Dancing About Architecture (Full Content)

Links for 2007-09-14 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

TV Torrents: When 'piracy' is easier than legal purchase
So true. Nice use of RSS!

Links for 2007-09-05 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

How to Play Guitar for Newbies
Hey, this could be handy!

Links for 2007-08-30 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Who's afraid of Google? | Economist.com
Interesting analysis

I've Been Feeling Detached Lately

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:12:38 -0600

Before I get back to gadgets, feeds, and Google, I have had a personal harrowing experience the past couple of weeks that I will share as a cautionary tale.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was visiting the mother ship, I noticed that something was "off" with my left eye. It seemed like the inside part of my left eye was looking through water or something, and it was messing with my perspective vision. Nothing hurt, and it wasn't hard to compensate for, but it was still kind of annoying. When I got back to Chicago on Wednesday (8/15), I called for an appointment with my ophthalmologist; I had LASIK done back in 1999 and I hadn't had a check-up in a couple of years, so I was overdue anyway. I just said that I needed check-up and that my left eye was a little funky. The doctor was on vacation that week, but I had an appointment for the following Tuesday.

The rest of the week was fine ... the eye was a little annoying, but not that big of a deal. I was a little anxious about the appointment, because that watery spot on my eye was not going away. At 2:00pm on Tuesday (8/21) I drove to the eye doctor's office. I went through a bunch of tests that all seemed kind of normal, plus a "side vision" test which is like a video game from 1974: when you see a little spot of light anywhere in your vision, press a little button which goes beep. The right eye was a steady series of beeps, but the left eye had long periods of time with no beeps. Hmmm.

The fun started after the doctor dilated my eyes and he began to examine my eyes with a bright light and some kind of lens that formed a very bright green vertical line. Right eye ... fine. When he got to my left eye and went looking around, he actually GASPED. He pushed back in his stool and all of the sudden he started treating me like I was radioactive. "Don't bend over. Don't shake your head. When was the last time you ate something today?" I knew things were probably not good after he asked that question.

He said that my left retina had become detached. Fortunately, it was only partially detached because it had not reached my macula, but I needed to have it taken care of right away or I risked permanent vision loss. So they made an appointment with a retina specialist in the area and I drove directly to the new office (which fortunately was in Arlington Heights where I live). This was at like 4:30pm. I figured I was probably going to ruin someone's evening.

More stinging eye drops, more bright lights, more tests ... yep, a serious detached retina. "When was the last time you ate something today?" I was going to have to go into surgery that night. A quick stop at home to coordinate babysitters and then I was off to the hospital. I haven't driven since then. Checking into the hospital was a piece of cake, and soon enough I was just lying around waiting for the 10pm surgery. Christine made it to the hospital right before I was rolled into the operating room.

They were going to perform a couple of procedures to re-attach the retina. The first is called a scleral buckle, which involves putting a flexible band around the eye to try to squeeze the wall back to the retina so it will go back into place. The second procedure is called a vitrectomy, where they essentially suck the fluid out of your eye and replace it with a gas bubble -- the idea that the gas bubble will exert pressure on the retina wall to keep it in place. It was this gas bubble that would become my nemesis.

The procedure started and I was under "twilight sedation", which is really pretty freaky. I remember the whole procedure (well, at least I think I do). I remember talking to the doctor while he was doing God knows what with needles and scalpels to my eye. They covered my right eye so I couldn't see anything, but still it was wild not being freaked out by all of that. That twilight sedation is good stuff. All in all, the procedure took a little over two hours.

Christine then drove me home. My eye was all patched up and I had a shield over my eye as well. In order to put the gas bubble in the right position, I had to sleep all night on my left side, which was tough because that was the bad eye side. Let's just say it was a very long, uncomfortable night. When I woke up, I had to continue lie on my left side as much as I could -- either that or I had to stare at the floor. At least on the left side I could watch some television.

