Python 2.4 is now available. Unification of integers and long integers, better floating point number support, multiple calls per XML-RPC operation, cookie support, and a subprocess module for spawning platform-independent processes are just some of the new features.
November 2004 Archives
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Nov30
Python 2.4 is out
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Nov30
David Sifry Red Herring interview
Red Herring published an interview with David Sifry of Technorati. The questions are pretty hard hitting and you get more background on Dave than the typical Technorati mention, like what he remembers about his high school prom. Secret to success? Work your ass off.
Q. As much as Technorati is popular today, the company’s position in the industry can be considered tenuous. Do you have an exit strategy?
A. Watch this space.
Q. Are you profitable?
A. Not yet.
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Nov28
Creative Commons question
My weblog is currently licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I allow comments for every post, subject to my approval. Other persons are therefore able to add their own content to an individual entry page.
The work is the individual entry on my weblog. By adding a comment a person is essentially creating a derivative of the work, an annotation to an entry.
Are comments considered part of the work and therefore subject to the Creative Commons license? If so, I should probably remind posters that their submission is subject to the license. Any thoughts?
Sidenote: Movable Type does not make it easy enough for me to manage Creative Commons licenses. I cannot change my Creative Commons license through my weblog configuration screen, even if I am granting a more liberal license than before. I should also be able to turn on or off a license for a post just as I am able to do with comments or TrackBacks.
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Nov26
Technorati two years later
Two years ago Dave Sifry announced Technorati: a new site with a set of web services he always wanted and spent three weekends hacking. Take a look at the Technorati of two years ago.
Unofficial history of Technorati
- November 20, 2002
- Official first use date.
- November 27, 2002
- Technorati officially unveiled. 12,000 weblogs indexed.
- December 4, 2002
- RSS watchlists.
- December 15, 2002
- First Technorati dinner.
- December 18, 2002
- Technorati sidebar.
- February 7, 2003
- Site contents released under Creative Commons license.
- February 26, 2003
- First major downtime: 4 hours.
- March 5, 2003
- 100,000 weblogs indexed.
- March 9, 2003
- Revenues of $2,000 over three months from charging a yearly subscription of $5 for an e-mail watchlist and $10 for a RSS watchlist.
- March 21, 2003
- Current events launches.
- April 6, 2003
- 200,000 weblogs indexed.
- May 8, 2003
- Google hints at blog-specific search tool.
- May 12, 2003
- Technorati API released for cosmos, bloginfo, and outbound blogs.
- June 9, 2003
- Technorati keyword search launches.
- June 21, 2003
- 300,000 weblogs indexed.
- July 05, 2003
- Technorati pinger launched.
- September 27, 2003
- 1 million weblogs indexed.
- February 4, 2004
- First hiring post.
- March 22, 2004
- Three free watchlists. BookTalk launches.
- March 30, 2004
- 2 million weblogs indexed.
- May 19, 2004
- First Technorati Developers Salon.
- June 24, 2004
- Keyword advertising launches, powered by FindWhat.
- July 7, 2004
- 3 million weblogs tracked.
- July 21, 2004
- CNN announces partnership with Technorati for the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
- July 26, 2004
- Politics subdomain launched.
- August 23, 2004
- $6.5 million venture capital funding at a valuation of about $12 million.
- August 27, 2004
- CNN announced partnership with Technorati for the Republican National Convention in New York.
- August 31, 2004
- Technorati pinger integrated into Movable Type.
- September 26, 2004
- Colocation center electrical fire followed by a weekend of down time.
- October 6, 2004
- First Technorati Hackathon.
- October 10, 2004
- 4 million weblogs indexed.
- October 21, 2004
- Technorati open house at their new offices @ 665 Third Street in San Francisco.
- November 5, 2004
- Advanced search capabilities, top 20 MP3s. Developer program launched.
- November 11, 2004
- Technorati search and post cosmos featured in Blogware default templates.
