Tekhnologiā:

Switching from NewGator to Google Reader

Today I made the switch. I moved my Feeddemon sync source from NewGator to Google Reader. The switch was rather easy, but there have been a couple unusual things I had to watch out for. The first one is that you need to have Feeddemon as the place you add feeds. If you add them to Google Reader, they don't seem to end up in Feeddemon. While this isn't too much of a problem if you know about it, it was something I verified when I was making the switch. Another thing that would be handy, and I suspect will be the ability to comment on a news item in Feeddemon and have those comments get appended to the article in Google Reader. This I suppose is a lot to as for version one of a feature.

So why go to all this trouble? Well, at work I use Feeddemon, and here at home I have a Macintosh. I can't stand NetNewsWire, I have never been able to use it the same way that I use Feeddemon. So now I'll use the Readair on my Macintosh.

RSS, FeedDemon, NewsGator, Google, NetNewsWire

Internet Explorer 8 and posting to your Typepad Blog

I downloaded IE8 today and noticed it had a new way to post to Microsoft’s blog by highlighting some text and sending it off to their blogging service.

Here is the code that will make it work in Typepad:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
 <homepageUrl>http://www.typepad.com/t/app</homepageUrl>
 <display>
  <name>Blog in Typepad</name>
  <icon>http://www.tschopp.net/favicon.ico</icon>
       <description>Post this in my Blog</description>
 </display>
 <activity category="Blog">
  <activityAction context="selection">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="text" value="{selection}" />
    <parameter name="keywords" value="{keywords}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="document">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="link">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{linkTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{link}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
 </activity>
</openServiceDescription>

1. Copy and paste this into a Text file.
2. Name it typepad.xml
3. Replace blog_Id with your blog ID

1. Browse to http://www.typepad.com/t/app 
2. Click on the blog you want to post to
3. Observe the URL http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/manage?blog_id=16627

Replace the <icon> with your favicon

Save the document

Upload file to your Typepad account

Create a new HTML file

Name it typepad.html

Put the following code in the html file:<A href="javascript:window.external.addService('http://www.tschopp.net/typepad.xml');">Click Here</a>

Replace my URL with the URL to the XML file you created above

Save file

Upload File to Typepad

Browse to HTML file

Click on link

My files are located at http://www.tschopp.net/Typepad.html 

Let me know how it goes. I will post updates later this week to get more than just selections working. I also want to expand this to other services. Let me know how this is working for you.

Blog linked to Facebook

I was playing around in Typepad and found a feature that links the blog to my Facebook account.  This post is to test out that functionality.  I wonder how it works.  I also wonder if it works.

Safari on Windows: Apple's Smart Client Play

I have spent the last week now looking at everyone’s ideas on why Apple released Safari on Windows.  I think some people have come up with some rather good ideas.  Others have come up with some rather strange ideas.   But I still don’t think that all the real reasons have come out.  Lets look at several key important factors that we know about apple and their direction. 

1. It’s about software.  Steve Jobs stated this several times at the D Conference.  His point is important.  It’s about hardware, with good software.  This has always been the case with Apple. 
2. It’s about the cloud.  Steve also said that his paradigm for software included the cloud of web services. 
3. It’s about the SDK for the iPhone.  Many people have pointed out that by having a version of Safari on the Windows, it allows those individuals to develop applications for the iPhone on the Windows. 

Software
Software is important.  Having your software running on a given piece of hardware is important.  By itself there is value in having your software run on Windows.   The more software that Apple releases on a given platform the less unique that platform becomes.  The software is the user experience and the brand.  All the software that Apple releases for the Windows platform breaks the branding of Windows.  What would happen if Apple continued to release different pieces of functionality from their iLife applications for Windows.  Would people use them.  Yes.  Would people recommend them.  Yes.  Would they be more usable than the built in Windows software.  Probably.  This hurts the Windows brand. 

This also plays right into a weakness that few have exploited up until this point.  Microsoft has to allow for 3^rd party applications to replace built in Windows functionality.  As soon as this becomes hard for Apple to do, all someone needs to do is complain about Microsoft lock in.  Google is doing this right now.  I’m surprised more companies are not doing this.  Adobe should start to build Bridge into the basic operating system search, replacing the way Windows handles graphic searches.  Also, I’m not surprised that Microsoft hasn’t played this card against other platforms they are trying to gain traction on.

