Letters From Exile

Recharge week

2010-04-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

One of the things I really like about paternity leave in California is that you don't have to take it all at once. In my case, I took three weeks off when my Son was born, and then went back to work with another three weeks in the bank. The only requirement for the leave is that you have to take it all within a year after your baby is born.

So, this week I'm taking another week of paternity leave. I'm calling it the, "catch up on sleep and give mommy a break" week. So far the results have been excellent. I've been watching Tommy while Jenna does a variety of appointment and takes some time for herself. Also, Tommy has gotten in on the game by deciding to sleep seven hours between feedings at night. That means we can put him down at nine and not have to get up again until four or five. The other benefit is that we can go back to sleep after he wakes up at four.

It's funny how much sleep matters. I feel like a fog has lifted. I'm thinking more clearly and more interested in the world around me. I highly recommend this strategy to other new dads, and am grateful that someone suggested it to me before Tommy was born.

Bad experience with Oceanair International

2010-01-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

In 2009 I finally moved back to California from a multi-year assignment in London. My move was managed by ACE Relocations who sub-contracted with Oceanair International to do my packing and shipping from my flat in London back to my home in California.

After several months of wrangling with both companies, we've finally received payments for some of our possessions that went missing during the packing / shipping that Oceanair was responsible for. I believe that the packers at Oceanair deliberately manipulated my packing manifest and shipping inventories to allow them to steal thousands of dollars worth of electronics from me during this move.

Essentially anything we shipped by sea that was an electronic item, never made it back to California. This included:

2 macbook pros
1 sony vaio
1 asus eeepc
1 nabaztag
2 sony psps
lots of various minor electronics (digital picture frames, ipods, etc...)

If you look at the paperwork we signed, there were boxes labeled "electronics", but in the end several boxes that got packed, seemed to be left off the manifest completely. With two guys working in our flat at a breakneck pace it would have been easy for them to skip labeling a couple of the boxes on their way down to the truck, and that is exactly what I believe happened.

If you are moving in the UK, I would recommend that you find someone else to do your packing and shipping. I know that I'll never use Oceanair International again, and I'll be encouraging my employer to never use this sub-contrator again either.

From this experience, I've got some tips on moving:

Do your own inventory. Don't let the packers seal a single box, until you have seen what is in it.
Count each box that goes out the door and compare that count to your own inventory. If your inventory doesn't match the number of boxes going out the door, tell the packers to empty their truck and find the missing boxes.
Make sure there is someone in the room with every packer at all times. Don't trust them.
Make a photo inventory and capture serial numbers on all of your valuables, and submit it to the moving company before they pack.
Add a call-home application to any computer that is going to be shipped, and make sure it has an encrypted drive and requires authentication to boot up. Even better, erase the hard drive on any computer that will be out of your control.

Back in the USA

2009-09-24T07:46:00.000-07:00

I've been back in California for 25 days now. I'm living in my new house, with a new puppy, and all of my old furniture that has been in storage for the last four years. I'm still having a hard time getting used to the fact that I'm back for good. It feels like a strange working holiday so far.

The house is great, Jenna and I are working like mad to get settled. Every night I try to do three tasks to get us closer to that end, and Jenna does several more during the day. We've been hanging pictures, setting up AV systems, organizing, and putting away.

The puppy is fun. Here she is right now sleeping in her favorite spot on the stairs. She likes to sleep either on that step or the one above it. I think she prefers the carpet there over the tile in the rest of the house.

She has been a surprisingly good dog over the last week. She hasn't destroyed much, and hasn't had any accidents in the house (given that the shelter warned us that she wasn't house trained is a little amazing from my perspective).

She did destroy a bathroom yesterday by ripping apart every roll of toilet paper and tissue box in the room, but it really wasn't her fault. We normally keep her in a crate while we are out, but she doesn't like it. Yesterday we used the bathroom out of desperation because she refused to go in the crate. BTW, if any of you have good tips on getting a puppy to like the crate, I'm all ears.

