Category: Technology

Commentary and analysis about new technology and business developments.

BeBox Project Update

Back in October, Rochelle got me to publicly commit to finishing my BeBox refurb project, or terminate it. She cleverly suggested a deadline far in the future. The date was last weekend.

Back in October, Rochelle got me to publicly commit to finishing my BeBox refurb project, or terminate it. She cleverly suggested a deadline far in the future. The 17th of January, the anniversary of my buying the collection. I later modified that to be the weekend after the 17th, to give myself an extra two days.

Those last two days were this past weekend.

So, I’m not finished, and haven’t actually made a whole lot of progress. My Daily Home Improvements are primarily going to tasks to clear space for the BeBoxes in my office, so Rochelle can have her parlor back.

DHI 13-19

BeBoxes, software updates, configuration fixes, more clearing of shelves, meta tags, meetings with designers, more fun with gas, clearing a flat surface, and over a dozen t-shirts bite the dust.

DHI 13: I worked on the BeBoxes, installing permanent RAM in the dual 133 that I plan to keep. Installed a network card too, but the Kingston card I tried isn’t working, not sure why. Might be tomorrow’s DHI — with my BeBox deadline fast approaching, that’s all I really have time for.

DHI 14: I updated my Mac to OS X 10.2.3, and ran the Repair Privileges tool on it, which corrected a few errors.

(Mac OS X tip: It’s always a good idea to do this after installing an OS update, or really, any installer that asked for the administrator password. You can run this without rebooting, or booting from a CD. Just run /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, and do a Repair Permissions on your boot disk. Works fine, and catches errors.)

I also found and fixed an error in our MIMEDefang configuration file, which may have been causing us to lose mail since the 5th (yikes!). So if you wrote to us and didn’t get a reply, try again!

DHI 15: I worked on the bookshelves again, selecting more books to be pass on to another household. I pulled out enough books, both paperback and hardback, to get all the other books that I didn’t have room for onto the shelves proper, instead of sitting casually on the edges.

I also installed MovableType, a different weblogging package, for Rochelle to try out on her weblog…if I can get her to start one!

DHI 16: This one’s kind of geeky (even more so than usual). I added my ICBM Address (latitude and longitude) to my blog page and registered with GeoURL. Now you can see what other web sites are near me physically.

DHI 17: Rochelle and I met with an interior designer for about two hours, to start the process of getting help to finish the water closet project we began almost two years ago.

Rochelle also got someone to come over and hook up the gas heater we’d worked on so hard previously. But that’s a whole other story.

DHI 18: I got rid of almost 20 old t-shirts from my dresser. I kept most of the Be t-shirts, though; I still can’t bear to part with them…

DHI 19: I cleared off my nightstand, throwing some stuff out, and getting rid of a pile of crap I was pretending I would eventually read. With a clear nightstand, I can now hook up my alarm clock and actually use it, a big improvement from Rochelle and I passing back and forth a little travel alarm (the person getting up earliest got the alarm).

I should add that Rochelle blew me out of the water this week, with less than two hours of work on the back deck. It looks fabulous, and it’s now worthy of having people over and hanging out on the deck. Woo hoo!

Making News Aggregators Easy

The time has come to make using news aggregators easy, Mac OS-style. Every browser should have a “Subscribe to this Site” command, which should send a standardized subscribe message to the user’s preferred news aggregator, which would use RSS auto-discovery to subscribe the user to the news feed. Could it be that simple?

The time has come to make using news aggregators easy, Mac OS-style. Every browser should have a “Subscribe to this Site” command, which should send a standardized subscribe_rss AppleEvent (or similar message on other OSes) to the user’s preferred news aggregator, which would use RSS auto-discovery to subscribe the user to the news feed.

This is a suggestion for Chimera, Safari, and other Mac OS X browsers to have a menu command “Subscribe to this Site” (I’m sure there are better words), and a corresponding toolbar button.

This is also a suggestion for Mac OS X to have a new standard Internet application category, of news aggregator, that the user would select in the system preferences. I think it would deserve its own tab, News, in the Internet preferences panel. (This could also be combined with Usenet reader prefs, I suppose, though that’s not my focus here.)

Aside: A promotion to a standard internet tool would require that Mac OS X include a news aggregation application in the distribution. I imagine there are a few third-party developers who could help out here (Ranchero and UserLand come to mind).