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Nov24
iPod DJs
The Playlist Club in London promotes an open DJ atmosphere where club patrons sign-up for 15-minute sets playable from an iPod. The best DJs of the night, judged by audience reaction, win prizes. It's like an open-mic night for DJs! (via PC Advisor)
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Nov23
News.com announces Trackback and Pingback support
News.com officially announced support for TrackBank and Pingback links. Search engine optimizers are already excited by the prospect of "anyone linking to a CNET News.com story who sends the proper notification will get a link back in return" from the PageRank 8 site.
CNET is also referencing TrackBack and PingBack URLs as link relations in the page header. I like the TrackBack button for readers CNET uses for readers to look at other related sources.
I need to do some more reading on Pingback, still not sure what differentiates it from TrackBack.
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Nov23
Live search comparison
Tonight I was thinking about the importance of the number of indexed weblogs when choosing a search service. PubSub claims to track 6.6 million sources, Technorati claims to track 4.7 million weblogs, and Feedster claims to track 1.1 million feeds. What can the target audience of these services do with this information? I decided to do some comparative research from the point of view of a marketing department tracking the buzz around their new advertising campaign.
Kevin Kringle is a digital word-of-mouth marketing campaign created by Best Buy and SMG Reverb. The marketing campaign is officially under a month old so it should be a good proving ground for live searches. The search phrase is "Kevin Kringle" in all cases.
- 22,500 results
- Last mention 5 days ago
- Yahoo!
- 10,300 results
- Feedster
- 21 results
- Last mention 3 days ago
- Technorati
- 8 results
- Last mention 5 days ago
- Bloglines
- 2 results
- Last mention 11 days ago
Still waiting on results from PubSub. Feedster's results page shows 100 results even though there are only 21. Feedster phrase search did not display correctly on my results pages.
The big search engines (Google, Yahoo!) performed better than I thought they would although you cannot yet subscribe to a search from a big search engine. Despite errors presenting the data, Feedster appeared to have the most results and most recently updated listings. Technorati and Feedster could both do a better job with on-page promotions of persistent search capabilities.
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Nov22
Bill Joy on the future of search
I just finished watching The Charlie Rose Show from Wednesday, November 16. John Doerr, Bill Joy, and Jeff Taylor participated in a panel discussion at a TechNet summit at Google HQ.
Below is my attempt to transcribe the first question by Charlie Rose and the second part of Bill Joy's response.
Charlie Rose: What's going to transform the Internet the most in the next 10 years?
Bill Joy: We go out to this sea of information and in some sense we go fishing. Google is the best fishing rod. But in fact our lives are overwhelmed with information that's coming at us and things that we have to deal with. It largely comes to us through the other major aspect to the Internet, which is e-mail, in a very disorganized way and we hunger for something that will make some sense out of that chaos that will look at all the things that are happening in the world and filter and order them in a way that is personalized to us. And that I think will be the next great revolution.
Rose: Personalization or?
Bill Joy: Something that takes not an index of the dead information on the Web, but the live information -- the things as they're occurring, as they're relevant to us. So it's real-time information, not just dead things, and it's personal to us, not for everybody, so it's got two aspects that make it different than what a search engine does, or the Web as we know it. And then presents it and sanitizes it and organizes it in a way that makes it sensible to our lives rather than getting all these e-mails that we have to deal with, it structures it in some way relevant to what's going on.
Sounds like what Technorati, Feedster, and My Yahoo! are up to. Good to see the big technology players getting it as well.
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Nov21
The Canvas turns off all wall outlets
The Canvas is a café and gallery located on the edge of Golden Gate Park in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco. It is a nice, bright space with its own parking lot, good food, and interesting people. They also have free wireless Internet access and you will notice many laptops alongside food and drink.
On a sunny weekend The Canvas can be crowded, and in the past The Canvas turned off their wireless Internet access to encourage turnover during their peak times. This weekend The Canvas decided to turn off all wall outlets, in what I assume is an attempt to increase turnover.