Life is hectic right now, but in a good way. We are bringing order to chaos, and looking forward to a visit from my Mom and Dad next month.

Buying a house with Google Spreadsheets and data

2009-06-01T23:04:00.000-07:00

Over the last several weeks Jenna and I have been shopping for a house in California. We've been living in London for the last three years, and are now preparing to move home to the San Francisco Bay.

By all accounts, this is a great time to buy a house. When we contacted our old friend and real estate agent, Roger Knapp, we were surprised that he sent us so many properties that met our requirements.

Roger sent us 140 possible properties for us to look at. Of those we choose 19 to visit on this trip, and we're hoping to buy one of those 19 this week.

The last time we bought a house, we approached the task in a very loose way. We visited the properties, took some pictures, and discussed them afterward, but we mostly relied on our feelings to tell us which house to buy. We don't have that luxury on this trip, so we've been more rigorous about collecting and collating data on each property we want to consider.

Google Spreadsheets has been a huge help in this. First we created a spreadsheet with MLS number, address, and price. Then we added a gadget to the spreadsheet to create a map with all the properties on it. This spreadsheet had the added advantage that we could share it with Roger, and our families to get their opinions on the properties we are looking at.

We realized pretty quickly that there were many more properties than we could possibly look at, so we introduced a simple subjective rating system. For each property on the list, Jenna and I looked at the MLS page for it, and gave it a rating of 1-5. We decided that we would only look at houses with a 4 or 5 rating.

Next we decided that we should derive some metrics from the data we had in the spreadsheet. So we created a sheet to calculate the monthly mortgage payment for each property with a fixed down payment, and added a price per square foot column to help us understand the underlying cost of each property.

After that we added some formulas to color the cells for our metrics. In each case we sorted the sheet by the metric in question, and divided the different between the lowest number and the highest number by 3. We assigned green, yellow, and red to the cells based on which third of the spread their contents fell in. This allowed us to get a really great overview of the properties, and showed us how some of our favorites were great values and some weren't.

Finally we created a form in the spreadsheet, that we could access from our iPhones while we are visiting the properties. It's got about 20 questions on it, where we ask ourselves to enter a rating of 1-5, and it is keyed off of MLS number. This means that as we are touring a property, Jenna and I can each answer the questions individually, and then send the data back to our spreadsheet.

We'll combine the survey data for each property and the metrics we calculated before to develop a ranking for our potential houses. That data should help us to understand which house is really our favorite across several considerations.

Once this is all done, I'll post the spreadsheet for others to see, but until then, wish us luck.

Division Binned

2009-03-22T07:41:00.001-07:00

Division Binned, originally uploaded by Allen Hutchison.

Looking out our window this morning we saw the heads from Pink Floyd's Division Bell album cover in the skip behind EMI's offices in London. The album came out in 1994, so I wonder where these have been all those years.

Really like Shell Sink

2009-03-04T06:16:00.001-08:00

I stumbled across Shell Sink the other day. It's an appengine app that allows you to capture and tag all of the commands you run from a command prompt. That means that you can synchronize your bash history for several machines, and tag and annotate commands in the web interface.

This is such a great idea. I often find myself looking for some huge complex command that I ran on one machine, to run again sometime later. Of course I could manually search through all of my bash_history files, but then I would have to remember which machine I ran the command on.

Shell Sink allows you to save all of those commands in one place and search for them, so I don't have to worry about where I ran that complex command the next time I need it.

There are a couple of things I wish Shell Sink supported:

Should allow people to delete old commands. If I run a command with some sensitive data on the command line (even though I know I shouldn't) I'd like to be able to delete that command from the Shell Sink history. Shell Sink does give me the option to disable command collection for a time, but I'm afraid that I'll forget to do that.
It should aggregate commands. Right now it just lists your history as it would in a plain text file. It would be great if it actually aggregated your commands so that there is only one entry for 'ls' in my history.
If it aggregates, it would also be great to have a counter for each command. So if I only have one 'ls' entry I can know that I ran it 500 times.

