block, you choose a title and style. The styles describe how each note is rendered: headline only? Threaded discussion? Full text? The whole set of notes and categories as a matrix, with an X where a category and note intersect? You choose and customize the style.
The next step is to describe what notes you want the block to show. Frassle will always choose the latest n notes that fit your criteria, so you can select from broad criteria (like a particular feed) and get recent news, or select more specific criteria (like a date range or specific notes by permalink) and make sure you get exactly the notes you want. Frassle will take you through a wizard to help you find and express what you want, or you can be all power-userish and write code like this:
!limit=4 (feed="http://myblog/index.xml" & cat="/todo") | (feed="http://mycompany/mygroup/index.xml" & cat="/tasks")
(That is an expression that says, "take any note in the todo category syndicated from myblog, or any note in the tasks category syndicated from mycompany/mygroup." The !limit command means that we'll choose the most recent 4 notes even if thousands—eek!—match the criteria.)
So, you've built your block. Click finish. You're taken back to your home page, only now it has a new block on it!
Things I Should Do
Bathe the cats
Get oil change
Implement style selection for pages
Get duplicate car key
It looks a little neater than that, but you get the idea. This block is a handy reminder, so you probably only want the headlines. If you wrote down your appointment time in the note titled Get oil change, clicking the link will show it to you. And once you've created a block, you can easily move it around on a page, and reuse it on other pages.
Since frassle is all about remixing and republishing content, each block has an RSS feed. You can subscribe to the latest 4 to-do items in your aggregator or syndicate them on another site. There is even a link that will generate javascript code so you can include an up-to-date copy of the block, as you see it on frassle, on any web page.
That's right. Write in frassle or on anywhere with an RSS feed. Slice, dice, chop, and combine in frassle. Publish anywhere.
The moon mission for the site builder is a community I want to build, with the help of Lisa Williams and other Berkman-Thursday regulars: blogtips. The purpose of blogtips is to help people learn about blogging—the technologies, the social styles and etiquette, and the practices of personal writing and citizen journalism. An ancillary purpose is to focus the (physical) Berkman-Thursday community and provide a channel for attracting new members after Dave Winer leaves Harvard. Lisa has already registered the domain.
Blogtips will need a bunch of things:
Blog software comparison checklist. We'll maintain a checklist of what blog software has what features. We hope this will be helpful for people trying to decide what blog software to use.
A blog (duh). Blogtips contributors will contribute new tips every day. We'll use categories to make the archives browsable by subject (tech, writing, social).
User forums. A place for newbies to ask their newbie questions, and for all of us to ask for advice and share experiences.
Customizable style. So it doesn't just look like frassle.
(Added 6/4/04) Flowers/hall of fame. A way to show a list of wishes—for certain sites to get RSS, or for aggregators to get certain features—with a picture next to the listing. If the wish is pending, it should be a desperate little puppy dog. If the wish is fulfilled, in blossoms to flowers. Implementation note: this can probably be done using a block plugin.
Hey, frassle is pretty close to having all of this!

McSweeney's: PROS AND CONS OF JOHN KERRY'S TOP TWENTY VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 14:31:36 EST

A frank and insightful view of possible VPs.
7. Paul Tsongas, former Senator, Massachusetts
Pro: Fiscal conservative, appeal could cross party lines
Con: From same state as Kerry, died in 1997

The virtues of polymathy, and why Brave New World is scary

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:55:59 EST

... there is the misconception that new ideas come simply from detail[ed] knowledge of your field. In fact, most creativity comes from around the boundaries of a discipline where fields of expertise overlap, it comes from the edges of the known not the comfortable centre. These days that overlap seems to be achieved mainly by the coming together of specialists at those boundaries - a sort of collective polymathy. But however you do it, innovation requires polymathy.
Over the past century, humankind has seen dramatic increases in specialization—at home, at work, in geography, in scholarship, in the layout of cities and towns. There is, of course, a compelling cause—knowledge in so many realms has been so much expanded that effectively applying knowledge to healthcare, law, or scientific experimentation requires extensive training. In these fields, there may be a cost in lost progress or innovation because of excessive division of understanding.
But there is also a much scarier trend. Not everyone needs to make scientific discoveries, but everyone needs to have a healthy life that includes caring for friends and family, pursuing satisfying work, making love, eating, learning, and teaching. Increasingly we have psychiatrists to care for us, consumerism as the surrogate objective of work we do not otherwise value, sexual desires shaped by mass media, food made by machines, and a school/college monopoly on learning.
Any of these effects is probably an impediment to happiness on its own. But what about the second-order effects? If, from a young age, you never believe you have a chance to become a most trusted friend, or an effective teacher, how will you approach other problems? Will you just assume you can't achieve goal because you're not a goal-ist?
This is the danger expressed in Brave New World and similar dystopic visions—that humans will tend further toward believing they can do nothing. Is that prophecy fulfilling itself right now?

Pluck: Search, Retrieve, Organize & Share the Web

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:53:20 EST

Pluck's suite of integrated applications helps you search, retrieve, organize and share the best parts of the web.

Simpy - social bookmarking and personal search engine

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:49:33 EST

Is Simpy for you?
Are you an information professional, web geek or an information junkie?
Do you have a lot of bookmarks and want to stop bookmark rot?
Do you want to search your bookmarks?
Do you want to find people like you and subscribe to their bookmark feed?
Do you access bookmarks from multiple computers?

StumbleUpon

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:48:48 EST

StumbleUpon is a completely new way to surf the web. It lets you channel-surf pages which your friends and peers recommend.
We are a community-based, word-of-mouth approach to websurfing—pages you "stumble upon" come from like-minded people who share your interests. Add the Toolbar, choose some topics and click Stumble! You'll meet people who like your favorite sites as you discover the best of the web.

Re: putation and Rating Systems for Frassle?

Fri, 28 May 2004 16:53:24 EST
Not exactly. Measuring popularity is useful, but the point of the metric I was describing is not just to measure quality, but to encourage contributions. Think of it as a high-score board for frassle: here are the people who did really well. There should be straightforward, but not trivial, ways to bump up this score. The prospect of getting a high score will encourage users to contribute in the ways favored by the metric.

Evolutionary Database Design

Fri, 28 May 2004 16:47:33 EST

by Martin Fowler Pramod Sadalage

Re: Reputation and Rating Systems for Frassle?

Fri, 28 May 2004 00:32:40 EST
The personal reputation thing would just be a little gimmick. The whole point is to define a metric that correlates to positive contribution to the frassle community, not to offer stars and hearts like Orkut. I wasn't thinking the reputation would be determined directly by other frassle users, although it should somehow take into account interacting with other users. But maybe also page popularity, frequency of writing, and more. I guess perhaps the hard question is: what does it mean to contribute usefully on frassle? Is it just writing a lot? (That seems overly transparent.)

Blogging from Berkman

Thu, 27 May 2004 23:50:42 EST
I'm at the Thursday blog group meeting at Harvard's Berkman Center. I send my thanks to the generous providers of the LOBBY7 open wireless network.

There is an interesting blog comparison chart at: http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm

Dave wants there to be a chart like this, only more thorough. I should talk to Lisa about getting BlogTips off the ground. With the pagebuilder and my checklist module, it would be easy to host this on frassle. I'm reluctant to offer that suggestion right now, because I don't want to toot my own horn. But in any case, I want blogtips and the blog feature comparison to go somewhere soon. Maybe it can be a project for this long weekend.

Yahoo! Groups has RSS feeds! Check it out on the rss-users list. This is pretty cool. Is it the counter-effort to Google's groups with Atom feeds? How long will it take for the assinine RSS/Atom rivalry to realize its own banality? I will speculate no more.

I'm still at the meeting, and this post will be updated, but I am going to save it for now.
How about an attendance list? It's 7:43pm and Bob Stepno just walked in. Jack Hodgson is to his left, Vernica Downey (sp?) next, Sarah Horton, Ben Gross, Jessica Baumgart, Garrett Eastman, Bill Ives, Sun, me, and Dave Winer.

Apparently Katie Hafner has an article about how addictive blogs can be in the New York Times. We briefly continue poo-pooing it for being so lame. I hear telephones are addictive too. Bob Stepno has a satire.

Dave asks who has applied for DNC press credentials. Bob and Dave have, and Bill wants to apply. The deadline is tomorrow, according to Jessica. Bob suggests going there and talking to the DNC about the decision process. If the application review process is geared toward small newspapers, what will their process be for individuals?

Dave confirms that spammers can't harvest email addresses off the Harvard blogs. This is by design. My email address is in plaintext on every page of my blog. Do I enjoy spam? I should install some better spam filters.

Cause of much laughter at the meeting: Letterman's top ten things you'll never hear on the Sopranos. Also in text.

Bob asks about New York Times permalinks. The story with those is that if you simply browse to some article on the New York Times homepage, and save a link from your browser's location bar, you will get a link that expires. For a while, you can read from that link, but then the NYT site requires would-be viewers to pay for archive access. However, if you have a link with certain magical extra text on the end of it, you can get a page that serves the full article, for free, forever. A handy tool exists to convert vanilla links into permalinks. Some experimentation during the meeting has revealed that the value of the PARTNER parameter in the URL is irrelevant, you can switch &PARTNER=GOOGLE to &PARTNER=USERLAND or &PARTNER=GOD all you want. I think we should write love letters to the NYT web team this way.

During a lull, I asked about ideas for getting a blogging/KM system bootstrapped for my software development group at work. CRM tools might offer some ideas for me to get a weblog-style KM system running at work.
ePeople is one, suggested by Ben.
Bill Ives will point me at a case study about Reiter(?), something with an intuitive UI and a campaign to evangelize the system and get people committed to using it.
I guess there are no simple answers, but I'm hoping I can get something started, with not too much effort. I'm still kinda on the fence about whether to build my own thing or install something off the shelf. But really, I just need to get started with something that I can grow over time. I'm writing to Bill Ives for more information because the rest of the group didn't seem too interested.

Dave is showing off his Radio Upstreaming. Whole Wheat Radio? That's two different kinds of Radio, by the way.

Doh, lost wireless connection! Woot, got wireless connection! Thanks, "linksys"! Dinner at the Bombay Club.

Re: Reputation and Rating Systems for Frassle?

Thu, 27 May 2004 23:43:42 EST
I was talking about two things.
A reputation system for people who are members of the frassle community. This means weblog authors and commenters (who are really just thinly-veiled weblog authors). Since the point of the reputation system is to encourage positive behavior by people so they can get more stars next to their name or whatever, it must apply to people.
A ratings system for posts and items on the web. This would be a way to quickly rate the quality of a post you read on frassle, or to save a rating along with a bookmark to any random thing you find on the web.
These systems don't have to be perfect, or even transparent, but they do have to be convincing and accurate. The reputation system I currently have no great ideas for. The ratings system, however, was one of the original motivations for frassle and I think I can do something pretty cool with that.

Reputation and Rating Systems for Frassle?

Thu, 27 May 2004 10:56:13 EST

Reputation systems, like ebay's seller ratings or amazon's Top 1000 Reviewers, are simple but effective ways to get people to contribute to an online community in a certain way. I'd like to have some reputation rankings for frassle. How should I construct these? How would I measure useful contribution to the frassle community?
A related system would be ratings for websites linked from frassle. This is a simple addition to frassle's note system but offers an easy way to drop useful data into frassle. I should sketch out a data model for this tonight.

Re: Other Frassle Thoughts

Thu, 27 May 2004 01:41:36 EST
Jessica, thanks for the frassle ideas. I'm thinking about lots of them but I'm going to respond first to your remark that my todo list is my intellectual capital.

Firstly, Boston is my intellectual capital. Or maybe Arlington. Or maybe Williamstown. Or Cincinnati. OK, that horse was dead before I even started kicking.

Anyway, what I was going to say is that I've been leaning more and more to making frassle a Free Software project. Releasing it under the GNU GPL. I've been afraid of this so far because of the possible administrative burdens this would bring upon me. Frassle has been a highly unstable piece of software, with no obvious extension points, and I imagined it very difficult to build useful collaboration among developers. Plus, frassle wasn't really unique enough to hook users on its own. Because it didn't have some nifty gimmick to make people ask, in awe, how'd you do that?, I've usually had to count on my friends to become my users rather than vice-versa.

But now I think frassle is starting to stabilize, and I believe the page builder, which will show up in the next version, begins to solve many of these problems. One thing the page builder is good for is showing how the stuff you see in frassle right now—feed, categories, aggregators, inter-category relationships, 100% dynamic views—can be powerful foundations for dynamic websites. The page builder is all about making it super easy to build dynamic web pages. You create a page, you add blocks to it that show a certain set of things in a certain form, and frassle delivers it. I am even going to add the ability to incorporate a page block into any HTML page on the internet—a little "steal this content" button next to the XML icon.

Additionally, I've designed the page builder so that it's easy to add a new kind of block display. For instance, you might not be satisfied with the "list of titles" or "title and body" block styles that come with frassle. Perhaps you want to show a calendar, or maybe even a dynamically-rendered checklist, or a music playlist. It's now will soon be possible to add that kind of power to frassle in an easy, pluggable way. You don't have to learn much about frassle to do it, and I don't have to learn much about what you did to add it to stock frassle.

So maybe frassle would fly as Free software. Ideas, dear readers? If you could modify frassle yourself, what would you change? What could frassle maybe help you do?

Re: Lisa Williams: Life is not a zero sum game

Wed, 26 May 2004 18:40:44 EST
Yeah, one of the best things about being a grownup is that you can have lots of different flavors of ice cream in your freezer. In fact, given the right kind of containers (cubes), I believe our freezer could hold upwards of 31 flavors. Watch out Baskin Robbins!

Lisa Williams: Life is not a zero sum game

Wed, 26 May 2004 12:40:13 EST

I just stood there, staring into the red plastic shopping basket with its mesh of holes showing the very clean linoleum and my navy blue sneakers down there below the two pints of ice cream. I could hear the fluorescent lights hum. I could feel my pulse on the crown of my head. It was 3AM in the supermarket and I was breathing air. I know this seems strange, but I never bought more than one pint of ice cream, ever, not even if I had the money; not even if there was a Buy One, Get One Free sale. Two pints of ice cream? Un-thinkable. Verboten. No. Fucking. Way.
I wanna be smart like Lisa. I wanna live with abandon like her friend Meg.

media.skybuilders.com

Tue, 25 May 2004 16:20:47 EST
This is Bob Doyle's site where has some potentially interesting videos from conferences, including OSCOM. His CMSReview site and related community of practice is also cool. When will video/audio from BloggerCon be up?

Thinking out loud about frassle design

Tue, 25 May 2004 11:17:21 EST

The upcoming version of frassle has a major piece of new functionality, called the page builder. The page builder (light bulb above head, details) lets you construct custom views of the information in your weblog as well as other weblogs published on frassle or aggregated via RSS. You start with a blank page and add blocks that contain dynamic content. The content is selected according to a rule called a noteset expression. Frassle looks at your noteset and pulls out all the matching blog posts (notes), then formats them according to a template you've selected.
For example, you could get a list of titles of everything on your todo list. You could get the most recent 15 posts to your blog and show their full or excerpted text. You could mix up recent posts from a bunch of your friends' blogs and present them together. You could even use frassle's inter-category similarity tracking to present recent headlines by topic, like a personal Google News.
I'm definitely excited about this feature. The major bits are done and it's working on my development machine. There is a lot of polishing to do, but the fundamental idea works and is profoundly powerful.
But I am also confronted with a challenge. This is a conceptual challenge that I need to think about for a while—days or weeks. It's about a relationship between concepts in software—in this case, between frassle's idea of a noteset and its idea of a feed.
If you build software, you know how important it is that the key concepts in your system are clearly articulated and differentiated. When you, as the chief designer of the system, find it difficult to grasp the ramifications of choosing one approach over another, it is a sign that the facilities you've built are confused and redundant. You can't excuse yourself for this, because you built it: you shouldn't be sitting around wondering why. The desired effect is quite the opposite: simple, clearly understandable concepts leading to profound power by virtue of their clever combination.
(Diversion: I don't want to insist on 100% orthogonality in software design. I don't believe that there should always only be exactly one way to do it. But when there are multiple ways, they should be distinguished from each other—whether by factors of efficiency, flexibility, future possibilities, or simply taste. There must be a way to choose consistently within yourself, so you can trust your old code and simplify your assumptions. This is my rationale for still loving Perl and its motto, There's More Than One Way To Do It.)
(OK, here's where I get to the actual thinking. The part below is still a work in progress.)
So yeah, notesets and feeds. A noteset is a flexible way of selecting a set of notes. A feed is associated with a person or some other kind of coordinated publishing entity. One piece of tricky business is that a feed in frassle is either a blog belonging to a user or an RSS feed aggregated from outside. But frassle publishes notesets (and subcategories within feeds) as RSS feeds too. So what happens if you subscribe to the RSS feed of a frassle noteset? You suddenly get this view of a dynamic note set cast into the guise of a coordinated feed. Should subscriptions in the aggregator associate with a feed, or with a noteset that selects recent items from that feed?
(to be continued/edited...)

Jay McCarthy's Home Burns Down

Mon, 24 May 2004 11:14:48 EST

My condolences to Jay McCarthy and his family, whose house was destroyed by fire on Sunday morning. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. Jay has written a touching story, right from the scene of the blaze.
His story captures the passing time after a catastrophe when you have logically concluded that things are bad but can't quite feel it yet. When this fades, Jay and his family will face a difficult process of grief and reconstruction. I wish them the best throughout, and Jay, if there's any way I can help—like carrying stuff, or some computer thing—let me know.

Lessons Learned while Bicycling

Fri, 21 May 2004 19:44:42 EST
I'm just back from a very pleasant bicycle ride, mostly through Belmont. Revelations:
Belmont has hills. Hills rock! Being much closer to the ocean, the Boston area is much flatter than my previous haunts. Bad news: I can't climb like I used to when I rode up Petersburg pass every week, and I wasn't that good even then.
Steep hills require lots of braking on the way down. Who knew?!
Left turns across busy intersections are a pain in the ass.
Even more on a bike.
Even even more at the bottom of a very steep hill.
Even even even more when your chain pops off the ring.
And then, you suffer. Suffer the indignity of dismounting, fiddling with your chain for a few seconds, then crossing the street like a total sissy, walking your shiny blue bike while wearing a spandex outfit so outrageous that you'd never even conceive of the possibility that normal people might see you wearing it except when you're zooming by at 19.7mph. Click, clack go your wacky shoes; shoes that someone, somewhere (in Italy) has probably put through a freakin' wind tunnel to improve their aerodynamics.
The good news is all is well in the end, and I've gotten a nice full-body massage thanks to the copious potholes on "Pleasant" street.

Note: A prospective longer ride is to continue down Pleasant St into Waltham, turn left on Main St, continue to Watertown, and try to find my way back home via Allston and Cambridge. There might be lots of traffic but the geographical experience would rock.

Jon Stewart's Commencement Address at William & Mary

Fri, 21 May 2004 10:36:59 EST
comedians are awesome at graduations

Refining thoughts over the Internet

Wed, 19 May 2004 10:26:22 EST
Geet has some interesting ideas for incorporating a refinement process into blog publishing. The refinement process is one thing I'd like to support in frassle, so it's good to get another person's perspective on how it might work.

How to be your own career coach

Wed, 19 May 2004 10:25:58 EST

Improved Bookmarklet

Mon, 17 May 2004 10:22:16 EST

Josh suggested a helpful improvement to the "frassle it" bookmarklet. For a little while now the bookmarklet would take any text you'd selected on a page and automatically put it into a <blockquote> (an indented quote area) in your note. Unfortunately, when you actually went to the editor it would leave your cursor trapped inside that same <blockquote> until you clicked the reduce-indent button (just to the right of the bulleted list button in the editor). Josh added a line break to the end, so now you can simply click at the bottom and be free of your blockquote.
Much simpler. Enjoy!

Re: Rethinking Unconditional Support for Israel

Sun, 16 May 2004 12:11:04 EST
Mike posted a reply to my comment.

Outils Froids: 2 nouveaux services de navigation sociale

Fri, 14 May 2004 13:57:28 EST

A mention of Frassle next to Furl, Spurl, and FeedMeLinks. In French. (Also available translated to English.) The author makes an important point that Frassle needs interface and documentation improvements, although I'm curious to find out if he has any specific suggestions.

Jot to frassle

Fri, 14 May 2004 11:56:58 EST
A useful feature for frassle would be a customizable bookmarklet called "Jot to frassle". To use this bookmarklet, you would choose a category in frassle and drag the link to your browser's toolbar (or your taskbar's quick launch area). Then, if you wanted to make a quick note to that category, you just press the button and get a popup window with a text editor. Quick popup, no fancy editor, no preview, just type and post.

Rethinking Unconditional Support for Israel

Fri, 14 May 2004 11:34:58 EST

Mike Pinkel, my former classmate, has some thoughts on the US giving unconditional support to Israel. You should read his essay, but the gist is that our support for even Sharon's most radical actions is more reason for hatred of the US. Thus, dropping the policy of unconditional support would improve perceptions of the US and contribute to improved security.
I disagreed and left the following in his comments.
So many Arabs hate the US and Israel because the clerics and dictators in charge of their countries foment hatred of the US and Israel. They do this in order to distract their followers from the ceaseless exploitation of their national resources. Without this distraction, any person left to think for herself would demand the reform of her own government.
The middle east caricature of Israel is a ploy to maintain power. Leaders of these states and religions work hard to cut off their people from connecting to the rest of the world — economically, politically, and culturally — so that they can control what flows over that link. If all the exports and imports in a vast land go through one dictator or royal family, they decide who eats, who gets paid, who gets oil and technology and internet access. If this heavyhanded effort wasn't hidden behind layers of state-controlled media, the people would surely get up and bust some asses.
But the dictators are smart enough to know that people in groups can unite quite strongly against a common enemy. They invent and reinforce the image of that enemy by any means, because the failure of that illusion would expose Saddam, Asad, the Saudi Royals, etc. as oppressive, exploitative hypocrites.
So, would it help kill these illusions if we were more rational in our support for Israel? To put it jokingly, do you think Al-Jazeera or Syrian state television would herald the improvement in US foreign policy? It's hard for me to imagine that anything short of us dropping bombs on Israel wouldn't be disclaimed as a superficial ploy on the part of those lying Americans who think you and all you cherish are idiotic scum. (Actually, I suspect a bomb would be "revealed" as a bungled attempt to attack Syria.) You're not that simple are you? You're a good Muslim* aren't you? Don't you want to keep letting me take the oil under your house? Don't you want to continue sending your daughters to commit suicide attacks?
(*Note that when I use "Muslim" here I am BY NO MEANS suggesting that Islam is inherently tied to brutality or terrorism, except that those who foment terrorism exploit the language of Islam to incite their followers to the extreme measures required to continue their power. It's kinda like how Bush uses "down home boy" style and talks about "accountability", only far worse.)
So, what would help to destroy these illusions? We need ways that people can hold their governments accountable and get a picture of the truth about the world outside. They need economic opportunity, democratic government, and cultural openness. Examples: mobile phone antennas, votes for women, outsourcing contracts.
Also, making Iraq a nice place to live and work will improve things. Leaving Iraq a smoking hellhole and power vacuum will make things much worse. America seriously needs to get its shit together about this occupation.

DNCC Press Gallery Sign-up - 2004 Democratic National Convention

Thu, 13 May 2004 15:04:56 EST
Wow, in this form for DNC press credentials, you can select blog for News Source Seeking Credentials. It's right there!

Another bout of downtime :(

Thu, 13 May 2004 13:10:08 EST

After the upgrade last night, it appears that some posts lost a word or two off their end. For example,
This is a test.
would become:
This is a
Very bad. (Anything that causes data loss is Very bad.) This morning I took down frassle and tracked this problem to what seems to be a bug in the HTML::StripScripts module for Perl, used inside my HTML scrubber component. I disabled the scrubber as soon as I noticed, but by then I had already processed every note in frassle through it. Tens (hundreds?) of posts had lost their last word or two.
To restore these posts, I decided to restore frassle's database from a backup I had made last night. I then manually restored a few blog posts made to the following blogs since the restore snapshot:
Albertin
j (moose's orchard)
Tara's annotated bookmarks
End results:
No blog posts should be mangled (i.e. had their last word chopped off).
All blog posts made before or after this morning should be on frassle and in the right categories.
Some posts made after about 11pm last night may have an incorrect timestamp.
Changes to your category tree since about 11pm last night may have been lost.
With luck, removing the recommendations engine will allow the server to avoid crashing for a while.
If your weblog appears to have lost any notes, or you find other unexpected problems, please contact me ASAP: email shimon@rura.org, AIM: shimonrura, or call (857) 928-3028.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

"find feeds" is gone

Thu, 13 May 2004 12:00:10 EST

My feed recommendations engine, formerly accessible by clicking a "find feeds" link at the top of any page, has been removed. I took it down because its queries present a great deal of strain to frassle's server. Hits to these pages by aggressive search engine spiders may have been a cause of frassle's troublesome performance over the past couple of weeks.

Argh... the server...

Wed, 12 May 2004 20:36:12 EST
Frassle has been getting swamped lately. I have some performance improvements up my sleeve, hoping that they will help avoid overloading the server. If not, I will consider changing to a more powerful hosting service. Sigh.

Debian Installers for every lifestyle

Thu, 06 May 2004 22:53:15 EST
Installing Debian? Whether you want something graphical and newbieproof, or you need the latest PERC4 raid drivers for your new Dell Poweredge Server, you can find the Debian install you need here.

d2r: a review of blogging APIs

Thu, 06 May 2004 10:25:15 EST

Why hack frassle when there are so many blogging packages out there?

Wed, 05 May 2004 11:50:23 EST

b2evolution is a feature-rich blogging software package. It has many of the key features of frassle: multi-user, DB-backed, built-in search, posts can be put into multiple categories, etc. It also has many features frassle doesn't: internationalization, draft/private posts, trackback, integrated statistics, and a plug-in architecture.
It looks so good that if I wanted to start a blog today, a blog with the most often used features of frassle, I'd probably use b2evolution or something like it. I mean, it's pretty awesome.
Josh, my housemate and fellow frassle user, has thus reasonably wondered: why am I spending all this time developing my own blog software when there are so many systems out there — that are not only powerful and pretty, but Free and easy to customize?
Hypocrite though Josh is, my first reflex is to defend frassle — it didn't start with the goal of replicating the functionality in typical blogging tools. I built some of it, and I started blogging with it, and so I wanted a lot of those features. But "historical accident" isn't a good excuse. Why not start with an existing tool and write plugins that add frassle-style functionality, like categorization?
My real answer to this does go back to my original motivations for frassle. But it isn't simply that I wanted to develop something unique and inadvertently fell into a commodity market. My original vision was for frassle to be not just a publishing tool, but to allow individual participants in the blogging world to leverage their community in a new way. I saw that a major activity bloggers were doing was pointing at stuff on the internet and responding to it. And I started taking advantage of this by using blogs I trust to find relevant information on various subjects.
Frassle is working toward automating that process. It needs some of the blog tool basics to make that functionality accessible, but it crucially needs a few features that aren't in any other system I know about.
Frassle needs to tightly integrate publishing and reading. Some other tools have aggregator functionality built-in, but frassle bases its entire comments system on aggregation and makes it easy to categorize other peoples' posts. The next important step in this integration is frassle's upcoming support for republishing — actual syndication of content from other sources, assembled using unique tools.
To achieve these features, frassle needs to do some strange stuff. It need to keep everything it aggregates. It needs to have an internal representation of URLs and categories that it can use to track who's talking about what and where they're doing it.
The hope is that it can fit into a unique niche — taking advantage of blogs more than Furl and del.icio.us, but deriving more meaning from the discussion than publishing software alone.
If you're a pessimist, you could say that frassle is in the peculiar position of having blogging features inferior to b2evolution and WordPress, while having linkstacking/shared bookmarking features inferior to Furl and del.icio.us.
But I'm an optimist, so I think there are some very interesting problems in that niche. But I'll admit I need to put my time where my mouth is and focus on what's really crucial for that.
Thanks to Josh and others for prodding me.

Netcraft interviews Brian Behlendorf

Wed, 05 May 2004 09:59:15 EST

Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and current CTO of CollabNet, a firm that hosts systems for collaboration in engineering teams distributed around the world, has an interesting interview at Netcraft. I went there just to use their handy "What's that site running?" tool, but really enjoyed Behlendorf's comments on open source software development, the SCO case, and his own company's experience with offshoring:
At the beginning of 2003, there was much discussion around the executive staff about outsourcing and/or offshoring. We had a dedicated and productive engineering staff in the U.S., but the amount of stuff we *wanted* to do was huge—and customers were demanding new features constantly. I was skeptical about the model where you hand someone a spec and magically they write code for you. While looking at this we met with a company named Enlite Technologies, who had a collaborative project management tool for the electronics-design market, and who had the majority of their engineers in Chennai, India. We were considering outsourcing some work to them, but I really liked the founder (Gopinath Ganapathy) and the team he'd formed, and I wanted something much closer and more, er, collaborative—so we decided to merge. Our products were complimentary, they had a great team in Chennai, and I figured that it was time for us to become our own best-use case in showing how our product could be used to build worldwide engineering teams, as many of our customers had done.
Since that point in time, we've integrated the two teams very tightly. Engineers in each location are spread across the combined codebases, and they know each other on a first name basis. We were the subject of an article in Salon about this. No doubt the topic is controversial, and there are huge challenges to making an offshore or outsourcing model actually work.
The open source model has a lot to do with making that possible. ...

More downtime :(

Wed, 05 May 2004 08:59:56 EST

Some weird things are happening to frassle. It was down this morning because the database had crashed. I started it back up and things seem to be OK right now, but since a reboot a couple of days ago lots of stuff has been going wrong.
To figure this out I will need a solid chunk of time to fiddle with the server. So as I'll be babysitting the server today and attempting to fix it tonight, expect occasional downtime throughout the day and a couple of hours of downtime in the evening (EST).
Sorry for the inconvenience.
P.S. Don't (wouldn't?) you love getting 200 error messages by email from your web server that say things like this?
WARNING: Message from PostgreSQL backend: The Postmaster has informed me that some other backend died abnormally and possibly corrupted shared memory. I have rolled back the current transaction and am going to terminate your database system connection and exit. Please reconnect to the database system and repeat your query.

Seb Paquet: A few of my favorite visionaries

Tue, 04 May 2004 16:58:19 EST

Some are diamonds in the rough, their signal often mistaken for noise; others are so unassuming that people hardly notice them. Others yet are just beginning to gather momentum on issues whose importance will probably have become blindingly obvious a few years from now. All of them envision big changes, and the glimpses I've had into their unusual minds have convinced me that they are onto something important, so I keep an eye out.
I spent a little time reading about the first person on Seb's list, Lion Kimbro. Based on that and the two names I recognized, this will be an inspiring list.

Re: Upcoming Concerts

Tue, 04 May 2004 15:03:31 EST

A program for the Friday May 7 concert is available in MS Word format.

Frassle downtime yesterday

Tue, 04 May 2004 12:04:37 EST

Frassle was down for about an hour yesterday, 4:30-5:30ish pm. It appears this was due to electrical problems at the facility where frassle's hardware is located. Everything should be back to normal, although I'm noticing some unfortunate slowness...

Dreams of frassle!