My PowerBook can last about 2.5 hours while connected to wireless Internet, beyond the stated ideal turnover stated by the café owners. Some other patrons I spoke with have old laptops with zero to no battery life and rely on the electrical outlets to get out and study for their medical exams (UCSF is close by).
if the electrical outlets were turned on I estimate there would have been about 8 laptops drawing power at one time. I am unsure of the associated electricity cost, but lack of electricity prevented me from buying another drink and debugging a project I was working on.
Is electricity plus free wireless Internet too much to ask from an establishment? The Canvas was even featured in The New York Times for encouraging community through free wireless access. I might have to rethink my café when I need to get some work done.
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Nov19
Russell Beattie consulting Yahoo!
Russell Beattie will join Yahoo! on Monday as a consultant in corporate development and strategy. Congratulations, you held out and waited for something good to happen, and did a lot of thinking about what works best in your future.
I commute from San Francisco to San Mateo every day, a bit short of Sunnyvale or I'd be up for a carpool. Yahoo! needs to compete with Google and get their own magic bus.
My first thoughts? Russell needs a gadget budget so he can play with new phones, services, and operating systems.
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Nov18
Adam Bosworth's ISCOC talk
Adam Bosworth gave a keynote presentation at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing in New York yesterday. Lots of good content covering programming languages, information overload, the need for simple technologies to warm people up to a bigger idea, and how the experts will still create the complex technologies while the simple methods coexist. "You want to see the future. Don’t look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload.
On the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0:
There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this community under the aegis of RDF and RSS 1.0. It failed. It failed because it was really too abstract, too formal, and altogether too hard to be useful to the shock troops just trying to get the job done. Instead RSS 2.0 and Atom have prevailed and are used these days to put together talk shows and play lists (podcasting) photo albums (Flickr), schedules for events, lists of interesting content, news, shopping specials, and so on. There is a killer app for it, Blogreaders/RSS Viewers. Anyone can play. It is becoming the easy sloppy lingua franca by which information flows over the web. As it flows, it is filtered, aggregated, extended, and even converted, like water flowing from streams to rivers down to great estuaries. It is something one can get directly using a URL over HTTP. It takes one line of code in most languages to fetch it. It is a world that Google and Yahoo are happily adjusting to, as media centric, as malleable, as flexible and chaotic, and as simple and consumer-focused as they are.
On the weblog reputation ecosystem:
The web becomes something like a giant room in which people comment on other people’s thought via posts in their own Web Logs. In so doing they put their reputation on the line. These are hardly cheap and anonymous posts. They take up real estate in a place that is associated with your own point of view and reputation. And thus the comments tend to be measured, thoughtful, and judicious. Furthermore if they are not, either you can decide that it is OK or you can opt out. It is like dueling editorials in a pair of news papers.
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Nov17
Apologies to Technorati
This morning when I checked my e-mail I found a note from Liz Westover sent to the Technorati Developers' e-mail list. Liz mentioned some changes to the site David Sifry would announce later in the day but the developers received early notice.
One of the features mentioned was very similar to feature I knew existed behind-the-scenes on the Technorati site. Something anyone could enable but was unpublicized and not publicly known. Tantek Çelik and Richard Ault let me preview a new site feature and I was supposed to keep my mouth shut since the feature was not yet public.
Well I saw the related item was public and assumed it was okay to post about the unannounced feature. This information was not yet public and not ready for public consumption, and I apologize for releasing that information prematurely.
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Nov17
Technorati site search
Blogware has a site-search feature using Technorati integrated into Blogware 1.21 and Technorati Cosmos links on every post. Blogware users can enable the Cosmos links in the advanced section of posting defaults.
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Nov16
Verizon now offers RingBack tones
Verizon Wireless announced Ringback Tones, ringtones for incoming calls. When someone calls a user who subscribes to the service they hear music instead of a ring. Ringback Tones is a $1 per month service and users can license songs for $2 per year. Now available in Sacramento and Southern California, nationwide by mid-2005.
You can play for New Kids on the Block for all those people you wish would stop calling you.
