A Whole Lotta Nothing

Moblogging with MT, pop2blog and my phone

Using a mixture of duct tape, pipe cleaners, and old tupperware bowls, I've now got my phone talking to my blog.

Starting with pop2blog, I hacked it to only keep track of attached images and email subjects, ignoring the rest of the message. It also only transmits image names as new posts to Movable Type on this server. It's on another server though, since some of the perl modules required weren't available to my activestate perl install's package manager (thanks chris for figuring out a workaround). I'm doing more CSS tricks to display a short 100px tall peek at the images, and if you click through you'll see the full image (still working on the archive pages for images).

So to recap, I take a photo with my phone, push about 7 buttons to send it off to a secret email account on one server. A cronjob on a different server checks the account every 10 minutes, then processes the messages and sends the results to a third server via xml-prc, which updates a movable type blog (including one custom template to produce the table you see above, and another template to create the CSS on the fly), which is included in another movable type blog (the one you are reading). Three servers, two blogs (with custom templates), a phone, and bunch of rudimentary glue code. Now you can see why I'm surprised it worked at all.

Spring finally sprung

Yesterday was no doubt the first real day of spring for me, and I have a feeling it was for everyone else too. It started off with a morning so warm I put on a pair of shorts for the first time since last October. I enjoyed a long brunch with friends followed by warm walks through neighborhoods and ending up in a backyard for an hour talking.

After returning home, backyard primping and preening ruled the day, followed by a nap filled with warm breezes and resting cats. Dinner was had after a walk downtown to a sushi restuarant. On the trip home, the sidewalks were loaded with people doing the same, which I've never seen before (it is California, after all, and we rarely see anyone else walking in the suburbs).

What really sealed the deal was checking my email last night for the first time in hours and getting only three new messages. It's as if everyone realized what a spectacular day they had in front of them and unpulgged collectively to enjoy it.

AMZN loves customer/user experience

I just got a bit of a visual jolt when visiting amazon.com today and finding this gigantic love letter from Jeff Bezos on the front page.

They certainly kick ass on user experience issues (though I've noticed they can improve in quite a few places), and their customer service is usually pretty good, but I had no idea it was so highly rated across the board with all customers.

Just goofing around in photoshop

Some learn from mistakes, others don't

Funny how history has the tendency to repeat itself.

Translation: hilarious

I noticed a site talking about my mozilla article in my referrers today, but it was in german. I jumped over to google to run the translation, and here's the best chunk of it:

...on my XP system use I the IE, despite all safety gaps and in such a way, since unfortunately the IE momentarily the measure of all things represents and we must naturally test the distribution of means of publicity particularly under IE.

First impression of Mozilla: I impregnated.

The Ben's rock

Ben Folds, Ben Lee, and Ben Kweller (three of my favorite musicians today) are currently touring Australia together and collaborated on a special EP, with plans to do a full album this summer. I got a copy of the tracks and can't stop listening to it. It's just... so...fucking...good.

Usually I'm not much for supergroup collaborations, but it's a great balance of all three. Some songs are kinda Ben Folds sounding, with lots of piano, some are acoustic and feature Ben Kweller's sound, with Ben Lee's sound also infused throughout. It's even got a 80's sounding, Gary Newman-esque song.

Worst reality show ever

The Oscars have historically been an amazing display of self-congratulatory nonsense, but I knew this year, in the midst of a war and global strife, they'd be especially pointless and nonsensical. In the grand scheme of things, we're talking about the most pointless display of public fawning and affection for people that already get far more than they deserve. It was a four hour trainwreck in slow motion, watching millionaires pat themselves on the back again and again. Needless to say, I enjoyed every single minute of its grotesque glory.

Some random thoughts throughout the night:

- Thanks to Billy Crystal's hosting of a few years back, Oscar night has pretty much been reduced to a glorifed Friar's Club Roast for Jack Nicolson. It was funny at first, but it's wearing thin. Write some new jokes people.

- 75 years of 5 hour shows = about 16 days of oscar presentations to date.

- I don't know about Nicole Kidman's new look. She looked like either a Don Johnson love interest from an episode of Miami Vice, or someone that popped out of a Nagel painting. She looked so 80s it hurt.

- Paul Simon's comb-forward 'do was looking pretty pathetic, he almost looks like Garfunkel now, though I liked his song. I loved the song for Frida, I thought the Chicago number was pretty good, U2 was so-so, but where was Eminem?

- The constant cutting-off of the short speeches got tiresome. It doesn't seem like the biggest source of fat on the evening's festivities are speeches. Can we have less retrospectives and less song-and-dance numbers? If the show was just about giving awards away, it could easily fit into 30 minutes. Look how short the list of winners is if you don't believe me.

- In most of the 75 year flashbacks of previous acting winners, you can often count the number of minorities shown winning on one hand. Sometimes on just a couple fingers. Sometimes on a single finger for a category.