If you are a command line addict, then check out Shell Sink, and let the author know you like it.

Appengine remote_api example on OS X

2009-03-04T05:13:00.001-08:00

The appengine team recently published an article on using remote_api, a new feature for accessing your appengine data store from a remote process. In the example they start off with a script that will allow you to get a console into your data store. The code on the site doesn't work as in for Mac OS X.

Below you'll find an updated example that does work for Mac. Basically you have to add the yaml lib directory to the sys.path.

#!/usr/bin/python
import code
import getpass
import os
import sys

DIR_PATH = "/Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine"

EXTRA_PATHS = [
  DIR_PATH,
  os.path.join(DIR_PATH, 'lib', 'yaml', 'lib'),
]

sys.path = EXTRA_PATHS + sys.path

from google.appengine.ext.remote_api import remote_api_stub
from google.appengine.ext import db

def auth_func():
  return raw_input('Username:'), getpass.getpass('Password:')

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
  print "Usage: %s app_id [host]" % (sys.argv[0],)
app_id = sys.argv[1]
if len(sys.argv) > 2:
  host = sys.argv[2]
else:
  host = '%s.appspot.com' % app_id

remote_api_stub.ConfigureRemoteDatastore(app_id, '/remote_api', auth_func, host)

code.interact('App Engine interactive console for %s' % (app_id,), None, locals())

That's all it takes. Hope you find it helpful. I'll also drop a line to the appengine team to let them know about these changes.

Egomania and work life balance

2009-02-27T14:02:00.001-08:00

I had an interesting chat at lunch today about work / life balance. Those of you who follow my twitter stream will find this ironic, but I actually feel like I have a pretty good work / life balance.

I don't log in after I've come home for the day, and I don't work on the weekends, and I don't carry a blackberry. There are, of course, rare times when I do all of those things (except for the blackberry), but its not very often. I'm also happy to say that the same statements apply to my teams at work.

Yes, some people stay later than me, some come in earlier, but generally we are all pretty balanced with work, and I actively throw people out of the office in the evenings because I don't want them to work crazy hours.

There are people, however, who put in long hours, check email every few minutes, and log on all weekends. I'm willing to bet that this isn't really required, and in my mind is a symptom of one of two possible team problems:

Its either a lack of distributed knowledge, or a lack of trust.

In the first case, the obsessive emailer has become a locked source of knowledge in the team. Everyone comes to her with their questions, and she feels compelled to respond so that others aren't held up. On the surface she feels like she is helping the team, but in the long run she is hurting the team. She is training people to rely on her when they don't immediately know the answer to their own questions. In effect, she has become the safety net. This leads to her working longer hours because she has to handle disruptions during the day and her own job at night.

In the second case its a lack of trust or empowerment in the team. In this case the obsessive emailer has become a locked source of decision making for the team. He has to weigh in on every decision no matter how small, and will become offended if others take action without consultation. He ends up working long hours because sometimes its just easier to do it yourself.

In both of these cases the obsessive emailer is really suffering from the idea that they are more important to the project than they actually are or they have made themselves critical where they don't need to be.

In my teams, I encourage everyone to use mailing lists, wikis, and documentation to overcome the first problem. If you are going to answer someone's question, make sure at least one other person learns from your answer, that helps to distribute knowledge throughout the team and makes it much easier for individuals to rotate in or out.

I also avoid weighing in on every decision in my teams. I encourage people to make their own decisions. Yes, sometimes they'll screw up, and that is ok. The best people you can have in your teams are the ones who screw up in a new way every time. That means that they are taking risks, and learning from their mistakes.

Don't let yourself become a team bottleneck, and don't loose your own work / life balance. Take a step back and see what people do without you. I'll bet you find that they get on ok.

