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May 6, 2009Oh Well, I Was Going To Buy A New iPhone In June Anyhow My iPhone + hard concrete floor + 4 vertical feet + perfectly flat landing. Phooey. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 6, 2009 9:06 PM. July 13, 2008coast2Coaster Updated For '08I spent a good chunk of my Sunday doing some long-overdue maintenance on coast2Coaster, and am pleased to report that the data behind the mashup has been updated for 2008. (Say it with me: hooray!) The total number of parks and coasters grew this year, from 2007's 266 and 743, respectively, to 270 and 749. I did a bit of pruning, too - a number of coasters in RCDB are listed as "In Storage"; they were deducted from the final tallies. "Under construction" coasters, on the other hand, are included. coast2Coaster '08 also contains Silverwood's latest, "Aftershock", opening later this month. Happy ridin', everybody! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 13, 2008 5:58 PM. July 10, 2008The Geek HierarchySlog had a blurb on this flowchart today, and I couldn't resist linking - it made me giggle too much. Basically, the hierarchy can be boiled down to: > Furries > People who write erotic versions of Star Trek where all the caracters are furries, like Kirk is an ocelot or something, and they put a furry version of themselves as the star of the story. (God, I laughed at this.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 10, 2008 6:39 PM. November 11, 2007Pardon The DustI spent a ton of time working on the blog this weekend, making a bunch 'o major and minor changes and tweaks. To wit:
I've done a lot of testing to catch issues, but I'm sure I missed something. If you see something strange, please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 11, 2007 4:01 PM. October 29, 2007ClearWire Update: Good NewsUpdate on the ClearWire saga: This morning I got a call from Larry at their Vegas office. I couldn't take the call, but he left me a very nice voicemail with the following information:
They also encouraged me to call their technical support and see if they could get the problem licked - they felt that "upgrades" had been made in the area, and that I might have success if I repositioned the modem. While I'm not going to sink more time in to making the service work (I've already contracted with the competition), I do appreciate the Hail Mary. So it sounds like a happy ending. And while I'm never thrilled to pay a cancellation, they did the right thing and held up their end of the bargain. Good on ya, Clearwire. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 29, 2007 2:15 PM. October 22, 2007Canceling ClearwireWhen Elaine and I moved in to the our place last April, we switched our Internet service provider from Comcast to Clearwire. This was driven by a number of considerations, not least of which was that a) getting cable Internet at our place was going to be an involved process, b) I'm no fan of Qwest (Seattle's incumbent telco), and c) Clearwire was new, friendly, and easy to order. So we gave it a spin. We were initially delighted with the service - generally very speedy and reliable - but over the past couple of months we've watched Clearwire's service quality go downhill and stay there. Connection speeds vary wildly, often becoming glacially slow; other times, the service will be fine, but then drop for anywhere from 20 seconds to 5 minutes. I've phoned Clearwire support a few times about this, and, ultimately, their answer is "wait five minutes and try again." Since the service is delivered wirelessly, they don't have lines to check or physical plant they can manage. Instead, the tech guys are stuck prescribing the usual "reboot your equipment", "try moving the location of your modem," or "wave a dead chicken over the device" routines. (At one point, the guy on the other end of the phone tried to blame my Apple equipment. Uh, no. Note to Clearwire support: it's not 1996 any more.) The problem didn't get better, and, as the slow service was now preventing us from curling up on the couch and watching Heroes via streaming video, that was that. We made arrangements for alternate Internet service, got it installed, tested it, found it fine, so and I called Clearwire this weekend to cancel. Or, at least, tried to cancel. They say that you can learn a lot about a society by watching how it treats its prisoners, and I believe that you can also learn a lot about a company by how it treats is ex- or soon-to-be-ex customers. In my case, I blew a good 50 minutes on the phone, waiting on hold to cancel my account. By the time I finally got to someone who could do the actual cancellation, he informed me that he was "concerned" about me canceling because it meant that I would be charged a $160 cancellation fee. Uh, er, no. No, that's not right. See, when I signed up for Clearwire, one of the things I expressly asked the sales clerk about was a) contract length, and b) cancellation policy. I hate contracts with a passion, and, if I'm getting in to one, I want to know what I'm on the hook for. She explained that they sell Clearwire in two flavors - the 1- or 2-year contract - and that signing the 2-year contract gets you goodies like a free modem, $25 VISA gift card, and things like that. Cancellation can be done at any time, but you're on the hook for the balance of your contract to the tune of $10 a month. Thus, if, like me, you have a one-year contract, use six months of it, and cancel, you owe $60 for the balance. But now they're telling me $160. I'm not thrilled about cancellation fees in general, but I knew the score when I got the service. I'm OK with paying them the $60; it's what we agreed. But Mr. Clearwire Termination Department doesn't see it that way, so, once I explain the terms that were explained to me by the salesperson, he launches in to this, "Well, sir, I have no idea why you would have been told that, as that's not our policy..." Translation: "We think you're lying." So then I explain to Mr. Clearwire Termination Department that I have these terms, you know, in writing, because the nice lady at the sale kiosk wrote them down on my order form. Funny how fast the tone of a conversation can turn around. Termination Department wants me to fax him a copy of the paperwork; I look at my calendar (Saturday), look around me (I'm at home) and explain that I'm nowhere near a fax machine because it's the weekend, and I'm at home. Fine. I can mail it in. So I then proceed to blow another 15 minutes writing a letter to Clearwire, making a photocopy of my paperwork, putting a stamp on it, and then shipping it off to Las Vegas. I'm annoyed. Totally, totally annoyed. Glad that I have the agreement in writing, of course, but still annoyed that this is how they play the game. Searching the Internet for other customers reveals similar stories. Wonderful. Stay tuned. (Interesting fact: Clearwire's automated hold system actually says, "To cancel due to connection issues or speed problems, press 3." Wow. I wonder how many people are grappling with these issues?) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 22, 2007 7:41 AM. June 30, 2007Malleable Google Maps
To see it in action, click here (opens in a new window). You'll see the default driving directions between Key Arena and Greenlake, which normally take you along I-5. Now, hover your mouse over the route there on I-5; you'll see a box that says, "Drag to change route." Pull that line over to Highway 99. The route will recompute automatically, and you'll see a new balloon to indicate your preference. It's wicked, because it lets you quickly adjust your maps based on things like, say, picking up a friend on the way someplace, or avoiding a stretch of road due to traffic or construction. (It's also ideal if you like to walk places and want to see what your mileage might be.) Give it a try! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 30, 2007 4:12 PM. June 24, 2007Same Planet, Different WorldsOne thing that's surprised me about the whole moving-in-together thing has been how much time I spend checking my calendar. Elaine and I are both pretty social, and as such we're forever trying to schedule ourselves or the other for dinners, lunches, walks around Greenlake, barbecues, Storm games, and the like. Until about a month ago, we generally did this with e-mail, which was like this extended game of Battleship: G: "I'd love to have Bill and his wife over for dinner. How's the 18th?" So the conversation continues like this over several more exchanges, and, eventually, we locate a date that seems to work ("You sank my battleship!"). Then I just have to see if Bill's OK with a) the weekend we've chosen, and b) being scheduled out two years. And then, a month ago, we tried switching from e-mail to using a series of shared Google Calendars. It's like going to heaven. If you've not tried it, Google Calendar is a terrific Web-based calendar. It's very simple, very usable, and very powerful -- a great Web application that feels a lot like a desktop app. However, the secret sauce of Google Calendar (much like the secret sauce of most of Google's Web applications, like Docs & Spreadsheets) is that Calendar makes it possible to share your calendars with others. The scenario breaks down like this. I log in to Google Calendar and populate a calendar with a handful of my personal appointments. I want to share this with Elaine, so she knows where I am (and whether to expect me for dinner). So in the Calendar, I click on the options drop-down, select 'Share this Calendar' and then enter Elaine's e-mail address. She gets an invitation in e-mail to look at my calendar, which, when clicked, adds my appointments to her Calendar interface. Simple. We've set up a few different calendar files, based on the context of what we'll be doing. Our "big three" are:
We also have the Storm Home Game calendar, and I've put up a calendar for my hobby stuff (e.g., singing). Since we're now both working on the same calendar file, we have a need to let the other one know if a given event is for one or the both of us. Thus, we flag appointments with "[G]", "[E]", or "[G+E]" to indicate whether the appointment involves me, her, or the two of us. (Entries have titles like, "[G] Drinks with Jon".) We're about a month into using this system, and I can't go back to e-mail. Having everything consolidated into a single view (that I can get from any Web browser!) is fantastically convenient, and saves time. Bill can walk in to my office, talk can turn to that dinner we've been trying to plan, and I can give him some good dates right away, rather than playing the, "Uh, let me e-mail Elaine and see what her calendar is like" game. Now right about now, I'm sure a few of you are asking, "But what about iCal? I thought you were all hot on your GTD, iCal-as-dashboard system! How does iCal know what's going on with your Google Calendar?" This is a great point. One of the big challenges I've had with Google Calendar has been interoperability with iCal - out out of the box, iCal can subscribe to calendar items in Google Calendar (change it in Google Calendar, and iCal gets the change), but this is a purely one-way relationship - I can't use iCal to change what's on my Google Calendar. And then came along Spanning Sync, and everything got better. Spanning Sync closes the loop between Google Calendar and iCal. It's a Mac OS X Preference Pane that keeps selected Google Calendars in sync with the calendars on iCal, and vice versa. As a practical matter, this means I can continue working in iCal as I usually do - dragging around appointments, changing things - and Spanning Sync lets Google Calendar know, so Elaine gets the latest, freshest, most-up-to-date information. When I'm at home, I can work on my Mac; when I'm at work, I can use Google Calendar through the Web. It's seamless, slick, and, like all great Mac software, Just Works. It also allows me to keep using KGTD, MailTags, and all the other great stuff I rely on to manage my projects. Spanning Sync isn't free (I pay $25/year for it), but it does come with a 15-day trial to let you know if you'll like it or not. (I liked it.) So there it is. I know a lot of my fellow Geek Couples wrestle with this problem, too, so folks, lemme tell ya - give it a try. I predict you'll be able to leave "Battleship" where it belongs - at Game Night. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 24, 2007 10:57 AM. May 19, 2007Google AnalyticsI've just switched my page-tracking system on the blog from Urchin over to the new-and-improved Urchin (aka Google Analytics). If anyone notices anything strange, please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 19, 2007 11:00 PM. May 13, 2007Airport Extreme, Super Duper, And A Good Night's SleepLast month, I upgraded the 'ol home WiFi network to the (allegedly) so-fast-it-hurts 802.11n standard, courtesy Apple's new Airport Extreme base station. I went with the Extreme for a lot of reasons - the speed was attractive, of course, as was my ability to collapse a bunch of older, loose pieces of Linksys network equipment (some of which was left over from my Vonage adventure) into one compact, gleaming, glowing chunk of Apple tech. But the big reason I went with the Extreme was for its ability to share a hard drive across a network. See, I'm a bit fanatical about backing up. Ever since my old PowerBook threw a drive in Orlando last July I've become that guy who backs up early and often. My usual routine involves a good, weekly dump to an external disk using SuperDuper!. Saturday morning rolls around, I plug in the drive, and then I'm off running errands for a few hours. But I do a lot of work on my computer, and weekly really isn't good enough. The thought of losing my machine on a Friday night - and wiping out a week's worth of work - has been nagging me, and I've wrestled with good ways of solving the problem. SuperDuper will allow for regularly-scheduled backups (e.g., "please back up my machine every night at 9:30 PM"), which is great, except that at any given moment in time during the day, my MacBook is as likely to be on my lap as it is on my desk. And if I'm not at the desk, I'm not next to my backup drive ... and so the backup doesn't get done. (This problem is going to get even worse when Time Machine comes out, as it creates a continuous backup of your machine, saving copies as you modify individual files or resources.) So. Backing up more frequently is a really, really good idea, but to make it practical I needed a centralized data store, accessible over the wireless network. Enter Airport Extreme. Seriously, the Extreme is fantastic. I just plugged my external, 500-GB USB drive into the base station, turned on sharing in the Airport Utility, and - bingo! - the drive is available on my network. Mac OS X mounts the drive when I sign in to my home network; the network volume works just like you'd expect it to. (Which means that when I'm on free coffee shop WiFi, there's no network volume, but when I come home the thing mounts automagically.) Performance isn't bad, but it's not as speedy as advertised. 802.11n, like 802.11b or g has two speeds: the "theoretical" transfer limit and the "real world" performance. Theoretically, 802.11n can deliver speeds up to 600Mbit/second. In the real world, transferring a 1.02gb QuickTime file took me a little less than 10 minutes in one test, and a little more than 15 in another - or 13Mbit/sec and 8 Mbit/sec, respectively. (I'm doing some tweaks to see about boosting this.) But truthfully, the performance is acceptable, and the peace of mind from having a reliably-backed-up MacBook is well worth the expense. When Leopard comes out, I fully expect to point it at my network volume, and let OS X simply park my changed files on the backup store. And, of course, there's a lot of flexibility, too - if I need more storage space or a greater degree of robustness, I can swap out the standalone 500-gig disk for a multi-drive RAID array. Peace of mind is wonderful. (PS To My Fellow Computer Users Who Don't Back Up Regularly - as one who has lost more than one drive to the Angry Gods of Data Loss, please believe me when I say that you will curse the universe when your hard drive sloughs off this mortal coil. Back up, back up, back up. Unless you can afford to lose all your photos, music, e-mail and so on ... in which case, what are you using your computer for, anyhow?) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 13, 2007 2:48 PM. May 11, 2007My Google MapsGoogle rolled out a new feature on their mapping service not too long ago, called "My Maps." I noticed the new "My Maps" tab in the interface, but, truthfully, hadn't really explored it until yesterday, when I saw that someone had gone through and built a My Map of the Magic Kingdom. So today, I'm in Jeff's office and engaged in a little impromptu Disney geekery, showing off the Magic Kingdom My Map and pointing out differences between the Magic Kindgom and Disneyland. At which point, the subject of My Maps - and their inherent coolness - came up, and I had to confess that I'd not, you know, uh, played with 'em. (Uh, Iwasbusywithworkandjustmovedandbesidesit'sbeenalongweek...) So then Jeff smoothly moves into his "I'm giving a demo" voice and explains that My Maps lets you define collections of points on a map and then save them - perfect, say, for planning a vacation. If you're off to London, you could easily start a My Map for the trip, plotting the location of the London Eye, Big Ben, The Tower of London and so on. Then, when you're figuring out what to do with your day, it's easy to see what should be done at the same time, and the distances you need to cover. Another killer use is having My Maps to store and plot a collection of restaurants you're itching to try. Jeff is already doing this, so at one point he did the double-click thing and I found myself staring at a map of Seattle, decorated with pushpins representing restaurants that I've heard a lot about ... but, like Jeff, have never tried. And thus, the lightbulb went on. Naturally, I've spent a chunk of my afternoon re-creating Jeff's concept for my own personal use (swanky, gotta-try-it restaurants in Seattle), but am realizing that planning my vacations is going to be a lot, lot more fun. Maps can be shared, too. So I ask, dear readers - what are you going to put in your My Map? Send it along! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 11, 2007 5:28 PM. May 9, 2007Custom Google Map Of The Magic KingdomThe Disney Blog is running an article this morning with a link to a custom Google Map that shows the distinct geospatial location of most of the attractions, restrooms, and so on inside the Magic Kingdom at Disney World. Switch to the satellite photo (like this Space Mountain link) and zoom around! Link. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 9, 2007 9:40 AM. April 22, 2007coast2Coaster 1.2I got to spend some time this weekend updating coast2Coaster. The good news is that the mashup now has the most-recent coaster data from our friends at RCDB, and if you're planning a trip for 2007, well, you're good to go. The number of parks and coasters has dropped a bit - we're down to 743 coasters this year (from 744 last year) across 266 parks (from 269). (I'm a little embarrassed that it'd been a year since my last update. Apologies.) I did a bunch of under-the-hood work on my software as well, which should enable me to roll out a few new features over the coming months. Stay tuned! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 22, 2007 2:37 PM. February 19, 2007Introducing The BookThe internal "Office Product Planning Random" e-mail alias delivered gold (again) this morning (tip 'o the hat to colleague Jill for sending it over) with the video, "Introducing the book." It's non-English (but does have subtitles), and anyone who has done in-person tech support at some point in their life will laugh, laugh, laugh (and cry, cry, cry) over this puppy. Be sure to watch the whole thing, too - the last 20 seconds or so (when it's "flipped over") are just priceless. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 19, 2007 8:48 PM. December 27, 2006Some Thoughts On The New Parallels BetaThe dealers-of-lightning over at Parallels put out a new beta (build 3094) of their must-have Desktop For Mac product last week. Holy smokes, it's cool. First, a bit of history. Parallels Desktop for Mac ("Parallels" for the rest of this article) is a program that lets you run Windows (and, more importantly, 3rd-party Windows programs) on your shiny new Intel Macintosh. As such, it's been of keen interest to Mac folk like Yours Truly who love their OS X, but have need to run a Windows program or two from time to time. Back in January, I wrote a piece ("Prediction: XP Is The "New Classic" Under 10.5") where I talked about how Apple's move to Intel processors was, in no small part, calculated to allow much easier 'switching' to the Mac platform by longtime Windows folks. Virtualization - the ability to run Windows on your Mac - was the centerpiece technology in making this happen: By going to Intel (as opposed to the Sparc, or the Cell, or any one of a billion other chip designs Apple could have selected), Apple now has binary compatibility with Windows, and, by extension, the entire family of Windows applications that exist in the world. This is the centerpiece of Apple's strategy for the next 5 years. At the time, I assumed Apple was going to bake seamless virtualization into Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5): And on the experience side, well, I suspect that Apple is working to make that pretty seamless. And the only way they can do that is to build compatibility for Windows software right in to the operating system directly. As it happens, Apple has a lot of experience doing this - namely, with Classic and with X Windows. In both cases, Apple made it possible for programs written for other operating systems and environments to work natively, and seamlessly, on Mac OS X. Subsequent public statements by Apple management - coupled with the release of Boot Camp, a non-virtualization approach for running Windows on the Mac - have proven me wrong. Apple is not going to put Windows apps side-by-side on the Mac. Instead, Parallels is going to do it. Parallels has delivered some astounding innovation in a fairly short period of time. The product started life as a straightforward virtualizer - run Windows in a window on your Mac, and call it a day. The performance of Windows under Parallels is pretty damn snappy, and, for those of us who (un)fondly remember the sluggishness of Virtual PC, it was both eye-catching and habit-forming. What's impressed me to death about the new Parallels betas, however, is that their product team clearly has a vision of seamless integration between Windows applications and their Mac counterparts. Their first effort toward this end - introduced just a few weeks ago, with Beta 1 - is called Coherence Mode, and it effectively erases the "Windows in a window" experience of virtualization. Coherence isn't perfect (yet), but it's damn good; watch this video to see how it works. (Cats and dogs living together ... mass hysteria!) After the shock and awe of Coherence wore off, I sat down with Jeff and we talked about a few of the shortcomings. I mean, Coherence is damn cool, but if it's going to be really seamless, Parallels needed a few more things. Specifically:
And then Parallels Beta 2 came out, and what did it have? Dock launching. Better window management. And a stronger, more seamless Coherence. (If you want to see a LifeHacker HowTo for Mac/Windows integration, go here.) I tell ya, these guys get it. (Heck, Apple might as well be funding these folks. With all the new business they'll bring to the Mac, they're practically the Aldus of this decade.) Of course, true seamlessness between Mac and Windows applications points to a rather interesting existential question about the future of the Mac application market. To wit: If you can run any full-blooded Windows application on your Mac ... why buy a Mac app at all? Now, in fairness, I think this is a question with an obvious answer. I mean, if you wanted to just run Windows applications all the time, why buy the Mac in the first place? And indeed, I think about all the great Mac apps that I use and love like NetNewsWire or OmniOutliner or Yojimbo, and there's no way that I'd switch to a Windows counterpart -- assuming one even existed. A lot of Windows software is clunkware - ugly, rudely functional, designed for people with too much free time. Great Mac applications like Delicious Library or Transmit have nothing to fear from the likes of WS_FTP. Of course, what makes these applications great is that they take smart advantage of the Apple platform - the system services (like AddressBook) and UI conventions that make the Mac the Mac. And those applications that Go Native - not in an Intel-processor sense, but in a Chewy Mac Goodness sense - have nothing to fear from Parallels. But there is an entire class of applications that I think are officially on the endangered species list. I'm talking about PC ports. As a "for instance", let's take the statistical package SPSS. It's an industry-leading product, with a thriving market for third-party developers and others who want to integrate statistical analysis into their business. We worked with SPSS in business school; I've been trained on the product through some classes SPSS offers. It's cool stuff. SPSS even has a Mac client. And you know something? It sucks. It's inferior to the current Windows version (generally, a generation or two behind - currently it's at v13, while SPSS for Windows is v15), and many/most of the third-party partner applications won't work on it. So, if I'm a Mac user who can suddenly run the full-throttle maximum-red-hot SPSS for Windows alongside my Safari and Mail.app, am I gonna settle for something that's two generations old? Not on your life. There are also good Mac products that happen to have Windows counterparts on different ship cycles. Mac Office is one of these. There's been a recent kerfluffle over the new, XML-based file formats used by Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007, and the fact that there are no converters available for the Mac (yet), while Office 2003 for Windows has 'em now. Rick Schaut over at the MacBU writes: Lastly, can we port the Win Word converter? Well, actually, in a way, porting the Win Word converter is exactly what we have been doing, but we’re still faced with having to wait until Win Word ships before we have the final source code to merge into what we’ve already ported. Once that merge is done, then we still have to go through several months’ worth of testing and bug fixing before they’re ready for public use. Of course, in a world of seamless virtualization, Mac customers have another choice: simply buy the Windows version of Office 2007, today, and run it as a first-class peer on your Mac. If you need the file format converters more than you need the Mac experience that Mac Office offers you, you're no longer in the ghetto - you've got choices. StuffOnFire (great name, BTW) even takes this a step farther and asks, "Does Office:mac Still Have a Place In The Universe?": But I argue that any Mac user who gives two shits about opening Office documents is working at a company that uses Office for Windows. Seriously: why else would you care? While I may disagree with some of the points of the post (I rather like Mac Office, and don't think of it as a "hulking Carbon beast running emulated in Rosetta on my MacBook Pro"), I have to admit that the guy's got a point. If you want the latest-and-greatest Office - including products that don't have "official" Mac counterparts, like Groove or OneNote or Visio - well, you're good to go. Get thee to the Fry's and load yourself up. For developers, I daresay the handwriting is on the wall: if your Mac app isn't sufficiently Mac-like, it will simply collapse into its Windows version, or, in the case of terrible Mac apps, simply cease to exist when competition comes to town. The Parallels guys are very aggressive about their updates, and I'm really eager to see what they've got up their sleeves for 2007. They're killing bugs, incrementally adding features, and eventually will get the product where it needs to be. My wish list contains the three items I listed above, plus a couple small ones: smart hyperlinks (clicking a link in a Windows app should spawn Safari, not IE) and support for sync services (so I can sync with Outlook, or whatever). But those are coming, I'm sure. $5 says Parallels gets 5 minutes on stage with Steve at January's MacWorld. UPDATE, December 29, 2006: Parallels Beta 3 (3106) is now out. (Jeez, do you guys ever sleep?) UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 27, 2006 10:42 PM. December 11, 2006Just Say YoI've previously posted about David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology, and how it's saving both my time and my sanity. GTD helps me get stuff out of my head (where it tends to rattle around, noisily, and then pop up from time to time when I'm least in need of it) and into a System - a comprehensive project list that makes sure I'm not missing details or dropping ideas. GTD is, fundamentally, an identification and tracking system. It helps me pick out projects or tasks that need doing (or, at least, warrant future attention), and then lets me schedule those tasks at times when they're most efficiently done. What GTD (or at least, my software implementation of it) does not do is help me track a lot of the qualitative 'stuff' that surrounds any given project or task. Let me give you an example. Whenever I'm working on my column, I invariably have to go through the following steps:
GTD is great for ensuring that I'm reminded when a column is coming due, and also great at scheduling tasks around the column itself (e.g., "phone my editor"), but it's not great for keeping track of the questions, the Web research, and other aspects of the project itself. Effectively, what I need is a 'repository', a place to store, categorize, and locate the bits and pieces of the project when they're needed. There are software products that do this, of course - it's just that none of them are very good. Historically, I've used AquaMinds' NoteTaker; while it's kinda clunky (I often find its interface to be just ... strange), it does a credible job of letting me keep 'pages' for my projects, and 'folders' to bundle like pages or projects together. Problem is, I find myself getting frustrated with NoteTaker on a regular basis (about every 6 or 8 weeks or so). This is usually triggered when it (often) does something to annoy me, at which point I convince myself that There Just Must Be Something Better Out There, Dammit; then I'm off and downloading demo after demo of software programs that, frankly, aren't that great, either. I feel like I've tried 'em all: Circus Ponies' NoteBook (which shares a codebase with NoteTaker, but is a bit different), StickyBrain (Cintra likes this, which was major points in its favor), DevonTHINK, a handful of others. They all fall short, for a variety of reasons too banal to get in to here. And then, recently, I tried Yojimbo. And, finally, NoteTaker has been kicked to the curb. I don't suppose I should be terribly surprised by this. Yojimbo is made by Bare Bones Software, they of the Mac-only, fabulouso-text-editor-extraordinaire BBEdit (to use BBEdit is to love BBEdit, as the old saying goes). Bare Bones makes great stuff, and with Yojimbo they brought their usual philosophy of Not Sucking and focused it on how to capture, retain, and find information easily. (Sounds about perfect, doesn't it?) Yojimbo is a 'repository' in the same way that all the other products are, except that it makes it really, really easy to pipe your data into its system. Here's what I like about it:
Yojimbo's still got a few places it can go - for instance, it would be great if I could highlight and annotate a PDF in its database, for research/review purposes - but that's a quibble. I've had a much easier time tracking the various little constituent parts of my projects ever since I started using it - and given how many projects I'm generally managing, that's really saying something. There's a free, 30-day demo. If you're running on a Mac (and you are running on a Mac, right?), I strongly, strongly recommend you give it a look. Way to go, Bare Bones. My hat is off to you folks! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 11, 2006 9:44 PM. November 22, 2006MovableType 3.33I've upgraded the blog to run MovableType 3.33; the upgrade seemed to go smoothly, but if you notice any weirdness, please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 22, 2006 5:00 PM. September 21, 2006Getting Things DoneKeith and I recently got into a conversation about productivity - he noticed that my e-mail inbox was relatively clean (3 or 4 messages) and was curious as to what, if any, techniques I use to stay on top of things. I'm a recent convert to David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology (aka "GTD"). Allen's methods have caught on like wildfire among the geek crowd (see also: 43 Folders, Lifehacker), and for good reason - they're simple, easy to implement, and they work. Buy the book. Allen's techniques boil down to a few simple concepts. First, when a new 'thing' comes in to your life (e.g., an e-mail message), you make a decision, right then and there, what to do about it. The motto is, "do it, defer it, delegate it, or delete it." Doing is appropriate if the item is simple (2 minutes or less) or really important. Deferring is better when the project can't be done right this second - it might require a special kind of attention or thought, say. Delegating is when you need to throw the ball to someone else for their action; Deleting is just what it sounds like. (And personally, I've found the DELETE key to be my best friend. It's incredibly liberating to just zap stuff that you know, in your heart, you weren't going to deal with anyway.) Generally, this works great for quick-hit stuff (you've Done it), team/collab stuff (you've Delegated it) and unimportant stuff (Deleted). Problem is, you're now leaking all these non-trivial tasks into your Deferred list -- and that's not helpful, right? I mean, the deferral list for important items ("Write business plan", "Suck up to boss") will compete with the list of other Stuff You Have To Do Sometime that's rattling around your head ("Get milk at grocery store", "Buy a birthday card for Richard", "Run marathon"). You need a system to track your deferred tasks, or else they'll just congeal into this unmanageable, amorphous blob. Enter the comprehensive project list. Allen proposes that you use a system to capture all these various Deferred items. When he works with his clients, he actually will spend a couple of days going through their office and files, capturing every last thing the person is doing, needs to do, intends to do, or thought it would be "cool" to do some day. (As you might imagine, for most people - especially go-go-go Type A's - this is a big, hairy list.) Most of the items on the list are going to be unevenly sized - that it, some items will be small, and deferred because of timing ("Go to Hallmark next week and get that birthday card") while others are larger, and deferred because, well, they're daunting ("Plan Paris trip"). So, armed with your comprehensive project list, you walk through it and figure out what the smallest next step is for each item. In the case of the birthday card, there's not much to break down (I mean, just buy the card, right?), but with the Paris trip, a first step might be to call a travel agent, or go on the Web to find out what fares look like right now. Whatever that next thing is, identify it. OK. So now you've got your project list, and you've got your set of next steps. Problem is, these steps can't be done in a vacuum - some require equipment (a computer, a phone), while others require you be in a specific location (at home, at work) or in a specific mode (out running errands). Allen calls these "contexts", which refers to the situation you need to be in to work on the step in question. There's no canonical list of contexts out there; rather, people create their own, based on what makes sense to them. I use a short fairly short list:
Your list of contexts may (will) vary, but these have been quite useful for me. (And if you want a deeper dive into contexts, be sure to check out 43 Folders' article on the subject.) So you've got your project list, your next steps, your contexts. Whew! Sounds like a lot of work, huh? Well, actually - it's not. What's has been a lot of work, for me at least, was feeling drowned in tasks and projects, or worrying about whether or not I was forgetting to do something, or - even worse - knowing that I had some projects lurking in my mind or on my hard drive that I was simply not doing because they felt too big or too amorphous. Getting clarity on what my projects really are and what I need to be working on next is ... wonderful. My mind clears up, anxiety drops, and I can focus. Not only that, but the ongoing overhead of project/task management is low. It's actually really, really easy to maintain things once you've got your project list, and, if your tools support the GTD methodology, it's unbelievably trivial to stay on top of the various things you're trying to shepherd. For example, I have a project called "gavinshearer.com" for blog-related items. The top-level project has two subprojects - "Entries" and "Site". "Entries" captures ideas for posts I'd like to write, or posts that are currently in progress. "Site" is a list of improvements I'd like to make to the physical site itself - software upgrades to Movable Type, that kind of thing. When I have an idea for an entry or a site improvement, I just drop it in to the appropriate project folder. Nothing gets lost. And, every Sunday or so, I go through my project folder and figure out what I want to work on this week - just assign a context ("@Mac") and a due-date, and I'm in business. From a mechanical standpoint, I manage my life in software (natch). As it happens, the Mac is a hotbed of GTD software development, and there are a number of options available to Mac users to make this stuff dead-bang easy. My kit consists of:
iCal is my calendar, and it runs my world. Think of iCal as the dashboard that lets me know, at a glance, what the heck I need to be doing on any given day. My contexts are different calendars in iCal, which means they're all color-coded and easy-to-read. OmniOutliner Pro is a list-making and list-management tool. It's a great product on its own, but it shines when you pair it with Kinkless GTD, a set of free AppleScripts and templates that customize OmniOutliner so it's a) optimized for the GTD methodology (project list, contexts) and b) can talk to iCal. OmniOutliner is my project and task repository - my brain. It's where I go when I need to add a task to my radar, and make sure it Gets Done. Then, I click the "Sync" button, and OmniOutliner populates iCal with the appropriate tasks on the appropriate days. (And, in a moment of utter coolness, if I've modified something in iCal, that gets synced back to OmniOutliner.) Kinkless GTD + OmniOutliner Pro is the glue, the core, of my system. Mail.app is straightforward e-mail software, but when paired with MailTags and Mail Act-On it becomes a GTD machine. I've written about this before, so I won't repeat a lot of that material here except to say that it's incredibly easy to defer a task in e-mail using MailTags; just tag the mail with a context, give it a due date, and then file it: you're done. Mail Act-On speeds this process up, helping me fly through mail messages by keeping my hands on the keyboard. Together, they're pretty amazing. So. That's my productivity system. I can tell you honestly that I've experimented with a lot of different systems for managing projects and getting things done, but Getting Things Done(™) is the only one that's been truly effective. I don't worry any more about whether or not I'm missing projects or forgetting things - instead, I can just glance at iCal and go from there. Heaven. If you're on a Mac and want to try this, most of the tools - OmniOutliner Pro and so on - have free trial periods. Get Allen's book (or visit his Web site), download some software, and see what you think. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 21, 2006 11:12 AM. September 10, 2006Rest Stops: Now With WiFiElaine and I were in Bellingham yesterday, having a nice, relaxed lunch with her mom and brother. On our way back down to Seattle, we zoomed past the rest area at Exit 238 and I noticed a small, blue-and-white steel sign (much like your standard "FREE COFFEE" sign) atop the "Rest Area >>" that said, WIFI Huh? Really? Yep, it's true. Turns out that Washington State has been quietly adding Wireless Internet service to several of its public highway rest stops. You can get a comprehensive listing of the rest areas (and their amenities) from the Washington State DOT site. I noticed the signs at Exit 238, as well as Smokey Point (just north of Everett). The service isn't free (20 minutes for $2), but it is there, and, as one who can see the need to get updated directions or travel information on the road, it's pretty frickin' cool. Way to go, DOT! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 10, 2006 11:27 AM. September 3, 2006MovableType 3.31I've just upgraded the blog to run on Movable Type 3.31; if you notice anything strange or weird, please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 3, 2006 12:00 PM. August 29, 2006Pimp My Mail.appOne of the new, touted-at-WWDC features of Leopard comes in the form of an upgraded Mail.app. Apple has taken some pains to integrate iCal and Mail, which allows us mere mortals to do handy things, like turn an e-mail message into a calendar to-do reminder - dang useful when you need to remember to, say, reply to someone's mail at a particular point in the future. In my opinion, these new features really point to the centrality- primacy, really - of e-mail as one's way of managing the world. I, for one, am dead in the water without my e-mail - it's a conversation tracker, life scheduler, serial-number-keeper and bad-joke conduit all rolled into one. When I moved to Mac OS X back in 2001, I did so whole-hog, and decided to use as many of Apple's bundled products as possible. Part of this was driven by availability (back in the early-transition days of OS X 10.1, there wasn't a whole lotta choice in the 'ol application space, if you know what I mean), and part was driven by a desire to try out some of the highly-regarded NeXT apps that were finally available on the Mac- Mail.app among them. And so, with a slight tear in my eye, I kicked Eudora on Mac OS 9 to the curb and went with Apple's built-in solution. On the whole, it's been a pretty seamless transition. But. Mail.app has been slammed by some, and justifiably so, as being a good "80% solution" to people's mail needs. In English, that means it does the basics - but not much else. So if you're checking and sending generic IMAP e-mail, it's great. But once you need robust rules support, or are managing gi-normous e-mail archives, or want integrated calendaring and contact management, well, you were either forced to grit your teeth or switch to competitive products like Entourage. Problem is, Mail.app is nicely integrated with the rest of Mac OS X, which means that switching from Mail also means that you're switching from AddressBook, giving up iChat integration, and likely losing Spotlight support. It's a big cost to bear. I've been gritting my teeth. Lately, however, two new products have come on to the market that have a) made my Mail.app experience about 2,000,000% better, and b) given me real hope that a thriving, vibrant market for add-ons and plugins to Mail is just on the horizon. I'm talking about Mail Act-On and MailTags. These programs extend Mail.app through some (undocumented) APIs, and, broadly, allow you to pimp your Mail.app today, in a way not too unlike what Apple will offer, built in, with Leopard. The first of these, Mail Act-On, allows you to associate a keystroke with a mail-processing rule. This lets you create and associate a virtually unlimited number of mail "rules" that can be invoked with a keystroke. For instance, I am forever finding myself spending time mousing around in Mail, filing e-mail from friends in their respective folders. With Mail Act-On, I can create a rule that says, "When you see a mail message from Richard, file it in Richard's personal folder on the hard drive." Then, once I'm done replying to a message Richard has sent me, I just hit the "Act On" key and the message is zapped to its home. Over the past couple weeks, I've managed to build a pretty comprehensive list of Act-On rules for people I e-mail on a regular basis. So today, when mail comes in, I can zoom through my Inbox in record speed. It's just wonderful. (It's truly astonishing how much time you can spend goofing around in an interface, as opposed to Getting Work Done.) MailTags, on the other hand, lets me link a mail item to iCal, much as Leopard will. Let's say that message from Richard needs some followup or action from me in a few weeks' time. All I have to do is tag the mail and give it a date; MailTags will file it in iCal as a to-do. Then, when the relevant date rolls around in iCal, I see both the to-do and a link back to the original mail message. This has helped ensure that I'm not missing to-dos, or forgetting some relevant piece of information on the date when I need it. Which rocks. There is a growing number of plug-ins for Mail, but Apple really ought to unlock its developer community through better documentation for plug-in authors. I can guarantee that Mail.app, as the incumbent/default mail application on OS X, will be taken much, much farther by the wisdom of the user community than Apple can take it on its own. In the meantime, feel free to get the jump on "Spring 2007" by pimping out your Mail.app with some slick add-ons. (Big thanks to the folks over at Mail.app blog HawkWings for all the tips!) UPDATE, December 31, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 29, 2006 9:51 PM. August 26, 2006When It Rains......it pours. At least with technology problems. Just five days after getting my PowerBook back and happy, it turns out that the battery in the silly thing qualifies for Apple's recall program (short version: Sony's batteries are, shall we say, explosively good, and Dell is recalling 4-some million batteries, while Apple is recalling 1.8M) If you have a PowerBook G4 or iBook G4, get yourself checked. Looks like my laptop is a de-facto desktop computer until my new battery arrives. Pity. UPDATE, January 3, 2008: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 26, 2006 2:17 PM. July 30, 2006Tully's: Grande Americanos ... And Free WiFiFriday's PI had a blurb about Tully's Coffee - turns out they're going to start offering free Wi-Fi in their 79 stores, effective immediately. Why are they doing it? Oh, because it's a good competitive weapon: "Free Wi-Fi will bring more people into the stores," said Tom O'Keefe, Tully's founder. "Will there be people who sit in the corner and get a cup of water? Yes. But most will come in and drink our coffee, and I want more customers. Once I get them in, I get them in." Now, I don't want to rain on Mr. O'Keefe's parade, but it turns out that most of the coffee shops near my place on Cap Hill - Victrola and Fuel being two of my favorites - already offer free WiFi. So while I agree with Tully's reasoning and business decision, I feel like they're a bit late to the game. That said, it does seem that this might be a good marketing move for free WiFi overall. Tully's caters to the mass-market gourmet-coffee-n-pastry crowd. These folks are Starbucks' core customers, and are likely not buying from the indie coffee place down the block. For those people, free WiFi might be something of a novelty, or at least a talking point that gets them buzzing about how neat it is. So. Who knows? This might be the start of something good. It's one thing for your local bookshop, restaurant or coffee joint to give up the free WiFi love, and quite another for a larger business to make it part of their competitive arsenal. If it takes business from Starbucks - or at least makes them a little uncomfortable - we might see something similar from our green-logoed friends. And that would be great. (In the meantime - check out Seattle Wireless for up-to-date hotspots!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 30, 2006 3:36 PM. July 22, 2006Lightning Strikes TwiceI have apparently pissed off the Laptop Gods, because both (both!) of the machines I have with on the road are experiencing some big, big problems right now. It started with my Tablet. Yesterday morning, the little plastic tab that sits at the top of the screen and locks the top of the clamshell to the bottom - keeping the lid closed when the laptop is asleep - broke off. What this means, in practical terms, is that the lid of the laptop can no longer stay closed on its own, which forces me to shut the Tablet down completely in order to move it (if I put it to sleep, it will jostle in transit, the lid will open 1/8" of an inch, and Windows interprets that as the machine "waking up", and then spins up the machine in my shoulder bag). This pretty much destroys my productivity, because it means I have to set up and tear down my workspace every time I move. (What makes this worse is that this is merely the latest in a long line of progressively-annoying indignities - such as glacial performance, regular lock-ups, and sub-30-minute battery life - with the thing. The Tablet is old, and, thankfully, my replacement laptop, in all its wide-screen Core-Duo hotness, is already on order.) The second problem happened later in the evening, when my my Mac decided to do a repeat of its precursor's February 2005 performance and just, you know, forget it has a hard drive. One moment I'm cranking out some e-mail to Ferry Corsten; the next, the machine's seized, I'm rebooting, and then it's all flashing-question-mark, all the time. I'm optimistic that I'll be able to resuscitate when I'm back to Seattle, but in the meantime ... it's a big, shiny, aluminum brick. Sigh. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 22, 2006 6:41 AM. July 14, 2006Cingular Wireless InternetBack in May, when I blogged about my experience with the Cingular 8125, one of the things I mentioned as a desired feature of the phone was "Internet access for my laptop." Specifically, I said: It's no great secret that I spend a lot of time away from my apartment (out the door early, home late, and traveling), and if my non-work e-mail, calendar, contacts, to-do lists and other data are sitting on my PowerBook at home, well, they're not doing me much good. Historically, my "solution" to this personal-data-access-issue has been to try using Web-based services; more recently, I've acquired a cellular data card that I pop into into my PowerBook, and I schelp the whole shootin' works around with me. This works, but is far from ideal - it's an extra 5 or 6 pounds on my person. So if a small-n-light doodad like a phone could run my calendar and handle my e-mail ... well, that'd be excellent. I've since given up on the dream of having a small-n-light device that can run my personal life. My personal (crummy) experience with the 8125, coupled with watching Jeff attempt (and fail) to make a smartphone work for him, has convinced me that the best solution for now is to just keep carting my Mac around. I know a lot of people who have much the same problem. And, frankly, carting your machine around isn't a bad solution ... as long as you can get consistent Internet access. This is a bigger problem than you might think. WiFi is fairly available, of course, both from the free sources (coffee shops, your nice neighbor, or "Mr. Linksys/Belkin 54G") and the paid ones (such as T-Mobile or the generic pay-for airport WiFi). But getting reliable, high-speed wireless Internet access outside of the coffee shop/airport location can be a challenge. And let's be honest: without Internet, your computer is, well, a 5- or 6-pound brick in your bag. Recently, my solution has been to use Cingular's high-speed cellular Internet service. Both Cingular and Verizon have invested in high-speed data networks (using GPRS and EDGE, respectively), and, as a laptop user, you can purchase a special PC card that will get you access to them. I've had a number of people (coworkers, mostly) ask me about the service, and I thought I'd take a moment to lay out what's good (and bad) about it. (Oh, hey -- props: This is yet another example of the Richard Huff Technology Hand-Me-Down Program™: Richard bought the Cingular gear (and service) before his last trip to Italy, and it was all gathering dust in the closet after he got back. So when I wanted to take it for a spin, well ... he loaned it to me.) Overall, the Cingular solution isn't too bad. The hardware is a Sierra Wireless AirCard 860 - with a cute little orange antenna - that slides into the PC card slot on my PowerBook. You need some custom driver software (Mobile High Speed For Mac OS X) from the NovaMind folks in Germany, but other than that - simple. Pop in the card, tell the thing to dial, and - boom. Online. Dang-fast Internet pretty much wherever you happen to be. The service and hardware a bit spendy. The card is about $200 (and activation's another $36); the NovaMind software is about $100, and monthly service is $60. What's it like? Well, performance isn't terrible. That doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, and it's not. Like cable or DSL, the connection is asymmetric - I get consistent download speeds of 70K - 80K per second, but uploads at 10K - 13K. The problem is latency - the network is incredibly, unbelievably, phenomenally latent. What this means, in practical terms, is that downloading a single large file over the network works well, while checking your e-mail using IMAP can take for ... ev ... er. Another challenge with the system is that the Sierra Wireless card does some pretty wicked compression to get its fast download speeds. This compression is handled by the PowerBook's CPU, which means that the computer feels sluggish while browsing the Internet. Finally, because the system relies on a PC card, it means your laptop needs to have an available PC card slot in order to get online. This isn't a problem if you're using an old-school PowerBook G4, as I am, but if you want a newer MacBook (or, God forbid, a MacBook Pro), then you're out of luck - the Pros use the newer, non-backward-compatible ExpressCard, while the MacBooks have no card slot at all. But if you have an older machine - and a need to be online everywhere - this isn't a terrible deal. I've succeeded at using my Motorola v551 phone as a Bluetooth modem on the Cingular network, but the speeds were unacceptably slow - only 6K or 7K per second. So the Sierra card gives a 10x speed boost over a generic cell phone. But it's no WiFi - and for $60 a month, I feel like it should be a lot, lot better. So I'm off to explore some other alternatives for access. With luck, I'll dig up some little gem that can replace the functionality (if not the blazing download performance) of the Sierra ... without breaking the bank. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 14, 2006 4:38 PM. June 12, 2006RSS HousekeepingI've made an under-the-hood change to the way that my site handles RSS. Effective now, everyone's feeds should be redirecting to my FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/gavinshearer). It should be seamless, but if something breaks (like, you don't get an update from me in the next 48 hours), please tell me. (Thanks.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 12, 2006 6:41 PM. May 30, 2006Three Cheers For CingularOK, a big, big shout out to the folks at the Cingular Wireless store in Pacific Place - they took back my Cingular 8125 with nary a fuss or complaint. And, while I know it's supposed to be that way ("30-day return policy" and all that), I also know of far, far too many situations where normal employees become agents of the Dark Lord himself, assessing evil restocking fees and whatnot. So. Good retail experience - hip, hip, hurrah! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 30, 2006 7:00 PM. May 29, 2006My Cingular 8125 AdventureThis weekend, I swung by my local Cingular store and picked up the Cingular 8125 smartphone. The 8125 is a well-reviewed phone with a full-size, slide-out keyboard, Bluetooth, WiFi, and the usual phone accessories (e.g., camera). It runs Windows Mobile 5. The thing is going back to Cingular tomorrow. I dropped cash on the 8125 for a few reasons. First, it seems like every other person in my life is buying a smartphone. Jeff, for example, has been (and is) a committed Treo user, and even recently upgraded to the new 700w. Brian recently bought himself the Verizon version of the 8125 (and loves it). So I was curious: is there something to this smartphone business? Second, I was hopeful that a smartphone would make managing my personal life a tad easier. It's no great secret that I spend a lot of time away from my apartment (out the door early, home late, and traveling), and if my non-work e-mail, calendar, contacts, to-do lists and other data are sitting on my PowerBook at home, well, they're not doing me much good. Historically, my "solution" to this personal-data-access-issue has been to try using Web-based services; more recently, I've acquired a cellular data card that I pop into into my PowerBook, and I schelp the whole shootin' works around with me. This works, but is far from ideal - it's an extra 5 or 6 pounds on my person. So if a small-n-light doodad like a phone could run my calendar and handle my e-mail ... well, that'd be excellent. At a super-high level, here's what I wanted the 8125 to do for me:
I'm pleased to report that, of these items, most are certainly possible - as in, on-paper possible - with the 8125. But the reality of using the silly thing just leaves a lot to be desired. Mostly, this comes down to clunky design, and an utter lack of concern for the overall consumer experience. Let's start with the basics: the 8125 is a bad phone. Period, full stop, end of story. The phone functions seem to have been tacked on as an afterthought. Consider the basic task of dialing a number. You can try to dial by using the touchscreen (which is error-prone and clumsy), or you can use the stylus on the touchscreen (which now requires you to fetch the stylus and poke at the screen, consuming two hands and your full attention). You can also slide out the keyboard to enter the number, except that - wait for it - the number keys are only accessible with a modifier key, so now you're either double-tapping the modifier to put it in number mode (don't make a mistake; backspace doesn't work in that mode), or holding down the option key while pressing buttons. To put it mildly, this sucks. Now I know that smartphones are generally assumed to be operated by people who have them populated with their contacts, which changes the usage - now you're just picking stuff out of a list, instead of entering a 10-digit number each time. However, I find that I use my current Motorola v551 in a sort of mixed-mode - sometimes I'm picking Richard's number out of a list, and sometimes I'm typing it in directly. It just depends. So to have a phone that's only designed for one way of interaction seems very user-unfriendly to me. Actually, the phone-dialing example is good for understanding the whole Zen of this puppy. Windows Mobile is a chunky, clunky user experience. It's hard to navigate and hard to understand, mixing metaphors at every turn. Let's say that you're working on a task on the phone, and now it's complete. Sometimes, you're presented with a wizard-like screen that has a nice, prominent "finish" button. (This is good thing.) Other times, however, there's zero indication about what you're supposed to do next ... and then you notice a small, lowercase, 'ok' in the upper-right corner. So you tap it, and then the task clears. This is a total pain. Phones should be engineered for people who are busy and don't have a lot of time to stare at an interface like it's the Mona Lisa, teasing out every nuance in order to understand what the ar-teest intended. I'll say this for my Motorola: when the thing needs you to do something, it's very clear about what that thing is, and what you're supposed to do about it. I'm pleased to report that the Web browser (Internet Explorer Mobile) works as advertised, and I'm even more pleased that some sites (like weather.com and Google) were smart enough to detect that I was on a mobile phone and route me to a lightweight, WAP-friendly version of their Web pages. The Internet-access-over-Bluetooth, too, was a success. After much research (thanks to Justin Blanton and Ross Barkman) and jiggering, my Mac was able to connect to the phone, dial out, and get good, sustained transfer speeds of 14K a second. While this is clearly not WiFi speeds (it's more like ISDN, circa 1996), it's good enough to get me my e-mail when the WiFi's not available (or, if you're in an airport, outrageously expensive). But the interface and usability are poor - mind-bendingly poor - and so the phone goes back. It's just not ready for prime time, in my opinion, and it's certainly not worth the $450 (and $40 a month for a data plan). I know everyone's talking about the "mobile future", and I, for one am eager to see it arrive. This weekend just taught me that the wait's a bit longer than I'd thought it might be. Phooey. UPDATE, June 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 29, 2006 8:54 PM. Switching To FeedBurnerJeff and David recently switched to serving their blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and I've decided to do the same. (I imagine we'll be moving Confab later this week.) It will be nice to have some feed-reader statistics, and I'm intrigued by a lot of the value-added services FeedBurner provides. If you're reading this site via RSS, please update your pointer to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gavinshearer. I've added a FeedBurner logo to the main page of the site, and also added an insta-subscribe button for you NewsGator, Yahoo, and Google users. Questions, please let me know! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 29, 2006 10:19 AM. May 28, 2006TypeKey Now Required To CommentIt saddens me to announce this, but I'm now requiring a TypeKey account to post comments to the blog, effective immediately. I've been flooded with spam comments all week, and it's reached a point of high annoyance for me - more than 70 attempts since yesterday. This is, sadly, a ratchet up from the issues I ran into back in February. I know some of you don't like TypeKey, and I apologize. However, requiring commenters to go through a legitimate registration service is the only way to prevent this kind of abuse. Questions, please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 28, 2006 3:04 PM. May 26, 2006Office 2007 Beta 2 Is Now AvailableOh! One more thing. The new version of Microsoft Office (Office 2007) is now available as a public beta. It's totally hot - I've been running it for months, and have fallen in love with it. If you'd like to get access to the beta, just click on over to Microsoft.com and register. Enjoy! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 26, 2006 5:46 AM. April 20, 2006MyBus + SMS = Crazy Delicious!I have recently discovered that you can get up-to-the-minute, real-time bus information from Metro and Sound Transit sent to your cell phone through SMS. This totally rocks. Yes, it rocks. It rocks because it solves an all-too-common problem for bus riders, namely: finding out when the hell the next bus is due to arrive. The service is relatively easy (and time-consuming) to set up (read: geeks only for the moment), but at a high level, it works like this:
I’ve been using this since Monday, and I must confess that it is wonderfully useful. One tip: since formatting and addressing the message can be pretty time-consuming with the triple-tap cell keyboards most folks are using, just keep your finished message in your phone's outbox and re-send it whenever you want up-to-date information. If you're a regular Metro rider, be sure to check it out! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 20, 2006 10:13 AM. April 16, 2006coast2Coaster 1.1I finally got some time to work on coast2Coaster this weekend, and am pleased to report that it's been upgraded to version 1.1. The site is live now. What's New?
Missing Parks
I am hard at work on the next iteration of coast2Coaster, and would love feedback: ideas, suggestions, and ways to make the site better. In the meantime: happy coastering! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 16, 2006 12:32 PM. April 9, 2006Site MoveJust a heads-up: I'm moving gavinshearer.com to a higher-performance server here at Gecko Central, and you may experience some weirdness (an old page, for example, or network issues) over the next week or so as the name servers update. I apologize in advance if it causes any strangeness. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 9, 2006 8:27 PM. March 28, 2006Life On The CloudEver since I started working at Microsoft, I've been suffering from "split data syndrome," and it's frickin' annoying. Like our good friend Murphy's eponymous Law, SDS boils down to a simple axiom: if you've got more than one computer in your life, the information you want isn't on the machine you're using. I experience this all the time in a number of different contexts - that password I need is in Password Master on my Mac at home, while that other password is in my OneNote notebook on my work Tablet. It's the little things you notice the most - browser bookmarks, for instance. Suddenly, you go to the computer for a given resource and realize, mid-mouse, that the thing you want is safely locked away on a drive that's 20 miles from you. It sucks. There are a lot of companies proposing solutions to this problem (Apple has their dot-Mac service, for example, while Microsoft recently bought FolderShare). Problem is, in my experience every service of this type has some rough edge that renders it less-than-optimal. Take dot-Mac: it offers a great solution for some scenarios (it does good stuff with bookmarks), while providing lousy support for others (calendars, anyone?). Increasingly, I've come to believe that the long-term solution to this problem will likely be done on a vendor-by-vendor, application-by-application basis: you'll buy your software from company X, who, in addition to the downloadable bits, will offer "cloud" services that allow your data to live on the Internet. This will let you access your important information from anywhere - the rich client when you're on your home machine, and a Web client when you're not. This is, in many ways, exactly what people experience with e-mail, today - you can use Webmail when you're out and about, and Mail.app or Outlook when you're at your primary machine. The reason I believe the app-by-app approach to be the right one is because of complexity. Applications are generally complex, with lots of little nuances here and there. Unless you know those nuances in and out - that is, unless you're the software author - it's going to be really, really hard to provide a great experience to your customers. We already have crude tools, and they stink. What we need, going forward, are tools that just ... work. Tools like NewsGator. I bring up NewsGator because I've recently been able to use it to start synching my RSS newsfeeds between my home machine, work machines, and the Web. And it rocks. As with all SDS issues, the historical problem is simple enough. I've got about a hundred feeds in my RSS aggregator, and, on any given day, half or so of them will be updated with news I want to read. Since I'm at Microsoft for most of my waking hours, it makes sense to have them on my work machine. But which one? My desktop machine has the big screen and full-size keyboard; my Tablet is mobile. So while I might prefer to read news on my desktop, if I'm out of the office (which happens a lot) then I'm cut off from my news. Conversely, if I'm in the office, the last thing I want to be doing is read news on a tiny Tablet screen. Of course, I want to read news on my home computer, too. If I'm working on my PowerBook, then I want to be able to get my news without perching my work machine on the corner of my desk. (Platforms are an issue, here, too - I use NetNewsWire on my Mac, and FeedDemon on Windows.) My "solution" to date has been to physically split my feeds. Home-related feeds stay on the PowerBook; work-related feeds live on my desktop machine at work. This is suboptimal for a lot of reasons (is Daring Fireball a home or work read? What about Wil Shipley?), but it's saved me from the hideous work of keeping full feeds on all three computers, and needing to manually refresh or delete news on one that I'd read on another. Well, I'm pleased to report that, as of this week, the problem's been solved. Last year, NewsGator bought Feed Demon. And then, a few months back, NewsGator purchased NetNewsWire. And, as of this week, both products will now auto-sync with the NewsGator cloud - no fuss, no mess. (I mean, yes, it did take a bit of work to get everything set up - we're still talking about computers, here - but even that was shockingly easy relative to the usual.) I can now leave my feeds in NewsGator's system and my various news clients will just Do The Right Thing. I can have FeedDemon on both my Tablet and my desktop machine, as well as my PowerBook and on the Web. When I read an article on one, it notifies the others. No duplication, no hassle. It's wonderful. When you work like this for a while, you realize how excellent the next few years are going to be in the computing space. Data is being divorced from parent applications, and liberated from the PC hard drive. When you put the stuff on the cloud, you can get your information pretty much anywhere you happen to be. The hard work of keeping your versions current, or making sure that one piece of data is on your laptop, or whatever, is pretty much abstracted away and handled for you by the network. Which, when you think about it, is how it should be. We're going to cure SDS, one app at a time. If you're using an aggregator (and you are using an aggregator, aren't you?) across multiple machines, this is totally worth checking out. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 28, 2006 3:01 PM. March 10, 2006Google Maps Mania!Hey! coast2Coaster scored a mention on Google Maps Mania today. Right on! I've had a few requests to add all the coasters in Canada to c2C, and I'm going to see if I can find the time this weekend. Stay tuned. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 10, 2006 4:40 PM. March 6, 2006Introducing coast2Coaster!I'd like to start this post with an apology: I know my blogging has been a little light over the past couple weeks, and I've had a few people mention it to me. I'm sorry about that. Part of it has been due to the intensity of stuff going on at work, and the rest of it's because I've had this kick-ass hobby project consuming my nights and weekends. The good news is that, after much coding, re-coding, and testing, I'm thrilled to be able to drop the sheet on it. It's called coast2Coaster. What is it? Well, from a geek perspective, it's a mashup between the Roller Coaster Database and Google Maps. From a coaster enthusiast perspective, it's a map of each and every roller coaster in the United States. (Oh, yeah. It practically made me bounce up and down in my chair when I started coding the thing.) Now, I've admittedly been jonesing to build a mashup since I attended Web 2.0 back in October. And, like most mashups, this one stemmed from a moment of personal Internet frustration. I got the idea, you see, when I was planning my 2008 motorcycle trip in January. Back then, I was trying to find out where all the good coasters were around the country, and was having a hell of a time - there just wasn't a good, single resource where I could go and see, at a glance, where the parks were. This seemed silly - the data was out there, and the technology was pretty popular. Where was the map? So, after some futile searching, I thought I'd just build the sucker. And here it is, free for all to enjoy. A few caveats. First, this is my first mashup, and I'm sure that some parts of it really suck. I'm not a Javascript guru, and had to learn a lot of this stuff as I was building the thing out. So if the thing blows up your browser or causes your machine to, you know, smoke, or something - I apologize. Please let me know what browser/OS you're running, what happened, and I'll put it in the debug list. Second, I have a lot of ideas for this application, and this is just V1. I cut a lot of proposed stuff to get the first release out the door, and also because I'm pretty sure the collective ideas of the Internet community will be much better than anything I can come up with on my own. So if there's something you'd like to see, let me know. Assuming my programming kung fu (and free time) are up to it, I'm all ears. Third, I wasn't able to geographically locate all the coaster parks out there. Of the 255 "active" parks in RCDB, I was only able to get latitude and longitude for 234 of 'em. I'll elaborate on the missing parks in the "how it works" section, below. Fourth, I know that the data hygiene isn't perfect. I did a lot of geocoding - some manually, some automatically - and I'm reasonably sure that some of my stuff is off. So please don't put your brood in the Family Truckster without checking to make sure that the park is, indeed, where I think it is. HOW IT WORKS At a high level, a Google Maps mashup just takes geocoded data (latitude and longitude) and plots it against a Javascript object. As long as you've got the geocoded data, you're golden. STEP ONE: Get the data. The RCDB pages are reasonably clean HTML, which made it pretty straightforward to break apart tables of data. What I wanted was the name of each park, its address, its URL, and the number of active roller coasters it held. RCDB is a mite too comprehensive, here - it lists coasters that are no longer operating (flagged as such), and parks that are no longer in existence. I needed to screen all this stuff out so I could build a list of just the good stuff. This took a lot, lot longer than I expected. There was a fair amount of tweaking and coding to make it all come together. As an example: some of the parks have changed their names over time, and RCDB captures this. Thus, you'll see "Bonfante Gardens (2001 to ?)" or something. I wanted to trim this back to just, "Bonfante Gardens." Not a problem, but it's indicative of the kinds of time-sucking detail work that you can get caught up in. STEP TWO: Geocode. It's also not perfect. I was able to geocode roughly 2/3rds of the list, but that left 33% remaining. I used a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 to look up those remaining addresses. Again, not a perfect solution, but it got me to where I wanted to be. STEP THREE: Code Your Web Page. MISSING DATA
V2 IDEAS
I'm very open to suggestions, here. Let me know what you'd like, and I'll see what I can do! Finally, I'd like to say a big thank-you to the guys at RCDB, who have done an amazing job of keeping the flame alive for coaster enthusiasts everywhere. This project would not have been possible without them. For my part, I'm just hopeful that coast2Coaster is something that people find valuable, and helps encourage people to get out and ride some cool stuff near where they live - or where they're traveling to. Enjoy! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 6, 2006 1:02 AM. February 20, 2006Blog AdministratiaI made a bunch 'o changes to the blog last night. None of it will affect folks who read my stuff through the main page (and RSS), but if you're looking for older posts, things have moved around a bit, and you've got some new options. First, I've renamed the "Dev" category to "Geek", and moved a number of articles (technical stuff, product reviews) that were previously in "Cool" or "Misc" over. Second, I've collapsed the "Internship" and "Visio" categories into the mainline "MSFT" category. Third, I've created new categories: one is "Confab" (for my podcast), and the other is "Politics." Most of my previously-political coverage (such as my monorail stuff) has been moved over. Finally, I've added a "key essays" page. As time has gone on, I've had enough people ask me about/refer to/link to certain articles to know that some are more popular than others. I've grouped them by broad topic, and will update them periodically as the feedback pours in. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 20, 2006 6:24 PM. February 11, 2006Comment Spam Is BackWhen I enabled anonymous comments back in December, it was an experiment - a way of (hopefully) stimulating more comments on entries, but without also stimulating comment spammers. Sadly, the spammers have arrived in force. I'm getting dozens and dozens of "casino!" and "mortgage!" entries on the blog. Bastards. Rather than let these people vandalize my site, I'm going to set the bar a bit higher and see if it slows them down. As of now, I'm requiring e-mail addresses to post on the site, have turned off HTML, and will auto-post entries only from authenticated or trusted commenters. I apologize for the increased security, but there's some nasty folks about. Please let me know if you run into any hiccups. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 11, 2006 11:45 PM. December 28, 2005Your Comments Are WelcomeI've had a handful of folks tell me lately how much they like to post comments on blogs - but they prefer not to go through a registration system (e.g., TypeKey), such as the one I use here on gavinshearer.com. After considering it for a bit (and evaluating some of the new, anti-spam features of MovableType 3.2), I've elected to turn off registration requirements on my comments system. If you want to post, well, post away. Two caveats. First, if you're posting without being authenticated, your comments won't appear immediately. This is because I fear "check out my online casino" posts will otherwise proliferate like wildfire. Second, should I, indeed, find myself flooded with comment spam (as I did with trackbacks, before disabling them earlier this year), I'm going to have to lock things down again. But if y'all wanna converse, well, bring it. Here's hoping it all works as intended. (Sigh. Spammers = bastards.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 28, 2005 6:55 PM. December 23, 2005Dell Comes ThroughWe've got a happy ending, here, folks: Rich Barrett got his Dell PC before Christmas. I just got the following e-mail from him: ...yesterday we actually received the machine. We're still working out compensation; they want to apply something to a future order and I want them to make good on this one. We'll see. So: a few details left to settle, but at least the machine is here. I'm very glad to hear it. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 23, 2005 9:43 AM. December 17, 2005Dell Hell FollowupFollowing up on Rich Barrett's nightmare with Dell, Cintra sent me a link to a recent article on Clickz ("Blogs and Dell's Enduring Hell"): A highly public discussion of Jarvis' troubles with his Dell laptop computer this past summer leapt from dialog on Jarvis' Buzzmachine site to other blogs, and even into mainstream media. The result is a population of links on search engines such as Google. In this case, postings on Buzzmachine and MSN, as well as other blog and news sources, surpass Dell in terms of "information influence" in terms of customer service issues. My friend Char posted a bit in the comments section of my original post; if you're following this at all, it's worth looking at. Rich: any news from Dell? Anything? Here's hoping it gets handled. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 17, 2005 6:05 PM. December 12, 2005Dell Customer Service HellMy friend Richard Barrett paid for a new Dell laptop back in early November, and the machine's not here yet. Making matters worse, he's getting the runaround from Dell's customer support department ("Uh ... the machine's in the mail. Uh, yeah.") Well, it is the age of the Internet, so he's got a blog up to detail what's going on. You can check it out here. Anyone know anyone in power over at Dell? I suspect the people in charge of the business would be none to pleased to read that this is happening to a (formerly) happy customer. (Alternately, if anyone has any other horror stories about Dell to share, I'm sure the guy wouldn't mind some company.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 12, 2005 3:53 PM. "The Search"Last night, I treated myself to the luxury of an unbroken couple of hours on my couch, curled up with a glass of wine and a copy of John Battelle's "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (I'm firmly convinced that I don't finish enough books. God knows I start plenty of them, but they always seem to wind up stacked on top of my bookshelf with an Amazon.com bookmark parked in around Page 70.) "Search" is excellent, a wonderful hybrid of business profile and social commentary. It is most explicitly not a chronicle of Google; rather, it's a historical look at the rise of search engines (think WAIS, Archie, and WebCrawler, then AltaVista, and so on), the de-emphasis on pure search by the leading Internet companies (Excite, Yahoo) in the late nineties, and the rise of Google as a solution to a problem that nobody wanted to address head-on. The book benefits from three things. First, the firms it discusses (and the timeframe in which they're discussed) are just flat-out interesting. The Internet boom created a lot of winners and losers, flooded a lot of people with money and power, and a number of interesting ideas and personalities were brought out as a result. "The Search" captures that aspect pretty well. Second, "The Search" is more than a business biopsy. Battelle thinks that search matters to society, and is firmly convinced that we're in our infancy with a lot of this stuff. I agree with him, and am really intrigued by some of the directions we'll see go over the next 5, 10, and 20 years. Third, and finally, "The Search" benefits from Battelle's writing style, which is just outstanding. His examples are clear, his characters are interesting, and the prose made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. A lot of these kinds of books tend toward the gushy, breathy, gosh-this-is-wonderful vibe, or else are dry, technical, and about as interesting as watching paint ... well, you know. This is not that. Definite recommend. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 12, 2005 9:40 AM. December 8, 2005Google Transit Trip PlannerCNET reports this morning that Google has launched a new Transit Trip Planner: The Google trip planner asks people to enter their preferred itinerary, such as location of departure and arrival, as well as dates and time of travel. The site then gleans all available information on public-transportation schedules to produce a trip planner. You can check it out at google.com/transit. I use (and love) Seattle-centric Google hack BusMonster, whose phenomenal usefulness was undoubtedly a nudge for Google to brew its own version. BusMonster, however, doesn't actually do the trip planning piece for you (e.g., "Take route 10 to 7th and Pike; catch the 194 to Sea-Tac at 6:20 AM"), while Google's does. As an example, check out these directions from Portland's airport to the Westin downtown. The site currently just supports Portland, Oregon, but it's a pretty simple mental move to see this supporting other cities in the near future. My favorite feature? The "Cost calculator" on the bottom ("$1.80 (vs. $4.49 driving!)"). Awesome. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 8, 2005 10:27 AM. November 26, 2005Upgrade To 3.2I've just upgraded the blog to run on top of Movable Type 3.2 (and hoo boy, is the new admin console nice!). If anyone notices any odd behavior, please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 26, 2005 4:26 PM. Metro Wi-FI, My Ass
I've blogged before about the Seattle Municipal WiFi system on the Ave, and how it doesn't work very well (spotty coverage, poor performance). Richard's experienced similar problems, as has everyone I know who's experimented with it. So imagine my delight when the 194 pulled up at the airport yesterday, and the billboard on the side of the bus said, "This bus has WiFi!" Cool! I've heard about these bus-based WiFi systems before - Google uses one for its employee shuttles, and SoundTransit has (allegedly) equipped some of the 545's with it. But I've never actually tried the service myself. Seemed like a perfect test, right? So I opened my laptop, and, sho' 'nuff, there's a WiFi SSID there. So I connect, and it does the negotiating handshake, and then ... nothing. No route off the bus to the Internet. I play with it a bit, try this and that, and finally close the PowerBook in frustration. What is it with these efforts? WiFi is a wonderful, wonderful thing, and ubiquitous connectivity has big promises for all manner of new services. Yet there's something about our efforts around here that wind up with these half-assed, unreliable systems. Spokane has a 100-block WiFi system in their downtown core, and it works great. Are we short of tech talent around here, or what? UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 26, 2005 9:10 AM. November 25, 2005One More Thing To Do On The BusI've blogged before about the many, many distractions I enjoy while commuting on the bus, from magazines to podcasts to Rocketboom. Well, I've added another item to the list: cell phone games. When I switched to Cingular and upgraded my phone, I initially focused on the basic stuff: good reception and battery life, iSync compatibility, Bluetooth. I didn't give much thought to the "other" stuff like text messaging, Web browsing, e-mail, camera (although the 551 has one), or custom ringtones. Recently, however, I found myself spelunking the innards of the phone, playing with this and that option, and decided to give the 'ol "Games" folder a look-see. The 551 ships with a demo of "Bejeweled", and so I gave it a try. And, dammit, I got hooked. So I bought the full version through the Cingular game store (not a bad experience; could be better), downloaded it to my phone, and now, well, there's one more thing I can do on the bus. Bejeweled isn't exactly the fastest, sexiest game out there - it's a Tetris knockoff - but it's fun and almost totally mindless ... mental floss, if you will. And the really nice thing about it is that you can play it with a single thumb on either hand, which means it's ideal for busses; you can stand on an overfull 545, hanging on to the overhead rail with one hand, chimpanzee-like, while playing the game with the other. I am finding that cell phone games are perfect for those 3-to-10-minute windows when you're waiting for something: the bus to arrive, the next bank teller, an open kiosk at the airport, the "please turn off all electronic devices" warning, you name it. Games are terrific little distractions ... especially when you're traveling for the holidays. Not that, you know, that's relevant this time of year. Thumbs-up. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 25, 2005 4:54 PM. November 3, 2005Keyboard ShuffleI have to say: computer keyboards don't get the respect they deserve. I think most people look at 'em and say, "oh, keyboard" as if the thing is some uber-interchangeable hunk o' plastic that just happens to sit on the desk. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I find the keyboard to be one of the most critical factors relating to my satisfaction with using a computer. Sit me down in front of a machine with a foreign keyboard (small keys, keys that stick, "ergonomic" warping, whatever) and I'm instantly transformed from a power user into someone who's all left-handed thumbs. It's terrible. All of this is a rather long-winded way of warming up for my real topic, which is to say that I've fallen in love with my standard-issue keyboard at work. Really. It's this flat, fast, super-tactile, easy-to-type-on, God-let-those-fingers-fly-when-you're-in-the-zone jobbie, and, after about 30 seconds of using it, I knew it was going to be love. (Product Placement: It's a Microsoft Digital Media Pro. In case you're curious.) In fact, I've fallen for the work keyboard so hard that I swung by the Microsoft Company Store this week and bought one for my personal use, at home ... on my PowerBook. My former favorite, the Apple Pro Keyboard, is now in the closet. And good thing, too - I've been CRANKING on my e-mail tonight, and the new 'board is making all the difference. What's it like having a Windows keyboard plugged in to the Mac? Easy. Everything Just Worked, including little things like the volume keys. It's a mite odd to use the "Windows" key as the "Apple" key (there's symbolism there, I just know it...), and "Alt" as "option" - but that's it. It's flawless, otherwise. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 3, 2005 9:39 PM. October 16, 2005People I'm ReadingAfter a number of requests from folks, I've implemented a "People I Read" section on the right-hand section of the main page. You'll find links to people I read regularly. Be sure to check some of 'em out! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 16, 2005 6:14 PM. September 21, 2005Trackback SpammersEffective immediately, I have disabled TrackBack on gavinshearer.com. Put simply, the volume of TrackBack spam has grown exponentially over the last week or so. Despite automated countermeasures and the liberal banning of IP addresses, these parasites have continued to spray ads for casinos, porn - you name it - throughout the blog, using TrackBack as their delivery mechanism. I like the idea of TrackBack a lot. Intended as a way of facilitating conversations between bloggers, it lets authors notify one another when a work is cited in a new post. TrackBack's promise is to connect more people, and provide greater context for readers by letting them follow TrackBack'd entries. Sadly, the mechanism has been hijacked by those who are desperate to get their sites listed high in the search engines. One way that engines (like Google) measure link "quality" (where higher quality = a higher position in the search results) is through the number of sites that point to you. Spammers use robots to post bogus TrackBack links all over the Web, thus causing their Google index to rise. So I've turned off TrackBack. I've wrestled with this decision for a few days now, but the problem is both straightforward and, ultimately, intractable. The anti-spam technology we have in e-mail is sophisticated and getting better; TrackBack has no such sophistication. So, owing to the outrageous administrative overhead of cleaning up after these bastards, I'm just throwing the switch. To my honest readers: I apologize. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 21, 2005 7:29 PM. September 19, 2005I Heart My New PhoneSo it's official: I love my new Motorola phone and Cingular service. Admittedly, it's hard to know when the goodness of one ends and the other begins, so I'm talking about them as a package. Indeed, let us expound on the happiness that has been brought in to my life.
Oh, and finally, Cingular has yet to lie to me. How cool is that? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 19, 2005 9:29 PM. September 12, 2005It's A Jungle Out ThereSo one of the things I did with my weekend was spend time doing security work. The Internet is getting scary. Richard and I have noticed an alarming uptick in the number of casual, attempted exploits against our infrastructure. Now, script kiddies are nothing new - it's a pretty rare day when we don't see automated spray in our log files from remote systems spidering and probing. Heck, it's one of the reasons the average "survival time" of an unpatched Windows PC is around 16 minutes these days. Bruce Schneider, in his excellent computer-security book, "Secrets and Lies What do I mean? Well, let's say you own a house, and the house's doors have locks on them. Fine. Now let's say that a thief wishes to break in to your house. In the real world, the thief will wait until darkness to reduce her chance of detection. The thief will also likely bring a toolkit, so she can pick your lock effectively. Even with these two benefits - tools and relative darkness - the thief must work swiftly, or else be detected by you, or your neighbors, or your dog, or something. So time is precious, the thief gets one or two attempts, and then she's gone. On the Internet, none of this is true. For starters, the thief can work at any time she likes - broad daylight or cover of night. Second, the thief has access to a dizzying array of tools, from those that pick your lock to those that take your door off its hinges. And finally, time is no problem - the thief can (generally) try attack after attack after attack until she finds one that does the job. Imagine someone walking up to your front door and trying to open your front door. That fails. So she tries to slide a credit card in the door. That fails. So she tries to pick the lock. That fails. So she starts walking around the house, trying windows at random. Those fail. And so on. She keeps trying and trying and trying. If this really happened - like, at 10 AM on a Saturday, when your family is home - how long would it take you to call the cops? 15 seconds flat? If? Well, on the Internet, you may not even know it's going on. Unless you watch for that kind of stuff. And we do. Lately, the attacks have increased in both frequency and sophistication. We're seeing new, strange stuff that's originating from China (which is not unusual), Amsterdam and Iran. We don't know what the hell to make of all of it, but it's prompted us to take a hard look at how well we're protected. Now, the Geckowerx platform has been behind a firewall since the company started. We've allowed SSH access to certain machines, but no longer. Script kiddies are throwing the phone book at SSH ports, and they're getting sophisticated. So we're mandating IPsec VPNs to allow access to the platform. Period. We've also begun hardening a number of the interactive systems on the platform, making sure things are patched and up-to-date. We're rewriting some of our software to guard against some of the stuff we're seeing. And we're banning IP addresses with a vengeance. I suspect that the mechanical aspects of this stuff isn't terribly interesting to the vast majority of people who read my blog, but I decided to write about this because I don't think people take their computer security seriously enough. If you have a Windows machine, get yourself to XP (95/98/ME users, that means you). Then, get virus protection and get up-to-date with the latest patches from Microsoft. Turn on your firewall in XP SP2. Really. If you have a Mac, you're in slightly-better shape. Mac OS X, despite its (deserved) reputation as "better" than Windows when it comes to security and viruses, is not some magical operating system that can't be compromised. So turn on your firewall. And make sure you're running Apple's Software Update every week. The new breed of Internet criminals have a lot going for them - sophistication, time, and tens of millions of PCs to attack. Remember: they are out to get you. So protect yourself. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 12, 2005 9:54 PM. September 10, 2005Switching to iCalNow that I've decided to move to the Motorola v551, I also need to change my calendar software. This is not something that's done lightly. Calendars, like e-mail, are one of those funny classes of applications that one becomes emotionally welded to. E-mail brings tidings and opportunities and all manner of human things into your life; calendars allow you to keep yourself on track, ensuring you don't miss that wedding on Saturday, your Tae Kwon Do practice on Tuesday, or forget to pick up cash and some Chardonnay on the way home tonight. I've been using the same calendar software - Palm Desktop (formerly Claris Organizer) - since 1998. So you could think of my brain as having well-worn pathways that conform to the keyboard shortcuts, idiosyncratic quirks, limitations and power of the product. Sadly, Palm Desktop is a snob. It only likes to talk to - wait for it - PalmOS-compatible devices. I can't easily go from my Palm Desktop to my iPod or my phone. In English, this means that I'm going to...
Guess which one I chose? Right. So I'm no lover of iCal (I think it's one of the weaker pieces of software that Apple produces), but it's about my best choice. I explored using Entourage, but I don't want to give up my address book and e-mail, and besides, the software feels like it weighs about 800 lbs. I can practically hear my PowerBook going, "UUUUGGGGHHHHHHH!" with the effort when I ask it to open a new Entourage window. So I'm switched over to iCal. And it's not terrible, but it does suffer from a few small problems. Not the least of these is that iCal won't let you create a to-do with a repeating occurrence. If you want to put a note in your calendar that says, "take out the garbage" that pops up every other Tuesday, well, iCal won't let you do that. Naturally, there's a hack. The hack is to take items that are recurring and put them in the calendar as time-based events. This means you can be reminded to "take out the trash every other Tuesday", but only as long as you agree to do it at 6:30 PM or something. Hack, hack, hack. Another silly iCal thing is that "to-do" items sit apart from the calendar when synched to an iPod (I acknowledge that this could be a weakness of the iPod, but I love my iPod and think iCal is a bit crap, so iCal gets the blame). Again, this means that you might look at, oh, Monday the 12th, and see your appointments (8:30 AM - Coffee, 9:30 AM - More Coffee, 11 AM - Lunch), but you won't see the bit that says, "Call Bill Gates; Discuss Raise" from your to-dos. Instead, you have to scroll down to a special to-do menu and then - and this is the part that kills me - find the damn to-do ... in alphabetical order. Yeah. They don't sort by date. (One thing I do like about iCal is that it allows you to associate free-form notes with just about anything. That means you can put all kinds of crazy pieces of information alongside a to-do or a calendar item. This is quite handy; it means I can associate confirmation numbers and whatnot with my air travel, for instance. Bully for that.) So while, yes, it's cool that my calendar is on my iPod, and it's cool that it'll be on my swank new phone as well, if there was ever an argument against bundled software, well, iCal is the poster child. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 10, 2005 7:52 PM. On Buying A PhoneSo the long-awaited iTunes phone came out on Wednesday morning, introduced with much fanfare and ballyhoo by Apple, Motorola and Cingular. I saw the specs, and they were pretty much exactly what had been rumored - and, so on Wednesday night, I bought something else - a new Motorola v551, with service by Cingular. If you're a regular reader, you probably know that I've been planning to switch my cellular provider since February. What you may not know is that I've been going through a kind of bizarre, schizophrenic decision about which direction to go with the damn telephone itself. When it comes to cell handsets, there seem to be three distinct design philosophies at play right now. The first of these is the "sculpted art" camp, which produces high-end, beautiful, hotness-of-the-moment phones like the RAZR. This camp prizes thin, light, brushed-alumnim jobbies that look like something Kate Moss would, indeed, be caught dead with. The second camp sees the phone as the Next Coming Of The PC, and is busily building "smartphones" that incorporate e-mail, Web browsers, blog tools, cameras, GPS, thermometers, Bluetooth, and all manner of other features, crammed in to a form factor that's as small as they can make it. The Treo and Blackberry are good examples of this camp - each is really more personal computer than telephone, and looks like it. They're bulky (people holding a Blackberry to their ear often look like they've got a paperback book in their hand), but, for a geek like me, hold that ineffable, compelling promise of being a phone plus x, where "x" is "the Web" or "a blog posting tool" or whatever. The third camp is all about churning out cheap-ass plastic handsets the carriers can dangle as free-phone giveaways to the three people left in the world without phone service. 'nuff said. So I've been thinking "Treo" for a long, long time, sniffing around the thing and trying to justify buying one. Jeff and Ravi each have one, and they both profess love (or at least like). But my experience with the Treo has been one of endless compromise - the keyboard too small, the software too slow, the data plan too expensive (Cingular wants an additional 40 bones a month - that's $500 a year - for unlimited data service) - which makes me suspect that I'd never really use all the cool features of the phone. And then I saw this genius post ("I Am Really Angry At Palm") by Wil Shipley earlier this week. Wil's having problems with his Treo, and he sums up the "gotchas" of the smartphone camp just ... perfectly. On e-mail: HEY, it turns out THAT IS NOT USEFUL. In fact, it's completely useless for the way I read mail if I can't delete the junk and transfer the good messages to other mailboxes when I've read them. Apparently this mail reader is for people who literally want to only read their mail, and not actually, you know, DO anything with it . On the Web browser: I have, honestly, tried to use it several times when I was out, and each time everyone around me has lost patience and gone on with their lives before I found any useful info. It'd be like, "Hey, where's the bar?" "Oh, I'll look it up on the internet..." [5 minutes pass] "Uh, I'm just gonna call 611..." "No, really, the page is coming up! I swear." And so on. Read the post. So I moved firmly out of the smartphone camp, and instead started shopping for phones from the ever-elusive, shadowy, mysterious fourth design philosophy: cell phones that allow you to place and receive calls reliably. As it turns out, finding a phone from this camp is a bit like finding the Holy Grail or discovering Cold Fusion. It's not like there's not a market - Epinions, for example, is awash with people crying for just such a device - but instead, phones continue to be objects d'art, miniature PCs, or just crap. (Memo to Nokia, Motorola, et. al.: that's bad marketing, people.) As it happens, my father recently did a lot of research on phones, and determined that the Moto v551 was developed by people who, while not entirely of the fourth philosophy, at least took an undergraduate class in college from someone who was. It's not cheap crap, and it's not a smartphone. It's also not the smallest or most stylish phone you've ever seen. But it does work with iSync (a big deal for me) over Bluetooth (a nice plus), the reception is excellent, and the battery life is rumored to be quite good. Plus, it supports MP3 ringtones, which means I can finally invest in this little beauty from Eddie Izzard (click "#3" on the fake phone to the left). So the phone is due here at Casa Gavin on Monday, and then I get to go through the fun process of trying it out and making sure it works as advertised. Oh, and the reason I'm not buying the iTunes phone? Simple. It's not compelling. At $250, it's expensive (hell, you can get a high-end nano for that!), and still 2/3 the size of a Treo (read: kinda large), but without any of the smartphone functionality. Basically, it's neither fish nor fowl. And I think it will die a quiet death after the holiday season. (The nano, on the other hand, is gonna sell a million billion units.) I'll keep you posted on the v551. Fingers crossed, right? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 10, 2005 1:59 PM. August 17, 2005v2I'm pleased to note the launch today of the new-n'-improved gavinshearer.com. I've been using one of the stock MovableType templates ("Squash") since the launch of this blog, and have found it to be pretty constraining in terms of the ability to add content categories, features, and whatnot. The intent of this new look is to give me a foundation upon which I can roll out periodic, incremental improvements. I've also been working on some behind-the-scenes stuff to ensure XHTML compatibility and clean rendering on a variety of browsers. A lot of that work isn't very sexy, but the anal-retentive Web developer in me kind of insists on that sort of thing. Hopefully, y'all will like it. Please let me know what you think! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 17, 2005 11:25 AM. August 11, 2005My Evening With iChat Given my recent Mambo project launch, that someone would be me. Tim lives in Anacortes, Dave is holed up out in Issaquah, and I'm in Seattle. Rather than try to work out some kind of in-person, we instead opted to try a multipoint video conference, hosted by Tim (you need a G5 processor to do multipoint iChat, and neither Dave nor I have burly-enough machines. A point, truth be told, of which Tim reminded us. Several times.). So what did I think? I think it's easily the best, most productive use of videoconferencing I've ever seen. A lot of my friends have iSights, so I videochat a lot. But most of this conversation is point-to-point, one-on-one stuff, which makes it (more or less) a glorified VoIP call. It's cool, it's fun, and it's nice to see the whites of someone's eyes (I love videochatting with my Dad, for instance, because I don't see him in person very much). But it's not necessarily a "better" experience than using the telephone. With a multiparty chat, however, all that changes. I think everyone's been on a bad conference call at some point in their lives. You have some group of people - 4 or more - who are "on the call" to talk about some issue. The problem is that nobody can see one another - no body language, no visual cues, nothing - to know who's actually paying attention or involved in the meeting. As a result, conference calls tend to be herky-jerky conversations, punctuated by long, dead silences. They're not very helpful, but they're inexpensive relative to the cost of getting disparate groups of people in a room. So we use them. With multiparty videochat, the world changes. You CAN see if people are nodding/smiling, frowning/confused, or surfing for porn while the conversation progresses. Hand gestures are possible (including - yes, Marnie - "finger quotes"). The conversation crackles; you get more done. And even though our chat was kinda blurry (Tim, despite his burly G5, apparently has a cheap-ass Internet connection), it didn't matter. The necessary visual information came through just fine. (Oh, and the reason there's four of us in the photo above is that we brought Richard in midway for some technical advising.) I wish we'd had something like this back in the Media Access days, because it would have made our remote collaboration about 1,000% better. It's honestly that good. (It also makes me want to buy a G5, but that's a whole other story.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 11, 2005 10:30 AM. August 8, 2005Google Maps Coolness #2,499So Allie posted an innocuous little link in the comments earlier today: Compliments of Metafilter - you are so going to love this: So I followed the link and checked it out ... and I have just two words to say: the first is "Holy"; the second is "Cow." The "pedometer" Web site uses Google Maps (like everything else, it seems) to let you measure off mileage for your walks or runs. You start anywhere you like; double-click on a point of origin, and then double-click again at your next turn or whatnot. Google maps the route as a line, measures the distance, and even - wait for it - computes your calories for you. This is so unbelievably cool, I can't even tell you. As my distances get longer and longer, finding appropriate runs gets tricky. One option is to find a course I know well (e.g., Greenlake) and then start banging out the multiples. Unsurprisingly, that gets pretty tedious pretty fast. Another option is to drive a hypothetical course in your car (or on your bike), measuring out distances. This is quite time-consuming, however, and tends to reduce one's willingness to explore new routes. So this pedometer site is a godsend. Seriously - if you're a runner or a walker (or just a curious urban dweller), check it out. One final cool thing - after you've built a route, the site lets you capture the thing as a URL, and even works with TinyURL to collapse it down into something manageable. So I have a 16-mile run coming up on the 20th, and I decided to map it out. Starting from my place, I'll run to Greenlake, run around the lake, then head south to the Burke-Gilman, and then finally East along the trail until I hit a good loopback point, finally ending right behind U Village. And, as a picture is worth a thousand words, you can check it out for yourself. Will the wonders of the Google Maps API ever cease? Seriously. This is blowing my mind. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 8, 2005 6:38 PM. August 6, 2005Stopping TrackBack SpamSpammers have discovered TrackBack. My TrackBack feature first got hit with spam a few weeks ago, and the trickle has turned in to a torrent - I awoke this morning to find eight (!) new junk entries, ranging from "online casino" to "phobia" to "tattoo flash". After doing some digging, I found, not surprisingly, that others are being plagued with the same problem. So I've started banning IP addresses from spammers, and will be looking to implement "Spam Lookup" on the site in an attempt to stop this garbage. Let me know if you run in to any problems. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 6, 2005 8:12 AM. August 1, 2005Requiem For A BookmarkMy mostly-wonderful experience at the AmeriTel Inn in CDA has been mauled, beaten, and set on fire by the technical cluelessness of their IT staff. Upon returning to Casa Gavin last night, I plugged in the PowerBook and flopped down to see what was going on in the world vis-a-vis my RSS reader. NetNewsWire had been having a series of Bad Hair Days in CDA, which I attributed to the weirdness/flakiness of the AmeriTel Internet connection. Now home, I figured that the software would gulp down the pure, unfiltered oxygen of a Blue State Internet feed and give me hundreds - nay, thousands! - of new articles to feast on. Uh, yeah. Didn't happen. Like a lot of places offering free Internet access, AmeriTel uses an authenticated proxy server to allow guests to the Internet. In plain English, this means you can't just jack in to the wall socket and start surfing. Instead, you jack in and their system throws you an Internet address on their local network. You only get access to the public Internet after you visit a special Web page that they operate, where you (usually) click the "I Agree" box on on their Terms n' Conditions page. Attempts to visit the public Internet without going to the Terms n' Conditions page will result in your being taken to the Terms n' Conditions page, without exception. All your base are belong to us. OK, fine, all well and good - except that the bozos who have set up the AmeriTel network decided it would be ... what? funny? ... to use a frickin' 301 "Moved Permanently" redirect instead of a type 302 "Found". For all you non-geeks out there, that means that when the AmeriTel system redirects you to their little Terms n' Conditions page, they send a signal to your Web browser that says, "Oh, hey - that page you wanted? It's moved, forever and ever, to this new location. Which is our Terms n' Conditions page." And many, many browsers will see that 301 error and go, "Oh, gosh! That page moved? Let me update my bookmarks list. That way, the next time my user tries to go to the site, they're taken to the new, permanent location!" (Permanent. As in, not temporary. As in, totally inappropriate when people are just passin' through town and want to use your connectivity for a few days.) One such browser - a friendly, tries-to-do-the-right thing kinda piece of software - is NetNewsWire. And so there I sat, in Casa Gavin, staring, slack-jawed, at my now-lobotomized RSS reader, as it tried - vainly - to get the latest from Slog from the AmeriTel Terms n' Conditions page. And AppleInsider. And Steve Sinofsky. And Daring Fireball. And so on. It had wiped out all my previous URLs for those pages, and replaced them - each and every one - with the new, permanent location. Which, for some reason, was not giving back well-formed XML. (Duh!) So that was that. Makes for a fun evening, doesn't it? Trying to recreate your bookmarks from scratch? Hoo boy, it's a real blast. Whee. The moral of the story (aside from the obvious one, which is "don't hire asshats to design your LAN architecture") is that bookmarks are precious. They are, in a very real sense, the way we think about the Internet - the resources we prize, the places we go to extract meaning from the ether. Robbed of my bookmarks, I felt ... I dunno. Not naked, exactly, but very much like it. Back up children, early and often. It also goes to show how an innocuous (I assume it was innocuous) technical decision can have unintended personal consequences. (DAMN them!