I had a post-op appointment at 2pm in Chicago, which my dad drove me to (thanks Dad!). The bandages came off and everything was a blurry mess. Apparently this is okay, though, because the doctor said that everything looked good. My instructions for the next seven days were: use four different eye drops four times a day, no washing my hair, no lifting anything more than 5 lbs., no flying, try not to read very much, and maintain my head in a certain position -- either laying down on my right side or staring at the floor -- for at least 22 hours out of the day.

So, for the next few days my hair got grungier, my right hip and shoulder got sore, and my eye looked nasty. It wasn't too painful ... mostly just headaches that were the worst at night. I couldn't do much but lay around and either sleep or watch tv. That was actually a silver lining ... I haven't felt that rested in quite some time. I could do some work on the laptop by hunching over and staring down at the laptop below me, but really only for short bursts of activity. The FeedBurner team was very supportive and covered for me nicely.

This past Tuesday (8/28) I went in for another check-up and got the good news: the gas bubble had done the job and the retina had successfully re-attached. I could pretty much get on with my life, except I still couldn't see out of my left eye and I still couldn't get on a plane or drive. Oh, and I still had to sleep only on my right side, but during the day I could go about my normal business -- just take it easy staring at a computer screen. This was fantastic. I celebrated by taking a shower and washing my hair.

I actually went back to the office on Thursday. I couldn't stare at the computer screen for too long, but it was great to get out of the house. My depth perception and peripheral vision is horrible, so there's a lot of my gliding around with my hands out to guide me. And of course I've got the crazy eye to scare the children and co-workers: the pupil is always dilated and is a little, well, bug-eyed. And red. Not the prettiest thing you've seen, but a whole lot better than it was a couple of days after the surgery!

So, what's next? Well, I had planned my brother's bachelor party in Las Vegas for next weekend, but I wouldn't be able to get on a plane because the gas bubble will still most likely be in my eye. So we're doing a trip up to Wisconsin instead. It will supposedly take a few weeks before I'll have reasonable vision in my left eye. Right now, when I look straight ahead, I "see" the gas bubble in the bottom half of my vision (it looks like I'm looking through a drop of water) and the top half of my vision is like looking through a thick yellow plastic sheet. That will supposedly get better, although I might have wear glasses or a contact lens. Bummer.

As soon as my left eye recovers, I actually have to go in and have preventative laser surgery on my right eye. Apparently there are thin spots and small holes in the right eye retina wall, so it is susceptible to detachment. As long as there's no gas bubble, I'm in!

What should you take away from this? Well, if you ever see flashing lights, new floaters, a shadow in the periphery of your field of vision, or a gray curtain moving across your field of vision, see your eye doctor right away. Say it's an emergency. That's where I went wrong. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, and I guess I was actually really lucky that it didn't detach more in that week before I saw the eye doctor. I should have insisted that I see SOME ophthalmologist, even if my regular eye doctor was not available.

I'm ready to get back to work and resume life. It's a really strange feeling when your life unexpectedly gets put on hold for a while. I'm thankful that medical technology exists to fix this -- it's just so amazing when you really think about what doctors do for things like this. Inject a gas bubble into your eye and wrap your eyeball with a belt? Wild.

So, that's that. I'll be writing about more pleasant topics Real Soon, I promise.

Reboot

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 09:26:24 -0600

Quite a bit has happened since my last blog post: I'm now a Google employee, I've found out that we're going to have a baby boy in November, I've picked up a few new gadgets, and summer has flown by. Lots to say, I just haven't been saying it. Time to reboot the blog.

Links for 2007-08-16 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Mylyn 2.0, Part 1: Integrated task management
Good intro to all the great things that Mylyn can do for you

Links for 2007-08-09 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
This should be fun

Links for 2007-08-06 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Fine Diner to Riffraff: Tipsy Tales of 4-Star Benders - New York Times
Hilarious

Links for 2007-07-19 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Avoid the dangers of XPath injection
We're fine, but good to keep in mind

Sansa Connect?