Tue, 04 May 2004 09:25:09 EST
Ah, this explains the cease-and-desist letter from the Frassle Brothers Foundry of Jonesboro, Indiana. ;)

Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories

Mon, 03 May 2004 15:51:12 EST
Great stories from the developers of the original Macintosh. Industry insights, technical challenges and solutions, and the dish on the celebrity personalities (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates).

Upcoming Concerts

Mon, 03 May 2004 12:58:02 EST

A chorus I'm part of, New Century Voices, has a few concerts coming up. NCV is a group of about 10 singers. We sing 20^th and 21^st century music (but it isn't all weird or atonal).
8:00pm Tuesday, May 4, 2004: Pickman Concert Hall, Longy School of Music, 27 Garden St., Cambridge. The concert consists entirely of music composed by Longy students and several musicians/ensembles will perform. We will premiere a work by Elizabeth Knight called Aeolian Harp. Free.
8:00pm Friday, May 7: Room N1 at the Rey-Waldstein Building, Longy School of Music, 33 Garden St., Cambridge. This concert features Longy Continuing Studies students, including our director Allegra Martin. At this concert we will be performing Jukebox Love Song, a wonderful jazzy setting of Langston Hughes' poetry by David Little; Lapides Vivi, a quasi-chant by William Whitley; and 4 Cats by our own Michael Veloso, a set of short musical settings of cat haikus. Also free.
5:00pm Sunday, May 16: King's Chapel, 58 Tremont St., Boston. We will be one of four local choirs in the twenty-third Composers in Red Sneakers Choralfest. All choirs will perform twenty-first century music by Boston-area composers. At corner of School & Tremont Streets downtown, near Gov't Center, State St, and Park St T stops. $12 general admission, $8 students & seniors.
Stay tuned for news of an all-NCV concert in the next month or two, featuring a much larger slice of our repertoire.

Hotkeycontrol XP

Mon, 03 May 2004 11:36:04 EST
A very handy program that lets you bind hotkeys to execute a program, load a URL, change sound volume, minimize/maximize windows, and more. Freeware for Windows 98, 2000, or XP.

Magical Disappearing Cats

Sat, 01 May 2004 17:36:53 EST
Whew... I found him. But not until I had searched around the house, shaken the food bag indoors and out, and carefully estimated whether our cat Loki could successfully have jumped from our second floor porch onto the roof of our neighbor's car.
Thankfully, it was a false alarm. Loki was just in his favorite hiding place. Didn't I look there first? Kinda.
You see, Loki (and to a lesser extent, his brother Euclid) likes to hide inside a certain set of drawers that are built into the dining room. His technique for entering these drawers is extraordinarily crafty—for a cat—and he executes it well. There are three rows of drawers; two small drawers in the top row and one large drawer in the lower rows. Loki stands on his hind legs and hooks his front claws around the edge of the top drawer. Then he pulls himself up with his front paws, so he is hanging from the top of the drawer. Finally, pedalling, kicking, and climbing with his back legs, he pulls the drawer open and jumps in.
Today's scary variation on this theme was an unusual disappearing act. As you may have guessed, Loki isn't in the habit of closing the top drawer when he's done sitting in it. So as I was doing some spring cleaning today, I shut the unused drawer. It turns out Loki must simply have been unsatisfied with the safety-from-vacuum-cleaner rating of the top drawer. I know that sometimes he climbs behind the top drawer and lands in the middle drawer, so of course I checked there before fully panicking. But this time, Loki had outdone even that. He had climbed behind the top drawer. He had climed behind the middle drawer. He had climbed behind the bottom drawer, and was napping peacefully on the dusty floor below the lowest drawer.
Down below the lowest drawer,
where only bugs and dust should be,
on that unfinished wooden floor,
is where I woke my dear Loki.

Our New Couch

Sat, 01 May 2004 12:20:59 EST
A generous Arlington heights resident has let us have this nice futon. Come to our living room and try it out!

Google's Form S-1

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 13:41:45 EST

I considered printing this, but the preview showed it as 171 pages!

ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 13:33:36 EST

I think this is the article that founder Philip Greenspun originally had on his site but was required to remove under the terms of a settlement with the ArsDigita VCs.

The Frassle Page Builder

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 11:51:47 EST

Some of the features you requested are being worked on. Threaded comments are already implemented in the development version of frassle and will be here soon. But the idea of building a blog that looks like your own blog, rather than a part of the frassle application, is very attractive. I have begun exploring this possibility, but I haven't got a complete enough design yet. Let me tell you what I've got so far, and maybe you or others have some suggestions.
The core functionality is called the Page Builder. Any frassle user can go into their Page Builder and create a new page. When you create a page, you choose a title and URL for it, along with a layout: 1-column, 2-column, or 3-column. You then get a pretty simple page with the layout you asked for, and can add stuff to the page by adding a block into a column.
A block contains a noteset, which is a set of notes (blog posts created in or aggregated into frassle) that match a certain expression. I'm using expression here in the programming sense—an expression is a written phrase that has some meaning. In this case, a noteset expression describes a set of notes using some of the following criteria:
a particular note, selected by GUID/permalink
notes from a particular feed
notes from a particular category
notes from categories with relevance of at least n% to a particular category (i.e. posts from a variety of feeds that are pertinent to e.g. blogging)
notes of a particular length/word count
notes that contain or don't contain some text
notes that are responses some note or note-set
notes that you posted as comments to another blog
your suggestion here
The noteset language can describe each of these criteria and allows them to be combined in typical set-theoretic ways. For example, you might ask for all posts from my feed with under 10 words, to go into an "interesting links" block. Or you might ask for all posts from my feed that are not over 30% relevant to my computers category, in order to make a non-geek version of my blog.
You can think of the noteset language as a very powerful, expressive search. While the expressions themselves will probably look like this:
noteset:feed=123&!(cat_relevance=/computers,50)&word_count<10
there will be a friendly interface that just builds these in the background. (A good UI to clone would be MS Outlook's filtering.)
The page builder is an interesting feature because it allows you to both build an aggregator page — something like Google news that shows you the latest happenings from blogs and news sources you care about — and build a custom view of your own frassle data. Other things you could do:
Create a personal "dashboard" page, with relevant bookmarks, headlines from your best friends' blogs, and a to-do/to-read list
Create something like Google News but with your own topics (I might have Blogging, Social Networks, Open Source Content Management, and Boston), based on frassle's related news feature
Build a page for an online community, offering forums (just a frassle note in disguise) and latest content
But your suggestions about blog widgets got me thinking. In the backend, every block hits the frassle note database. But in the front end, we want lots of options. Given a noteset, you may want to display:
a set of titles/links (headlines)
the full note contents, possibly with links to add a comment, categorize, etc.
a note excerpt
just images(?)
who knows what else
Each of these implies a certain presentation of the noteset. I envision each being designed as a frassle plugin; if you want to create a new kind of view, you just create a plugin that renders a block. This allows a lot of flexibility—you could build a calendar widget, or a blogroll, or whatever—but keeps things pretty simple.
I think Movable type has a plugin architecture and we should learn from that. I have heard some complaints about it and we should especially learn from those.
The moon mission could be a community site for Envisioning the Future of Weblog Software, or as you suggest, converting Lisa to the frassle religion. :)

Funchain: The Semantic Social Network

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 09:31:03 EST

Possibly interesting. Discovered on orkut's Semantic Social Network community.

Private School Snobs and the Draft

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 13:57:51 EST

There's an interesting discussion about compulsory military service over at the EphBlog. It is in response to this Record op-ed by Daniel Gura, which argues for a draft on grounds of socioeconomic egalitarianism. I'm with EphBlog writer Dave Kane in his assessment of the article ("slipshod"). I thought Aidan Finley brought up an interesting point in the comments:
The bottom line here is simple: the upper socioeconomic classes don't, and shouldn't serve in war. Part of the incredible stupidity of the Great War was preferentially recruiting and killing the best and the brightest. America's never done that—cf. Vietnam—hell, in the Civil War, you could pay for someone else to fight for you. I think society has a compelling interest in only sending less advantaged brackets to the front. As our dear Gura himself admits, he's got dreams. "I hope to be working somewhere that will allow me to learn the skills to later in life be apart of the decisions that are made in our government." Yep, that's not a dream your average grunt has. Drafting Williams kids is a waste of resources, and a waste of time.
While some will interpret this as sarcasm, I took Aidan's post seriously. Although it sounds crass, think about it. It's certainly appealing to envision Ken Lay risking his own ass for the future of the worldwide energy supply, but since he's old, lazy, and demonstrably poor at following rules, he wouldn't be of much value as a soldier.
With a volunteer army, each individual who considers joining must weigh its risks against its benefits. You only need join if the risks are worth it for you. If you're wealthy or expect a wonderful fulfilling life, the small risk of death outweighs the potential gains (salary, benefits, education, tuition, etc.). But if you're poor and uneducated, maybe the army is a desirable alternative to delivering pizzas.
The notion that we should have a draft in order to improve the socioeconomic diversity of the military doesn't appeal to me. This is because I don't believe the makeup of the military, socioeconomically skewed though it is, is any more unjust than the socioeconomic makeup of fishermen or truck drivers (other professions with low pay and high death risk). National defense seems pretty fundamental, but wouldn't our way of life also be threatened without reliable trucking services and affordable lobster?

opensourceCMS

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:09:14 EST

This site was created to give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best open source and free php/mysql based software systems in the world. You can log in as the administrator to any site here, thus allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs. Each system is deleted and reinstalled every two hours. This allows you to be the administrator of any system here without fear of messing anything up.
It's php/mysql only, but still, having a single place to try out tons of different CMSs is pretty cool.

August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 23:26:32 EST

Paul Ford's fictional take on the semantic web.
Update 4/28: I read this article, and it's the same cheerful me-too semantic web kool-aid. We'll all be living in a beautiful taxonomically-described world, and somehow we'll agree on what terminology to use. Yeah right.

unalog

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 17:48:27 EST

You can look at what various people and groups of people are reading on the web here. You can get an account and add your own links, and create and join groups here too. If you get an account, or create a group, either one can be made private, so nobody but you (if a private account) or your fellow group members (if a private group) can see your links. And, well, that's about it so far. More stuff is on its way though. Stay tuned. Join the list or drop us a line if you like.

Miguel de Icaza on Microsoft

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 14:57:34 EST

What Free Software hackers need to know about Microsoft's competition strategy.

Raw: Annotating the Web

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 11:33:11 EST

Danny Ayers on blogs as metadata. Right up frassle's alley.

Online Gaming as Narrative

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 10:51:11 EST

Lets take a look at online games, such as Lineage, which are a much larger phenomenon than most people are aware. This particular game holds the record for having the most people online at once, probably hundreds of thousands. It is immensely popular in Korea. Or, in this country, consider Sims Online or EverQuest. If you take into account not only the game itself but also all of the peripheral activities (activities happening around the edge of the game such as the support sites, the chat rooms, and so on) you find a rich social ecology constantly unfolding. But just focus on the game itself which involves all the players building and evolving a complex world, and you see a new kind of nonlinear, multi-authored narrative being constructed.
It's great to see gaming characterized this way. Why? Because it's how I'd characterize an effective community. A good city, school, or workplace is a complex, evolving, nonlinear, multi-authored narrative. Architects work to develop the physical space that guides this narrative. Programmers, artists, teachers—we all both set the norms in the community and respond to them.
The unique strength of games, then, is that they encourage radical creativity. And I think that's just what we need in order to advance the art of community making, on screen, in books, and in our towns.

Dick Cheney is a Duck-Huntin' Man!

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 16:59:45 EST

http://home.comcast.net/~paul.strother/lagado/DICKCheney.mp3

John Battelle: Built From Scratch, The Interface Migrates to the Web

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 10:55:50 EST

Battelle reports on his visit to Microsoft and makes an interesting conjecture: the web is Microsoft's new platform strategy. What this means is that, foreseeing the commoditization of the OS, Microsoft wants to establish MSN and its major properties in communications (messenger, hotmail) and information services (search, content) as a basis for lock-in.
I don't buy that they've given up on the OS—Microsoft has too much leverage there at present to allow that kind of pessimism (or optimism, depending on who you ask). So, if it's not a replacement, can the MSN platform coexist with Microsoft's existing platforms: Windows and Office?
Of course it can. This is the classic Microsoft strategy: use dominant positions in existing markets as (1) a cash cow and (2) a way to enter new markets. Microsoft is extraordinarily powerful not just because of their size and wealth but because of the breadth of their assets: in virtually every realm of the software and internet industries, Microsoft is a potential competitor. Just like they used the Windows platform to push IE (and Media Player) to market dominance, they will use the IE, Office, and Windows platforms to push their search engine. If successful, they will leverage search to push other MSN products such as messenger, hotmail, and probably upcoming blogging and social networking services. In all of these realms, Microsoft will not bother to innovate. Secure in the knowledge that their virtually unlimited resources will allow them to clone or purchase the competition, they will wait and see what sells.
In this practice we see one key competitive advantage of Microsoft. Unlike other tech companies, they do not sacrifice themselves at the altar of innovation. Bill Gates' admission that Google kicked his ass isn't a moment of great character—it's a simple acknowledgment that the innovation part of search is over and the Microsoft part beginning.
But look at the big picture. What Microsoft really needs to defend against is the decentralization of software consumer decision-making. What I mean is the trend of individuals picking and choosing what tools they use on their computer. Microsoft is designed to make money selling batches of Windows and Office licenses to PC manufacturers and corporations. Compare this to the way people buy airline tickets or furniture: these are more commoditized services and the decision criteria are price and less quantifiable factors such as quality, reputation, and aesthetics.
So the risk to Microsoft is that web services—by nature decentralized, offering multiple choices of service provider—will become the focal point of computing instead of the desktop. They must walk a fine line between good-faith support and buzzword compliance while scheming to keep enough control to profit.

How to speed up your PostgreSQL database with zero effort

Sun, 25 Apr 2004 22:17:59 EST
Run the ANALYZE command.

Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 15:44:42 EST
Steve Gillmor has some interesting ideas for trust-based aggregation. A similar vision to frassle's.

Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder (NADD)

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 15:53:59 EST

Here's a tip: If the building you are currently in is burning to the ground, go find the person with NADD on your floor. Not only will they know where the fire escape is, they'll probably have some helpful tips about how to avoid smoke inhalation as well likely probabilities regarding the likelihood you'll survive. How is it this Jr. Software Engineer knows all this? Who knows, maybe he read it on a weblog two years ago. Perhaps a close virtual friend of his in New York is a fire fighter. Does it matter? He may save your life or, better yet, keep you well informed with useless facts before you are burnt to a crisp.

Idle Words: Bukowina Tatrzanska

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 15:23:18 EST

Curiously enough, the prohibition against bringing grain alcohol across the Atlantic has nothing to do with import restrictions - rather, it's because the silly airlines insist they will not transport a highly flammable liquid. A moment's thought exposes this as nonsense, since airliners fly around all the time filled with extremely combustible kerosene, which is not only more dangerous than ethanol, but also has an unpleasant, greasy aftertaste.

memcached: a distributed memory object caching system

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 13:51:06 EST

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.
Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

Joel on Software - Fire And Motion

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 13:47:13 EST

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.
How does this relate to software? If you're supposed to be making a product but keep on being distracted by the barrage of buzzwords, you're pinned down. Keep moving, even a little bit, every day.
Also good by Joel: an article on measurement dysfunction in the workplace.

How LiveJournal Scaled

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 13:25:37 EST

Here are the slides from a talk about the growth of LiveJournal from single machine hobby to 60-machine supersite. Very technical, very Perl, very interesting.

Reuters pissing itself to mention Google

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 11:07:35 EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Within days, Internet search firm Google Inc. is expected to announce it will carry out an initial public share offering, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The announcement is related to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule that says a private company must make public more information about its business once its passes a certain size in terms of assets and number of shareholders, the Journal said.
Really people, get a hold of yourselves. The SEC has a rule about what private companies must do when they reach a certain size, Google is expected to comply with the rule. In other "news", a bear shits in the woods, indicating Google IPO is right around the corner.

Thursday Recap

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 00:07:27 EST
I really should be going to bed, but I'll do a quick recap of this fun Thursday evening before I forget entirely.
The usual Thursday blog meeting was colocated today with a talk by Shorenstein Center Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, who runs NKZone. Rebecca is a fascinating person who has been CNN bureau chief in China and Japan, and is currently devoting significant effort to covering North Korea. On NKZone, she takes on a very tough subject—there is virtually no journalist access into DPRK—by engaging any available sources on the net and digesting reports from China and South Korea. Her talk touched on a lot of interesting points, such as the role of weblogs in journalism, the atmosphere of secrecy and fear in DPRK, and the ways weblogs can engage a community.
But what really makes Rebecca interesting is that she's very unusual for a journalist: she has resigned from CNN to take a detour into exploring what she sees as a new kind of news medium. (I was delighted to hear that although her year at Shorenstein is nearly up, Rebecca will be staying at Harvard for another year thanks to the Berkman Center.) I no longer find it acceptable to consume news that doesn't include links that discuss, vet, and provide supplemental material for each story. As a generation of world citizens grows up used to these possibilities, the CNN demographic will continue to age and shrink.
Of course, this does not imply that blogs written by amateurs will overtake professional reporting. I strongly believe both postions will learn from each other in the next few years, and we will have a better world for it.
The talk included pizza, drinks, and cookies. I stupidly went to a spicy Asian all-you-can-eat buffet for lunch so I wasn't able to sufficiently take advantage of this opportunity. Though actually, Harvard's pizza wasn't very good.
After the talk we stayed in the room and had our "Berkman" meeting. This one was quite different than usual: a much smaller group and in a different space. Sun, Jessica, Rebecca, Dave, Rick, Tom Griffin, and I were in attendance. We talked a bit about the future of our meetings in the anno-Daveini era. Then Dave and Rebecca schemed a bit about how to kill Google. They both see it as too powerful.
In my opinion, they are overreacting to a couple of small fringe services Google has only dabbled in. I hope Google does well not only because they provide vast good in the universe but also because they could be a valuable counterbalance to Microsoft. Microsoft also provides vast good but has a history of and inclination toward causing severe damage by killing whole market segments in willful, cold calculation. I'd waaaaay rather Tim O'Reilly, dirty rotten bastard though he may be, get rich off Google's success than give Microsoft more cash so they can strangle another innovator while DOJ Antitrust Division sleeps.
The other topic of discussion was the Iraq war. Oddly, I was the only person speaking who might conceivably have been pro-war. Dave thought we should high-tail it out of there ASAP. Rebecca didn't disclose as much opinion but seemed clearly anti-war. Rick initially supported the war but only due to the danger of WMD. I don't think I clearly articulated this at the meeting, but I am actually a supporter of the Iraq invasion and occupation regardless of WMDs. Iraq is an opportunity to shape part of our military into a long-term security force that can enter a dangerously disconnected place like Saddam's Iraq and leave behind safety and economic links to the rest of the world. The middle east will need this kind of intervention time and time again if the US and emerging superpowers (China, India, Russia) are to expand their energy imports without a corresponding increase in terrorism imports. We had better get started, and notwithstanding my favorite sarcastic Bush campaign slogan—Don't switch horses in mid-apocalypse—we'd better stay in Iraq until it's well on the way to becoming a sunny vacation destination.
I should add that, although I am pro-war in this case, I am anti-Bush. A better president would have gathered the support of his countrymen and allies, rather than giving us all a fat old middle finger.
After the Berkman meeting ended, Sun, Jessica, and I went to get some ice cream and hang out outside. I gave them a tour of my frassle to-do list (no kidding, they actually asked), which resulted in at least 10 new feature requests. I could talk all about that now, but it's really, really time for me to sleep. Goodnight, friends.

Joel on Software - The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 10:59:43 EST

Joel Spolsky has a great guide to interviewing, useful to people on both ends.
Before the interview, I am very, very careful to avoid anything that might give me some preconceived notions about the candidate. If you think that someone is smart before they even walk into the room, just because they have a Ph.D. from MIT, then nothing they can say in 1 hour is going to overcome that initial prejudice. If you think they are a bozo, nothing they can say will overcome that initial impression. An interview is like a very, very delicate scale — it's very hard to judge someone based on a 1 hour interview and it may seem like a very close call. But if you know a little bit about the candidate beforehand, it's like a big weight on one side of the scale, and the interview is useless. Once, right before an interview, a recruiter came into my office. "You're going to love this guy," she said. BOY did this make me mad.

Re: Frassle Release Notes

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 23:02:39 EST
OK, some good news.
The bookmarklet now has distinct MSIE and Mozilla versions. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but oh well.
The problems with redundant feeds are fixed. This also solves the symptoms of the response threading bug, although a more permanent and direct fix is coming soon.
The next steps are a handful of small improvements/bugfixes for the aggregator, some performance improvements if I can muster them, and a fancier page builder to let you construct customized views of your frasslized content.

What I like about software

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 15:04:34 EST
What I like about software: it's the one creative realm where we aggressively work to understand what makes a multi-person creative process work.

Frassle Release Notes

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 14:11:59 EST
Some not-so-good observations about the new version of frassle:
Bookmarklet broken in IE. The document object in IE does not have a getSelection() method, so the new bookmarklet causes an error in IE. An IE-safe version of the bookmark is this:

javascript:document.location= "http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/note_add?uri=" + escape(document.location) + "&title=" + escape(document.title) + "&body=" + escape("<blockquote>" + document.selection.createRange().text + "</blockquote>");
Response threading bug. Jessica noticed that when a response points to a subject URI that is the permalink of more than one note, it shows up multiple times in the comment-author's blog. This will be fairly easy to "solve" by adding a GROUP BY statement to the fa_Vnotes_by_feed view and selecting the feed with minimum id (inelegant but probably OK). This is one consequence of the unenforced assumption that permalinks identify notes uniquely.
Performance is getting poor. Frassle is not unacceptably slow (as it once was), but parts of it are getting pretty bad. Full-text search, for one, is extremely slow. This may be a weakness of the outdated full-text search system I'm using. But also, the feed page is getting sluggish. This may be due to overreliance on the aforementioned fa_Vnotes_by_feed view, and will probably take a bit of profiling to figure out for certain.
Redundant feeds. I thought I had figured out how to fix a data problem caused by my stupid aggregator (another thing: it's still stupid), but it didn't work on the production server when I tried it last night. I should try again.
But other than that, things are looking pretty good... ;)

Re: Re: Frassle Alpha 4

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 09:24:31 EST

I didn't make any changes to the "Preserve existing timestamp" function. I'd be surprised if it broke, but I'll test it.
If you want to edit HTML directly, you have to switch the editor from WYSIWYG mode to source mode. You can do this by pressing the <> button which is on the second row of the toolbar below subscript.
(This is a test to see if the "preserve existing timestamp" feature works— OK, it worked for me. This post should still say 9:24.)

Frassle Alpha 4

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 00:36:25 EST
If you can read this, frassle v. a4 hasn't crashed yet! New features include:
A WYSIWYG editor that's so fancy, it just crashed my f***ing browser. (This is going to be a bit shorter than the original message it replaces.)
Readers can now comment on frassle blogs without registering for an account.
When you log in, you can choose an option to remember your login. This stores a persistent cookie in your browser so you never have to login again as long as you're using that browser.
Search is now by default limited to the blog or category you're currently browsing, if applicable.
Improvements to the edit categories tree widget, including a couple of bug fixes and the ability to add top-level categories through the tree.
If a post in your weblog links to an item that frassle has a copy of (i.e. if you posted a comment or are just responding to something that was e.g. in your aggregator), your post has an [up in thread] link to take you to the original note.
A better bookmarklet that will automatically copy your text selection into the body portion of a new blog post.
A redesigned index page, that points at a full list of frassle blogs.
A bunch of esoteric things I've forgotten about.
Enjoy, play around (test my software :) , and let me know if anything goes wrong!

James Boswell on Wisdom

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 15:43:50 EST

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
—James Boswell, 1791

Tara Liloia: Blogging BloggerCon

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 09:34:35 EST
Tara has assembled a very thorough list of blog posts about bloggercon. Found via Betsy Devine, who has a great index of photos.

BloggerCon!

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 13:13:46 EST
It's a beautiful day in Cambridge and I'm sitting on a ledge at the law school's pound hall. Around me are Andrew Grumet and Frank Catanzaro, having a very creative discussion. They are talking about an idea Frank brought up in Lisa Williams' Visions from Users session.
The essential idea is to help real time chat conversations blossom around blog posts. Frank thinks this should work as a feed: you get a dynamic buddy list of who's participating.
A related question may be how to deliver this information. One idea I'd like to consider further is the use of an IM bot to represent your blog. What if there was a shimonobot that was integrated with my blog? You could sign up for alerts, that seems pretty straightforward. What else would you do? How would an IM agent act on my behalf in blog-like ways: community building, content management, social networking?

Thank you officer

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 23:29:07 EST
Tonight at 10:16pm on the way back from a work conference, I failed to yeild going into the Concord rotary on Rt. 2. My mistake entirely; I must have been very tired and misjudged the distance. Worst of all, I failed to yield to a cop.
I was very apologetic and polite, and he let me off with a warning. If you factor in increased insurance premiums along with the ticket itself, a ticket would have cost me at least $700. So thank you, officer. I'll drive more carefully in the future.

New tool: OPML to CSV Converter

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 09:12:48 EST
Here's a web-based tool I made that converts OPML into comma-separated values, so you can import things like the bloggercon II registrants list into your favorite spreadsheet program.

Clay Shirky on New York

Fri, 09 Apr 2004 16:22:11 EST
Some really great stuff in here.
When the Korean family who runs the deli on my corner started selling pita bread, they decided to introduce it to their customers by setting it out on the counter underneath a hand-lettered sign that said "Perfect for fajitas!"
*That* is New York. It's accidental cultural collage — not in the self-concious "It's Shakespeare, but with black people in speaking roles!" kind of way but in the "There's a Popeye's Fried Chicken in Chinatown" kind of way, in the "Koreans run delicatessens and Iranians run bodegas" kind of way.

Shirky: Situated Software

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 16:44:54 EST

Fortune: Sun, Microsoft, and Open Source

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 14:29:59 EST
Wowsers, did he just imply that Microsoft will open source their software? Inevitably?
That's probably been my closeted opinion for a few years, but jeeeezus, here it is in Fortune. Kinda mind-blowing.

On Courage

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 10:28:44 EST
Lisa Williams: My father reared me on the saying, "An unchanged mind is like unchanged underwear."

CSS HOWTOs

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 10:09:45 EST
Terse guide to CSS. Someday I will skim this to update my skills in this somewhat useful realm.

Giant Ocean Tank Webcam

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 16:51:05 EST
Boston's New England Aquarium has the coolest webcam ever: not only can you watch all sorts of cool fishies, but you can physically control the camera over the web. (Thanks Lisa.)

Lisa Williams: Visions from Users Draft Session Description

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 09:53:58 EST

sorttable: Make all your tables sortable

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 16:30:48 EST
An awesome DHTML hack to add column sorting to any HTML table.

Architectural Analysis of Gmail

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 15:56:58 EST
Here is a very interesting, thorough analysis of how Google might build Gmail. It really shows off how much ass Google truly kicks.

s l a m: bringing the dark side of syndication to light

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 14:13:19 EST
What is syndication for? This piece, by the author of ActiveRenderer for Radio, asks what it will take for blogs to embrace not only reading and writing, but editing and aggregation:
I would argue that weblogging is not only an author's dream, it is (or will soon become) an editor's dream. Most people associate journalism with writing. I've spent enough time in daily newspapers to know that it's only part of the job. Papers would not exist without people whose job it is to organise the available writing material, decide on sequences, hierarchy of information, association with photo or graphic material, and so on.
How would this work? You'd need an RSS aggregator and publisher, something like Feedster's Feedpaper. But you'd also want the ability to structure this in a web page that others could read. And the kicker is, of course, that you want to allow users to design and share their own internet editions without knowing about RSS or anything technical.

Twisting this to my own ends: Frassle seems like the perfect back end for this. What it needs is a customizable front end: the page builder. I want to see the page builder tab just to the right of the aggregator. You have to be logged in to use it. You give your page a name, and it gets a permalink just like a note. You can choose a title and background/text colors (or perhaps a theme). You can choose 1, 2, or 3 columns. Into each column you can stack a number of building blocks.
Each building block is a page element. It can contain

the text of a note or set of notes, optionally with title, categories, and comment links. Select the set based on a mixture of these criteria:

a set of specific notes (by GUID/permalink), or
the latest N notes in a certain feed, or
notes in a certain category, or
notes matching a certain search.

a list of titles with links and hover text, with selection criteria as above.
Hmm, that seems implementable. In fact, I just sketched out a data model...

Spring - java/j2ee Application Framework

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 16:57:36 EST
you had me at "we believe J2EE should be easier to use"
Update 4/6/04: Holy shit, this is easier to use?

The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 14:49:38 EST
Funniest thing ever. I think it's an AmEx advertisement, but that is just a weak commercial excuse for some really great stuff.

Sun gets religion; cuts 3300 jobs

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 14:35:38 EST
Today Sun is mixing the good and the bad. The good news is a remarkable $1.6 billion (that's cash to Sun!) settlement with Microsoft, hailing a more sane business relationship between the companies. The bad news is a round of severe across-the-board layoffs, including some of the first cuts in R&D, which had been spared in prior rounds.
This has to be a wise move for Sun. It's about time they stop antagonizing Microsoft and start bending over backwards positioning themselves as a partner or even a candidate for acquisition. I think it's a matter of Sun broadening their view of dealing with Microsoft from its traditional conquest-or-capitulation dichotomy. If they can do this quickly and effectively, there is the possibility for them to continue existing independently and even to grow as they forge new business opportunities among the select few huge computer companies. But if they fail to eliminate the antagonism, they will be pushed out of that powerful circle. Once that happens, it's a short ride to hell.

Gmail is the Right Move

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 14:25:46 EST
Lots of hubbub on Google's upcoming GMail service, which will offer email service in the style of Yahoo and Hotmail. GMail's major distinguishing features are:

a gigabyte of storage space,
powerful search services for all that email, and
targeted advertising based on your email contents.
Some people have been skeptical about #1, assuming that a Gigabyte is just too much space to give away. But in the consumer market, a gigabyte of hard disk storage now costs under one dollar. Of course, reliable server storage costs more, but

Google is good at making efficient use of cheap hardware,
the cost is worth it if it attracts many users away from stingier alternatives and makes Microsoft (owners of Hotmail) squirm, and
most people won't use the whole gig anyway.

Given that the gigabyte thing isn't an April Fool's joke, that leaves search and targeted advertising. These seem controversial but I think most of the bristling is coming from privacy advocate straw men rather than anyone real. A web-accessible, good, fast search of all the emails I've ever sent and received would be immensely useful. As for privacy, it shouldn't be any harder for Google to keep that information in safe hands than Yahoo, Hotmail, or anyone else.
On advertising, this may be a little creepy at first but the privacy implications are quite clear: it'll be OK. Google's software will select ads to serve you based on email content, and advertisers will not receive any personal email or identifying information. This is not about Google giving advertisers the right to pick through your inbox and choose ads for you. This is about giving Google a better way to target ads from their adsense program, which is a win for users and for Google and for advertisers because better ad targeting means a higher clickthrough rate, which means viewers are being served more relevant ads. I tend to find advertising annoying mostly because I am not persuaded by generic appeals for generic products I don't need. If advertisers can instead suggest special new things that will actually benefit me, I hope they will rise to the challenge.