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Nov16
iTunes backup encouragement
Today I downloaded an album from iTunes and the complete download of the album an alert box popped up reminding me to backup my music. To an iPod perhaps? Apple needs to make it easier for people to use their iPod as a backup device or at least turn a blind eye to the tools that help people backup and retrieve their music using Apple's hardware.
I purchased Jack Johnson's iTunes Originals. Good narratives between tracks, but only a few of the tracks are originals.
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Nov16
TechNet summit at Google
TechNet organized an innovation summit at Google's Mountain View Campus yesterday. The tech elite such as Bill Joy, John Chambers, Eric Schmidt, Paul Otellini, John Doerr, Terry Semel, Carly Fiorna, and more. Michael Beazley of the San Jose Mercury News covered the event.
Charlie Rose moderated the panels and The Charlie Rose Show will air four episodes this from the event, starting with John Doerr, Bill Joy, and Jeff Taylor tonight.
Eric Schmidt said "the next killer device is clearly a personal one" and he favors a data iPod holding the world's information.
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Nov15
Feedster advanced search
Feedster has many advanced search features most people are not aware exist. Since every search is deliverable as an RSS feed, you can tweak the results of the Feedster database to your content.
You can visit the Feedster advanced search page and search a particular weblog or your entire feed list if your OPML is available online. OPML search is useful for finding that entry you know you saw somewhere but you forget the details. Feedster displays its entire history for a site search while Technorati displays only the past 30 days.
Search your OPML is a lot more interesting to me than site search; you can build your own cloud. If a company wanted to track what its employees were saying about a certain topic they could create an OPML file of all the employee weblogs and subscribe to a search via e-mail.
Feedster indexes feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF) while Technorati indexes HTML. I searched within a few weblogs and found identical results for most weblogs in the past 30 days. In cases such as Scoble's link blog Technorati has the advantage since the RSS feed displays only 15 entries while the HTML page has a lot more.
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Nov15
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Mercury News interview
Matt Marshall of the San Jose Mercury News recently visited venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to interview partners John Doerr, Brook Byers and Ray Lane.
Companies stay in stealth mode longer to discourage clone ventures. Most companies come out of stealth with about 100 employees. People like joining stealth projects, and companies already know who they want for their first 100 employees.
Brook Byers: Network was a thing of the 1990s. I don't know what it is now.
John Doerr : It's the blog.
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Nov12
Betting on Tools that Power Blogs
Olga Kharif of BusinessWeek wrote about the companies building weblog tools and the venture capital that follows.Ask David Sifry when his little San Francisco startup called Technorati will turn a profit, and he laughs contagiously. No, Technorati, which tracks Web logs, or blogs, and will soon offer blog searches, is a long way from turning a profit. But it has big-league venture-capital backers like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital, and they're willing to wait as blog entrepreneurs cast around for a good business model.
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Nov11
Feed update scheduling
I want to be able to define in my feed aggregators when a feed or feed group should not be checked for updates.
When I attend a conference or I am at work I am focused on groups of feeds. Please only update those groups automatically until after 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. I know audio from Fresh Air will not be available until 4:30 p.m., so there is no use in teasing me at 10 a.m. while I wait for the audio.
Similar to
ttleach aggregator could useskipHoursorskipDaysas the default and not let me override the feed data, but I should be able to add my own viewing habits or knowledge of the source for a better experience as well.I ran the idea by Nick Bradbury last weekend and he said it made sense but he had never thought of it before. Hopefully I can control my feeds better and take a load off the publishers by knowing their feeds better than they have described them.
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Nov11
Feedster Feed of the Day
I am Feedster's Feed of the Day! Very cool! I took a look at the list of past feeds of the day, and there are some pretty big names like Instapundit, Talking Points Memo, and Wonkette just featured in the last few weeks.
If this is your first time here, welcome! Please stay a while! Grab a RSS feed or an Atom feed to stay informed of all the latest postings.
I blame Halo 2 for keeping my post count low this week. Normally I am much more interesting.
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Nov09
Koders source code search engine
Koders is a search engine for source code. Very useful when you want to see how other projects have implemented the code you are considering.
