Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Twitter is a great, when it works. All it takes is a Steve Jobs keynote or a Presidential Inauguration to bring out the infamous Fail Whale. Unfortunately Twitter’s approach to deal with its up-time issues is to reduce functionality and limit developer access as explained in this Webware article.
The solution to fixing Twitter’s reliability and still allow developers to support its users is simple: Google should buy Twitter.
Why Google? No other company has the capacity to server up millions of people. Even the mighty Microsoft quickly ran out of bandwidth or server capacity to accommodate all the people interested in downloading released the Windows 7 Beta. Only Google can serve the masses reliably.
I like Twitter. I’d like to see some new features such as group messaging. I don’t want to see developers throttled. Unfortunately, Twitter cannot fix this problem themselves. They need Google.
~Posted by Al Degutis
I’ve wanted to experiment with Photosynth some more, so I decided to try a 360 degree synth of Judy’s Mickey Mouse Christmas Tree. I set up a backdrop behind the tree, put the camera on a tripod and snapped 26 pictures while slightly rotating the tree in between shots. About half way through I realized that as I rotated the tree, I was also inching it forward and to the left so I started inching it back during the remaining shots. I’m not sure how much the movement affected the results, but my goal of having a photo that you can “scroll around” didn’t work out. I also wonder if the problem was the backdrop which kept the background the same. My thought was to keep the background neutral so it only saw changes in the tree. At this point I’m uncertain if the problem was my technique or Photosynth’s limitations.
It claims to have used all 26 photos but I don’t see how they’ve been synth’d. Here’s the result, which unfortunately require Internet Explorer on a Windows PC:
Here are all of my attempt at Photosynth:
http://photosynth.net/Search.aspx?query=aldegutis
I’ve used various interfaces for Twitter, including the Twitter.com website itself. As the number of people I follow grew from a handful to dozens and now a couple hundred, I found that only one Twitter app works best for me: TweetDeck. TweetDeck has a number of useful features, but the one that made me use it almost exclusively is Groups. You can create your own groups, as many as you’d like, selecting which of the people that you follow and they’re Twitter updates (“tweets”) appear in their own column. I’ve created groups for Family and Friends, Locals (geographically), and Tech Heads. This allows me to quick browse through tweets in each category.
The problem I have with TweetDeck is how much screen real estate it takes up to display the various columns which includes All Messages, Replies and Direct Messages, plus my groups. I end up scrolling back-and-forth to see the various columns to frequently. It’s my understanding that a future release will allow you to resize the columns, which will be an improvement. I’d like to offer up two other suggestions. Let me preface these ideas by saying I have no idea if either of these are technically possible, nor how challenging it would be.
First, it would be nice if each column could be standalone, free-floating columns or connected. A great example of this is the Google Chrome browser in which you can take a tab and separate it from the main browser window to stand on it’s own, or drop a standalone browser window onto another one to insert it as a tab. Even if it is not possible to do the attach/detach action, just having separate, free-floating columns would be beneficial. Using Twhirl with my various accounts as an example, this screen shot illustrates how this might look:
I have the Twhirl windows stacked in this example, but normally they’re a little more spread out. The key here is to allow me to control their placement including the possibility to overlap them to save screen space.
My second thought on how to manage the multiple columns is to use a side tab approach. In this case, TweetDeck would have its All Tweets column with vertical tabs on the side for the additional columns. When you click on a tab, it would slide out that second column next to the All Tweets columns as illustrated below.
Alternately, it could slide out that tab into the single All Tweets column, replacing it and keeping it one column wide:
The space required to display the tabs could easily run out depending on the number of groups you create. This could be handled by 1) using abbreviations such as Tweets for All Tweets, DM for Direct Messages, @ for Replies and 2) allowing the list of tabs to scroll up and down.
Again, I cannot speak to the technical challenges to implementing either of these interfaces, but I hope that I’ve provided some ideas that may help improve this great Twitter client.
~ Posted by Al Degutis
About 30 minutes after I received my real spam quarantine digest, I received an email claiming to be a spam quarantine digest. It was obvious to me that it was a fake, but looking closer showed that the spammer did a very poor job crafting this fake. Unfortunately, the everyday computer user may not notice these mistakes. Here’s a screen shot of the message via my webmail interface:
The sender (From: line) lists a .local domain which is not a valid top level domain (e.g. .com, .net, .org, etc). When you hover over the “Click here to access you spam quarantine” link the browser exposes that the link is to https://192.168.1.50:442/quarantine/manageuser… The 192.168.1.50 address is not a valid public IP address. It is part of a block of IP addresses (192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255) used for internal, private networks and is not routable (i.e. sent) across the Internet.
Posted by Al Degutis
It took only 1 hour to import our DVD and CD library (169, 191 respectively) into Delicious Library, a great and easy to use Apple app. It makes the job of importing items by scaning the item’s barcode using the iSight camera then looking up the item in Amazon, pulling in tons of data on the item. I found it faster to use my camcorder connected via firewire because it did a better job focusing on the various barcode sizes. I’ve never noticed how small some of the barcodes are. Some of our music CDs are sooo old they don’t have barcodes. Remember back in the day, when you bought something and it had to have a price tag or label? You know, those pre-barcode days. Some people may be too young to know what I’m talking about.
