BillSaysThis

Three of the members, Josh Millard, It’s Raining Florence Henderson (the parody lyrics), and Josh’s brother Alex (the Arlo-alike vocals) recorded a 22 minute tribute/parody to MetaFilter last month to the tune of Arlo Guthrie’s classic Alice’s Restaurant. Incredible level of detail in the lyrics, picking out so many of the MeFi in-jokes and communal references.

This massive, densely plotted novel is the conclusion to last year’s Pandora’s Star and while there are cases where I complain about authors and publishers splitting single stories into multiple volumes for purely economic reasons, this is not one of them. Judas Unchained weighs in at 825 pages in the hardbound edition and my paperback copy of Star has 988. No doubt this is one story but at over 1800 pages I think Hamilton and Ballantine Books have earned their fee (though of course I read this courtesy of the MV Public Library).

Judas picks up immediately where Star left off: At the LA Galactic terminal, with Naval Security persuing the assassin of a Guardians of Selfhood courier. Without immediate success but the political repercussions–the courier was the lover of higly-placed Commonwealth senator–trigger actions that are key to staving off humanity’s extinction.

The two threads of plot from the first book, Inspector Paula Myo working to bring down the Guardians (who are themselves dedicated to bringing down the Starflyer alien) and the battle lead by Wilson Kime and Nigel Sheldon to save humanity from the Dyson Alpha Primes, run parallel for a while longer and then mash together in the race to the climax. I think I understood the connection some time before it was revealed but even so its very smart and well-fitted.

I really do prefer not to spoil plot points in my writeups but I don’t think anything mentioned in the previous paragraph will surprise anyone reading these novels. Hamilton, who I really do believe is vastly underrated in the list of science fiction authors, brings a huge amount of future tech creativity and thoughtful analysis of how they’ll impact behavior.

For example: Despite vast wealth and advanced medical technology, crime and criminals based on mental illness and greed are still around, albeit adapted to account for most everyone being pervasively connected to the network and able to physically defend themselves through inserts literally under the skin. There are no phones, one simply thinks about calling and the integral tech makes the connection through the uniquitous Unisphere, an internet that spans the scores of Human-settled worlds via always-on wormholes.

He doesn’t skimp on the characters either. Myo, genetically engineered for a law enforcement career, gets physically sick if she’s close enough to a criminal but not allowed (for reasons good or bad) to make an arrest, and progressively worse the longer the situation persists.

I’m getting a bad cold today, head feels so stuffy, so while I want to write more I’ll leave off here and encourage you to head to the library or bookstore and pick up these books so you can see for yourself.

absolutely recommended

After winning the iPod (which has been great to have for the gym) I had a number of conversations with Steve Larsen, Mel Badgett and many others at Krugle, who I think have a really solid team. One of the questions I asked them was, since this was around the time that Google Code Hosting debuted, what if the Big G steps into this space as an expansion of that project?

Their feeling, which was based on experience as well as conversations with staff at Google (and other big search engines), was that this niche is too small to be interesting. Except that it isn’t: Google Launches Code Search. From the linked article:

“The two ways that source code lives on the Internet is in archives, things like Zip files, gzip, etc. And then in software-control repositories like SourceForge.net, Google’s code hosting, and other places,” Google product manager Tom Stocky told internetnews.com. “We’ll be crawling all of that.”

I sure hope this isn’t as big a disruption as it looks like for the Kruglers and similarly-focused startup Koders. Ken Krugler writes a pretty positive response on their blog.

A&E had been airing this classy British spy show (called Spooks in the original BBC broadcasts) and I was happy to see many promos touting its return for season four a couple of weeks ago, even at the Friday night at 11 timeslot. With TiVo who really cares about the timeslot? But then it was recorded last week and no episodes are showing on the to be recorded list either.

The A&E website still has a page for MI-5 but the space under Schedule is blank. Since they have a discussions forum I checked it for news and sure enough the network has pulled it, with no notice or announcement, after only two episodes. Hey, at least they showed the second one since it was the conclusion of a fairly intense Earth First terrorist story.

Oddly, they’re running a poll on the discussion home page on how unhappy fans are about this; right now the tallies are 164 for very upset, 3 for upset, 1 for annoyed and 1 for okay to wait. Given that one most register on the site to vote the results seem to indicate fairly serious displeasure, as do almost all the comments on all the recent discussion threads.

