 OMG, Twitter is suggesting people to follow?! 
Starbucks and free wifi, continued
 Follow up to the piece earlier this week.
You may not like Starbucks coffee, it's not my favorite (that was kind of the point) -- but I'll go there over other choices because of the free wifi. It's funny because I have other choices because I have Verizon Mifi. And the freeness of Starbucks shouldn't matter either because until recently I had AT&T Internet service (at the house in Berkeley) and therefore Starbucks wifi was always free, for me.
There's a funny thing that happens, maybe some psychologists can explain, when something is free for everyone -- that makes it more valuable for you, even if you don't really care if it's free.
Anyway, some free advice for Au Bon Pain and all the pizza joints near the Starbucks on Astor Place, figure out how you can provide free wifi too. I bet it's going to make a diff in your business, pretty soon. It'll be like offering your customers a free glass of water if they ask for one.
 7/30/2010; 1:42:38 PM. .
On my way to publishing a Kindle book
 This morning I published a book for distribution via Kindle. I took the full content of Scripting News for 2009, formatted it according to their rules. That was the hardest part. You have to render it as simple HTML and all the images have to be included in the zip archive you upload. That meant writing a parser that went through the text, pulls out the images, downloads them locally, and patches the URL in the HTML.
I couldn't figure out how to price it at $0. The lowest price was $1.99. Hope that isn't a problem. Of that, I will get 35 percent or about 70 cents. I don't expect it to amount to a lot of money.
I want to write a book, and I have some people I'm brainstorming with. By starting to publish to the Kindle, even in a rough format, I start to get my feet wet. For me, a veteran bootstrapper, this may be a necessary first step.
Anyway, it may take a few days for it to make it through their approval process. When it's available for purchase I'll post a pointer here.
If you want to download it now, here's the archive.
http://static.scripting.com/misc/2009.zip
Let me know what you think (and please think before you comment).
PS: Wonder if I'm going to have to pay $1.99 to see what my stuff looks like on a Kindle? That would totally suck.
7/30/2010; 12:52:45 PM. .
 Got me some DOCSIS 3
I splurged and upgraded to Time-Warner "wideband."
Everything about Time-Warner, the company, is smarmy -- but the connection is very nice and fast (but not symmetric).
$99 per month, $40 to install.
I'll keep you posted on how it goes.
7/29/2010; 12:58:31 PM. .
DO YOU THINK BEFORE YOU COMMENT?
science.newsriver.org
 Earlier this month I reported on bloggers leaving scienceblogs.org because the publisher sold a presence on the site to bloggers from PepsiCo.
One of the rationales for bundling all the science bloggers together in one place was the synergy that comes from aggregation. Of course, with RSS you can achieve the same effect, without putting them all on the same server. So I put it on my to-do list to set up an science blogs aggregator, and yesterday I had some time to do it, so here it is.
http://science.newsriver.org/
As always, the OPML for the site is public so if you want to feed it into your aggregator you're welcome to. You should reimport the OPML from time to time, or ask your aggregator developer to do it for you -- because that list will be updated dynamically as the site grows.
And if you know of science blogs that should be included in the list, please post a comment here.
7/29/2010; 9:50:29 AM. .
Ole and Lena ride again
Some people don't care for them, but I love Ole and Lena jokes.
Here's a good one.
Ole was going on a business trip to St Cloud but it was cancelled at the last minute cause the Minnesota Twins made it to the playoffs.
He's lying in bed before going to sleep when the phone rings.
He listens, gets up to look out the window then returns to the phone.
He says in an irritated way: "How should I know, it's a thousand miles away!" and hangs up.
Lena asks: Who was that Ole?
Ole: Oh Sven yust vants to know if the coast is clear.
7/29/2010; 8:17:12 AM. .
Kindle is OK
 The iPad with its Kindle app got me interested in reading on a tablet again.
But it's summertime, and I'd rather read in the park, or on a bench looking out over the Hudson.
The iPad doesn't work for outdoor reading if there's any sun at all.
Further, I have a backlog of unread books I bought on Amazon, and I don't see why I should replace them (or if I can) using Apple's store.
I already buy a lot of stuff from Apple, and I don't like how they push around app developers and content companies. We're talking about First Amendment stuff here. So I vote with my dollars, and feel good about it.
So a couple of weeks ago I bought a Kindle DX, and I think it's a great product.
When I read on tech blogs that Kindle is a goner, I think these people must not read very much. Reading isn't about tech prowess or the shiniest gadget.
