Delicious, you were so much more than bookmarks

Del.icio.us may be my favourite online service. I can sync bookmarks in a dozen ways quite easliy, but Del.icio.us is so much more than that.

• It’s a search engine – I can find results that are filtered by real people, and fellow geeks at that, with no extra effort from anyone.
• It’s an RSS reader – I can keep up with the latest news and trends, again with results filtered by real people
• It’s a powerful personal collection – I can recall what I was doing at any point in history, I can import my ever-changing tags/interests into other programs for use, I can browse and brainstorm in incredibly productive ways, etc.

…I use the API to leverage my information in a dozen ways, all of which are useful and important to me. I’ve written bookmark sharing scripts for small community sites based on the API…

I know I’m not alone and I find myself wondering what Yahoo! is thinking – it’s a terribly popular site that seems very flexible and well designed. I would think it could pay for itself, one way or another. Even if not, the bad publicity and community anger should be enough to stop this insanity.

Crowd-sourcing is a buzzword now, but it’s still a very powerful mechanism, and del.icio.us provides a wealth of information. I like Yahoo. I greatly appreciate their spirit of community and sharing, and find myself saddened by a potential loss greater than that of a single site. Del.icio.us is a valuable resource, and one that should be protected – I had every expectation Yahoo! would do that when they purchased it. It seems I may have been wrong.

From TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/

Filed under: informal, journal, del.icio.us, delicious, yahoo

Thanksgiving Thank: online organization/productivity tools

I’m disgustingly pleased with my life right now – and I attribute it to one singular thing (shamelessly taking for granted all the wonderful things that make my life what it is): organization. I recently went on an organizing kick and it’s made a massive impact. Yes, I’m getting more done, but part of the key is that I’m not doing things I would have done had I continued the way I was.  I’m doing the things that are actually important.  Not just things that maintain the status quo of my life, but the things that take me where I want to go. I feel light as a feather, unweighted by a mind cluttered with all the things I wanted to do but had no time for.

Now I know without doubt: I have time.

For a few weeks prior to this one I’d been stressed and constantly forgetting things – I was saying daily that I wished I didn’t have to sleep and had so many things to do and never had enough time. Now I’m finding time to regularly blog – something I almost never feel I have enough time to do. To read my RSS feeds (and quickly discard what I don’t really need without guilt). To tackle small projects that take me toward getting my business ideas realized, getting my house built, living comfortably, maintaining good social relationships, and a dozen other things that just plain make me happy (including work, something I’m infinitely grateful for).

I’m enjoying the journey instead of grinding my mental hard drive on things I’d like to do or should do or probably forgot.  This is fun.

To sum up what I’ve done:

• created a list of concrete goals and actual singular actions to accomplish them
• placed (only) necessary computer folders/files in the cloud (via Ubuntu One)
• checked all code into version control on the office server (via git)
• posted/clipped goals, quotes, resources, and links to the web (via springpad)
• filed current and [possible] future tasks online (via Remember The Milk)
• posted code-related tasks/tickets/bugs online (via Trac)

Note: each goal has an associated springpad notebook, a remember the milk list, a folder in the cloud, and sometimes a Trac environment and git repository: organization based on what I want to do.

The best part?  Once set up, using these things is considerably less effort than trying to organize and remember without them.  When it’s time to do “something” I simply refer to a [smart]list of actions on Remember The Milk and pick a “something” I can do.  I can add or retrieve my somethings to/from any of the uberleet tools above in a few seconds and they all automatically do things to make my life easier.  Best of all, they generally work together – tickets put into Trac show up in the right place in Remember The Milk, complete with a link for when it’s time to work on it.  Code pushed to the server using git automatically closes referenced tickets in Trac, which marks the RTM tasks as done.  Files on any one computer I happen to be using are automatically synchronized across all my other computers…and everything I need is available everywhere, provided I have a computer and internet access.

The act of getting everything synchronized and/or out of my head and online caused not only less stress but useful real-life organization (largely automatic thanks to the wonders of teh interwebs). It also prompted an evaluation of my goals and what I was doing to reach them. Usage has shown me that I’m now making excellent progress – faster than I would have dared to dream. And I’m still sleeping.