SAP Ventures: On Dealing with Bloggers

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 13:54:31 EST
Point-by-point advice on the difference between management and leadership, which might be summarized as stubbornness and tenacity versus sensitivity, insight, and listening.
A manager, often found running amok in large companies, would have tried to shut me down by invalidating my ideas, spinning the results, discrediting me, and finally, by simply ignoring me because I'm not mainstream media. A leader, on the other hand, came to my house (this blog), admits the problem, and details what they are doing to fix it. In short, the leader left me nowhere to go and impressed by their personal style; [LinkedIn CEO] Reid turned me from a critic to a fan.

newsmap: visualize google news

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 13:44:23 EST
This neato flash app offers a treemap visualization of Google News. The idea is to represent the aggregated news items from Google News in space such that news trends across topic areas are visible.

CSM: New haven for free music: Canada

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 09:58:11 EST
Andrew points to this article, which has surprising and pleasant news from our friends to the North.
Although the Canada ruling does not, of course, apply in America, there may still be positive consequences here. For one thing, the Canadian record industry may be finally forced to confront market realities and invent ways to make and sell music that incorporate sharing. Maybe ten or fifteen years from now when we wake up from our lawyer-induced market coma, we'll be able to follow in their footsteps.

HP Labs Semantic Blogging Demonstrator

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 10:41:47 EST

The demonstration platform for HP Labs' semantic blogging research programme
What is this research program? Sounds cool. I should look for more information.

bootsnall: Police Racism in Russia

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 09:01:41 EST

Just as I was admiring the scene, a young policeman standing in front of Lenin's Mausoleum waved at me and signaled at me to come over. I strolled there and he asked for my passport. Yuks, another silly passport check on dangerous Asians like me. Maybe he thinks I'm a Chechen terrorist. I handed over my passport, which he examined carefully.
"OK, fine," the blond policeman said in halting English, "but you have committed a crime."
This initially scary story turns out to be rather amusing. Lots of good stuff on this site, too.

Re: Re: A business case for Friendster cashing in on their network data... by opening it up

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 18:07:25 EST
The problem with FOAF/ESF/whatever is that they have no data. If they catch on, this problem would be solved. But until they catch on, they're going to be a pain to use. As if the pain isn't sufficiently evident based on the fact that we refer to an XML protocol, not a web-based service...

A Public Librarian Chimes In

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 11:01:38 EST
Jessica has posted responses from her friend Kevin, a public librarian, to my post that started a discussion about the services libraries provide. (There is also a comment here.) Most of his responses focus on how difficult it would be to implement these services because of the budgetary and time constraints libraries and their staff face. Naturally, I completely neglected this point in my original post except to say that perhaps my suggestions would work better in a for-profit business than a library. I was writing about how to better serve patrons.
And I'm not sure what he means by being "overly focused on books" or why that's a problem.
Here's what I mean. Books, though wonderful in many ways, do not have anywhere close to the monopoly on information that they used to have. People talk more, they watch TV, they read and write and play on the internet. There are now many more ways of doing what you could only do with books 50 or 100 years ago. So then, what are libraries about: frail printed bound volumes, or uniting people with information, art, and entertainment? If libraries are mostly for books, then you should expect them to continue declining in importance relative to other information sources.
Perhaps what I am trying to do here is describe a different idea of the market where libraries participate: one where people learn and exchange information. This description is certainly broader than the usual idea that a public library is some kind of sacred institution essential to the functioning of a literate democratic society. While the library may be essential, in terms of democratizing knowledge the glory days of libraries are over. And one key advantage of the internet is that it doesn't depend on the reluctant patronage of a cash-strapped government.

Andrew Grumet: Lessons from the 60s

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 10:09:27 EST
Andrew considers Fred Brooks's notion of conceptual integrity in software: the importance of a consistent underlying vision. Brooks argues that this integrity can only be achieved in software when no more than two people take control of the design (and keep that design alive during development).
I agree wholeheartedly. Whenever people design together, but without a very deep shared understanding, their subtly different motivations and visions are inevitably amplified into huge, gaping dissonances during implementation. It's not too hard to get a thorough shared understanding of a solved problem: you can simply take a few people who went to similar kinds of schools and read the same textbook, and they will probably be able to build you a suspension bridge that works.
But if you are building radically novel kinds of software, the vision of what that software shall be has probably originated in one individual's head. Furthermore, even if that person is an excellent communicator, her vision is probably implictly premised on all sorts of subconscious assumptions that even she can't describe. But as you move from idea to implementation, many of those assumptions will be questioned. The right answers to those questions depend not just on intellect and facts but on intuition. Thus even if a large part of the grand vision has been communicated, a software project will suffer when parts of the implementation can't be checked against the original intuition.
This makes the case for having one person lead the design of a software product. Can you also get away with using two people? I think you can, because when two people know each other very well and respect their own and the other's strengths and weaknesses, they become very aware of the limits of their own intuitions. They can accurately guess how the other will feel about using adjacency lists vs. boundary sets to implement tree structures, or they know to ask. Over time, the shared understanding that develops between these kinds of collaborators is a unique, wonderful, and powerful thing.
Three people, however, make a group. First, it is twice as challenging for each participant to develop his personality such that it best meshes with the others. Second, the question of whether to involve the rest of the group in a given decision at least doubles in complexity. Instead of asking 'What would Bob say?' We now need to ask also 'What would Alice say?'. In between, we have to recall all sorts of information about Alice, like what her last experience with an issue like this was and whether she is in a mood today where she will passively agree to any suggestion rather than risk a confrontation. This information probably takes the place of similar information about Bob in our short-term memory.
These added scaling costs are what I think makes 3+ -person design collaboration so difficult. There are ways that we can attend to a singular collaborator that simply become too difficult with 3 or more people. Developing a meaningful shared understanding goes from being something that two mature people can excel at to something only a rare lucky few can pull off.

Personally, I have always felt more comfortable interacting with one other person than interacting with a group. Part of my ineptitude (often manifested as shyness) with groups probably comes from growing up as the only child of a single mom. It takes me a while to get comfortable with a particular group of folks, but I can very quickly get a good reading on person. Consequently I am better in chats, dates, and interviews than parties. Consider yourself warned. :)

get your war on: manufacturing jobs

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 16:31:31 EST

Frassle comments blow

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 15:09:29 EST
The comment system on this blog blows. It is a nice idea in spirit to make commenting equivalent to posting on your own blog, but the execution in frassle is too complex. I think if I had a simpler, faster way to leave comments, one that didn't require you to register, I would get more comments. From the perspective of frassle, setting up a weblog for each commentor is no big deal, but to a user, "set up your weblog" begins to sound like more of a commitment than you'd want to make just to call me on some bullshit I wrote. So the project for tonight is to build a comment system that first looks like all the other vanilla comment systems on MT/Radio/whatever blogs, and second follows the frassle model as closely as possible.
Here's how I might implement it. Some of this will not make sense unless you know frassle's data model (i.e. unless you are me):

When you want to leave a comment, you may register/login or post without registering.
If you post without registering, frassle makes up an fa_feeds entry for you of type local_anonymous. It stores in that entry a secret key that is also sent to your browser so that you have editing privileges over that feed.
The anonymous option gives you control over a feed as long as you use the browser that has the original cookie. If you later sign up for an account using that browser, your local_anonymous fa_feed is converted to local and the cookie is deleted.
That anonymous cookie is also used to key into the fa_feeds table to automatically recall your name/email address/home page URL data. Posting updates these fields.
The primary goals are a simple interface and a smooth path from commentor to frassle contributor (aka comments as the gateway drug).

Eric Sink: Getting Started with Your Own Software Company

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 15:05:41 EST
Interesting basic advice.

A business case for Friendster cashing in on their network data... by opening it up

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 11:18:54 EST
I was reading a post by Cesar Brea who notes the coolness of the Event Share Framework (ESF) for RSS. ESF allows blog/news feeds to include data about events—start time, duration, location, and so forth—and can be easily integrated with calendaring applications. For example, you could subscribe to a calendar feed of events in your workplace and have them automatically show up on your Outlook calendar.
Cesar notes some ways to increase the value of sharable calendars:
Imagine a site called calendar.com that aggregates RSS-ESF feeds (the domain name is taken, btw, even though no live site's up). Think Google for events. Search by where you live / travel, time/ date range, keyword. Find person/ organization with events you would like to go to/ attend remotely. Subscribe and get future events and updates sent to your Outlook calendar / PDA calendar automatically. As a person trying to schedule your next cub scout pack meeting, check calendar.com to see when a good date would be based on "related groups'" calendars (e.g., other organizations in your town, like school, church, sports leagues, etc.).
The question of finding "related" calendars is interesting. Note that Cesar suggests exploiting existing physical communities for this information. Of course, with most of my friends carrying out data entry for Friendster, why not just reuse that data? Duh, because it's locked in Friendster.
Friendster, which has the social network data but only primitive communication systems, ends up being a big collector's game.* If Cesar's hypothetical calendar.com could get at that data, it could easily support a scheduling wizard that crawls your social network and suggests times for potential events based on likely interested people, or suggest attendees for an event based on their availability and interest. This is of great value for the user. It would be a good reason for Friendster to create simple APIs (subject to user control so that privacy can be controlled). In fact, if there were useful services like these, I'd happily pay Friendster to make my data available (of course, I am more of an online exhibitionist than most).
Friendster, Inc. probably doesn't believe that's a viable option because it opens up their most valuable asset—the network data of millions of users—to the competition. On the other hand, it also vastly increases the value of that data because it can be used in novel applications that Friendster, Inc. will not be able to invent and implement. Opening up but controlling an API, inviting innovation from small vendors, and then taking over the biggest markets is a good way to make money. It's the Microsoft model. Maybe Friendster should give it a shot.
* Here's a goofy idea for a metric of the value of a social network service like friendster. Simply run a survey to determine what percentage of users have gotten laid thanks to using the service. Call this the score score. I'd imagine friendster has a pretty low score score, like .001%, but livejournal much higher, perhaps 3%.

Jessica responds to my thoughts on improving libraries

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 09:03:13 EST

India: Hole-in-the-Wall

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 11:37:16 EST
Found in the comments on a Philip Greenspun blog post:
An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues of digital divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.

NYT Essay: The Honesty Virus

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 11:51:17 EST
NYT Magazine is running an article by Clive Thompson that starts out by reporting on a study. The study finds that people lie less on the internet in spite of its image as a realm of dangerous strangers. I had a funny thought as I read this paragraph:
On the Internet, though, your words often come back to haunt you. The digital age is tough on its liars, as a seemingly endless parade of executives are learning to their chagrin. ... This isn't a problem for only corporate barons. We all read the headlines; we know that in cyberspace our words never die, because machines don't forget. ''It's a cut-and-paste culture,'' as Hancock [the study's author] put it (though he told me that on the phone, so who knows? There's only a 63 percent chance he really meant it).
The parenthetical remark that ends this paragraph is a joke. (I mean that literally; it is a funny phrase intended to evoke levity.) It includes a playfully ironic jab at the author. My thought was: why didn't he put a :) smiley face there?
Oh yeah. This isn't a blog post (although the author writes a blog), it's an article in the friggin New York Times.

Newsweek: All Eyes on Google

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 11:34:39 EST
A great article by Stephen Levy that follows up on and ties together lots of recent events in the land of Google.

Lisa Williams has more great ideas for discussion tools

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 10:39:11 EST
Lisa Williams, who got me thinking about how comments you make on other blogs ought to be findable from your own blog, has some more great ideas for technology-aided discussion. In particular, the location-aware commentary ("show me what others think about the restaurant I'm currently standing in front of") is a wonderful idea that can be solved or closely approximated by current technology. That's what I love about computer technology: there is such a strong current of innovation that you don't have to look far back to discover fundamental, amazing new ideas. I think it's partially a privilege of good timing— a kind of renaissance.

North Adams Transcript: Blogging

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 09:23:31 EST
This article about blogging quotes a few bloggers from the Berkshires, where beautiful (and better-than-Harvard) Williams College sits. It features Toph Cyll, who was a terrific colleague in Williams Students Online as well as a good friend.
"I'm fascinated by digital community," said Cyll. "I think that's sort of the heart of the phenomenon, it lets everyone mix and match. It's so organic that it's really redefining the ways we interact on the Internet."
I must confess I am immensely proud of what Toph and all of us in WSO have accomplished. It was a great privilege to work with that group— honest, important, fun, and rewarding hard work.

NYT/Thomas Friedman on Outsourcing

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 10:34:08 EST
Friedman has a short and sweet commentary on outsourcing. What it boils down to is this: America has a unique culture and infrastructure designed to facilitate innovation.
America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.
This resonates encouragingly with some thoughts I wrote a few months ago under the heading A silver lining in the cloud of outsourcing. Though there are some major industry changes that will upset many people— including some I know personally and wish the best for— the end result will be to refine America's focus on innovation. The challenge to address is not just how do we make the short-term economic impact of offshoring less devastating, but how do we transition the labor forces to sustain and develop America's infrastructure for innovation?

Halley: The Love Of Your Fate

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 10:28:50 EST

"Nietzche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now."
— Joseph Campbell

Internet Archive: FreeCache

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 13:49:38 EST
Easily cache large media files for free at bandwidth hotspots around the internet! Wow!

What good is a library?

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 10:33:56 EST
A post by David Weinberger from the SXSW conference session on librarians got me thinking about the many roles of libraries. I think there may be a niche for a business in the library world: one that recognizes that people aren't really willing to physically go to libraries for information any more. It's now remarkably easy to get information online, and no claims of superior quality will change the perception that google is fast, easy, and good enough.
So why go to a library? Some reasons:

there are people there you want to work with
you can browse and skim a reputable collection by topic
you can use resources that are bound to that place, such as librarians, annoyingly proprietary databases, or special media (microfilm, maps)
it is a nice place to hang out and think about things at leisure away from the bustle of everyday life
What would a library more tightly focused on these goals need?

a number of small, reservable, soundproofed conference rooms with chalkboards and internet access so that 2 to 4 people can have a discussion without disturbing others
a cafe that serves coffee and snacks, to sustain long stretches of study and discussion as well as to provide a noisy, stimulating atmosphere for those who prefer it; and to function as a rendezvous point
dedicated quiet reading/study areas where one can retire with a book or laptop and cup of coffee
specialized browsing-oriented catalogs: librarians should focus on a hobby or interest of theirs and develop focused browsing systems in partnership with library patrons and experts in the field; these could be done on a rotating exhibit basis
I'm going to harp on that last one a little; can you imagine how great it would be to go to the library to see an exhibit on the greatest information in an area of interest to you, curated by experts? Not only would you find new, stimulating material, but you'd also be guaranteed to bump into experts and other hobbyists
The library would have to prominently feature (and even market) the reputation of its librarians and patrons, so like-minded people could find each other and would choose the library as a natural meeting spot
The library must be located near businesses and restaurants so that it can be easily utilized for meetings and can be seen as the launching point for friendships, romance, and partnerships
And what's wrong with current libraries that prevents them from realizing these goals?

They are overly focused on books. Books now contain a much smaller fraction of the world's useful information than they did when libraries were conceived, but the concept of a library's holdings hasn't kept in step.
They are excessively tied to government or educational institutions. In theory, public libraries should serve the public, but as large government institutions they are inert, inflexible, and underfunded. University libraries exclude many potential patrons and will never have their primary focus on the public, and suffer from many of the same problems as public libraries on top of that.
Because they are tied to multi-purpose institutions, libraries are too general. Their identity is caught up with the university or the town, so the average patron does not feel his potential to rearrange the place, leaving his imprint. Hence the library has little personal appeal.
Libraries are too large. This is a one cause of their generality, because the sheer physical size of libraries makes it difficult for them to assume an understandable identity. Additionally, the "economy of scale" ideal for the library often results in depressingly bad architecture that encourages us to get our books and get out, without lingering to discover new resources — librarians, books and periodicals, or other patrons.
Libraries enforce an overly strict distinction between patron and librarian. The flow of information isn't just librarian-to-patron anymore, but the other way around and inter-patron. Individuals should be able to contribute to the structure of the library's physical space and information systems.
Libraries don't serve coffee. This is especially asinine. By comparison, Starbucks serves information (via wireless internet access).
Libraries underserve groups. Because of their reputations as quiet zones, libraries are seen as places for individuals to read and reflect. But if the value of a library is to grow increasingly from its power to connect people socially—since its market in distributing information is being clobberred—it must serve groups even more than individuals. This means libraries must contain a large amount of flexible meeting space with collaborative tools like TVs, computer projectors, seminar rooms, and chalkboards.
Libraries discourage talking. Instead, libraries should set up a physical environment that encourages going up to someone who is browsing and making suggestions out loud, using your voice, and making connections with people.
The next question, which I don't have time to think through right now: can you make money doing this? I am skeptical that current library systems will be flexible enough to try out these kinds of ideas, but perhaps we can entice some entrepreneurs to build a "mall for smarties"?

Gregor: non-leaky abstractions in physics

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 14:12:20 EST
Gregor writes in his weblog about a conversation he had with Prof. Eberhard Hilf:
hilf demonstrated how equations as jotted down by einstein in 1905 would be almost incomprehensible to modern scientists today. over the years, verbose notations have been replaced by increasingly more succinct ones, new symbols have been introduced. i immediately had to think of leaky abstractions. hilf was adamant that physics was not prone to those problems because it is grounded in solid math.
good for them physicists, and too bad computer science cannot claim the same currently.
Hilf may have misunderstood what leaky abstractions are really about. Had he understood, he probably would have seen that physics and other natural sciences have the exact same problem, and that the mathematical rigor he claims is at best equivalent to the formal definition of computer programs and therefore not even relevant to the problem of leaky abstractions.
First, let me explain the problem of leaky abstractions. As originally explained by Joel Spolsky, leaky abstractions are a challenge to software engineers. Much like mathematics and theoretical science, new achievements in software development build on the foundations already in place. These foundations are abstractions that package up the complexity of other tasks. For example, if you are building a program to download a file over a network, you can use the web protocol, HTTP. Then you can choose a program to serve the file from a number of existing applications, and instead of writing the code to connect to the server, follow the rules of the protocol, and write the file to disk yourself, you can simply invoke an existing piece of software that does this. In highbrow engineering circles, this is called reuse and is highly desirable because it saves development time and avoids creating new code that must be debugged and maintained. It also helps to cement existing standards so that software makers can compete on the basis of innovative features rather than "we crash less".
An abstraction becomes leaky when some of the details it claims to handle leak through and become your problem. Continuing the file-fetching example, what happens if the network is down? You depend on some piece of fetch software to get files, which depends on a network protocol to ensure that two computers can communicate reliably, which depends on a network to allow computers to fling bits at each other. If the network can't handle that job right now, it can tell the network protocol. But the protocol can't do anything about a network that's physically disconnected, so it shrugs. The fetch software you invoked can't do anything about a protocol that won't let it connect, so it shrugs. Your program depends entirely on this piece of software, so you shrug. A leak in the bottommost layer of abstractions has sprung through every other layer, and has to be dealt with outside the realm of the automatic. "Plug in your network cable," your computer says. Do you ever get that message when your cable is still plugged in, but your cat has stepped on a power strip and turned off your network hub? Another leak!
You may already see that leaky abstractions can show up outside of computer science. Do business transactions always go as they should? Have you ever come to a restaurant expecting to get a meal, only to find that they couldn't seat your group? Have you tried to drive home from work in the usual 30 minutes only to find that weather or a car crash dragged that out to 2 hours?
Of course, these are all informal abstractions. In Physics, the abstractions are all mathematically defined. A more rigorous abstraction of driving home from work wouldn't leave any room for leaks. Right?
Well—not exactly wrong nor right. It depends how you look at it. If you're developing the theory alone, you're not going to find that suddenly F = m*a doesn't hold up because e.g. it isn't defined for a = 3 m/s/s; the requirement that definitions be rigorous prevents that. But if you're trying to develop a theory that accurately describes the interaction of actual physical objects, the classical Newtonian abstraction above breaks down at certain points, like when mass is really really small or you're moving really really fast. (More knowledgable readers are welcome to correct/improve my Physics.)
What we see here are two ways to judge the rigor of an abstraction, which I'll call theoretical rigor and applicative rigor. The mathematical foundations of physics ensure its theoretical rigor, but when applied to the description of nature, we can find failures in applicative rigor. Newton's models, though we call them laws, do not accurately describe everything they were once claimed to describe. And applying these laws to real life situations requires accounting for a number of other factors—wind resistance and its ilk. We could qualify the law by describing the highly idealized world it assumes, but that would take too long. We'll settle for expecting the laws of physics to describe limited, idealized versions of what actually happens in real life.
Now back to computing. Most programming languages require that you write well-defined programs—you can't leave out a step and expect the computer to ask you what to do when it gets there. The language usually provides a sensible default, like doing nothing, but this is a way to compress the notation, not to escape rigorous definition. So programming languages, at least those that have an actual deterministic implementation on a computer, actually enforce the constraints of theoretical rigor at least as well as the Physics research community.
But when we take those theoretical tools and apply them to solve problems, we find many leaky abstractions: broken networks flummox our web browsers; buggy data compression libraries leave security holes open in our servers. Each of these bugs is like a wind resistance we hadn't thought of. We hackers had been assuming a simpler world, and so the model of the world we coded for doesn't exactly correspond with the world we're selling software too.
But that's OK: it happens to Physicists too.

For more information:

The Curry-Howard Isomorphism describes a relationship between logical proofs/proof systems and computer programs/programming languages. It is described in this Wikipedia entry and at length in this online book.
I also made a comment in a nerdy discussion on programming language design and the isomorphism at the About Kim weblog.
Gerald Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking teaches you how to think scientifically, including how to respect the limitations of abstraction.
Joel Spolsky's original essay, The Law of Leaky Abstractions, is a good read and isn't too long.

A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes)

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 11:59:05 EST
Ruby is a sweet little programming language. It has some of the Perl ethos of inspiration by natural language, and it is simple. It's smaller and less well known than Perl, but as you can tell by the name, it's probably roughly in the same family of programming languages. Future project: take an afternoon and learn it. This guide seems like a fun, skimmable way to start. And if I don't learn it soon, it'll be hard to be the first kid on the block hacking it.
(I'm betting there are a lot of geeks on my block, which seems probabilistically true although I have no first-hand evidence. Another project: get to know my neighbors better?)

What is Waypath?

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 11:36:58 EST
It's some kind of blog search tool that allegedly points you at contextually related posts. How does it work? Is it any good?

Envisioning the Future of Weblog Software

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:14:04 EST
I've organized most of the comments to Dave's original request for ideas for blog software. You can browse the comments primarily along two dimensions: what is the feature they're asking for, and how deep is their vision (somewhere between simple bugfixes and long-term research questions).

How it's organized
Start browsing here
Outline of my organizational structure
This is still preliminary and rough, but let me know if you think this might evolve into something useful. Some things I could imagine using it for:

browse the outline to measure how many people are interested in various areas
easily find related features
if you're looking for research ideas you can focus on those and skip the bug reports
I can give a quick tour of this tonight at the Berkman meeting if people are interested. I'd also love to hear suggestions as to how I can make the organization better.

Salon: The new Pentagon papers

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 10:36:39 EST

A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war.
I've only skimmed the beginning, but this seems like a must-read.

little.red.boat

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 09:01:58 EST
Top ten things not to use as an alternative to toilet paper if you suddenly discover you haven't got any toilet paper...

Re: Amazon.com Syndicated Content

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 22:44:50 EST
A google search turned up this tool which will allegedly use Amazon's SOAP API to get your wishlist and return it in RSS. But it doesn't seem to work for me.

Formality Considered Harmful: Experiences, Emerging Themes, and Directions

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 22:42:31 EST
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 8, 4 (1999), pp. 333-352.

Career Calculus

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 17:04:56 EST
Sage advice about how learning from your mistakes makes you more clueful.

Professor of Pickpocketry

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 14:11:34 EST
A fun story about a guy whose job is to tempt pickpockets around the world. He earns their respect, perhaps by stealing his wallet back, and learns their techniques over coffee. Then he consults to business travelers and police departments. A short, sweet, unusual professional narrative.

O'Reilly Network: Steven Johnson on "Emergence"

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 10:53:33 EST
This 2002 interview discusses some cool ideas about emergent properties of online communities. This interaction struck as particularly prescient about the personalization tasks that frassle hopes to take on, which were more recently spelled out by Robin Good.
Dornfest. What's interesting is that Slashdot worked for me to a certain degree, and then to a certain degree it worked for me only to the extent that I was an average Slashdot reader — which I'm not. Even if I turned off everything but the highest rating posting, I still find a lot of noise to signal. What has emerged in the weblog community is that I don't have to become an average Slashdot reader, I can say, I'm kind of like Cory, and I'm kind of like Steven, and I'm kind of like Dave Winer in a certain sort of way. I'll read their things, and they'll point me to the appropriate things, including Slash articles.
So you have this wonderful after-market community. And if I decide, for example, that Dave Winer's focusing too much on politics, I may stop reading his blog, but I'll still get stories from him, via somebody else.
The result is that when I wake up in the morning, I get to see a lot of the stories that come through Slashdot or from the New York Times that are interesting to me, without having to wade through Slashdot to find them.
Johnson. That's a great point. I know people are working on creating the meta-blogs, and I feel there's an incredible opening to create that — the thing like Slashdot that sits on top of all the blogs, and is collectively filtered by all those bloggers and their readers. There are a lot of different versions of that, but I don't see one that's really solved the problem. To me, the thing that has to happen to the individual blogs is that they're still too centered around the personality of the blogger him- or herself. They're still too limited to emailing the blogger, or a crude bulletin board. What I would love to see is, one way or another, by force of personality or whatever, to have these clusters of 100 or 200 or maybe 1,000 people who offered real contributions and collectively owned the thing.
read the whole interview »
How can these writers bear to have such far-reaching, broad, prescient visions but not go and try to implement them? Isn't it a gnawing frustration, having to wait for someone else to try it and watching them bungle it up? Or is it that these visioniaries have seen how difficult, messy, and error-prone the implementation process really is, and they'd prefer just to sit in the background and have their occassional "I told you so"?

INFO.ORG.IL - Crutches for short term memory

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 09:08:15 EST
Browsing around the site of Hanan Cohen, who pointed at an interesting link in the last post, I found these very good suggestions for a "where did I read that?" tool. This is an important feature that ought to be done well in frassle and similar weblog/aggregator tools.

An Interview with Donald Norman on Mental Models

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 09:01:09 EST
From a comment by Hanan Cohen on David Weinberger's blog, what looks to be an interesting interview about an important application of cognitive science to user interface design.

Litigation as a Business Model

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 17:15:15 EST
The SCO Group, not content to die a quiet death, has over the past year transformed itself with a new business model. Starting with a lawsuit against IBM, SCO has been suing corporations it alleges have violated its licensing agreements for the Unix operating system, which SCO owns.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe that legally SCO has no leg to stand on. In their first allegation, they accuse IBM of violating their Unix license by copying code into the Linux kernel. Not only have they failed to publish any evidence that this is actually the case, but because SCO itself published Linux source code under terms that release these kinds of proprietary claims, that may not even matter.
SCO was probably hoping to be acquired by IBM as a settlement for this case. But IBM's stubborn desire to fight the trumped-up accusations hasn't spelled doom for SCO: somehow, despite huge declines in their original business—software—SCO's stock price has shot way up and they have received new rounds of venture capital financing. It's a little perverse to watch: investors are giving this company money on the theory that it can generate enough fear to extort protection money from its former customers and business partners.
What's scariest is that, as Cesar Brea points out, it's working. Although when the cases go through court SCO is likely to lose and might give up, its directors and the small army of lawyers and consultants they retain have profited greatly. Just by looking like a bully, they've inflated their stock price enough to cash out at a huge profit.
This is an interesting case. A couple of years down the road, I hope it will serve as a catalyst for some improvements in our legal system and the complete humiliation and financial ruin of SCO Group and every one of its executives and lawyers.

OpenP2P.com: Next-Generation File Sharing with Social Networks

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 16:36:57 EST

Generative Programming and Component Engineering '04

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 08:50:19 EST
For the next few days, I will be working on a paper submission for this conference based on my thesis research. So please don't distract me by offering fun things to do. (:

apophenia: what i want in an RSS tool

Sun, 07 Mar 2004 00:50:10 EST
Danah Boyd has some really good, though somewhat vague, ideas.

For Great Justice

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 13:39:14 EST
Some internet trends are still funny a year later. Like when they show up in the "real world"...
Update: this is part of a rather hilarious series of hacks.

Jared Diamond: Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 11:50:22 EST
Transcript of a long talk by the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel introducing his book.

Random RSS

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 10:00:13 EST
One of the sillier features I built into the feed recommender is a link that gives you a random RSS feed. I subscribed to it in my aggregator (the excellent SharpReader for Windows), and now I get a handful of headlines from some random person whenever it refreshes! Maybe I'll find some interesting blogs in this way.

How to Write

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 09:27:30 EST
Links to a variety of essays about writing. Found at gapingvoid.

Woot!

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 00:11:58 EST
I fixed the segfaulting that was holding back the new feed recommendations functionality. It's not really part of frassle, but it's cool and you'll like it.

Amazon.com Syndicated Content

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 23:06:34 EST
Amazon offers syndicated feeds for various categories of products. Why not also offer RSS feeds of my wishlist or my personalized recommendations? Or of my order history? I would really like to keep track of and republish what I like, and it would be just plain useful to keep some of my friends' wishlists around— so I can stay apprised of their interests as well as quickly find gifts.
Update: I sent the following message to Amazon.com suggestions:
I love your new RSS feeds! But I think you could do one better by offering personalized RSS feeds. Why not give me an RSS feed of my wishlist? I could easily republish my wishlist on my weblog, showing visitors my interests. I could also subscribe to RSS feeds for my friends' wishlists, so I can easily give them gifts. It's a win-win: customers get better ways to follow along with each others' interests, and Amazon.com offers an omnipresent impulse buying option. It will only further cement Amazon's position as the definitive store—where you link when you want to talk about a product.
Good work!
Shimon Rura

The NewsMaster: A New Emergent Socio-Professional Role?