Our collection of items can be viewed as shelves or lists.
An example of the details it automatically pulls from Amazon to populate into the database:
Next up, importing our books.
- Al Degutis
I like Google’s Chrome browser, maybe more than Google does. I use Chrome on my Windows computer and am impatiently waiting for a version for the Mac. It’s a frustrating wait because Chrome was developed using WebKit, the system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari.
While ads for Google Chrome have been spotted on YouTube and Linked In, I think the excitement for Chrome as dimished. Could part of that be because Google itself is doing such a poor job of supporting its own product? The Internets are all abuzz about the new GMail Themes and Colors. Seriously? Anyway, being the lemming that I am, I checked them out myseft and found that they don’t display properly in Chrome.
Here is how Firefox and Chrome display the same theme in Gmail.
Yes, I know that Chrome is still in beta, but what Google product isn’t? See right there in the image under the letters “i l” in GMail, it says beta. After four years, GMail is still in beta which either means a) Google doesn’t understand the beta testing cycle, or b) Google doesn’t care.
I’ll continue to use Chrome on the limited systems it’s available and I’ll continue to shake my head in disbelief when I come across this annoyances.
As for the GMail themes and colors, meh.
- Al
Google’s new web browser, Chrome, has been designed to be fast. How fast is it? Here are the results of a Javascript testing between Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.
The Javascript speed test used is here.
Chrome also did better (overall) in this test.
Robert Scoble also tweeted the results of his quick memory test: “Chrome memory utilization? 61,548 (with Google Reader loaded). Firefox? 215,220 with just Twitter (which takes far less memory). Chrome wins”
Jeff Hicks tweeted his memory test: “
Walt Mossberg has posted his review of Chrome here.
So the jury is still out on memory usage, but it looks like Google Chrome is off to a good start with performance.
I’m looking forward to the availability of the Mac OS X version.
Posted by Al Degutis
Note – you will need to install the Photosynth browser plug-in to see the images below. At this time you have to install the client and browser plug-in at the same time, which you can do by click on the below.
While I still can’t get Microsoft’s Photosynth to display the web images on my Windows XP or Vista running in VMWare Fusion v1 (Fusion v2 Beta is required), I was able to get some interesting results with a series of pictures I took of our house and property.
The steps to creating a synth are very simple:
- 1. Take pictures, preferably enough “connecting photos”
- 2. Feed the photos to the Photosynth program and it does the rest
My first attempt at creating the necessary photos for a good synth was a simple 360 degree view from a center-ish point in the backyard: camera on a tripod, snapping pictures and slightly rotating the camera for the next shot. Of the 42 photos I feed it, 76% of them were synthy and the following is the result.
Apparently, I am not synthy enough, to borrow a phrase from Microsoft’s Photosynth beta. Wanting to try Photosynth but using a Macbook Pro as my primary computer, which is not supported natively, I launched Vista Home Premium in a VMWare Fusion (v1) virtual machine to meet the requirements of running it in Windows. After downloading and installing the software then permitting the browser plug-in to install I took a shot at my first synth. I grabbed 40 photos of our house and surrounding property taken back in 2003 and feed it into Photosynth. After it processed and uploaded the finished result to the Photosynth web site, I was presented with the following when trying to view the results:
CNET’s Rafe Needleman wrote a piece titled 10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 (so far) which many have used to point out why cloud computing won’t work. I love the idea of using just about any computer to access my data. I am also concerned about the cloud, not only because of reliability but also accessibility. We live in a rural area with a water well, septic tank/field and slow Internet access (grant it, our 144k iDSL is better than dial-up). Even if Internet services were more reliable I still face a bandwidth issue. Plus, there is the issue of access while traveling. Just about any hotel provides Internet access, but some (it appears to be the larger ones) still charge. For example, I stayed at a Marriott hotel in June for a conference and they were charging $10 per day. That was on top of the room charge at this “full service” property.
Yet, I like keeping my data, or some portion of it in the cloud for easy access.
I download my small business email to Outlook via POP which acts as long term storage. All of my other email clients, which are the ones I primarily use on a daily basis, utilize IMAP. This allows me to access recent email from a web browser (i.e. webmail) on any computer, my iMac, or Macbook Pro.
Another favorite hybrid cloud computing app I use is Evernote. My like somewhat manual approach to sync’d email, Evernote stores a copy of my notes online. These notes can be accessed, and sync’d to, my Mac or Windows computers. One weakness, in my opinion, is that the awesome text recognition feature, which can also “read” text from images, is done on the Evernote servers, hence in the cloud. Should the servers or Internet not be available, newly entered local notes would not be searchable. I’d like to see the text recognition feature for non-images take place locally to cover those situations.
I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s Live Mesh to sync data across multiple machines. The primary problem is that there isn’t a native Mac client, yet. So, accessing my Live Mesh data requires the use of a browser which is clunky. Live Mesh has a lot of promise and the peer-to-peer syncing that Paul Thurrott brought to my attention is very exciting… once there’s a Mac client that supports it. It would be very cool if Evernote supported peer-to-peer sync as well, though I don’t think it’s critical.
It’s all about syncing with a central location, but having access to most, if not all, at any time.
Posted by Al Degutis
