View all entries in the 'Geek' Category

Hello world: Return from the silent majority

by eleanor on 16 Jan 2006 @ 7:09 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

OK, all the signs are pointing to me needing to spend more time with WordPress. Among PhotoMatt’s 22nd, the fanfare around the launch of WordPress 2.0, and the fact that my VP is leaving to go work with Matt - all conjoining with a long weekend, time had clearly come to upgrade and finally port my whole bloggy world over to a vibe more manageable from my Yahoo! busyness.

So I’m down to 73 feeds, with a few more hanging on the edge of (in|ex)clusion. I’m proud - I used to find 200 almost indispensible daily reading.

Hello world, many happy returns, etc.

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Last day of ciccadas, hummingbirds, and fighting with blue jays

by eleanor on 23 Jun 2005 @ 3:32 pm in Geek   ++

So since March I’ve been working from home and scoping out new projects. Working every day, slaving away with 30 tabs open in Firefox, pondering all the new stuff out on the net, who’s got it and who doesn’t, and what in the world I wanted to do next. Though always interesting, it’s been hard to always make sense of what’s going on, and that’s been a lot of what I’ve been writing about.

But now I have a job, and starting Monday, the hummingbirds, ciccadas and nasty blue jays will just be a if-I’m-lucky weekend diversion. I’ll be ok. I’m actually wickedly allergic to the jasmine that the hummingbirds love so and my herbs will just have to take care of themselves. I will however miss the ciccadas.

I’m just kidding really - it’s a great job, with a real team, and I’m terribly excited.

So that’s what’s been up the last couple weeks as I get everything settled for that. This week is “vacation geek-out week”, full of conferences. I have a bunch of stuff to write up about Supernova and then there’s Gnomedex tomorrow, which should be interesting. As long as I’m not locked in the back room reserved for the paraiah that procrastinated on registration. Ah, the rewards of social engineering.

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Finally, the Amazon Darknet review

by eleanor on @ 3:04 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

While at Supernova, my (disclosure) buddy JD Lasica and I did a video talking about JD’s book, Darknet, on the conflicts between remix culture, Hollywood and Washington. My first citizen journalism experience - what a dilletante.

I thought JD’s book was great, a really solid treatment of the subject. He used one of my favorite approaches to understand a space — a combination of a big picture survey with deep dives to profile specific instances. In this case, it was profiling people and how they were using technology (almost all of the illegal under the DMCA, poor folks) to do new things with media.

And that spurred me to finally do the Amazon review that JD asked me to do weeks ago (only after I said it was a good book!) - so I’ll post it here. Perhaps I should reread the T&C of the Amazon page to see what I signed away, but microcontent is microcontent (is microformats) and it’s all mine. And thus I will repost for you to remix.

In what is essentially a PR war of hysteria (on both sides), JD presents the middle ground, shifting the focus off the corporations and file-sharing teenagers. We learn about real people who, having become accustomed to technology in their lives, adopt it to create a richer media experience. These hobbyists have the tools and ambition to express themselves, except now the law has intervened. Before, fair use was an acceptable compromise because it was hard to make a perfect copy. Now with perfect duplicates, all fair use is suspect, since the tools used to digitally record a few seconds of a song or movie for a remix piece are the same that pirates would use to steal music or, worse, to profitably bootleg. Those tools illegally circumvent copy protection and the act is a crime no matter the intent.

This is the tension JD describes is his book - a world where an absolute law applies to a range of activities, many of which seem perfect resonable and socially beneficial.

JD presents no real answers because as a society we haven’t come up with them yet. Darknet triggers important questions: is fair-use an intrinsic “right”? should it be? what can people repurpose for their own use in a non-commerical setting? how can that be defined/controlled? where are the mechanisms to license use of this content?

JD points us to the root of the conflict: otherwise normal people become criminals in pursuit of creating their own art and entertainment - works as “trivial” as they are culturally important.

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The forgotten cost of Firefox: cookie mgmt

by eleanor on 23 May 2005 @ 12:01 pm in Geek   ++

I’ve been a Mozilla devotée since 1999, and was slow to come over to Firefox. I like Firefox, but this Silicon Beat piece on the “problem” of users rejecting cookies today just jogged my mind. I’m not longer prompted to accept cookies. I recloned a couple weeks ago to fix a bluetooth problem, and realized I hadn’t customized that part of the browser. Today I rediscover that Firefox is much more limited in how you can control cookies (something that surprises me each time I learn it). What a pain, and so hard to understand. Is it a “feature” or is it just part of Firefox’s original misssion of being a stripped down, fast version of Mozilla?