Wed, 16 May 2007 19:02:43 -0600

In my continuing quest to expand my personal Yahoo! Music kingdom, I've become intrigued by the Sansa Connect WiFi player. I really liked the description of the device given at "How to get the most from your Sansa Connect". I'm totally bought into the subscription model, so this seems pretty cool. I'll probably end up waiting for version 2.

On the home front, I'm considering giving the Sonos system a try. I'd probably jettison one of my YMU accounts (yes, I have two: one for me and one for Christine) for a Rhapsody account. should probably do that anyway.

Yahoo! Music Podcasts?

Mon, 14 May 2007 23:57:18 -0600

Long-time readers know that I'm a huge fan of the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service. I've built my little music ecosystem around it, with a Creative Zen Micro and a Roku Soundbridge as devices that support the subscription content. I'm generally happy with the set up, even though the Yahoo! Music Jukebox is -- ummm -- just not very good. Here comes a rant.

So, here's what I want to do: subscribe to a podcast (specifically, the KEXP Music that Matters podcast) with Yahoo! Music Jukebox and have it automatically download new episodes to my portable player when they become available. Pretty much a minimum level of functionality you'd expect out of a podcast client, yes? Let's try to set it up.

First, there's no support for podcasts out of the box, so you have to go find a plug-in somewhere. So, go to the help, type in "podcast" and a promising page comes back: Podcasts and the Yahoo! Music Jukebox. Cool, maybe this is going to be easy. "If you already have the Yahoo! Music Jukebox, you only need a plug-in to use podcasts. Download the plugin here". Great, let's click on that link.

Huh? I'm taken to some Yahoo! Gallery Beta home page, with no mention of anything music-like anywhere. Okay, fine ... must have been a re-org. Let me just type in "podcast" in the search box then. Here are the results. Wow, that's pretty unhelpful -- nothing that looks like a plug-in here. I click around for a while, and there's just no plug-in to be found anywhere.

Okay, that didn't go so well. Maybe Google knows where the plug-in is. Ah! There's an entire Yahoo! Podcasts Beta site. Here we go ... a link in the FAQ: Podcasts in the Yahoo! Music Engine. Well, that's the old name for the client, but that's probably okay. Click to that page ... we might be in business! "If you have the Yahoo! Music Engine software, you can get the entire Yahoo! Podcasts experience without launching a browser. All you need to add is the podcast plug-in, if you haven't already downloaded it, click here". What am I waiting for? Click!

(In the background, we hear the gnashing of teeth and the rending of garments)

Back to square one, I find an old reference on Jeremy Zawodny's blog to a podcast plug-in from 2005. I'm more than a little skeptical because it's so old, but what the heck ... click on it and I actually get deep-linked into a page that actually works!

So, I download the plug-in, try to install it, and it ends up uninstalling Yahoo! Music Jukebox from my machine. Wow. Fine. Reinstall Yahoo! Music Jukebox. Thankfully, all my settings are still there. Try installing the plug-in again. This time it seems to work ... I get two tabs labeled Yahoo! Podcasts and My Podcasts.

Success? Not a chance. Even though I have these two tabs and it looks like I can subscribe to podcasts, there's just no way I can find to actually link the podcast to my device so it gets synced up. Maybe create a playlist, add the postcast subscription to the playlist and sync the playlist? Nope.

All smarminess aside, I'm stuck. Seriously, can anyone help me at this point?

Xbox Live Firewall Settings

Thu, 10 May 2007 12:38:23 -0600

For some reason, the other night when I was trying to play some Gears with my brothers, my Xbox Live connection was freaking out ... I couldn't connect to a hosted game and I was seeing lots of lag. Lag! I haven't seen lag like that since Quake CTF over a 56kbps modem.

So, at some point I must have changed one of my routers or switches, because when I went to check my network connections I got a "Moderate" for my NAT settings. Ah, so I must have to tweak some firewall settings. Funny I didn't have this problem before. Well, since I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find "Old Pentium running shorewall on Gentoo" on the list of Xbox Live certified devices, I try to find out what port forwarding I need to do.