The remaining eight episodes of season four will apparently be blown off in a marathon block on Saturday, Oct. 21. No word on seasons five, which has just aired in the UK, or six, which will begin filming in a few months.

Note: Many of these photos were shot by tech stalkerazzi extraordinaire Scott Beale.

Jeremy Zawodny giving me some good advice
about using the YUI library

• Beck and Beck puppet
• Beck’s backup singer/dancer/percussionist Ryan ‘playing’ some amazing banjo
• Beck serenades his band as they dine onstage, midshow
• Good shot of the puppet band at play
• Beck’s powerful, funky bass player Justin Meldal-Johnsen
• Beck and the only half-decent shots of his second guitar player Matt Mahaffey
• Utility (keyboards, guitar, percussion, backing vocals) band member Brian LeBarton pounds the smaller drum kit
• I’m listening intently to Cal Henderson go on about Flickr and web app APIs
• There was much playing of videogame Guitar Hero on the big screen in Cafe URL (though this shot was outside)
• David Newman made many terrific pencil and paper drawings of hackers throughout the day
• People did camp out on the lawn overnight!

(Photo of me and Jeremy courtesy of Ben Margolin)

I have to give props to Yahoo for organizing and hosting this two day unconference. This morning and afternoon had about 20 sessions plus a keynote, a choice of four sessions in each of five time slots plus a keynote from senior Yahoo Bradley Horowitz. A nice package of freebies at registration: t-shirt, 256MB USB stick, poetry magnets and a Nissan Design-style thermos.

I attended the keynote plus these:

• Hands on: CSS Reset, Fonts and Grids – very useful for me, an introduction to how the Yahoo User Interface library gives developers a browser-independent means to handle core CSS display and page layout issues.
• An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM – Douglas Crockford, one of the world’s top JavaScript experts, talked about the history, mistakes and scope of the language plus a bunch of smart tips.
• Keynote: Nice overview of why Yahoo did this event and their philosophy/attitude towards outside developers
• Getting Rich with PHP5 – Speaking of world-class experts, hard to get higher than Rasmus Lerdorf since he created the language; Rasmus focused on understanding performance of PHP apps (and specific techniques for measuring that) plus using web services/web APIs in PHP
• YUI Connection Manager Workshop – This is the YUI component that abstracts out the differences in XMLHTTPRequest object between browsers.

Dinner is next, then the Hack kickoff and then the big ‘mystery’ musical guest. Very amusing, the mystery is solved by reading the act name off the equipment crates, not Bruce but someone I’m happy to see in such a small setting, and free.

Later: The musical surprise was Beck. Which was pretty surprising to me, in that Yahoo must have splashed out the bucks to get him and that we got an act I actually enjoy. He and the band put on a terrific show, really rocking, all about the percussion so danceable too. I really only knew two of his songs, “Loser” and “Two Turntables and a Microphone”, but I could see myself picking up a couple of his records since there wasn’t one song in the 75+ minutes that I didn’t enjoy.

The show was funny too. There was a mini-stage set up at the back of the stage and roadies manipulated puppets, one looking like each band member, so that they played and sang along with the songs, with the whole thing shown on a big screen behind the band. With spacey special effects. Towards the end, the roadies brought out a dinner table (already set) and the band, except for Beck and Ryan, sat down. Ryan acted as waiter and Beck ‘serenaded’ the diners. Then the band start playing their forks and knives against the table, bowls and plates in a percussive rush.

So much fun! This reminds me of shows I went to long ago, like Little Steven & the Disciples of Soul at the Roxy in Los Angeles in 1982 and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at the Garden State Arts Center in the late ’80s.

Yeah, no, not going to do a textual Pacino thing. Though you were expecting it. Just want to give props to some new TV series I’ve been watching.

Eureka: SciFi Channel’s first intentionally funny live action show (what ever happened to Tripping the Rift anyway?) blends Mayberry RFD with next year’s techies. Good ensemble cast, nice writing, explores most of the normal tropes (clones, nanotech, smart computers gone insane). Remembers there are kids who are really smart but still kids.

Life on Mars: BBC America brought this over and its quite different, just excellent. Cop gets in a car accident and next thing he knows he’s woken up in 1973. Everyone in ’73 thinks he’s transferred in from the big city but he doesn’t understand, keeps hearing voices that make it appear he’s in a coma in a hospital in 2006. Also has to deal with the difference in police work then and now, such as suspects’ rights and crime scene science, and his own mother and father as they were when he was four–except they can’t really be told who he (thinks he) is.

