There’s been a lot of hullabaloo recently about Google’s decision to censor search results in China. The neat thing is, is that you don’t need to be in the People’s Republic to see for yourself how it works. Why not search for tiananmen on Google China and compare it with the result from the non-China Google? (Apparently, searching for Tiananmen on Google China with a capital ‘t’ leads to the expected results of tanks barreling down on students. Go figure.) So much for ‘don’t be evil.’
See censorship in action using Google’s image search for ‘Tiananmen’
(Via Gizmodo.)
Googles censorship, while no technological master piece, can be construed as “doing evil”, don’t forget the cheap clothes, electronics and counterfeit merchandise you picked up at the mall, during the holiday shopping season.
It easy for technology pundits and critics to attack a company like Google, but the reality is, we all support the Chinese government through our business decisions and purchasing habits.
Want to incite social responsibility, start in the closet, not on the desktop.
Over the weekend I decided to purchase an episode of Commander and Chief using iTunes.
It was a typically painless process, a few minutes later I had the pilot episode, and after checking it out I went about my weekend activities.
Sunday night, as Amy and I were lounging, playing games and being completely lazy, I remembered the episode was waiting on my powerbook.
Having acquired a sweet DLP projector at Thanksgiving, I decided to hook the powerbook up to the project and see how bad iPod-optimized video looked when blown up to 6 feet across.
After getting the cables hooked up, my powerbook was running s-video to the projector, audio to the stereo system, with iTunes playing the episode in full screen mode.
To my astonishment, it looked awesome!
Definitely not DVD quality.
Considering that video optimized to play on the tiny iPod screen, plays on my wall at the approximate size of a 60” screen is amazing.
Rock on Apple!
These are just random thoughts.
Why are shopping cart apps so convoluted and complicated? Something I’m hoping Shopify.com solves.
Having spent a significant amount of time untangling an OS Commerce store for my partner, I am amazed at the complexity being packed into these apps.
In the open source world the enemy of mass adoptions seems to be too many chefs, and a failure to say NO.
The idea of mashing up web services into new shiny new applications is actually an old idea.
Its simple, don’t reinvent the wheel, use the best of breed, whenever possible.
This is why I rely on Paypal, presently. Its not perfect, but what service is?
Paypal rocks by creating a relatively secure DMZ where customers and businesses exchange funds, without credit card information being stored on yet another server.
Unlike typical e-commerce systems, Paypal puts the customer in charge of their information.
How many sites store your information?
How much control do you have over it?
However, Paypal needs to do two things, to keep my business in 2006.
- Add Fedex to their shipping repertoire
- Allow more automation in subscription management
I want customers to be able to request upgrades and downgrades in their subscription level, without having to cancel and re-create subscriptions.
On another topic, why does every new web application require an account and password?
When will someone devise a system that is more transparent to users?
On how many sites do you use the same name and password?
Should users be allowed to define their own authentication system?
Why couldn’t I tell shiny new mashup #47 to authenticate my account against my IMAP server, based on a certain e-mail address? Or use an LDAP or POP3 server instead?
Don’t store my password, just my account key, and let me worry about the rest.
When Noqr and Client Minder launch, I will be converting back to Typo.
Initially, I used Typo for this blog, but it just didn’t have the pizzaz I was looking for.
Its time to give it another try, or convert to Wordpress 2.
It has been about 14 months since I attended the Building Basecamp workshop. Since then, I have completed 4 full blown Rails applications.
RQueue was my first Rails application, a spam/archival review application for Message Partner’s MPP product, and looking back at the code, I cringe in some places. But thanks to the low cost of change in Rails, it will be easy to improve upon the early mistakes.
The design faults I partly attribute to trying to bolt Active Record onto a vendor defined schema. A lot of SQL gymnastics were requires, not to mention, who knew e-mail administrators would want to review millions of messages at one time. Ouch.
CCM was next, a light weight CRM application for Mactank. This is actually the 4th incarnation of the application. Originally written in PHP 5 years ago, migrated to Java WebObjects 2 years later, and now comfortably at home as a Rails application.
The schema needs to be changed, since it relies on MPP handling the SMTP to MySQL transport. It was my first attempt, in Rails, at loose coupling of related data.
The Mactank.com web store, is a light weight store which handles processing orders for MailTemplate and other products. When I say lightweight, I mean super light. It really operates an intermediary between the static site, Paypal and CCM.