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 21:55:32 EST
Bingo! Robin Good gets it: the next round of tools to help us deal with information overload will be radically different. They will take the chaos of different views on the internet—thousands of blogs each offering a different filter on news of different but interrelated topics—and synthesize from them a more accurate view of what's relevant to you than any current, homogeneous view of the internet.
As amazing as it may appear, the emergence of the newsmasters shows that individualistic and self-directed work may actually provide great social benefits.
The creation of dedicated information channels, originated by independent publishers and not by vested commercial interests or mainstream media conglomerates may create the opportunity for a true renaissance of culture, learning and to a multiplication of our abilities to manage large amounts of rapidly changing information.
The task here is to automate the application of personal discretion. If you had infinite time, you could manually pick out the most interesting news items every day—but you'd waste lots of time wading through spam, repetitions, and irrelevant material.
The obvious approach to solving this problem says, "just get everyone to agree to organize things in a certain way." But as we see every day (Yahoo, dmoz, the yellow pages), this approach can never intimately accomodate the unique interests, beliefs, and cognitive styles of different people. Certainly, there are clusters of similarity among people—you might call them cultures—but their boundaries are vague. The way humans support improved conscious experiences in each other is rich and nuanced, and so any approach proposing simple, discrete relationships and organizations is hopelessly naieve. People see the world in different ways, so we had better deliver it to them in different ways.
Ideally, we'd like the system to resemble a good teacher. A good teacher is not only well-informed, but builds relationships so rich that each head-turn, puzzled look, or nod refines her understanding of the student and shapes her presentation.
Computers have never come close to this kind of cultural value, where they seem to go beyond being a tool and actually help to shape our conscious experience. With RSS in 2004, we have an abundance of consciousness streams in a form that can be easily sliced, diced, chopped, and synthesized using simple computer technology. The challenge now is to find out how to construct the optimal conscious experience for a person, given the shared yet fragmented wisdom of millions.
Like my favorite frassle slogan reads, what we want is honey from the hive mind.
"What's important here is that each node of each layer need not worry about the rest, and need not be focused on the goal of the system.
The agent seeks what is available, the way a retinal cell gathers light, and passes on what is relevant, the way a neuron passes on a signal.
The filtering occurs not in the individual node, but through the independent actions of the aggregation of nodes."
That is the reality: no a priori agreement. No altruism. Make the decisions cheap and self-interested, yet magically supportive of the network. Not only is it desirable for cells to operate without concerted effort toward an overall goal, but that would be impossible. For there is not one overall goal, but a multitude of different, related goals, each understood and accessed differently by different participants in the network.
Think: if we all tried really hard and followed the rules, could we express the point of America? The point of culture? The goal of life?

Bloggers have been first to scout new independent sources, alternative voices, and who have pointed links to new ways of looking at any issue. They, more than any other group, have brought, among much useless noise, the true emergence of effective meta news sources that originate, filter and aggregate valuable content online.
"Decisions about selection and classification are made on a case by case basis using very coarse, and unregulated, mechanisms."
So, what it appears to the many superficial onlookers as a universe of mindless writings (blogs) is nothing less than the initial phase of a complex and orderly process whereby humanity at large takes control of filtering, gathering and re-organizing his own know-how an discoveries.
This is what first inspired me about blogs. Each seemed to be contributing a view of a slice of the internet, and its view was unique. Furthermore, a number of readers seemed to indicate their trust in a given weblog by reading or subscribing to it. This brought together two crucial ingredients for building a network of culture: the conferring of judgment on packets of conscious experience, and the expression of trust in a source of these judgments.
And here's the kicker: every bit of the process is done on a computer. Someday, someone's going to figure out how to extract the essential data from all those PCs and make this whole thing a lot more automatic.
Frassle is my attempt. Not only can you see what I link to, but you can see what I read—my aggregator—and connections I've made between my own channels of consciousness (categories) and those of others—under related items.

Re: Article from NYTimes

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:43:06 EST
Hi Rachelle!
There's an incredibly useful website here which, given a regular link to a NYT article, will provide you with a link that works forever. So even after the link in your title asks viewers for $2.95, this one will show the full article. I try to use these links whenever linking from my weblog.
(Note to readers: this is a reply to a post in Rachelle's weblog. In frassle, replies are posted to the reply-author's blog; mine in this case. The reply references a URL that points at the original entry, this one by Rachelle in this case. Frassle will then display my reply underneath Rachelle's original post, and visitors to my blog can see what I've been commenting on.
But as you can see, the interfaces here aren't fully worked out yet. There has to be some way to see what I was responding to if you start at my blog.)

Mohammad Ali Abtahi

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 11:47:49 EST
Holy shit! The Vice President of Iran is a blogger!
Farsi, Arabic (I'm guessing that's what they are) and English versions are available.
Wooooow, if you thought using blogs to turn American media around was a daunting but worthwhile task, just think about Middle-Eastern media...

IRAQ THE MODEL

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 10:23:05 EST
Here are a couple of really amazing blog posts. The blog they come from, Iraq the Model, is written by three brothers, dentists and a doctor by occupation, living in Baghdad.
This single page of their writing is a million times more unique and informative than anything CNN or the New York Times would ever put out.
Why? Because it's a primary source. It's someone not unlike me in age, ambitions, and ways of thinking. It's someone who, because he's lived it, doesn't reduce the situation to an absurdity like "Americans are pillaging the country to extend their empire" or "Iraq would be best served if Americans just left" or "Iraqis are a treacherous violent people who will never function in a democracy".
If you're purely pro-war or anti-war, please realize that you have taken a reductionist position: Iraq under Sadaam was a horrible place to live, the potential of its people was stifled, and it was near-perfect primordial soup for terrorists. At the same time, the American invasion is a huge disruption with many casualties and costs, and its ultimate success depends much more precariously on our long-term success helping the Iraqis convert their nation into a functioning, open society. Iraqis have a tremendous role in this process, and it's extremely encouraging to see some of them stand up and call Al-Jazeera on its violence-mongering.

A new version, kinda, finally

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 00:04:54 EST
Well, here it is, kids: frassle alpha 3. One major part of the new version is disabled right now, and I'm in a bit of a bad mood, because deploying this version has not been easy. Still, you can find the most important new features working here and I'll try to debug tomorrow. Major new features:

faster, simpler categorization interface (javascript-based)
a new "related items" view from any category
various user interface improvements
full-text search
Try it out: if you have an account, login; otherwise sign up.
Let me know what you think and if you hit any bugs.

Perspectives on Microsoft's Computer Science Roadshow

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 16:50:02 EST
Bill Gates has recently visited several schools to talk up computer science as an area of study and work. One interesting perspective is from Kevin Schofield, a Microsoft Researcher who travelled with Gates and was particularly impressed by the increasingly cross-disciplinary role of computer science. There are also some wonderfully/painfully cynical comments at Philip Greenspun's weblog. Dave says "People were choosing computer science as a career because they hoped to be the next Bill Gates, not because they wanted to work for Bill Gates."
I say there is some hope: Microsoft hasn't been 100% successful so they still have to make occassional improvements and enhancements to some of their products in order to get people to buy the latest versions. Therefore, they still depend on startups to come up with good ideas (so that they can be purchased or cloned). Add to this the inevitable inertia of a 50,000-employee corporation, and a smart entrepreneur has a good shot at 3 or 4 years of fun, profitable, independent existence before Microsoft absorbs or destroys him. (See also my essay on Microsoft vs. Google.)

Classical Computer Science Texts

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 13:40:18 EST
Links to the full texts of many seminal papers.

Purple Cows

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 12:02:39 EST
I guess I'm on a Dave Pollard kick.

I started with his list of the top 10 most important ideas in blogs for 2003.
He brings up some good points about Purple Cows in Knowledge Management.
What's a Purple Cow, you ask?
And, well, can they revive KM?
As some readers will know, the purple cow has special meaning to me as the mascot of my alma mater, Williams College. Maybe it's a sign.

USATODAY.com: Skyrocketing method patents stifling innovation, say critics

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 11:43:17 EST
Tim O'Reilly (publisher) vs. Jay Walker (priceline.com).

Storytelling: Passport to Success in the 21st Century

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 11:28:25 EST
Via Dave Pollard, who writes:
Stories are subversive, and far more persuasive than presentations, prescriptions and reports - Take a look at the best selling business books — from the stories of corporate frauds and spectacular failures to the biographies of CEOs — and you'll find most of them are stories. Rather than analytically laying out the causes of failure or success, they tell a story in dramatic style, first-hand, in chronological order. Not only is this more engaging, it is more consistent with how we learn, and more persuasive because it slyly leads us to reach our own conclusion, unaware at how the narrative is manipulating us to that end. Having reached that conclusion, we embrace it more readily than if someone else tried to 'sell' us on it, and we remember it better because we recall the 'journey' that took us to it. ...

Chapter 8: K-Logs

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 16:58:13 EST
A book chapter about weblogs and knowledge management.

Yahoo! Groups : klogs

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 16:55:37 EST
A mailing list about blogs and knowledge management.

NYT: The Social Security Promise Not Yet Kept

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 15:15:15 EST
Lisa quotes a story from Whiskey Bar featuring the author of this NYT article describing how, since 1982, Americans have been overpaying Social Security taxes. Prior to that, Social Security taxes were assessed so as to cover benefits being paid. The putative purpose of the extra charges was to reduce the federal budget deficit. Congress
...borrowed the surplus, replacing the cash with Treasury notes, and spent the loan proceeds paying the ordinary expenses of running the federal government.
Only twice, in 1999 and 2000, did Congress balance the federal budget without borrowing from the surplus.
Both parties have treated the surplus Social Security taxes as "cash flow to the government," which has been allowable since the Johnson administration started counting Social Security as part of the federal budget, not as a separate budget, said C. Eugene Steuerle, a tax policy advisor to President Reagan.
In short, a large part of the Social Security deduction on your paycheck is being spent as if it were part of the Federal Income Tax deduction. This seems trivial but there is something fishy going on: the government has been treating the social security tax as a special kind of income tax. How is it special? Well, for one, you don't get charged Social Security tax on income above $87,000. The end result is the further skewing of the tax burden... onto the middle class:
Over all that year, Americans paid 15.3 cents on the dollar of income in income taxes, but many middle-class Americans paid a larger share of their incomes to the federal government than the top 400 when both income and Social Security taxes are counted.
What would it take to create an organization that enforces fair accounting standards on the federal government?

MSNBC - CIA slipped bugs to Soviets

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 11:49:14 EST
Ben emails this story of an upcoming book by Thomas C. Reed, detailing a campaign of technological sabotage carried out during the Reagan administration by the CIA and US defense contractors against the Soviet Union. In one of the most creative cold war stratagems, the US was able to exploit the success of Soviet campaigns to spy on US science and technology. Not disclosing the knowledge we had gained (especially from engineer/informant Vladimir Vetrov, who was later discovered and killed), the US effectively poisoned the stream of intelligence by supplying software and hardware that would work for a while and then fail catastrophically.
The most direct result was a gigantic natural gas pipeline explosion in Siberia in 1982. It did serious damage to the Soviet economy, but killed no one. The explosion was the largest non-nuclear blast seen by US satellites. Amusingly, NORAD was worried about unknown missiles or small nukes for a while — until the good guys came down the hall told them it was actually good news.

Harvard Institute of Politics: Calendar

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 10:49:41 EST
Upcoming interesting events: Jesse Ventura on third party politics; Robert McNamara on The Fog of War.

Zipdy: Free Zip Code Distance Calculator

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:19:01 EST
I've been looking for this capability. Zip code and longitude/lattitude distance calculations are immensely useful in online community websites.
Zipdy is a program for calculating the distance between two zip codes and finding all the records in a RDBMS with a zip code with x miles of another zip code. Currently, RDBMS support exists for postgreSQL.

Google Search: true love near 02474

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:55:03 EST
Google labs has a cool location-based search. But my test proves that it's not up to the most interesting location-based queries. [Via Garrett]

Wirearchy: Jon Husband's blog

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 09:50:35 EST
One Jon Husband had an interesting response to a call for visions of the future of blogging tools. He seems to be interested in a lot of the same stuff I am: the intersection of knowledge management, social software, weblogs, and new organizational, social, and economic structures.

Malcolm Gladwell on SUVs: Big and Bad

Tue, 24 Feb 2004 11:15:31 EST

According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls." Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills." One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a.m."

Andrew's Challenge

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 15:24:05 EST
In his blog today, Andrew Grumet waxes nostalgic about AOLServer. I used AOLServer with ArsDigita Community System 3, and it was clearly the finest environment for building database-backed web applications that I've ever used. It took me a little while to get TCL, but eventually I understood that everything is a string—really, really, everything.
This site you're reading, however, isn't programmed in ACS or its excellent successor OpenACS. It's programmed in Apache::PageKit, which sits on top of Apache's mod_perl. This is the same environment I chose for the Williams Students Online (WSO) website.
PageKit works well for WSO for two reasons: it's simple, and it's Perl. Simplicity is key because as a student organization, WSO has high turnover and it must be easy for new people to contribute. Perl is good because it's a language that most young geeks know or aspire to learn, and can learn quickly thanks to many good online sources. Also, it has an insanely great repository of reusable modules.
I had hoped to use a Java framework at first, but these were so brutally complex and huge I couldn't even set them up, let alone train other students with little programming experience to hack them. That failure brought up two priorities: the web framework had to be simple enough that I could explain it to someone with a little programming experience in 5 minutes and they would get it, and the language had to be something that didn't make such a person recoil in horror.
ACS and OpenACS are wonderful systems but they fail on both counts. To someone who is well educated about relational databases and understands the implications of programming multi-user web/db apps, ACS is beautiful and makes excellent sense; but WSO had only one such person—me. To someone who has just taken a Java data structures course and has never developed any software for users, ACS is unfathomably huge and the strange languages of TCL and SQL are peculiar to mysterious. Experienced geeks who haven't done DB apps, of which WSO had a handful, can usually see SQL as something potentially useful for real-world stuff but tend to view TCL as a passe fad. You need these experienced folks to lead interesting projects, and you want them to be comfortable, so you tend to avoid suggesting any language that elicits a bitter beer face.
PageKit really is a simple and wonderful framework. The essential feature is that your website is split into a Model (program code) and a View (HTML pages). When a URL is hit, PageKit looks for a corresponding subroutine in your Model code. That subroutine is called, and is responsible for setting some values. The View is then rendered; the HTML in each page is mixed with special tags that the server processes and replaces with the values your Model code produced. The Model code is nice, object-oriented Perl, and the View templates are HTML with about 5 special template tags that do IF blocks, loops, and stick values set by the model into your document. It's a pretty good framework, and though it doesn't have the sophisticated user management, package system, or array of software that OpenACS has, it's much much easier to learn and extend.
But Andrew did bring up one point where Perl/PageKit is simply uglier than the AOLServer API: database calls with loops. One of the most common tasks in generating a dynamic web page is executing a SQL query and looping over the results. AOLServer offers the beautiful db_foreach construction:
set title "Late Night With Conan O'Brien"

db_foreach get_matches {
select description, tvchannel, when_start, when_stop
from xmltv_programmes
where title = :title
} {
do_something_with $title $description $tvchannel
do_something_else_with $when_start $when_stop
}
In PageKit right now, you'd write this as:
my $title = "Late Night With Conan O'Brien";
my $sth = $model->dbh->prepare('
select description, tvchannel, when_start,
when_stop from xmltv_programmes where title = ? ');
$sth->execute($title);
while(my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref)) {
do_something_with($row->{title}, $row->{description},
$row->{tvchannel});
do_something_else_with($row->{when_start},
$row->{when_stop});
}
Now, this isn't 2 to 8 times as much code as AOLServer; it is only 2 extra lines and a few characters. But all the differences are mere scaffolding, and we should be able to abstract that scaffolding and make the essential feature—running a SQL query and looping over the results—absolutely central. The TCL does some scary stuff though: it takes the columns returned from the query and creates variables in the loop body's namespace with the same names. It also does something really, really useful that Perl's DBI (generic database interface) lacks: its :title syntax specifies that the title variable's value should be used (bound) in the query at that point. In Perl, this is a two-step process: you specify ? in the query where you want a value to be bound, and then when you execute the query, the arguments you pass are filled into the corresponding question marks. The big problem with the Perl approach (used also in Java and Microsoft ADO, and probably others) is that you can easily have a dozen ?s in a SQL statement and it's a pain to match them up in order. We should be able to use names like AOLServer. Andrew probably didn't intend his post this way, but I'm looking at it as a challenge: can I make my environment as good?
Answering the Challenge
Can I answer this challenge? Let me try to state it first:
Make it possible to write Perl that has the same effect and structure as the AOLServer db_foreach statement, without extraneous code.
Package this code as a module so that it's easy for any programmer to use the new construct.
Slight adjustments to accomodate Perl syntax and conventions are OK, but any programmer who knows AOLServer's db_foreach should be able to instantly recognize and accurately understand the corresponding Perl.
Sketch of a Solution
I'll take the following template as my goal. I'd like to have working Perl that looks like this:
my $title = "Late Night With Conan O'Brien";
$dbh->db_foreach 'get_matches' q{
select description, tvchannel, when_start, when_stop
from xmltv_programmes where title = :title
} {
do_something_with($title, $description, $tvchannel);
do_something_else_with($when_start, $when_stop);
}
Can I do it? Will Perl let me meddle with the language syntax enough to make this kind of crazy business compilable? This post will be continued tonight...
Update 2/27/04: I didn't get to continue this post the night I wrote it. Since then, I've mostly hacked the code I want, but I haven't had a chance to write it up. Meanwhile, Jay has written some code that basically does the looping for you. He also calls poking around in the symbol table to find existing variables "disgusting", a point which I'm both inclined to agree with and find rather irrelevant. As a teaser, I have Perl code that looks and works almost exactly like the TCL code, including grabbing existing variables and support for named bind variables.

The Story of the Painter

Sun, 22 Feb 2004 23:56:15 EST

There was a tradesman, a painter called Wayne, who was very interested in making a penny where he could, so he often would thin down paint to make it go a wee bit further.
As it happened, he got away with this for some time, but eventually the Baptist Church decided to do a big restoration job on the painting of one of their biggest buildings. Wayne put in a bid, and because his price was so low, he got the job.
And so he set to erecting the trestles and setting up the planks, and buying the paint and, yes, I am sorry to say, thinning it down with turpentine.
Well, Wayne was up on the scaffolding, painting away, the job nearly completed when suddenly there was a horrendous clap of thunder, and the sky opened, the rain poured down, washing the thinned paint from all over the church and knocking Wayne clear off the scaffold to land on the lawn among the gravestones, surrounded by telltale puddles of the thinned and useless paint.
Wayne was no fool. He knew this was a judgment from the Almighty, so he got on his knees and cried: "Oh, God! Forgive me! What should I do?"
And from the thunder, a mighty voice spoke...

"Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more!"

Bugfix: "frassle it!" bookmark

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 09:50:48 EST
Sun noticed a bug in the "frassle it!" bookmark on the home page— it referred to the wrong host. I've fixed it. Thanks!

What is BlogRunner?

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 09:32:30 EST
Is it another Technorati?

Ideas for a voter support system

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 14:55:18 EST
There's been a lot of talk in the Berkman group about using technology to help voters make more informed decisions. As I was reading this article from The Nation (thanks Jim Moore), I got to thinking: if Dean knew that the mass media were going to turn on him, why didn't he plug his website at every opportunity? Well, it wouldn't have been very useful because it is mostly a rah-rah brochure with lots of padding in between actual position statements.
Let's face it: when a candidate is on TV or in a debate, they give canned, generic responses that I'll call brochure answers. These are designed to make everyone feel good about the candidate, without giving away enough actual policy to turn anyone off. They're fluff.
Now, if a candidate actually did stake out some positions in any detail, we would have a much more honest and straightforward election. It would become feasible to know what policies Mr./Mrs. Whoever actually advocates. Right now the best place to get candidate position information is perhaps from the League of Women Voters' DemocracyNet, but the candidate-supplied statements there are incomplete and vague. They're statements manufactured during the campaign to have the same brochure appeal as all the other garbage we see. DemocracyNet gives you power to compare, but what you're comparing is sales pitches. We'd like to compare facts about political issues.
So how do we compare facts? First, I'd like to see major issues (e.g. "Abortion", "Gun Control") broken down into specific multiple-choice questions ("Roe v. Wade: should we keep or overturn it?", "Assault rifles: allow or ban civilian purchase?"). Each candidate would then be paired with each issue. Clearly, the reductionist way that these questions are stated and structured makes it difficult to guarantee objectivity. Therefore, the Voter Support System would have to make available the identity of the researchers who selected the issues and interpreted the candidates' positions. Like a good academic paper, all references must be cited. Any visitor to the site should be able to contribute to the vetting process by issuing specific references that support or challenge the validity or applicability of a reference. And very importantly, there must be no aggregate or statistical reasoning. The system shouldn't tell me "266 people agree with this statement and 127 disagree," because that doesn't tell me if it's true or not. Majority opinions, especially on a website, do not correlate to factual accuracy and leave open a huge window for abuse.
Here's a mockup:

Viewing position information for CURIOUS GEORGE: Gun Control

Statement of the Issue Candidate position
1. Should guns be given to Monkeys? Choices: yes, no
George's Position: yes*
* IMPORTANT! We have received compelling arguments that CURIOUS GEORGE could support either yes or no on this issue. Therefore we have LOW CONFIDENCE in the summary position above.
Supported by:

candidate statement, 12/4/2003
quote published in Chicago Sun-Times, 1/24/2004

Challenged by:

report of cute monkey PAC, 2/2/2004
Man in Yellow Hat on NBC's Meet the Press, 2/5/2004

» support or challenge our assessments

2. Should machine guns be sold to minors? Choices: yes, no
George's Position: yes
Supported by:

candidate statement, 12/1/2002
MADD Press Release, 7/1/2003
New York Times analysis, 8/21/2003

Challenged by:

no challenges yet

» support or challenge our assessments

(Hover over a link to get more information on what that link will do.)
The Voter Support System would involve three major roles:

readers, who view the position information for candidates and offer new resources that support or challenge certain interpretations of a candidate's position
moderators, who screen out reader suggestions, but only ones that are obviously off-topic or spam
researchers, who are tasked with verifying the accuracy of reader suggestions and, if accurate, classifying them on the candidate-issue tree
Readers can be anyone, including known biased sources such as competing campaigns; we evaluate specific arguments, not their messengers. Moderators are a mostly administrative function necessitated because of the web-based nature of this system, but still all their decisions should be subject to public review. Researchers must be a disciplined group devoted solely to evaluating the accuracy of claims from readers.
The reputation of the voter support system is staked primarily on the quality of its issues breakdown and the objectivity of its research. I wouldn't use a system that told me if candidates were for "tax relief", because "tax relief" is an abstract term with a loaded meaning—what kind of cruel person could be against relief?! The key is to stick to specifics and avoid opinion, and gather measurable data. To initially populate the issue tree with candidate stances, you'd want to do a vast media review. You might want to enslave a large cadre of grad students for this purpose.
Summary
The key assumption here is that voters want to vote based on rational facts, not hype or emotion. This may not be true for all voters, but it's how I'd like to vote, and I think there should be a system to help me do so.

break down issues into specific, multiple-choice questions
research positions of each candidate on each specific issue
publish rationales, not statistics, for all position judgments
solicit vetting of those judgments from readers
research the accuracy of reader arguments and publish that research
Or in short, reduce to specific issues in a systematic, verifiable, open way.
Finally, a Solicitation
If you'd like to work with me on a system like this, I can do the technical side of it. But I'd need help with the issue structures and ongoing research. Email me.

Shimon's Recommendations Engine

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 12:58:16 EST
I've been working a bit recently on a recommendations engine based on the data of Share Your OPML. The SYO database contains the RSS subscription lists of 733 people, who have 81,438 subscriptions to 24,748 distinct feeds. It uses your subscriptions list, and those of everyone else in the database, to help you find feeds you'd like, but that you aren't yet subscribed to.
This is an area Andrew Grumet, Kingsley Kerce, and I have been talking about for a few weeks. He had the data in convenient form in an RDBMS the day after Dave Winer released the SDK, but last weekend I took a few hours and got it flowing into my own RDBMS so I could play too.
As I've been working on recommendations, I've found that it's really hard to evaluate whether the recommendations are any good. First of all, because feeds.scripting.com ends in, and is advertised mostly on, scripting.com, the audience is biased to include people interested in blogging and technology, liberal politics, and so forth. If you randomly pick a feed from SYO, how likely is it to be something interesting?

Task: answer this question by building a feature that takes you to a random feed.

Another problem is that it's rather cumbersome to actually look at any of the recommended feeds. SYO only includes XML links, and an obvious improvement would be to spider the linked XML and dig out a website URL. Indeed, Andrew's site very conveniently does this. I'd like to do it or something like it myself; I'm considering perhaps offering a frassle-ized interface to the RSS feed contents rather than a simple link. This would offer a consistent interface to externally-produced content, which is both good and bad.
The next question is, how do you quickly look at a blog that some goofy software has recommended to you and decide whether you'll like it and what it's about? In a perfect world, you'd have enough time to carefully read everything on it, but in real life we're all in hurry. Here are some easier metrics that I think can be correlated to quality and relevance, or can at least give you a sense of what the feed's about and what kind of burden it will impose on you, the reader:

titles of posts
what outside sites are linked from the posts
category titles, if the feed has categories
average time between posts - to help you determine how often new posts will knock on your door. Perhaps better presented as average number of new posts per day?
average number of words in a post (and min, max?)
what feeds point to the same website URL? Am I subscribed to any of those? (i.e. is this feed just a copy of something I already read?)
Currently, there is only a development version of my recommendations engine in an undisclosed location, but I'll try to get it up on this site, and public, real soon now.

A nice old picture of Williams College

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 11:03:22 EST
The Philadelphia Print Shop offers this neato old print (found via Google images). One thing I like about it is that 3 of the dorms where I lived are visible.

corral - a Free web-based RSS aggregator

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 09:45:17 EST
Implemented in mod_perl with a postgres backend. I'd like to look into this program to see if I can hijack its aggregator features for frassle, because right now frassle's aggregator is pretty immature. At the very least, the code should offer some clue about how to handle HTTP Gone and If-Modified-Since headers.

The Ideal Aggregator: Notes part 1

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 13:22:12 EST
At the Berkman meeting on 12 Feb 2004, we continued our project to understand and design the ideal aggregator. The following is my summary of that discussion. I meant to post this several days ago and to make it strictly factual, but the passage of time has made my memory fuzzy, so I think it's more useful for me to abstract and organize than attempt to create minutes. I will also toss in some opinion, which I will try to make clearly discernible. I hope this will be useful and welcome your comments.
Current Options and Limitations in Aggregators
We considered the current state of the art in aggregators. There are two main styles of aggregator out there right now:

three-pane aggregators, such as FeedDemon or NewsGator, which typically present a list of feeds on the left of the window, and split the right part of the window vertically, displaying the titles and dates of posts on top and the contents of one post in the bottom; and
one-pane or blended-feeds aggregators, such as the one built into Manila, Feedster, and frassle, which blend incoming posts from a number of weblogs into a single stream.
One issue that was brought up is how aggregators handle scalability. In my opinion (and I actively use both kinds of aggregators) this is a serious challenge for either approach. A three-pane aggregator with too many feeds will tend to gather a number of feeds that simply don't get read. I tend to subscribe to all sorts of feeds that sound interesting, but I don't read them thoroughly right away, and after they fail to make my first-pass reading list for a week I forget what they're about, and lose any motivation I once had to read them.
In a blended-feeds aggregator, on the other hand, I am reluctant to subscribe to too many blogs. I need to keep the average size of the aggregator posts view short enough that I can efficiently skim it every few hours; if it has 150 new posts each time, I can't even whiz through it in the kind of time I'm willing to allot.
One possibility is that the 3-pane style offers a better hint toward a scalability solution because I can implicitly capture information about how important a certain feed is by how it's organized in the left pane. Another possibility is that the 3-pane aggregator is simply offering me an option of denial: I can subscribe to a feed without risk of inflicting too much new reading on myself, but as a result that subscription becomes meaningless. Because a blended-feeds aggregator forces me to view a bunch of different feeds as part of the same stream, I don't have that cop-out. I think there's a lot to learn from each approach.
Where it's Located
Another major dimension of aggregator design is where the software is located and accessed. The two main approaches here are desktop and web-based. A desktop aggregator tends to offer more control and a richer user interface. A web-based aggregator tends to offer more availability (since you can use your aggregator from any web browser anywhere in the world), but its UI is limited to typical web browser capabilities.
How are items selected?
Although we typically think of aggregators as gathering posts from a list of subscribed RSS feeds, there are actually a few different sets of criteria that can drive an aggregator:

manual— the typical approach, where a user maintains a list of feeds himself and the aggregator gets all posts from each of the feeds.
automatic— the aggregator software gathers feeds or posts that match certain criteria. For example, you might want all feeds written by authors in the Boston area, or all posts mentioning your name or your company's product, or posts to the top 100 feeds in Share Your OPML.
curated— an individual maintains a list of feeds for others to use. For example, a medical librarian might gather RSS feeds relevant to different teams in a pharmaceutical research lab, and thereby offer her patrons an easy way to stay apprised of new developments in their fields.
It's interesting to note that some of these options seem more like feeds than aggregators: the simplest case is feedster, which will allow you to make an RSS feed of its RSS search results. Although the output is RSS, the RSS contains an aggregation of many different feeds. Another cool example is w4 k-collector, which organizes posts from a multitude of feeds by topic and offers results in RSS as well as in your browser.
Another area where I see some potential is in bridging between manual, automatic, and curated styles. Can we have an aggregator that delivers posts that are relevant to you (manual), but with little effort (automatic) and leveraging the expertise of others (curated)?
The Grand Challenge
What would a great aggregator look like?
We don't know yet. Write down ideas, draw pictures, and share them with us. You can

come to the Berkman meeting tonight or any Thursday,
post to the AggregatorWishList Wiki Page on Rick's server, or
email me and I will bring up your idea at the meeting.

Leo: Literate Programming Editor/Outliner

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 11:36:10 EST
Interesting ideas in this editor. By way of John Sequeira, who has some pretty scattered ways of keeping himself organized. :)

Joshua Whalen: Paybacks are a Bitch

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 10:42:50 EST
[Via Scripting News] A few very interesting stories about payback, and a suggestion for how to pay back the national media for killing Howard Dean. I'm not sure about the last point, but the stories are absoluately worth reading, especially if you're intrigued like I am by psychos and the mafia.

The upgrade worked!

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 23:43:45 EST
Like magic, frassle's linode virtual dedicated server migrated from a data center in Texas to California. It took about 30 minutes, and now I've got more RAM and a higher ratio of the CPU. If frassle is still slow, please complain.

Server Upgrade Tonight

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 20:08:45 EST
Frassle will be down for a few hours tonight for a server upgrade. When it returns, frassle should be significantly faster.
Also, in the next couple of days I will be taking version Alpha 3 live. This version will include a number of useful features, most notably:

full-text search
vastly improved (newly DHTML) interface for categorizing
related items view: show items from other authors that may be pertinent to your current category
Thanks much to everyone who has used frassle and suggested upgrades, and special thanks to my friend Josh Ain who is helping me with the new categorization interface.