Here we go: "Xbox 360: Port settings for Xbox Live". Looks like port 88 UDP and port 3074 UDP and TCP. So I put those rules in the firewall, reload the config, and test the network connection again. Now I get "Strict" instead of "Moderate"! That's no good. Well, it turns out that you have to route TCP on port 88 as well as UDP ... I put that rule in as well and now everything works as it should.

So, moral of this story: forward both UDP and TCP traffic on ports 88 and 3074. Port 88, eh? I never knew that Xbox Live used Kerberos. Learn something new every day.

Circuit of Life

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:43:46 -0600

Well, my Slingbox just died. Must have blown out the power supply or something, because plugging it in does nothing. Oh well ... I think I bought it the day they came out, almost two years ago now. I guess I'll have to pick up a new one.

But, for every yang there's a ying ... my Roku SoundBridge started working again. For the past several months, I couldn't contact any of the servers in the house so all I was getting was Internet radio. I don't know if it was a firmware update on the Soundbridge, a new version of Yahoo! Music Jukebox, or a new router, but all of the sudden I can play all of my Yahoo! Music again. Ahhhh.

Save Net Radio

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:38:01 -0600

I've been exposed to so much great music via Internet radio that it just fries me to think that ignorant lawmakers are trying to crush it. Please sign the petition to do what we can to keep these stations operating.

March Madness Widget?

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:44:20 -0600

Where's my Google March Madness widget -- er, gadget? I see there's one for Yahoo! Widget Engine and seems like there's a nice SpringWidgets one (see below), but nothing for Google Desktop. Don't see one for Vista Sidebar either. Ah well. The nice thing about SpringWidgets it that it works both in a web page and on the desktop ... very cool.

March Madness always reminds me of one of our coolest Spies back from the Spyonit.com days: we'd alert at the conclusion of every game, or only for upsets. That was a fun one.

Get this widget!

Why the Semantic Web is Doomed

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:33:44 -0600

So, why is the so-called Semantic Web (caps absolutely Required) doomed to fail? While there might be lots of technical reasons, all you really need to know is that one of the core specs for the Semantic Web has the acronym of GRDDL. I'm sure they want me to pronounce that "griddle", but I can't help but pronounce it "girdle". What's even worse is what is stands for: Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. Gleaning? Really ... you're going with gleaning? I can understand picking lame-ass words to fit a bitchin' acronym, but you chose gleaning so you could nail down the girdle acronym? I really don't need to know any more about these people.

This has become a useful filtering mechanism, actually. I get contacted by lots of different companies about all sorts of things (note to tech recruiters: I will never ever answer my phone, so stop calling). Now, when I check the company's web page, if the words "Semantic Web" show up I know I can ignore them, as they will be neither competitive nor complementary to anything I'm interested in doing.

Fun with User-Agents: Firefox and IE7

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:50:23 -0600

One of the key parts of FeedBurner's stats processing is trying to determine if a request for a feed represents a casual, drive-by browse or an intentioned subscriber. It has gotten a little bit more complicated lately as some clients serve double-duty. I wanted to share with you how we handle the requests from the two most popular browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.

Firefox

The Firefox browser can also be used as a feed-reading client with the Live Bookmarks feature. So, the key for FeedBurner is to determine if a request for a feed is coming from Live Bookmarks (where we can count it as a subscriber) or from a visitor that just happened to click on the feed chicklet (where we just report it as a browser hit). Up until Firefox version 2.0.0.1, we really have to guess, since the requests for the most part look identical: they both have a User-Agent that looks like Mozilla/.*Firefox/.*. So, what we do is that we look at a couple of other headers: X-Moz and Referer. So the logic tree looks like this:

If version < 2.0.0.1 and (X-Moz: prefetch or Referer is not empty), then it's a browser.

Otherwise, it's a Live Bookmarks request.

That's not ideal, because if someone just types in the feed URL in the location bar or launches the feed URL from a different app, we'll count it as a Live Bookmarks hit because the Referer will be empty. But we have nothing else to hang onto.