New lines added to severedelays.org

2009-02-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

Last night I upgraded the service running at status.severedelays.org (html, xml, json) to include current status for the London Overground and Docklands Light Rail (DLR). This rounds out the service nicely for London.

The last couple of weeks have also included a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make the service scale. I'm pretty happy about where it's at, and am now ready to include new transit networks and new developers.

If you would like to work on a current status API for your local transit network, get in touch with me. Severedelays.org would like to host your data. It's trivially easy to add new transit networks to the service. For example, take a look at the work required to add the London Overground.

This process makes it easy to add new lines, stations, or anything else with data available on the web. My next task for the service is automated service aggregation. I'll be providing aggregates of service levels for each line in the system. So you'll know how often it runs without disruption, and what the likelihood is of it running without disruption tomorrow.

There are hundreds of great applications to be written with this data. Drop me a line if you are interested.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

2009-02-21T22:12:00.000-08:00

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.

Crisisofcredit.com

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit jdjarvis.com.

My road-trip mix tape

2009-01-23T14:10:00.001-08:00

Country Feedback by R.E.M.

This is the perfect REM song. It has dense imagery and a unique musical environment.

Round Here by Counting Crows

It's mellow, and one of my favorites. I love the guitar arpeggios.

Suddenly I See by KT Tunstall

I love the chorus in this song. I end up humming it for hours every time I hear it.

Unit testing with Google App Engine

2009-01-10T11:33:00.002-08:00

Tonight, I've been working on the unit testing framework for severedelays.org. I started out with a basic web search that lead me to this article, which suggested mocking out all of the framework calls. This sounded great, but was really too much work for me to reliably do on a regular basis.

What I really wanted was something I could run from my machine to make sure that my code was ok without having to manually run through all of the possible pages in my app.

Next I came to these suggestions by the App Engine team, however, this approach doesn't actually work very well on the mac because this platform uses the GoogleAppEngineLauncher, so none of the app engine code is installed in the python path. Again, I could get around this, but it's a bunch of work and my collaborators would have to do different work arounds for their platforms.

Finally I came to GAEUnit, which was almost what I wanted. From a testing perspective, this solution is great, but if you look at the setup instructions, the authors suggest that you drop their gaeunit.py in your appengine directory, and create a /test* url in your configuration.

I don't like this for a couple of reasons. First I want to keep my test code seperate from my deployed application code. There is no reason to have to deploy my test code in my production application. The extra code can lead to confusion, and possibly to bugs. Also, I was nervous about adding another URL target that I would have to support, even if I can ensure that the tests self-destruct when they are run in production.

I came up with a workaround, that I'm pretty happy with. I created a second appengine configuration in our repository to house the tests, so now my code tree looks like this:

severedelays/appengine/... (This is where my production code lives).
severedelays/appengine-test/...(This is where my test code lives).

So, this allows me to keep my test code out of my production code. All I need to do to import my production code is to create a couple of relative soft links between the two directories for my lib and third_party directories.

Now, when I'm working on the code I can startup a dev sever for both appengine configurations. In the first I can test what the app looks like, and in the second I can run the tests.

This also has the advantage of seperating the datastore for the test instance from my development instance. Overall, I'm pretty happy with this setup.

Severe Delays - London Underground Tube Status API

2009-01-04T13:48:00.000-08:00

I spent most of my holiday break relaxing and catching up on little projects around the house. I did manage to get some time together to build a service that I have wanted for awhile.

As many of you know, I wrote a little iGoogle gadget to display the current status of the London Underground network (the Tube). It worked well, but relied on a backend that I didn't have any administrative control over. So, when the TFL changed their page layout, which they seem to do a couple of times a year, it took awhile to get things fixed.

The last time this happened, I dropped an email to Malcolm Barclay (author of the great iPhone TubeStatus app) and asked him if he would like to collaborate on this problem. He agreed, and we were off.