As a user of what’s now the flagship product of the Mozilla family, all I know is I just deleted a quantity of cookies that makes me feel positively unclean. And it’s very clumsy to maintain that state. I deleted by accident a cookie for Bloglines (with “don’t allow sites that set removed cookies to set future cookies” checked) and was unable to log back in. I had to go to “manage cookies” and delete Bloglines from the list of Exceptions (it was marked as “Block”). Phew! What else will I have to do that for just to get rid of the Zedo, Hitbox and all that other junk?

The full Mozilla suite has a much richer set of tools to manage cookies. I miss the “ask me before accepting all cookies” option, almost enough to go back to the full suite.

As it is with Firefox, it’s almost easier to track what sites I’ve viewed via my cookies than in my damn history - given all this residue! I’ve been to many of these sites just once, and there they site in my cookies! Horrible.

Where is the value for me? I’ll accept cookies if they are linked to login info, or customization that I explicitly create. But otherwise they’re just bugs. I’m willing to explicitly subscribe to feeds and make that data public, but site-based cookies that simply report repeat visitor trends drive no value for me. I know site stats are important to owners, and that this is data they crave, but the no-tangible-value-for-me of this chafes.

Back to the question of Mozilla Suite vs Firefox+Thunderbird, I remain curious: are Firefox+Thunderbird more memory efficient than the full Moz suite? Are they optimized for standalone use, or meant to be used together?

Updated: Hit publish too soon.
Updated: I also have this piece open in another tab on web analytics, journalism and pr from earlier this year. One of the my feeds linked to it (when I have my Firefox tracker, I’ll know who it was). This shows another piece of the puzzle, the back end mining that goes on behind the scenes. I don’t mean to be naive and say that there shouldn’t be advertising on the web, but rather to push for a technological solution that creates value for me as user. And no, I’m sorry, receiving more pertinent (targeted) advertising is not a value I experience, except when I am in shopping mode.

Maybe there should be a browser button to click to denote when I am open to deals being offered?

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Everything iCal resource

by eleanor on 19 May 2005 @ 3:09 pm in Geek   ++

Niall sent me this today - Ohtogo’s iCal Resources. I’ve heard about python folks have used, but this is the first real package I’ve found (and I did actually sniff around the MozCalendar mailing list, pretty scary. Shoulda just searched). I’m not coder enough to write my own, far better to munge other stuff.

The iCal WordPress plugin sounds good, but I want it in the other direction. I want my calendar (only certain categories) to drive my ical, to drive my blog - pour in all the new data into new post drafts? I’m not really sure how realistic that is, but I sure want it to be less work.

That reminds me, I was gonna install that but then got distracted. But a good distracted: you’ll never guess what by! Backing up and cleaning up my server! Oh, I’ll be a good little girl geek some day.

I’ll be very interested to see what code it generates from the WP iCal plugin. It may very well be liveable to just use that, instead of cracking into the problems off stripping out categories and checking to see what’s already been added.

I’ve also been dying to know what the “h” meant in Tantek/Technorati’s “hcal”, “hcard”, etc, hstandards. It’s just for HTML.

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Funny of the day

by eleanor on @ 2:44 pm in Geek   ++

This précis made me laugh - top to bottom. But then again, I just saw Hitchhiker’s Guide last night so my sense of the ridiculous is freshly honed (it was super good and we could have just walked into a 12:30am screening of Sith but we didn’t).

This immediately brought to mind a piece I read Tuesday, as I was catching up on an older Economist. Apparently the celebrity trash newsies market is booming on both sides of the Atlantic, and we have new entrants. (Econ is sub required - a lot more than a couple $17 martinis, but, as some will say about the Times, worth it — or you can read about it in USA Today, perhaps the most appropriate source for analysis on this kind of news). From the Economist piece:

Young women want every bit of information they can glean about their role models and are willing to buy several titles each week…..Advertisers may sniff at low-down gossip, but America’s female readers seem happy to take their celebrity news any way they can get it—true, false, worshipful or unkind.

Of course, you have to 1,$s/women|female/bloggers/g (ie. sub “blogger” for “chick” over the whole article). But the point remains that old media and new media are getting closer every day. Where are the celebrity blogger gossip blogs?