Firefox 2.0.0.1 has a wonderful new addition that makes this tracking much more accurate. Now, if the request is coming from Live Bookmarks, there will be an X-Moz: livebookmarks header. We can detect that and we don't have to do the referrer guessing game.

If version >= 2.0.0.1 and X-Moz: livebookmarks, then it's a Live Bookmarks request.

Otherwise, it's a browser request.

Internet Explorer 7

The latest version of Internet Explorer adds feed reading capabilities by leveraging the Windows RSS Platform. So, on the surface, things seem really straight-forward, since the Windows RSS Platform has its own User-Agent that's distinct from the IE7 User-Agent.

If User-Agent matches Windows[- ]RSS[- ]Platform/\S+ .*, then it's a "Windows RSS Platform" subscription.

At this point, however, things get complicated. Outlook 2007 has a cool feed reading capability. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Office team didn't get the memo and identifies itself the same as IE7 instead of leveraging the Windows RSS Platform, which would have made much more sense. So how do we distinguish between IE7 browser hits and Outlook 2007 subscriptions? We use the old referrer trick: if there's no referrer, assume it came from the automated poller fueling Outlook.

If User-Agent matches Mozilla/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE 7.* and Referer is empty, then it's an Outlook 2007 subscription.

But wait ... there's more! It turns out that some Microsoft Vista Gadgets also identify themselves as IE7, and we think it's more appropriate to treat those requests as subscriptions rather than browser hits. Fortunately, there's a hook: we can look at the Referer, and if it starts with x-gadget:///, then the request is coming from a Gadget.

If User-Agent matches Mozilla/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE 7.* and Referer starts with x-gadget:///, then it's a Vista Gadget subscription.

Finally, if none of the other rules match, we treat it as an IE7 browser hit.

So, those are the kinds of decisions that we make when evaluating each of the over 300 million feed requests we get each day. We're constantly reviewing the list of User-Agents we get in those requests in an effort to make these stats as accurate they can be. What really makes our lives easier is when we can definitively discern through request headers if the request is for an intentioned subscription vs. "other". With developments like a distinct User-Agent header for the Windows RSS Platform and the new X-Moz header, we're getting closer!

FeedBurner is 3

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 14:26:53 -0600

I recently checked my email archive to find out when, exactly, we launched the "pre-alpha" of FeedBurner. Turns out it was February 25, 2004 ... three years ago today. Happy birthday, FeedBurner!

Here was the original email that we sent out to friends and family on that day. I'm amazed with how we've pretty much stayed on target with our original vision.

Hi there,

We are very excited to announce a pre-alpha release of our new service, FeedBurner.com ( http://www.feedburner.com ). FeedBurner is an RSS/Atom post-processing service that enables publishers of syndicated content to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By "pre-alpha", we mean that the software still contains a number of bugs, and while we wouldn't release something that was "unstable", we also wouldn't go throwing around the term "high availability" just yet either.

Our pre-alpha release contains a small subset of the services we will be rolling out over the coming weeks. Look for additional services like authenticated feeds (enabling premium content to be syndicated), "future-proofing" to eliminate the market's current debate over feed formats, and even content namespace enhancements to facilitate the broad syndication and feed-splicing of rich content types (eg, think syndicated music meta-data and associated news and purchase information).

As syndication and non-browser content aggregation/display become rapidly more popular, we believe our "syndication clearinghouse" model will provide a large collection of publishers with an enourmous [sic] amount of leverage in the market. For example, today even the most popular bloggers have little to no control over how frequently their content is polled, what newsreaders do with their content layout/style, or how many advertisements are layered into the display at the fringes of syndication. Nor are they afforded any revenue opportunities for their syndicated content. By channeling large numbers of publishers through our post-processing facility, we can begin to help these publishers effect changes to their benefit in a number of interesting ways ( poorly coded newsreaders that excessively drain bandwidth can be shutout, significant opportunities to provide revenue channels to the individual publisher emerge, and much much more).