This is also a request for all the Mac OS news aggregator application developers to work together to design the right AppleEvent; that ought to be pretty simple. (It might even already exist…?)

Why is this a good idea? Here’s the Before & After user scenario:

Before Subscribe RSS support:

  • User finds an interesting news site or weblog, and decides they’d like to read it regularly.
  • User hunts on web page for a “RSS” or “XML” logo, or other subscription button or link (different for every site).
  • User (hopefully) finds link, right-clicks “copy link to clipboard”.
  • User switches to preferred news aggregator application.
  • User selects the Subscribe to New Site command (different for every aggregator).
  • User pastes in URL copied to clipboard.
  • User clicks Subscribe button.
  • User (hopefully) gets confirmation page/screen that they have successfully subscribed.

(Brent, apologies, I know NetNewsWire makes it a little easier, but I’m still using Radio right now.)

(Dave, apologies, I know that Radio has the slick coffee cup icon approach to subscription, but it’s Radio-specific (for both user and site author), not a general approach.)

After Subscribe RSS support:

  • User finds an interesting news site or weblog, and decides they’d like to like to read it regularly.
  • User clicks the “Subscribe to this Site” button on browser toolbar.
  • System switches the user to their preferred news aggregator application.
  • User (probably) gets confirmation page/screen.

A lot fewer steps, and all of them are simpler (except #1, the eternal dilemma of the Internet).

This is an opportunity for leadership from browser authors, especially Apple, to really leverage the weblog and news aggregation waves. I frankly find my news aggregator more important to my “digital life” than my camera, DVD drive, or even iTunes. This kind of usability could make news aggregation a part of everyone’s mother’s lives.

LazyWeb, take me away!

Keynote

I just finished installing my new copy of Keynote, Apple’s new presentation program. It’s _so beautiful,_ I am imagining that I will borrow a Mac to be able to give a presentation using Keynote during our sales kickoff, next week.

I just finished installing my new copy of Keynote, Apple’s new presentation program, and spent a few minutes playing around with it. It’s so beautiful, I am imagining that I will borrow a Mac to be able to give a presentation using Keynote during our sales kickoff, next week.

But then I look through the available presentation themes…and none of them are professional in the way I’d like to present to the sales team. They are all beautiful, and they certainly have character. Indeed, that might be the problem. I want the gorgeous Quartz transitions and imaging, but I actually want to use a more “boring” theme.

The themes page says that it’s possible to create new themes using tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, and there are (somewhat brief) instructions in the manual, so this is probably a temporary issue. I hope that lots of people will buy Keynote, and that designers will create new themes for it. I might even be willing to pay for a themes pack. Might be nice if Apple offered such a thing as a reward to early Keynote buyers…

DHI #8: Phone Charger Swap

I unplugged my old mobile phone charger from the rack, and plugged in the new one. Now I can charge at my desk, instead of random places around the house that have a free plug.

I unplugged my old mobile phone charger from the rack, and plugged in the new one. Now I can charge at my desk, instead of random places around the house that have a free plug.

DHI #5: Razor and More Anti-Spam

DHI #5 consisted of poking a hole in the firewall for Razor to access its central servers, and disabling most of the RBL blocking in sendmail, while enabling RBL checking in SpamAssassin. I also kept Rochelle from blowing up the house.

DHI #5 consisted of poking a hole in the firewall for Razor to access its central servers, and disabling most of the RBL blocking in sendmail, while enabling RBL checking in SpamAssassin.

I also kept Rochelle from blowing up the house. But that’s a longer story, for tonight.

Stigmergy

Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web is a great article that puts many of the latest internet technologies together, and explains how what they do is interesting and new. Thought-provoking reading to start the new year, highly recommended.

About eight months ago I wrote about how a variety of different technologies were synergistically combining to build something very new. Amazing progress has been made on those elements, and many new ideas have come and been made real in working code.

Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web is a great article that puts these things together, and explains how what they do is interesting and new. New and very sophisticated structures are forming in the internet, and it’s all happening via mechanisms similar to the way that ants bring food back to the nest.

Thought-provoking reading to start the new year, highly recommended.

