Andy's Blog

The Last Journey of a Genius

2008-07-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

Pure genius. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

Obviously This Show Needs to Get Made

2008-05-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

Fun with GreaseMonkey and the Future of Email Apps

2008-05-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I hacked (I mean literally hacked, it ain't pretty :) up a little GreaseMonkey script called TripIt For GMail. The idea was to play around with the concept of embedding TripIt functionality inside a mail client. Since the GMail team are supporters of GreaseMonkey and have created an "API" for GreaseMonkey scripts within the GMail UI I decided to start there.

The script is extremely simple. All it does is embed an 'Add to TripIt' button in the right hand column of the GMail web UI.

Currently the script does not even attempt to decide whether or not the email you are looking at is a travel confirm (that's something one could imagine adding pretty easily). Also, because it's just a GreaseMonkey script and not a true application running inside of GMail it doesn't have access to the source of the mail message and therefore needs to automate the actions of a user clicking on the 'Forward' button, typing in plans@tripit.com and hitting 'Send'. Clever, but not how I really want to build this app.

I haven't had much time to work on the script since January as I've been pretty busy but I did just post it to UserScripts here for anyone who is interested in playing around with it. It's only been tested on Firefox 2 on Linux, Windows, and Mac so if you're using FF3 or FF1 your mileage may vary.

More important than the actual implementation of this script is the direction I see email clients and platforms heading. Imagine an email system that is smart enough to detect what you were looking at and automatically do intelligent stuff for you. In the use case that is currently near and dear to my heart the system figures out that the email you are looking at (or maybe you don't even have to look at it :) is a travel confirmation, sends the source of that email to TripIt (ideally via a RESTful API authenticated via oAuth) so that a beautifully formatted itinerary gets created for you. Take that one step further and imagine the email platform re-consuming that data from TripIt in any one of a number of forms (e.g. iCalendar, RSS/Atom, API, etc...) so that all of it is re-integrated into your suite of productivity web/desktop apps in semantically intelligent ways. The system should do all the work for you so you can focus on where you're going and what you have to accomplish once you get there (i.e. your "real" work).

In the travel space TripIt has been driving the use of email as a critical component of what I humbly think is a very useful social travel organizer for folks who travel. Beyond travel however, there are tons of useful applications (both social *and* non-social) for this kind of intelligent platform and trying to inspire folks to create these applications was a focus of my talk at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco.

I think the message is getting through and I think folks are finally realizing that email always has been and continues to be a great interface to systems, humans, and your data. Folks such as Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten over at NextWeb, Jake Kuramoto at Oracle, and Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch understand and have talked about the possibilities.

The time is right, and long overdue, for intelligent apps built on top of good old fashioned, ubiquitous, and highly scalable email to begin seeing the light of day. In the coming months I hope we start to see companies like Yahoo and Google open up their mail platforms and turn them into application platforms. We've already seen Yahoo begin opening up their search results page with SearchMonkey and the best information is that he rest of Yahoo, including mail, is going in that direction as well.

In smaller ways it appears as if this trend is already beginning with the beta launch of webmail provider Zenbe. I haven't actually seen the Zenbe yet but if it works as advertised, this is a great model for where mail platforms should be going. There are also companies such as Xobni who are nicely positioned to chip away at this problem from the client side of what is probably the most widely deployed email platform in the world (at least in corporate settings), Outlook/Exchange. It would be nice if Microsoft's Exchange group were focused on this but so far I've seen no indication from the sleepy giant in Redmond that they are thinking along these lines. Of course there are a lot of smart folks up there so I wouldn't be surprised if someone is trying to fight what must be a significant amount of corporate inertia to get this done, who knows. It's definitely a huge opportunity for them given their dominant market position in corporate email infrastructure.

I can't wait to see this continue to unfold, it's going to be an interesting year!

Ooops...

2008-04-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 Presentation

2008-04-25T09:12:00.001-07:00

I made the slides for my Web 2.0 Expo preso available via Slideshare and embeded them on the TripIt blog. Enjoy!

Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo

2008-04-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

If you'll be attending Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I will be giving a talk entitled Making Email a Useful Web App on Wednesday (4/23). Should be a fun, and I hope informative, discussion. Drop by if you can!

TripIt Nominated for a Webby!

2008-04-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else I've been following the Webby's for years but never in a million years imagined I'd be a part of a company that was nominated for one. If you guys were planning on voting and like TripIt, please don't be shy, vote now! Vote here! (registration required)

Solved: iMac Wireless Issues

2008-03-29T22:34:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks since I purchased a NetGear RangeMax router I haven't had a single problem with the iMac. My apologies to Apple but it seems like my old Linksys didn't have what it took to sufficiently cover the apartment.

In other news, I finally upgrade my main laptop from Dapper Drake to a beta version of Hardy Heron and it rocks!

Update: iMac wireless w/ DD-WRT

2008-02-24T12:32:00.000-08:00

Impressive, I boot up the iMac this morning and it immediately connected to my non-SSID broadcasting wireless network. A sign of good things to come, I hope... If so, I may have to begin writing an apology to Apple.