One final point. Isn’t Safari used to render out all those widgets in OS X?  Will this mean that those guy will now run on Windows and on the iPhone?  If the answer is yes to this question, then we now have a common development environment for these widgets.  This is an end run around Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all at once.  This also leads to my next point.  This also provides a common platform for Cloud based Applications

The Cloud
What applications use the cloud these days.  There are all sorts of tools which use web services.  But in the end, there are only several standards that are available in this space.  The battle is still being fought.

Microsoft has been doing a lot of heavy lifting in this area with their .Net framework and the implementation of WS-* to provide inter-platform operability. All this stuff is great for fat clients and .NET  based smart clients.  But this leaves Apple and Adobe to build in support for the WS-* standards into their smart client applications. 

Oh wait, Apple has no Smart Client platform.  Or do they?  Perhaps Safari is their Smart Client Platform play.  Adobe has AIR, and Microsoft has Silverlight.  We notice with both of these platforms each company is extending their strength (Flash and .NET) into an area that is a weakness.  So what do you do if you are Apple.  You need to extend things you control, things like Safari and Quicktime.  I wouldn’t be all that surprised that if in the next 12 months you see WS-* get extended down into both of these applications.  In the mean time we have things like JSON and AJAX.  While you can’t get all the functionality out of these services as you can out of a WS-* framework.  You do get enough to handle the day to day workings of a consumer device.

I predict that Safari + Quicktime will be the Smart Client platform that Apple will move towards in the next year to create their cloud development platform.  This will be done to extend the widgets platform that currently exists today.

SDKs
I think this is going to be the true SDK for the iPhone.  If you merge Quicktime into the Canvas tag, then you truly have something.  If I had an iPhone right now, I would love to play around with some of the Apple specific tags supported by Safari.  What happens when I throw widget code at it’s JavaScript interpreter.  What happens on Windows if I do this?  I would also love to point it to a .MOV file online that has some interactive content in it.  Extend and expand this, and you have a nice save environment to build applications that won’t take down the network they are running on.

Summary
I feel that the decision to make Safari as the SDK for the iPhone is a good idea if they take some of the steps laid out above.  This is an opportunity for Apple to take control of the platform that will be used to develop “cloud” based applications.  They will leverage their iTunes / Quicktime platform on Windows and combine it with their iPod platform into a cell phone form factor, bypassing the coming standards war which will feature Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Yahoo fighting it out to control the Smart Client Platform.

Tags: Apple, iPhone

iPhone "Simulator" of Sorts

I am putting this together for my own edification.  I have taken the iPhone Interface by Davidcann, and modified it a bit.  Go here to take a look

There are a bunch of things to do, like getting the URL and titles to change automaticallly

Also, I will change the URL field into something that can be editable.  But I put it together to see how my current mobile home page I use on my Blackberry Perl would look on an iPhone.  I’m still a bit concerned about the lack of a SDK for the iPhone, but I do not have a doom and gloom attitude about it.

Too many feeds...

I am at a dangerous point in blogging.  I have 212 different RSS feeds / blogs that I read.  I know others manage a whole lot more but I’m not as good as they are.  At one point back in 2000 or so I had only one feed that I subscribed to via the My Netscape Portal.  It was the news feed from the site I use to run, at www.theonering.com (they no longer syndicate their news sadly).  Over the last 7 years or so, the number of feeds I read has increased.   It is now at the point where it takes an hour to read everything each day.  I am now starting to run into a barrier of having too many feeds and I need to change something.  I am running into several problems. 

The first is that I am still looking for a taxonomy to manage all my feeds.  As I scale up to this level, I am starting to run into the problem that I can’t exactly map everything into nice inboxes.  The second problem that I’m now facing is that not everything that I save maps into nice outboxes either.  The best tool to manage this so far has been FeedDemon.  Their folder structure for feeds, watches and news bins makes sense, but I am at the breaking point as the GTDesque “workflow” that I have setup is needing to be reworked.  The only way I can see reworking it is to make sub categories under each of my meta categories.  To be honest, I think that FeedDemon will work just fine doing these things, but my overall workflow will need to change.