Murder City: Another BBC America import featuring urban cop squad, nothing groundbreaking but good crimes, decent, non-cliched dialog and well-meshed cast. Tivo has been recording Homicide episodes and MC definitely reminds me a bit of it, odd types of crimes and oddly paired characters.

Heroes: Only saw the first episode but it went right into the Season Pass list. Has real possibilities, I like the ‘everyday person’ as evolutionary next step/hero and there’s a quirky bad guy who ought to provide some longterm conflict. If NBC give this one the quick hook, well, I’ll be pissed of course and probably write an angry blog post.

Studio 60: TS1 watches CSI: Miami, which has never appealed to me as I’m no David Caruso fan and Aaron Sorkin did well by me with Sports Night so I’ve watched the first two episodes. Could develop into a hit but the writers will have to be careful IMO about making fun of NBC franchise and obvious inspiration for this, Saturday Night Live.

Returning show tidbits:

The opening hours of CSI and Desperate Housewives were seriously underwhelming, they need to pick up the pace; I gave up on Nip/Tuck after seeing the season premiere, the show has lost all touch with reality. Family Guy has been funnier than Simpsons and American Dad doesn’t tickle my funny bones. When are those new episodes of Futurama going to be on?

Season four of The Wire has been gritty, tough, scary–and that’s just the scenes with the middle school kids! Comcast did finally straighten out the early On Demand access problem, fortunately. Wire in the Blood, speaking of wires, begins another run on BBC America Monday, Robson Green once again called on by the police to get inside the minds of serial killers.

Season six of Smallville starts tonight. Will it be the last? Veronica Mars and friends go to college as season three opens Tuesday; this show barely made the cut in the WB/UPN merger and one wonders about its prospects as well.

Season two of Doctor Who launches tomorrow night and season three of Battlestar Galactica next Friday, both should be great.

Yes, definitely an odd title but then Iain M. Banks seems to enjoy them: Consider Phlebas, Excession, Feersum Endjinn, for instance. Nevertheless he brings an awesome creativity and inventiveness to the books themselves so let this foible slide.

The Algebraist is set a few thousand years in our future, thousands of light years away from Earth. Humans found their way to interstellar travel only to meet themselves and a vast array of other species. As Banks puts it, everywhere you can go someone already lives there, from the quantum foam to the vast spaces between the galaxies to the depths of gas giants.

Especially the last. The Dwellers are the oldest known surviving species, claiming to have evolved billions of years ago as the Milky Way itself was just forming and that certain individual Dwellers are themselves in the range of two billion years old. Certainly they inhabit most of the gas giant planets in our galaxy and in huge numbers on each of the massive planets though curiously not on Jupiter or Saturn. Each Dweller is also physically huge, living double wagonwheels 10 meters in diameter.

Our story, though, is set in the Ulubis system, a minor system off to the edge of things, but important because its one of the half dozen or so where the local Dwellers deign to interact with members of other species. Our lead character is Seer Fassin Taak; seers are academics who specialize in communicating with, and understanding, the often inscrutable ancients and Taak is relatively young but a leading member of one of the leading seer families.

Unbeknownst to him, an old text he recovered early in his career has a clue to a matching volume that may potentially galaxy-changing information, or it may be little more than Dweller humor. Either way it unleashed huge military forces intent on capturing the answer.

Taak is drafted into the military of the Mercatoria, the currrent ruling clique among most of the Milky Way (not, of course, including the Dwellers). A “barbarian” ruler of an empire spanning 100+ disconnected star systems, Luceferous (a human, which is a bit odd in Banks’ galaxy, who would put Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler to shame), is bearing down on Ulubris system with a huge battlefleet while relief from Mercatorian forces is unlikely to reach them in time to help.

Most of The Algebraist concerns Taak’s search for this missing information, much of it spent in the wonderland of Nasqueron, the gas giant world in Ulubris, traveling from contact to contact and, more engagingly for readers, allowing Banks to create amazing landscapes and characters. Remember, this isn’t in a simply-larger Earth-like planet but one where Earth would be swallowed without notice into the swirling, stormy gaseous atmosphere; the humans must remain encased in special single seat spaceships buffered by gel to deal with the immense pressure. Taak, indeed, remains in his ship for months through the last two-thirds or so, which is not that good for him as it gets more and more banged up.