Disclaimer: I have a bulging backpack and a martini-based price comparison works for me; at least he didn’t “put it in perspective” against 10 Starbucks visits or products from Apple. I wonder if that would have secured less derision? Ya gotta know your market.

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Gnomedex

by eleanor on @ 10:57 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Ah, so I’m calendaring because I haven’t lately. And people keep mentioning Gnomedex. Which I went to last year. But hadn’t checked out for this year, let alone even registered for.

It’s in Seattle (good I think, but I personally hunger to visit Portland as those things go), the weekend of 23-25 June. We went last year, when it was only $99 and in Tahoe (I like conferences in places I’m already looking for an excuse to adventure to). I think Mike and I will be going - that is we’ll try and hope to see you all there.

Even if you’re not a conference-goer and more like just a normal person, this is a good place to start. This conference grew up in the midwest and last time, there were midwest moms helping out. So it’s a very laid back, friendly sort of place. You’ll meet some people you’ve heard of or read, but others completely new. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on the high profile stuff and people, but that’s not where life really happens. I’d especially like to see more girls there this year, as there was a shocking dearth of them (but all the boys were very nice).

Register here.

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Jeff Hawkins at ETL today

by eleanor on 18 May 2005 @ 11:07 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Niall and I have become Stanford groupies. He says it’s pseudo b-skool for him, and - even though I did that already - I might agree. In my case it’s revisiting the themes from the entrepreneurial side. I was a strategy and econ wonk in b-skool, and thought it’d be impossible to teach entrepreneurialism. While it may be, I now find that having designated times to discuss the issues, tradeoffs and best practices is very useful.

The speaker at today’s ETL session needs no geeky introduction, as it’s Jeff Hawkins of Palm fame. We’re gonna get our Treos signed! Niall’s got the pen and I’m getting the fixative. See you today at Terman at 4:30.

This is the second time I’ve fetishized my handheld - my old cute orange Clié has a little kitty hair (under the piece of tape) from my now-long dead familiar kitty.

I’m willing to guess that Jeff won’t burst into song, but it’s impossible to tell.

I’ll post pictures of our trophies and the process after our adventure.

UPDATE: Ah, ok so here we are, with the quintessential geek photo from Niall. Jeff was a good sport about signing, but he seemed keenest to sign on the inside. I have to apply fixative to mine today to make sure it doesn’t scratch off. (it’s reduced here the poor-man’s way, head up to flickr for the original in all Niall’s fooery). Nice composition!

Note also for the entrepreurial engineers out there, that 106miles is tonight. They say it’s full, but you might want to see if you qualify for the invites to the next one.

And dammit speaking of cats - why isn’t kittenwar back up yet???

Edit: .org, .com - tomato tomato - Thx to JeffC for the link correction.

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Capturing the full view from microcontent

by eleanor on @ 10:55 am in Geek   ++

After a long and torturous session, my subscriptions are finally back in order. In a dramatic instance proving subject-based taxonomies don’t always work, I’ve smushed my subs into a few broad groups. The grouping’s based on a mix of knowing people, interest in content, posting frequency, and - perhaps strangely - ratio of “new” to rehash.

I’ve got a lot of feeds, but wasn’t trawling them effectively - but when I do, I’m struck by the ‘yada-yada’ effect of many blogs. And that’s my posting style - if I can get to something news-ish immediately (what Jeff noted here) I’ll post on it, but as it decays, I care less. It comes down to the fact that for me there’s a short window where you can legitimately repost facts, say an acquisiton or rumor, without providing analysis. After that I expect to be told something new. Which isn’t really fair, since the order in which I cruise a blog has nothing to do with when it was written.

At long last I powered through all my feeds yesterday, and have such a sense of Greek chorus. We’re all singing the same song - which would imply I need fewer feeds. But that’s not really true.

This gets back to the end-all-and-be-all that I wish someone would come up with - a conversation tracker. I’ve talked with the guys at Technorati about this, and the complexity is insurmountable they say. I bet that there are folks out there with a more pragmatic, just get it working ethos that can do it. This isn’t a criticism, Technorati works on a theory of precisely mapping the known and countable. This project would be a “good enough” tool, and might therefore be a good candidate for a Google beta (though it would be very dangerous for Technorati since it would be the idea pretex for encroachment on their market).