- I didn't think Michael Moore would win because I didn't think anyone would let him onstage, but when he did win, he basically went on to do a parody of himself. I don't think I've ever seen a crowd turn from standing ovation to loud booing, and they did it in the span of 30 seconds. As much as I love his movies, books and tv shows, I'd say he deserved it. Let the 2000 election bruhaha go Michael. Really. Everyone else has moved on.

- In many ways, Adrien Brody communicated the same message as Michael Moore, but with style, dignity, and class. Though I expect he'll catch heat from conservatives for putting Allah and God in the same sentence. The lamest thing he said was that because he worked on a holocaust film he understood what war is really like, which is ridiculous in at least a dozen ways.

- I was joking with some folks earlier about doing a drinking game. Every time you hear the words "peace", "troops", or "pray" you were supposed to drink, but I was surprised that the acceptance speeches didn't feature those phrases more often. I guess the celebs got the message they weren't supposed to do that, even though the president of their organization got to.

Send in the clones

James posted links to all the ManyFilters currently available. I'd also add the following:

- WeblogFilter
- SXSWFilter
- BuffyFilter (not the same code, but based in spirit on it)

In terms of mefi-clone software, there's also phpilfer and conventia.

Congrats to Cory

How nuts is it that Cory's book was reviewed by Jeff Bezos and Harriet Klausner, Amazon's #1 reviewer? And speaking of, how on earth does someone review 4605 products (almost all books) in just a few years? I'm seeing 4-5 lengthy book reviews per day in some of her history, how on earth does someone do such a thing?

update: Mike assures me she's for real

Country-wide WiFi review

I took a bunch of flights a couple weeks back and thought I'd be able to enjoy my downtime between flights catching up on email and reading the web. Since I don't know of any central site that tracks such things (is there a "geek airports" list with availability and price, like the geek hotels site?), here were my findings:

San Francisco (SFO) - New media business capital of the world and no wireless.

Chicago (ORD) - The business capital of the midwest, but not a wireless signal in sight.

Boston (BOS) - Major business city in New England, second only to New York City in the region, but nada on the wireless coverage in the terminals I sat in.

Austin (AUS) - Finally! Wayport access cost $5.95 for 24 hours of connectivity. Two years previous, it was free, but $5.95 ain't bad and I got an hour's use out of it.

Denver (DEN) - AT&T coverage through their "GoPort" service. A 24 hour connection costs $9.99. I had a few hours in Denver so I decide to do it, filling out this signup application, but I get a web server error upon submittal. I checked my credit card and wasn't charged for the $9.99, but I did sit in Denver connection-free due to their app.

It kind of shocks me how few aiports offer wireless access, even though much of airline travel is business related. It's an easy business model too, you just buy a $50/month DSL line and throw some base station hardware up for everyone to use, then start making 5-10 bucks a head, per day from customers. I also saw Microsoft tablet PC kiosks in Denver, as well as a booth hawking Intel's new Centrino product. SFO also had a Centrino display, even though SFO doesn't offer wireless access. It was interesting to see businesses such as Intel and Microsoft understand the value of engaging business travelers, even though the airports themselves do not (I also wondered, now that Google put money into Blogger, would they see value in selling blogs to business travelers in airports and why don't they have kiosks in major hubs too?).

Last year while flying, I found only two other airports offering wifi access: San Jose (SJC) and Dallas (DFW). One other odd finding was paying $5.95 for wireless at one wayport-equipped airport (austin), then having a stopover in Dallas (also covered by wayport) required a separate $5.95 account, even though I was within the 24 hours originally purchased.

As a complete aside, I noticed on my six flights that I was surrounded by giner ale drinkers. Sure, once in a while I run into someone that loves fresh ginger, or I find a non-cola drinker that insists on it, but my rowmates on four of the flights were drinking it. Everyone was asking for it. The staff was running out of it. People were getting testy when they went without it.

The data's a bit of an outlier, and I have the feeling I missed some trendster proclaiming it as the miracle drink du jour. So what's the deal with it? Is it the new Atkin's Brau? The favorite juice for sugarbusters? Did Oprah plug it as one of her favorite products out of the blue?

Marketers take note

One thing I can't get out of my mind as we approach an impending war (in just 8 hours!) is the supreme display of marketing prowess on the part of the Bush Administration.

We were attacked by a rogue terrorist group on September 11, 2001. It seemed clear to me at the time that there would be a worldwide police action to find them and deal with them. It was six billion vs. a few hundred (a couple thousand, tops?). That wasn't the approach however, and we ended up bombing Afghanistan in an attempt to kill all the operatives that were still in the country. Perhaps it was the cold war era leaders in the administration, but even though we were attacked by a terrorist group and not a country, we decided to limit our actions to a response in another country.

