January 2008
100 posts
Going to the top →
A screen shot of an email I sent to Steve Jobs at Apple. Marc van der Chijs: “Dave, what happened to me at the Apple Store in Shanghai is even worse. They tried to recover my data, but did not have another HD to put it on, so they copied it onto one of their store computers. Two weeks later I came back to the store and to my big surprise I found all my data still on that computer. Every...
Holy Hannah it's a Morning Coffee Notes podcast! →
The last podcast of the year, for sure, it’s a tutorial on the meaning of the at-sign in Twitter for Dave Sifry. Maybe I got it wrong? If so, post a comment here.
December 2007
78 posts
Fix on Feeds page →
I fixed a maor bug on the Feeds page in FlickrFan.
You don’t have to do anything to get the update, other than leave the app running.
The new version is 0.34.
Sorry for this bug. Glad to have it fixed.
Office and conference FlickrFans →
I don’t have an office, and I’m not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan.
First a little background…
My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He...
Playing with Photobucket →
Apparently Photobucket supports RSS (good).
They use media-rss (also good).
But they seem to only provide thumbnails of the photos, which is not good (if true).
Here’s the RSS feed for my newly created Photobucket account.
Insightful review in Wired News →
Michael Calore at Wired News writes about something I do too, and love. Wired News: “The first time I ran it, I let FlickrFan pull just AP photos, then I sat back and watched. I run two monitors here at my desk at Wired, so I can see two photos from the news agency side by side. This makes for some fantastic juxtapositions — like a picture of Bhutto smiling on one screen and her coffin...
Pride of Cucamonga, Day 2 →
Still listening to this classic Dead song. And writing about it on Twitter…
It’s an MP3 that I ripped from the Mars Hotel album. Which I bought on CD many years ago.
I’ve listened to this track about 1000 times. When I play it it puts a smile on my face. Because Cucamonga is a place with no pride, imho.
It’s a joke, kind of like Truckin makes fun of New Orleans, a town...
Thanks Lifehacker! →
A simple no-nonsense writeup of FlickrFan. Thank you.
However, the product does much more than what they say.
We’ll continue explaining and enhancing the product here.
A feature a day... →
I’m going to try to add one feature to FlickrFan every day.
Today’s feature: How to find a user’s feed, if they have one.
Bottom-line: On the public list, there’s now an XML icon next to every user who has a feed, who hasn’t opted-out.
Recommendation for Flickr →
I’ve been emailing today with photographers who use Flickr to manage their sets and collections. They like it that people can view their pictures publicly, but they want to control how they’re used. RSS, used as a way to distribute pictures, is a new idea for many of them.
Based on these conversations I think it’s important that they have a way to:
1. Turn off the RSS feed for...
Political notes →
Being head-down programming basically for the last four months, I’ve been paying attention to US politics, but not writing much about it.
A few thoughts… It’s terrible of course that assassination plays such a big role in the politics of India and Pakistan. It’s also a shame that we didn’t hear much from Ms. Bhutto before she was killed yesterday. She was very...
End of year links →
NY Times list of buzzwords of 2007. Washington Post: “The RIAA’s legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed.”
Twitter down? →
It appears Twitter is down.
Couldn’t come on a worse day. All the support concerns and links to blog posts are now flowing through email. Oy. We’ve gotten hooked on this technology and when it’s gone, it hurts.
Pride of Cucamonga →
Oh, oh, pride of Cucamonga
Oh, oh, bitter olives in the sun
Oh, oh, I had me some loving
And I done some time Beautiful song, can’t get it out of my head!
FlickrFan, day 2 →
Good morning, lots of discussion on many weblogs about the new product, FlickrFan, announced here last night.
I’m going to write about it here, a lot, over the coming weeks and months, but first I wanted to link to some of the comments about it.
Don Park: Dave’s New Thingy.
Rex Hammock: Dave’s cool new thing.
I guess it’s a “thing” eh?
Phil Jones: Platform...
New product release today →
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls…
It’s with much anticipation that I say this.
I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.
The idea is simple.
There’s a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity.
The purpose of this product is to...