You’d need to collect all the feeds from all the blogs out there and do processing and mapping to very imprecisely map out the conversation. Me, I’d like to see it by date, and watch the flow of the conversation as the snowballs move up and down the hill. Others might want to watch it by authority. Whatever works for you - it should just be a sort on the data. When we talk about AttentionXML - the problem that solves for me is to help surface what I don’t already know or have access to. In all of these discussions, adding a time-based linking trail would help map out discussions, simulataneously tracking their linear progresssion as well as the collective mind map to capture how ideas morph and change, merging on later with other themes.

And this is the same kind of text processing and intelligence that Paul Kedrosky was expecting from PatentMojo. And when it comes to search, getting beyond keywords to context requires much more heavy lifting.

What I wonder based on this, and talking with the Technorati guys over the months is the degree to which user bitching in the “you can’t find my important post” works to really constrain the innovation that a company is comfortable with. Google’s clearly ok with alienating whole tranches of society in their experiements-cum-product-offerings, but they run their business to be isolated from this. The degree to which Technorati or Six Apart, as members of the blogging community, seem to have their moves questioned and second-guessed by the ecosystem is a striking counterweight to their ability to make the kind of leaps necessary to innovation.

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Being bookish: events tonight

by eleanor on 11 May 2005 @ 5:22 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Tonight there are two book events for more scholarly pursuits (not everything is food & drink):

• Steve Johnson has a book signing for Everything Bad is Good for You at Books Inc. in Mountain View at 7:30PM.
• Scott Berkun takes time out from talking to big corps with a chill meet up during his book tour of the Bay area. He’s out promoting his new project management book, The Art of Project Management. This one is, yes you knew it was coming, at Faultline Brewing Co., a bar in Sunnyvale starting around 7.

Niall and I (currently listening to Tim Draper of DFJ at Stanford) are headed to the 2nd event, though I am still eager to read Johnson’s book too.

Update: the ETL event yesterday at Stanford was not to be missed. Tim broke into song, which Niall captured here.

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…but on the web, they just swat at each other

by eleanor on 9 May 2005 @ 12:55 am in Geek   ++

It’s with the success of yesterday’s outing (and many of the rest of the last week, where there were many great women) in mind that I approach this latest girls vs boys piffle. I heard from Niall yesterday about the Technorati/AO 100, the headline for which I had seen go by on SharpReader when Dave posted it on Friday. I didn’t think it a big deal at the time or even truly pay attention when Niall mentioned it, but when I get back I see Susan Mernit’s post. And realize that of course there’s a chick angle.

Some of this stuff is getting a little worn. Yeah, there both are no chick speakers and there are lots of chick speakers. My problem with the speakers of both sexes is that too often those that put themselves forth, especially in the vanguard, like to speak more than they are worth listening too. Hell, isn’t this all less about the “speakers” than the “writers”, or better yet “the participants”?

That’s what I find most fascinating about blogs. Gives voice to those too remote to attend or keynote these rarefied events, too shy to put themselves forward, and giving the mic to everyone concurrently. The trouble with any event where you have a speaker or a list or any anything is that it’s hierarchical and ranked. Despite our best efforts, in real life only one person gets to talk at a time.

Link ranking is interesting up to a point - it helps break through and order the simultaneous cacophony of asynchronous online chatter. And thus for me link ranking it works best at the topic level. But fame doesn’t make me believe someone’s opinion more. It only seems to impact the info they sometimes receive or the depth of their perspective (influenced by whispered offline conversations), both of which I benefit from.

In reading through all this, I am processing in a different direction. I have no reaction to this contest in a feminist context. Always On has a lot of chick activity, and in my view, it’s chick participation on the senior side with a lot of sensible things being said. But does that come into this? Women who contribute there are largely lost to the wider world. And no, I’m not sure what I think about that, which is why I’ve never posted. Captive audience vs. owning my microcontent. You tell me.

But still this controversy rages, as if people forget that lists of any sort remain a self-aggrandizing thing. And why not, it’s freakin’ business. These ain’t just bloggers, these are media guys looking to make a buck.

Tony Perkins — one must never forget — ran hype machine Red Herring even as he wrote a book on its demise, The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks . Don’t roll your eyes - that’s what the man did. Maybe I’m just biased because I happened to be receiving Business 2.0 at the same time, when in 1999 B2.0 expanded to bi-monthly based on the volume of advertising and Red Herring was just as bulging. Now, he’s now trying to make the AO Blogozine hunt, among other elements of the AO business. I have the first issue, being an AO member, and the cover says “Happy days are here again!”. That definitely goes in my trophy box, along with my Digiscents schwag.