With the web store, I really focused on building only what was needed, when it was needed. I didn’t try to outthink myself or our needs.
Client Minder is the latest application, I like to call it a powerfully simple notification system. It took about 1 month of real time from concept to completion.
Client Minder sends notifications by e-mail and SMS to clients of any business. It is targeted at small businesses who need to reminder clients of appointments, event and other important information. Our first customers have been dentists, for whom a missed appointments are quite costly.
It is being rolled out in February, and I tried to follow the examples set by companies like 37signals.
Lastly, a mini application which I haven’t had time to polish, is what I call a Railet.
Rails provides a very strict domain based application framework, part of which includes a Public directory. Typically, static content like images, style-sheets, javascript are placed in this directory.
When developing Mactank.com, common chores like managing mail list subscriptions usually requires some minor scripting.
Instead, I wrapped the static site in a Rail framework, wrote a quick controller, without any database functionality, and implemented the interface elements using Ajax.
It worked out a lot better than I had hoped, so I am going to expand the features, and release this sometime this spring.
Those are the projects which occupied my time in 2005, as part of my partnership with Mactank.
For 2006, in addition to improving on those projects, I am going to launch 3 projects of my own.
The first project, which will launch at the end of next week, is Noqr.
Noqr is my take on site monitoring, with the ubiquitous unique spin.
The other 2 projects are top secret.
Actually, they are simply too amorphous to communicate clearly right now. One involves collaboration, e-mail, SMS, RSS and breaking down borders. The other is related to small business e-commerce.
As the saying goes, I can sleep when I’m dead. ;-)
I don’t have a cat, so cat blogging is out for me.
But I do love music, so I wanted to kick off Desert Island Music Friday’s.
A single track and disc (album, compilation, etc.) that I would want if stranded on a desert island.
Today’s desert island track, I’m Trying To Learn To Serve (Hidden Track) from Dishwalla’s album Pet Your Friends.
Unfortunately, you can’t get this track on iTunes. :-(
If all you heard from Dishwalla was the overplayed Counting Blue Cars, you missed a great album from an awesome Santa Barbara-based band.
Today’s desert island disc is, Kasabian’s self-titled debut album.
This album is awesome from start to finish. It picks up were The Verve’s Urban Hymns left off.
Rumors have it that the Mac Mini and iBook are next up for conversion to Intel.
My wish list for the Mac Mini is:
- Convert from a single traditional memory slot, to dual laptop memory slots
- Make accessing the hard drive easier. Ideally a slot loading hard drive
- Use the magnetic power adapter, added to the Macbook Pro
- Reduce the size of the power brick
I want to be able to swap hard drives in the event of failure, avoid the flimsy power adapters, and squeeze at least 2 GB of ram into the sucker.
Why?
These are perfect hosting “nodes”.
I have 3 Minis in a data center and they rocks for specific applications.
Mark Cuban posted the following, regarding the response to his companies release strategy for Bubble, the new Steven Soderbergh movie.
NOT A SINGLE PERSON. NOT ONE stood up and said, ‘screw him, our product is great. We dont care what he does’. Not a single person said’ ‘It could hurt our business, but we will just have to work harder to bring people in to our theaters’. Not a single person said, ‘It will make us have to work harder and create a better value and experience for our customer’
(Via Blog Maverick.)
My partner and I have been working together for 5 years. In that time, we have tried several business ventures, with no major success.
The bills get paid, but nothing breaks out and really grows.
Today, we are on the verge of launching a new service, which I truly believe rocks.
Is it perfect? No.
Does it solve everyones needs? Of course not.
But it does what it is supposed to, really well.
The competition is out there, but I know I built the best product I could, that it will quickly get better, and it solves a real problem.
Competition will only make our product better.
These are saying I have encountered of the years.
- Perfection is the enemy of done
- Ignore the atheists, focus on the agnostics
- Know the problem, provide a solution
- Hire people smarter than yourself
- Always be ready to pitch
- Fail fast
When the 360 sold out at Thanksgiving, in response to Microsoft’s PR spin, that the shortage was planned, I said they blew it.
At best they had a few months before the window would close, and gamers would turn to the Revolution and PS3.
Most PR-dependent blogs, like Gizmodo, Engadget and Joystiq, weren’t phased.
Initial response to the shortage, was to claim success and revel in the chaos moms and dads endured to secure a 360 for little Timmy, last Christmas.
Now the press is starting to turn.