I put together a source code repository and a site at www.severedelays.org. The API is still a little new, but I've been running my iGoogle gadget on it for about a week now with no serious trouble. It's pretty easy to use and I provide data in two formats XML and JSON.

To make a request you fetch the following url:

http://status.severedelays.org/uk-lon/current?format=xml

This will give you an XML formatted doc with all of our most recent information (right now that is just tube lines, but more is coming). If you prefer JSON then change the format to json.

The next release, which will probably come out in a week or so, will include information for tube, dlr, and London Overground, as well as the messages for each station. There will be an API for getting at particular pieces of data (/uk-lon/lines/current or /uk-lon/stations/current).

You might ask why I've got the uk-lon identifier in the URL. That is where you come in. Do you want to include data from your own network? I would love to hear from you. It would be great to get information from any and all mass transit networks, and even road congestion data too.

This service runs on top of Google's App Engine. I hope you find this useful, and please drop me a line if you have any questions.

More Protests

2009-01-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

Last night and tonight have brought more protests in London. Last night there was a large demonstration at Trafalger Square, and the an attempted march toward Kensington, but apparently the police blocked that from taking place. The protesters reassembled at High Street Kensington for a couple of hours in front of the Israeli embassy.

Jenna and I saw the protests on our way to get groceries last night. There were a lot of angry people in the road, and the police had traffic on Kensington High Street blocked off. As we were watching the protests, people started throwing things towards the police, or maybe towards the embassy (the police were standing between the crowd and the embassy so it's hard to say).

A line of about 100 police in full riot gear moved in, and that was when Jenna and I decided to move. We didn't want to be between the police line and the crowd. Over the next hour or so the police segmented and dispursed the crowd.

There was a new demonstration tonight, but it didn't have the same force of the group last night, and organizers are promising another large demonstration next weekend.

Third day of protests at home

2008-12-30T07:47:00.002-08:00

This is the third day of protests at the Israeli Embassy down the street from my flat. I snapped this picture on my way to get some groceries this afternoon.

Murder Rates Compared

2008-12-30T01:28:00.000-08:00

This morning The Times published an article that mentioned the high murder rate in South Africa in the context of that country hosting the 2010 World Cup. The Times quoted the absolute number of homicides in South Africa last year, "18,487". Unfortunately, without context, that number is completely meaningless. I wanted to know what that number really meant for day to day life.

To help with that I found a page on Wikipedia that compiles the homicide rate for several countries per 100000 people. That changed the South African number to 38.6. Then I compared that rate to the rates in several countries I have visited in the last year.

This chart gives much greater context for understanding how incredibly high the murder rate in South Africa really is.

Lighter

2008-12-27T15:46:00.003-08:00

I just went through security at BGI in Barbados and had a sad experience with airport security. I was carrying a lighter in my carry-on that my wife had given me for my birthday last year. It was a pretty nice one that hadn't been cheap.

The reason I was carrying it in my bag was because my airline (Virgin Atlantic) forbids lighters in checked luggage. Given this rule, I packed it in my bag and headed through security only to fond that I'm not allowed to tale a lighter through security in Barbados.

Essentially the authorities have set up a system where you can bring a lighter into the country, but aren't allowed to tale it home. In fact I learned later that the only way I could have gotten it home was to ship it home as a parcel.

So, be warned.

Why I Voted No on Proposition 8

2008-10-29T00:43:00.002-07:00

I voted in California by Absentee Ballot a few weeks ago, and I've been talking about my votes in this space over the last few days.

Today, I want to talk about why I voted NO on Proposition 8. For my friends who don't live in California, the Wikipedia definition of Prop 8 is:

Proposition 8 is an initiative measure on the 2008 California General Election ballot titled Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. If passed, the proposition would "change the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California." A new section would be added stating "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

In essence, Prop 8 takes away the rights of same sex couples to marry in California. I find this not only un-American, but disturbing at a very deep level. Prop 8 is bigotry codified in law. Americans should be better than this. We should know that in our country all people are equal under the law and have the same rights under the law.