The Kindle is lighter, works in more places, has longer battery life, better connectivity, and has the biggest base of content. Plus they have been very smart about making their content available on every device known to man, including Apple's.
Bottom-line: Don't worry about the Kindle.
7/29/2010; 8:03:37 AM. .
We'd probably survive a 500-character limit
 Xcv comments: "At the large tech company I work at there is an internal micro-blogging tool. The limit was recently increased from 140 to around 500.
"People are still writing concise things. It is just incredibly refreshing to not have to abbreviate things. And also you can include full links instead of shortened crap."
Interesting story.
7/29/2010; 12:20:14 AM. .
Starbucks' free wifi is the deciding factor
 In the neighborhood around NYU we have a million places to get coffee, and many of them have free wifi. The ones that don't, like Au Bon Pain, which have better food, can't compete. And most of the free-wifi places have inferior wifi. So this morning, when I was looking for a place to work for a bit, there was no choice but to find a Starbucks, get an iced coffee, and sit down.
Not sure where they're going to go with the free wifi, I hope they add some features, and I hope they find a way to make it pay. But right now, it gives them the advantage over all the other places. Working, free wifi is a big deal.
7/27/2010; 10:45:12 AM. .
What's the point of the magic trackpad?
On Twitter, Dossy wonders why the new Magic Trackpad from Apple.
Come on guys get with the program. You're in the middle of a bootstrap. This is the next step.
Apple has a new operating system called iOS. It's what runs on iPods (which they are phasing out), iPhones and iPads.
What doesn't it run on? (Yet.)
Why not? Wellllllll. Cause for one thing, the Mac is built around a mouse as a pointing device and iOS is built around fingers as the pointing device. So if you want to run iOS software on Mac hardware don't you need a little new hardware? Just a little?
Come on, this isn't that hard. It's Software Evolution 101.
7/27/2010; 9:14:49 AM. .
Will the 140-char limit drop next?
A hybrid of Google Calendar, Foursquare and Flickr
Let's say I'm having lunch with Andrew Baron next Tuesday at a local restaurant. We both put items on our calendar. Link those two items, and then link both of them to the location we're having lunch at.
When the big day comes, I whip out my iPhone, which of course is synched to my calendar, and take a picture of Andrew and he takes a picture of me. The pictures automatically are linked to the calendar entry and to the location.
Now, someday anyone (since we made this public, why not) who's just trawling around wonders if we ever met, they not only know where and when but what we looked like that day.
Of course the right way for this to work is if it isn't a hybrid, but just nicely interconnected.
7/26/2010; 6:22:14 PM. .
Add this to Twitter's to-do list
Dancing in the Streets!
Inception is to The Matrix as...
 A lot of people seem to like Inception. Many of them are very smart. I don't get why they like it. I found it disappointing.
I really wanted to like it. I need a movie like The Matrix, which was one of the most inspiring movies of all-time, a movie I still quote, more than ten years after it came out.
But Inception is to The Matrix as Dan Quayle is to Jack Kennedy. Inception is actually worse. Try this out. Inception is Fat Albert and The Matrix is Jack Kennedy. Hey hey hey!
Inception is a sloppy movie that gives great trailer. Think about it. All the great visuals in Inception are in the trailers. After the great visuals, what is there? A plot so grandiose and sloppy that the characters spend half the dialog explaining how it works. Okay that could be interesting. But it's not.
I had the feeling of being in a movie theater watching a long boring movie, enjoying the air conditioning and popcorn. Thinking about what I'd do when I got back to work. Believe me, nothing like that happened the first time I watched The Matrix. Or the second, or third, or fourth, or fifth. I could watch it again right now and still love every line of dialog. Inception? Maybe it had two or three ideas that made you think. The rest of it was slop.
Okay so let me put my stake in the ground. David Weinberger says it's going to be nominated in 12 categories and win most of them.
I say Inception is Avatar. It won't win any of the big awards. If it's the best movie of 2010 it's going to be a very very very bad year.
7/26/2010; 8:41:17 AM. .
Zero-tolerance for mindless Apple advocacy
I'm taking a page out of Apple's playbook.
If you can't stay on-topic, I'm not only deleting your comment but adding you to the blacklist.
I'm trying to improve discourse on my blog in a way similar to Apple's wanting to improve the apps on the iPad. This feels very symmetric to me.
7/25/2010; 6:55:59 PM. .
Apple's Flash policy is a breach of Postel's Law
 I was browsing the web today on my iPad looking for the lyrics to a song I heard yesterday on the Jonathan Schwartz show on WNYC.