I want to know the intent of the product →
I’ve been saying this ever since I started blogging.
When you have a product to announce, start a blog (if you don’t already have one) and announce it.
Before there were blogs, I wished Infoworld or PC Week would give space to the lead developer of the product, whether he or she is a marketer or technical, even the CEO if they wouldn’t assign a former reporter or ad guy to...
Blogger of the Year →
There was a time, a long time ago when I thought we’d have awards here on Scripting News. I’d nominate several blogs in different categories and the readers would vote and we’d have winners, and could celebrate, and prepare for next year, with some idea of what we value in blogging.
But the first year I did it, 2001, there was a huge outcry of anger at my hubris in thinking I...
Holiday greetings! →
Tomorrow and the next day are big Jewish holidays, it’s the time when we all go out for Chinese or Indian food, and talk about anything but Baby Jesus. On Christmas Day I’m going to Santa Cruz to hang with Naked Jen, who has a tradition of seeing three of the movies that come out for the holiday, and then we’re going out for a Jewish celebration probably with Chinese or Indian...
What I learned about security, privacy and Apple →
First, thanks for the great comments on yesterday’s post about Apple and the hard disk of my MacBook. People were universally positive and helpful, and I can say I really learned some really important things as a result of the discussion.
First, the cost of the data on the hard disk swamps the value of the value of the disk and even the value of the computer. There was source code on the...
Note to Doc →
Blogs are one of the few Vendor Relationship Management tools we have that actually work.
Someday we’ll have elaborate information systems that allow a negative customer experience, one with privacy and security implications, to propogate far and wide, quickly. The vendor will feel pressure from customers immediately. Today our ability to influence vendors is very limited. But it...
Macs are even more expensive than I thought →
When I got back from Europe my black MacBook wouldn’t boot, it just sat there with a disk icon and a flashing question mark. So I made an appointment at the Apple store in Emeryville to have it looked at.
When I got there, there was no wait, they were calling my name. The repair guy opened the Mac, took out the disk, went into the back room, and came back saying the disk was bad, I’d...
My Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz →
In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet.
A few comments.
1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did....
I'm with Rex →
Of course Apple is fascist scum for shutting down Think Secret. Rex Hammock said the one thing that I as a Mac user have to say about the news.
“There’s nothing positive about this settlement for my side.”
Amen brother. I keep thinking “Someday Apple is going to regret that they took their customers so much for granted.” But I know better. I used to say that, and...
Could S3 be an end-user product? →
I’ve not made much of a secret of the fact that I’ve been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.
It’s fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to...
CES, here we come! →
Thanks to PodTech, I’m going to CES again this year, and I’d like to see whatever it is that I should see. Suggestions please, in the comments.
I love devices that can be used for podcasting, for example something that fits in your pocket, has a battery, and wifi, and either is programmable by developers or includes a podcatcher. Is this the year of the podcatcher breakthrough? ...
Frozen peas →
Boobs on Ice: What’s with the peas?
RSS makes Google Zeitgeist this year →
This year RSS was the third-most asked-about “what is” term on Google, after love and autism.
Parking meter →
Does Twitter do enough? →
Evan Williams, the Blogger guy and Twitter co-founder, gave a talk at LeWeb3 about keeping software small, and how sometimes you can create a product by removing features from an existing product. He showed how Twitter is less than Blogger, no permalinks, titles, comments, templates, etc. It’s almost nothing compared to Blogger, but we’re using it and liking it.
It’s not a new...
A flashconf on fair use? →
There’s been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.
It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell’s was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because...
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of blogging →
Here’s a zip archive containing the source of the last 10 years of Scripting News.
Since Scripting News existed before blogs were invented, I went ahead and included the stuff that I blogged before there were blogs.
I hope this isn’t too confusing!
“cheesecake” PS: Scott Karp asks if blogs can do journalism. Try this question. Can journalists do journalism? At best they...
How spam will likely enter the Twitter community →
I think I know how spammers are going to enter the Twitter world. It’ll come in the form of replies, which basically function like email. You can direct a message with a url to anyone as long as you know their username. Here’s a screen shot that illustrates spam being sent to a hypothetical user. I didn’t send it of course.