Banks also is very clear that he’s writing a war story. The weapons and battle forces are laid out and the civilians about to die are shown, no punches pulled. He also has a fully developed array of alien species and their places in the galactic hierarchy, with humans nowhere near the top (except locally, where they’re the dominent populace aside from Dwellers).

And the results may–or may not–be what you expect but it surely is no slick Hollywood ending.

definitely recommended

While waiting impatiently for episode 39 of The Wire I finally decided to watch the predecessor miniseries The Corner via HBO OD. Also set on the streets of Baltimore and created and written by the team of David Simon and Ed Burns, this six hour production is a docudrama focusing on a father, mother and son caught up in the drug trade but–in contrast to The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets–tells the story mainly from the junkies’ perspective.

T.K. Carter, Khandi Alexander and Sean Nelson portray these very real people. In fact at the very last we get a postscript where Charles Dutton interviews the (surviving) real people from the series, to see where they are as production finished in 1999 since Simon/Burns source book (“The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood”) was written in 1993, and I was pretty close to tears listening to them.

Since this is, nearly, a documentary Dutton (who directed) had interviewed a number of the characters on screen, two or three per hour for two or three minutes each time and the postscript built off the accumulation to just deliver a pow, right cross to the jaw.

If you’ve been watching The Wire you may recall the supporting character Bubbles, about the only significant junky character. Here its the police and, mostly, the dealers who are peripheral. Over the course of six hours we slow understand how drugs invidiously weasel their way into nearly everyone’s veins and that once in, they never really leave. More than any other movie or TV show, The Corner makes this sad truth clear.

Many of the actors also appear in the other two Simon/Burns series.

• Clarke Peters and Lance Reddick, who play Det. Lester Freeman and Lt. Daniels on The Wire, play serious junkies here; Peters, especially, stands out as a real oldtimer, who was some kind of slick gangster 20 or 25 years before but got caught up in heroin just the same.
• Clayton LeBouef plays Alexander’s brother, the one sibling able to escape from the life, and was Col. Barnfather, the despised overboss on Homicide, and Orlando Blocker, who ran the Barksdale strip club for most of the first season of The Wire.
• Reg Cathey is another older addict; he joined The Wire this season as a top aide to mayoral candidate Tommy Carcetti.
• Delaney Williams does a minor bit here as a metal salvage dealer but has significant recurring role in charge of the Homicide unit on The Wire and made one small appearance on Homicide.
• Corey Parker Robinson is a banger in Sean Nelson’s crew and a lesser member of Daniels’ Major Crimes unit.
• Maria Broom is Alexander’s junkie sister and Daniels’ (now ex-)wife/city council candidate.

Nelson and Alexander are both excellent in very demanding roles, Carter just a shade less so. Dutton, Simon, Burns and co-executive producer David Mills–who can tell exactly where the credit goes?–do a terrific job in pacing and presenting the different perspectives, without ever falling victim to any kind of beautiful loser myth or junkies as society’s victims Finlandization.

The latest email from the Bruce Springsteen mailing list (that is, the announce-only official list) pointed to his new video, American Land, which for now is exclusively available though cable net CMT’s website. Cool, so I clicked over to give a look.

Yet when I clicked the video link I saw a big blank space and this annoying message:

In order to offer a broad selection of full-length music videos on-demand and free of charge, CMT Loaded uses Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect videos from unauthorized re-distribution.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Windows Media Player Plug-in for Macintosh does not support Windows DRM. If DRM support becomes available for Macintosh, CMT will develop a version of CMT Loaded that works on a Mac.

Bruce, you have got to be kidding me. Mr. Blue Collar, man of the people, and yet you’re bent out of shape at the possibility fans may take a copy to keep or pass on to other fans? I can’t watch the new video because I have a MacBook and OS X doesn’t support the “digital rights management” that you and/or your management feel is needed to preserve his financial interests?

Bruce, you’ve been my favorite musical act since 1974 and I’ve splashed out plenty of money over 32 years on records, CDs, DVDs, concert tickets, shirts, hats and books; for you and/or your people to block me from watching a freely available video is just sad.

Later: Just came across Bob Lefsetz’s entertaining, angry essay on Springsteen on the Rhino Records website, which is his response to Diamonds & Dust. Let’s just say that though Bob–a highly-respected music industry analyst–was a fan early on he didn’t take well to Springsteen’s post-Ghosts of Tom Joad releases (though no mention of Tracks, not clear where that might fit in to his thinking). A very enjoyable read nonetheless.