It's a show tune, that started off not-too-interesting but by the end the lyrics had me choked up. It was a beautiful story, and I not only wanted to hear it again, but I wanted to share it with others.
I eventually found a rendition of it on YouTube, but during my exploration I came across a Flash thingie (what are they called) that promised to have some info about the song, but of course since Apple doesn't like Flash, my iPad can't "see into" it.
Aside: The song I was looking for turned out to be Life Story sung by Lynne Wintersteller from the play Closer Than Ever.
It was at this point that it hit me that what Apple is doing with Flash is dangerous, for reasons I hadn't previously considered.
Deliberately throwing out content that might have useful information in it, that's not too wise, imho. Better to keep as much as we can, and stop worrying too much about whether we like the format or not.
And what Apple is doing violates Postel's Law which says you should be liberal in what you accept. Another reason Postel was wise. It helps keep the web from breaking.
A reminder that now that Apple's market cap is bigger than Microsoft's we have to think about what it does differently. If Microsoft had decided to outlaw a popular format, no matter how much we may not like it, we'd look at that as an anti-competitive move. Why should we look at it any differently if it's Apple?
Update: You can view what Apple has done as linkrot, but on a massive scale, and it was deliberate. Linkrot is usually accidental, but this was deliberate. If Microsoft had done this, the very same people who are defending Apple so fiercely would be (virtually) marching on Redmond with torches threatening to burn it to the ground.
7/25/2010; 1:55:04 PM. .
In Washington it's all public relations
 The banking reform bill is all smoke, I hear -- from people who know.
An analogy.
We've noticed that in the summer buildings get hot. Sometimes they get so hot that people die! So we've just passed a law that all buildings must have air conditioning. But you don't have to turn on the AC until the temp gets to 150 degrees. Oh that does a lot of good. (Not.)
Obama signed the bill, hailing it as the most significant banking reform legislation since the Great Depression. Will it do anything to prevent the kind of meltdown we had in 2008? Nahhh. That would spoil the fun. How can the bankers soak the last bit of life from the US economy if they're regulated.
Forbes says Obama is anti-business.
Obama calls him up to say thanks.
Now he can get re-elected.
As if we'd vote for Mitt Romney.
As if it would make a diff.
Bonus: How to remove Obama bumper stickers.
7/25/2010; 12:42:51 PM. .
Apple as Captain Queeg
 If you've never seen the movie, this is how it goes. Captain Queeg, played by Humphrey Bogart, is a career naval officer, in charge of a ship that drags targets for battleships to practice on. It's part of the huge Pacific fleet during World War II.
Queeg is a mid-level guy, not going anywhere. It being wartime, most of his officers are draftees -- college kids, smartasses, in one case a coward (played by Fred MacMurray). There's another career officer on the Caine played by Van Johnson.
The captain is way past his prime. Mediocre. A failure that they've kept around because no one had the time to retire him. The same story for the Caine. So it tries to stay out of range when the other American boats take shots at the targets it drags.
Queeg does all kinds of stupid shit, like navigate over the towing line of a target the Caine is towing, thus losing it. He's weird, he likes to play with steel balls. When he discovers that some of the frozen strawberries are missing from the pantry he starts an investigation. He says it's about time they had some fun on the ship. He believes they were stolen by some of the officers. He's reliving a victory of his early career. This is too much for the college kids, so they convince Van Johnson to depose the captain, in the famous mutiny that the movie and the Herman Wouk novel are named after.
Classic movie, with some great performances. And somehow the story comes up all the time in real life, especially in the tech industry.
Anyway, just when it seems the rest of the world is ready to let Antennagate go, here comes a Youtube video from Apple, dragging the Droid-X into the mess. Now Apple's competitors get to look aloof, like leaders, puzzled why the captain is making a federal case about the strawberries.
 The users just got their emails telling them how to get their new cases. The thought occurred to me that Apple could have given us a nice present anyway, even if there hadn't been a PR mess. Wouldn't that have been classy. We appreciate that you're an early supporter of our products (knowing we're the ones who always get screwed, we know it, but they don't have to say it). So here's a nice gift. It's really nothing, but it's our way of saying we appreciate you.
Instead, they're taking stupid cheap shots at the upstarts, making themselves look stupid and cheap. They so totally don't need to look that way.
Now I don't think for a minute that Apple is Captain Queeg. It's not some marginal character in a big war. It's more than an aircraft carrier, it's a whole fleet. So why are they acting like a burned out captain of a mine-tower who thinks he's found the missing strawberries.