And Dave, well Dave is the frontman for an enterprise which is still looking for a business model, and thus motivated to do PR things like this. Dave needs the a-listers, pioneers, influencers and up-and-comers more than anyone else - they’re the backbone of Technorati’s model: their very picky and somewhat fickle user community/content library. Unlike Tony, Dave’s “customers” don’t pay for the interaction, but rather view Technorati (ed. note - corrected clumsy wording) as a public utility (even as they monetize the free content given them).

So this makes far more sense to me from Tony’s view than from Dave’s, except to show that all this chick kerfluffle and questioning of linking-as-merit-meter has started to chip away at the certainty that Technorati’s paradigm of ranking by link is the end-all. And it’s not - it’s just a model, just one observation of how people use the web.

This is business, and being a businessman, Dave’s responding to “market need” and playing with moving from the generated Technorati 100 to some new 100 with a cattle-call vote experiment . This is progress folks.

I’m incredibly frustrated and saddened to hear all these “won’t somebody please just think about the children” cries about women’s inclusion at seemingly every occassion. I agree with the Founding Fathers bit here, and yes, Dave changed it quickly, and great - but that’s a lame ass Google-type error that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. So that part rounds out to a solid eye-roll from me. But there the chick debate should end.

Any merit-based ranking now, whether by influence or readership, will include almost all men if it runs from now back. I don’t think that if we look over the start of blogging til now we can credibly expand too far beyond Liz’s chicks. And those are great strong women. But this 100 should be a nice obvious hall of fame, not a political statement. It’s ridiculous to cry that it needs to change to reflect some normative goals and I’m totally opposed to ballot box stuffing by chick swarming to have our voices be heard.

Far more constructive from my view would be a list of up-and-comers, separate from this list which is honoring the past and immortalizing the right-now state. Can you imagine it? This would give world-changers metrics, rather than the shifting results of the Technorati 100. Data one could measure with to gauge progress.

So far, I found Shelly Power/Burningbird’s post most in synch with my thinking (when we jive we jive). And she wrote all that before this mess started. It’s an interesting sidenote that, contrary to what she says, I find myself moving toward creating a blogroll that is more dynamic and linked with what I’m reading (as yet unimplemented). I am finally becoming fascinated by blogs as a tool for knitting together networks, not just as a personal mouthpiece.

But so my take is that the fight for any top 100 spots is about personal aggrandizement, but it’s also supposed to be about truth. I take Dooce’s scat-blog a smidgen more seriously when I’m told it’s consistently in the top 10, but that’s goes in the same category as other things that are inexplicably popular. As a marketer, I’d certainly value the data, and I suppose it’s only human to jockey for position since there is renumeration tied to this. And that’s what this is about - but there shouldn’t be crying about it: “there’s no crying in baseball.” People at the top make money. They deserve that money not because they deserve it as humans, but as compensation for entertaining, appeasing, and appealing to a wide audience moneyholders want to reach. You don’t get the money until you do that.

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Wine and geeks and gondolas: girls and boys together having fun

by eleanor on 8 May 2005 @ 11:56 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Courtesy of Jonas (and Courtney for the bus!) we had a geek out in vino-ville yesterday. A herd of 24 (or 26 depending on your math and the time of day) descended on Napa. We picnicked at VS Sattui, where a few of us tasted (the one free tasting of the day - hit Sonoma for the free tastings!) while the others teetotaled. Jonas and Stephanie found a most snacky dessert - chocolate pretzels (think chocolate teddigrams) and this sublime dipping sauce with an improbably perfect combination of pear and cinnamon with caramel. Like a psycho apple butter. I had to snatch some for my own pantry as shown below. Yeah, it remains unopened (I hoard; it’s restraint that gives me the warm feeling all over). Hey Mike, you better hurry home.