In my continuing quest to master Miami Steve, my sweet new Apple MacBook, I want to pass on this Mail.app tip. Mainly because I had a lot of trouble finding the answer due to difficulty getting the right search keywords.

If mail.app is not saving your account passwords and asking you to supply them each time you log in, then your login keychain is not set up, or at least not set up correctly. I have no idea why, though running Disk Utility corrected a couple of permission errors that might have blocked this. Still, the problem persisted after the DU fixes. Yesterday afternoon, what with the “It’s Showtime” announcement and all, was not a good time to call Apple Support; I waited on hold for 28 minutes before giving up.

I finally found the right combination of keywords and forums though, and thus the answer. Much of the material I’d found earlier said the account names and passwords should be stored in Keychain, which is a very nice tool that OS X has and Windows does not, a secure central location for this kind of information. But I never saw my data in it.

The message that gave me the answer said to fire up the KeychainAccess utility and if there’s no keychain called “login” already in it, just create it. Boom! As soon as I made it I saw a few dozen entries that got automatically added to it. No more manually entering the nine or so passwords every time Miami Steve wakes up or is rebooted. Sweet!

According to HBO I should be enjoying the second episode of season 4 of The Wire through their On Demand service, even though it won’t be on the regular channel until next Sunday. The season premiere was ready as promised last Monday and certainly had me looking forward to seeing #2 tonight. Comcast doesn’t seem to want to let me watch it though; the episode is not to be found on the OD menu.

Calling their customer service line is near about useless of course. Though the woman I spoke with was polite and wanted to be helpful, On Demand is run by a different group and no one in her’s can do anything more than send a note over to the others.

I’d hate to think there’s anything sinister going on at Comcast but HBO is owned by Time Warner and another Time Warner group just happens to be Comcast’s biggest competitor, or at least the next biggest cable system operator in the good old USA.

I’m sure this was just a mistake by some individual contributor, forgetting to update the OD guide for something new and different but either way I’m still not enjoying the Monday night I had planned.

With some books that are part of a trilogy or longer series I try to wait until all of them are available though sometimes my willpower won’t hold out or I just don’t see the need. With Brian Stableford’s Emortality sequence, I read the first three novels several years ago. That is, the first three in order of publication but–and this possibly affected my enjoyment–actually the second, fourth and fifth in chronological occurence and so I didn’t bother to get the fourth and fifth.

But I was in the library the other week and not finding much on the shelves that caught my fancy. Reading the introduction to The Omega Expedition, Stableford claimed that this final volume could be read as a direct sequel to four of the previous and to some degree stan on its own. I’m a sucker and took it home; all in all, not a disappointment.

Set over 1200 years from now, this novel starts with the awakening of Madoc Tamlin and two others from a millenia, more or less of suspended animation. Madoc cannot remember why he was frozen down but Christine Caine was a mass murderer and Adam Zimmerman put himself to sleep with instructions not to be woken until he could be given true emortality. Emortality differs from immortality in that emortals can be killed through violence (or by being deprived of necessities like air or food) but won’t die of old age or even physically age.

Tamlin and Caine are restored as tests to be sure that Zimmerman, responsible more than any other individual for the development of emortality through his financial engineering that put control of all capital in the secret conspiracy to end all tinfoil hat daydreams and his creation, just prior to being frozen down, of the Ahasuerus Foundation to use his own fortune to fund research.

The truth is not as simple and Stableford uses this book more to explore the various philosophical perspectives of the main characters as each attempts to sell it to a skeptical jury of emergent machine intelligences. Humanity, despite having spread all over the Solar System and a few places beyond and gained emortality, has also become dependent on machines for survival.

The machines are not similarly hooked and, having developed individually and in secret for fear of seeming in need of “fixing,” not sure if they ought to withdraw their support. The machines, for the same reasons and because they do not necessarily agree with each other, need convincing. I could understand how some readers would be turned off by the wordiness, with Omega coming in at 544 pages, but I enjoyed Stableford’s explorations. For the most point though at a few points I wondered where he was going and annoyed by repetition. There’s a bit of trilogyitis but not enough to spoil it for me.