7/24/2010; 8:15:18 AM. .
My "Hello World" post
I have to test this app every time I do a fresh install. Please excuse the digging. 
7/23/2010; 11:38:14 AM. .
About Flipboard and reading surfaces
 A few days ago Scoble posted a tweet saying that he had seen the Excel or Pagemaker for the iPad platform. It turns out that product is Flipboard, from Mike McCue, who I know from Netscape days. Mike went on to found Tellme which sold to Microsoft.
I haven't been able to use Flipboard yet, their servers are too busy, but from Scoble's video and their website, I think I understand what the product is.
Prior art: Pointcast, Netscape's initial RSS aggregator, Daylife (a NY company I have invested in).
If subscribes to your Twitter and Facebook feeds, grabs links to pictures and stories your friends point to, and presents them in a visually appealing way. Behind the scenes there's a lot of RSS (hence the connection to Netscape's RSS aggregator), but it's not a River of News, it's a "magazine style" reader. It is initially appealing, but I'm not sure whether it is useful over time. Scoble says he's been using it for hundreds of hours and still likes it. That's a point in their favor, Scoble really works this stuff.
Normally I wouldn't write a piece until I'd had a chance to use a product, but this time I want to put a question out there about the architecture and plumbing, and see what comes back.
With no disrespect, Flipboard is a scraper. It takes content flows that weren't intended for this kind of presentation and repurposes them. How could they do otherwise, it's a chicken-and-egg situation. Right now there is no content that is specifically designed for a Flipboard-like environment. But now that their product exists, it seems we have one half of the puzzle in place, why not put out a proposal to the content tools vendors (of which I happen to be one) and say this: If you want to produce content flows that look beautiful in our environment, here's how to do it. Let us either put hints in our source code for you, or create new renderings of our source code specifically to be viewed in the new environment.
I want to get this idea out there as soon as possible. Mike is a smart guy, and I'm sure he has hired some smart people. I don't doubt that they've thought of this. The question is -- have they done it?
And more broadly, there certainly are others working in this area. How can we all work together to boot up a great new level of reading and writing, on the iPad and elsewhere?
I want to be clear -- I'm on the authoring tools side of this. Aside from my small investment in Daylife, I have no stake in the reader side, at least not at this time.
For background, I explained this idea in a piece earlier this month.
7/22/2010; 5:45:35 AM. .
How to do open development work, Rules 1 & 2
 Last night, at a NYC dinner party, a reader suggested I write a Ten Commandments of open development work.
Even though it reeks of hubris, it's probably a good idea.
I've been involved in a lot of open development work over the last 30 years, and some of it has worked, but most of it fails. When it fails it's almost always because some group of people violated what I will call Rule 1.
Rule 1: All meetings must be open to anyone who wants to participate.
This is important because it means that any control anyone is exerting is visible to anyone who wants to see it. And that visibility tends to limit the control.
As soon as you have an invite-only meeting, someone is going to have to take your word that the process is fair. And the process isn't fair. So, if you say it is, you're lying. And lies are a terrible foundation to build on.
I think SOAP died when it became clear that Microsoft and IBM were having private meetings.
It's why so many of the supposedly "open" formats that Google is promoting have no chance of working in the market. I can't read minds, so I can't tell you why they do it. But it never works. A lie is a lie, even if you work for the largest company in the universe.
Rule 1 is the mechanism whereby small developers, even the ones who aren't blessed with invitations, have a chance to compete in a world ruled by the large companies. (And by the way if you get an invite it doesn't mean they like or respect you. You're probably the fig leaf they'll use the "prove" the process was open, even when it wasn't.)
But a pragmatist might say -- if we made the meeting open to all, and announced it publicly, 1000 people would show up and we'd get no work done. True. I've been in those meetings. And listened to one boring speech after another, and during all that boredom I figured out Rule 2.
Rule 2: If you have a choice, ratify defacto standards instead of reinventing them.
When it came my turn to speak in the 1000-person meeting, I said we could all leave the room this day with a standard if we just ratified RSS instead of trying to create something new that does exactly what RSS does. Even though what I said was true, no one could refute it, we didn't do it. And here we are eight years later and the defacto standard still rules.
The great thing about both these rules is that even if you break them, they still rule.
If you have an invite-only meeting then your work is for nil, and the people who aren't at your meeting will route around you, and if there's value in an open standard, it will be created in the haphazard way that open formats come about, naturally.