Then we did nature tourism0-trekking. From the petrified forest (did you know St. Helena was a volcano??) — I especially liked this shot –

and the geyser, you could hear just the most inappropriate comments - it was clear none of us left our real lives too far behind. Then we went to Sterling, which was pricey but tasty (as long as you kept on keepin’ on with the tastings). On the trip down the hill (Sterling has a fancy gondola ride), we had a little incident. Mischievous, sauced geeks vs gondola and gravity. Bounce bounce. We didn’t fall, but we probably coulda, and got some pretty nasty looks from the crew as they (off in the distance) scrambled to restart the gondola. They eventually sent a truck from which descended a guy who pressed a button to get us moving again (kind of anticlimatic). And yeah, when you’re already pushing Treo-photography to the limits, it’s best not to take pictures while howling with laughter.

I don’t even think he gave us a dirty look when we (docilely) floated by, but I can’t be sure ’cause I was laughin’ too hard. Probably not, I bet they rock the gondola during the off hours. Oh yes indeedy.

As the Treo shots show, I didn’t have a real camera then, being the non-camera born in Rochester never-worked-for-Kodak iconoclast I tend to pose as. But I actually have been suffering camera envy all week, and got one this AM (in time for the food pR0n up above). Not sure I’m gonna keep it, but you’ll start seeing better pictures soon. In case you’re interested in what the rest of the pro-quality camera toting crew captured, the flickr tag for yesterday is (teehee) Rockin Gondola.

The group was great - some people I knew pretty decently, others I’d seen and barely talked with before, and still others completely new. Because we were not geeking, we didn’t start a company, invent a new AJAX type thing, or a new programming language, but we did talk about having a “geek prom” (spurred by the fact that all of the East Bay seemed to be on prom night), outings to Winchester and other places and also a more oenophile wine outing.

But in my book the exceptional factor of the group (beyond that I liked them all) was that it was almost 50% women. And if a pugnacious warrior like Jonas can build around him a group of really competent, interesting women, why can’t other guys?

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Javascript is like Scheme and therefore cool

by eleanor on 6 May 2005 @ 10:10 am in Geek   ++

The other night at dinner — which was quite cool, by the way — a vertible symphony of geekery with Mike, Dylan Schieman and Alex Russell (moderated ably by Adam Rifkin) convinced Mike that he needs to learn Javascript. Yay! Alex said Javascript came from Scheme, which makes sense because it seems just garbled. I’m not a prof programmer by any means, but after looking at Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby - Javascript just hurts. Scheme is weird, but it has such programmer caché. Anyhow, Mike’s hooked on the idea, so we’re gonna play at learning it, which means Mike learns it well and then gives me the pragmatic scoop.

I can say unironically that it’s a funny bit of marketing these geeks do amonst themselves. As I’ve probably said, my perception was that Javascript was just for dumb browser tricks and exploits (that’s so 1998, but there you go - branding is forever). It seems many programmers thought it lacked credibility too, but there would be no better way to burnish its image than to link it to such ancestry as Scheme. Especially after a talk by Paul Graham of Lisp/Scheme evangelization fame!!

As you can see in Niall’s photo, though we (Mike) had some misgivings about Il Fornaio as a site for geek dinners, it worked beautifully. Even when it started out as just “maybe 8″ of us and grew to “too many”.

It’s def at the top of my list now, unless you get some cheap laughs over the huge portions at Cheesecake Factory. Il Fornaio always does a great job - the best service in the city. And open til 11. And not too much money.

My favorite part was that they brought over the reserve wine list, which Mike and I — usually wandering in as townies wearing whatever — don’t usually get (we even asked once in 2001 after having spent so much time at the one in Pasadena, which has great wine list, and were surprised they didn’t have one). We musta looked like a newly-funded startup. Very cute.

I have notes from the ETL session, which I’ll massage in the next few days, but really, Niall’s notes are up and done already so go there now.

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Never do server admin before coffee

by eleanor on @ 9:57 am in Geek   ++

Tee hee. Who says my blog’s not a place where I whisper breathless confessions!

This AM I decided I was going to play with WebCalendar, which supposedly synchs to Palm and outputs to iCal - which would theoretically emit a scriptable stream so y’all can see what I’ve found without me doing work (I love you but remain lazy).

But I did a ../ when I just meant / and things got overwritten. Like my index file, and who knows what else. An older one is in place, but I do wonder if I have a backup. Hmm… I wonder. That brings up a good point: I wonder what else got deleted. Hmm…

The good thing about early adventures like this is it’s just academic now. I say “Fascinating, look at that.” Later in the day I’d be grinding my teeth!

Anyhow, it’s probably best to have a blackscreen day and just hack on stuff. My css could use some work, maybe to highlight quoted text in blockquote. And while I’m at I might play with some of the stuff Jonas has done in implementing “tag this” stuff. Because then I can tag things after the fact (bc I always forget) without doing a full on re-edit.

It’s been a while since I’ve checked out new plugins and stuff over at Wordpress.

And of course, once my calendar data can zip from app to app, I’ll have to code up something to extract upcoming events for display.

So yeah, stuff will be broken today. And if I don’t fix it today, it’ll be broken tomorrow too. Mike is going to Finland and I am going to Napa. But we’ll see what we can get done before then. (haha, that’s the royal “we” there. I have to code my way out of my own mess. I just meant it’ll be total chaos tonight.)

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Grassroots conferences: PodcasterCon doin’ it right

by eleanor on 4 May 2005 @ 2:45 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

The PodcasterCon people are taking a very interesting approach to their conference. I had to do a lot of looking around their site to see who was behind it because I was curious if it was Eric Rice because he mentioned a plan to do one back in the day. But it’s not. It’s a guy named Brian Russel of Audioactivism.org. Good job Brian.

I really like the community-based approach and openness - especially with the budget. Seems like a great way to appeal to newbies and bring more people into podcasting, and an excellent way to throw open a conference’s agenda.

I’m not a podcaster; I’m not even a consumer of podcasting. But this sort of event softens my view of the media, especially in the face of all the fluff in the last week, like this tragicomic piece from Frank Barnako on the Adam Curry/Sirius thing. You have to login to MarketWatch (free, at least) to read the whole thing, but it’s high melodrama and well worth it for gems like “Reaction to the strategy cast has been negative, beginning with comments from a computer programmer who originally worked with Curry to develop podcasting software.” It then moves to cover Paris Hilton, which is probably where the debate belongs.

In the hype and personal driven world of blogging, podcasting and video blogging, it was incredibly refreshing to need to dig thru the PodcasterCon site to find the honchos. Bravo!

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Events today and Palo Alto Geek dinner

by eleanor on @ 12:59 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Today there is a bunch going on around my hood.

Today’s Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders session features Bill Campbell, former CEO and current Chairman at Intuit and Danny Shader, CEO/Pres of Good with an hour’s talk entitled “From Start-Up to Success: Lessons in Growing a Company”. It starts at 4:3o over at Terman Auditorium and is free. Niall says Campbell’s on the dock for his role in mentoring the Google gang as a been-there-done-that guy. Should be an interesting talk.

Then there’s a bake off:

• SDForum has Paul Graham at PARC speaking on How to Sell a Startup - but don’t let the generic title fool you. As Adam Rifkin points out on the 106Miles blog, this isn’t same-old-same-old: this is a new model of product development and market expansion. This has snacks starting at 6, goes until 9 or so and is $15 members/$25 nonmembers. I’m headed over to hear Paul’s pragmatic take in favor of what traditional startup theory rails against: tooling your startup for a flip. He’s one of my favorite not-bloggers - proving some things deserve a longer expositon. His essays are among the best out there - though strangely out of synch with the feed model. He should enable his site with feeds - I run into the same trouble keeping an eye out for new stuff that aggregators solved. Good thing others pick new pieces up pretty quick. You can get the feed here.
• Harvard Business School and the Economist are cosponsoring a tech event, “Business 2010″ right down the road at SAP. This one gets you dinner along with the punditry, but has a more fuzzy futurist bent (that’s actually what I’m moving away from, yay me!). It’s $25 with dinner from 6-8:30.

Then a bunch of us - split up by the quandary of too much interesting stuff to do - will meet back up for food (the SDF hors d’oeuvre-challenged folk) and libations at Il Fornaio. They serve till 11, and are equally happy to dish out pizzas, real food, espresso, vino, or desserts. This will happen about 9, with some of us filtering in later. Even if you’re staying in, feel free to come out for some snacks and chatter.

Update: I’ve got a reservation at Il Fornaio under Eleanor. See you there.
Update 2: Paul has a feed. Yay.

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Spellbound - text area checker for Firefox

by eleanor on 3 May 2005 @ 4:56 pm in Geek   ++

Now that Thunderbird actually comes with spellcheck (I do remember when it didn’t, and probably continued in that assumption for too long - yet another curse of the early adopter) we now have a spellchecker module for text areas. It’s called Spellbound.

And yes, that should ably cover blog posts.