Another problem, the destination of the url is likely...
Scripting News is 10.71110623 years old today →
Here’s a formula that calculates how many years old Scripting News is on any given day.
double (clock.now () - date (“4/1/97”)) / (60*60*24*365.25)
The answer is: 10.71110623.
It counts the number of days since its inception and divides by the number of days in a year. It accounts for leap years, assuming there is an extra 0.25 days each year.
Bathtime in Clerkenwell →
Click the pic to play.
Okay let's get viral! →
Fred Wilson did it, I had to do it tooooo.
In NYC, the Second Ave Deli is coming back →
Ed Levine writes a remembrance of the newest deli to open in NYC, with the same cast and food, at a new location, uptown (on 33rd St) and not on Second Ave.
New York sighs in relief. So does every deli fan in the rest of the U.S. and the world.
That seals it. I’m headed back to NYC before the end of the year.
PS: A funny thing happened when I entered Second Avenue Deli into Google Maps.
Amazon removes the database scaling wall →
When Amazon introduced S3 in March 2006 I knew I would use it and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have — storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later...
Graceland →
The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a national guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the Civil War
I’m going to Graceland
Graceland
In Memphis, Tennessee
I’m going to Graceland
Poorboys and Pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland
My traveling companion is nine years old
He’s the child of my first marriage
But...
Twitter takes a break, we're awake, and... →
There’s a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven’t heard any grumbling about this, but it’s worth a bit of a grumble.
What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time?
What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It’s unthinkable, because the web is built on the...
It can only mean one thing →
My black MacBook, purchased in May of last year, a day after the product was announced and a day after the computer it replaced, a white G4 iBook, died — died itself earlier today. There was an evil clicking sound coming from the back. The spinning rainbow cursor. Reboot it to see a disk with a flashing question mark.
The death of the black MacBook can only mean that there’s a new...
Amazon's database →
A note from Jeff Barr that Amazon has announced the database companion to S3.
No doubt I’m going to use it.
U.S. Blues →
I’m Uncle Sam/that’s who I am Been hidin’ out/in a rock and roll band Shake the hand that shook the hand Of P.T. Barnum/and Charlie Chan
Glad to be back home in the good ole U.S. of A.
Best wishes to Scoble →
I was in the audience yesterday when the one dramatic moment of the conference took place. Scoble was on stage. Mike Arrington was sitting to my right in the front row of the second section (on the right). Mike showed me a piece he was writing, and I gulped. It said Scoble was leaving Podtech and probably going to FastCompany to start a TV network for them. Since Scoble is my friend, I knew that...
Bebo has the right idea →
I don’t know what Bebo is, I guess it’s a social network, they say it’s #3 in the USA, #1 in the UK, but they just did something that’s pretty likely to work, if it’s technically possible. They’re cloning Facebook so that their service will run Facebook apps. What this means, if they can pull it off, is that they won’t have to fight to get support from...
Why I use Twitter →
I use it because it helps me keep in touch with people I want to be in touch with, without taking very much time. It serves a function that the links on Scripting News used to serve, but that was just a one-way thing. Now I get links and ideas from other people. It’s an equalizer, a playing field leveler. It’s useful the same way a cell phone is useful. Sure some conversations on cell...
Arc de Triomphe →
As the cab was heading back to my hotel it turned down an avenue and there was the Arc. I grabbed the camera and got a movie as we approached the circle around it.
Future-safe archives, day 2 →
Phil Wolff on things for bloggers to do before they die.
Was TechMeme hacked? →
Here’s a screen shot of the HTML source.
Looks like it’s trying to serve some kind of ActiveX control.
Happy to be using a Mac.
PS: Scoble just showed up and TM works on his cell phone so there’s something weird going on.
Future-safe archives →
I just woke up in Paris, it’s 5:34AM here, but back in California, it still never ceases to amaze me, the day hasn’t yet flipped. You guys haven’t even gone to bed yet! Now that’s amazing to me. What perseverence! Keep up the good work everybody.
I just started posting a couple of twits that really should be a blog post, so let’s get started.
First at some point,...