If you'd like to stay up to speed on the service and the company, we are going to maintain a weblog at http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner that tracks the progress of the company and service, and we'll also use this space to discuss publisher services and business issues.

best,

Dick Costolo
CEO
Burning Door Syndication Services, Inc.
http://www.feedburner.com

Pipes Dreams

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:21:34 -0600

First off, let me just say that I think Yahoo! Pipes is very cool and that it has the potential to be an important building block for the next phase of the web (see "A More Personalized Internet?" for an overview). It's the logical next step for this ecosystem that is made possible because of the standard content interchange format called a "feed". Feeds first allowed there to be a loose coupling between content publishers and content consumers and let each evolve separately. Then, FeedBurner came around and showed that this loose coupling also enabled value-add middleware that respected and in some cases even strengthened the "content contract" between the producers and clients. Pipes is a logical next step which does a very cool thing: it allows external parties to construct content workflows and, most importantly, gives them a sharable URL. FeedBurner and Pipes actually complement each other very well, and I've been having a lot of fun over the past week demonstrating that.

There are some very interesting directions that Pipes can take as it evolves, and I'll be curious to see what Yahoo! does with it. One of the first things I wanted to do when I started working with Pipes is that I wanted to be able to construct and share new modules. I hope that it's something they would consider exposing, because man would that be tight! From personal experience, though, I know that it's probably not going to happen -- it's really hard to lock-down any kind of code that would have to execute in your process space, so that's probably out. But maybe if they could just expand the existing "Fetch" module so that one could POST the current state of the stream to an external URL that I host on a server somewhere and I could return the transformed content, and you could wrap that up in a sub-pipe that expects additional user inputs as the config parameters ... something like that could work.

Which brings me to the meat of this post: wonderful things could happen if you marry Pipes to the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). What if the pipe output, rather than just being XML that spills on the floor when the URL is requested, could instead be hooked up to a module that speaks APP? Now you've got a really cool content routing mechanism. The "Fetch" module already really handles the input end of things, but being able to channel the output to a different destination could open up some amazing possibilities.

One detail to be worked out is the triggering mechanism for the workflow. Currently, a request to the resultant URL serves as the triggering mechanism that the workflow should executed. This is how FeedBurner works as well -- there's no master cronjob that ticking away and retrieving all the source feeds every 30 minutes. Instead, when a request for the burned version of the feed comes and the source feed is stale (i.e., hasn't been checked in the last 30 minutes), then go refresh the source feed. That way, you don't waste cycles updating dormant feeds. Pipes works the same way.

So, if there isn't a request URL, how would you "run" the workflow? Probably the most appropriate thing to do would be to use something like a ping mechanism, so that if the pipe is pinged and the content has been modified since the previous run, you run the pipe. That could probably work.

In the end, if you take the promise of Pipes, the potential of Google Base, and add some of the stuff that you'll see from FeedBurner in the next few months, you'll have some wicked tools to start rewiring the next version of the web. I think it's going to be quite a trip.

Thoughts on the T60 wide-screen

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:22:35 -0600

I've had my new Lenovo T60 wide-screen (87445BU) for about a month now and I'd have to say that overall I'm very pleased. Here are some specific thoughts on my experience so far.

Performance: Great
The main reason for getting a new machine was performance. Deploying the codebase for FeedBurner locally was just starting to take too long. The new box is a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of memory and it feels nice and fast. Compiles are much quicker, Eclipse is speedy. One pleasant surprise so far has been drive performance -- I ended up getting a 5400 RPM drive so I thought I/O was going to be sluggish, but I have no complaints.

Screen: Not so great
I'm not sure what to think about the display ... it seems, well, just kind of dingy compared to the T42 display I had. Also, it's sitting right next to a 20" Dell display (giving me a 3360x1050 workspace) at work which puts the T60 display to shame. Color just seem muted and a bit washed out. I've messed around with the settings a little bit, but nothing so far has really helped all that much. I do like how much real estate you have on the 15.4" wide-screen, though, so I'm happy with that.