Dave Thomas on code generation

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 15:02:40 EST

Washington Post: Search For Tomorrow

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 09:53:53 EST
A well written article with a pretty good analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of internet search, starting with the typical lines from librarians and proceeding to describe some of the potential of personalized search.
The way one part links to another reflects the preferences of Web users — and Google tapped into that. Google, in detecting patterns on the Web, harvested meaning from all that madness.
This points the way to one of the next big leaps for search engines: finding meaning in the way a single person searches the Web. In other words, the search engines will study the user's queries and Web habits and, over time, personalize all future searches. Right now, Google and the other search engines don't really know their users.
Unfortunately, it's hard to gain much inspiration from this article since it mostly repeats the adages of semantic web and "intelligent agents" research. In case you hadn't noticed, neither of these fields has made visible progress in search or any other realm. Where AI and explicit metadata techniques were once thought to be critical, approaches that seemed overly simplistic are closing in on the AI vision very quickly. The best example is Google, but AI/semantic web is losing out in other counts. Like right now it seems that a more feasible way of automatically figuring out schedules between people around the world is for Microsoft to achieve 100% market share with Outlook. I certainly don't look forward to that but the semantic web community doesn't seem to understand that it would take years of work by a marketing force as leviathan as Microsoft to achieve the kind of widespread consensus they require.
Not that intelligent agent research couldn't be useful at some point, but if Google wants to bank its future on knowing its users, it's own Blogger and Orkut services are much more valuable.

scottraymondnet: Broadcatching with BitTorrent

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 11:21:34 EST
A great idea: distribute video payloads for RSS feeds using BitTorrent!
Here's the scenario: you'd like to distribute videos over the internet. Perhaps you're making your own TV program, with episodes coming out every week. Right now, you could make an RSS feed that points at a URL containing each video, and update that feed each week. But this has some problems:

To view the video, each user must click a link in their aggregator and then wait for the video file (which is probably huge) to download.
To offer that file at a particular URL, you must have the server capacity to transfer that much data at high speed. This is a lot of capacity, and is hard to achieve with one centralized set of servers— sites like CNN contract with companies that have hundreds of servers all over the internet to deliver videos.
These are both deal breakers. First, you have to wait 30 minutes to watch a 15 minute movie, and second, you can't watch at all because the download slogs along at .01 kb/s or you simply get a "This user has exceeded their monthly bandwidth limit" message.
The first concern can be partially addressed with an RSS2.0 feature called payloads, whereby your aggregator can be told to download the video overnight. This, of course, only works for people with desktop aggregators, permanent internet connections, and computers that stay on all night. The second concern is even harder to surmount— if we want independent film artists to spend their time making quality movies, we can hardly expect them to spend $zillions paying Akamai to host their work around the world.
That's where BitTorrent comes in. BitTorrent is a decentralized network for file distribution. The key property of BitTorrent in this context is that you can release a file onto the BT network, and the more people want it the more available it will be. So if lots of folks actually want to download your video, lots of folks will automatically volunteer as redundant servers providing that video content. Downloads are more available and faster. You are still limited by your internet connection, but suddenly it's a lot more likely you'll be able to download at 300 kb/s over your cable modem.
I'd really like to see this happen because it would increase the quality of my video-viewing experience. I am now at the point where, excluding face-to-face and telephone conversations with friends and coworkers, the aggregator is my primary information source. I don't have a TV and barely listen to the radio; I no longer have the patience to sift through so much ill-targeted junk I don't enjoy. I expect to have my interests stimulated, not ignored— not even for commercial breaks. I'd like to watch funny and informative video content, but I'm not willing to cancel my divorce from the monoculture for it.

Atom: my summary

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 19:28:45 EST
Atom boosters talk a lot about how their new standard provides openness, choice, and a better specification. But by introducing it at this point, with the sheer force of marketing they are using, they are destroying something else. What they are destroying is consensus. Consensus takes time to build. While it may be easier to build consensus around a better standard, even if Atom is better it isn't going to help developers work for users because it destroys consensus among developers about how to do syndication. Or to sum up, something almost demonstrably true: the chief contribution of the Atom standards is argument. Three years ago, this would have been good, but nowadays it stinks.

Finally, I cave and talk about Atom.

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 16:52:36 EST
I made a comment here about Atom. Another reader, Firas, said
I only want it (admittedly, I don't use UserLand software, but in products that I do use) because it's the way Blogger.com sites are syndicated, and that's not likely to change.
Firas - 2/13/04; 3:31:16 PM
I mean, how can you blame someone for producing lock-in if you'll practice lock-out yourself?
Firas - 2/13/04; 3:40:58 PM
And I responded as follows.
Firas, lock-out isn't bad if it prevents hostile, ruthless organizations from monopolizing a market that is or could be rich and efficient. Now, to be fair, I'm not sure why Atom and RSS are fighting in the first place. There is really heavy feature overlap. RSS2.0 is pretty stable and licensed under creative commons, and Atom makes a big spiel about being "open", so it's unclear how one or the other could be leveraged by a would-be monopolist. From my perspective, whether or not Atom solves some of the problems in the RSS spec(s) is irrelevant. It might be easy and fun to use Atom but right now 99.9% of feeds are in RSS, not Atom, and virtually all aggregators read RSS, not Atom. Introducing Atom makes these aggregators harder to develop and harder to use, simply because it's something different. Whether it's better or not, the timing of Atom is about as bad for aggregator users and developers as humanly possible.
Shimon Rura - 2/13/04; 3:58:28 PM
I may also suggest that there is something to be learned from this fact: nobody who doesn't get turned on by acronyms has ever thought about the "important" differences between RSS and Atom. Sometimes, we hackers need to get a life.

Accordion Guy's Performance

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 11:37:56 EST
At the dinner last night after the Berkman meeting, Accordion guy performed an absolutely stunning accordion/baritone rendition of Hit Me Baby One More Time. Download the video here (10MB AVI with sound).

Common Content: Music : My Life Changed

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 10:45:43 EST
The piece with which Lessig concluded his talk yesterday.

Berkman meeting redux

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 23:44:13 EST
Got home 20 minutes ago from the Thursday meeting. I'm exhausted.
Josh and I left work at 3pm, drove to Harvard to hear a talk by Lawrence Lessig, and chatted with Mike Walsh during the reception. Afterwards the three of us went to Berkman into a meeting I rather enjoyed. The dinner afterwards (at Cambridge Common) was pretty good too.
I'll write more on the Lessig talk soon. Meeting notes will show up tomorrow, including notes I took on the project to understand and design the ideal aggregator. As usual, I came away from the meeting with a couple of really cool ideas for future features in frassle (say that five times fast).
Wendy and Joey are the cutest couple. Awww. Joey played an accordion/baritone rendition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" at dinner, which I recorded on my new digital camera. The video (with sound!) came out perfectly, and soon the whole world will share in my first experience of The Accordion Guy!

Gregor: tools for getting things done

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:09:25 EST

Digital Web Magazine

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 11:32:04 EST
According to Sooz, they're looking for articles.

Grumet SYO: Similar Feeds

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 23:54:56 EST
Andrew codes the Amazon.com of blogging! Readers who subscribe to Andrew Grumet's Weblog also subscribe to...

Replies now show up

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 23:51:34 EST
Deployed the frassle feature that will allow replies to a post to show up underneath that post. Check it out here, here, or here. Call the first response r1 and note that it ALSO has a response (r2). This is interesting because r1 was entered on Jessica's frassle blog, while r2 was entered on her Harvard weblog. From the viewer's perspective, these show up in exactly the same way. This is because when I got Jessica's Harvard RSS feed with the frassle aggregator, it treated post r2's <link> element, which pointed at r1, just like it treats comments on frassle. Essentially I interpret <link> as an in-response-to pointer. Messages without links, like this one you're reading, are the top of threads. If you comment through frassle, the permalink points at your frassle blog. If you comment on an external blog that frassle then aggregates via RSS, the permalink is copied from your RSS.
What's the point? Trackback, comments, aggregators... aren't as different as I once thought. :)

Boxes and Arrows: Planning your future

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 11:49:30 EST
Via Gregor's blog, a concise and useful template for planning your career. Nothing groundbreaking in here, but a straightforward approach to writing a plan that will force you to reflect intelligently on your goals and accomplishments.
I've been thinking about making a plan like this for a little while. On one hand, it seems kinda lame; something that ambitioneers (think Harvard undergrads) do in high school and follow to a T. That always seemed dangerous to me, because it would preclude risk and serendipity. I like serendipity. If you could fit that word onto a license plate (SERNDIPT?) I'd seriously consider it.
But planning starts to become appealing once you've left school. The conception of life as an unending journey of 6-month classes suddenly vanishes. After college, I became much more individualistic; the things I do have their most important consequences not for school or for the company, but for my abilities, fitness, happiness, and wealth. Of course, it was always the case that I was in school to better myself, not out of some obligation to the education system; I could have easily dropped out and made enough money to sustain myself. But I never thought about it that way before. In retrospect, schooling is like building personal infrastructure. Now that I'm not 100% focused on my infrastructure, I can take some time to leverage my accumulated education and wisdom and build some really kickass stuff on top of it.
Building really kickass stuff requires a plan. In school, you have little control over your schedule. Sure, you can choose which classes to take, but the choices are extremely constrained. In plain old life, you can switch careers, be unemployed, take long breaks, travel, seduce women, work 80 hour weeks for a year or two, commit crimes, devote yourself to family, or even go back to school. Many of these options are appealing, while others are idiotic. In deciding which is which, the key problem is your limited resources. Too many things are worth doing, and there's not enough time to do them all. In a way, it is about accepting mortality.
But it is also immensely empowering to realize the degree of control you have over the outcome of your life. There's nothing fundamentally different about famous, successful people: they were just lucky or smart at the right times. I've met a few people I consider famous/successful since moving to Boston, people whose achievements I'd be quite proud to match. They are smart, intriguing folks, but they're not infallible. Stack me up against one of them, and I think I'd win on some counts. If they did it, so can I. I just have to make a good attempt. That means I'm making a plan and following it until it seems stupid. And then I'm making a better plan.

Harvard Calendar: Lectures, Mtgs, Symposia

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 10:55:15 EST
Somebody should scrape this into RSS...

Minor fixes

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 23:32:55 EST
Fixed up the individual-note-view page to properly display the link and the various editing/categorization links. It now looks just like the list you see under the "recent posts" or aggregator views, since it uses exactly the same code.
Added the ability to delete a note. Deleted a bunch of scrap "test" notes from very early in frassle's life... :)

Powers Of 10

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 18:47:31 EST
Zooming in writ large: from outer space to quarks, by orders of magnitude.

Museum of Science Lectures

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:07:50 EST

Diego on Social Software

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:48:51 EST
Jeremy Zawodny links to some rather interesting posts by Diego Doval about social networks. I've read the first and half of the second. The first discusses some UI and usability issues; the second explains some interesting mathematical analyses of social networks. These are important because currently, social network software is computationally very, very primitive. We continue to invent and implement cool new things to do with that information.

Nutrigrain (feel great)

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:12:51 EST
Feel GREAT!
Update (8:58pm): The site seems to have added a login requirement, perhaps because of too much traffic.

Linux Gazette: OCaml, an Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:07:59 EST
About time I learned this totally sweet language!

hatch.org: Social Bookmarks Manager Right-Click Context Menu

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 14:28:25 EST
Steal this context menu UI option for frassle.

New Frassle Version

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 23:21:24 EST
A few new features in this frassle version, mostly in the aggregator. Notably, the aggregator actually aggregates incoming feeds.
One major problem right now is that frassle will cause Apache2 to segfault (giving you an empty document) if you try to choose a non-default "show posts since" time on the aggregator page. This is due to bugs in Apache2 or mod_perl 2 or Apache::PageKit, and since I don't expect to be able to fix them easily what I will do instead is downgrade to the more stable apache/mod_perl 1. Tomorrow...

More Theory: Hacking Friendster, Part I

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 16:32:17 EST
kids, don't try this at home

NYT: The Tyranny of Copyright?

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 14:28:16 EST
From Lessig.

Louise Gluck Leaving Williams for Yale

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 16:42:30 EST
News from The Williams Blog and Yale Daily News that Louise Gluck, US Poet Laureate and 20 year faculty member at Williams, will be moving to Yale. In fall 2002, I had the privilege of taking an introductory poetry workshop with Louise, and I'm sorry to see her go. I'm not sorry so much because Williams is losing a luminary, but rather because she was truly an excellent and rare kind of teacher.
In many ways Louise is an iconoclast. In fact, she is perhaps the most serious person I have ever met; she has refreshingly little tolerance for bullshit. She seems to accept a rather broad definition of bullshit, ranging from the common tendency of novice poets to value prolonging conceptions of their own talent—dispelled very effectively and to their great benefit in her intro workshop—to computers. The registrar's department is probably happy to see her go, as she was one of only two Williams profs who would only turn in grades on paper.
But all is not lost for young poets at Williams. I was also lucky to take a tutorial with Lawrence Raab, who, though more normal than Louise, is at least as good a teacher (and whose poetry I have always preferred). Unfortunately, as a thesis-writing computer nerd, I could not be more than a dilettante at poetry. Both Gluck and Raab helped me to learn about writing and poetry, and their workshops taught me how to learn from and not be silenced by my fears. And were great fun.

Dovester - Old Social Networks

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 21:25:54 EST

The oldest club in Europe, an exclusive French society of dove breeders, used social networking tools since the late 17th century to connect its members via a handwritten newsletter, circulating from member to member, and being amended along the way.

My Generation's New Political Self-Awareness

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 10:11:52 EST
Jim Moore, Dean's internet guru and Berkman regular, has some interesting observations about yesterday's near-record fundraising. In my opinion, what was appealing about Dean's promise—an email to supporters asking for an all-out effort to win Wisconsin but vowing to bow out of the race if he lost—was that it resonated with a concept of Dean For America as a movement, not just a political campaign.
Let's face it: if this election is about one man, it is about George Bush. Bush's potential opponents have their varying strengths, to be sure, but the differences among them utterly pale in comparison to the differences between any of them and Bush. We almost owe Bush our thanks for galvanizing all of us against him. It is now possible to feel camaraderie with virtually anyone in the Western world under 30 by sharing disgust at the US President.
The implications of these bonds are stunning. My generation has had things pretty easy here in America. Growing up, the economy was kind to our parents, we were wonderfully educated, and we always felt safe and trusting of our nation and government. But in the past three years, the economy has tanked as we entered the job market, the resulting government budget crunch has drained public schools and universities everywhere, and our illusions of safety have been brutally compromised. While it's true we shouldn't expect boom times to last forever, we see a president that has not only ignored but worked against our concerns in favor of entrenched interests that we oppose. And, for the first time, there are major political organizations that really appeal to us. One may be a candidate, but like many others, what appeals to us is the opportunity to participate meaningfully in politics within a constituency that has only recently, but with great force, acheived self-awareness. It tells us you don't have to be old, unionized, or religious to rally together— a tremendous relief for us, who have been battered and fried in diversity rhetoric.
That's why I almost gave money to Dean yesterday— his message showed the biggest hint of understanding our pressing needs I've seen yet. What would get me to give? A promise that, rather than letting his campaign fizzle to death in primary after primary, he'd turn the money and momentum it has raised into a new kind of union and advocacy organization that would continue to represent us for years and years. For that, I would not only open my pocket, but also my schedule.

JavaScript Pie Menus for Internet Explorer

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 11:33:30 EST
Holy DHTML interface magic, batman!

Harper's: When Killing Just Won't Do

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 10:10:53 EST
Harper's excerpts from a USAF research report about nonlethal weapons. This is crazy stuff that stirs horrifying fantasies of large-scale mind control. On the other hand, many of the weapons are quite imaginative:
Pheromones: The chemical substances released by animals to influence physiology or behavior of other members of the same species. One use of pheromones, at the most elemental level, could be to mark target individuals and then release bees to attack them.
Imagine the collateral benefits of weapons such as these. Lots of insane terrorist movements glorify death as martyrdom, but how would you like to suffer from the "bees revenge"? It won't kill you, but a few hundred bee stings sure will keep you very unhappy for a week. Or what if pheromones could be placed onto dangerous materials, so you could find the bomb shops by following swarms of bees? You could even plant fake materials in this way, which would give a whole new meaning to a "sting" operation.

NYT: When a Search Engine Isn't Enough, Call a Librarian

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 09:42:26 EST
Did you know that librarians can answer reference questions? That they are in fact specially trained to help you find answers in their vast archives of human knowledge?
Still, with a widespread public expectation that answers can be found almost instantly by typing a few words into an Internet search engine, librarians increasingly find themselves on the sidelines in the question-answering business. So they are slowly warming to the idea that they must educate the public about ways to sort through the mountain of available information.
"When Google doesn't work, most people don't have a plan B," said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is teaching a course on Google this quarter. "Librarians have lots of plan B's. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google."
Librarians are pretty neat. I met one, j Baumgart, at the Berkman Thursday meeting. Like Steve, I think librarians and hackers (by which I mean individuals who program computers because they really get a kick out of it, not malicious computer users) are birds of a feather. We both have a lot to learn from each other. Librarians should know that technology is not just a constant threat to their jobs, but can empower them to work more efficiently. Programmers should learn from the librarians' great respect for their clientele (contrast their patrons with our users—it's as if we assume our customers must be on drugs) and patience. I also think we should absorb some of the public-service mentality in order to attract people who love programming for noble reasons, not just because it pays well (not that I want a pay cut).

Buy Bush a PlayStation 2

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 16:15:28 EST

As I sat pondering the President's motives one day, it suddenly dawned on me that it is entirely likely our Commander in Chief has never played a single video game in his life. "Of course!" I exclaimed, startling my girlfriend, who was driving at the time. "Without the catharsis that video games provide, Bush has no way of fulfilling his militaristic fantasies other than actually fighting wars."

Aegis 4.16

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 11:56:38 EST
Neato version/configuration management system. Has all the basic features, and also can enforce process contraints such as requiring that changes are accompanied by tests, and the tests pass.

STLtoday: The Creativity Machine

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 14:54:45 EST
It's not interesting AI unless it convinces someone that human race will meet its doom at the hands of evil sentient machines.

Good luck, Google

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 11:43:40 EST
As this article explains, Microsoft has officially taken on Google. Google ought to be very, very scared; particularly alarming are the article's comparisons between Google and Netscape. But to Google's credit, the company has not been arrogant about its success. They also have a much better CEO, Eric Schmidt, than Netscape did— this is a guy with good business sense but also the technological know-how he'll need to stand any chance of competing with Microsoft.
Still, the odds are not good. It will be very easy for Microsoft to exploit their Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer monopolies to direct users toward their search. The article makes note of Microsoft's limited consent decree:
OTHERS say that even though the Justice Department consent decree is weak, it may still be enough of a barrier to prohibit Microsoft from making Internet search an integral part of the operating system in the same way it absorbed the Web browser.
"They can't undercut Google on price, and I don't think they can get away with integrating search," said S. Jerrold Kaplan, an industry executive who competed against Microsoft while at Lotus, the spreadsheet maker that is now part of I.B.M.
I'd have to disagree with this. While incorporating search into the IE toolbar out-of-box may provoke a Justice department response, this may be too little too late for Google. Microsoft can pay fines without flinching, and once a user is lost to MS she isn't coming back. If I worked for Google I'd be talking to the Justice Department right now, explaining where and how MS may attempt to exploit existing monopolies, and why each approach is illegal. Microsoft has many, many opportunities.
Google's stake against Microsoft's IE leverage is the Google Toolbar and Deskbar. I use both of these product and like them. They would be ridiculously easy for Microsoft to clone.
A further advantage MS has here is the Windows Update channel introduced in Windows operating systems since Windows 98. This is a useful feature that allows Windows users to download software updates quickly and conveniently. While it helps users by making security patches easier to deploy, it also gives Microsoft unprecedented control over an extremely powerful distribution channel. What this means is that Microsoft can outplay Google on search integration into the OS with incredible ease. While hundreds of thousands of users may go to Google, download their toolbar, and install it, millions will run Windows Update, get the latest Internet Explorer, and instantly have convenient access to Microsoft's search.
So in short, the legal and marketing perspectives are bleak. I would guess Google is working hard on their patent portfolio, but they will not beat Microsoft's marketing machine. I hope their decision to avoid acquisition by Microsoft took into account the fact that they will have to fight an absolutely brutal technological battle to retain any fraction of their current lead.
(Note: Google and Microsoft have never officially been in acquisition talks. But I have a hard time believing that an acquisition wasn't attempted. Microsoft recognizes the value of Google: the patents, the scientists, the culture, the users, the technology, and the programmers. Google's founders, however, probably hate Microsoft. Though their hatred is not without reason, I believe it led them to reject a priori a Microsoft acquisition. I hope they realized the implications of that decision, and wish them luck working out those implications in their favor.)
I believe that to stand any chance at all, Google needs to relentlessly accelerate its technological lead. Google has not only a clever, patented search technology, but also a vast computer infrastructure. We're talking about 10,000 computers cooperating to answer search requests. Microsoft took a long time getting hotmail operational under the constraint that it be powered by NT servers, and search is a considerably different application. Microsoft will have to develop the search technology and build the infrastructure. With its virtually limitless capital and potential to attract the best minds out of Google, MS is poised to do this fast. But even given these resources, Microsoft will need at least a year to match Google's search quality, speed and user capacity.
Google will need to widen this gap. Start running fast, and start running now, Google, before the 1500-lb Gorilla carrying a smoldering machine gun catches up with you. Recruit and retain the best talent. Develop outstanding new services that Microsoft cannot clone. Remember: Microsoft can clone your current features far faster than you originally developed them.

IPO or not? The specter of Microsoft offers an interesting perspective on Google's much-hyped but tenuous upcoming IPO. Certainly, Google is Silicon Valley's most-loved company since Netscape. Better than Netscape, Google is less arrogant, has strong leadership, and as a late entrant to the search market is used to competing on technological grounds. However, an IPO and the vast growth that accompanies it is still tremendously risky: once your ordinary employees feel their net worth grow to $zillions, they may get lazy. Fast growth will tax the corporate culture. On the other hand, the influx of capital, combined with technological advantages, will help Google grow its infrastructure at a rate that closer to Microsoft's. It is unfortunate that Microsoft's deep, deep pockets force Google to consider the sacrifice of their corporate culture, but the high-growth path to victory over wealthy incumbents has paid off before— consider Amazon.com's resounding defeat of Barnes & Noble: painful and long but ultimately successful. Will the same strategy work against Microsoft? Maybe. How long will Google be able to hang on without IPO growth cash? I don't know their financials, but not as long as Microsoft.

Major optimization coming...

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 10:22:44 EST
Last night I made some performance optimizations to a certain DB query used on every blog page in frassle. This sped up page load by 7.5 times. I've only got the faster code on my development machine right now, but I will get it onto frassle.rura.org tonight.
My friend Ben lamented that my tools should force me to manually improve their performance. Surely, it would be nice if PostgreSQL could translate my layers upon layers of abstractions into the fastest possible equivalent. But I don't begrudge pg my time: it is such an amazing, fast, worry-free tool that I can hardly expect the undecidable.
Follow-up 2/2/04 11:59pm: I wasted most of this evening getting a new 120GB hard drive installed in my computer, but I was finally able to get the new code onto frassle.rura.org (and fix a small bug in the meantime).

A walk on the pond

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 17:28:36 EST
I took advantage of today's sunny, balmy 30° weather to go for a walk. I went to my old favorite walk destination, Arlington's Spy Pond. As I got closer, I saw people— on the pond! Of course any Bostonite can tell you that by now ponds are frozen so solid you could drive a tank across them, but I hadn't made the connection with my local pond.
This was the first time I'd seen so many people out on the ice. I counted over 30 people skating, walking, biking (!), and playing hockey. I walked and slid around for a while. The ice glowed a beautiful bright blue against the sunset. I especially enjoyed the air bubbles under the ice: frosted over on the inside, they looked like bright white mushroom caps rising through the ice. A pretty surreal experience, walking on water.

Godseye: Viewing Boston from the sky down

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 09:52:09 EST
Godseye is a project that allows its users to attach pictures and stories to homes, trees, shops, and other parts of their neighborhoods and cities. You begin by gradually zooming in on high-quality, color aerial photographs, then selecting a building or other feature. When you focus on a specific feature, you can view and contribute storefront photographs, histories, or personal stories.
The potential uses of this data are vast and compelling. We spend lots of time playing around in online communities now, but there can be a mutually beneficial relationship between physical and online neighborhoods, and godseye proves it beautifully.

An exciting Berkman meeting

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:28:06 EST
Unusual but interesting meeting tonight. I gave a demo of frassle; it was a little nerve-wracking at first because frassle's basic functionality has lots and lots of rough edges, but by the time I got to the cool stuff about learning category relationships it was well received.
It's clear at this point that I should put together a guided tour of frassle. It will be demoed at least once in the next few days, and if people are coming to it without a real guided tour from me, they will need some explanation. The interface does not, at present, explain itself.
I also brought my roommate Josh. He seemed to really enjoy the meeting and I'm sure we'll be chatting about it during the ride to work tomorrow morning. Another new visitor was Sarah, who is a smart and charming postdoc researcher blending social science and medicine. Many good conversations before, during, and after dinner, and I'm still riding high from my little demo.
One other note. I don't know if anyone noticed, but famous Harvard (ex MIT) linguist Stephen Pinker was sitting at a nearby table in the Bombay Club. On my way back from the restroom, I saw someone sitting at a table and thought, geeez, that guy has hair just like Stephen Pinker. I walked around, and there he was!

Overstock.com: Best Earnings Report Ever

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 16:06:20 EST
The CEO of Overstock writes a letter to stockholders, frankly explaining his company's achievements and mistakes.
Conclusion
A man crosses a desert by shooting an arrow from his bow and retrieving it as he walks. He must cross the desert with the fewest shots possible. At times he strains the bow with all his strength and lets his arrow fly, but sacrifices accuracy, at times shooting the arrow wildly off course. Other times he aims carefully and draws timidly, attempting little but guaranteeing himself small, solid progress. In time he finds the balance of draw and aim that covers the most ground in the fewest shots.
I have not yet found such balance. Yet in 2003 Q4 we drew the bow deeply, and our shot went far and fairly straight. On such a deep draw I could have blundered the shot (as I have before), and only the excellent work of my colleagues prevented mishap. I do not enjoy chancing so much on each shot. Yet I saw an opportunity to let one fly, and we still have much ground to cover.
Your humble servant,
Patrick M. Byrne
President

Search and Download Oracle DB Docs

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 15:10:51 EST
Andrew suggests I should check out these docs to see if there's an easy way to siphon the feeds.scripting.com data out of his oracle DB into a DB of some sort that I can play with. It may be easier to use the feeds.scripting SDK, but we'll see.

Upcoming features: Improved aggregator

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:47:31 EST
The next major feature for frassle will be an aggregator I won't mind using myself. Currently the "aggregator" functionality means that I can have feeds come in from RSS rather than be written on frassle itself. This enables the basic inter-category relationship statistics, and the essential technical stuff, but the interface blows. Aggregators should, well, aggregate.
The updated design will show recent postings from any feeds below the current category. So, for example, activating the aggregator inside my incoming category will show you the latest posts in all my feeds. I will probably break down incoming into subcategories for people I know personally, tech news, normal news, etc., and so you'll be able to narrow down your aggregated feeds that way too.
SharpReader, an RSS aggregator for Windows written in C#, has been influential here. SharpReader does a similar thing with categories, although it is a three-paned reader. Another cool feature it has is automatic threading together of related posts; when posts link to each other or both link to the same external URLs, they are visibly tied together. This is enormously convenient and I intend to copy and extend this idea for frassle. Extend because the careful threading together of related ideas is not something that should be left solely to computer programs. It's an intelligent activity.

Busy Frassle

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:37:22 EST
A busy day at work. A few people who are not me are hitting my frassle site, which is very cool. Hopefully there'll be time for me to give a short demo at berkman tonight.
One nice thing about putting your software out there for other people to use is that its shortcomings keep showing themselves to you, over and over and over again. Some people (not our industry's finest) might mistake this for a bad thing.

The Doctrine of Honesty

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 22:49:08 EST
During my freshman year of college, while walking through the path in front of the Williams College Museum of Art, I invented a piece of personal doctrine. The principle I invented was small and easy to understand but with profound implications, just like a good computer program. It was that
I should never do anything I'd be ashamed to have appear in a personal journal on a public website.
Naturally, there are some obvious exceptions. For example, if a friend confides in me and I listen to his secrets, those do not go up on the web journal of my thought-experiment. Details of my sex life are also not the public's business. But the point was to give myself a tool for evaluating certain long-term consequences of my decisions as I decided them.
In particular, this got me into the habit of asking myself how my actions could be scrutinized. I didn't want to please everyone or get everyone to agree with me. What I wanted to do was avoid any situations where I might have to defend something I felt was indefensible.
As a result, I always wanted to find and reconcile small personal conflicts before they became big ones. I got into the habit of reflecting on my actions and trying to understand what motivated them. I'd take a devil's advocate position, pretending I was someone out to prove that Shimon was stupid or evil. Real Shimon and Devil Shimon would argue (politely) in my head. The goal was to be able to either honestly refute or honestly take responsiblity for any shortcoming Devil Shimon could find.
Did this prevent me from making any mistakes? Hardly. But it made me realize that I can make mistakes, even mistakes that hurt people or hurt me, and that it's OK. I can learn from them, and I can be careful and avoid them in the future. But the doctrine of honesty gave me a powerful tool for dealing with my mistakes: it enabled me to consider them scientifically.
If you have not been in a good writing workshop, you may not know the value of confronting your own mistakes scientifically. The reason is that by nature, human beings have a certain level of pride in and expectations for thier work. We are usually not conscious of our pride and expectations until they're injured or unmet, hence the popular truism you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
The problem with having pride and expectations is that you subconsciously support your pride, or your expectations. These concerns become hidden assumptions; the things you can't say. Well, at most crucial junctures in thinking, there is good sense to saying those things you can't say. In science, the major breakthroughs must not, by definition, fit into current paradigms. In therapy, the fears that a patient is unable to talk about are the most crippling.
Unsurprisingly, this scales to one's day-to-day life. Those actions you take that you're least inclined to examine, those motivations you're least inclined to explore for fear of what it might admit, are exactly your greatest opportunities to improve yourself as a human being. Just like those problems in a poem you bring to a workshop that you're most afraid will expose your lack of skill will in fact do that and show you, conspicuously, how to improve both your current poem and your overall ability.
Maybe that's why I blog— to keep myself honest, and to remind myself that I can make mistakes. In writing. Several times a day. :)

Wired 12.02: START

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 15:37:11 EST

Wired 12.02: The New Face of the Silicon Age

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 15:31:32 EST
A sensible take on offshoring from both sides of the debate/ocean.
But the rest of us, like it or not, will have to adjust. The hints about how to make this adjustment are evident at Patni. As I meet programmers and executives, I hear lots of talk about quality and focus and ISO and CMM certifications and getting the details right. But never - not once - does anybody mention innovation, creativity, or changing the world. Again, it reminds me of Japan in the '80s - dedicated to continuous improvement but often at the expense of bolder leaps of possibility.
And therein lies the opportunity for Americans. It's inevitable that certain things - fabrication, maintenance, testing, upgrades, and other routine knowledge work - will be done overseas. But that leaves plenty for us to do. After all, before these Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined and invented. And these creations must be explained to customers and marketed to suppliers and entered into the swirl of commerce in a fashion that people notice, all of which require aptitudes that are more difficult to outsource - imagination, empathy, and the ability to forge relationships. After a week in India, it seems clear that the white-collar jobs with any lasting potential in the US won't be classically high tech. Instead, they'll be high concept and high touch.

Computerworld: Blogs Bubble Into Business

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 09:59:43 EST
Basic overview article on blogs in the corporate world.

Dating Design Patterns

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 14:00:14 EST

Dating Design Patterns is the result of years of work—long ago, and far away. Suppressed for years because of the potential catastrophic harm to technological and economic advancement if the entire scientific community were out salsa dancing every night, it's finally available. The original patterns were dating design patterns. For the ultimate complex system needing a set of reusable solutions. For the ultimate scientific guide to spectacular dating interfaces.
With Dating Design Patterns, in either a container-managed or independent architecture, you can implement flexible, elegant, reusable, sneaky, and successful approaches to dating.

BBC NEWS: US budget deficit reaches $500bn

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 13:29:24 EST

In his annual State of the Union address, Mr Bush called on Congress to exercise spending restraint and promised to freeze increases in non-defence spending and limit the overall budget increase to 4% annually.
Excuse me while I vomit...

PLINK - People Link

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 11:34:55 EST
A FOAF search engine.