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 1, 2005 10:34 PM. July 18, 2005Blogging: The First AnniversaryAs of last Thursday, the 14th, I've been blogging for one year. Blogging is writing. And a good blog, like a good story or narrative, needs to know what it's about - who the audience is - in order to sustain itself. (Susan Solomon wrote a bit about this in her recent essay, "Don't Bore Me With Your Blog"; worth a read.) I felt like my internship experience last summer was a terrific opportunity to launch a blog and get my "topic" or "focus" for free. Hence, the site went live as a "Microsoft MBA Intern" repository - my experiences going to Microsoft, working at Microsoft, and trying to decipher Microsoft. I found myself getting in to the habit of writing, and was also surprised to find that it was somewhat addictive. Once my internship ended, the blog morphed into a second-year UW MBA thing. And now it's "The Summer Adventures Of A Once And Future (Product) Planner" ... which is about as self-indulgent as you can get, right? To my mind, the blog has been a very, very good thing. Being a blogger has led to some interesting moments at parties. Case in point: I met Guido at a party at Cintra's about six months ago. He's a big nerd (like me) and we quickly hit it off. So when I was at Cintra's on the 4th of July, Guido came up to me and said, "Man, I've been reading your blog. I know we only met the one time at that dinner party, but I feel like I know you." And from there, we launched into an animated, excellent conversation. (Similarly, Chris Howard and Ben Lower, two incoming UW MBAs (Class of 2007) each looked me up on campus after reading my stuff.) It's a little unnerving to have people you've just met hit you with, "So, congrats on your half marathon!" or whatever. But it's also interesting, because it tends to start your conversations at a level far beyond the "normal" cocktail party chatter. But where do we go from here? Topic-wise, I am planning to restart the Microsoft theme once I return to Planning. Microsoft is an interesting company at an interesting point in history, and Office, as one of its most popular and useful products, is facing a slew of unique challenges and opportunities. Product Planning is at the forefront of dealing with that stuff, and I, for one, am fascinated by the task. I hope that I can share some of the adventure with you all ... or at least, those parts that aren't covered by nondisclosure agreements. I'm also planning to write more about, as it's been put by a few of my friends, "entrepreneurs that sell out." Microsoft, as a 50,000-person business, is going to require a way of working - of getting things done - that is distinctly different than the "14-person startup" thing I've been doing for my entire career. Again, I'm curious to see the advantages (and disadvantages) of that way of working, and will tease out any insights I can. I'm hard at work on a new look-and-feel for the site, and will be rolling out some new features and things as my time permits. But, I have to say to you, dear readers - what do you want? Right now, I'm getting about a hundred unique visitors a week, and I'd like to know what you all are looking for. Let me know! UPDATE, September 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 18, 2005 9:57 PM. July 14, 2005We Have Liftoff!Well, after weeks of work (and a rather intense past few days), it thrills me to no end to announce that my content-management project - the redesign and rebuild of FundAdvice.com - went live at 10:45 PM tonight. There's a bunch of stuff still to do - some small niggling bits, some layout bits, and so on - but enough of the functionality, look, and so on were there that we elected to put it out there and let real users bang on it. And it's about damn time. Take a look and let me know what you think! (And, as soon as this link-test finishes, I'm goin' to bed. Tomorrow is all about putting out fires...) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 14, 2005 11:21 PM. July 12, 2005"This Net Screams"NetworkWorld has a cool story about Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster ... from an IT perspective: "For starters, the Dragster is wired with 560,000 feet of copper cable to carry back performance data from 300 redundant pairs of sensors located throughout the track and engine room. The majority of the sensors are proximity switches that can measure the movement of the metal coaster car over the track. There are also thermal temperature and pneumatic sensors. If any one of the sensor pairs fails to match the readout of the other, the Dragster is shut down for a safety check...." Coaster people tend to fall into two warring camps about how they prefer their thrill rides - "steel" vs. "woodies". This is, in many respects, pure aesthetics (Pepsi or Coke? Mac or PC? VW or Toyota?), but, as a steel guy, I will tell you that I love the precision with which modern thrill machines are built. That said, I really, really like the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk ... even if it's been exposed to ocean air, rain, and salt water for the last 80+ years (opened May 17, 1924!). Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 12, 2005 5:39 PM. July 4, 2005We Welcome Your CommentsI took advantage of the low-flow holiday weekend phone calls n' email and devoted my morning to a bunch o' work on the blog. The most important new features are TrackBack and - at long last - comments. If you want to add comments to a post, you'll need a TypeKey account. I have gone back and enabled comments for every post since July 1st. Please let me know if you run in to any strangeness. I've seen some JavaScript oddities already, and am actively working to squash them. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 4, 2005 2:20 PM. July 3, 2005BusMonsterGuido sent me a link yesterday to a kick-ass new site that fuses Google Maps, Metro's Trip Planner, and the UW ITS "MyBus" web services. It's called BusMonster. (And it's not compatible with Safari yet, so you'll need Firefox or IE to see it.) Essentially, the site allows you to search for bus information in King County. Simply type in the route number you're interested in (e.g., "43") and the system plots the travel path for the bus in question. It's not unlike the map you can get from Metro, except that BusMonster does a better job of putting the route map in context of the rest of the city (bodies of water, nearby streets, and so on). BusMonster also lets you search for a place (e.g., "Safeco Field"), at which point you can see what routes are nearby. But BusMonster moves into the "astoundingly cool" category through the interactive, live nature of its map. First of all, the map uses live GPS data to plot the actual position of the bus on the route. You can see where the bus(es) is(are), right now, this second. Second, you can click on any number of stops for more information about the routes that stop there, and when the next one is due. Again, all live. This thing is hot. I got pretty excited back in April about the Craigslist/Google fusion, but this takes it to a whole new level. The developer, Chris Smoak, has a blog. I'm so gonna use this thing. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 3, 2005 10:18 AM. June 29, 2005Vonage SimulRingMy love affair with Vonage continues. One of the features they offer is called "SimulRing", which allows you to have calls to your Vonage number also ring up to 5 other numbers simultaneously. In English, this means that my friends can now call my home number, at which point both my home phone and cell phone will ring. If I'm home, I take the call there. If I'm out, I take the call on the mobile. I set it up this morning, tested it. Works great. So cool. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 29, 2005 10:55 AM. Automatic For The PeopleMy content management project has shifted into high gear. I've written before about trying to find a good, friendly CMS; I started with eZ Publish, and have since settled on Mambo. I've spent the last several weeks on the learning curve, customizing the installation and dealing with the billions of little niggly technical problems that cropped up. And I'm pleased to report that the new system - content engine and customized presentation layer - is ready to rock and roll. Now we just have to get the content into this sucker. This is tricky. The site I'm migrating has about 1,000 HTML files, most of which need to be brought over. These HTML files are a mishmash of code and standards; they were authored in a Web-page builder product, so they're bloated with FONT tags and have all kinds of tag-nesting issues. It's certainly not feasible to do this work by hand, so my challenge has been to find a way of automating everything. The specific steps include:
BBEdit can do all of these steps for me, but not all parts of the application are AppleScriptable. So I found myself exploring the use of Automator (and a host of other options) to allow me to daisy-chain my steps together. The solution I came up with (Khan would undoubtedly call it "a hack") was to use a product called QuicKeys to glue all the steps together. QuicKeys lets me build a set of instructions - part AppleScript, part window-and-menu manipulation - and record it as a macro. It's pretty wicked. Now that my programming and testing are done, I can literally push a buttton and watch BBEdit go through a series of gyrations in about a second. When it's complete, I just copy-paste the output (with occasional light corrections) into Mambo. We're launching July 11. I love computers. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 29, 2005 10:04 AM. June 26, 2005Old And Busted: Sony. New Hotness: Canon.
Well, I acted on the impulse, replacing my 2001-era Sony CyberShot DSC-P5 with a 2005-era Canon PowerShot SD400. I've had the new kit for a little less than a week, and have carted it everywhere - Rattlesnake Lake, around Seattle, and up to Vancouver. I can tell you, unreservedly, that I'm thrilled I spent the money. My criterial for the camera have remained basically unchanged since 2001: I want a small, light, automatic camera that can fit in a pocket and take great photos. I have found that portable, slip-it-in-the-pocket technology (e.g., iPods) tends to get used, whereas larger, bulkier equipment (e.g., the "photo rig" that most people have at home, with lenses and film rolls and whatnot) often gathers dust. So being able to actually use the silly thing by having it on my person is a very, very big deal. So with that in mind, let's take a quick trip through what four years of product evolution gets you these days.
The Canon PowerShot SD400 just rocks. It's small, it's light, it takes great photos and I'm totally in love with it. It's an excellent unit, and I can't recommend it more highly. And big, big thanks to Jeff who steered me in the direction of Canon; I was considering another Sony, but he made an impassioned argument for Canon which, as it happens, was spot on. (I can't wait to fill up my iPod Photo with pictures!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 26, 2005 8:50 PM. June 21, 2005Outed By iChat!
So there I am this morning, minding my own business and tending to e-mail when Jeff decided to hassle me: "Spandau Ballet? Dude, you are aging yourself..." Ack! "True" was playing in my Party Shuffle. Damn! I'd been outed! Thus began a fairly lively conversation between the two of us where we agreed: a) Sharing your musical tastes with friends and associates is a Good Thing, but; (I should like to point out that the Zeppelin decision came from Jeff. And, as old as Spandau might make me ... dude - Zeppelin? What are you, like, 50? Why not suggest some Rolling Stones or something? Pat Boone? *grin*) Seriously - I'd love this feature. I think it would be hysterically funny, because once people *knew* that the presence of the bogus song name indicated you were listening to something deemed socially unacceptable, they'd want to know what the heck it was (IM: "Stairway to Heaven"? Hardly. I bet you've got Vanilla Ice on over there!"). Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 21, 2005 6:37 PM. June 3, 2005June CleaningI invested a good chunk of my morning working on the blog. Most of the effort was dusting and cleaning (fixed some stale/broken links, etc.), but I have also turned on categories and category browsing (a common request). I tried to do an upgrade to MovableType 3.17, but marsEdit started throwing XML-RPC errors. I don't know what that's all about, so I've reverted to 3.14. If you notice weirdness with anything, please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 3, 2005 11:04 AM. May 26, 2005Learning To MamboI spent my morning doing an up-close-n'-personal install and customization with a new content management package called Mambo. I'm blown away. As my consulting project has deepened, my relationship with eZ Publish has soured. Despite its early promise, I have found the process of customizing eZ to be excruciatingly painful. Yes, it has some excellent features. But the day-to-day experience of using the damn thing always wound up frustrating me; its layers upon layers of features (and, therefore, complexity) meant that the rabbit hole kept getting deeper. Interestingly, as I looked for solutions to my eZ Publish problems, I kept running in to blog entries from others who were experiencing my same issues. This made me more confident that the problem was the product, and not just some bizarre learning curve I was on. In fact, many (most) of these folks were jumping/had jumped to another CMS, and the vast majority of those were using Mambo. So I tried it. Short version: it's got the features I need (open, customizable, support for PDF, RSS and podcasting, WYSIWYG editing, search statistics, Urchin compatibility, etc.). It's wicked fast. There's a thriving third-party community building modules and add-ons. And the interface for the administrator(s) (my client) is MUCH friendlier and cleaner. If you want to check out the admin interface, click here (opens in a new window). Username and password are both 'admin'. So we'll try this for a while - but so far, it's astounding. UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 26, 2005 2:35 PM. May 22, 2005Seattle's Muni WiFi: Functional, But Needs Work
The process could be easier. The network itself seems to be kind of faint: I'm sitting next to a window, and only getting two bars' of strength. On top of that, it's not an "open" system from a click-the-menu-and-go standpoint; instead, like the Spokane system, there's a terms-of-service document you need to read and agree to before they let you out into the wider network. Problem is, the authentication system they use for the TOS process is wonky. Safari simply wouldn't deal with it, giving me "reset by peer" errors. So I switched to Firefox, which worked, but not before the browser threw me three different "WARNING! Certificate mismatch!" errors. I gotta say, for a service that's supposed to "stimulate economic development", this thing could be a lot, lot easier to use. But it does work. And it's free! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 22, 2005 10:25 AM. May 19, 2005PI: Seattle Launches Test Of Free Wi-Fi ServiceThe PI is reporting that, as of yesterday, parts of Columbia City, the University District, and four parks (Westlake, Victor Steinbrueck, Freeway, Occidental) are now enabled with free municipal WiFi: "[Mayor] Nickels said free Internet access in neighborhoods is a way to help small businesses attract customers. Several cities across the country offer or are developing free wireless Internet zones. Spokane last year started offering free wireless Internet service within 100 blocks of downtown." Cool! It's about time we dipped our toe in this water. I'll check this out when I'm near campus tomorrow. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 19, 2005 10:26 AM. May 9, 2005PowerBook Is SOLDWell, that was fast: my PowerBook sold on eBay last night. Thanks to everyone who expressed interest, but the almighty "Buy It Now" option trumped. UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 9, 2005 3:23 PM. May 8, 2005PowerBook For Sale
It's got AirPort, 512 MB of RAM, a 60 GB hard drive, and about two months left on its AppleCare contract. Fabulous machine. (And you can "Buy It Now" for $600!) UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 8, 2005 7:00 PM. May 6, 2005Link IssuesI'm doing some maintenance on the blog tonight, removing and updating old links. If you run in to anything strange (broken links, or non-response from the Web server), please let me know. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 6, 2005 9:24 PM. May 4, 2005Stopping SpamScientific American has a fascinating, six-page, long-form article about spam: what it is, why it exists, and how some of the best minds in computer science, government, and the Internet community are working to reverse its growing plague. If you're at all interested in the intersection of open systems, inherent trust, commerce, automation and government jurisdiction ... it's a must-read. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 4, 2005 7:13 PM. Qwest Is In Trouble: Exhibit B
This is cool. Apparently, Seattle-area ISP Speakeasy is using WiMax - not standard 802.11x. This means the WiFi equipment in your current laptop won't work. If you want to connect to their network, you buy some special equipment, plug it in to your LAN, and you're good to go. The broadcasting tower covers a five-mile radius, which gets downtown, Queen Anne, and Cap Hill - pretty much most of the city. Think about this. High-speed wireless Internet is being beamed out all over the city. I know Spokane does this right now, but this is a huge PR coup for Speakeasy, and points to some interesting possibilities for synergy between ISPs and real estate companies (e.g., you provide the space, and we'll provide the bandwidth). High-speed Internet, no wires needed. I don't think the phone company is going to like this too much. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 4, 2005 2:13 PM. Blueteething
I hate wires, so over the weekend I invested in an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. This morning, I returned them. Bluetooth may be a fine technology for connecting cell phones and cameras to your Mac, and it gets raves from Khan (he uses his phone as a clicker and iSyncs over Bluetooth all the time.) However, as a technology for input devices, Bluetooth blows. The wireless connection has far more latency than a traditional wire, which leads to a feeling of the keyboard being sluggish - slow responses, slow key repeat rates, and so on. Further, since the Bluetooth devices are battery-powered, the designers of the keyboard and mouse have the devices take little naps from time to time to conserve power. This means that the "sluggigh" feeling is even more pronounced, because you put your hand on the mouse and the cursor doesn't move right away. This means you move the mouse more in response ("Hey! Wake up!"), which culminates in the cursor doing this wild dance around your screen when the signals finally arrive in the Mac's CPU. Sheesh. What a pain. Props to the folks at the University Bookstore, who were about as fantastic with my return as anyone could hope for. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 4, 2005 1:59 PM. May 3, 2005The Vonage Experience
As a geek, I'm often enthusiastic about new technologies or services, but know, deep in the back of my mind, that problems usually come with the territory. Marketing people have an astounding ability to paint a pretty picture of Life With Our Product, but when the thing actually arrives at your house you notice the warts. Then it's off to phone tech support, RTFM, and on and on until you reach a comfortable truce with the device. So, in truth, when I ordered Vonage, I expected that the promise - unlimited local and national phone service for $25 a month over your high-speed Internet connection - would fall a bit short. Calls might sound tinny or hollow. Calls might not go through. There might be unacceptable latency or delays. The equipment might be a Rube Goldberg device that takes two weeks to get running. I wasn't sure what it would be, but mentally I was ready for all of it. Here's the really shocking thing: Vonage "just works." Here's the process. Honest.