But here's where the marketing comes in. We're not sure if we got the one guy we were looking for. After a few months, this country seems to give up on getting him, but instead of discussing failure, the conversation is shifted. We now need to remove another dictator that has been problematic in the past. Without much in the way of evidence of current wrongdoing, and in some cases outright lying, the majority went along with it. Not only was the conversation shifted, it remains shifted and the administration is achieving the goals it clearly set out to accomplish.

I don't know if you noticed, but this is huge. Imagine a marketing group saying that in 6 months, no one will talk about Google.com any more, we'll all be discussing Teoma or All The Web for anything search related, even though they don't have very many compelling reasons you should do so. Then imagine them pulling it off, and six months from now no one cares much for google.

Kudos to the Bush Adminstration for pulling off one of the biggest strokes of marketing genius I've ever seen.

shhh, don't tell anyone

So I heard about an accidental price break on new TiVo units, good until the end of the month. The story goes that it was intended for a select group of insiders, but the URL got passed around and TiVo is honoring the deals until 3/31.

First good news all day

Especially given our current situation, I'm really surprised to hear the Senate rejected the Alaskan drilling bill.

Obvious questions no one seems to be asking

So if Saddam and sons do go into self-imposed exile today or tomorrow, does that mean there won't be a war, and we'll just toss in a new leader in his place?

I assume we'll start bombing lots of suspected WMD facilities when the 48 hours are up. Since they're our best guesses where weapons previously not found may reside, we're going to be blowing up lots of stuff and making mistakes (they can't all be WMD facilities). Anyone see a problem with that?

How do know when it is over? When Saddam's body is found? When weapon storage areas are all blown up? What's the goal of this action and why isn't it clearly being communicated?

SXSWrapup

I just posted some photos and a quick recap of this year's SXSW Interactive Festival that took place in Austin last week.

SXSW 2003

I didn't start out feeling gung ho about this year's south by southwest interactive festival, in fact I wasn't having that good of a time until the last day. Last year was fun enough, but I sort of felt that maybe the conference had been replaced by others. While the market has been down for the past few years, it didn't seem to negatively affect SXSW too much in the past. It weeded out the stupid and the weak: no one talked of synergizing their sticky eyeballs after 2000. This year however, not only had the crowd of hucksters returned to the golf courses from whence they were created, but unfortunately so had many designers, writers, photographers, and bloggers. The crowds seemed smaller this year, and there were several designers that didn't choose to attend. Friday night, I rolled into an amazing Austin evening. Watching the previous week's forecasts and seeing cold temps I thought the festival's theme might become "everyone in sweaters." A quick warm snap made this year as perfect in terms of weather as the past. But after settling into my hotel and catching up with pb after he arrived, we noticed a lack of peers in the area. While we missed the big event of the evening already, there didn't seem to be anyone else around. We had a quiet dinner with Andre and Dana, and afterwards noticed the Omni's lobby was totally dead. We got back to our hotel around 10:30 and the night was prematurely over. What happened the packs of 50 geeks roaming every nook and cranny of the city like in years past? After getting the first long sleep and big breakfast in days, we caught the very end of the Kick event and I was happy to finally see everyone was here. Saturday's keynote broke the champagne on the boat for me and David Weinberger got up to share his common sensical long-range view of why the web matters, and it didn't disappoint. The convention space for panels seemed a bit smaller this year, with most rooms holding maybe 50 people, and a big room that could handle 150 or so. There were oodles of bloggers around, perhaps the decline in attendance was only in the professional sector. I can't remember seeing a lot of people sent by their workplace in the halls and presentation rooms. Hugh and the gang seem to tweak their setup every year based on feedback and the new panel schedules worked pretty well this year. Most presentations were a short 60 minutes, with 30 min breaks in between. There were plenty of panels to see, though if I was pressed to share any downsides, the 30 minute breaks seemed a tad long when there were a string of panels I wanted to get through. I don't know if everyone would agree that 15 minutes was a better time, but although the breaks let me catch up with speakers after their talks, and take time to check email and write up notes in the hall, sometimes it felt like too long of a break (especially after the 2nd or 3rd one of the day). As always, there were times when I didn't want to see any panels and times three great things were happening at once, but there's not a lot that can be done to combat that kind of scheduling. At one point I thought "why doesn't Hugh ask some bloggers to look over the schedule to point out conflicts" thinking that we webloggers had our fingers firmly on the pulse of the conference, but then I remember attending Po Bronson's "What should I do with my life" panel. A condensed version that showed up in FastCompany a few months back rocketed to the top of daypop/blogdex and stayed there for a few days upon its debut, but Po's panel was only about 1/3 full when I would have predicted a packed house. The subjects of panels themselves were for the most part interesting, though I noticed a lack of vision in many. My memory may be fuzzy, but I seem to remember the most exciting panels at SXSW (and any other tech conference for that matter) focused on what was next. Instead of looking towards the future, I felt far too many panels talked about the present. The theme of some panels (including my own) could be summed up as "This is how the world views weblogs (right now). This is what CSS is currently like. This is what it means to run a non-profit site (right now)." The most interesting panels this year seemed to be all the non-technical panels that discussed social issues. The panel on how communities could deal with online deaths, Kevin Warwick's talk about his cyborg-ness, the Po Bronson reading about how to find ones purpose in life, and Bruce Sterling's panel on the future. As usual, the social gatherings eclipsed anything the official conference sessions could offer, and the organizers did a good job steering attendees towards parties, open bars, and site launches. The Fray Cafe was a blast, and maybe it was due having an in-house bar. As the night wore on, people loosened up and got up on stage, probably due to the social lubricants available from the bar. The 20x2 event was a lot of fun. Hearing Dakota Smith play at the familyalbum.com party was a highlight. And it was the first time I made it out to Bruce Sterling's house party. Like I mentioned earlier, this year's conference didn't really click until it was almost over. I think it was a combination of good panels (Po Bronson's morning panel asking the audience to think about their life's passions and Bruce Sterling's afternoon talk that looked into the wacky frontier of the future) and talking with new folks that brought me a bit out of my element. I got to see new creative projects people were working on. I got to feel a little out of place talking to people I barely had met. While I didn't have any direct discussions or see any panels that discussed specific issues I faced, the environment of the last couple days in Austin sent my mind racing. I came up with a dozen new innovations for my personal website that I wanted to work on as soon as I got home. In the dead time between panels I came up with novel ways to optimize MetaFilter that hadn't occurred to me before. Seeing other people's projects spurred on a new idea for a photo essay. On the plane ride home I started writing what I hope will become my first story either performed or written for the Fray. I brainstormed ideas for a technology story I'd like to pitch to a magazine. After seeing digital video cameras everywhere, I came up with an idea for a short film I'd like to someday do. I'm happy that I got to attend this year's SXSW. After days of panel discussions and nights filled with drinking and socializing, I came away rejuvenated and inspired to work on lots of new projects. In the crowds that only come together once a year, I found motivation and I've already begun to work on all the new ideas I got there. While the content of panels wasn't ground-breaking across the board, the conference itself has carved out a niche as a place for creative minds to gather and interact, and that's where I find the real magic lies. Photos from this year's SXSW