Cesar Brea: Deciding on Contact Collaboration

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 11:28:48 EST

MPR: The Blogging of the President: 2004

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 22:14:54 EST
Note to self: listen Sunday 1/25, 9-11pm.

Bcc = blog carbon copy?

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 00:34:55 EST
Today I received an email inquiry regarding a comment I had posted on Andrew Grumet's weblog. Since I thought the content of my response might be of interest to Andrew, I cc'ed him in my reply. (In retrospect, it was pretty a pretty simple question Andrew probably understood perfectly well; but I should try not to undermine the point of this post because of facts.)
Naturally, I thought the right place for my reply was not a private email message but the comments section of Andrew's blog (or on my blog linked from Andrew's with something akin to TrackBack). So that's why I think a useful feature will be a simple way to "Bcc your blog" when you are writing an email. This is especially useful when the blog becomes a central organizing tool, but is probably even practical when blog contain only occassional whimsy.
How to do this securely is another question, but as a decent last resort, you could just queue up emails to a secret blog address and ask the blog author to approve/edit/categorize them at his next visit to his own blog.

OpenFTS: Open Source Full Text Search Engine

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 15:31:58 EST
Full text search. Coming soon to frassle.

Vannevar Bush: As We May Think

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 12:52:07 EST

Golublog: (Instant) Messages From Mars

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 10:21:52 EST
Hilarious! This guy writes great stuff!
Rex: r u on earth?
Hl4vot: no, still on mars.
Rex: whoah. No lag on the line.
Hl4vot: ;)
Rex: shit - you guys got that portal working?
Hl4vot: yeah - pretty cool eh. All the earth content we want, none of the nasty time delays.
Rex: heh
Hl4vot: it was really screwing up our Tivos.

Back from Berkman

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 00:30:33 EST
A wonderful Thursday at Berkman today. The meeting was long and packed: not only were the attendees more numerous than usual, but we had a special guest and some very cool presentations. Our guest was Hank Barry, former CEO of Napster and current partner at San Francisco VC firm Hummer Winblad. In contrast to what I've recently been reading about VCs, Hank was affable and had a personality. He also paid for dinner for our entire 17-strong group. Noticing that he was leaving early, I got up to introduce myself and thank him for the check. He said something along the lines of "what good is it being a VC if I can't buy dinner?"
A large chunk of the meeting was taken by Jay McCarthy, who demoed his blogging style. Let me tell you, it is not for the weak. Jay produces a digest of over 1000 blogs, reading 2000-3000 posts every day. I think this style is somewhat psychotic, but he is producing something cool and useful and some of his quirks are endearing.
Dave didn't talk a whole lot, which is unusual, but he did demo his work on Channel Dean. Dave and others got a bit excited when Andrew mentioned the Amazon-style recommendations he and I have been working on based on Share Your OPML. To be fair, Andrew is doing most of the work; all I did was give him a vague idea and some pseudocode. I'd love to help with the SQL and web interface but alas, collaboration is difficult.
I think that Dave showed a hint of disappointment when Hank explained that he was basically interested in making money from blogs (or at least in understanding if there was money to be made there), because Dave abruptly ended a conversation that several people were about to roll with. However I understand any potential apprehension against VCs or the like in a field that has so far been largely untainted by money-grubbing and built from the passion and toil of genuinely interested people.
Finally, dinner was great fun. Rick Heller tried to talk with me about politics, but I think I let him down as I am rather poorly informed and unwilling to take firm positions on political matters. (Aside from hating Bush, of course; I'd have to be a real dolt to miss that meme or the horrendous acts of misgovernment that reasonably prompted it.) I gave Critt and Steve a short demo of frassle over Steve's LifeBook and GPRS net link. The demo not only made me glad I had used almost no graphics but also netted me a valuable dose of encouragement as I continue to work on frassle.

Link to iTunes

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 14:23:34 EST
If apple or whoever really wants to capture the online buy-a-track market, they need to popularize themselves in the role amazon.com currently occupies for books: the definitive online reference for any given title. I should be able to put a link to a particular song that takes you to a page where you can read/write reviews, view information, and buy the track. This may be already possible but apple/whoever needs to embark on a campaign of popularizing this option. The need to have permanent links for pages about specific tracks, and they need to encourage users to use these.
Use case: song of the day. Lots of people would probably like to publish a song of the day. In a happier world, we'd just publish the mp3 on our website, but you can't do that here. Instead, however, I could publish a link to the iTunes store. This would have to be a useful link— user discussions, a short song exerpt, album art, and lyrics would be good— and it would allow viewers to instantly buy the song for $0.99 over the web only.
LiveJournal is perhaps the perfect partner for delivering this service. They could roll out a song-of-the-day feature to thousands of music-loving users at a time. These users are apt to see through the thin veil of commercialism and subvert it, so it would be best to reward them in some special way, such as providing longer music samples, occassionally making a song-of-the-day free to download, giving the bloggers a referral kickback, and/or allowing them to customize the track info/purchase page.
Of course, Apple has been a poor example. They don't really care much about selling music online; they simply recognized that a thriving online music store would grow the market for their iPod, and of course they were right. One of Apple's competitors in music stores but not in iPods will probably implement this idea soon.

Furl - Your web page filing cabinet

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 11:15:10 EST
A browsing tool that lets you save and organize thousands of useful web pages in a personal 'web page filing cabinet.'
Moment of fear: has someone beat me to frassle?
Moments of relief: 1. I'm not in it for money, I'm in it to spread the word about weblogs and collaborative internet directories. 2. Furl could be an awesome source of feeds.

Many-to-Many: Social Search

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 09:25:51 EST
On the release of eurekster beta.

eurekster search

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 09:08:43 EST
Search that leverages a social network! Awesome!
But Eurekster? wtf?

Marc's Voice: Eurekster

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 09:05:28 EST

Searching the BlogSphere

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 08:43:04 EST
A handy personalizable blog searching tool, with some valuable insights on customized search and blogs.

Groupware was overrated

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 23:10:54 EST
Five years ago "groupware" was going to revolutionize collaboration by integrating conference calling, videoconferencing, shared whiteboards, and other neato technologies for connecting people. As far as I or any other regular person is concerned, however, none of this ever transpired. Now it turns out simple technologies like email lists and weblogs are providing the substantial bulk of technological support for collaborating groups. There's no news here, just another lesson in how it's easy to get distracted by shiny objects that you can't reach, and leave your audience longing for even the scrap of a promise you could have actually fulfilled.

Changes at FWB Software, Inc.

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 19:25:53 EST
"The previous management had made claims in press interviews and on the company website regarding the status and upcoming release of RealPC OSX claiming it was in late beta and about to be released. After more thorough investigation and interviews with the previous staff, we have found that the development had not formally been started, and it appears not a single line of code has been written. FWB has not to date even received the source code upon which any development would use as the foundation to build a new RealPC for OSX. I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware when it comes to the claims regarding RealPC."
[via Wired's Vaporware Awards]

HP+Apple, and Microsoft's eventual unraveling

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 14:11:46 EST
Mad props to Steve Jobs. This is a big step toward, of all things, the next wave of Microsoft getting its ass kicked.
You may recall that the most recent wave of Microsoft getting its ass kicked was the internet. Microsoft pretended the internet didn't exist for about 4 years. They currently have undue influence over the way the web works because of IE's huge market share, but they have not been able to leverage the internet to create more lock-in for their products. In fact, because the web is ubiquitous and fairly standardized, it has been reducing microsoft lock-in. This will continue.
The next wave of Microsoft getting its ass kicked will come from the convergence of consumer electronics and personal computing. Of course, Microsoft has some feelers out in this realm— in particular, their operating systems for phones and PDAs, and their console entertainment system, the Xbox.
At present, neither of these systems has the kind of overwhelming market share Microsoft needs in order to dictate the evolution of the industry. They were late entrants to both of these. And consumer electronics is a rather different beast from computer software. Firstly, there is less lock-in. You don't expect to be making a heavy intellectual investment in operating your phone or mp3 player. You don't expect it to last for many years. And most importantly, you expect that a large variety of devices will be available for you to choose from when you walk into Best Buy. And if you come back two weeks later, something totally new from a company you've never heard of will be there doing something cool.
Compare Microsoft with the companies that produce these devices. Microsoft is not and never has been visionary. Can they keep up with the pace of innovation the consumer electronics industry requires? Can they beat small, engineering-focused, aesthetically conscious, agile companies from every corner of the planet? Not a chance. They know this, so they will try to win by creating software lock-in and using huge acquisitions to buy market share.
Will that work? It won't work as well as it did in software, where Microsoft was uniquely positioned to own the PC software industry by historical accident. The PC software industry was small, technologically advanced but amateurish in business, and mostly contained within the US. The consumer electronics industry is vast, tremendously sophisticated, and its powerhouses are Japan and Southeast Asia as well as the US. Could Microsoft acquire Nokia? Possibly. Could it acquire Sony, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, and Daewoo? Perhaps one of them. But not many. Daimler-Benz can have Chrysler, but we'd be pretty shocked if they started asking around about Ford and GM.
So: consumers will want choice, which means they will also want interoperability. Microsoft might very successfully market its software but the sheer number of players they will have to market toward will demand that they publish standards to reduce lock-in. Microsoft could in fact have a very profitable business, but it will be hard to maintain the kind of monopoly they enjoy on the desktop. Worst of all for Microsoft, the burgeoning portable computing trend will demand interop with desktop computing. This will further erode Microsoft's monopoly.

How can Microsoft win? Primarily through failure by its competitors. Competitors could underestimate Microsoft's seriousness once it begins to pursue an acquisitions-or-crushing strategy. But I don't think this is likely for two reasons. Firstly, this market is not wholly unlike the online services market, which Microsoft entered with MSN. With MSN they were able to take away considerable market share from entrenched players (notably AOL), but they do not own online services. We owe the freedom to choose our online services to two things: FCC regulations and Steve Case's resolve to not let AOL be bought by Microsoft— a resolve that went so far as to create a poison pill provision for AOL, which meant that the company would cease to exist in the event of a hostile takeover. I would expect Sony to have at least this much resolve. On top of being a big powerful company, after all, they are Japanese. Secondly, it is not clear how Microsoft can leverage its desktop dominance into mobile-device dominance. Unlike online services and web browsers, Microsoft can't give you a phone and service automatically when you buy a computer. Not only does the product bundling become rather blatantly illegal, but this would cost real money. Still, if Microsoft decides to burn through a ton of its capital by giving away hundreds of dollars' worth of electronics and network services, it will not only be nice for consumers but attractive to competition.
Be on the lookout for Microsoft to:

Acquire a second-tier wireless service provider such as Cingular or AT&T's wireless division. (Losing that division would be death to AT&T but they were never a very smart company anyway.) Vast regulation in these industries will make this experience quite painful for MS.
Embark on a marketing blitz for corporate customers on linking their SmartPhones and corporate groupware (Exchange).
Extend joint ventures with mobile phone makers, and possibly take up the cause of an ailing manufacturer once there is such a manufacturer. Sony has the lead here thanks to the SonyEricsson partnership. If motorola begins to eat dirt for some reason, they would probably be a good candidate.
Lose another fortune attempting to outwit Sony in the next generation of game consoles. (In the Xbox, Microsoft could not compete with the experienced Sony designers' Playstation 2, so they crammed the machines with so much hardware that they lost oodles of money to keep the Xbox's price the same as Sony's.)

The Jason Leith Generator

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:20:14 EST
Now unreliably hosted off of my cable modem.
Hey, you know the thing with the peccability? It was, like. ummm, ichthyophagous, but not quite as ichthyophagous as Jen.

David Bohm on sharing meaning

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 22:53:06 EST

"Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?"

David Bohm (1917-1992), physicist & philosopher

Lawrence Wright: The Kingdom of Silence

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 22:49:57 EST
Long, interesting article about an expat's experience in Saudi Arabia.

High Stakes, No Prisoners

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 22:36:36 EST
Yesterday I received a copy of High Stakes, No Prisoners : A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars that I ordered used through amazon.com. The book so far is quite interesting, and seems to be earning its reputation as an insightful and frank insider's story. The author doesn't shy away from calling certain business plans stupid, or certain famous people incompetent, dishonest, or narcissistic; and he even has strong criticism for some of his own mistakes. You even feel sorry for him, but perhaps only for a little while until you remember he made $133 million selling his company to Microsoft. Their product was the web page editing tool FrontPage.
But possibly the most wonderful thing about this particular book is its inscription. It reads:
Deb
Congratulations on joining THE eGlobalChem Team. We have a winner and are excited to have you on board to realize our dream.
(illegible signature)
1/15/2001
Can we congratulate Deb on her recent third anniversary at eGlobalChem? Well, unfortunately not.

Josh Ain

Sat, 17 Jan 2004 11:25:00 EST

World Wide Words

Sat, 17 Jan 2004 11:20:04 EST
Awesome site by a lexicographer with great, detailed phrase and word etymologies. Example: push the envelope.

Dowbrigade: Al-gebra Cult Zombifies Nation's Youth

Sat, 17 Jan 2004 11:16:49 EST

Boston.com: Local anchor feels our pain from afar

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:18:01 EST
Stuck in frigid Boston because you're a news anchor reporting on what's going on here 6 hours a day? No, you're not.

What type of brain do you have?

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 13:26:06 EST
Different people are inclined toward systemizing (uncovering and constructing systems) and empathizing to different degrees. The guardian has some tests that you can take to figure where you fit on these axes.
According to these tests, I have a "combined" brain, with high empathizing as well as systemizing quotients. Maybe that's what you get when you take the child of two artists and give him only one way to rebel: become an organization-obsessed hacker...

The Political Divide :: RealClear Politics' Op-Eddy Awards

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:51:30 EST
Some possibly interesting awards for Op-Ed pages, but what really interests me here is a very nice HTML editing text box. HTML source display, buttons for formatting, and you can select things and then make them bold or add a link.

Guns don't kill people, abstractions kill people

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 09:43:41 EST
I'll admit it: I am afraid of abstractions. Afraid because while abstractions can capture important pieces of understanding and help people communicate, they can also be both unnecessarily divisive and excessively vague.
By abstractions I mean words that have highly non-literal meanings; concepts like love, good, happiness, and sometimes death and failure that express meaning in broad brush strokes. To contrast abstract and less abstract phrasings, consider a possible line from a poem that reads as such:
His love for her brought him happiness.
And contrast it to the much more literal:
The sight of her cast his weary lips into an asymmetrical smile, revealing his right front tooth.
As you can tell, I'm not trying to win any awards here. Consider the first statement. There are zillions of possible interpretations, and it's quite conceivable that a line this vague would inspire all sorts of unexpected interpretations. Some might immediately cast it as a thoughtless aphorism supporting the oppressive heterosexual status quo. Some might think of a particular love in their own life. The second is, well, not something I'd want to see in a poetry workshop either, but the range of possible interpretations is at least a *little* more under control.
That is the problem with abstractions. They are out of control. You are arguing with somebody about something, you can't really tell what you're all talking about, but you know he said something that sounded totally absurd. Well, it probably sounds that absurd because he, or you, or both of you, were taking an abstract word to mean something more or less than the other. Now you've gone and had a whole long argument— philosophical at best, enfuriating at worst— because neither of you could express your understanding clearly enough to learn from one another.
Now you see why I can't tolerate slashdot.
That's why I try to avoid abstractions. I don't care about being right-in-some-abstract-sense. I like to build things that work, I like to understand how things work, deeply, so I can take them apart and teach someone else how to put them back together. I don't like arguing over how to call something when I could be learning from someone else's unique perspective. That's why I like to listen, I like to hear specifics, and I like to ask pointed questions. And why when someone tells me I'm wrong, I ask for an explanation of what that means.

Next-Generation Content Interchange Standards Powwow

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 01:13:34 EST
On Saturday, February NN, join technical pioneers and inspired thinkers on weblogs and aggregators to discuss
Next-Generation Content Interchange Standards
Leveraging existing standards such as RSS and OPML, the functionality of aggregators is growing. How can we make sense out of all the content? How can we use and extend current standards to share and organize weblog content? Where do upcoming systems demand new standards, and how should we work them out in order to ensure interoperability and the best possible user experience?
This powwow will last for 4 hours and will be held at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society on Saturday, February NN.

Hours 1 and 2 will offer a series of short presentations by attendees. Presenters will be offered 15 minutes to present followed by 5 minutes of questions from the audience. Presenters should attempt to present a coherent vision of the future of weblogs, aggregators, or collaborative content development. Demonstrations of software are encouraged, but promising ideas still in their theoretical stages are also welcome. Presentations should make clear what kinds of information services their visions provide and depend upon, so that attendees can work together to capture the value of these services in standards that support the widest range of interoperability and ad-hoc collaboration.
(break for lunch)
Hour 3 will be a group brainstorming session. Attendees will synthesize the ideas presented in hours 1 and 2, and invent new ways to build, blend, and distribute weblog content. If the attendees are numerous enough, this may break into several smaller sessions. A moderator will lead each session.
Hour 4 will offer attendees the opportunity to work closely in smaller groups on specific new standards RFCs. We hope that groups formed in this session will take the lead in fleshing out and maintaining these next-generation standards.
We hope to bring together a group of people to share ideas and make contacts that will support the next generation of weblog-based content interchange. Our primary goal is to support the development of earth-shaking new technologies in ways that maximize the benefit of these technologies to humanity.

XFN - XHTML Friends Network

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 23:09:27 EST

NYT: Napster Runs for President

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 12:56:16 EST

The elusive piece of this phenomenon is cultural: the Internet. Rather than compare Dr. Dean to McGovern or Goldwater, it may make more sense to recall Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. It was not until F.D.R.'s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television, not only by vanquishing the camera-challenged Richard Nixon during the 1960 debates but by replacing the Eisenhower White House's prerecorded TV news conferences (which could be cleaned up with editing) with live broadcasts. Until Kennedy proved otherwise, most of Washington's wise men thought, as The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1961, that a spontaneous televised press conference was "the goofiest idea since the Hula Hoop."

Whoops. I accidentally caused this month-old post to appear at the top of my blog by editing it. All I did was change the title to read "NYT" rather than "NT", but of course my software also had to update the timestamp for this note. I've since added an option to preserve the existing timestamp when editing, which I'm going to check...now.

NYT: Braun Is Expected to End Bid and Back Dean

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 12:55:07 EST
Perhaps we'll see a Dean-Moseley Braun ticket! I think Moseley Braun is brilliant, so this would be good, but on the other hand I'd like to see someone less likely to spend tons of money we don't have.

Six Months

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:30:12 EST
My software engineering professor once told me that it usually takes 6 months for a software engineer to learn the ropes at a new job and reach normal productivity. I'm at about 4.5 months today, and can anecdotally confirm that figure.
When I started here I had just come from school, where I almost never had to work with anyone else. I never had to work to understand code written by years of programmers before me. I was never given a task without some tools to help me get it done or at least some sympathy from other students.
Work has turned out to be more like research than I expected. The answers, the fixes, are not known by the person who gives you orders. You start on something and you become the expert; perhaps you write some documentation, purely from the kindness of your heart. In schooling success is largely engendered by compromising at the right times, persistence, and asking for help. In work, some help is available but there is, in some sense, more personal responsibility. On the other hand, the stakes may seem smaller than at school because evaluation is less frequent and more subjective. Which is not to say that the evaluation is any less important, but it's hard to imagine going home and crying like a Harvard student with a B if you get a $1000 raise instead of a $3000 raise.

CEIVA digital picture frame

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:18:18 EST
Cool digital photo frame. I have something like this, a Kodak Smart Picture Frame. The Kodak frame had all the same features as this Ceiva, including the phone-line-based photo sharing, but I think it came onto market too soon. The equipment and service was too expensive so the Kodak frame never hit it big and they discontinued it. I got mine for $100 from a discount computer stuff shop after it had been discontinued.
One thing I like about my Kodak frame is that it actually has a rather nice wooden frame around the LCD. No brand name images, no buttons (they're on the top and back), just a wooden frame. People have oft mistaken it for a regular picture frame until, suddenly, the picture magically changed!

Milestones.

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 00:13:37 EST
I got RSS import working. Now all my frassle data from the prototype, which it offered to me in the form of a moby RSS file, has been imported into this beta.
This is important because not only does it give me a hell of a lot more data, but it also lays most of the groundwork for doing RSS aggregation. Aggregation is, of course, vital for frassle to do anything cool; sans that, it's just another blog tool.
Sidebar todos: deleting categories. I forgot to say ON DELETE CASCADE for fa_memberships.cat_id, so it's a pain in the arse to delete a category. I should figure out how to add this constraint. Also, deleting a note. Also, delete a note from a category. Also, full-category-path displays on hover. Also, RSS feed generation.
Maybe Friday evening would be a good time to wrap up a bunch of these loose ends, and then I can get intercategory relationships happening this weekend. This will leave me quite ready to figure out how we'd want to share this data, and maybe I can talk with Dave about it at that point.

Share Your OPML

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 08:58:39 EST
Dave Winer has come out with a great system that touches on the sort of collaborative filtering possible by utilizing other people's reading lists. It's called Share Your OPML. OPML is a way to represent an outline containing links; in this case the outline is the set of feeds you read and the links point to each feed.
Using this subscription data from many users, feeds.scripting.com can compute interesting information like

the most popular feeds, and
given a feed, get a list of who reads it.
Essentially, feeds.scripting.com lets you pivot on two axes: specific feeds and specific humans. This is useful because I can find other humans interested in the feeds I read and learn from their selections.
Feeds.scripting.com is going to be the Amazon of RSS.
This has a lot of potential:

Significantly better personal recommendations should be possible. Amazon doesn't do any hard math to figure out "people who bought this also bought that" listings. Feeds.scripting.com could do something similar to provide concise listings of recommended feeds to its users.
We could learn from users. People might be willing to tell you what feeds they like the most, from which we could form more confident recommendations.
Link with harmonizer. The feeds.scripting.com service could be used like a harmonizer, a service that allows you to update subscriptions on multiple computers when you add or remove a subscription from any one of them. People—well, at least I—want a harmonizer service they can just use, and we haven't got one yet. If you can combine that incentive with the recommendation power of feeds.scripting.com, it makes the service all that more appealing.
Scaling. The more services come into play, the more difficult it will be to contain them in one site. Indexing the subscriptions of everyone on the net is a google-scale task, and the blog community does not have google-scale resources (at least, not until google realizes that we exist and our content is valuable). So we need to be clever about how we can split up the work among thousands of volunteer servers, each blinking on and off over time. A possible architectural inspiration for this is IRC, since it is another network where worst-case maximal interconnection would make distributed servers inefficient, but in practice this kind of interconnection is rare.
Another great part of feeds.scripting.com is that its data is fully available in structured formats (OPML, naturally)—so the implementation of any of these new features can be done anywhere, by anyone. Get hacking!

Shimon: Marketing to the tipping points

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:04:13 EST
This is what a reply would look like.
In this second paragraph I would use several expletives to refute that point contained in my subject's writing that is weakest, even if the point has little to do with the substance or intent of the overall post.

Marketing to the tipping points

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 15:38:54 EST
Scoble, who I don't generally read but sometimes has some gems, suggests that Microsoft market their mp3 player technology by giving 100 popular bloggers free equipment. He says this would be about $4000 per blogger, total $400,000; a reasonable marketing cost.
What struck me is that this could actually be effective. Popular webloggers are mavens in the geeky mp3-listening world. What makes this tactic a real gold mine, though, is that it hasn't been done yet. If Microsoft does this, and has success, the tactic will surely be copied, and then there won't be nearly as much buzz because the second time around, we're not witnessing marketing history.
But in the future, when everyone uses frassle :-D , it'll be easy to locate mavens in lots of different areas. Novelty won't be as necessary because advertisements could be better positioned within groups of interested people. In other words, some consumer audio gadget that 5 people whose weblogs I read get for free isn't going to result in my buying one. I just don't really want one. On the other hand, products and services that my friends use and like and tell me about often result in purchases by me. What I hope frassle can do is make this kind of process possible on lots of scales— big-money things like a microsoft mp3 player or local services and restaurants.
The other important upshot of this is that advertising becomes less of a smokescreen. Making good products and giving some of them away may turn out to be the best way to compete. Making shoddy product and sending out gobs of spam indiscriminately will get you ignored. Advertising execs won't be fashionable NY high-rollers, but real, well-connected and well-respected people, experts in a field.

An environment for test-driven development

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 12:59:39 EST
Test-driven development has often sounded rather appealing from the quality perspective, but I've never found it compelling for the developer because you'd have to build all sorts of test scaffolding before writing any code. However I think that with the right kind of environment, we can capture the basic material of tests from the outset and constantly verify these specifications during development.
For example, suppose you're tasked with writing a function that takes two strings and tells you whether they are the same in some sense. (In what sense exactly doesn't matter, just that there is some sense to it.) To understand how this should work, a typical programmer might consider several sets of inputs and their desired outputs, and try to derive a pattern. For example, if we represent our function on two strings as + and the outputs as true or false, we might have the following desired outcomes:

"aaa" + "aAa" = true
"xYZ" + "xYZ" = true
"xxx" + "xx = false
This data could be very easy to input. I'd like to see an interaction sequnce like this. Each line is something the user tells the IDE:

I'd like to create a function.
It's called Foo, it takes two strings as input, and returns a boolean.
If you give it "aaa" and "aAa" it should return true. ...
From these inputs, the IDE can create a stub function and make note of the test cases. On the left of the function name, the IDE should display a little light with three possible colors: gray, red, and green. Gray means some tests on this unit have not run since it was last modified. Red means some tests have failed. Green means all tests have passed. If you click on the light you can run tests or edit the tests for that unit.
This could make test-driven development very satisfying. First, you deliver a partial specification of the function's behavior, from which the computer derives some test cases. Then you code for a while. If you think you've got it right, you click the little grey light, tests run, and it turns green. At any point you can go and add tests for new behavior you just thought of, and the IDE keeps track of whether they have been passed, so it truly makes sense to have tests drive development. Furthermore, all these test cases are available to anyone reading the function, so years down the road you can come to a function and see how its behavior has been specialized over time.
This same kind of interface would probably also work well for other unit annotations, such as assertions (pre and post conditions).

This proves editing works.

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:41:39 EST
Finally, I can edit the stuff inside a note.
And even edit the subject link. Note that the permalink is preserved; if you want a new permalink, make a new post. We take permanence seriously around here.
And now even the the timestamp is updated when a post is edited.

Laura Kipnis: Should students be allowed to hook up with professors?

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:39:37 EST

Next Frassle Todos

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:30:22 EST

RSS import
RSS output
RSS remote feeds
threaded viewing of aggregated input!
OPML import subscriptions
OPML export blogroll
much later: blogroll viewing panes, special categories (rank, ordering, favs, sendto), everything else...

Arts and Minds: Bimodal Minds in the Prevailing Linear Monoculture

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:14:55 EST
Cognitive injustice?
Human brains and minds appear to be inherently capable of at least two quite different kinds of processes and reasoning, The first kind, the one we have come to regard as normal, is predominantly linear and logical. The second process is more non-linear. It is often labeled "sloppy," disorganized, and is considered by many as slow to learn. In school it does appear to be inefficient when compared to the linear. It is called learning disabled, and specifically often diagnosed as dyslexia, dyscalculia, and attention deficit disorder.
Despite being a computer programmer, I identify very strongly with the non-linear mode of thinking. I can't say I've had great difficulty in school, but my learning style feels most laborious when I need to understand or memorize sequences or complex logic. In particular, I am absolutely terrible at memorizing things. On the other hand, my associative memory is excellent— given any stimulus, I can recall or derive dozens of related facts quickly. I am fairly good at trivia, but I can't for the life of me produce a list of things I need to do today off the top of my head.
Luckily I have, over time, developed tools and techniques that help me to some degree to overcome this. For example, I take fairly organized notes, and when I do have to understand something linear— such as complicated conditional logic in a program I am working on— I often make use of diagrams such as flow charts and other visualizations. I write copiously— explanatory writing is a sort of bridge between precise, linear order and associative, redundant teaching.
The whole process is still quite compellingly summarized by Gregor: serendipity is my drug, tunnel vision my antidote.

Minding the Planet

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 10:10:05 EST
This is the weblog of Nova Spivack. I can't say for sure, but I think his company, Radar Networks, is building something a lot like frassle.

The Augmented Social Network

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 19:58:02 EST

Love in the personals

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 13:53:30 EST

Between the wit, bluntness, desperation and deceit, some say the personals ad has become a new art form. Others prefer to sit back and enjoy the brilliant lies for what they are.

Social Software ideas

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 10:11:27 EST

Lisa Williams on hooking your blog up to the world

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 09:34:49 EST
Lisa, always an astute observer of potential improvements to weblog technology, notes a few vital services: technorati, blogdex, geoURL, and others.
Frassle should provide the features of some of these services and make it easy to integrate with the others.

Paul Graham: What You Can't Say

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 08:40:59 EST

Enough fucking around!

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 02:35:08 EST
The next step, clearly, is to refactor out a recent component. That recent component should be category-narrowable just like the old frassle. Then we will have most of the old functionality, excepting a few minor interface things that I will work in when I get the time.
Frassle is shitty software, with bugs!

Suck.com: Daily

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 02:08:54 EST
About women.

Dave Barry's Gift Guide: Literary Selection

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 14:08:08 EST

We're sorry, but if you can read those words and not think ''This book has to be made into a major motion picture starring Russell Crowe and Keanu Reeves as the men, and Courtney Love as one of the chickens,'' then you have a heart of stone.
This and more in Dave Barry's gift suggestions.

Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 13:55:01 EST
I hide something and give out the GPS coordinates. You search for it with your portable GPS. Sounds awesome.

On Standardization

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 13:16:16 EST
Standardization in an industry is a kind of quantum leap: a shared acknowledgment that certain techniques should cease to distinguish competing products and fade into the landscape. Standards thus enable competition on a new plane; they refine the market. Because of these effects, there is a period of time when an industry is ripe for creating a standard. And then there are other times.
It's too early to standardize when serious players in the industry are still distinguishing themselves based on the potential object of standardization. Standardizing here will not happen, and any standard that claims to succeed here will probably be ignored because a representative sampling of the industry could not possibly agree enough to establish a standard. As the players compete more, and steal more features from each other, certain common features will show up; these can become standardized.
It's too late to standardize when an effective standard already exists. This needn't be a standard formulated in some arbitrary style—it can just as easily be a de facto standard. In any case, if there is a critical mass of users depending on an existing standard, any new standard that hopes to simply replace the existing standard will not succeed. A successful new standard must also displace the old standard: it must offer something compelling enough to get people to change their ways. But people are lazy, and standards are the world's most comfortable couch, so this rarely happens. This is why the Atom vs. RSS debate is hopeless: Atom offers only esoteric improvements over RSS. But RSS isn't just a document (cynics may note that it's at least 3 or up to 7 documents, but we'll ignore that for now). RSS is tens of thousands of feeds you can use right now. RSS is hundreds of news aggregator applications. RSS is good enough, we trust it, and we aren't going to migrate wholesale to some unknown technology whose raison d'etre we can't fathom. Not without a much more effective PR machine than I think the Atom folks can produce, at least.
Twisting it all around
To our varying pleasure and disappointment, these rules don't always apply. With sufficient clout, a new standard can replace an old one even without offering anything novel. On one hand, this is a way that we can escape the apathy of existing standards and go back to fix things. On the other hand, this is a way that Microsoft can effectively threaten the standards that are at the basis of an economy. This is "embrace and extend", which might better be called "entrace and exploit". Whatever you call it, the goal of this tactic is to subvert the goal of standardization under its own guise: shaping a "standard" that builds a new economy that benefits a specific player to excess. If the guise can be kept up, people won't notice that some new "standard" chokes out competition. After all, refining the market means that inferior products will fall into oblivion. Which is why we have to be very careful when considering a standard—and not just a formal standard, but a de facto standard we might influence with any choice we make—to make choices that stand for what we'd really like to have an focus on. It's hard, but if you want to do things right sometimes you have to think.