No, really. It worked just like that. No fuss, no mess, no hassle. No need to call them and "set up" my service (the equipment was preconfigured). It was, quite honestly, spooky-easy. So I called friends. I called friends in California and Texas. I called my Dad. I called people all over. The call quality is fabulous. I plugged in my fax machine and faxed some stuff. Worked perfectly. It's all just so, like, works-out-of-the-box and does-what-the-marketing-literature-says-it-will that it becomes nearly boring. I can't even tell you how amazing that is. Some coolness about Vonage: your call records - who called you, who you called - is available, live, through their Web site. You can do call forwarding, set up and check voicemail through the Web site. You get an e-mail when voicemail is left for you (uber-handy if your Vonage phone is at home and you're at work/school). Essentially, your phone service is now a Web-managed application. So - wow. Just wow. Eventually, more people are going to figure out how killer this is. Qwest is in big, big trouble. UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 3, 2005 1:30 PM. April 25, 2005VonageCell service in my new place is not very good (much as I am tempted to blame Verizon, the problem seems consistent across cell providers). Therefore, much as I might like to be cellular-only, I've been thinking that I need to get a landline. This is a problem. Our local phone company is the ever-evil Qwest, who, despite the untold millions they're spending on their "Spirit Of Service" ads, still cannot seem to spend $0.05 on better training for their call-center staffs. (Oh, and good luck with the accounting scandals, guys.) My buddy Khan has Vonage, and I've been curious to try it. Vonage competes with Qwest in the local phone business by using VoIP. Effectively, I plug my phone in to the Vonage "box", which then plugs in to my Comcast cable Internet service. Conceptually, it's wicked cool. Local calls plus national long distance for a flat rate of $25. How can you not love it? But the devil is in the details with these things, so Khan and I engaged in a lengthy iChat technical support session, wherein I asked him about a bazillion stupid questions. As always, Khan had great answers, but he did recommend that I replace the basic (free) Vonage "box" with an all-singing, all-dancing combo WiFi-Ethernet-router-Vonage device from Linksys (the WRT54GP2). I'm loathe to swap out network equipment willy-nilly, so I did a little more digging on the Linksys - and sadly, the reviews were terrible. I found this blog entry from Michael Geary, at which point I pretty much decided that the Linksys was a loser. I've gone ahead and ordered Vonage service, and opted for the free box (sorry, Khan). I'll see how it goes, and will post once I've tried the service for a while. UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 25, 2005 8:42 PM. April 24, 2005Eyepatch? Check. Parrot? Check.So as I'm waiting for the nice man from Comcast to arrive, it turns out that there are a bunch 'o wireless networks near my place. Sitting at my PC, I spy six different (public) SSID's - of these, all but two are available without a password. And, of course, these two are the faintest of the bunch. The good news is that my Vaio gets signal from one of them (network: "linksys"), and I'm now able to (slowly) get my mail and (slowly) surf the web courtesy of some anonymous neighbor. As Deets would say: "Arrrr...." Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 24, 2005 6:22 PM. April 14, 2005Content ManagementOne of my consulting projects right now involves taking a sprawling, content-heavy Web site and bringing it out of 1998 and in to 2005. The site needs to be refreshed, reorganized, given a new look and feel, and a modern codebase. Part of this process involves replacing their current, static publishing approach with a content management system, or CMS. A CMS will allow them to do all their edits in the browser, make immediate changes to one file (which then propagates to all the relevant pages), and so on. This blog uses Movable Type (a great, lightweight CMS that's perfect for ... weblogs). However, MT is too dinky for what we need to do here. So I spent my morning shopping for CMS applications, evaluating them against a list of criteria I'd developed to meet the client's needs. Hoo, boy. It's a crazy market! After poking around with about 20 different systems (everything from PhpWebSite to Midgard Project, Simian Satellite, WebEdition, Land Down Under, netEDITOR, TYPO3 and Nuke), I finally found a product that really curls my toes - eZ Publish. Available under the GPL, this app is totally open - written in PHP, relies on a MySQL backend, Apache Web server, and UNIX underpinning (the current infrastructure is Solaris). It comes with source, so it can be modified from here to New Jersey. It makes extensive use of an object model for content, so we can use it to manage all kinds of different pieces of information. Its browser tools are cross-platform, so they will work on Macs and PCs, in both IE and Firefox. So far, it's exceeding my expectations. (And it's by these folks in Norway! I have family in Norway! Connection? Hm ...) Anyway, I'm so having an "I Love The Internet!" moment. Think about this. A small company in a foreign country is able to leverage a global network to distribute its product, add-on products, and even documentation (they have a book on Amazon Unbelievable. And so, so, so cool. UPDATE, December 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 14, 2005 6:37 PM. March 28, 2005Full Text Feeds Now AvailableTodd wrote me tonight, asking if I could expand my RSS feeds: "I've subscribed to your blog via RSS, and I'm reading it via NewsGator. Unfortunately, your feed cuts off posts just as they get interesting and I have to click through to read the rest." Sorry about that, man. Optimizing my RSS feed was something I've been meaning to do for a while, but never found the time. (I'd also like to include images, so that's on the to-do list). Anyhow, it's fixed. RSS was truncating my excerpts at 40 words; they'll now truncate at 2500. (My verbosity might be high, but I kinda doubt it's that high.) Let me know if you experience any weirdness. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 28, 2005 7:27 PM. March 19, 2005Gauging Google; Or, Why Ajax Kicks Ass
The latest in cocktail party conversation among the digerati is guessing what the heck Google is up to. This is both natural and historical. Google's star is on the rise: their stock is up, the press loves them, consumers "get" what the company does, and the story of how the firm was founded (two smart guys meet in college, work hard, and become billionaires) plays right in to the mythology of the American Dream. It worked for Jobs in the 70s, Gates in the 80s, Andressen in the 90s, and now, well, it's Sergey and Larry. However, getting such a rush of focus and attention in such a short span of time tends to compress and distort the smallest of signals or moves. Certainly this is true of Microsoft, whose business activities, it is believed, are part of some coordinated master plan to rule the universe (heck, my very first blog entry was about how the tortured reputation of Microsoft effectively prevented me from being able to process and understand Microsoft for the first month after my arrival.) So it is with Google. As Google Labs throws off interesting and intriguing new projects, the Web picks 'em up and begins strategizing about how each of them fits in to Google's Master Plan For World Domination (tm). While I don't necessarily believe that Google has a master plan (I mean, Sergey and Larry are clearly smart guys, but they don't strike me as the SPECTRE types), I do think that Google has stumbled on to (or created) something that is pretty damn revolutionary. At its core, Ajax is an entirely new way to develop for the Web. It allows for the creation of software that is interactive, fast, and lively inside a Web browser window. Consider. In the "traditional" method of Web development, the Web browser requests a page from the server. The server obliges, sending along the HTML and graphics, which the browser then assembles in the proper way. At this point, the transaction is over, the connection between the server and the browser terminated. From the standpoint of the server, the page is delivered, and it doesn't think anything more of it. The browser, too, has forgotten that the server even exists - until the user clicks on another link, at which point the process starts all over again. This approach to Web development is certainly usable - heck, it's taken us pretty far in the last decade - but suffers from some issues. One such issue is that it feels pretty clunky, relative to desktop software. Most desktop software feels fluid, seamless - windows, pulldowns, and other visual elements can come and go without the entire screen refreshing. On the Web, however, the whole page needs to reload in order to update one small element. This is particularly visible in mapping Web sites. Look at this link for Yahoo! Maps (opens in a new window). Now, change your magnification level or click on the arrows at the top or bottom of the screen to "scroll". The entire page will need to refresh. This is because the graphic you're looking at is not, in any way, "live" - the server delivered it, the browser has it, and there's nothing else going on. Now, look at the same link in Google Maps (opens in a new window). A few things should pop out. One is that the Google map is a lot prettier (this is a byproduct , not the point, of the Ajax technology, but it's still relevant). The second, and less obvious, is that the map will update in real time. Changing the magnification level will result in immediate, fluid changes to the mapping area. And finally - this is killer- you can click in the map area and drag it around. Google Maps is the poster child for the Ajax development approach. Gmail is another. Effectively, Google has developed a core competence in delivering highly interactive Web applications that look and feel extraordinarily like desktop applications. So the $100,000,000 question is - if you can do this in the browser, will users still care about the desktop? In other words, is the OS still important? Or is it, as Marc Andressesn once famously said, "a partially debugged set of device drivers?" This is not academic. Today, tens of millions of people use Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo Mail to do e-mail. They don't use a desktop e-mail program, like Apple Mail or Eudora or Outlook Express. My girlfriend is Exhibit A in this scenario; she uses Hotmail (both at home and away), and prefers to "keep it simple" by only having one interface to her e-mail. The interface is consistent whether or not she's on her 12" PowerBook, borrowing a PC while she's at a job, or in some Internet Cafe in Italy. Because it resides in the browser, Hotmail is Hotmail is Hotmail. Webmail is one thing. Desktop applications, like word processors and spreadsheets, are another. Or photo sharing applications (iPhoto, anyone?). Or entirely new classes of applications that blend the best of the network with the best of the desktop. Stuff we haven't even thought of yet. Stuff we'll all wonder how we could possibly live without once we see it. (I call that the "Netscape Moment", and and it came for me in September 1994). I'm not saying that Google is getting in to the Office business. I am saying that, with Ajax, Google probably can if it wants to. While there's an essay over at DaltonLP.com thinks that Google is not pursuing any kind of grand, unifying strategy, there are some really, really, really interesting articles ("The Secret Source Of Google's Power") that seem to confirm that Google's big interest is in getting as much as possible off the PC and on to the Web. So while not a "grand plan" in the Now-Witness-The-Power-Of-This-Fully-Armed-And-Operational-Battle-Station kind of way, it's certainly a strategic direction, a point of view. And that's notable. So. If Google can successfully deliver a satisfactory, Web-based word processor or spreadsheet, will it be good enough to get users to try it? Before Ajax, I'd have said no way. But now? Well, the game seems to have changed. Many would point out that one major drawback of Web applications is that you have to be connected to the Internet to use them. No connectivity = no productivity. A corollary of this is that your connection speed has a direct impact on the usability of the app. (Modems suck.) Therefore, Web applications seem to be "for" those with reliable broadband. However, this is not a small market. Anecdotal information from some of my consulting clients show that about 70% of the market has broadband right now. This is far, far higher than I would have believed two years ago. And on the upside, a Web application gives you centralized data storage. And worldwide accessibility to your stuff from any PC, anywhere, anytime. This is not a trivial benefit. When my PowerBook died, my data very nearly went with it. I was forced to do the USB Keychain Shuffle, schlepping data from my old machine to whatever computers I could get access to (such as my Vaio, or machines on campus). This then meant that those computers had to have compatible software (e.g., Office) ... which they don't always do. Putting the data on a remote server and making the Web the primary interface removes all of these challenges. Kind of like Webmail. Of course, if I'm Google, I'd be worried about what might happen to the Web browser if I'm doing all this bodacious JavaScript-and-XML programming work. So, if I were prudent, I might make sure some smart Firefox programmers were on the payroll. And I might even think about putting out my own, Google-branded Web browser as a hedge against my stuff not working with another, dominant browser. But that's just me. Thoughts? UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 19, 2005 3:22 PM. February 28, 2005In Praise Of DMSGood news this morning, in contrast to my Verizon experience... I have been doing business for many, many years with an outfit called Data Memory Systems in New Hampshire. They stock all kinds of RAM chips for desktops, laptops, printers, you name it. Their prices are good and their service is great. One thing I love about DMS is that they have a lifetime memory repplacement guarantee on their certified memory. That means when a chip goes bad (as sometimes happens), they'll swap it out for one that works - no charge, no hassle. You don't even pay shipping. This has been relevant to me a few times over the years, and DMS has, without fail, been friendly and wonderful each time. This morning, I had to call in to get the Bad RAM chip from my dead PowerBook replaced. Despite the fact that I bought it in July 2002, the DMS people were just fabulous. My new RAM is on the way right now, second-day air. (It will likely get here before my PowerBook gets back from AppleCare.) So: if you're shopping for RAM, I can't recommend them more highly. They stand behind the promises they make to customers. Which, I guess, is unusual these days. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 28, 2005 10:54 AM. February 20, 2005Pop-Ups Are BackDammit, dammit, dammit. Slashdot has a thread on the return of pop-up advertisements on the Web (MacFixIt also has a thread going). This is classic biological behavior at work. The pop-up code, so effectively eradicated by blockers in browsers and third-party toolsets, have evolved to find a way around the blockers. Personally, I've seen more pop-ups in the last week (using Safari) than I've seen in the last six months. Score one for the bad guys. Let's hope some good brains can figure out how to thwart this new code. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 20, 2005 7:32 PM. GetSmarter
Last month's issue of Wired magazine had a blurb about SmarterChild, which is an IM bot that answers your questions. I've been playing wiith it a bit, and it's really cool. Unlike Eliza or other (crappy) AI technologies, SmarterChild uses AI to parse a text-based query into a Web services request. In English: you can say, "Where is In Good Company playing?" and SmarterChild will respond to you with showtimes in your local area. SmarterChild can get you movie showtimes, sports team schedules, horoscopes, headlines, weather, and dictionary lookups. When Mary and I went out to the movies last night, I used it to get a quick read on showtimes. I found it to be fast and accurate - unlike the cumbersome experience of using a site like Moviefone. If you want to try it, just add the AIM handle "smarterchild" to your buddy list. The first time you message the account, you'll get a terms of service and whatnot; after that, give it your ZIP code and it gets a whole lot smarter about how to help you. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 20, 2005 7:31 PM. February 10, 2005Power Has ReturnedAt long last, my new PowerBook is here, configured, and purring. It's wicked. I wrote earlier about how, from a specifications standpoint, this new machine is vastly superior to the one it's replacing (and, of course, this one has the advantage of actually working properly as well). The experience of using it, however, is something altogether different. The engineering on this thing is incredible - it feels smooth, snappy, sleek. In terms of "road feel" it's like going from a 1990 Volkswagen Jetta to a 2005 BMW. There's a qualitative aspect to it that's utterly seductive. The computer industry in general is pretty poor at conveying the "soft side" of using these machines - the tactile sensation of fingertips on keyboard, the heft of aluminum construction versus plastic, a razor-sharp, bright screen. Given, though, that the industry is trying to figure out its late adolescence, I'm wondering if such issues are going to come front-and-center in the business over the next few years. The automotive industry knows that lots of firms can sell you four tires, an engine and a steering wheel - so instead, they compete instead on brand, styling, color, sensation, snobbery and the smell of "new car." Does it work? Do the math: people are willing to spend upwards of $50,000 for the "right" car, when a Kia can be had for far less money. Is there a lesson here? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 10, 2005 8:39 PM. February 9, 2005The Eagle Has Landed!!Ha! I phoned FedEx to get a package status on my PowerBook, and found out they'd hung on it at the local depo, flagged for delivery tomorrow morning. That meant, according to the guy on the phone, "I could come get it if I wanted to." Um, yeah. Google's Map Service + Flexcar + 1 hour = Happy Camper. The machine is currently copying the contents of my old hard drive. Tonight should be configuration-a-go-go. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 9, 2005 1:28 PM. Gavin Shearer: Apartment A, Seattle, WashingtonDammit, dammit, dammit. The PowerBook saga continues. FedEx called me this morning (hi, FedEx!) to get my street address. Seems that Apple shipped my PowerBook to: Gavin Shearer It boggles the mind. The thing made it all the way from China without having a specific address on it. So FedEx, being the upstanding folks that they are, thought they should call and find out where to deliver it to. Trouble is, this is classified as a "delivery exception" and now there's no guarantee that I'll see the thing today, let alone by 10:30 this morning. I repeat: dammit, dammit, dammit. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 9, 2005 9:43 AM. February 8, 2005Google Maps = New Hot ToyGoogle has a new mapping service! I saw a link to this killer new toy on BoingBoing this morning. It took me all of 3 seconds of goofing around with it to be convinced that this is my new best friend. A few specific killer things: First, it uses DHTML to draw its maps, instead of GIFs (as MapQuest uses, for example). A GIF is a static image, and not super-attractive. Using DHTML allows the Google map to be truly interactive. Just click and drag, and the map updates with your mouse, live, on the fly, in real time. Excellent. Second, the map system allows you to do "local search" at any time. That means you can get a map space (oh, say, of Seattle) and then click the "local search" link. This allows you to search the Yellow Pages for a business within the visible space of the map you're looking at. The search results appear to the right of the map; clicking the result you want will - wait for it - put a cartoon bubble over the relevant physical space, with the name, number, and Web site of the business. Holy crap! This system just rocks. It's limited to the US for the moment, but - wow! Way to go, Google! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 8, 2005 9:31 PM. February 7, 2005When It Absolutely, Positively Has To Be There OvernightFedEx reports that my new PowerBook is (finally) in America - Anchorage, Alaska, as of 2:33 this afternoon. It's gone from Shanghai to the Philippines to Anchorage, and now is (presumably) winging its way to a distribution center somewhere in the continental 48 states. They're promising it by 10:30 on Wednesday. (And not a moment too soon!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 7, 2005 8:58 PM. February 6, 2005Gordon Moore Is A GodMy annoyance over having to buy a new machine has officially given way to wonder. Moore's Law gets a lot of coverage in the technical and popular press, and often is used as a conversational shorthand for "quick, continuous change." However, when you take Moore's out of the abstract (e.g., "Processing power will double every 12 to 18 months") and put it in to the particular (like, oh, a new machine you've just forked out some cash to obtain) the results go from intellectually interesting to jaw-droppingly cool. Consider. I bought my old (now dead) PowerBook in July 2002. It was Apple's midrange machine at the time, and it cost me about $2500. My new computer is the same size (15"), with the same form factor and approximate weight (about 5 lbs.) and the same screen resolution. I'm also spending about $2500 (a little less with the educational discount) for this thing. Now, let's put the machines under the microscope. Consider the following table:
One word: wow. My new machine is, in every measurable way, the superior to its predecessor. In addition to the metrics that existed in 2002 (like processor speed or hard drive space), I can now also take advantage of technologies that just didn't exist a mere 30 months ago (like Bluetooth wireless networking, or a DVD burner that fits in a laptop computer), as well as other innovations that make the product much easier to use (like keyboard backlighting, which is so cool that it almost makes my teeth hurt). Do cars get this good, this fast? No. God, I love my industry. UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 6, 2005 4:13 PM. February 4, 2005It's Away!I just received an e-mail from Apple; my new PowerBook has shipped. According to the FedEx Web site, it was picked up in Shanghai about three hours ago. Whoo-hoo! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 4, 2005 6:54 AM. February 1, 2005So Long, And Thanks For All The FishMy trusty PowerBook G4 is terminally ill. The old boy threw a ... well, something yesterday afternoon, and hasn't been the same since. The machine had been its old, reliable self (no restarts for a good 45-plus days!), and suddenly it just froze. Boom! Solid screen. I wasn't even doing anything strenuous at the time - I was scrolling down on a Web page. Reboot. The computer came back up, ran for about three minutes, and froze again. Reboot. Reboot, reboot, reboot. I tried everything - clean install of the System, (didn't help), hard drive utilities (both lightweight and heavy duty - didn't help), hardware diagnostics (found a bad RAM chip - aha! - but removing the chip didn't help), and so on. I wound up pulling every Mac trick out of my playbook and trying it. No avail. The machine is limping along right now - I can get bits and pieces of uptime out of it, and the data on the drive is still good (thank God). However, I'm wholly dependent on my Vaio for schoolwork (short-term crunch), and I'm just totally out of luck when it comes to my Mac-specific applications (like, oh, my calendar, contact management system, password keeper, newsreader, mail application, yadda yadda). It made for a stressful evening. If you want to see me lose my shit real quick, start messing with my production machine when I'm on deadline. I had Marketing and Finance cases due today, QMETH due tomorrow, Ethics and Finance assignments for Thursday and I'm back to Negotiations for the duration of the weekend. Plus, we've got our brand audit going on and some major team stuff due next week for Ethics. I cannot be without my laptop. In fact, I was about 0.025 miliseconds from jumping in the car to grab a new 'book from the U Village Apple Store. However, compounding this problem is that the availability of new machines is poor right now. Apple introduced revamped PowerBooks on Monday morning, which means the channel is bone-dry for both old and new product. This left me with little choice but to custom-configure a 15" G4 on the Apple Store and order the sucker. 3 - 5 days to build, 5 days to arrive. (No, they didn't have a FedEx option. Dammit.) So. 10 days from now, I should have a new machine, at which point I can suck the brains out of my old one and start the repair process (my old PowerBook is still under warranty). There's a lesson here about the strength of spirit being dependent on the weakness of flesh. I know it. In the meantime, I've never been so un-excited to get a new computer in my whole life. UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 1, 2005 8:40 PM. January 23, 2005Now Running 3.14...I've just completed an upgrade of the blog software to Movable Type 3.14 (from my previous 3.x version). If anyone notices anything out-of-the-ordinary with the blog, please drop me a line. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 23, 2005 8:42 PM. January 20, 2005Moving The Industry ForwardI wanted to expand a little bit on last night's post about the Mac Mini. In it, I complained that "...some modern PC laptops don't come with WiFi, Bluetooth, FireWire, DVD drives, or even modern (2.0-era) USB" which is "...bad for the industry, because it retards technological progress in general." A few of my friends have asked: what the heck am I talking about? Personal computers aren't "for" anything in the same way that other, physical objects are. The last 30 years of personal computing have been, quite literally, a series of people figuring out neat things they can do with their machines and then getting their friends to do it, too. BOOM! Overnight industry. Spreadsheets? Dan Bricklin was a Harvard MBA who got sick of "running the numbers" by hand. Desktop publishing? Paul Brainerd thought that computer documents ought to work more like a sheet of paper. Marc Andressen had a jones to look at images and text, together, on this geeky thing he and his friends were screwing around with at college. Shawn Fanning liked the idea of sharing his music with his friends. In each case, these innovations depended on that which had come before. The spreadsheet needed a non-mainframe computer. PageMaker needed that, plus a GUI. Mosaic both of those, plus the Internet, HTTP and HTML. And Napster required everything of the other three, plus digital music (which itself required CD-ROM drives and sound cards). Good, cheap, widely-available modern hardware is the precursor to software innovation. Now consider the modern PC. Many Pentium 4 machines out there still ship with freakin' parallel ports. In human terms, this is like having a prehensile tail as well as an opposable thumb. It's just embarrassing. Why the legacy equipment? Because the PC hardware business is a low-margin, high-volume business that's based on "shipping boxes" with little regard for the future impact of that box. PCs are usually bought based on comparative specifications (e.g., Box A has 600mhz processor and 40 GB hard drive, Box B has a 500 mhz processor and 30 GB hard drive. Hence, Box A is better), so manufacturers tailor their specs to what their competitors are offering. Innovation proceeds along grooved tracks - processors get faster, drives get bigger, CD-ROM drives get faster, etc. - but no real time or money is proactively spent by the PC makers to introduce new kinds of hardware or features that will obviate the existing stuff. Status quo = profit. So USB promised to change all this. It's fast (12,000,000 bits per second), smart (it detects whether something is plugged in or not), daisy-chainable (you can support up to 127 devices off one USB bus - just add a hub if you need more ports), didn't experience IRQ conflicts, and even had power - devices could get their electricity from the USB bus itself, and no longer needed to be plugged in to the wall. USB was even invented by Intel, so it was backed by one of the most powerful and respected companies in the industry. USB, on introduction, flopped. No, really. PC manufacturers at first didn't include it on their designs. This was a combination of the cost and education issues. Consumers "weren't asking for it", so makers didn't include it. Of course, consumers "weren't asking for it" because they didn't know about it ... because their PC didn't come with it. Chicken and egg. Then Intel twisted some arms, and a few manufacturers (Compaq, for instance) started including it. Still, nobody used it because all the keyboard, scanner, mouse, and printer vendors were making devices compatible with the "larger market" - the old, serial- and parallel-port using public. Again, chicken and egg. What USB needed - and ultimately got - was a shot in the arm. And the shot in the arm came when Apple introduced the iMac in 1998. The iMac was watershed for a lot of reasons, but the most-overlooked, IMHO, was that it jumpstarted the USB market. See, the iMac didn't allow any kind of peripheral to connect except for USB. The industry snickered - didn't Apple know that there weren't any USB peripheral vendors out there? - but, overnight these USB peripheral makers had a captive market for their stuff. And so they started making it, and shipping it, and the iMac's success meant that millions of people were buying USB stuff and loving it. Time passes. A few years later, the penetration of USB peripherals was sufficient to make its other advantages obvious to the rest of the world, and the PC industry started pushing USB. And today, the "USB economy" - keyboards and mice, of course, but also USB flash drives and iPod Shuffles - is huge. The exact same thing happened with WiFi technology - it'd been around for a long time, but it was expensive and exotic. Apple shipped the iBook with WiFi, shipped a base station to go with it, and now WiFi is everywhere. In fact, the entire Internet and telecom industries are undergoing some major change, and a lot of it is being driven by cheap, reliable, wireless technology at the PC level. My point in all this is not to praise Apple, per se (they did a lot, but they did some of it from necessity), but to instead damn the rest of the PC box makers for lacking anything that even remotely approximates vision. (Dell is one of the worst, here.) By "giving the people what they want" (which, mysteriously, is almost exactly what they've come to know), these companies are effectively freeze-drying our technical infrastructure at the 1981 IBM-PC era. They're killing tomorrow to eke out a slightly-more-marginal profit today. Golden goose, anyone? Hello? Microsoft is spending a lot of time and money on designing the "PC of the future", and I commend that. My suspicion, however, is that Microsoft is still stuck lobbying the Toshibas of the world to produce radical new hardware designs (e.g., Tablet PC) for customers. Some of this lobbying is successful, some not. Some markets will take longer to mature than others. Hardware makers, however, generally don't care about long-term industry growth. They're too focused on short-term earnings. So maybe Microsoft should get in to the PC business. It could produce the high-end "reference" machine, and let the other manufacturers follow suit and fill the needs of their respective niches. Hm. In the meantime, Dell is happy to sell you a $400 PC that's the best 1981 had to offer. But don't let anyone tell you it's the equivalent of the Mac mini. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 20, 2005 4:13 PM. November 9, 2004Internet Broadcasting Turns 10WXYC-FM (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is celebrating their first decade of broadcasting their radio signal over the Internet. My hat is off to them. Ten years ago, WXYC made history by simulcasting their radio signal to both their "terrestrial" FM audience and the (very) small group of people who were able to receive it online. They did it at a time when literally none of the streaming tools that, today, we all take for granted even existed. No RealAudio. No Windows Media. No MP3. Nothing. It was a hack. It was ugly. It was visionary. And it worked. How do I know all this? Because we were number two.
On January 9, 1995 - nine years, ten months ago - Western Washington University's own KUGS 89.3 FM went live on the Internet. If you're inclined, you can watch a video about this (7.3 MB, QuickTime required). (Gotta love that hair. Can you tell I was 21?) You might also check out Hobbes' Internet Timeline. After loading the page, use your browser's "Find" command to look for KUGS. A little background on our project. College radio stations have, basically, no money. They're run as a labor of love by a volunteer community, and, in our case, that meant that KUGS' underpowered, 100-watt signal was never going to get any stronger. We used to joke that our signal could reach "three guys smoking weed in the back of a Nova" ... but that was about it. There are parts of Bellingham - and even parts of campus - where you can't get KUGS. This made it hard for us to build real awareness of the station in the community. So when I became KUGS' Promotions Director in 1994, I started thinking about ways to get the station some awareness and notoriety, do something unique. I was already spending hideous amounts of time working down at Pacific Rim Network, which meant my thoughts were going Internet Service Provider ... Radio Station ... Internet ... Radio. Eventually, the idea for the project clicked: we'd expand KUGS' audience by broadcasting on the Internet! And of course, people thought we were crazy ("Who is ever going to sit in front of their computer and listen to music?"). But the idea had PR value, and the station needed visibility. So with the blessing and help of our General Manager (Ted Askew, currently kicking ass doing radio in Aspen) and Program Director (Keith Boyd, now at Microsoft), we got things rolling. We built the station's first-ever home page, found some software to do the job (we used CU-SeeMe, same as WXYC), and hooked it all up using my personal Power Mac, some bubble gum, and a bit of twine. It was a hack from start to finish - the consumer video camera, the cheap fishtank, everything. But we turned it on, and it worked. One of the things we did in tandem with the Internet project was to launch a promotion, called "Where in the World?" The idea was simple: if you were the first person from a state in the U.S. or a country around the world to listen to KUGS, we'd send you a KUGS t-shirt (we had a lot of extras, and this was a clever way to reclaim some shelving). All you had to do was send us an e-mail with the date and time you were listening (adjusted to PST, of course), and tell us what we were playing. We'd compare entries against the daily music journal, and ta-daa! The listeners responded; e-mail started coming fast. Washington was first, of course, and then California. Oregon, New York, Florida. And then England. And Australia. And Japan. And we all started freaking out. (In fact, eventually we ran out of T-shirts!) Our project took off beyond our wildest speculation - we got attention and media inquiries, plus compliments from other broadcasters around the world. Eventually, this all culminated in an invitation to the National Association of College Broadcasters' conference in March 1995. I was asked to speak on a panel about "emerging and interactive technologies." So there I was, on a panel of eight folks in a big room in a hotel in Los Angeles, staring out at a packed house full of college kids just like me. And every single one of them wanted to do Internet radio for their own station, because they all were as under-funded and enthusiastic as we were. Clearly, the Internet was going to go from Geek Toy to Mass Market Audience. (Fun Fact: It was at this very same conference - and on this same panel - that I met my friend Heidi.) The conference was a big turning point for me. I flew home, finished out the last week of Winter quarter at Western, and put my college education on hold to build Pacific Rim. We sold it almost exactly two years later, in March 1997. (And I finally finished my Bachelor's degree in 2002). But back to WXYC. For a while, we at KUGS thought we might actually be the first in the nation to broadcast online. It was hard to find out who else was out there, however, because search engines didn't really exist. Remember, the Web was much smaller then, and primarily navigated by links from one page to another. The only "directory" page was the NCSA "What's New?" page, which we watched religiously for signs of other online radio stations. Shortly before launch, we discovered WXYC. And at that point, we knew we weren't going to be first in the country. But we'd settle for second in the USA ... and first on the West coast. Take a bow, WXYC. Y'all made us proud. UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 9, 2004 4:50 PM. August 13, 2004The HotZoneHey! This HotZone stuff works! I'm sitting in my room, on the 8th floor of the Doubletree, and the signal - while faint - is solid. Fantastic. Oddly, Spokane is using some kind of authentication system from Zum (the price is "free"), instead of leaving it wide-open as most free WiFi systems do. I wonder if they are doing it so people have to accept the terms and conditions of the network ... or if they want to eventually charge for the thing. At any rate -- free wireless. Right on. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 13, 2004 10:29 PM. July 21, 2004You Can Always Buy Me Clothes...I need another black t-shirt like BillG needs another $5, but this one seems pretty darn applicable... Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 21, 2004 10:32 AM. |
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