I was so proud when I read that my employer publicly took a position to oppose this proposition:

However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

This morning, I saw a link to a video that Lawrence Lessig made about his opposition to this initiative. Take a look at what Lessig has to say on Prop 8:

Why I Voted for Obama

2008-10-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

There are many, many reasons that I voted for Obama a few weeks ago. Today I want to share a video with you from a campaign event in Ohio.

"There are no real or fake parts of this country. There is no city or town that is more pro-American than anywhere else. We're one nation. All of us proud. All of us patriots."

Why I Voted for Obama

2008-10-26T04:10:00.001-07:00

I voted awhile ago by absentee ballot, and I voted for Obama. There are a lot of reasons, but the main one is education not experience. When I interview someone, the first thing I look at is where they went to school and how they did there.

Why do I do this? Because the school you go to is a great filtering mechanism. If schools didn't filter we would all go to Harvard, Berkeley, and MIT. We would all go to the best schools because we want to ensure that we get the best education. So, while the school a candidate went to isn't the only determining factor, it's an important one.

Then I look at how that person did at school. Did he graduate at the top of his class at Harvard? Did he graduate at all? Did the candidate work hard in school? That's important. The only reason a person has to work hard at school is if they are motiviated. For the first time in a person's life, they are on their own, and no one is really pushing them anymore. There is no external scrutiny, and that tells me something about their character.

Now, I apply those decision criteria to the people running for office, as summarized on this blog:

Barack Obama:

Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.

Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden:

University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.

Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.
John McCain: United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899
Sarah Palin:

Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester

North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study

University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism

Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester

University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

I have to say that is a pretty stark difference, and that difference is one of the biggest reasons for me to vote for Obama. I want smart people in office. I want people who are smarter and have worked harder than me to represent me to the world.

Reading Books on iPhone 2.0

2008-08-26T13:52:00.001-07:00

I've always been a fan of ebooks, and have read them for years on Palm devices with software from eReader.com.

I wrote a short article a year ago about reading ebooks on the iPhone, and another one last September on using Books.app, but the conclusion in each of those cases is that the iPhone would be a great platform for ebooks, but the software wasn't there yet.

I'm really glad to say that the software is "there" now with the release of several software packages on the iPhone. In particular I've been using eReader, and Stanza for reading on my iPhone, and have been very pleased with both.

In each case the app provides a full screen text view, with a tap or slide motion to turn the pages. Both are extremely easy to use. eReader works with all of my books from eReader.com, and allows me to download books that I have purchased in the past. Stanza will read several formats, but it's biggest use for me is a library of free out of copyright texts that I would otherwise pay for at eReader.

Of the two I would say that Stanza has the best UI, but eReader has the best book selection (by virtue of their online store). They are both free in the iTunes store, so give them a try and let me know which you like best.

Missed it

2008-08-25T01:30:00.000-07:00

If you follow my tweets, you know that I was in New York last week for a couple of days. This was a rare trip for me for two reasons. First, Jenna was with me, and second I wasn't there for work. This trip was strictly about seeing New York, and more importantly deciding if it was someplace that Jenna and I would like to live when we are done in London.

One of my ulterior motives for this trip was a visit to The Museum of Modern Art to see Van Gogh's The Starry Night. It is one of my favorite paintings, but I had never had a chance to see it in person. When we went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam a few months ago, I learned it was in New York at MOMA, and was looking forward to seeing it there.

Sadly, when we got to the gallery we learned that the painting was now traveling, and I wouldn't be able to see it.

According to the sign it will be back in New York in Autumn, so maybe I'll get a chance then. If not, then it's coming to Amsterdam in 2009, and I'll go over to see it there.

Keeping up with friends

2008-08-11T21:45:00.001-07:00

I've been using twitter for about a year and a half, and other social aggregation services like FaceBook and FriendFeed, but recently I've found that there are a couple of developments that, combined, really make the service worth the time.

First is the growing convergence between these services. When I write post on twitter, it goes into my status message on Facebook, and is also aggregated on FriendFeed. When I comment on a post on FriendFeed, the comment can be sent to twitter as well, and when I write a post on my blog, it ends up on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Second is the number of people watching these services. From my point of view that number has finally reached a majority of the people I try to keep track of, and in many cases I'm starting to connect with old friends who I haven't heard from in years.

Third is the amount of activity on these sites. People are really starting to use them and even better, people are really starting to interact on these services.

I ran into Christina Kuhn today at work, and we got to talking about the fact that she knew I was in town because she saw my status on Twitter. The she mentioned that one of her friends just announced her pregnancy on Twitter. I had to laugh when she brought this up, because I follow the same friend, and found out about her news the same way.

Over the last few days I've had a bunch of replies from people I knew in high school, former jobs, and old friends. It's starting to feel like a real community. Do other people have similar experiences?

Google Translate for iPhone

2008-08-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about working for Google is the 20% time. While it's popularly touted in the media as "one day a week to do whatever you want", it's really just an acknowledgement that there are times when you get an itch, and have to scratch it. The company let's you do that on their time for up to 20% of your time.

This is a great way to explore new areas, and try new things. It's also a great way to get a product out the door that might not happen otherwise.

My latest 20% project is an iPhone interface for Google Translate. You can see the blog post where I introduced the feature over on the Google Mobile blog.

This was a fun project to work on. First I got to dive deeper into client-side javascript and HTML5 AIPs. Second I got to work with some great engineers like my friend David Singleton.

So far the response to the app is pretty good. There are about 1200 links on a relevant Google Blog search, and about 40 results on the same search in Google News. So far, I've seen a lot of great recommendations, and will have to plow through all these articles to see what people are saying.

I'm already hard at work on adding recommendations and incorporating feedback, expect to see more updates in the future.

Apple running away from success

2008-08-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

When you are trying to create a new development ecosystem the number one thing you have to keep in mind is that the developers are the lifeblood of that system. Why was palm the number one handheld for so long? Because it had an incredibly strong development community. What kept that community so strong? The support from Palm in the form of development tools, and resources.

Why has the Mac and Mac OS X been so successful? Because apple has supported developers by giving away commercial grade development environments, and publishing huge amounts of information about the OS so that you can build any app you can think of.

How is apple screwing the pooch on the iPhone? Because they are messing around with developers income streams. I sight two cases from last week:

First Nullriver, which built a tethering app to allow you to use your "unlimited data" from your iPhone contract on any computer. It was a clever little hack, Nullriver got it into the app store, and downloaded by a bunch of people before Apple pulled the app from the store shelves. This in itself might have been OK, but Apple didn't see fit to communicate at all with the developer:

We still haven't gotten any answer from Apple as to why NetShare was removed from the App Store. Calls to ADC yield wait times of a few hours and we're forced to give up. E-mails to various contacts at Apple and the developer program have also given us no response. Is this acceptable business practice? We don't think so. When an application fails to be approved or even more importantly so, when an application gets removed from sale, Apple should be required to provide a valid reason.

Second Box Office is also pulled from the App store. This case may be due to a name change for the App, but the basic issue is similar, a lack of communication from Apple:

I'm currently investigating why Now Playing/BoxOffice was pulled from the app store. Hopefully i'll get some actionable information soon.

In each case Apple could have avoided trouble by responding to developer questions. In both cases the developers have tried to get in touch with Apple to find out what is going on with their applications, and in neither case have they received any information from Apple.

This is just poor customer service on the part of Apple for it's developer customers. These are the people that Apple is planning to use to make the new iPhone an unmitigated success, but Apple is going to find it a lonely road if they don't start paying attention to their developers.

Support is about more than splitting a revenue stream, it's about responding to issues as they arise, and answering questions. Support is about not leaving your developers out to dry when they are depending on you.