WiseGEEK: What is a mangosteen?

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 11:44:11 EST
One cool factoid from a site full of them.

Jim Moore on Blogs and Social Ties

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 10:43:03 EST

Finally, a good thing about weak social ties is that it appears to be difficult to exert conventional social pressure across such ties. It is hard to "pressure" someone into agreeing with an idea or an action. Loose ties are voluntary. Thus ideas and actions that grow across networks of weak ties can perhaps be presumed to be better vetted by each person—based on merit rather than coercion. Perhaps this process of individual discernment helps filter out bad ideas seeking to spread across the network of loose ties. Perhaps this filtering in turn contributes to collective wisdom being developed across the loose-tie long distance network as a whole, and thus also within the strong-tie local communities at the edges.
The goal of Frassle is to catalyze this filtering process. I share the hope that such a process can contribute to wisdom across the network.

OK, things aren't so bad.

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 22:38:32 EST
I haven't got frassle 1.0 up to the level of functionality in the prototype, but it's coming along. I guess I am naturally more hesitant because I am trying to get more things right. It's always more painful to correct things in the future than to do them right the first time, but on the other hand, all the careful thinking in the world isn't worth squat if there's no product. Version 1.0 is thus the art of compromise.
Next steps:

crumb trail for current category
category name shows in title
left panel on 'feed' page shows subcategories with links
recent items show members of any category below current
RSS view of recent items

Feeling slow...

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 20:55:06 EST
My mind is dragging. I should be making progress on frassle but I don't even know if I've fully woken up today. Probably I should take a shower and clean up and do laundry. Instead I imagine I'll try vainly to work on frassle for a while and eventually give up and sleep or sweep or something.

Happy New Year!

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 16:59:32 EST
It should be a wondeful 2004. I have three new year's resolutions, but I'm going to keep them to myself for a while since I don't believe in blabbing about how great things are going to be when I don't yet know if I'll succeed. I'll need some luck, but what the heck, I'm feeling lucky. Punk.

Tim Bray on Search

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 16:18:48 EST
A rather verbose but possibly interesting series on Search.

Evan Miller on Financial Aid

Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:08:03 EST
Anecdotal, insightful, hare-brained, wacky, provocative, a bit too long but I like Evan and he's smart.

PhilG: How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates

Mon, 29 Dec 2003 10:08:33 EST
The indomitable Greenspun on the personal and corporate successes of BillG, with plenty of great pointers and anecdotes.

Textism > Tools > Textile

Mon, 29 Dec 2003 09:56:11 EST
A processor for an HTML shortcut language on an intriguing website.

First night of hacking is over.

Sun, 28 Dec 2003 23:41:54 EST
Well, Frassle1 is still in pretty sad shape. On the bright side, though, I have some of the core features existing now, so I should be able to make progress on some of the new stuff ASAP. This should indicate increased porting of old code to get back to the old level of functionality in a night or maybe two. This means working categories, category editing, note editing, and viewing categories. Then I can work on the new aggregation mechanism, account settings, and intercat relationships.
One implementation note: use more views. For example, there is a pretty similar display of a note when viewing a list of them (feed.tmpl) or a single note (note.tmpl). A view can encapsulate this difference and I can select from the view in order to pick out a class of notes (eg all in a feed) or just a single one. Then I can use the same loop to display them. Cake.

scripting news

Sun, 28 Dec 2003 23:26:34 EST
dave winer galore

fooasdf

Sun, 28 Dec 2003 23:26:11 EST
asdfasdf

Boots on the Ground

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 21:34:45 EST
Blog by a soldier about his experience in Baghdad.

Item-specific Comment RSS

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 14:44:33 EST
A tag proposed for RSS2.0 that gives a link to an RSS feed of comments on the current item. Definitely something frassle should implement.

Joel on Software - Biculturalism

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 14:25:24 EST
Joel Spolsky on Eric Raymond's new book, The Art of Unix Programming, and the differences it highlights between the Unix and Windows programmer cultures.

Dr. GUI on Components, COM, and ATL

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 10:07:38 EST
Brief introduction to COM, why it exists and how it works.

CharisMac - Firewire Dino

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 09:15:25 EST
The coolest firewire hub ever.

Courage

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 22:48:50 EST

Courage is a special kind of knowledge; the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared. — David Ben

Article: Live with TAE - Thomas Barnett

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 15:05:18 EST
From Critt, an interview with an influential military theorist who thinks danger is defined by disconnectedness.
As an advisor to the Secretary of Defense for 20 months following the September 11 attacks, Naval War College professor Thomas Barnett helped draw up our government's plans for prosecuting the War on Terror.
His primary insight was to divide the present nations of the world into two categories: a "Functioning Core" that exchanges ideas and goods globally, and a "Non-integrating" group who are isolated from other countries both economically and in the realm of ideas.
Noteworthy:
TAE: What are Iraq's prospects for economic development and integration into the global economy? Is getting its oil industry operational sufficient to achieve that?
BARNETT: No. Historically, countries develop the slowest when they rely on export of raw materials. and over-reliance on one resource makes a country more susceptible to the rise of elites who control the masses by controlling these resources. The Middle East is a place where there is a lot of wealth, but not much development, because the resource wealth is controlled by elites. And these rich elites produce kids with an expectation of hereditary rule who behave badly. That's Osama bin Laden in a nutshell.
This guy is brilliant. Is this long-term, globewide policy really what put us in Iraq? If so, can we handle that challenge? Was Bush hoping that these goals would become so clear and compelling that his initial lies would be seen as a crafty sell rather than as grossly misleading claptrap with no motive more evident than Halliburton profiteering?
Unfortunately I am not terribly optimistic that Bush feels this. And if he does I doubt he can effectively communicate it to the World which hangs on his every word. I'd love to hear what Wes Clark has to say about this...

Why does MS Word have better change tracking than Visual Studio?

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 11:21:11 EST
In Microsoft Word, when you work on a document with other people, there are many useful hints that indicate when someone has changed something. For example, if someone adds an item to a bulletted list, it might show up in red and underlined. When you hover the mouse over this red text a note pops up that indicates when this line was added and by whom.
I want the same thing for code! For some reason, people take spec documents more seriously—they leave thorough notes, a changelog, they try to adhere to company standards; whereas in code even I will be tempted to do things in a style so poor that no intro CS instructor would let it slide. Perhaps the issue is just that documents are easier to comprehend—if you sit down and read some English text, and have some of the necessary background, there is enough explanation and redundancy in the words that you can quickly get a sense of what's going on. In code, however, things are so detailed and complicated that you have the opposite effect: it's easy to figure out what's happening in the details, but very difficult to abstract from these into an accurate big picture.

Shimon's Amazon.com Wish List

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 09:32:57 EST
Currently contains some books on Visual Basic that will make me a better worker, and some fiction and non-fiction books I've heard were good.

Death Gets A Website

Tue, 23 Dec 2003 21:47:30 EST

The FuzzyBlog :: Scott Johnson's Blog

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 16:47:08 EST

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:08:54 EST
This page is utterly hilarious. You have to read it, although you can read it in spurts. A good thing to keep in reserve for times when you need to laugh at how weird people are.
The key to a successful relationship is communication. That's the First Rule. Margret's corollary to the First Rule is the Timing clause. This states that the best time to initiate a complex and lengthy talk about, say, exactly how we should go about a loft conversion is (in reverse order of preference):

When you see that Mil is playing a game online and is one point away from becoming Champion Of The World, Mil is racing out of the house to catch a train, Mil is in the middle of trying to put out a kitchen fire, etc.
During the final minutes of a tense thriller Mil has been watching for the past two hours. Ideally at the precise point when someone has begun to say, 'Good Lord! Then the murderer must be...'
Just at the moment, late at night, when Mil has finally managed to fall asleep.
In the middle of having sex.

I need sleep...

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 14:32:31 EST
Yawn... I haven't been fully rested in about three weeks. At the beginning I was coming down with some sickness that my doctor thought was strep. My throat never really hurt that much, but I was wiped out all the time, sleeping 10 hours a night and barely able to keep my eyes open during the day. I went on antibiotics, which appeared to help a whole lot, although in the end the test showed I didn't have strep.
Anyway, since I started on the antibiotics I have been restored to a mostly normal sleep schedule, that is, 7-8 hours a night. But still there is a palpable sleep deficit in me. Because of errands this weekend I didn't get to sleep in, so perhaps I should try going to sleep really early (9:30? 10?). Also I should make sure to go to bed rather than falling asleep with a book or TV show in the La-z-boy: I've been doing this a bunch lately and I don't think it results in good sleep.
The Spaniards have it right. My most productive times are morning and after 9pm. Afternoons should be for napping. Maybe I should move to Spain. Maybe I should strive for a life where I have enough control over my schedule to take afternoon siestas.
One last possible explanation that my lethargy is due to laziness. Only because my group at work takes walks every day after lunch am I not 100% sedentary. I think tonight I need to order myself a pair of rollers and work 30 minutes of biking into my schedule every day. Perhaps first thing in the morning, or perhaps right after work. The difficult thing with exercise is that when I start it up after not doing any for over a week or so it makes me very tired. But if I can commit to a regular pattern it will definitely improve my overall health and energy level.
Sorry this post is so rambly... I'm sleepy.

Tech Bloom in full flower

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 11:32:15 EST

Welcome to the Tech Bloom.
The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.

Idle Words

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:36:18 EST
Long article talking about the Wright brothers, their patent struggles, and the development of flight.
Unfortunately, like countless engineers before and after them, the Wright brothers were also dour, stubborn, and completely lacking in basic social skills. They wanted nothing more than to sell out and be free to pursue their aeronautical research, but alienated all potential buyers by refusing to demo the flyer until a contract had been signed. This stubbornness grew partly out of their obsession with having the invention stolen. After proving to themselves and the world that powered flight was possible, they basically locked the airplane away and said to each other 'let's litigate!'.

Second p0st: All-RSS-within-one-click finder

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:52:04 EST
Kind of an RSS spider.

RSS Finder [dive into mark]

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:50:58 EST
Python module for getting the RSS feed for a given page. First tries RSS Autodiscovery and then tries regular links that might be pointing at RSS.

Radio UserLand: Weblog Neighborhood

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:48:37 EST
Tool for tracing through blogrolls. Unfortunately it only runs in Radio but it's a cool idea.

Guardian: Weblog heaven

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:46:03 EST
Famous faces of the blogging world. I read like two of these.

The World's 100 Oldest Family Companies

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:37:02 EST

The Pentagon's New Map

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:26:49 EST

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point—the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.
That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.

The New Yorker: Fiction

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:59:05 EST

World knows our foreign policy better than we do

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 16:13:36 EST
Azerbaijan: expect "regime change" in 20 years.

Elizabeth Bates, 56, Researcher on the Development of Language, Dies

Sat, 20 Dec 2003 22:28:34 EST

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:57:10 EST
Radical advice for the Google IPO.

Economist.com | Coffee-houses

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:53:39 EST
The internet of the old millenium.

On Being Postacademic

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:19:58 EST

My academic friends thought of me as particularly well-read about the academic institution and committed to working within it, as someone who, having succeeded in getting the proverbial "good faculty job," considered it my political responsibility to care about the institution. Yet in a short period of time this caring, this emotional commitment, had apparently evaporated. Academia had gone from being my vocation to being the independent source of my most extreme alienation.

Register: Orlowski on the Internet and Librarians

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:13:39 EST
Ignore those idiots who say the internet is going straight to hell. It in fact never left hell! It was all just hype!

Frassle feature list

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 09:29:45 EST
These are features that should go into frassle. Some are high-priority, some far-off dreams, most in between.
Notation like [this] denotes incremental levels of complexity on a feature. {This} denotes estimated time to implement, possibly divided out by phase.
Feature list

Pop-up UI tips. In frassle, you might have little tricks to speed things up. For instance:

When adding categories, you can type "One; two;three" to create separate categories named One, two, and three.
When typing a local: URI, you can leave a space at the end in order to ask the server to disambiguate by appending a number. For example, if you type "local:berkman " and berkman and berkman1 already exist, your URI will be automagically changed to say berkman2.
Near where these tricks are useful, there should be a little hint gadget.
Pull from Google/Feedster. When an item is published to a feed, or maybe when a user asks, frassle should query Google or Feedster to find other relevant information. {4h??}
Clickthrough and "return to frassle" frame. When you click on a link to an external site, the link should actually take you to clickthrough?member_id=12345. This page should [phase1] do a redirect and [phase2] return a frameset with the external site in the bottom frame below a thin top frame that takes you back to where you were on frassle. {phase1: 20m, phase2: 40m}
local:blahLink URIs on members should denote locally-served content. This content should be reachable at a URL that looks like http://fa.rura.org/blahLink to make things easy to write down. {40m}

Deeper observations

frassle is web search with really, really big search terms. It's like if you asked google not only about some words, but also provided it with a sort of personal cultural history so it could find things relevant not just to those words, but to those words as understood by you. This is anxiety-provoking because it seems to demand a high-bandwidth, computation-intensive connection on the low-bandwidth, computationally stupid internet. On the other hand, if the fundamental problems of search can be solved by faster networks and computers, that's pretty nice. Of course, a key distinction may be that search terms are getting larger by orders of magnitude, so perhaps hardware technology may not be able to keep up. On the other hand we in CS are pretty good at coming up with tractable approximations to nondeterministic problems, so if we get to the stage that this is a serious question we will have some idea how to go about solving it.

RFC: Subscriptions harmonizer

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 00:09:18 EST
Dave Winer's neat little system for keeping your list of subscriptions in harmony between multiple different aggregators. The nifty thing about it is that rather than using a centralized, web-based aggregator, the centralized part is as simple as possible: you just tell it when things change and it shares.

BerkmanThursdays Wiki

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:54:40 EST

FakeHelipads.com - Copter Kudos Without The Cost

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 13:55:52 EST
Nothing makes your company look prosperous like having a helipad, except perhaps the appearance of having a helipad.

If you hate the Yankees, as I do, please click on this link, but befor...

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 11:49:09 EST
If you hate the Yankees, as I do, please click on this link, but before you do so, swallow your coffee.

Fastbuzz Headline News

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 11:43:50 EST
Another web-based aggregator. I shall steal good user interface ideas!

Bob Stepno on TinderBox

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 11:40:22 EST

My Feedster

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 00:42:31 EST
Web-based RSS aggregator service from Feedster.

Microsoft, music and antitrust

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 00:09:43 EST

"Federal and state regulators are concerned that Microsoft may be violating the terms of its antitrust agreement with the "Shop for Music Online" feature of Windows XP, and have filed a court briefing regarding the issue. According to a CNET article, the "Shop for Music Online" feature raises concerns because it launches Internet Explorer and not the users chosen default browser. Microsoft has responded that it believes the feature falls within guidelines. The issue may be resolved by the courts if Microsoft and regulators are unable to reach an agreement." - Spymac

Shirky: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

Wed, 17 Dec 2003 18:56:42 EST
Interesting opinion on encryption adoption
The RIAA's successful extraction of user identity from internet service providers makes it vividly clear that the veil of privacy enjoyed by the average internet user is diaphanous at best, and that the obstacles to piercing that veil are much much lower than for, say, allowing the police to search your home or read your (physical) mail. Diffie's hypothetical problem is today's reality. As a result, after years of apathy, his proposed solution is being adopted as well.

4096 Color Wheel

Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:45:50 EST
Nifty javascript color picker tool.

NYT: PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 11:56:32 EST
This article reviews Edward Tufte's poignant attacks on powerpoint's one-damn-thing-after-another style. And:
Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte is a fan of ''information density,'' shoving tons of data at an audience. You could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it's a matter of choice. ''If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation,'' he adds, ''they wouldn't want it.''
Oh, and people would want to sit through an incredibly vacuous presentation? I've had well-behaved elder co-wage-slaves refer to presentations as "death by powerpoint." There is hardly a mood of eager anticipation on the part of the presentation viewers.
In fact, that is the problem right there. Presentations are NOT things to "sit through." A worthwhile presentation is engaging, it meets a need of the audience. The presumption in Mr. Marks's statement, then, suggests that a presentation is not for the audience, but for the speaker. If that is the case, then I feel powerpoint is a perfectly adequate tool to help a person prepare to deliver a sales pitch. In an empty auditorium. (Oooh, audi torium, even the word reminds us...)

FCC Commissioner Copps: Battle to control Internet threatens open access

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 08:55:41 EST

This Internet may be dying. At the behest of powerful interests, the FCC is buying into a warped vision that open networks should be replaced by closed networks and that the FCC should excuse broadband providers from longstanding non-discrimination requirements.
Now this is a guy who should run for president.

Arab Potatoes

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 18:52:14 EST

An old Arab man who has been living for 40 years in Idaho wanted to cultivate potatoes in his garden, but digging up the earth was getting to be too hard at his age. His only son, Ali, was studying in France, so he decided to send him an e-mail explaining the situation:
"Dear Ali: I feel very disappointed because this year I'll be unable to plant my potatoes in my garden. I am too old to plow the ground. I wish you were here, then my problems would be solved, because you would remove the soil for me. I love you, Dad"
"Dad: For God's sake, DO NOT remove the ground of that garden. It's there that I have hidden you-know-what. I love you, Ali"
At 4 a.m. the next day the local police, plus FBI and CIA agents, along with Pentagon delegates, came in and turn the garden upside down looking for dangerous material to build bombs, anthrax or whatever. They found nothing and they left. The same day the old man received another e-mail from his son: "Dear Dad: I am sure you can plant your potatoes now. It was the best I could do in the current circumstances. I love you, Ali"

Staticfree: Chaining RSS filters

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:30:36 EST

Village Voice: Wireless on the Streets

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 09:28:22 EST
By way of Jessica:
Evans chronicles her struggle with homelessness and her recovery from her religious past in the online Web log Being Homeless. She's one of an increasing number of the down and out and disenfranchised who are venting their frustrations—and finding friends and support—on the Web.

Jaron Lanier Interview

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 09:21:32 EST
Critt points to an interview on the social and cultural impacts of technology with the guy who coined the term "virtual reality". Lanier has some reasonable points about the dangers of technology, and seems to have a reasonable non-luddite basis for his views. I wish, however, that he could have gone into more detail about what the thought trends he rails against really mean. The Singularity? Sounds like froofy AI mumbo-jumbo. I'm not very optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on how you look at it) that AI will deliver on that promise.

The Nonverbal Dictionary of Signs and Gestures

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 23:55:40 EST
This compendium provides illustrated descriptions of many different gestures, and explains the emotions behind them. Interesting and practical!
From the page on blushing:
Observation. One of the first signs of anger is an uncontrollable reddening of the ears.
Even better is this anecdote from the eye-blink:
E-Commentary: "Today on NBC's Today Show Matt Lauer talked about how Madonna had lied to him about her announced pregnancy just the other day. He showed the video and her response, but he missed something to ponder about. She did what I call the eyelash flutter (different, under high speed camera, from the eye-blink: we can see that it does not close completely and the speed is amazing) when asked, 'Are you pregnant?' I first observed this eyelid behavior in 1985, and find that people who are troubled by a question or an event do this, especially if they have to answer and are about to lie. I tell attorneys to look for the eyelash flutter when they have people on the stand; it means they really do not like the question at all. I even had a case where the individual picked out the route of escape for me when I went through several routes with him; I just waited for the flutter to pick out the way." —Joe Navarro, Special Agent, FBI (3/21/00 7:02:26 PM Pacific Standard Time, and subsequent)

Gregor: berkman dinner

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 15:20:31 EST
Includes a small picture of me (next to Dave Winer) and a secret mention of frassle!

sweetcode

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 13:01:48 EST

Sweetcode reports innovative free software. "Innovative" means that the software reported here isn't just a clone of something else or a minor add-on to something else or a port of something else or yet another implementation of a widely recognized concept.

Remem: The Remembrance Agent

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 12:57:01 EST

The Remembrance Agent (Remem) is an Emacs plug-in that watches over your shoulder and suggests information relevant to what you're reading or writing. While search engines help with direct recall, Remem is a tool for associative memory. Suggested documents are displayed in a buffer at the bottom of your Emacs window, and are updated every few seconds based on the last hundred or so words surrounding the cursor. Documents are pulled from your own text documents, and Remem's internal indexer can parse email archives, HTML, LaTex and plain-text documents. It runs under most Unix systems (and maybe even properly souped-up Mac or Windows) and both Emacs and XEmacs.

Paleolithic Food

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 11:44:44 EST
Eat like a troglodyte.

PsPrint Business Cards

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 00:14:08 EST
I am going to make some "business" cards with a picture of some sort on them. Perhaps a picture of me?

XFML hierarchical faceted metadata exchange standard

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:56:16 EST
Evokes the XML overengineering gag response. But I guess you are looking at "faceted metadata".

Celko: Trees in SQL

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:37:43 EST
Describes the nested-set model of trees in SQL, which is how trees should be represented in frassle. I did it the simple adjacency list way though, since it was marginally easier and this is prototype software.

MindManager

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:33:01 EST
Visualizing thought tracking/interconnection tool. Maybe. Worth trying, according to Gregor.

MudLondon & Space mapping

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:24:24 EST
Linking up the physical world to crazy new ontologies! Maybe... need to read more closely.

New Scientist: Pretty women scramble men's ability to assess the future

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:57:45 EST
Hell, for me they even scramble the present. My favorite kind of scrambling, by the way.

Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:50:20 EST

Dave Winer: Stop Energy

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:31:55 EST

Suppose someone, call him Mr. A, has an idea that he believes is ready to deploy, or is requesting comments as he is getting ready to deploy. So he posts an RFC, usually on a mail list or a website, in the hope that people will spot a problem and help him figure out a solution; or find no problems and co-develop an implementation, or develop a compatible implementation. In theory, the Internet is a collegial environment, with lots of people who want to do new stuff, where one should expect to get this kind of help.

AT&T Natural Voices - Demo

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:27:59 EST
Holy shit, it actually has an imperfect but reasonable pronunciation of my name!

Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 15:58:25 EST
That's Finnish for The Prime Number Shitting Bear.

The Believer

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 15:57:17 EST

The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. There are book reviews which are not necessarily timely, and which are very often very long. There are interviews which are also very long. The Believer contains no ads and is printed in four colors on heavy-stock paper.

del.icio.us - a social bookmarks manager

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 15:35:19 EST
I nearly thought someone had beat me to frassle with this tool. In fact it has a lot of the same features as frassle, but is much more basic. Still very cool though; what frassle would be if I had only 1 hour to program it and wanted to extract the most useful features I could.

Lisa Williams on posting comments to your own blog

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:47:44 EST

NYT: The Dean Connection

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:36:20 EST
Slightly gushy but interesting article about the Dean campaign, and how it's a teeming mass of 20-something techno-rejects.

Dowbrigade: Channel Z Wish List

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:05:02 EST
Dowbrigade reflects on Channel Z features demoed by Dave Winer and considers what kind of views he'd like to have available for readers of his blog.

New Architect: Bottoms Up

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:58:35 EST

At first, reductionism was healthy. As top-down redesigns became too large for one person, or even one team, managers broke large projects into smaller projects and assigned teams to tackle specific tasks. Initially, team members resisted any separation from the whole. They insisted on understanding how their work fit into the bigger picture. They insisted on interdisciplinary collaboration, and so we had teams of specialists working toward shared goals.
But sites keep growing and reductionism is a slippery slope. Increasingly, people are simply giving up on the big picture. They act locally but don't think globally. These individuals now design their parts in utter ignorance of the whole.

Biomedical ontologies

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:45:40 EST
A link-rich description of taxonomies and ontologies by Mary Chitty, a medical sciences librarian.

Malcolm Gladwell

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:43:46 EST
Mary Chitty recommends Gladwells Tipping Point. I afraid it might amount to a collection of fun but not that new or exciting anecdotes (for me). Social networks, mavens, viral marketing, blah blah blah. That sort of feeling. But Gladwell does post some of his nice New Yorker articles on his site.

Phil Agre's Home Page

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:35:00 EST
A researcher on internet / political / social issues. Some interesting papers to look at when I'm bored.

WP: Patenting Air or Protecting Property?

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:17:42 EST
Via Dave:
The Acacia case highlights why a growing chorus of corporate and government officials is warning that the US patent system is broken, threatening to stunt technological innovation.

Beating Information Overload with News Aggregators

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:38:32 EST
A lawyer's perspective.

Stephen Levy: A Net of Control

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:27:57 EST
How "trusted computing" initiatives endanger freedom on the net. Haven't read this yet, but I think I know mostly what it's going to say. And there is no turning back: we definitely need some tools to restrict freedom on the net, because there is too much junk floating around. The scale of the net has grown to the point that we come to depend on sociotechnical structures that can privilege certain parties over others. Frassle is one such tool. Google is another.
When we build these tools in the internet, however, we have the opportunity to invent new societal structures that reflect better values. This is perhaps the greatest appeal of the net for me: it's a space where people organize themselves, their relationships, and their knowledge. The tools we give people to use on the net shape its living environment. The net is, at its best, like a city that we all live in. TCP/IP and web servers, in the net world, take a role like physics and chemistry in meatspace. Applications like search engines are like highways. Communications hubs like friendster are like universities or clubs. The universal value, appeal, and permanence of the internet convince me that in 1000 years, people will consider the internet as intrinsic a part of the human social experience as we now consider the city.

Operation Enduring Freedom is in the Motherfucking House!

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 10:44:39 EST
Get Your War On: a cynical comic about corporate life, politics, war...

Uses of User Mode Linux

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 10:21:31 EST
Here's a more complete list of UML virtual dedicated hosting providers.

Linode.com - Virtual Dedicated Servers

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 10:15:46 EST
This company provides serious virtualized (via user mode linux) dedicated servers. This means that they can provide the feel of a dedicated system— full customizability, root access, isolated hardware environment— without having to actually dedicate a real machine to each user. Hence, it is a lot cheaper than the alteratives: $10 setup + $20 monthly for a basic setup, compared to $150 setup + $100 or more monthly.
If frassle grows to the point that I want it hosted somewhere other than my PC, I'll definitely look into these guys. From my perspective, my only gripe is that while they give more disk space and bandwidth than I'll likely need, they are stingy with RAM. A 32MB RAM upgrade costs $10, which is as much as the jump from their basic 64MB system to the 96MB one— except switching plans rather than simply adding to your existing plan also gets you more CPU, disk, and bandwidth. Frassle, like many web apps, is mostly about RAM: there isn't that much data, but it's hella-faster if it's cached in RAM rather than on disk. Plus since it's written in mod_perl on (pre-forking) Apache 1.2, the web server hogs lots and lots of RAM. Maybe if I move to Linode hosting it'll be worth switching to Apache 2.0, which has a much more efficient threading model.

Shimon's Old School Blog

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:24:53 EST
This is a blog where I post longer, more original thoughts. Unlike frassle, it has reliable hosting and contains more thought-out, digested stuff; whereas frassle has what's on my screen and on my mind in a stream of smaller pieces.

VentureBlog: Old School Social Networking

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:21:51 EST
A few interesting observations about a law firm, corporate values, and meat-space social networking:
I am certainly not the first to say that having a strong corporate culture is a key success factor for any company, big or small. But that was unquestionably true of Cravath, which is one of the most prosperous law firms in the world. The thing I admire about Cravath's corporate culture is that it is clear and dominant — Cravath is a firm where law is practiced without compromise and without apology. Most of us didn't go to Cravath as young attorneys intending to make partner — simple math made clear that wasn't likely (only a handful made partner out of any entering class of 70 or more). We went to Cravath because it was a great place to learn and a great place to leave. And that was the culture. At Cravath you practiced the best law with the best people and when you left, you took with you the training and those connections.

Malaspina Great Books

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 08:52:58 EST
Link from Gregor Rothfuss:
Malaspina Great Books is a biographical database on Great Ideas. These are the living ideas that have shaped, defined and directed world culture for over 2,500 years. By definition the Great Ideas are radical. As such they are sometimes misread, or distorted by popular simplifications. Understanding a Great Idea demands personal engagement. Our selection of Great Ideas is drawn from literature and philosophy, science, art, music, theatre, and cinema.

Should you go to grad school

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 18:50:52 EST
A Swarthmore prof gives grad school advice, more relevant to humanities than science, but still an interesting read

NewsForge: Another open letter from Darl McBride, CEO of SCO

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 16:54:01 EST
I can edit Shimon's notes!
—Josh
I know! I write shitty software!

—Shimon
The Santa Cruz Operation, those crazy litigators with the surprisingly cool name, are just a cornucopia of bullshit! CEO Darl McBride virtually ignores the lawsuit issues in this letter, which is mostly focused on fleshing out an apriori framing of SCO as defenders of the rule of law against nearly terroristic Free software advocates. But if you have a sense of humor there are some great parts:
SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws. Constitutional authority to enact patent and copyright laws was granted to Congress by the Founding Fathers under Article I, section 8 of the United States Constitution: Congress shall have Power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries....
This is so creative— totally out of left field, zany even! If these guys weren't evil, they would have probably made good writers for the TV show The Family Guy.
Anyway, after rambling about how well legally established copyright is, Mr. McBride jumps to:
Thus, SCO is confident that the legal underpinning of our arguments is sound. We understand that the litigation process is never easy for any party involved. Our stance on this issue has made SCO very unpopular with some. But we believe that we will prevail through the legal system, because our position is consistent with the clear legal authority set down by US Congress, the US Supreme Court and the European Union.
This leap— from general remarks on the law to the merits of a specific case— is so brazenly illogical that anyone with any clue about law or copyright will see this as a pathetic smoke screen. It's like saying that because murdering people is clearly illegal, you can't own a gun. To be the slightest bit swayed by this kind of argument indicates a disturbingly weak understanding of causality and consequences. Which I suppose makes it just adequately convincing, if you're psychotic.

NYT Op-Ed: The Mysterious Stranger

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 15:57:37 EST

Everybody talks about how the Internet has been key to his fund-raising and organization. Nobody talks about how it has shaped his persona. On the Internet, the long term doesn't matter, as long as you are blunt and forceful at that moment. On the Internet, a new persona is just a click away. On the Internet, everyone is loosely tethered, careless and free. Dean is the Internet man, a string of exhilarating moments and daring accusations.

MSDN: Windows Scripting

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 11:36:37 EST

Jeremy Zawodny's 2004 Predictions

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 10:53:29 EST
Some interesting predictions for search engines, social networks, reputation systems, and RSS. I think I agree with all of it. Which is good because the goal of frassle is basically to combine all of these things.