If you choose to reinvent a defacto standard, you will still have to support the defacto standard, and it will grow while people may implement your competing format, but lots of people will wonder why they should bother, and won't.
7/21/2010; 9:04:34 AM. .
Apple's Black Friday
 The more it settles in, the worse it looks for Apple.
Rex Hammock swears it's his last piece about the press conference, but why should it be? We've been immersed in the Reality Distortion Field, he and I, for our entire adult lives. And neither of us are spring chickens. Now that's it's fluttering in and out, and mostly out -- why not spend some time appreciating it, and trying to find a better way to talk about Apple's products.
What became clear on Friday is that Apple does great as long as everyone is fawning, oohing and ahhing with every new feature. But when there's trouble, even just a bit, the charm is gone.
The first clue that the iPhone 4 was going to break the mold was when he announced it on stage at the WWDC and the damned thing wouldn't connect to the Internet. They blamed it on the people in the audience.
Then we saw Jobs at the D conference, lecturing a questioner about how they were going to take more control of the apps so that people couldn't look at the browser IDs of people coming to external sites from the Cupertino campus. This had the charm and charisma of Captain Queeg testifying in the Caine Mutiny.
Then one gaffe after another on Friday, each more ridiculous than the previous. He asks if they could get the benefit of the doubt. Oy he's been getting nothing but the benefit of the doubt for his entire career. He says they built all those stores because they love their users. Really. It kind of looks like they sell products there, for money -- you know -- profit.
Then he commits the biggest sin for Apple, he says the iPhone is just like the others. Oooops. That one is going to be hard to walk back. It wasn't in a random email that could be blamed on someone else. The boss said it, in slides for everyone to see. The iPhone is like all the others. It's just a phone.
If I had any advice to give the folks at Apple it's this.
1. Read Rex's piece.
2. Read JLG's piece.
 There are ways to communicate about problems with products -- be direct and honest. And when you design them, assume that every flaw is going to be examined in great detail. Like it or not the users have great communication tools now. That's the actual world you live in.
Instead of saying how you are just as awful as your competitors, praise them to the hilt and say you're aiming to do even better. Everyone loves an aspirer. No one loves a sore winner. Coach Bill Walsh of the 49ers had this down. Johnson & Johnson did a voluntary recall of Tylenol at the first hint of a problem. Avis is Number 2 so they try harder. There are so many examples of people respecting the hell out of their competition, and taking product failure seriously, seeing things from their customers point of view. Not merely talking about them or to them, but hearing them and reflecting back to them what they say, in policies and features.
Rex says: "The Friday fiasco displayed also that when the management of 'the message' doesn't go according to the way they want it to go, they stop being insanely great and just start being insane."
The reporters were caught just as flat-footed as Apple was. To blame the media, as Apple has been doing, isn't realistic. It's despite the media that we find out what's really going on, without very much help. They do carry Apple's water, but lately they've been hearing that things have changed and maybe they're starting to respond.
To think that the Reality Distortion Field was intact last Friday is not to understand the RDF. That was the one of the first press events where the field was not in force.
7/20/2010; 5:00:48 PM. .
Realtime XML-RPC API
To restart the Instant Outliner, I needed the equivalent of FriendFeed's realtime update functionality.
It's really elegant, but I couldn't make my software depend on another service for update notification. I started to do it in REST and realized that I was reinventing a lot of what XML-RPC already did.
So I put aside the REST approach and went with XML-RPC.
A day later I had it working and a day after that I had the Instant Outliner converted. Unlike previous implementations this one works perfectly, is instantaneous and requires no polling. The long-poll approach works perfectly.
I wanted to document this for the programmers who are testing the Instant Outliner, because the realtime updating functionality is more general, it can be used to connect our workgroup together in more ways than through I/Oing.
There are two entry-points, one to get the next set of updates, and one to push an update to the workgroup. Both assume there's an identity system in place that can independently determine if a username/password is valid. (The identity function hooks in as a callback.)
Users can connect from more than one location at a time, each instance gets a complete set of updates. So I can leave my I/O app running at home and stay connected from a classroom or Starbucks.
You can find the source for both the client and the server at builtins.realtime in opml.root.
Here are the two entry-points:
1. realtime.getUpdates (username, password) returns array of struct
2. realtime.pushUpdate (username, password, htmltext, type, data)
7/20/2010; 11:10:47 AM. .
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Only this time they aren't just targeting newbies, the kinds of people who sign up, see nothing interesting and then disappear. I already follow 1323 people, and I've been on Twitter since 2006. According to 