Just Installed DD-WRT

2008-02-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

I just hacked my Linksys router and installed dd-wrt so I could boost the signal strength of the device. Btw, for anyone who has been considering doing this but has not because you were afraid of bricking your router, I had no issues with the install process. I have a WRT54G v2 router which is pretty old and as such very well supported so your mileage may vary, but I had no issues.

I have been suspecting for a while now that my rants at Apple have been misplaced and that the true nature of my wireless problems have more to do with the distance between the new iMac and the router. We'll see, but either way dd-wrt has all kinds of neat features that the stock Linksys firmware did not have so I will have plenty to play with this evening.

New Look for the Blog

2008-02-20T21:53:00.000-08:00

I didn't really like how narrow the template I was using was so I'm playing around with a new look. So far so good.

Tabs v. Spaces

2008-02-14T17:18:00.000-08:00

It's unfortunate that it has been so long since I last posted but I have been really busy both personally and professionally. I re-ran across this today as I was searching for a solid PHP mode for Emacs (I finally ditched Eclipse and PHPEclipse as my PHP development environment as it was too slow and my threshold for pain was finally surpassed).

http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html

Absolutely classic! Let the religious wars begin...

Enjoy and Happy Valentine's day.

Supreme Nerd God

2008-01-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

If NerdTests.com says it, I have to believe it.

The iMac is Wired

2008-01-14T09:45:00.000-08:00

I have given up for now trying to get the wireless on the iMac to be stable. Of course the problems might be related to my access point (standard Linksys WRT45G), the distance from the machine to the access point, hardware issue, or radio interference of some kind. Of course my Ubuntu box is sitting right next to the Mac and having no problems so I don't really believe the problems have anything to do with anything but the Mac itself. So for now I've hardwired the Mac to the network so I can get some work done.

Next steps are to wait for the next Leopard update (I hear it's coming out soon). If that doesn't work, I will give Apple customer support a spin to see if it's as good as folks claim. If those two things don't work I might try a different access point. I know folks who have the NetGear RangeMax and have had good success, maybe I'll try one of those. So disappointing...

2007 a Year in Review

2007-12-31T15:08:00.001-08:00

Just kidding, I hate those new year roundup/prediction posts. Stop reading blogs, turn off your computers and go have some fun, it's New Years Eve! Happy New Year everyone!

A Few Weeks with an iMac

2007-12-29T21:42:00.000-08:00

I've had the iMac now for a few weeks and thought I'd give some of my first impressions of the machine. I really like the machine. It's the first Mac I've owned and it's the only computer that I've ever owned that I could see being described as "sexy." The physical design of the machine is beautiful. It feels solid, is quiet, takes up a minimal amount of space (important in a San Francisco apartment), and is very fast. Apple has done a wonderful job of making the experience of owning a Mac from the time you open the box to the time the machine is up and running a really great one. Compared to the pain I had when I set up a Vista box at work a few months back, the iMac was a cinch and I was up and running within 30 minutes (including un-boxing and physical setup). Compare this to Vista where I spent the same amount of time un-boxing the machine, and then the rest of the day removing all the crapware Dell was gracious enough to install for me, this was a dream. The only thing Apple tried to sell me was a .Mac membership. I politely declined and was never bothered again. I really appreciated that as it was obvious that someone spent time thinking about *me* (the person that just forked over his hard earned money to buy this machine) as I was going through this process. It may sound weird, but I'd almost describe it as thoughtful.

As for the machine itself, I'd say it's been an OK experience so far. I don't say "great" because while the gear is nice and I was up and running quickly, Leopard isn't quite ready and hasn't been as stable as my Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux. I've had a few Leopard kernel panics that I have been unable to figure out and the wireless support is embarrassingly bad. To be fair, the kernel panics seemed to have subsided since I installed the 10.5.1 "patch" for Leopard and the machine does seem a bit more stable now.

Above all, the one thing that has surprised me more than anything is the lack of reasonable support for "secured" wireless networks. My network at home was set up with a 128 bit WEP key (not too secure but I change it on occasion and it's better than nothing), is not broadcasting its SSID (why would I?), and is MAC limited to only my machines. I have *never* had a problem with my Linux box finding my wireless network. Granted, with Linux, you generally need to find the right driver/gear combination to get a stable system, but once I sorted that out, it has been rock solid for me.

The wireless support has been a nightmare. Every time I booted the machine it would forget the SSID of my network. Seriously? So, I re-provide the SSID and the password and then maybe it would attach successfully to the network 1 in 10 times. I even had this type of problem after waking the machine from sleep. Come on, the ability of a Mac to go to sleep and come up right where you left it is legendary! After a few times dealing with this I decided that I needed to figure out what was going on. So, I did some experiments.

The first thing I changed was to remove the wireless security and WEP password. This made absolutely no difference to how the machine behaved. The next thing I did was to broadcast my SSID. Sadly, this seems to have made things more stable. I say sadly because now my network SSID is being broadcast to the world. It's not so much that I am worried that the black van with the tinted windows is going to pull up outside my house to steal bandwidth and passwords (I am a heavy user of SSH and SSL), but I am pretty amazed at how poor a job Apple did making sure Leopard was "right" before they released it. Isn't this the company that hates buttons and wires? Are they subtly encouraging me to wire up? :)

Ok, enough grumpiness for one night. Apple will be coming out with another multi-hundred GB patch for Leopard shortly. I'm hoping they will sort these issues out.