If this keeps up, many folks are just going to wait for the PS3 with Blu-ray and forget about the 360. So let’s get the party started, ok Microsoft?
(Via Gizmodo.)
Consider this, the Xbox 360 sold less at launch than Sega’s Dreamcast, and they missed the year end sales goal of 3 million units, selling only 1 million.
How does a company with Microsoft’s war chest screw up this badly?
The combination of my current projects, along with my pending Remicade infusion on Thursday, will delay further work on Noqr until this weekend.
In 3 days I completed:
- Database Schema
- Basic CSS Layout
- Application Framework
- Underlying code libraries needed for major features
Hoopefully, next week the application will be live.
Tobias, over at Jaded Pixel, posted about the Bring your own domain feature of Shopify.
I am so happy this is catching on! It was an obvious path given Rails domain pattern.
One of my current projects is using a similar feature, as part of a partnership/reseller program.
I can’t wait for Tobias and company to fling the doors open on Shopify!
On one of my current projects, I decided to try organizing the CSS differently.
Instead of a single big style sheet, or couple or minor segments, I divided up the styles by logical use.
This led to the following categories:
- Base – The layout
- Color
- Type
- Forms
- Navigation
- Ajax
To my surprise, this really saved time, specially when making changes.
For example, the color definitions shrank considerably, since I could layer ids, classes and tags on a single color definition.
It also was invaluable in finding and fixing those pesky IE issues. Since I knew right where to look when the issues arose.
It may seem like common sense, to CSS pros, but this really was an eye opener and productivity booster for me.
Here is the official response from Clickatell.com:
Thank you for contacting Clickatell.
Recent changes have taken place in the US marketplace with regard to USA messaging, and it is now requested that all existing SMS traffic, including mobile terminated (MT), alerts and notifications, etc., now be run over dedicated US shortcodes. Messaging to the US is currently running perfectly, but we do foresee that in the near future there will be a strict control on all messaging.
As a temporary solution, Clickatell currently routes all USA traffic (for clients who do not yet own their own Shortcode) on a registered and approved Shortcode, so messages will not get blocked. We propose that customers prepare themselves in advance and startto activate a dedicated Shortcode as soon as possible.
More information regarding obtaining short coded numbers can be found at –
http://www.clickatell.com/brochure/us_shortcode.php
After checking with numerous aggregators, and pseudo-aggregators, this appears to be the consensus.
There is one company which has not published this requirements, yet. Quios.
Though, I expect the same response from them shortly.
In the meantime, I have compiled a list of over 250 Email to SMS addresses, covering most carriers.
Hopefully, I can scale our project quickly, take advantage of volume discounts, and offset the financial impact of leasing a CSC.
Before that happens, I need to receive a crystal clear explanation of what can get your CSC shutdown, and if there is any recourse against false complaints or potentially malicious acts.
This new barrier, coupled with the play for tiered internet access, companies like SBC are making, could make it difficult for startups and small tech companies to do business in America.
I have seen forms that allowed users to enter a mobile number and select their networks.
37signals’ Backpack does this.
Is there a directory of these addresses?
I found this and this.
If anyone knows of any others, please let me know.
After doing more research, I found shared CSC programs at a few companies.
Checking back with the helpful staff as Simplewire, I learned that companies offering shared CSC for applications are playing with a loaded gun.
One call from an angry customer, to a telco, and the shared CSC could be unceremoniously shutdown.
The guys at Simplewire agreed that the telcos are essentially shutting out small business use of SMS services.
They are happy with their growth, and have no motivation to encourage small developers and businesses to contribute to their network traffic.
Also, the discounted CSC fee of $375/month is going away on January 31st, 2006, after which it will be $500/month.
So the question is, do I pay to play, or go another route?
Considering, anyone can complain to a telco and potentially get your CSC shutdown, what is the benefit of paying for a CSC anyway?
Just heard from a foreign gateway provider.
You are required to get a CSC to transmit into the U.S.
It is being dictated by the U.S. carriers as a group, and there is no way around leasing a CSC from the telcos to send SMS messages.
If you live anywhere, but the U.S., SMS delivery is dependable and less expensive, generally.
While sending SMS messages to the U.S. is now a premium service for the entire world.
Guess who is paying the ultimate price?
U.S. consumers of course.
Fewer new and innovative services will be offered to U.S. subscribers, in my opinion.
A project I am working on relies on SMS messaging. As I posted a while back, real SMS messaging can be costly, but has several benefits over SMTP delivery.