Glasshaus no more?

The most recent post to Glasshaus' site makes me think I won't be getting any royalty checks anytime soon for this (I'm joking here, we were a couple thousand short on sales before that would happen anyway).

It was a cool outfit, they had good books and treated the authors very well. The weird part is they just asked me to contribute to another book a few weeks ago, but now they're gone. I've heard from two sources that their parent company Wrox Press is broke, so all the publishing houses below them are gone as well.

Trackback from iTunes

Today I looked at my list of contacts in AIM and knew Jerry Kindall was the l33t applescript developer of the bunch. I showed him my previous post, went off to grab a burrito for lunch only to find a working script in my inbox upon return. I just tried it out and it's working as I speak, with output identical to the winamp pings. The full instructions and applescript are included:

"Here's an AppleScript that does more or less the same thing as your WinAmp technique. The difference is iTunes can't automatically run a script when a track changes, so we have to poll iTunes every few seconds.

You'll need to drop the script onto Script Editor and change the trackback URL, which is near the top of the script. To make the script simpler, I put the &excerpt= part at the very end of the URL, so I just have to append the URL-encoded song info.

The script runs as a standalone application with a menu bar and dock icon. If you'd rather it be invisible, drop the script applet on Drop Script Backgrounder after you've saved it.

The script uses the UNIX curl command to send the ping, so it requires Mac OS X. I could have used URL Access Scripting, which would have made it compatible with older Mac OSs, but URL Access Scripting just hangs around using up memory even though you're only calling it every few minutes."

-- Jerry Kindall

Download: iTunes Trackback.sit version 0.1 (23kb)

Jerry says he'll probably update it with a nice URL interface (you have to edit the script by hand now).

Applescript has zillions of possibilities. You could setup another trackback category for your online status, and only display the last trackback, then have iChat update your status via trackback when you log off, log on, or are away.

Imagine going one step further, with a Bluetooth-equipped phone and Clicker installed. The act of walking up to your desk and sitting down could trigger status posts to your blog via trackback.

I was going to title my winamp post "trackback coming soon to your toothbrush" as a joke, but it's scary how close it is to being a possibility.

Trackbacks in Winamp

You might have noticed that I show the current playing song from my mp3 player here on my site. What you don't know is that I've been using a hack for the past few months. For Winamp, I used the DoSomething plugin to work through a local special template file which would create another local flat file with song info. I'd then ftp the output file to my server, which I loaded as an include. To get my mac to the same, I had to setup a similar program, and both hacks ended up constantly sending flat files to my server over insecure FTP. Kinda sounds like overkill, doesn't it?