Man Registers Car Online As He Is Stopped By Police Officer

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 10:27:30 EST
Just-In-Time: not only for compilers.
Sean Leach was pulled over in his 1992 Mazda 626 for an expired registration. The officer that pulled him over, Jason Zier, proceeded to write Leach a ticket, but not before Leach called a friend to help him re-register his 626 online, after hearing that his vehicle would be towed away. By the time Zier had finished writing the ticket, the vehicle was registered again. Zier's patrol car's computer confirmed that the car was legally on the roads. Although Leach's speed and wit didn't help him avoid a ticket, but it did let him drive away without being towed. The lesson here, everyone, is twofold; first, never procrastinate when it comes to renewing your vehicle registration, and secondly, never underestimate the value of your mobile connectedness with the world.

How everyday things are made

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 10:12:41 EST

If you've ever wondered how things are made - products like candy, cars, airplanes, or bottles - or if you've been interested in manufacturing processes, like forging, casting, or injection molding, then you've come to the right place.

Lakoff on Arnold

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 08:55:36 EST
Anyone who wants to win an election should read Lakoff. Unless you're a Republican, in which case he probably doesn't have much to teach you (and you'll hate his politics).
What is peculiar to California is Arnold and the culture of the movies. But the same mechanism lay behind the Republican victories in the 2002 election— and in elections around the country since the days of Ronald Reagan— but especially in the last decade when Republicans have mastered the art form of activating the strict father image in the minds of voters. Arnie's popularity has the same source as Bush's popularity with the Nascar dads: identification with strict father values and stereotypes. Moreover, Davis' inability to communicate strong progressive values is hardly unique to him. Democrats nationwide have a similar inability to effectively and strongly communicate their values and evoke powerful progressive stereotypes.

Lydon interviews Lakoff

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 08:53:28 EST
Linguist George Lakoff gives a good rundown of the mass psychology that makes Arnold so shockingly electable. Chris Lydon attempts to offer blogs as a possible way out, but Lakoff stays focused on his (rather convincing) explanations of the success of conservatives' language and the failure of liberals'.

EPIC - Eclipse Perl Integration

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 08:40:18 EST
Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) is a very nice extensible IDE. Currently it has especially strong support for Java and C++ but this is a promising project to add some Perl support. Note that since Eclipse is written in Java it is painfully slow on machines under, say, 1Ghz. Text editing oughtn't be CPU-bound, but...

UrbanDictionary.com/fhqhwgads

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 14:42:14 EST
Check out the definition of a crucial StrongBad term in this user-edited slang dictionary. Of course, they also have some traditional words that you can already find in the OED.

Classical Music Archives

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:47:14 EST
This site contains thousands of tracks of classical music for online streaming. For a $25/year fee, you can download and stream even more music.

Javalobby responds to 88% study

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:12:05 EST
Rick Ross responds to the results of this study:
It would be my preference to point out the silver lining in all of this, but I don't see a silver lining here. I believe the folks at Wily Technology have done a genuine service to our Java community, even though the findings of their survey are stark and disturbing. We all need to do a better job, from start to finish, in the process of building, deploying and maintaining high performance J2EE applications. "Five eights" won't cut the mustard, it's just plain lousy.

Lisa Williams on the Work/Life distinction

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 12:22:43 EST
Lisa describes the tension of the work me/real me dichotomy. It all crystallizes for me with this paragraph, where Lisa describes how inspiring it is to see a farm machine and its driver doing their work. How different it is from confused, chaotic service work:
I think the allure of the Big Machine that baled hay is the fact that so often work is a Bad Machine — stupidly designed, poorly maintained, perenially just this side of broken. We all sit at the controls of a machine every day, and we all reflect on the fact that most of our Work Machines require constant patching, thumping, kicking, and swearing to make any progress at all. The controls of such a machine, needless to say, are not ergonomic, and to relinquish them at the end of the day generally brings nothing but relief. We go home and put Band-Aids on our knuckles many days.

NYT: Nations Chafe at U.S. Influence Over the Internet

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 11:36:40 EST

During the conference, an expected 5,000 representatives from intragovernmental, business and nonprofit organizations, will try to create an action plan for the next phase of the Internet.
Excuse my skepticism, but yeah, right. 5000 people none of us have heard of making an action plan for the internet? That's getting together a bunch of politicians to plan the next step for a cultural force that they have very little control over. I guess they are in denial about that part, though.
An interesting statistic though:
Because the Internet first took root in the United States, it may be understandable that American interests have tended to prevail. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, still has more Internet addresses than all of China, according to Lee McKnight, an associate professor at Syracuse University and an M.I.T. research affiliate.
Of course, lots of IP addresses doesn't mean lots of internet usage. But China is a country, whereas MIT is only "a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking."

CNN: Teacher tells kids Santa is 'make-believe'

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 10:58:44 EST
There's nothing like an article about ruining the hope of children that ends in a bad pun:
Donzelli said the school's principal "had a real stern conversation" with the teacher. But there will be no written reprimand because she did not violate any school district policy.
"We have no Santa clause," Donzelli said. "We would think that teachers would use better judgment."

NYT: Dell Moves Some Customer Service Back to US

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 09:29:56 EST
Not a lot to this article, but a few notes worth reading toward the end, such as:
"There are truly some areas where complexities'' make sending work offshore difficult, Mr. Vashistha said. He recounted the experience of one client, a skateboard manufacturer with almost all its customers teenage boys, that found sending its support services overseas disastrous. The cultural nuances, and the constantly changing jargon of skateboarding, made it necessary for support calls to be handled by like-minded young American men. The company, which Mr. Vashistha declined to name, moved its support operations back to the United States last year.

SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer Beta

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 09:15:29 EST
A tool to automatically check conformance to best practices guidelines on a live DB.

Molly Ivins: The Uncompassionate Conservative

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 16:09:22 EST
Bush just doesn't get it with regular people!
Okay, we cut taxes for the rich and so we have to cut services for the poor. Presumably there is some right-wing justification along the lines that helping poor people just makes them more dependent or something. If there were a rationale Bush could express, it would be one thing, but to watch him not see, not make the connection, is another thing entirely. Welfare, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps — horrors, they breed dependency. Whereas inheriting millions of dollars and having your whole life handed to you on a platter is good for the grit in your immortal soul? What we're dealing with here is a man in such serious denial it would be pathetic if it weren't damaging so many lives.

NYT Op-Ed: The Orphans of Invention

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 11:43:07 EST

Enormous sums of money were lost in the great Internet bust, and analysts are still wringing their hands over the industry's fall from grace. Has technology, one economist recently wondered, become "just another crummy factor of production"?
But something more was lost in the bust. It has nothing to do with money, at least not directly. It has to do with people and history, with what might be called industrial memory.

No Place to Set Up Shop

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 03:15:26 EST
Sure, my dot-com company will sign a 10-year lease!

ArsDigita: An Alternate Perspective

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 03:14:07 EST
Response to Eve Andersson's Diary of a Startup by Michael Yoon.

Diary of a Start-Up: the rise and fall of ArsDigita

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 03:12:18 EST
By Eve Andersson.

Update 2/12/05: Eve appears to have removed the original article, but it is republished here.

Juicy Studio: Visual Basic Regular Expression Object

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 21:50:29 EST
Nice, concise overview of the visual ba... god I miss Perl

XML.com: Perl XML Quickstart

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 21:48:58 EST

Spam Conference 2004

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 16:45:18 EST
January 16, 2004, 9 am to 6 pm, MIT Room 26-100, free of charge. Some interesting speakers— notably Paul Graham and Eric Raymond— but a topic I'm not sure I want to devote a whole day to.
(I'm not a cynic about the spam problem— I think there are technologies that could help— but I'm not so obviously confronted with spam to take it on seriously. Frassle-based inter-blog spam might become an issue someday, but it obviously isn't going to be discussed at this conference. And FYI, despite making no attempts to hide my email address, I get good-enough spam filtering using my ISP's SpamAssassin gateway and some procmail rules I programmed in 2000.)

Holiday Snowglobe

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 16:29:31 EST
Snowglobe, or biosphere? I'd describe this fun little interactive flash animation as a mix of your finest local crafts fair and Grand Theft Auto III.

DOM Developer Central

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 13:58:16 EST
DHTML and all that jazz.

Sept 11 Widow sues members of the Bush Administration

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 13:54:11 EST
Underreported:
The suit text goes on to document the detailed forewarnings from foreign governments and FBI agents; the unprecedented delinquency of our air defense; the inexplicable half hour dawdle of our Commander in Chief at a primary school after hearing the nation was under deadly attack; the incessant invocation of national security and executive privilege to suppress the facts; and the obstruction of all subsequent efforts to investigate the disaster. It concludes that "compelling evidence will be presented in this case through discovery, subpoena power, and testimony [that] Defendants failed to act and prevent 9/11 knowing the attacks would lead to an 'International War on Terror' which would benefit Defendants both financially and politically."
The suit itself is documented here.

RSS 2.0 Specification

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 13:15:21 EST

Coding Projects of Srijith

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 09:55:53 EST
Some maybe useful stuff, including a clever prototype aggregator and an Arts & Letters Daily RSS feed generator.

Social networking software continues to grow

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 09:18:37 EST
Short but link-rich note about what's happening in social networking software lately. Some of the links point to potentially interesting research that drove the technology.

Lars Pind: My Personal Crusade

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 08:16:02 EST
On connections between art and science, the creative element in software making, and other good stuff.

CIO Mag: software vendors love making buggy software

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 15:37:13 EST

If CIOs want to receive upgrades, patches and access to tech support—as inadequate as it can sometimes be—they have to pay the yearly maintenance fee. Software companies earn a significant amount of cash from these fees. So it's in the manufacturer's best interest, at least financially, to make products that need maintenance and that have to be continually improved with successive updates, patches and versions that CIOs pay for up front. In sum, bad software works for the vendors.

XML.com: What is RSS?

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 13:53:20 EST
Good article by Mark Pilgrim giving a technical overview of the 7 (!) different RSS formats.

Kevin Marks on Commodities

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 13:02:41 EST
Kevin Marks:
Commodities are great - to paraphrase something Clayton Christensen said - once your business has become commoditized it is simple enough that you can hire some MBAs to run it for you.
Does MBA stand for "Modular Business Addon"? Can you order packages of them and install them in standard sockets? More importantly, have the Chinese figured out how to manufacture them in bulk for under $200 each? Because I could probably use some MBAs to keep my appointment book, at the right price.

Cesar Brea's Weblog : Brain-Stem Software Strategy

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 11:08:21 EST
One thing this chapter comments on is the fallacy that "if you build it, they will come". In fact people suck at figuring out what's good for them (certainly they're never as good at it as you are) so I think this phrase should be restated as "if they are coming anyway, they will come". ;)

Ion

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 09:38:26 EST
A window manager that doesn't waste your time with windows. I get a lot of this out of sawfish with virtual desktops and keyboard bindings for everything, including moving and resizing windows. But still interesting.

CNN: Multitasking is counterproductive

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 09:32:46 EST
News flash! Doing too many things at once reduces your productivity. Modern corporate culture, probably led by PCs and the cubiclized office space, pushes workers to do a lot of multitasking. As someone who's been using computers for a long time while growing up, I feel like multitasking is in my blood—I expect to listen to music, read news articles, ponder ways to approach a software challenge, and write blog posts at the same time. Hopefully this doesn't show glaringly in each endeavor. It probably does show in my patience and attention span.
What are you doing right now as you read this article? Ordering supplies for the office from your distribution warehouse? Monitoring a screen for production equipment performance? Getting an e-mail back to your colleagues in the Denver office? Carrying on Instant Message conversations with three co-workers? Writing up a report in Word for the meeting on Wednesday? Eating the lunch you never have time to leave the desk for? Opening and reading traditional mail? Filing an in-house memo to Tech Services because your browser is acting up? Making a list of the clients you're expect to reach by close-of-business today? Trying to resize the fonts in the company newsletter so it fits on one page?

Squeak/Morphic Demo

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 09:22:58 EST
Real video of a presentation featuring some Squeak stuff. About teaching or something?

Better Living Through Software - Software that Doesn't Stink

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 09:00:16 EST

I believe that there is tremendous waste in the process; far more waste in software than in other industries. This is why I don't get too excited when people debate about whether Americans work too many hours. Especially in the software industry, the amount of overhead is so huge it's a wonder we get paid at all. The idealist in me says that if people would slow down, spend more time thinking, engage in proper planning, and stop making excuses for the constant fire drills, we'd cut the number of hours worked in half. The extra hours we work are, IMO, evidence of the software industry's high margins and tolerance for waste than evidence of any necessity.

MobileWhack

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 21:10:15 EST

MobileWhack is all about that mobile handset, palmtop, hiptop, ipod, or laptop in your pocket, purse, briefcase, or dangling from your utility belt. It's about squeezing every last ounce of mobility out of your mobile device.

How to Misunderstand Open Source Software Development

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 21:08:30 EST

Congress like drunken sailor

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 20:02:43 EST

Congress is throwing away astonishing amounts, "spending money like a drunken sailor," and President Bush shares the blame because he is not using his veto power, Republican Sen. John McCain said Sunday.

Business dorm

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 19:14:33 EST
We all would have been really successful if we had lived here. Also, we would have no soul and our names would be Drew Newman [guest entry by Josh Ain]

Sysinternals Freeware - Utilities for Windows NT and Windows 2000

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 16:11:51 EST
A bunch of useful utilities for anyone developing software on a Win32 platform.

Sweet glory hallelujah!

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 16:02:06 EST
A free tool to let you remap CapsLock to Ctrl. Why have I waited so long to Google thee?

Having fun is sometimes pushing the envelope

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 15:42:06 EST
Chris Winters on the importance of tomfoolery and experimentation in the making of programs, and how the Perl community embraces this (to the jeers of the "real" languages).
I wholly agree that in order to build wisdom and skill most quickly, one needs to be free to experiment in a realm where failure is not catastrophic. Taking risks and having fun, with the guidance of a master, is the fundamental mode of learning.

clagnut: Colour tools

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 15:16:09 EST
Links to a few good sites for developing color schemes. From a site with a very good color scheme (but too many boxes).

The iPod Culture

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 14:11:00 EST
Are iPods a culture? This article in Wired describes a trend of iPod owners approaching other people with iPods and trading music for a few moments at a time. This kind of spontaneous interaction is strange and delightful, and the great success rate (outside NYC, at least) of such encounters indicates that there are some interesting shared values characteristic of people who walk around listening to iPods:
Author Douglas Rushkoff suggested that iPod sharing is a legacy of online file sharing—essentially the same thing, except offline.
"It's kind of a stoner's ethic, really, the way you pass the joint at a Dead show," he said.
So what does this mean? If you see me walking around with an iPod, and you think we might both enjoy exchanging music for a few moments, what are you really supposing about me? Here are some ideas:

I may have interesting taste in music
I am open to interacting with strangers
I think strangers might actually have something to offer me
I'm not likely to turn to you and say that your racket is antimusical devil-chant, and you should be taken out and shot for your blasphemy, even if I dislike your music.
Aesthetic pleasure can and should be shared.
These values imply a worldview that is highly trusting and open to connections, even with strangers. It is even kind of like the bonds that can be formed under oppression, where victims and their supporters can come together despite disagreement to protest war or civil injustice. But now, with the iPod, similar subcultural bonds can form through the enjoyment of music, which is both intimate and inclusive. In this regard it handily beats drugs, although one would look silly listening to an iPod at a Grateful Dead concert.
Approaching someone with an iPod may not be too different from approaching someone who's reading a book you like. But the particular techie-ness of the iPod, its style, and its iconic status probably make it more inviting. There are probably under 30 books that I would inspire me to approach someone on the subway, but from a distance, an iPod is an iPod is an iPod. And there is of course something special about music as an expressive medium that can transcend mood, education, and culture to help different people experience life together.

iPod's Dirty Secret

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 11:33:19 EST
Considering buying an iPod? Watch this video. But also note that apple has recently launched a $99 battery replacement program.

GOP pulled no punches in struggle for Medicare bill

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 10:20:32 EST
More good reasons to hate party politics:
Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan's southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.
In a respectable parliament (perhaps that is a contradiction in terms) these kinds of threats should have cost Cunningham and others their jobs.

Java Outline Editor

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 21:10:21 EST
An OPML & such editor, obviously written in Java.

Invisible Shoebox

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 19:26:53 EST
Cute comic strip between a nerdy girl and a cynical ant about comments on blogs.

Jim Moore urges taxonomists to consider levels of abstraction

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 16:04:44 EST
From Jim Moore:
And finally, finally finally, a note to the Thursday Night Club about categorization and meta-data: The simple genius of Glazer, Schatzman and Strauss was to point out that when you take notes on a situation, you tend to do so at three different levels of abstraction, and that if you paragraph and tag your notes that way, they provide a better source file for later thinking. To be concrete, some notes are direct observations, or at least fairly direct observations, and include telling details as well as a sense of some whole event or process. these notes can be tagged as "observational notes" with a little "ON" in the left margin of each paragraph. Some notes refer to questions that are raised by observations, or references to queries or experiments that might resolve questions. These are tagged as "methodological notes" with an "MN" in the left margin. And finally there are one's thoughts on theory, one's hypotheses about causal connections and systems, as well as references to others' written work. These "theoretical notes" are tagged "TN."
I think this sort of tagging is generally useful for academic researchers essentially every field.

Look Out, Outlook: RSS Ahead in 2004

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 15:23:52 EST
Steve Gillmore forecasts some cool stuff about RSS Information Routers or something.

Wired 9.12: The Geek Syndrome

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 14:21:03 EST
Good article about autism and asperger's syndrome. Mentions Williamstown resident Jessy Park, an interesting person and amazing artist who I met several times in college, and who resides in a wonderful house next to the science center.

DNC: Kicking Ass - Mile-high lies?

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:37:29 EST
British Airways: "president say what?"

Clark Kerr, Leading Public Educator, Dies at 92

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:31:56 EST
University of California legened Clark Kerr is dead. His writing seems saddeningly accurate:
Paradoxically, Mr. Kerr himself was to issue some of the most cogent warnings about giant multiversities. While maintaining that they were inevitable, he warned of the danger of ``knowledge factories'' whose neglect of students through large classes, the use of teaching assistants and the selection of faculty members based on their research expertise rather than instructional capacities could turn those students into an ``alienated'' class.
He joked that a university had become ``a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.''

spiked-life: Hooked on self-esteem

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:03:45 EST
Review of Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age by Frank Furedi:
'Every culture has a story about the human subject - the values it expects people to aspire to', explains Furedi. 'Our culture's story is of a weak, feeble person, who is continually at risk, and for whom the chances of things going wrong are very great.' Therapy culture represents a shift from the view of the robust, independent person, capable of great individual and collective achievements, to the notion of the fragile, powerless victim in need of continual professional support. 'Far less is expected of humans in the twenty-first century than was expected in the nineteenth', says Furedi. 'Today's society operates around the belief that people can't cope on their own, or face the challenges of life.'
Perhaps this partially answers a certain awfully cynical query by Philip Greenspun.

Harper's Magazine

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 11:57:29 EST
An interesting magazine that distills a variety of news sources into concise but enlightening portraits of our time. Also has a beautifully intertwingled website design by Paul Ford.

UNIX Load Average Part 1: How It Works

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 10:20:46 EST
I've often looked at "load average" numbers hoping to get a sense of whether or why a Unix box is running slowly. This series of articles explains the mystery of the load average. It seems... complicated.

F-This! Bookmarklet (Copy link; don't click)

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 22:58:38 EST
Use this javascript code as the link value for a bookmark to add a "Frassle this page" button to your browser.

SomaFM: Listener Supported, Commercial Free Internet Radio

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 22:21:16 EST
I especially like their secret agent channel.

Feed Validator for RSS and Atom

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 22:07:07 EST
Sam Ruby & Mark Pilgrim's validator for RSS and Atom.

Hot Deals Club - updated many times daily with the best deals

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 21:36:35 EST
Great site for finding cheap stuff to improve the materialist's lifestyle. Coupon codes, hot deals, etc.

CPAN Search/Browse

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 21:11:12 EST
I'll be looking at the RSS parsers here tomorrow when I start on frassle's aggregation features.

Robin Good: Personal Knowledge Mapping Tool

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 19:45:59 EST
visualization of knowledge

Jon Udell: Data Emergence

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 18:48:14 EST

Either way, the point is that in this case, selfish routine use of a tool permits data emergence.

Robin Good: Data Emergence

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 18:47:30 EST

"Data Emergence is the incidental creation of personal information through the selfish pursuit of individual goals."
Exactly what I'm hoping to get with frassle. Maintaining and refining your directory means you (1) have a more organized, web-based bookmarks collection and (2) get more accurate recommendations from the software, but also that you provide more useful directory data to those who syndicate your directory.

The city is listening: NYC 311 Hotline

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 16:08:29 EST

"It allows us to do more with less because we can see exactly how agencies are performing and manage our existing assets better and smarter," said Gino P. Menchini, the city's commissioner for information technology and telecommunications, who set up and runs the system. "It allows us to be able to do what we need to do without having to add additional resources. It's cost avoidance, more than anything else."
The 311 data, at the mayor's direction, is also being used much like the Police Department's highly touted Compstat system, to check up on how city agencies respond to the public every month and to hold commissioners accountable for the results.

Kurt Vonnegut on Bush

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 15:15:16 EST

Those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians', and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or 'PPs.' To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is "The Mask of Sanity" by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times...

Cap Gemini on Measuring Innovation

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 15:00:21 EST
Presents a model for evaluating innovation that is more objective, supporting theories about the value of innovation to a company's success.

WP Op-ed: The Bush Betrayal

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 14:42:41 EST
An abomination by his own standards?
In Bush's first three years, nondefense discretionary spending — which fell by 13.5 percent under Ronald Reagan — has soared by 20.8 percent. His more libertarian-minded voters are taken aback to discover that "compassionate conservatism" turned out to mean social conservatism — a stepped-up drug war, restrictions on medical research, antigay policies, federal subsidies for marriage and religion — and big-spending liberalism justified as "compassion."

Cesar Brea's Tale Of The Binge-O-Matic

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 14:24:09 EST
Former ArsDigita business guy Brea traces the kernel of social networks and p2p sharing to an inauspicious but funny 1999 "killer app":
"I've got $2 million in venture capital," he said, "and I want to build the killer site for college kids who want to party."
Ah, those good old days...

John Hughes: Why Functional Programming Matters

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 13:22:16 EST

As software becomes more and more complex, it is more and more important to structure it well. Well-structured software is easy to write, easy to debug, and provides a collection of modules that can be re-used to reduce future programming costs. Conventional languages place conceptual limits on the way problems can be modularised. Functional languages push those limits back. In this paper we show that two features of functional languages in particular, higher-order functions and lazy evaluation, can contribute greatly to modularity. ...

50 Questions for Programming Language Designers

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 13:05:41 EST
A smart and terse summary of different options & tradeoffs in programming language design. Some of the more esoteric concepts are explained, making this almost a syllabus for a programming languages course.
There are some things I could pick on, particularly in their discussions of OOP. But on the whole a good list.

Emode basic IQ test

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 11:10:28 EST
Finally, a computer program that knows I am just like that brainiac Bill Gates. :-P
Congratulations, Shimon!
Your IQ score is 133

This number is the result of a formula based on how many questions you answered correctly on Emode's Ultimate IQ test. Your IQ score is scientifically accurate; to read more about the science behind our IQ test, click here.

During the test, you answered four different types of questions — mathematical, visual-spatial, linguistic and logical. We were able to analyze how you did on each set of those questions, which reveals the way your brain uniquely works.

We also compared your answers with others who have taken the test, and according to the sorts of questions you got correct, we can tell your Intellectual Type is a Facts Curator.

This means you are highly intelligent and have picked up an impressive and unique collection of facts and figures over the years. You've got a remarkable vocabulary and exceptional math skills — which puts you in the same class as brainiacs like Bill Gates. And that's just some of what we know about you from your test results.
On second thought, this blog is proof enough that I'm a facts curator.

Wiktionary

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 10:59:23 EST
Collaborative kinda-multi-lingual dictionary.

Today is World Aids Day.

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 10:09:58 EST

NYT Mag: Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 09:35:42 EST
MIT Instructor Amy Smith doesn't equate invention and high technology. She and her students invent cheap, simple solutions to problems faced in developing countries.

FlightView Flight Tracker

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 09:12:13 EST
Real-time flight status, with maps, weather, and other stats.
One cool visualization: Airport traffic into Boston.

Imad Khadduri: "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage"

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 08:37:04 EST

Iraq Scientists: Lied About Nuke Weapons

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 08:35:58 EST

BitTorrent Tutorial by Don Park

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 23:30:24 EST

CGI Environment Variables

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 14:32:53 EST
For all those times you can't remember how they misspelled "referrer".

BitTorrent

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 10:40:47 EST
Seems like a really interesting app, but a pain to set up. Apparently a major part of the serverage is handled by a vanilla web server. I'll look into it later maybe.

Creative Rhomba: Ultraportable USB MP3/radio/recorder

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 19:52:16 EST

my thanksgiving flight status (returning)

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 19:30:52 EST

Sibneft-Yukos merger blown

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 00:29:07 EST

Putty SSH client for Win32

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 21:17:05 EST
Excellent, simple telnet/SSH client for Win32. On every Windows machine I've used for the past couple of years. :)

How Orbitz computes flight fares with Lisp

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 02:07:24 EST
Apparently Lisp can scale to pretty large business problems, such as airline fare pricing and reservations. A rather interesting and technical article.

bivio OLTP Platform

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 01:50:07 EST
Sounds like a good web app framework, although possibly a bit too high on the OOP jive.

Pagekit Reference

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 01:46:56 EST
Probably my most productive programming environment. I don't know if it says something bad about me or about "progress" in programming tools that I like to build applications using a simple framework based on Perl and relational databases. But sometimes simplicity is beautiful...

Don Park: P2P Selling incentives

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 23:42:43 EST
A cool and perhaps even feasible idea for P2P selling. Sell someone else something you're interested in buying, get a coupon. Incents sales by people who are actually interested in the product.

Paolo Valdemarin sureys taxonomies

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 15:46:42 EST
Too many different formats for putting category information into RSS feeds. At least, this contains some pointers to feeds with category info that I might subscribe to in order to test frassle.

my thanksgiving flight status (outbound)

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 15:09:53 EST

TiVo sounds like it almost might make TV watchable

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 14:22:12 EST

NYT: photo of very clever cheat sheet

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 13:29:29 EST
This article is about how one school took up a fight against cheating. But the included photo is especially worth noting because it depicts a wonderfully imaginative way of hiding a cheat sheet.

SQL for Web Nerds

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 11:46:08 EST
Good, terse intro to SQL from Philip Greenspun. Covers SQL syntax and some reasonable intro to data modelling so that you don't screw up your database because you didn't use transactions when you should have.

Philipino takes lesson from Ahnold

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 11:40:48 EST
Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

Will Ferrel's speech at Harvard Commencement 2003

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:52:59 EST
Transcript and real video of Will Ferrel (formerly of SNL) giving the commencement address at Harvard. Pretty funny. Also kinda surprising that Harvard doesn't seem to have much dignity anymore. ;)

New Yorker: CLASS NOTES

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:47:16 EST
If class notes were honest:
McMurdo Station, a lonely research outpost in Antarctica near the South Pole, has to be the last place on earth where you'd expect to run into your roommate from sophomore year. If anyone ever does, please write or call with details.

Aidan Finley

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:41:46 EST

Dave Kane's Williams College Blog

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:41:14 EST

Williams Students Online (WSO)

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 22:56:03 EST
The best student group ever.

Four Levels of Competence

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 14:51:20 EST

LocalFeeds: Boston

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 14:44:47 EST

Wired: Congress Expands FBI Spying Power

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 13:58:12 EST

Blooberry HTML reference

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 13:10:04 EST
Really excellent HTML reference.

spam gives a bad name to the penis enhancement business

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 11:56:46 EST

Swarm Intelligence Bibliography

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:54:17 EST

Al Molnar devises tiny transceiver-on-a-chip

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:51:08 EST

Bronfman group buys Warner Music

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 09:41:50 EST

Gregor Rothfuss on "What I do" -- more than software

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 09:30:58 EST

serendipity is my drug, tunnel vision my antidote. i seek out the big ideas in every field that will reveal its treasures to my inquiries. i synthesize, recombine, mutate. infect.

Cyborg logs and collective stream of (de)consciousness

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 09:26:51 EST
Various forms of apparatus for a new kind of wiki or blog (weblog) are described. In particular, ways of bringing together a collective deconsciousness are presented. The systems works with CyborgLogs (cyborglogs or "glogs") from a community of portable computer users, or it can also be used with a mixture of portable (handheld or wearable), mobile (automotive, boat, van, or utility vehicle), or base-station (home, office, public space, etc.) systems. The system enables a community to exist without conscious thought or effort on the part of the individual participants. Because of the participants' ability to constantly experience the world through the apparatus, the apparatus can behave as a true extension of the participants' mind and body, giving rise to a new kind of collective experience. In other embodiments, the system may operate without the need for participants to bear any kind of technological prosthesis.

The World as a Blog

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 09:19:23 EST
Cool Flash app showing random blogs located on a map of Earth.

3. Jim Lynch: Darn Tootin'

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 08:52:53 EST

2. Steve Gillmor: Yu-huh!

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 08:51:58 EST

1. John Dvorak: No

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 08:51:29 EST

Ben Cooper

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 08:15:28 EST

Jinn: An illustration of how bad managers habitually refuse to listen and thereby sow destruction

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 00:26:57 EST

Easy News Topics 1.0

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 00:21:26 EST

HTML color scheme picker

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 00:20:57 EST

PostgreSQL Cookbook

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 00:20:24 EST
Example solutions to many Postgres questions.

10% of US Imports from China are sold at Walmart. Do you know where your job is?

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 21:40:00 EST

myRSS Scraper

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 15:51:20 EST

Syndict8 Feed Search

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 15:44:48 EST

Finance for Geeks

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 14:47:00 EST

Survey find Java apps have shitty 88% uptime

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 14:38:13 EST

Python Desktop Server

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 14:25:19 EST

Dave Winer: NYT & RSS

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 13:14:11 EST

NYT: Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 11:58:44 EST

New York Times Permalink Generator

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 11:57:59 EST

Edwin Land: Generation of Greatness

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 10:46:44 EST

Lisa Williams blog

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 10:14:36 EST

Blogrolling

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 10:12:06 EST

jbaumgart on grocery layout confusion

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 09:00:19 EST

Democrat Urges G.O.P. to Withdraw Bush Ad

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 08:56:28 EST

matt.blogs.it: Whose personality do you want today?

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 00:28:35 EST

The Zombie Within Christof Koch and the Science of Consciousness

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 00:25:30 EST

Call Lena Kaleva

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 00:11:52 EST

Viewing position information for CURIOUS GEORGE: Gun Control
Statement of the Issue	Candidate position
1. Should guns be given to Monkeys?	Choices: yes, no George's Position: yes* * IMPORTANT! We have received compelling arguments that CURIOUS GEORGE could support either yes or no on this issue. Therefore we have LOW CONFIDENCE in the summary position above. Supported by: candidate statement, 12/4/2003 quote published in Chicago Sun-Times, 1/24/2004 Challenged by: report of cute monkey PAC, 2/2/2004 Man in Yellow Hat on NBC's Meet the Press, 2/5/2004 » support or challenge our assessments
2. Should machine guns be sold to minors?	Choices: yes, no George's Position: yes Supported by: candidate statement, 12/1/2002 MADD Press Release, 7/1/2003 New York Times analysis, 8/21/2003 Challenged by: no challenges yet » support or challenge our assessments