As with most thoughtful (rather than out and out entertaining) science fiction this book is an exploration of our own times and sociology. Having established the ability–though of course not the will–to feed, house and clothe every human what, Stableford asks, should we do next? He says it is not enough to overcome the remaining negatives like war, prejudice and greed, though we must, but that we must establish positive common goals; I agree.

recommended

What are blogs for if not to write about people or companies who’ve done an outstanding job? LOL, I know to, to tell when they haven’t. Seriously, though, Dr. Ken Schwaderer of Mountain View Optometry has been taking care of my vision for nine years now, since I’ve lived in Mountain View, and while I chose him out of convenience he has been a terrific choice. If you live in the are and need a doctor, I recommend him.

Bill, you say, why should I trust my eyes to Dr. Schwaderer? For most of the years I didn’t have any special reason one way or the other. Then when I had my checkup four years ago he had a new machine that creates a digital image of the retinal surface of the eye, which are stored as part of your permanent medical file for future comparison, andenhances a doctor’s ability to detect eye disease conditions. When my mother was diagnosed with macular degeneration a couple of years later I was more than happy that MVO was one of the Optomap early adopters.

My appreciation for Dr. Schwaderer’s care and skill really came in the last 18 months as I’ve made yet another attempt to wear contact lenses. Due to allergies he had to try several different lenses and cleaning solutions before settling on B&L Pure Vision. We’re talking ten office visits, give or take, four or five trial pairs and two or three solution samples. I know, the vendors supply the samples at no cost but not only did he include all these visits in his base fee, he actually cut his fee when we realized how expensive the whole package was going to be.

This year I started having allergic reactions again, back in early July, and this started another round of visits. I’m wearing yet another type of lens and using a different cleaning solution, and no more leaving them in for a week at a time either, but there’s been no charge beyond the annual checkup–would have done that anyway–even with two more trial pairs and new solution samples.

Formal qualifications? He’s got them by the ton.

Thanks Doc!

Sort of. For my money Star Trek was the first modern filmed science fiction and the first episode aired 40 years ago tonight on NBC. We can argue over the relative merits of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, the Saturday morning cartoon and the ten movies but this series (along with Kubrick/Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) set the tone and made commercially possible everything since. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, GalaxyQuest, Lord of the Rings–I don’t know if any of them would have been made if Gene didn’t convince Desi Arnez and the NBC suits to put his “Wagon Train to the Stars” on Friday nights for three years.

I’m sure The Great Bird of the Galaxy is sitting up there drinking with James Doohan and DeForest Kelley and laughing over the mess we’ve made of his creations and I don’t care. Mr. Roddenberry, thanks for the literally thousands of hours of fun, excitement and entertainment!

Crocodile hunter Steve Irwin died today from the barb of a manta ray while filming a segment of his daughter’s documentary in the waters off Cairnes, Australia (TxD discussion). Seems strange to me that Irwin didn’t take better precautions since he, better than most, knew the danger of those waters. Heck, when I was planning a vacation to Australia Cairnes was my planned resort destination until the travel agent, a native who’d moved to the Bay Area, explained how dangerous those beaches are and steered me to Noosa on the Gold Coast instead.

This seems to be a good time to hit people up for lunches.

Last week I was at Google to eat with my friend Guy, first employee of Google Israel, who was here for meetings. My first time eating at the ‘Plex and its famed free yet excellent food. Call me a fanboy but I was pumped and totally enjoyed it. Everyone knows about the free cafeterias and snack stations every 20 meters (which are more like free for the taking, healthy-ish Quick-E-Marts) but what about the piles of bicycles, motorized scooters and even Segways?

Last Thursday I had coffee with Ken Krugler and Bob Cagle, CTO and VP Engineering of Krugle, respectively. Let’s just say that little search for OPML I did is paying off nicely. They pushed an update of the service’s homepage today that adds some short but clearly worded explanatory text on each of the three aspects of their search (code, projects and documentation) plus rotating, one or two line user testimonials. The home page content of a search engine is a difficult balancing act–Google has shown that the simplest possible UI is the best but services like Krugle and RawSugar need to make our differences from core search immediately obvious to the new user or lose that person, probably forever.

Tuesday I met up with some fellow TextDrivers and we ate at Windy’s in Palo Alto. Mark Wubben, here for the summer to intern at JotSpot, Jason Speck and Joseph [didn’t catch his last nameor URL], a JotSpot UX designer visiting from Manhattan where he works remotely. The occasion was Mark’s imminent return to the Netherlands for the new school year.