Sending SMS by SMTP works, but is only reliable if the end user diligently keeps you informed of the network they are on, thanks to number portability, and you don’t get delivery reports.
In the last 2 weeks, as the project neared launch, Simplewire informed us that we needed a CSC (short code) to be a valid sender.
This is something new in the U.S., I had been using Simplewire for a couple years with no problem, one of the reasons I embarked on the current project.
It seems the U.S. telcos have decided to tighten their hold on this market, requiring each new commercial sender lease a CSC, in addition to paying a per message fee.
I am now contemplating switching to a European or South African gateway, and possibly falling back to SMS by SMTP.
To give you an idea, it costs $375/month to lease a CSC, an additional $1000/month for support through Simplewire, and a per message transmission fee.
The $375/month is a discount for a 12 month lease, and not requiring a vanity CSC.
Supposedly, we can recoup the costs by reusing the CSC across multiple applications.
Next, the telcos will be charging extra to deliver your internet traffic consistently?
Oh wait, they are already threatening to do just that!
Life intervened, preventing anything from moving forward on day 3.
Instead, another project received a flurry of activity.
More to come on Noqr later today.
Will be working on more interface design and tackling the installation of ImageMagick.
Update #1:
ImageMagick is installed. I had to download, compile and installed the following libraries, to get ImageMagick to build:
- libjpeg-6b
- libpng-1.2.8
- jbig2dec-0.8
- ghostscript-8.53
- freetype-2.1.10
Now Sparklines (with RMagki love) spits out gorgeous charts and graphs!
I have an idea for a lightweight, rails-based shopping cart system, but the name I liked is being squatted, as usual.
While I own more than 30 domains, each one as a distinct project associated with it. Not that I can promise to complete each one, but that was my intention when I purchased them.
Here is the typical response, when looking at squatted domains:
Dear Sir or Madam:
Eyetooth Branding and Trademark has been retained to process inquiries pertaining to the domain name: SPEEDYCART.COM
The domain name is solely available to eligible* parties. Please confirm eligibiity with founders or company attorney where applicable. Price terms: 24K USD for purchase, or 6,500.00 USD for a ten year lease. (Long term renewals with first option priced in accordance with the US Consumer Price Index.)
Price terms preserved for five business days. No hold is placed on the domain name. Inquiries must be resubmitted thereafter, so an option contract may be adviseable. To proceed, please reach Eyetooth by phone or email to request an online transfer agreement.
Eyetooth Branding walks buyers through the easy steps in secure domain acquisition. Purchase and transfer occur in real time and domains are live for use immediately. One can also request transfer via Escrow.com. To view complete information on the Escrow.com process, visit http://www.escrow.com/solutions/domain_name/index.asp. In certain cases, leases, option contracts and flexible payment plans may be available.
Please contact us if you require further information.
Sincerely,
Name Removed
Sr. Account Manager
Eyetooth Branding and Trademark
San Francisco New York Sydney
New Customer Tel: +1 646.265.5307
info@eyetooth.com
*Buyer or Lessee intends a new, legal mark use (or Buyer’s extant mark rights, if any, vested after 02/2000, Owner’s date of acquisition). Eligibility exceptions
for generic/dictionary/common names may be available.
I guess this is why my recent acquisitions have been Noqr.com and M8lr.com
Of course, these companies have a right to do this, but I don’t have to like it.
Today, I decided to follow the advice given by Jason Fried, of 37signals.
So, I wrote the story of Noqr. A few sentences describing what it does.
Basically, something to refer to over the next few days to keep focus.
On another note, I decided to use Sparklines in the project. But keep smacking my head up against the dependency on ImageMagick.
Everything looked good, until I installed the ImageMagick binary for Mac OS X, and ran into the following error:
dyld: Library not loaded: /sw/lib/libjpeg.62.dylib
Damn!
I have avoided relying on DarwinPorts or Fink for years now. For 2 reasons, I like having everything compiled and installed in “standard” locations (/usr/local), and I don’t like the lag involved in relying on a 3rd party to compile, test and distribute new versions.
Looks like I may cave in and use DarwinPorts, but that will require some extra work to deploy on my server.
Anyway. Later tonight. The interface! :-)
Update:
Finished the basic layout of the main page, with color scheme, css and some copy.
Also mapped out the pages needed for the launch.
Not quite as far as I hoped, but good enough.