DHI #4: Old Machine Stripped

I removed the CD-ROM drive, hard disk, and network card from the old server, which used to be Rochelle’s old PC. What remains still starts up and runs; it’s next to the front door, ready for putting out on the street.

I removed the CD-ROM drive, hard disk, and network card from the old server, which used to be Rochelle’s old PC. It’s probably seven years old at this point. What remains still starts up and runs, but needs something to boot an operating system from.

I’ve got it next to the front door, ready for putting out on the street, but I’ve decided to let Rochelle have that pleasure. When she reads this posting, she can toss it on the sidewalk. (Hopefully gently, it’s still a usable machine for someone.)

DHI #3: New Server in Permanent Home

Today’s Daily Home Improvement (DHI from now on) was to sew up the new server, and move it from the operating table to the computer rack, its “permanent” place. This was actually more work than it sounds like.

Today’s Daily Home Improvement (DHI from now on) was to sew up the new server, and move it from the operating table to the computer rack, its “permanent” place.

The computer rack is a bunch of shelves where the server, the DSL box, a printer, the phone and some other electronic odds and ends share space with a couple hundred floppies and CDs, and about 40 pounds of unfiled papers. It is a mess. The rack will surely be the subject of many, many DHIs this year.

While I was at it, I removed the old server (a 150MHz Pentium with 80 megs of RAM), replaced the old power cable with a heavy duty cable, moved the CD-ROM drive to a different ATA bus than the hard disk, so the hard disk could run in UDMA100 mode, and tweaked the MIMEDefang startup script to not spew messages in a different format than the rest of the system startup scripts.

The part Rochelle will like the best is that I got a machine out of the living room. Except all I really did was move the new machine out, and the old machine in. But tomorrow the old machine is going to get cannibalized, and I’ll probably put the remains out on the street. Things like that usually disappear in about 35 seconds…

New Year’s Resolution #1

One of my many New Year’s resolutions for 2003 is to do something for the house, every day. It can be a small thing, like changing a light bulb, but it can’t be an ordinary thing, like washing the dishes. And every day, I’m going to list it here in my blog, where you can hold me to it. Gulp!

One of my many New Year’s resolutions for 2003 is to do something for the house, every day. It can be a small thing, like changing a light bulb, but it can’t be an ordinary thing, like washing the dishes. (Washing the dishes when it’s Rochelle’s turn might count, though. ;-)

And every day, I’m going to list it here in my blog, where you can hold me to it. Gulp!

Many days my little thing will have to do with the systems infrastructure for our web sites, mail servers, etc. Indeed, my first two days are exactly that:

  • 1-Jan: Add MIMEDefang and SpamAssassin to our mail server.
  • 2-Jan: Tweak MIMEDefang configuration to only check incoming messages, and not add SpamAssassin reports as attachments.

Still, I hope that no more than 200 of my 365 improvements will be electronic. God knows there’s enough things to put away or throw out, just in my office, that will qualify as a home improvement!

New Server Up and Running

Over the course of Saturday I finished installing and configuring the minimum required software to be able to switch over to the new server for running my sites. On Sunday I swapped the IP addresses of the new and old systems, and got to work fixing the things that broke when I took the new machine live.

If you’re reading this, it’s being served up by my new server.

Over the course of Saturday I finished installing and configuring the minimum required software to be able to switch over to the new server for running my sites. On Sunday I swapped the IP addresses of the new and old systems, and got to work fixing the things that broke when I took the new machine live. I finished up all the obvious stuff around 2am Monday morning, and while there have been some glitches with my DSL connection that I believe are coincidental, it has been mostly smooth sailing since then.

The one area where there seem to be problems is in e-mail. I have configured my mail server to be substantially more aggressive in rejecting spam e-mail, because I’m really tired of being bombarded by 100s of offers per day for medical, sexual, and financial “breakthroughs.”

The aggressiveness seems to be causing mail from legitimate senders to be bounced. So, if you’ve e-mailed me since Sunday and I haven’t replied, it’s probably because I haven’t received your message. Try contacting me at my work e-mail address, [alderete] at sign [persistence] period [com], and let me know you tried my home address first.

I’m working over the next couple of days to change the outright rejections into recommendations, so my usual correspondence should be preserved again, while still blocking the spam. Hopefully that will be in place by the end of this weekend.