I kind of rushed to get this site's new design online before the trip to Austin, and this past week at SXSW gave me about a bazillion more ideas for the site. I'm going to write up all the tech I used, how I built it, and why I did each part in a couple weeks when the site is more feature complete, but I wanted to give you a preview of what that'll be like.

One of the ideas I got yesterday at lunch was using trackback on blogs to do Now Playing lists by just passing urls through mp3 players. I asked Ben and Mena a couple questions and they told me it was 10 minutes work. With a few clicks and copy/paste jobs, I just completed in a matter of minutes and it actually worked.

So Winamp is now sending trackbacks to my blog, and every time a new song comes on, a new ping goes out, and my site changes. Here's how to do it in Winamp 2.x:

- Go into your movabletype admin and make a new category for your blog to hold all the song pings.

(I called mine "nowplaying". You won't post new items to this category, it'll just be a dumping ground for trackback pings. Categories can accept trackbacks in the newer (2.5+?) versions of MT.)

- Hit the "edit category attributes" link after you create the category.

- Toggle the "Accept incoming TrackBack pings?" to yes.

- Copy the tb URL to the clipboard

- Download the DoSomething Plugin and install it.

- Go into Winamp's preferences (control-P), look under the Plugins - General Purpose, highlight DoSomething, then hit configure (follow the next steps exactly because the DoSomething plugin has a crappy UI).

- Find the "Actions" drop down, change it to "Submit A URL"

- On the URL line, paste your trackback URL that MT gave you after you enabled category trackbacks. I modified mine slightly, so that it took the following form:

http://example.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=xxxx

(xxx = special ID given to you by MT)

Now, to complete the trackback data, just add on song info as an excerpt in the URL. DoSomething offers artist, song, album, and lots of other info, but I find in my aging and varied collection of MP3s, the simpliest "%%CURRENTSONG%%" variable gives you what it can.

I submit a fake URL, and I used blog_name to trackback my username (if you had a group blog, you might want to track other authors like this).

My final DoSomething URL looks like this:

http://example.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=xxxxx
&excerpt=%%CURRENTSONG%%&url=foo&blog_name=mathowie

Be sure to then click the "Add ->" button to save it to DoSomething's list of things to do when playing mp3s.

- Go back to MT, and make a new index template, like so:

<MTPings category="nowplaying" lastn="10">
<$MTPingExcerpt$><br />
</MTPings>

I include that down the side of my site using normal server-side includes, but you could also just toss the previous code into your main template (be aware it might involve a lot of rebuilding in the main template, that you might want to avoid).

I bet this would be a ten minute applescript hack for iTunes. If anyone figures that out too, lemme know. I'd love to be able to keep track of songs played on both platforms.

Also note that in the ten minutes it took me to implement this, I used a single variable from Winamp, and only display a single variable from the trackback. There is lots of room for customization here, and this could be just the tip of the iceberg on how to connect various applications to your blog. There are still some display issues for me to work out over in my sidebar, but I'm really impressed it all worked so easily.

update: Ian Skeeling got it working in Blosxom.

SXSW so far

Although the crowds seem smaller, or maybe there are just so many film people around, SXSW is fun this year. My panel went ok today, and I'm looking forward to relaxing the rest of my time here.

One thing has really been driven home by the availability and ubiquity of hacking tools: the downside of wireless is (un)security. I've been saying this since last year's E-Tech conference, but as long as Apple is pimping their airports and the wonders of wireless they really should have an "iSecure" app that makes ssh tunneling painless and easy. A few months ago I spent an entire saturday afternoon writing scripts to auto-login to my email server through a tunnel, and that was just email. Secure web browsing is something else entirely, and the services of things like anonymizer look attractive as a total package (but they're still a pain in the ass to setup).

Ideally, it should be entirely transparent, painless, and easy to setup and use a secure tunnel. Apple could even tie a service into their iTools accounts. I'd be happy to pay $50 a year for encrypted email and web traffic (with an easy interface to establish the connection).

User Experience MX

The new Macromedia site is simple and clean and I like it, though I'm finding it takes me more steps to find things they used to have on the front page of their site. Granted, the home page used to be cluttered and offered 50 options of where to go.

The most interesting thing I found on the new site was their new commitment to user experience issues as a cornerstone of their business.

While I can picture the marketing team sipping lattes in their "war room" with a huge banner carrying their new slogan "great experiences build great businesses", it's refreshing to hear a major web firm (especially one known for reducing usability in the past *cough* skip intro *cough*) realize the importance of user experience on their bottom line.

Adaptive Path has been preaching this for the past couple years, but it's nice to see a major corporation listening.

Flash apparently still 99% bad

Due to the inconsistent rendering on chimera camino and safari betas (not that I have a copy or anything *cough* just saying if I did), and the general slowness/crashability in mac/moz, I dropped the flash map that was once here. Oh well, now readers won't see that I'll be in Boston tomorrow for the first time in my life, enjoying a quick snow shower before SXSW (for no reason, here's a Tenacious D bootleg of their Boston medley of songs).

Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App

Last summer, I found that IE on my mac was so completely screwed up I was forced to use another browser until they released an update. While I had only occasionally used mozilla for testing, after a couple weeks as a browser refugee I was a mozilla convert, and have been ever since. I use IE for testing only now, and can't see any reason to move off mozilla anytime soon. I always wanted a resource to point friends to that were not yet mozilla/phoenix/chimera converts and decided a few months ago to finally sit down and write it. The following instructions and screenshots are from November 2002 releases of mozilla 1.2 betas, but the tips and tricks should translate to current and future versions without too much trouble. Living in an Ad-Free World The first thing that got me, and what has kept me coming back to Mozilla is the ability to live in a world free of annoying advertising. I've gotten so used to it that I'm surprised when I see a coworker or friend's desktop mired in popunder windows or flashing banner ads. Why live with it if you don't have to? Killing popups and popunders The current 1.3 betas have an easier method to do this, but the following thumbnail links to the Advanced | Scripts & Plugins settings that will ensure you'll never see another popup or popunder ever again. The unchecked "allow unrequested windows" option is key here. The other settings prevent other annoying behaviors as well.

Hit Ok, and that's it. You can now surf any major newspaper, media site, or search sites without ever being distracted or annoyed by another x10 ad window ever again. Dropping Ads Mozilla also allows you to block ads, which presents a bit of a moral dilemma. If you block all ads, you'll never see them again, but the website operators will never see a cent because you'll never click on a hidden banner ad. Some people go as far as saying that reading websites after filtering out all advertisements is "stealing" content. Personally, I block ads from certain servers for two reasons. The first is basic annoyance. If a banner ad is flashing, or shaking, or otherwise distracting, I find I can't read the text on the page. Mozilla makes this easy to do on a case-by-case basis, with a right-click menu option, shown below.

The other reason I block ads is for untrustworthy sites. I make a point to block the major networks like doubleclick that have a history of shady data mining practices of internet surfers' browsing habits. You can go as far as you want with ad blocking in mozilla. To illustrate the point, I blocked a few servers that advertised on one of my favorite content sites. You have to admit, it's a lot easier to read sans distractions, though the jury is still out on whether or not it's a good idea to take it this far.

Alternately, you can also set your Mozilla preferences to only allow animations to loop 1 time (I don't have screenshots of this, but the newest versions make this easy). This eliminates annoyingly animated ads because they finish their animation loop very quickly and stop flashing in less than a second. Tabs, Tabs, Tabs "Tabs" are exactly what they sound like - ways to layer several web pages into the same window. The tabs themselves are then shown across the top of the browser window and are used for switching between views. They're not exactly a new idea, though the mozilla implementation is a bit different than things I had seen before. A few years ago Opera added the MDI (multi document interface) option to their browser, but it required an either/or option when you first ran it. Given the choice between a desktop full of windows and a single window restricted to a dozen views, the cluttered desktop seemed easier to work with for me. Mozilla (and other browsers adding support) added flexibility by letting you selectively add tabs to a window. This way, you could have five browser windows on your desktop, but within each you can also have as many screens as you like. Tabs for writing weblogs For blogging especially, I've found this to be a useful feature, because it allows me to organize windows into specific working spaces on my desktop. I might have a browser window with a page pointing at my weblog posting tool, and the same window will also have a tab for each link I will be mentioning in a post. As I write my entry, I can quickly swap to the other tabbed links, reading, excerpting, and copying/pasting text for my post as needed. Or if I'm surfing around and find something interesting, I can save my place there, open a new tab with my blogging engine, then switch back to the site worth blogging and work on a post from there. If you check out the next screenshot, you can see me doing just that. I've got a new entry in Movable Type, with two links mentioned in the post, and those two pages are tabbed in that browser so I can quickly copy and paste as needed.

Tabs for reading weblogs I find that tabs are just as useful for reading lots of blogs because they allow you to organize your reading and branch your surfing into many different directions, without losing your place. The preferences for tabs in mozilla allow you to enable a couple cool features. You'll want the "load links in a background" and "middle-click or control-click" features enabled as you'll soon see.

Loading tabs in the background (and with a keystroke) means if you're reading a blog post, and there's a link in the middle of a sentence, you can simply control-click it, and continue reading. Mozilla will open the link in a new tab, but in the background. This means your browser won't change focus, and can finish what you were reading without interruption. When you hit the end of the post, you can swap over to the tabs you loaded for additional background on whatever the weblog author was trying to say. To illustrate the power of tabs for reading further, with the recent proliferation of sidebar link lists, there are quite a number of things to look at in a given day. For a site like the following pictured, I simply hold down the control key (or command on a mac), and load links from the sidebar list in new tabs while I read the captions and titles leading to them. This allows me to quickly read through 10-12 links pretty easily.