Time to sleep on it.
Tomorrow, more interface work and building ImageMagick on Mac OS X 10.4.2, without DarwinPort or Fink.
Russell Beattie, posted something about short domain names, which prompted me to go on a quest.
Low and behold, Noqr.com is what I found, along with a few alternates (.net, .biz, etc.), and Nokr.net
It took me awhile to think of an appropriate project for the domain. But it finally came to me, and I am going to document the process of bringing it to life over the next 9 days.
The tools at hand:
- Ruby on Rails
- Lighttpd
- MySQL
- TextMate
- CSSEdit
- Fireworks
- Paypal
- Mac Mini
- Trusty Powerbook
The goal:
- Deploy the application in 10 days.
Today’s accomplishments:
- Designed the database schema
- Created Rails skeleton (with plugins)
- Chose color scheme for interface
- Committed initial code to Subversion repository
Total time spent, including this entry:
Tomorrow:
- Design the interface (HTML, CSS and Images)
Good night.
It will never happen!
Microsoft is a monolithic American company. In general, most customer are noting more than an entry on a spreadsheet at a company the size of Microsoft.
But they could learn a thing from Nintendo, in regards to PR.
When Nintendo’s DS sold out in Japan over the last month, they issued an apology.
We heartily thank those who bestow their patronage on our humble company.
Over the New Year season, demand for our portable game system “Nintendo DS” has vastly exceeded our predictions. It has gone out of stock, which we know has caused a great deal of trouble to our honored customers and retailers. For this we apologize from our hearts.
We will begin to ship our product by air mail, as this will help it get to retailers a bit faster. We are shipping product every week, but as supplies will not be fully replenished until the end of January, we humbly supplicate ourselves before you and beg your favor.
Source: Wired’s GameLife
Apple when running short on iPods, or Microsoft creating a shortage for the Xbox 306, could gain a bit of goodwill with some humble communication.
Most US companies should take note of this social communication.
Joystiq: “It costs Microsoft approximately $715 to make, the manufacturing costs are still too high, another reason why they’re producing relatively small quantities.”
Can you say oops?
This is what you get when a software vendor, with too much cash and not enough experience, decides to buy their position in a new market.
Considering the lack of truly inspiring launch titles, complaints of buggy hardware and noisy operation, it is probably good for Microsoft to avoid too much market penetration.
Still come the release of Gears of War, I will be hard pressed to find a reason not to buy a 360.
Okay, so there’s the people who like this sort of thing. They really want to be away from everyone else. Maybe they really want to be in a quieter environment, or maybe they’re just ‘those’ people who look at what the crowd is doing and immediately look for somewhere else to go. Others wonder what the hell those people are doing upstairs anyways. They’re missing the party! The chaos is just part of it. There may be more noise in general, but there’s a lot more people to talk to, more things to do, and if something happens, you’ll generally be there to see it first. The people that want that sort of thing want to be downstairs where the action is. There are others who may wander upstairs for a bit, enjoy the pace, but after a short while really miss what’s going on downstairs, so they get up and go back down.
That’s me. I’ve gone back downstairs. (In case you haven’t gotten it yet, this is an analogy for switching back to Windows.)
(Via Russell Beattie Notebook.)
So Russell has headed back to Windows, after his experience with the Mac.
Over the years I have seen this happen about 20% of the time someone switches.
The grass is greener on the other side syndrome, perhaps? Or the comfort zone, which seems to be part of Russell’s reason.
Russell makes a few good points in the post, about missing out on what is happening (software-wise) on windows (aka the other 95%).
But, I couldn’t help wonder if his desire for the more chaotic party downstairs will help him achieve his goals for 2006?
The desire to try out all those cool things is a glorious magnet for any geeks time, but why not set up a sandbox to play in? An inexpensive laptop or desktop where he can satiate the need to experiment.
My work machine is a Powerbook. I also have a Mac Mini and an inexpensive Compaq laptop, both of which I use as my sandboxes.
The only real exception I take in his post, is the one about “exorbitant hardware prices”.
Yes. Apple does not sell cheap computers, and some items, such as monitors, they charge a premium for.
But, when you buy any Windows PC you spend just as much in the long (6-18 months), thanks to the debacle that is the Windows aging architecture.
Don’t kid yourself. Windows simply spreads the costs down stream, with antivirus, spyware, constant patching and lost productivity.
It is sad to see Russell leave the Mac, but to each his own.