Similar things I’ve written:
Efficient Use of Remember The Milk
Organization for [true] Success

Filed under: informal, journal, git, organization, productivity, remember the milk, RTM, springpad, trac

Education and Sustainable Living

I remember being a young girl, sitting in my room and thinking about something my father had said. Whatever it was we discussed has gone from memory, but I remember being surprised that people took more than they gave, in a lifetime materials sense, and particularly surprised that we did, too. That was about as far as I could grasp – I believe words like ‘sustainable’ and ‘ecology’ were a bit out of reach at that point. I was terribly fortunate to have parents who were fact-teachers rather than ideology-teachers. Still, I remember thinking that when I grew up I’d find a way to only take as much as I gave. That seemed to make sense. I think my parent’s style of teaching makes sense, too. Give people facts and teach them how to think, then let them figure it out.

I still think that living sustainably makes sense, but more for my original little-girl reasoning than due to anything else. The adult-me knows about things like global warming and pollution and ecologies and economies…yes, of course. But in the end, it’s still the little-girl me that thinks it’s the right thing to do that makes the difference. It isn’t about everyone else, it’s about me, and taking responsibility for how I live my own life. So what if someone in China is going to start using more gas as I start to use less? So what if I’m one miniscule cog? It’s my cog, and I’ll do as I see fit with it.

I often wonder about how we teach children – they have the opportunity to learn many facts, especially those fortunate enough to have internet, but I get the feeling most aren’t, or weren’t, fortunate enough to have as much time spent on values or the critical thinking side of learning. To me, critical thinking and forming values are far more important, and applicable to any kind of learning. To clarify, I mean “values” less as ‘this is right, that is wrong’ and more as core things like responsibility.

I’m not trying to live sustainably because I ‘should’ or because it’s ‘right’, but because…it’s elegant in my eyes. As in an elegant piece of code, as in the elegance of balance. My cog doesn’t have to make a difference, but I’d like it to make sense. To be elegant, if possible.  That’s good enough stuff to have stuck with me from childhood.  If I’d known this colour of the word ‘elegant’ as a child it would have summed up my feelings on the subject of sustainable living just as well as it does now.

Filed under: informal, education, sustainable living

Moving Electrons is Cheap

Due to the nature of free markets, and the laws of nature, it isn’t hard to forecast what is going to happen to certain markets in the future, barring any sort of major disruption.  See, moving electrons is cheap, and moving physical items is not.

When one creates something digital, a special thing happens.  Something not at all in keeping with the rest of the physical world as we know it.  Your creation can be copied for almost nothing.  Your creation can be distributed for almost nothing.

In terms of software or music, this means you only make something once, but millions of people can enjoy it for next to nothing, thanks to computers and the internet.  Contrast this with a chair, where you must make the chair for each person who wants to enjoy it, and you must get it to them.

However, and this is a big however, even the building of a chair can be reduced to little more than digital data, through the use of CAD and CAM programs, and I think the future will see much more of this sort of thing.

A designer in Ohio will create a chair using a CAD program and post it online.  Someone in China will see the design, download it, and use a local (or in-home) 3D printer to create it.  Money may or may not be exchanged along the line.  Undoubtedly, downloading furniture will not only be normal, but free in some places (it already is).

While this sort of thing is already possible through services like Ponoko, there is much room for growth in computer-aided manufacturing.  Point being, it’s out there, and the impacts may be great.  In a world with increasing energy prices and environmental concerns, it’s something that will be driven by more than just money.  Consider the ability to easily customize data – a downloaded chair design could be altered to have five legs rather than three, with little extra effort.  Consider, also, the implications for the ‘buy local’ movement.

Filed under: informal, predictions, cad, cam, cnc, ponoko

Spokeo: so cool, so creepy

Update: Since this post is so popular I thought I’d add a summary.  In short, Spokeo is totally legit – I’ve been using it fairly regularly for the two years since I posted this and can say, without doubt, that Spokeo does not spam and only shows information that is already public.  The only sketchy part is that it’s an automated service and some people are horrified to realize how easy it is to find and neatly summarize whatever they’ve put on this information superhighway if one has something as simple as an email address.  My solution: if you feel guilty, contact them and let them know how you found them (Spokeo will do this for you, though that’s closer to spam) and if you have an issue with the superhighway, use an alias (name and email combination, using a proxy for IP anonymity if you’re especially concerned) that you never ever associate in any way with your ‘real’ identity, whatever that is online and/or off.