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Just post it (why short entries are boring)

by eleanor on @ 4:52 pm in Geek   ++

As you can tell I run hot or cold. No blogging for a while now, not for lack of drafts, but out of apathy. They’ve been mostly short bits. Interesting perhaps, but not things where I have too much to say. You’d think such restraint might be good, but no, that’s called driving away readers.

Tony says to just post it (and to keep the others shorter too). I say ‘enh’.

Isn’t there supposed to be an important point driving each post? Maybe not. Maybe it’s just branding. Maybe I should have my picture on my blog like Russ or Niall, because as movie stars know, frequent impressions make humans like other humans. Or so I hear.

But in good faith and to be a good sport, I’ll post the little bits I have, backdating them to the draft date. So beware the stories of my user-ville trails and tribulations and flotsam and jetsam.

And no, the answer isn’t just to be interesting all the time. I’m thinking, and mulling, and growling, and furrowing my brow. Thinking about what I want to do next - which for the first time in my life isn’t crystal clear. Which is itself pretty irritating. Thanks for bringing it up.

Just so you know I’m serious, I’ll close by reporting on one of my more successful projects lately, a Make-worthy scheme to defend my porch herbs from bluejays with a bobblehead owl. Bobblehead is just the thing, ‘cept a breeze is a rare thing here in lovely Menlo Park (the sounding of my windchimes typically presages power outages). Mike suggested twitch-enabling the owl with fishing line stretched into my office. And why not? It’s a hell of a lot more fulfilling than working through Javascript to hack Firefox or pondering the vicissitudes of calendar sharing or a chick blogging conference. And it causes such consternation among our gardener dudes, who duck thinking the owl’s real.

And that should make a more favorable story, as opposed to a confessional outlining my luser adventures trying to get Bluetooth Dial up Networking working over Cingular. Successful? No, but I can at least HotSync over Bluetooth now, though it did take full system reclone. And no, the answer is not to get a Mac (why isn’t Linux the proffered choice of the elite? yet more irritation).

So the lesson of the last couple weeks is that all this tech is too wonky, too convoluted, and just too geeky for anyone but sabbatics to screw with. And when you think you can be tricky, you can’t.

The snappy retort there is to fix it, but where do you start?

I’m so much crankier without a run.

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‘No follow’ ethos permeates greater web

by eleanor on @ 1:32 pm in Geek   ++

Scrolling through my Slashdot feed, I see a piece with a note of the new. Soko - in sending in a story on Lawsuit Says GPL is a Price-Fixing Scheme, featuring two evildoers suing the GPL - specifically mentions withholding link love from them:

I found the story on Groklaw - no links to Ms. O’Gara or Mr. Wallace from me.

Timothy then appends a link to a Google search (in a tongue-in-cheek feminist dig, I’ll point out that’s googling only the boy of the duo) and posts it.

I wonder what implications this has for hearing “the other side of the story”. It’s true that people can just take that second step and google it for themselves, but following a provided link is part of the value Slashdot (and blogs) provides. Since they go so far out of their way to not post I link, I wonder if it would be “bad” to see for myself. Encourage them by increasing traffic? Give them a chance to express their rationale? It’s hard to tell.

Now Slashdot is arguably where the whole phenomenon of linking first proved itself. A slashdotting is a huge vote of confidence, relevance and interest, and it’s a short step from noticing that to implementing that in tools like Technorati. I was a regular /. reader for years, falling off during my hard core research work (in the course of a day, I’d encounter almost all their stories). Since I’ve been away from formal research, /. is making more sense. This is the first instance I’ve noticed where someone’s specificially declared their intent to withhold links. I imagine that including a link withe the no-follow would do the trick for search engine calculations, but it would still give the baddies a traffic spike.

Food for thought.

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Time to close that browser again….

by eleanor on 19 Apr 2005 @ 1:07 pm in Geek | Mobility   ++

This isn’t a Moz dev update blog, but since I just posted on Moz upgrades on Friday, I’ll note that Firefox has a new vulnerability fix release. Upgrade today to 1.0.3.

Now I just have to go through all my open tabs so I can shut the browser down and run the install.

Tabbed browsing is a great thing, until I get to my Treo - and what is otherwise a good browser experience sucks because I never have only one tab open at a time. Hmmm too bad this article on a tabbed browser from PalmSource seems to be lying…. it’s awfully old to have not been released and findable by now.

Grump.

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