You can even check out an estimation for how much money you will save by integrating the existing code or project versus building it yourself.
Some examples:
- Google reference in java code
- GAIM costs more than HTTPD?
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Nov09
TypePad users receive easy advertising
Six Apart and Kanoodle announced a deal to allow TypePad subscribers to easily add Kanoodle's content-targeted advertisements to their sites. Expected rollout is Q1 2005.
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Nov09
Feedster ping
You can now ping Feedster. No more relying on weblogs.com and blo.gs for updates and additions. Good move!
Hopefully this means more of my entries will make it into Feedster's database. In August I wrote my own Movable Type template to subscribe a search by keywords after I was unhappy with the Feedster results.
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Nov08
E-mail down over the weekend
I did not receive any e-mail from Friday afternoon through Sunday. I have contacted my host, and changed some things on the server-side to make everything work again. If you sent me an e-mail over the weekend I apologize, but it may be lost forever so please resend.
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Nov07
Voice of the vendor
BloggerCon took place yesterday at the Stanford Law School and was described by Dave Winer as the "unconference," where everyone is equal and participates in a university setting as users. During the Information Overload session led by Robert Scoble there was some vendor identification beyond the rules of the conference, and the response to the vendor violations set a tone for the conference that left many participants on edge and caused some audience members to get up and leave as an act of protest.
The discussion focused on what features users would like to see in the feeds they used to help them consume information more efficiently. At one point in the discussion it was obvious to me some of these problems are addressed by Technorati's Attention.xml or other similar implementations of feed aggregators using user actions to help refine future data representations. I knew Dave Sifry and Tantek Çelik would be excited and possibly chat up some of the feed aggregator developers on the side to let them know about what they were thinking in regards to attention metadata.
On IRC, the discussion of Attention.xml had already started. Dave Sifry raised his hand as high as it could possibly reach, and he may have even done some jumping jacks. When he was given a chance to speak he spoke as a vendor about Technorati's solution to the issue and crossed the line regarding vendor pitches at the conference. Dave Winer stepped in, called him on it, but Sifry continued. Dave Winer stood firm and would not let Sifry talk about Attention.xml. Steve Gillmor spoke about attention metadata as a general concept, but not many people seemed tuned in to the complex explanation.
Bob Wyman of PubSub made reference to PubSub. and some of the key considerations needed to implement an idea raised by an aggregator user (11:38 in). Dave Winer stepped in, told Bob he was being too technical, and said "vendors don't participate in the discussion actively here" and voices in the crowd seemed unhappy with the level of control exerted by Dave during an "unconference" of equal users.
A bit lengthy, but that is some of the background as I remember it. The incident overshadowed the entire day as participants were not sure what was mentionable or not mentionable.
Now for my take on it all.
Did Dave Sifry cross the line and plug Technorati and its services? Yes. Given the pre-announced constraints of the conference he should have talked about the idea of attention metadata and not the Technorati implementation of that idea. Technorati's implementation is not solidified and is looking for feedback and a good opportunity for feedback presented itself.
Introducing yourself and your vendor affiliation is not a bad thing and is not against the spirit of what I think Dave Winer and Stanford wanted to see happen at this conference. Introducing yourself and what you are involved with establishes authority. When Brendon Wilson introduces himself and mentions his involvement with PGP, I interpret his corporate mention as establishing authority when the context of the discussion was verified identity.
A vendor identifying himself or herself is creating authority or creating an introduction to a group of users if they are interested in seeking out him or her later. There are good ways to connect vendors and their existing users without opening up to a sales pitch. There were users at the conference interested in meeting and speaking with Mark Fletcher and they are more likely to give one on one feedback about Bloglines if they know he is in the crowd and what he looks like.
Overall I think the issue of vendor participation was overblown and detracted from a free flow of ideas and participation from intelligent users and authors. It was good to meet so many people who are creating tools to make online publishing a better experience. You should not have to watch from the sidelines while there is so much collaboration to accomplish.