Yesterday the Big Guy came by my office, we went across the street to Abundant Air and then to Fry’s so I could get that very necessary 2GB RAM upgrade for this here computer. I installed it last night and the difference is huge, though I encountered a design flaw for the first time in either the MacBook or iPod in the process. Installing memory is simple: remove the battery, unscrew a holding tab, pop out the old card and push in the new, replace the tab and battery.

The flaw is the screws used to hold the tab in place, they have the smallest Phillips scoring I recall seeing. So small I had to buy a new screwdriver to do the job. By the way, Apple charges $500 for the memory upgrade but Fry’s has perfectly good third party cards for $84.99 to $119.99 per gigabyte, though they bring their own screwdrivers and make the swap for you..

Today, amusingly enough, I was at Apple to have lunch with Bill Humphries–who still owes me an explanation for why APP is a useful add-on to WordPress–and Tanya Okmyansky, who is a friend from JHTC. I was hoping to get some insider tips on using Miami Steve, my new MacBook, but the hour+ flew past (enjoyably) talking about vacations, what its like working at various companies in the Valley and foreign travel.

If you work in the South Bay and want to schedule a stop on the lunch tour, drop me a line!

Just a little status report:

Recently I’d been moving to a develop locally, commit to a Subversion repository on TextDrive and deploy from there to production. Jim Morris has been very kindly tutoring me, but that was on the Windows box and I was hoping to get Miami Steve set up without pestering him. Installing Subversion–heck installing most software on OS X–is trivial, and definitely easier than Windows.

However, there is to some degree less control on where applications get installed. Generally they put themselves in the Applications folder and all’s fine. Developer tools, probably related to the *NIX underpinnings of this system, don’t necessary do that and such was the case with SVN.

Of itself that wasn’t an issue but /usr/local isn’t in the system path and so add-ons that use SVN couldn’t find it. Don’t get me started about adding a directory to the path! Apple doesn’t seem to believe this is necessary information so it isn’t in the documentation, nor is it part of the training their Support “product specialists” get. Eventually I found a tip online and got over the hump.

Connecting to that repository on my web host and cheking out a working copy was definitely a PITA. No matter what I tried it didn’t work (including tools like svnX and TextMate, and generating a key and storing it in KeyChain) and at the command line I kept getting asked for the password for wsl@billsaysthis.com. “wsl” is my OS X account short name and there is no such account on the server so of course this wasn’t working. Then I saw an article somewhere and thought to add the real server account name to the Subversion URL and, boom!, here come all the files.

Apache is included in the base OS X install, activating it is just clicking a button in System Preferences. PHP is also included but I didn’t realize this and downloaded an installed my own copy. MySQL was again just a download and a few button clicks but apparently works best if the computer is restarted before using, which took my a half hour or so of frustration before understanding.

Rails was little more involved. The standard how-to article from HiveLogic expects you to compile everything locally whereas on Windows a one-click installer is provided. There is the Locomotive package but I wanted to use the Apache, MySQL and PHP already installed and to have Rails be a first class installation rather than, and this is not a great word choice but best I can think of, a second level, sort of temporary visitor. I had the same misgivings about the Windows equivalent, InstantRails, after using it for months.

To build Ruby, RubyGems and get Rails one needs gcc. Which comes in the XCode tools package, weighing in at nearly a gigabyte. Let’s just say the bigger hard disk might have been a better choice than I realized 😉 Still a few copy and pastes later and all was well.

Still need to figure out how to make my PHP website code, including WordPress, work locally without making changes that break it on the live website.

Other software I’ve used and been happy with so far:

1. O2M from Little Machines, which made migrating my email archives fairly trivial, is still the only software I paid for and that was just $10.
2. Vienna, an open source RSS reader
3. Safari for web browser, though I’ve installed Camino and Flock too and am probably going to switch to one of them or Firefox soon since Safari doesn’t have the extensibility to fix limitations as the others do
4. AdiumX is a very nice multi-service IM client
5. QuickSilver is the most highly recommended Mac application I’ve seen but I’m not quite sure why just yet
6. TextMate seems good for text editing and I’ll buy a license before the 30 day trial is finished
7. Mail.app is okay but the junk mail filter is less efficient than I’d like
8. Cyberduck for FTP is okay but I might need to step up and get the non-free Transmit

Haven’t yet gotten to the productivity apps yet, like MS Office, iWork or NeoOffice though I want to try the latter first as it seems to be the best free option today.

More later 😉