Posts from October 2004

Tomorrow I am attending the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara. I posted my session schedule on .Mac if you are interested. All feature presentations will be recorded and made available by O'Reilly. I plan to record Sam Levin's Messaging & Branding presentation and make it available on in MP3 format. I also plan to record the How To Run Your Own Software Business session. (I am still waiting to hear back from one panelist regarding permissions.) If you are at the conference look for me on iChat and say hi!...

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Over the last few days I received multiple e-mails about a message submitted using an e-mail address I use only on my weblog and it's feeds. The interesting thing is it appears this e-mail address was used to send a message to Clay Skirky's NEC list. It looks like a spammer might be crawling weblogs specifically to spam weblog mailing lists and it's the first time I have observed such a thing. Watch your inbox for a message from "nec-bounces@shirky.com" for approval of a message subject of "Re:" and you might observe part of a trend....

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A suspicious business envelope, standard overnight envelope size from on the street police information I could obtain, was found at the Embarcadero MUNI station late morning. By 11:45 a.m. the San Francisco police department had closed Market Street for two blocks from Main Street to Fremont Street as well as half a block to a full block for side streets. Not much known right now, but a lot of office workers are heading out for lunch to find Market Street cordoned off by police tape. Update: Bay City News reports a "white cylindrical container with black end caps, was found...

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Rimmer's Rims are the illest thing on the street! It's not about practicality, it's about mackticality. "May impede your car's ability to execute turns." (via Autoblog)...

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Chris Anderson wrote an awesome article for Wired about the power of the Long Tail. I had heard the basic ideas behind the article before, with the exception of his take on MP3.com. Andersen argued that you cannot have a successful business containing only Long Tail elements. The problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail. It didn't have license agreements with the labels to offer mainstream fare or much popular commercial music at all. Therefore, there was no familiar point of entry for consumers, no known quantity from which further exploring could begin. He believes that you...

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Technorati is throwing a party next Thursday, October 28, at their new office space near SBC Park in San Francisco. The new office is within walking distance of the N Judah and CalTrain train stops. Free beer, WiFi, food, and interesting people....

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I just finished reading David Pogue's review of Google Desktop when I noticed a video box on the sidebar. Video supplement and The New York Times? Interesting. David Pogue compares Windows XP's built-in search to Google desktop complete with a picture of a girl plugging her nose and David dancing to Who Let the Dogs Out by Baha Men....

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Cal Henderson of Ludicorp gave a presentation to the Vancouver PHP Association on September 9 about Flickr's general architecture and the use of PHP. A zip of the PowerPoint presentation is available on Flickr's site. I converted the PowerPoint presentation to a PDF file for easy viewing. (via MovableBlog Asides) Some interesting statistics on Flickr as of September 2004: About 60,000 lines of PHP code. About 60,000 lines of templates. About 25,000 database transactions per second at peak. 13 selects per insert/update/delete. About 1,000 pages per second at peak. They use Java for their node service and as a FTP...

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Tonight was the Feedster hosted blogger dinner at Vino e Cucina in San Francisco. Scott Johnson and Scott Rafer mentioned they are launching a Feedster Hacks site with the help of a librarian to classify and unify Feedster add-ons.. Feedster will also hold a "12 days of Feedmas" competition to highlight the best Feedster hacks and reward the authors with a new iPod. I highlighted the differences between Feedster and Technorati. Scott Rafer and I discussed the new focus of Feedster on channel searches such as jobs or politics. Talked with Jeremy Zawodny, Ray Goldberger, and Matt Mullenweg about FeedMesh....

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Scott Johnson mentioned this morning Feedster is looking heavily at NYU's Coral distributed content system as a possible solution to RSS bandwidth issues. Coral operates over port 8090 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls. Your domain name server must also be aware of DNAME records. Good idea but it needs some kinks worked out for widespread use. BitTorrent uses ports 6881 to 6889 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls as well. Port usage has not stopped the widespread use of BitTorrent, although BitTorrent users are highly technical. A good conversation topic for tonight's Feedster Developer Dinner at 7...

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