Update: 26 Nov 2004: Sifry's remarks regarding the Technorati MP3 feed is during the Podcasting session recording at 1:06:30. Podcasting was the first session of the day and the Sifry was the first occurrence of vendor conflict that day.
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Nov05
Technorati changes
Technorati is no longer just phrase search! Technorati launched new features and a new redesign today. A new feature still in testing is a feed with enclosures of the top 20 MP3 references in the blogosphere.
Dave also claims they have better blogroll detection. They fixed the Developer's Wiki and I can finally login again.
Technorati also announced a $3250 developer's contest ending December 31.
A lot to announce all at once! I noticed there are no advertisements on the search results page. Could be unintentional but an interesting change.
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Nov05
Technorati trademarks
On August 26, 2004 Technorati filed a trademark application for "attention index" (serial number 78474374). This move shows Technorati is serious enough about Attention.xml to file a trademark application with the Patent Office.
Technorati also has a Goodpoint trademark about to clear. I have no idea what the significance of that trademark is about but it was filed while Krisztina Mendonca (GoodPoint Web Design) was doing contract design work for Technorati.
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Nov05
TypePad adds rich text WYSIWYG support
TypePad now features rich text editing and spell check. Some pretty slick JavaScript and design implementations in the WYSIWYG post editor. Only a matter of time before we see this functionality in Movable Type?
You currently cannot preserve formatting when copying and pasting text from a word processor or other application according to the TypePad rich text tips page.
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Nov04
F-16 fires on elementary school
Associated Press: "A National Guard F-16 fighter jet on a nighttime training mission strafed an elementary school with 25 rounds of ammunition." The firing range is three and a half miles from the school. -
Nov03
iPod photo thoughts
I kept quiet when Apple announced the iPod photo a week ago, not wanting to join the crowd and hype another Apple product like the rest of the cult of the Mac. On Sunday I visited the Apple store in San Francisco and played with the iPod photo for a little bit and realized what an iPod is really about.
I want to be able to backup my data easily, and have that data available at all times, possibly enabling synchronization on multiple machines. I live on the edge when it comes to my software environment and sometimes I push the edge too far. The iPod photo is about giving me access to as much of that data as possible away from the tether of a computer.
Music and pictures are the two biggest consumers of hard drive space on my PowerBook's 80 GB hard drive. Having access to the two biggest categories of drive consumption makes sense to me. I have gigabytes of movies too, most are not legal, but I would be happy connecting the iPod to a television when the time comes to share a movie.
With the iPod in my hand and a beta copy of Tiger waiting for an install at home I saw the iPod as a backup device with limited ability to play with my data on the go.
I expect to see a lot more album art tools for iTunes in the coming months. Windows Media Player and MusicMatch do a much better job at cataloging music than iTunes.
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Nov03
Outsourcing front line
On Monday I started my new job at NexTag, a comparison shopping site in San Mateo. NexTag has offices in the U.S. and India, with over 30 software developers in Gurgaon (near New Delhi) in India. In some cases NexTag will hire employees locally, train them, and relocate the employees to India to lead a team in Gurgaon.
How does the existence of a software center halfway around the world change your daily work load? You definitely need to reevaluate your time and spend a lot more time on clear specifications instead of building the application yourself. Once you develop the specifications you need to present them over a videoconference network to a development team in India, and hope it all makes sense.
Something different to get used to for sure. Is this the future of software development? I have yet to look at the quality of the Java code, but I am sure there are many software products we are familiar with and have no idea where the implementation took place.
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Nov03
LexisNexis and code funerals
Programmers at LexisNexis have a creative method of expiring outdated code: it is buried in a graveyard. There are at least eight grave markers and some funerals include the playing of "Taps" and eulogies. To make sure really hated sites are banished forever some employees drive a stake through the printed pages of code. -
Nov02
Election Day
Today is election day in the United States. While the presidential election receives the most attention, I spent most of my time reviewing local and state propositions. 31 propositions ranging from a position on the war in Iraq to children's hospital funding.
Time to elect a President, Senator, House member, school board, and more.
If George W. Bush wins today's election I expect San Francisco to erupt in riots.