I saw some random mention of Spokeo somewhere in reference to online data and being careful what you post, so I had to check out the site to see just what ‘spokeo’ was.  First click: privacy link.  I’m not even going to consider using something of this sort if it sells data, especially my friend’s data.  Spokeo promises never to do this, and while ‘never’ is a long time, everything currently seems legit, from Google searches to their site, and I used a Yahoo alias to create an account/log in/import contacts – they’ve combined the steps.  Really, the whole site is almost stupid-simple to use.  Kudos to Spokeo – they make it easy to interact with something that is not easy to do.

Almost instantly, people I know start appearing in the left column, with more activity and places than I would ever have guessed.  From an address book I haven’t updated in at least five years – some of the addresses returning results are over a decade old.  Minutes later I’m exclaiming over an old friend now having four children – she’d posted stories and pictures on MySpace…and I’m feeling a bit like a stalker.

See, I was reading about online data and the associated issues because it’s been something I’ve been thinking about.  I tend to be pretty picky about how I put things online.  You can find a plethora of information from social networks if you know my usual nick, but it’d be difficult to find out my name.  Likewise, you can find the usual information in public records if you know my name, but it would be difficult to find things I put online.

Spokeo, also, has little instant information on me unless you know my spam address – the address I use to sign up for things.  As it’s for spam, I don’t tend to give it out to anything but forms.  Likewise, my personal addresses only go on paper or outgoing email.  Not appearing on spokeo via an address book import is not an entirely unexpected side-effect, though it came about from a different angle: separation of identities and avoidance of spam.  I have always assumed anything online is accessible to anyone, and that includes things on any computer I have hooked up to the internet.

When I find people online who do not share this assumption, and get angry that their information ended up with someone or on somewhere they didn’t want (like on Google or in some spam list) I find myself confused.  This is the digital highway, is it not?  You use Google, do you not?  You must comprehend some of the basic functionality of the internet.  But they don’t, and I’m left wondering what people would make of my use of spokeo.  Everything in spokeo is public – there is no hacking going on, and it’s nothing I couldn’t have found on my own had I looked.  It just makes things easier.  And that, my friends, is the issue behind the issue.

Spam would be an almost non-issue if there were no bots or automation involved – if the spammers had to type in each email address, each message.  On the other hand, in such a world there would be no RSS feeds.  I see spokeo as somewhere in the middle right now – it has no inherent ‘evil’ because it isn’t doing anything illegal, it isn’t hacking into private data, and it isn’t doing anything I couldn’t or wouldn’t have liked to have done myself.  It’s simply making it easier for me to do.  The problem lies in the fact that some of the people, albeit people who would likely not mind me viewing their data, may not realize I now have access to that data.

So what did I do?  I imported the rest of my contacts.  As I know each of these people, and would generally either like to speak to them or don’t care to read their stuff at all, I figure I’ll take a bit of time as I find it to write something to them wherever I found them, or at whatever email address seems to be active.  In this way, I don’t have to feel like a stalker and can salve my conscience while, perhaps, helping to spread the knowledge that this is, in fact, an information highway.  One which I shall use as best I can, and that includes having all of my friend’s social network data on a single site.

Filed under: informal, privacy, spokeo

Returning 0 for ‘no errors’ is illogical.

This is one thing I really don’t get about traditional programming practices – usually I write a function to do something, and return data. Usually, returning something of any sort means it returns TRUE on a bool check. TRUE evaluates to 1 (and vice versa) in many languages, just as 0 evaluates to FALSE. So logically, when there’s an error I want to return FALSE, or 0. This goes further, too. For example, if you have a javascript event handler for certain DOM elements, like links, and return FALSE the default behaviour, taking the user to the URL that has been clicked in this case, is aborted.

So in practice, returning TRUE or 1 means things are good and should continue, and returning FALSE or 0 means something else, usually an error. This is intuitive. So why oh why is the ‘right’ way to return a ‘no error’ status the other way around? I get the binary machine ‘bit’, I do. I just don’t like it.