The second problem is that I am starting to run into the problem of never being able to be caught up on my reading.  I have now gotten into the habit of scanning articles, but I have found that this misses items.  There have been two solutions to this.  I have started to subscribe to linkblogs.  I wish more people would establish linkblogs and publish them.  These linkblogs are great as they allow me to see if there is anything “important” that I missed on my trip through the other blogs.  The other way I am managing this overload is that FeedDemon supports watches which is an automated way to collect information.  I think that over the coming months I will be expanding these watches to be more detailed and specific.  As this happens, I will need to subscribe to more generic feeds to feed these specific watches.  This of course is a force feedback loop that will increase complexity.

My final problem is that I have tried many of the applications out there for reading feeds and I’m starting to approach the breaking point of these applications.  I will keep posting over the coming months regarding how I am managing this, but I suspect that I will find a couple opportunities for improvement on the RSS reader side.

What Type of Computer Programmer are You?

Go here to take your Programmer Personality Test

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Your programmer personality type is:

   PHTB

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

What Should Google Buy

A while back someone asked me what I think Google should buy next.  I was reminded of the conversation today by a co-worker so I dug up my response.  The post still makes a whole lot of sense even if it’s over two years old.

One: I would look for some data mining companies with some nice IP. If you choose correctly you could end up with a nice product to brand. Some nice algorithms to improve your own systems, some nice IP to own. Think along the lines of say Biometrics, pattern recognition, and data-mining. The idea is to improve your own search and to leapfrog remaining companies in this space by tying in data mining into search.

Two: GIS. Purchase some of the providers of the data for your Google Maps. Purchase the company which will scan buildings and real world structures to put into Keyhole. You might also want to pick up a nice clean multi-platform 3D engine. You also want to pick up better GeoCoding capabilities.

Three: Real time Monitoring. Traffic.com and other sites like this which provide real time data about the real world. Also look into companies which provide real time monitoring of other transportation systems.

This is all very interesting considering the announcements over the last month of so.  So how would I modify this?

One: The Algorithm.  You must always improve this.  Purchase any company that has interesting IP in the area.  You are looking for pattern recognition and data mining.  Anything that can make your index larger.

Two: The Inverse of Search.  Connecting content creators to content consumers.  AKA Advertising, Branding, Identity.  This is how Google gets paid.  If a person can search for Pizza why can’t a restaurant search for Pizza Customers?  You are looking for mediums for selling ads. 

Three: The Real World.  Any technology that is merging real world information with online information.  GIS, Mapping, Scanning, OCR, Speech to Text.

Communicaitons & Technology: There must be a better way

Introduction

Today we are swimming in communications.  While many of the tools we use to moderate our way through the morass are helpful, many are starting to show signs of wear and tear.  Some of them are downright broken.  It has gotten to the point that it isn’t unusual to hear that someone has given up answering email.  But this isn’t a new phenomenon.  I know many people who refuse to answer their phone and let the voice mail pick it up. 

What is the solution to all this mess?  Is there a solution to all this mess?  That isn’t a question I’m willing to ask in earnest just yet, let alone answer.  Before we give up on answering it, let’s start by looking at the problems and see if there is a good way out of this problem.  

First we will look at the types of communication.  Then we will address the time sensitivity of the communication. Additionally, we need to look at the direction of the communication.  Finally we need to look at the security needed in the communication.

Another Idea for a Tool

I want a tool that allows me to import into the following:

• Google Bookmarks
• Browser Favorites / Bookmarks
• Del.icio.us

The Applicaiton should take as an input:

• RSS
• OMPL

The above files should use extensions to handle categories or tags.

What I’m going to build here is a tool that will sync up a list of postings.  I currently have things in my RSS reader, my Google Bookmakrs, my browser favorites, and my Del.icio.us links.

I guess the idea here is that RSS / RDF / OMPL RSS and OMPL are really good transports for the metadata assoicated with a given webpage.  We should be able to get information in and out of each of tools that are used to create these links.