Tabs let you organize The bottom line is that tabs allow you to organize your desktop just as you would with folders on your hard drive. I find myself now using two or three browser windows at any one time, each with several tabs within each. One will be my blogging window, as I read through sites, jump to links within them, and start new posts based on the sites I see. My other window will be news to read, and I'll start at cnn.com or google news or sfgate.com and open a new tab whenever I see an interesting story from scanning the front pages of the sites. I've often got a third window filled with a bunch of MetaFilter administration windows, to help me manage the site. Overall, it lets me organized my web wanderings and I can't possibly see moving to a different browser until they support this. Other Nice Features While the following features aren't solely in Mozilla, they make the browser even better. Sidebars Ever since I used the sidebar features in IE 5 on windows, I've loved the utility they offer. Mozilla's sidebars are simple and depending on how web applications use them, they can be pretty powerful. On MetaFilter, I provide a sidebar feed for quick scanning/reading of the site and quick link loading in the main window.

One of my favorite ways to read blogs is by using BlogTracker. It lets you build a customized view of weblogs.com, only showing you your favorite blogs. While it takes quick a bit of wrangling to setup, once everything is in place, it's a great use of the sidebar feature. I find myself actually using blogtracker more than an RSS reader, since I can accomplish the same thing -- keep up on lots of sites, and since it's in a browser, I can jump to offsite links quickly and easily.

Incidentally, I usually shy away from mozilla variants like Phoenix and Chimera due to the lack of sidebar functionality. Remote Blogging I have to admit, while I'm impressed by the xml-rpc powered Mozblog as a proof-of-concept (in a "wow, it actually worked!" sort of way), I honestly can't find a good reason to use it everyday. I've found the best uses for xml-rpc apps are those that live outside the browser, allowing you to do web things easier, or more powerfully, inside a real application environment. Since you're already in a browser, I don't see why you wouldn't just go to your Blogger or Movable Type backend page to post an entry, or use a bookmarklet to make it easier, than to pop open mozblog to do the same.

Skins While skins have been historically synonymous with turning any app into "tiny font, too dark to read, quake clan-ified" versions, there are a few tasteful things being done with Mozilla skins. The basic benefits are there -- if you don't like the way Mac/IE looks, there's not too much you can do, but with Mozilla, you just click a couple buttons to install a new one, and if you're really into it, you can make your own. Personally I find the Orbit variants are highly usable, providing large, easy to read buttons that are high contrast as well. Alternate Navigation Interface While this is a bit geekier than the other features here, I love the site navigation bar (hit View | Show/Hide | Site Navigation Bar | Show as Needed to enable it) because it presents an alternate way to navigate weblogs that also puts the functions in a predictable place. For most weblogs, it gives me a visual indication that they've got an RSS feed and I can auto-discover it with good readers. For sites like MetaFilter with lots of posts and comments, I frequently use it to jump between discussions more often than the hard coded next/back links on the site itself. Some have taken their use of the link element pretty far, with sites offering all sorts of information about the author, quick links to other sites, tables of contents, and copyright information. When a site uses this feature, it means I can find the search engine, about page, and archives instantly, which comes in handy when you're doing research. Greg Knauss proposed a standard for web site organization five years ago, and this feature comes pretty close to offering just that.

Web Searching Google integrated with Yahoo Maps a while back, and I find it incredibly useful for searching multi-line addresses. Set your prefs to use Google first off.

Then just highlight addresses with your mouse and right click to get a "web search for..." menu item to appear. Following it for an address will give you a map as the first result, making it easier than copying and pasting multi-line addresses one at a time.

Cross platform, open source, and other rah-rah Finally, I really like that there's finally a cross-platform web browser I can depend on. I split my time about equally between a mac laptop and a pc desktop, and in the past I've had to go without win/IE dhtml features in certain web applications when I was on my mac, and I've had to figure out ways to accomplish the same thing between the versions of IE for each platform. With Mozilla, once you get something working, it's going to work on all platforms. The fact that it is open source is a good thing for the user. While it certainly dragged the project down a bit at the start, now that we're a few years into community development of mozilla, new features and fixes seem to come pretty quickly these days. The mozilla team has really hit their stride, just in the past couple months, they've fixed a handful of bugs that made my favorite browser even better. And if a good idea pops up in one browser (like the google toolbar in windows IE only), the sheer size of the community makes development of those features in mozilla rather speedy and complete (like the google toolbar for mozilla). It also happens to be free, and if you're so inclined there are numerous hacks out there to extend mozilla further for the user.

Make me a post I couldn't refuse

With the recent proliferation of camera phones and hiptops, I figured it was only a matter of time before slick tools came out to support them. I've heard about all sorts of home-brew solutions, but pop2blog looks like the first generic mobblog solution, and it seems general enough to work with camera phones and plain email as well.

It's interesting that the integration of blogging tools with email services is just happening now, when many blog authors and app developers are getting devices that rely on email for getting messages and photos out. For at least the past two years, I've often encountered people new to weblogs, but experts in computing and the internet ask for email-to-blog functionality in all their tools. This is especially true in the business world, where email has been a mainstay, and blogging is nascent. And for some people, email is their preferred interface for all online transactions, and they're surprised when they hear that built-in support for email-to-blog posting is almost entirely nonexistent.

I know that bridging the protocols and standards between email and web-based blog applications isn't the easiest thing to accomplish, but why weren't developers listening to their users for the past couple years?

Making OS X useful

This article on taming the dock looks like the solution to my frustration with OS X. I arrange my dock in much the same way shown here, with my favorite apps on one side, and the running apps on the other (though, still on the default dock), but I'm constantly hitting the wrong icon when the dock ballons up on mouseover, and I can never remember where exactly I need to point to launch an app.

I'm giving this a go and seeing how it works out. Funny how it looks a little bit like the windows start bar, isn't it?

Spectrum wrap-up

I had a lot of fun at the Spectrum Conference, and overall it was a great learning experience. Cory's notes over at BoingBoing were better than actually attending, as he whittled down hours into a few choice paragraphs and quotes. While some of the legal details sailed over my head, there were interesting discussions about technology and implementation issues. Much of the debates revolved around taking either a commons approach, where anyone can do anything with the spectrum and we'll think of ways to regulate it as needed, and the property approach, where segments are auctioned off to the highest bidder to own and do whatever they want. The moot court near the end of day one pitted one group vs. the other, but overall was a mishmash of ideas. I'm surprised the commons folks don't use more examples from all over the world, where unlicensed spectrums seem to reign supreme, and I was surprised at the weak arguments presented by the property folks who claimed there would always be room in a profit-driven model for a small commons.

The crowd split on the approaches, with every technologist, software creator, and wifi-loving laptop owner siding with a commons approach, while the straight laced older generation of washington policy types seemed big on the property side. Numbers wise, the pro-property folks were definitely in the minority, and from a quick visual survey of the room, I'd say anyone born after the dawn of unix time (Jan 1, 1970) was a commons supporter, so my guess is that property's days are numbered.

Adventures in redesigns

So after keeping the same design around for a little over 2 years, I decided it was time for a change. My goals with this design was to accommodate more stuff, but still aim for simple and clean (and also, I was looking for a reason to use Travis Beckham's insanely cool patterns -- background images have been dorky for so long they're cool again).

A couple months ago, I noticed I was writing less than usual, hiking less often, and not taking all that many photos. To force myself to spend more time on those things I decided the next design would reduce the importance of daily blogging, and give other features more prominence. The features area to the right is the same size as the blog area for that reason, and while at the moment there is nothing new there, I'm aiming to either write an article, post a photo essay, interview someone, or do some other feature-sized thing once a week from here on out. I also wanted to get myself back into taking daily photos. I did it through most of the year 2000, and I learned a lot by forcing myself to just do it everyday.

The redesign is only on the front page and the weblog archives for now (which are now Movable Type powered, to boot), but eventually everything else will get converted over, and I might add more stuff to the right side, but I'll try not to make it too portal-like. The whole design is liquid, and I used some CSS tricks to have the photos on the right fill their areas -- the smaller or wider your browser, the less or more you see of the images. The daily photo image is the actual full size photo, just positioned centered as a background (yes, a pointless waste of bandwidth, but easier than thumbnaling and clicking on it to see the full sized version is faster).

While this site isn't quite validating as xhtml strict (the stock Flash code is causing the errors), and I did have to use a table to get a consistent layout of the two sides (floated columns refused to work), I've found a really odd bug. If you're viewing this site in a newer version of Mozilla or mac/IE, you should see a nifty Flash map of the US/World (coded brilliantly by Bryan) showing the places I've been recently, where I am currently, and where I'm heading soon. If you're using Opera, Safari, or win/IE, you won't see anything at all. The map works by itself on a page, and inside a table in all browsers, but for some reason, half the browsers I point at this page don't like it and ignore it. I suppose I'll figure out the problem eventually. If anyone is confused, here is what is supposed to look like (screenshot 1, screenshot 2)

One thing's certain: after the past couple days of work on this, I could really use some Extreme, Totally-In-Your-Face, Milk Products™

The Spectrum of packet sniffing

The view of the Spectrum Conference, from etherpeg at 9am (screenshot). Around noon (screenshot).

I've seen the future, and they are Cory and Joi

Joi and Cory live in the future and have the cameras to prove it. Joi also had an amazing japanese cell phone that featured two cameras hidden inside it. He could switch between shooting from the back of it, to the front of it (taking a photo of yourself using it).

I wish I recorded some audio during lunch as there was an almost magical symphony of forks hitting plates that created a strange cacophony the speakers had to outdo.