Filed under: informal

Can people please just decide on one switch format?

I find the Man page (which is made more difficult when there is nothing under the package name, BTW), I read it, and I think I get it. I type in the switches and arguments I think I need and I get ‘invalid argument’ errors. I tinker and tinker until I finally figure out the argument is fine, and the argument order is fine, it’s the switch syntax that’s wrong. Normally it’s –switch-name [arg] or -s [arg], which is what it seems to show on the Man page. But noooo this time it was -s[arg] – what’s up with that? It seems like it’d be more difficult to write the code to accept that. I can deal with writing both -s short and –long switches if both options are supported where possible, or it’s obvious that all options are one or the other, and I do this in the things I’ve written, but two is quite enough, thank you.

Filed under: informal

FF Mouse Gestures

I know I usually write about how mouses* steal time, but they aren’t a bad device for some tasks, web browsing often being one of them. It’s much less work for me to click on a link than to deal with some program sticking labels and hotkeys in for them (and breaking inflexible layouts). So I use the mouse, and I find it annoying to move my mousing hand back to the keyboard when I’m doing so. I’m also not a fan of mousing up to the navigation buttons. Half the time I remove them. Including an addon to remove the ‘go’ buttons I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on (you can manually remove them as well). I don’t like clutter in my UIs. What tragedy that my two favourite hotkeys, ctrl+l (location bar) and ctrl+k (search), require my mousing hand.

I’ve tried mouse gestures before, though it must have been ages ago because I remember it really slowing down my computer and not working very well. I bore with it for a time because it was handy, but alas it went by the wayside and I haven’t had the heart to try again until recently. The mouse gestures addon for Firefox (view default gestures here) is not like that old technology I remember at all, and I can tell we’re going to be good friends. I’ve only had the thing for about an hour and it’s already comfortable…and faster than my beloved hotkeys. Whatever is the world coming to?

*Mice, for those who like that.

(Anyone else thinking of pan-dimensional mice here?)

Filed under: informal, firefox, mouse gestures

Tech Support

Why is it the first response I get to any bug report, trouble ticket, or tech support question is completely useless? I’m hoping it’s just that support personnel are used to dealing with idiots. Because if I’m really that bad at reporting bugs I’m just another idiot, and I don’t want to be an idiot.

I say ‘my mail server doesn’t exist’ and mention missing MX records and I get nonsense about it not being a web address I can visit. Uh, yeah, I know, but the host should still *be* at an IP or it can’t send/receive mail.

I say ‘I got an error with the installer on line X, downloading Z file and changing X to Y fixes it’ and I get ‘why were you manually installing it?’. Well, there was that error I mentioned.

I say ‘I can’t transfer large packets over my connection, but I can still ping’ and I get people trying to walk me through an internet setup. On a windoze environment. Ummmno.

Goodness forbid I tell tech support that I’m running Linux, ’cause they don’t support it. Doesn’t matter if I have the same issue when I boot into Windoze. Thankfully, one of the local ISPs has particularly good tech support – they even put me through to their ‘Linux guy’ when I called.

I know what fixing bugs is like. I’ve read thousands of bug reports. I try to give the information I think they’d want, and to be very explicit about it. When it’s a language I don’t know well, I can’t give the exact problem and fix, sorry.

Filed under: informal, techsupport

Spel Alasca

People in Alaska generally don’t spell very well, and it’s atrocious. Not only is it annoying to read, but it says volumes about the school system up here. I don’t expect everyone to spell everything properly – some people just aren’t language people. Others just aren’t math people. No big deal – my spelling isn’t that great, either. I know this, though, and try to remember to spell check. Spell check is your friend.

When I meet people up here who, in other places, would have no trouble spelling or using proper grammar yet spell and speak in odd ways it bothers me. It’s not a local thing – it’s not like places in the US where areas have linguistic oddities, here they have linguistic oddities but they are all different. Well, almost all. There’s a state-wide mindset that most store names should be pluralized. ‘I went to Barnes and Nobles yesterday’ is a good example. This is odd, and I notice, but I don’t really mind – it’s a local thing.

Filed under: informal