Upgrading from T42: Annoying
One thing that I hadn't counted on was having to update all the accessories. I had a T42, but for the T60 you need a different AC adapter and a different docking station. Also, since it's a 90W power supply, my iGo juice70 power adapter. Not really anyone's fault, just annoying.

Even with the bigger screen, it doesn't real feel any heavier or more bulky than the T42.

Niceties
There are some really cool features that I wasn't necessarily expecting. The one that surprised me most is the fingerprint scanner. I thought it was going to be worthless and stupid ... instead, I love it! I love being able to just swipe my finger to log-on whenever the machine turns on or comes out of stand-by. I totally didn't expect that.

I also like how the machine supports the Bluetooth 2.0 stack, so my bargain Bluetooth headphones work without having to use the silly adapter.

The battery life has been great, much better than it was on the T42. DVD-writer is convenient. The Access Connections app is still flaky.

That's it. I'm still a happy ThinkPad consumer. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to jump onto Vista when I cash in the little upgrade coupon. That will be the subject of a future post.

Anatomy of a Hack

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:02:44 -0600

Last Thursday we had another hackathon at FeedBurner -- our fourth -- which is always an event to look forward to. This one was a lot of fun and there are some really cool hacks that are live right now. My hack was an "Event Feed" service, and I thought I'd write up a bit more information about how it works and how I hope publishers might use it.

First of all, like most good ideas, the idea for this one came from one of our publishers. This suggestion came from Jon Morris (Matis). He keeps his upcoming performances in upcoming.org and wanted a way to display the events on different web sites.

At first, it seems like this should be easy. Upcoming.org has feeds, and FeedBurner has BuzzBoost (not to mention several other widgety tools). Should be able to just burn the feed and choose BuzzBoost, right? Well, not quite. For some arcane reasons, the dates associated with the items are not the event dates, but instead represent when the event was added to upcoming.org. Turns out, that's not terribly useful for most feed consumers. Fortunately, they include other elements in the feed using the xCal namespace that includes information like the event date and location.

Enter the "Event Feed" service at FeedBurner. When you activate this service on the "Optimize" tab at FeedBurner, you're saying that the source feed represents a series of events and that you want them treated that way. So, what FeedBurner does for each item is:

Find the event date and make that the item date
Put the items in ascending date order (optionally only including future events), and
Optionally prepend the event date in the item title

So, Jon's case, his source feed isn't terribly useful. But if we burn it and apply the Event Feed service, we get a more useful feed. Finally, we can apply BuzzBoost to get an easy-to-distribute list of upcoming performances:

So far, so good. But I don't use upcoming.org ... I happen to use Google Calendar. And what good is a hack if it's not useful to the author?!? So, the Event Feed service will also work with public and private Google Calendars. You just have to find the RSS feed for the particular calendar you want, which can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. Hint: it's somewhere on the Calendar Settings page.

This will work for both shared and private calendars ... let's see how it works. Here's a public calendar: Chicago Bulls schedule. If you look at the feed, you can see it's not terribly helpful: events are totally unordered and it includes past games as well as future games. So, let's burn it and add the Event Feed service. Ah, much better. Here's a nice little headline animator for it as well:

Finally, after staring at those nice upcoming.org feeds complete with event location information, I couldn't resist tossing a FeedFlare into the mix. This was literally cobbled together in 10 minutes right before the end of the day -- I love how easy it is to create these things. Anyway, here it is: Map Event FeedFlare. Take a look: it's just examining the item and looking for the lat and long elements and the venue name, then composing a URL to Google Maps with that information in it. This is actually a good example of how you can use XPath to pull arbitrary information from other namespaces out of a feed item and use them in your FeedFlare. Here's an example of a feed that's using that FeedFlare: source feed, burned feed. And here's what it looks like in as a SpringWidget:

Get this widget!

I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at this hack. I had a great time building it and I can't wait to see what people do with it!

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Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:54:56 -0600

Looks like my new T60 widescreen will be waiting for me when I get home. I'm shivering with anticipation From Kowloon Bay to Arlington Heights in less than a week. That's cool.