DIAD MISSORT

2007-12-12T21:01:00.001-08:00

ups-huh1
Originally uploaded by andydenmark

I recently purchased a 24" iMac for the home and had it shipped from Amazon. My bad for trying to have it shipped to my house because I am never there. I asked UPS to redirect shipment and now my iMac has gone missing and apparently has entered the DIAD MISSORT zone. WTF? I stopped by the UPS depot on my way home and the very nice UPS employee honestly told me she didn't know where my package was but somehow she was confident it will be delivered tomorrow to the TripIt offices tomorrow.

We'll see...

Happy Birthday Commodore 64

2007-12-10T21:06:00.001-08:00

I can't believe it's been 25 years. I guess that means I'm old. :) CNN did a nice piece on the birthday of the best computer ever made. Time to fire up MAME and play a round of Jumpman Jr. Don't worry, I own the original!

Happy Thanksgiving

2007-11-25T17:23:00.000-08:00

I thought this was pretty amusing and so I thought I'd post a link so you could all enjoy as well.

Thankful I'm Not Bill O'Reilly

Disclaimer: OATV, and by extension Bill, err, I mean Tim O'Reilly is an investor in TripIt, but that has nothing to do with why I'm posting this link. :)

Enjoy!

It's a little late, but Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Mystery Solved

2007-11-20T21:39:00.000-08:00

The mystery of the can opener has been solved! Thanks Mom & Dad. :)

Great TripIt Coverage

2007-11-20T11:58:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've posted any TripIt coverage highlights since I've been pretty busy working on new TripIt features.

The past couple of weeks we've gotten some nice mentions though.

I sat down with Nate Koechley a while back to talk about TripIt and our use of YUI. The full interview may be found here. I've blogged about YUI before and I still think it's an awesome Javascript library and I am so glad we're using it to build TripIt.

TripIt also got a very nice mention on the Blog of Omar Shahine of Microsoft. We've been working closely with our friends at Microsoft and are so happy about how much they love TripIt!

Finally, we got covered in a really nice article by the AP this morning.

Did You Buy Me a Can Opener?

2007-11-14T22:05:00.000-08:00

The other day I had a truly bizarre experience. I retrieved a small package from my mailbox from Cricket Productions. I didn't remember ordering anything from and I had never heard of Cricket Productions. Since the package wasn't ticking, I opened it and found that someone had sent me a One Touch Can Opener. While I'm very happy to have this ingenious 'As Seen on TV' device I'm a little creaped out by having received it this way.

I didn't order this thing and yet it came with no note or indication as to who purchased it for me. Furthermore, it was addressed to 'Andy Denmark' not 'Andrew Denmark' like most of the marketing junk mail I get. So, whoever purchased this thing, thank you, and please fess up!

Yes, it did come with the free GripMate opener!

Update: Mom's Using Ubuntu with a Non-Ascii Character Set

2007-11-06T22:29:00.000-08:00

I spoke to my Mom on Sunday and had a little scare when she told me that she could not write to her family in Iceland because she didn't know how to get at non-ascii (she didn't say non-ascii, that was me) characters. Although I knew it was possible to use a Linux box to not only read, but also write, non-ascii character sets, I had never personally set this up. While I knew I could figure it out, how could I teach my Mom how set this up without flying to New York!

After 30 minutes of Googling around and playing around with my machine I put together the following set of instructions and sent it to her in an e-mail:

Go to System >> Administration >> Language Support
Select Icelandic and check the box in the right hand column
Select default language as 'English (United States of America)'
Select 'OK'
Once that is done, go to System >> Preferences >> Keyboard
Select the 'Layouts' tab
Click '+ Add'
Select 'Icelandic' from the left hand column and click 'OK'

I was fully expecting having to walk her through it on the phone. Even if we went through each step on the phone I anticipated we may have run into all sorts of complications.

This evening, I received an email from her saying that with a little help from Dad that they figured it out and she can now write e-mail to her family.

Who says Linux isn't ready for the desktop of the non-super geek?

Maybe if he hadn't put his finger in his mouth?

2007-10-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

There are cameras everywhere recording everything we do. The man who is likely to be Australia's next prime minister discovered this recently. I can't believe some of the stuff that gets passed around the Internet nowadays.

SFGate is reporting the story here.

5.6 Earthquake

2007-10-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

We just had a 5.6 magnitude earthquake centered near San Jose. It felt like a slow rolling quake that made everything in the house sway back and forth. I have felt a few earthquakes since moving to California but this was by far the largest one yet. The scariest part was how long it seemed to last (probably about 15 seconds). That may not sound like much but when the earth and your whole house is shaking, it's an eternity. The good news is that there was no damage and nobody was hurt that I know of up here in San Francisco.

Time to finish filling the disaster preparedness kit.

Here's a picture from the USGS: