Archive for the 'internet' Category

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Google Chrome Update

Published on December 8, 2010 in internet. 0 Comments Tags: , .

On Tuesday I attended Google’s Chrome update event in San Francisco. There were three topics on the agenda: Chrome, the Chrome Web Store, and ChromeOS. I’m not going to try to go over all the specifics of each topic. It’s a pointless exercise when Engadget, PC Magazine, etc are also at the event and live blogging/tweeting. I’m just going to give some perspectives that I haven’t seen in the reporting thus far.

Chrome

If you are using a Chrome beta or dev channel build, none of the features announced would be new to you. The only exception is the Crankshaft technology that was added to V8. The claim is that Crankshaft can boost V8 performance up to 50%, using techniques which sound reminiscent of the HotSpot compiler for Java. Unsurprising that the V8 team includes veterans of the HotSpot team. Improving Javascript performance is good, and in this case it’s even better because V8 is the engine inside Node.js, so in theory Node should get some improvements on long running Javascript programs on the server. I’m pretty sure that there is some performance headroom left in Crankshaft, so I’d expect to see more improvements in the months ahead.

The Chrome team has the velocity lead in the browser wars. It seems like everytime I turn around Chrome is getting better along a number of dimensions. I also have to say, that I love the Chrome videos and comic books.

Chrome Web Store

So Chrome has an app store, but the apps are websites. If you accept Google’s stats, there are 120M Chrome users worldwide, many of them outside the US, and all of them are potential customers of the Chrome Web Store, giving it a reach comparable to or beyond existing mobile app stores. The thing that we’ve learned about app stores is that they fill up with junk fast. So while the purpose of the Web Store is to solve the app discover problem (which I agree is a real problem for normal people), we know that down that path lie dragons.

The other question that I have is will people pay to use apps which are just plain web apps? Developers, especially content developers, are looking for ways to make money from their work, and the Chrome Web Store gives them a channel. The question is, will people pay?

ChromeOS

The idea behind ChromeOS is simple. Browser as operating system. Applications are web applications. Technically there are some interesting ideas.   

The boot loader is in ROM and uses crypto to ensure that only verified images can be booted (the CR-48 has a jailbreak switch to get around this, but real hardware probably won’t). It’s the right thing to do, and Google can do it because they are launching a new platform. Is it a differentiator, maybe if you are a CIO, or a geek, but to the average person this won’t mean much.

Synchronization is built in. You can unbox a ChromeOS device, enter your Google login credentials and have everything synced up with your Google stuff. Of course, if you haven’t drunk the Google ecosystem Cool-Aid, then this won’t help you very much. It’s still interesting because it shows what a totally internet dependent device might be like. Whatever one might say, Android isn’t that, iOS isn’t that, and Windows, OS X, and Linux aren’t that. When I worked at Sun, I had access to Sun-Ray’s, but the Sun Ray experience was nowhere as good as what I saw yesterday.

There’s also some pragmatism there. Google is working with Citrix on an HTML5 version of Citrix’s receiver, which would allow access to Enterprise Applications. There are already HTML VNC’s and so forth. The Google presenter said that they have had an unexpectedly large amount of interest from CIO’s. Actually, that’s what led to the Citrix partnership.

Google is piloting ChromeOS on an actual device, dubbed CR-48 (Chromium isotope 48). CR-48 is not for sale, and it’s not final production hardware. It’s a beta testing platform for ChromeOS. Apparently Inventec (ah, brings back my Newton days) has made 60,000 devices. Some of those are in use by Googlers, and Google is going to make them available to qualified early adopters via a pilot program. The most interesting part of the specs are 8 hours of battery life, 8 days of standby time, and a built in Verizon 3G modem with a basic amount of data and a buy what you need for overages.

Hindsight

At the end of the presentation, Google CEO Eric Schmidt came out to make some remarks. That alone is interesting, because getting Schmidt there signals that this is a serious effort. I was more interested in the substance of his remarks. Schmidt acknowledged that in many ways, ChromeOS is not a new idea, harking back (at least) to the days of the Sun/Oracle Network Computer in the late 90′s. In computing timing matters a huge amount. The Network Computer idea has been around for a while, Schmidt claimed, but it’s only in this day, that we have all of the technology pieces needed to bring it to fruition, the last of the pieces being a version of the web platform that is powerful enough to be decent application platform. It’s going to be interesting to see whether all the pieces truly have arrived, or whether we need a few more technology cycles.

Web 2.0 Summit

Published on December 8, 2010 in internet. 0 Comments Tags: .

This year I was able to go to the Web 2.0 Summit. Web 2.0 is billed as an executive conference, and it lives up to its billing. There is much more focus on business than technology, even though the web is technology through and through.

The World

The web is a global place, but for Americans, at least this American, it is easy to forget that. Wm Elfrink from Cisco did a great job discussing how internet technologies are changing society all over the world. I also enjoyed John Battelle’s interview with Baidu CEO, Robin Li. There is a lot of interesting stuff happening outside the United States, and it is only a matter of time before some of that starts working its way into American internet culture.

Inspiration

Mary Meeker is famous for being an information firehose, and she did not disappoint. Her 15 minute session contained more information than many of the longer talks and interviews. I wish that she had been given double the time, or an interview after her talk. Fortunately her talk and slides are available online.

Schulyer Erle did an Ignite presentation titled How Crowdsourcing Changed Disaster Relief Forever, which was about how OpenStreetMaps was able to help with the Haiti disaster relief effort, and provide a level of help and service heretofore unseen. It’s good to technology making a real difference in the world.

Vinod Khosla gave a very inspiring talk about innovation. The core idea was that you have to ignore what conventional wisdom says is impossible, improbable or unlikely. Market research studies and focus groups won’t lead to breakthough innovations.

The session which resonated the most with me was the Point of Control session on Education, with David Guggenheim (director of Waiting for Superman), Ted Mitchell, and Diana Rhoten. Long time readers will know that our kids have been home schooled (although as they are getting older, we are transitioning them into more conventional settings), so perhaps it’s no surprise that the topic would engage me strongly. One of my biggest reasons for homeschooling was that almost all modern education, whether public or private is based on industrialized schooling – preparing kids to live in a lock-step command and control world. Homeschooling allows kids to learn what they need to learn at their own pace, whether that pace is “fast” or “slow”. One of the panelists, I think it was Ted Mitchell, described their goal as “distributed customized direct to student personalized learning”. That’s something that all students could use.

Just Business

Ron Conway’s Crystal Ball session was chance to see some new companies, and was a refreshing change from some of the very large companies that dominated the Summit. The problem with the large public companies is that their CEO’s have had tons of media training and are very good at keeping on message, which makes them pretty boring.

The Point of Control session on Finance got pretty lively. I thought that it was valuable to get two different VC perspectives on the market today, and on particular companies. One of the best sections was the part where Fred Wilson took John Doerr to task over Google’s recent record on innovation.

I’m a Facebook user but I’m not a rabid Facebook fan. Julie and I saw “The Social Network” when it came out in theaters, so I was curious to see Mark Zuckerberg speak in person. He did much better than I expected him to. While there wasn’t much in the way of new content, at least Zuckerberg demonstrated that he can do an interview the way that a big company CEO should.

Postscript

I found the content at Web 2.0 to be pretty uneven. Since this was my first year, I don’t have a lot to compare it to. I will note that the last time I went a high end O’Reilly conference (ETech, circa 2006), I had a similar problem with content not quite matching expectations. For Web 2.0 this year, there turned out to be a simple predictor for the quality of a session. If John Heilemann was doing an interview, more likely than not it would be a good one.

NewTeeVee 2010

Published on November 30, 2010 in internet. 0 Comments Tags: .

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in November, including some conferences. Here’s some information from NewTeeVee.

I dropped into NewTeeVee because I’m doing a lot with video and television these days, but I’m not really from that world. NewTeeVee is targeted at that space where the Internet and television overlap. As a result the conference feels kind of weird when you are used to going to conferences filled with open source developers and programmers of all kinds. There was very little talk about technology, at least in a form that would be recognizable to internet people. Quite a number of the presentations involved celebrities of one form or another, which is unsurprising, and I found it interesting to hear their takes on the future of television, and of entertainment as a whole. One of the most interesting sessions in this vein was with the showrunners of Lost and Heroes, two shows which have been very successful at combining broadcast television with the internet. Despite their pioneering efforts and their success, it was discouraging to hear them talking about how hard it would be to replicate the combined new media and old media combinations of their shows.

The closest that we got to technology in a form that I recognized was a talk by Samsung, which was really about their efforts to evangelize developers to write applications for Samsung connected TV’s. Samsung has its own application platform, and I found myself wondering whether or not they would be able to get enough developer attention. I’d much prefer to see TV’s adopt Open Web based technologies for their application platforms.

I came away from the conference feeling like a visitor to a country not my own, with a better sense of the culture, but still feeling very “other”.   

iPhone 4 and iPad update

Published on August 30, 2010 in internet and iPhone. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been using my iPhone 4 and iPad for several months now, so I thought I would give a hard real use experience report.

iPhone 4
I love the phone. I do see the much written about antenna attenuation problem, but day to day it doesn’t affect me as much as AT&T’s network does. One of the prime times for me to use my phone is while standing in line waiting for the ferry. The worst time is during the afternoon, because there are several hundred people all packed into the ferry terminal, all trying to pull data on their iPhones. The antenna has nothing to do with this.

In every other way, the phone is fantastic. My iPhone 3G would frequently hit the red line on the battery indicator by the time I hit the afternoon ferry, and that was after I had carefully managed my use of the device during the day. With the iPhone 4, I don’t have to worry about managing the battery. That alone has made the upgrade worth it for me.

The upgraded camera has been a huge success for me. I attribute this to a single factor – startup time. I was always reluctant to pull out my iPhone 3G for use as a camera, because quite frequently I would miss the moment by the time the camera came up. I’ve been using Tap Tap’s excellent Camera+ and I like it quite a bit. Unfortunately, you can’t get it on the app store right now, because the developer inserted an easter egg that would allow you to use one of the volume buttons to trigger the shutter. Apple then pulled the app from the store. This is the first time that App Store policy has affected an app that I care about, and I’m obviously not happy about it. It seems to me that Camera+ could have a preference that controlled this feature, and that users would have to turn it on. Since the user would have turned on that feature, they would’t be confused about the takeover of the volume button. It seems simple to me. I really like Camera+’s light table feature, but I really hate the way that it starts up trying to imitate the look of a DSLR rangefinder. The other area where Camera+ could use improvement is in the processing / filters area. It has lots of options, but most of them don’t work for me. I have better luck with Chase Jarvis’ Best Camera on this front. In any case, I’m very happy with the camera as ” the camera that is always always with me”. The resolution is also very good, and I’ve been using it to photograph whiteboards into Evernote quite successfully.

iPad

I’ve been carrying my iPad on a daily basis. I’m using it enough that when I forgot it one day, it made a difference. One thing that I’ve learned is that the iPad really needs a case. I got much more relaxed about carrying mine once it was inside a case. Originally, I thought that I would wait for one of the third party cases, but all of the ones that looked like a fit for me were out of stock, so I broke down and ordered the Apple case. It does the job, but I am not crazy about the material, and I wish that it had one or two small pockets for a pen, a little bit of paper, and perhaps some business cards.

I am pretty much using the iPad as my “away from my desk device” when I am in the office. Our office spans 5 floors in a skyscraper, and I have meetings on several floors during the course of a day. The iPad’s form factor and long battery life, make it well suited as a meeting device. I have access to my e-mail and calendar, and I’m using the iPad version of OmniFocus to keep my tasks and projects in sync with my laptop. I’ve written some py-appscript code that looks at the day’s calendar in Entourage and then kicks out a series of preformatted Evernote notes so that I can pull those notes on my iPad and have notes for the various events of the day. This kind of Mac GUI to UNIX to Mac GUI scripting is something that I’ve commented on before. Thanks to multi-device application families like Evernote, I expect to be doing some more of this hacking to extend my workflow onto the iOS devices. I don’t have a huge need for sharing files between the iPad and the laptop, but Dropbox has done a great job of filling in the gap when I’ve needed to share files.

Several people have asked me about OmniFocus on the iPad, and whether or not it is worth it. I have a large number of both work and personal projects, so being able to use the extra screen real estate on the iPad definitely does help. I have come to rely on several features in OmniFocus for iPad which are not in the desktop version. There is a great UI for bumping the dates for actions by 1 day or 1 week, which I use a lot. I am also very fond of the forecast view, which lets you look at the actions for a give day, with a very quick glance at the number of actions for each day of a week. Both of these features are smart adaptations to the iPad touch interface, and are examples of iPad apps coming into a class of their own.

Another application that I’ve been enjoying is Flipboard. Flipboard got a bunch of hype when it launched back in July, and things have died down because they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Conceptually, Flipboard is very appealing, but the actual implementation still has some problems as far as I am concerned. I can use Flipboard to read my Facebook feed, because Facebook’s timeline is just highly variable in terms of including stuff from my friends. I don’t feel that I can read Twitter via Flipboard, because it can’t keep up with the volume, so I end up missing stuff, and I hate that. Some of the provided curated content is reasonable, but not quite up to what I’d like. Flipboard is falling down because there’s not a good way for me to get the content that I want. I want Flipboard to be my daily newspaper or magazine app. But I can’t get the right content feed(s) to put into it.   

As far as the iOS goes, my usage of the iPad is making me horribly impatient for iOS 4. I would use task switching all the time. Of course, then I would be unhappy because the iPad doesn’t have enough RAM to keep my working set of applications resident. Text editing on iOS is very painful on the iPad. I’m not sure what a good solution would be here, but it definitely is a problem that I am running into on a daily basis – perhaps I need to work on my typing. There is also the issue of better syncing/sharing. My phone and iPad are personal devices, so they sync to my iTunes at home. I use both devices at work, where I have a different computer. This is definitely an area that Apple needs to improve significantly. At the moment, though, the fact that I am using my iPad hard enough to really be running into the problem means that the iPad has succeeded in legitimizing the tablet category – at least for me.

Thoughts on Open Source and Platform as a Service

Published on May 31, 2010 in internet and open source. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The question

Last week there were some articles, blog posts and tweets about the relationship between Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings and open source. The initial framing of the conversation was around PaaS and the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/{PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby}) stack. An article on InfoQ gives the jumping off points to posts by Geva Perry and James Uruqhardt. There’s a lot of discussion which I’m not going to recapitulate, but Uruqhardt’s post ends with the question

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Has cloud computing reduced the relevance of the LAMP stack, and is this indicative of what cloud computing will do to open-source platform projects in general?

Many PaaS offerings are based on open source software. Heroku is based on Ruby and is now doing a beta of Node.js. Google’s App Engine was originally based on Python, and later on Java (the open sourceness of Java can be debated). Joyent’s Smart Platform is based on Javascript and is open source. Of the major PaaS offerings, only Force.net and Azure are based on proprietary software. I don’t have hard statistics on market share or number of applications, but from where I sit, open source software still looks pretty relevant.

Also I think it’s instructive to look at how cloud computing providers are investing in open source software. Rackspace is a big sponsor of the Drizzle project, and of Cassandra, both directly and indirectly through its investment in Riptano. EngineYard hired key JRuby committers away from Sun. Joyent has hired the lead developer of node.js, and VMWare bought SpringSource and incorporated it into VMForce. That doesn’t sound to me like open source software is less relevant.

Cloud computing is destined to become a commodity

The end game for cloud computing is to attain commodity status. I expect to see markets in the spirit of CloudExchange, but instead of trading in EC2 spot instances, you will trade in the ability to run an application with specific resource requirements. In order for this to happen, there needs to be interoperability. In the limit, that is going to make it hard for PaaS vendors to build substantial platform lockin, because businesses will want the ability to bid out their application execution needs. Besides, as Tim O’Reilly has been pointing out for years, there’s a much more substantial lock in to be had by holding a business’s data as opposed to a platform lock. This is all business model stuff, and the vendors need to work this out prior to large scale adoption of PaaS.

Next Generation Infrastructure Software

The more interesting question for developers has to do with infrastructure software. In my mind LAMP is really a proxy for “infrastructure software” If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the development of web application software, you know that there is a lot happening with various kinds of infrastructure software. Kiril Shenynkman, one of the commenters on Geva Perry’s post wrote:

Yes, yes, yes. PHP is huge. Yes, yes, yes. MySQL has millions of users. But, the “MP” part of LAMP came into being when we were hosting, not cloud computing. There are alternative application service platforms to PHP and alternatives to MySQL (and SQL in general) that are exciting, vibrant, and seem to have the new developer community’s ear. Whether it’s Ruby, Groovy, Scala, or Python as a development language or Mongo, Couch, Cassandra as a persistence layer, there are alternatives. MySQL’s ownership by Oracle is a minus, not a plus. I feel times are changing and companies looking to put their applications in the cloud have MANY attractive alternatives, both as stacks or as turnkey services s.a. Azure and App Engine.

How many of the technologies that Shenykman lists are open source? All of them.   

Look at Twitter and Facebook, companies whose application architecture is very different from traditional web applications. They’ve developed a variety of new pieces of infrastructure. Interestingly enough, many of these technology pieces are now open source (Twitter, Facebook). Open source is being used in two ways in these situations. It is being used as a distribution mechanism, to propagate these new infrastructure pieces throughout the industry. But more importantly (and for those observing more closely, quite imperfectly), open source is being used as a development methodology. The use of open source as a development methodology (also known as commons-based peer production) is definitely contributing to these innovative technologies. Open source projects are driving innovation (this also happened in the Java space. Witness the disasters of EJB 1.0 and 2.0 which lead to the development of EJB 3.0 using open source technologies like Hibernate, and which provided the impetus for the development of Spring). Infrastructure software is a commons, and should be developed as a commons. The cloud platform vendors can (and are) harvesting these innovations into their platforms, and then finding other axes on which to compete. I want this to continue. As I mentioned in my DjangoCon keynote last year, I also want open source projects to spend more time thinking about how to be relevant in a cloud world.   

My question on PaaS is this: Who will build a PaaS that consolidates innovations from the open source community, and will remain flexible enough to continue to integrate those innovations as they continue to happen?

JSConf US

Published on April 19, 2010 in internet. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

I spent the weekend in Washington, DC attending JSConf.US 2010. I wasn’t able to attend last year, due to scheduling conflicts. Javascript is a bit higher on my radar these days, so this was a good year to attend.

The program

The JSConf program was very high quality. Here are some of the talks that I found most interesting.

Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford was up first and describe Javascript as a “a functional language with dynamic objects and a familiar syntax”. He took a some time to discuss some of the features being considered for the next version of Javascript. Most of his talk was focused on the cross site scripting (XSS) problem. He believes the solving the XSS problem should be the top priority of the next version of Javascript, and he feels that this is so urgent that we ought to do a reset of HTML5 in order to focus on this problem. Crockford thinks that HTML5 is only going to make things worse, because it adds new features / complexity. He called out local storage as one feature that would introduce lots of opportunity for XSS exploits. I was very surprised to hear him advocating a security approach based on capabilities. He mentioned the Caja project and his own proposal at www.adsafe.org. He stated that “ECMAScript is being transformed into an Object Capability Language; the Browser must be transformed into an Object Capability system”. This was a very good talk, and it caused a swirl of conversation during the rest of the conference.

Jeremy Ashkenas talked about Coffeescript, which is a language that compiles into Javascript. It has a very functional flavor to it, which was interesting in light of Crockford’s description of Javascript. It also seemed to be influenced by some ideas from Python, at least syntactically. I really liked what I saw, but I’m wary of the fact that it compiles to Javascript. I am not bothered by languages that compile to JVM bytecode, but somehow that feels different to me than compiling to Javascript. I’m going to spend some time playing with it – maybe I’ll get over the compilation thing.

Gordon is a Flash runtime that is implemented in Javascript.   Tobias Schneider caused quite a stir with his talk. He showed several interesting demos of Gordon playing Flash files that were directly generated by tools in the Adobe toolset. Tobias was careful to say that he doesn’t yet implement all of flash, although he definitely wants to get full support for Flash 7 level features. It’s not clear how Gordon would handle newer versions of Flash, because of the differences beween Javascript and Actionscript. Bridging that gap is probably a whole lot of work.

Since 2008 I’ve had several opportunities to hear Erik Meijer talk about his work on Reactive Programming at Microsoft. He’s talked about this work in the context of AJAX, and a common example that he uses is autocompletion in the browser. Jeffrey Van Gogh came to JSConf to talk about RxJS , a library for Javascript which implements these ideas and provides a better experience for doing asynchronous programming, both on the client and server side. In his talk Jeffrey described RxJS bindings for Node.js.  I also met Matt Podwysocki, who I’ve been following on Twitter for some time. Matt has been writing a series of blog posts examining the Reactive Extensions. One hitch in all of this is that the licensing of RxJS is unclear. You can use RxJS in your programs and extend it but it’s not open source, and you can’t distribute RxJS code as part of an open source project. I’m interested in the ideas here, but I haven’t decided whether I am going to actually click on the license.

I dont’ remember the first time that I heard about SproutCore, but I really started paying attention to it when I saw Erich Ocean’s presentation at DjangoCon last year. The original speaker for SproutCore couldn’t make it, but Mike Ball and Evin Grano, two local members of the SproutCore community stepped in to give the talk. Their talk was heavy on demonstrations along with updates on various parts of SproutCore. They showed some very interesting UI’s that were built using SproutCore. The demo that really got my attention was related to the work on touch/multiouch interfaces. NPR had their iPad applications in the App Store on the iPad launch day. Mike and Evin showed a copy of the NPR application that had been built in 2 weeks using SproutCore. The SproutCore version can take advantage of hardware acceleration, and seemed both polished and responsive. Dion Almaer has a screenshot of the NPR app up at Ajaxian.

Raphaël is a Javascript toolkit for doing vector based drawing. It sits on top of either SVG or VML depending on what browser is being used. In the midst of all the hubub about Flash on Apple devices, Dmitry Baranovskiy, the author of Raphaël pointed out that Android devices don’t include SVG, and thus cannot run Raphaël. Apparently people think of Raphaël as something to be used for charts but Baranoskiy showed a number of more general usages of vector drawing that would be applicable to every day web applications.

Steve Souders works on web client performance at Google and has written several books about this topic. His presentation was a conglomeration of material from other talks that he has done. There were plenty of useful tidbits for those looking to improve the performance of their Javascript applications.

Billy Hoffman‘s talk on security was very sobering. While Crockford was warning about the dangers of XSS in the abstract, Hoffman presented us with many concrete examples of the ways that Javascript can be exploited to circumvent security measures. A simple example of this was a simple encoding of javascript code as whitespace, so that inspection of a page’s source code would show nothing out of the ordinary to either an uninformed human or to a security scanner.

In the past, Brendan Eich and I have had some conversations in the comments of my blog, but I don’t recall meeting him in person until this weekend. Chris Williams snuck Brendan into JSConf as a surprise for the attendees, and many people were excited to have him there. Brendan covered a number of the features being worked on for the ECMAScript Harmony project, and he feels that the outlook for Javascript as a language is improving. Someone did ask him about Crockford’s call to fix security, and Brendan replied that you can’t just stop and fix security once for all time, but that you need to fix things at various levels all the time. His position was that we need more automation that helps with security, and that the highest leverage places were in the compiler and VM.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the server-side Javascript space. Ever since the competition between Javascript engines heated up two years ago, I’ve been convinced that Javascript on the server could leverage these new Javascript engines and disrupt the PHP/Ruby/Python world. If you subscribe to that line of thinking, then Ryan Dahl’s Node.js is worth noting. Node uses V8 to provide a system to build asynchronous servers. It arrived in the scene last year, and has built up a sizable community despite the fact that It is changing extremely rapidly – Ryan said he would like to “stop breaking the API every day”. In his presentation Ryan showed some benchmarks of Node versus Tornado and nginx, and Node compared pretty favorably. It’s not as fast as nginx, but it’s not that much slower, and it was handily beating Tornado. He showed a case where Node was much slower because V8′s generational garbage collector moves objects in memory. In the example, node was being asked to serve up large files, but because of the issue with V8, it could only write to the result socket indirectly. Ryan added a non-moving Buffer type to Node, which then brought it back to being a close second behind nginx. I was pleased to see that Ryan is very realistic about where Node is at the moment. At one point he said that noone has really built anything on Node that isn’t a toy. If he gets his wish to stabilize the API for Node 0.2, I suspect that we’ll see that change.

Jed Schmidt is a human language translator for his day job. In his off hours he’s created fab.js a DSL for creating asynchronous web applications in Node. Fab is pretty interesting. It has a functional programming flavor to it. I’m interested in comparing it with the RxJS bindings for Node. It’s interesting to see ideas from functional programming (particularly functional reactive programming) percolating into the Javascript server side space. In some ways it’s not surprising, since the event driven style of Node (and Twisted and Tornado) basically forces programmers to write their programs in continuation passing style.

I didn’t get to see Jan Lehnardt’s talk on evently, which is another  interesting application of Javascript (via JQuery) on the server side. I need to make some time to go back and watch Chris Anderson’s screencast on it.

The conference

As far as the conference itself goes, JSConf was well organized, and attendees were well taken care of. The conference reminds me of PyCon in its early days, and that’s my favorite kind of conference to go to. There was very little marketing, lots of technical content, presented by the people that are actually doing the work. I heard lots of cross pollination of ideas in the conversations I participated in, and in conversations that I heard as I walked the halls. I especially liked the idea of “Track B” which was a track that got assembled just in time. It’s not quite the same thing as PyCon’s open spaces, but it was still quite good. Chris and Laura Williams deserve a big hat tip for doing this with a 10 person staff, while closing on a house and getting ready for their first child to arrive.

Last thoughts

The last two years have been very exciting in the Javascript space, and I expect to see things heating up quite a bit more in the next few years. In his closing remarks, Chris Williams noted that last year, there was a single server side Javascript presentation, and this year the content was split 50/50. This is an area that you ignore at your own risk.


Lifestreaming clients round N

Published on March 10, 2010 in community, internet, iPhone and Macintosh. 0 Comments Tags: .

I guess two posts on lifestreaming clients isn’t enough?.

Yesterday MacHeist started offering pre public beta access to Tweetie 2 for Mac.   That caught my eye because Syrinx, my primary Twitter client has been a little slow at keeping up with Twitter features.   I didn’t really want to get the MacHeist bundle (don’t want to hassle with packages that I don’t want) just to get the private beta, but I mentioned on Twitter that I was thinking about it.   Several folks suggested that I try Echofon.   I gave it a whirl, found some things that I like and other that I didn’t.   I started keeping notes about Syrinx vs Echofon, and now it’s turned into a blog post.

My usage style / requirements

I follow a bunch of people, including many people who live in Europe who tweet while I am asleep.   I need a client that can remember unread tweets from overnight.    I’ve found very few clients that are able to do this.     My reading style tends to be bursty as well, so I want the client to do a good job of keeping track of what I’ve read and what I have not.    These two requirements are what has kept me on Syrinx – it can hold days worth of tweets without a problem.   Syrinx’s bookmark also gives me definite way of marking what has been read and what has not, and puts control of that mark directly in my hands.

The other major requirement is that I spend some time (probably too much) on airplanes, without net access.   I want a client (mostly on my iPhone) that can go back in fill in the gaps left by being in the air.   Tweetie 2 for the iPhone can do this, but the experience of switch back and forth between reading the stream on desktop Syrinx and iPhone Tweetie 2 is annoying.

A minor requirement is to be able to monitor a number of Twitter searches at once – that means opening a window for each search, something that Syrinx also does.

Now, let’s have a look at how Syrinx and Echofon stack up for me.

Syrinx

The obvious things that I like about Syrinx are that it can hold as many tweets as I want, as well as the bookmark.    I’ve also grown accustomed to the way that it displays time in absolute format, something which Tweetie 2 / iPhone also does.   One other nicety in Syrinx is that it can display real names in addition to Twitter handles, because sometimes handles and people are hard to match up.   When you have tons of tweets lying around in the? client, sometimes you want to go back to one, and Syrinx obliges with the ability to search all the tweets that it currently has in memory.

So what are the problems with Syrinx? It’s been occasionally unstable, but not in a show stopping fashion. It doesn’t have good support for lists, but I still haven’t made much use of lists. Syrinx does great on opening windows for searches, but it doesn’t remember what searches you have open, so you have to keep track of that yourself. Probably the biggest drawback of Syrinx is that its development is going slowly because its author has a day job.

Echofon

When I compare Echofon and Syrinx, I realize that a lot of the things that I prefer in Echofon are niceties. I like that it can open browser links in the background. I like the way that the drawer is used for dealing with Twitter users and profiles and for displaying conversations.   I just wish it could display more than one conversation at once – but that’s hard in the drawer model. The ability to colorize tweets matching keywords makes it easier to pick out tweets on high priority topics.    As a photographer, I appreciate the ability to display pictures without going all the way to the browser.    I do wish there was a way to get some kind of preview of those pictures right in the tweet stream.   Echofon does this clever thing where it combines “rapid-fire” tweets from the same person.   This seems to work really well, and the visual cue is definitely helpful.  

Looking at the tweet authoring side,  I love the “retweet with comment” option.   One reason that I stopped commenting on retweets was that it was annoying to do it.  No more.   Echofon can tab complete Twitter id’s when @replying or direct messaging.    I still wish for a direct message “rolodex” – there are some people who have hard to remember Twitter id’s.   bit.ly is my preferred URL shortener because of the analytics, but you have to be logged in to bit.ly in order for that to work well.   Fortunately Echofon is able to log into bit.ly accounts so that your analytics work.

In theory, I like the idea of an Echofon ecosystem that syncs the desktop and mobile clients.   I haven’t tried this yet because I have iPhone Twitter client fatigue, and because as much as I like Echofon, there are some issues that make it hard for me to switch over.

The first of these issues is that Echofon won’t hold all of the tweets that happen overnight.  It looks like Echofon will hold about 5 hours of tweets before it starts to drop them on the floor.  There go some of those European tweets.

The next big issue is that marking read/unread doesn’t work for me.  If I am scrolling up through my home tweets and I hit the top, everything gets marked read.   It’s easy to do that by accident.   Switching to the @, DM, or search tabs also marks my home tweets as all read, and that doesn’t work for me at all.

Compared to those two issues, everything else is just nits, but here goes, just to be complete.   Echofon doesn’t display absolute time or real names.    Also, Echofon doesn’t let you search your home tweets.

Wild and crazy wishes

Certain URL shortening services (su.pr and ow.ly come to mind) wrap the page in a header bar, which is annoying.  I’d love if my client would route through those services so that the URL that I got in the browser was the actual content.

Sometimes there are links that are retweeted a bunch.   I would love it if a client could compress all those retweets into a single entry which showed how many / which people I follow retweeted a link, along with an indication of whether or not I had already “read” an earlier retweeter (which would mean I had already read the link).

I guess I’ll have to do another version of this post when Tweetie 2 for Mac finally ships.   Or maybe it’s still early enough for some of these ideas to make the cut.

 

On Twitter Data

Published on May 26, 2009 in internet. 3 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve been getting various kinds of private communication about this, so it’s probably worth some commentary…

For some time now, I’ve been wondering when someone would start to use systems like Twitter as a way to deliver information between programs. A few weeks ago, Todd Fast, a colleague at Sun gave me a preview of what is now the Twitter Data proposal. Todd and Jiri Kopsa have done all the heavy lifting on this, so if you have substantive comments or requests, they are really the people you should be dealing with. They were kind enough to recognize me as a reviewer of their work, but the initial idea is theirs.

Twitter Data is a bit different than what I was envisioning. I was thinking more along the lines of jamming JSON or XML data into a Twitter message as a starting point for program level data exchange. That would allow us to leverage existing tools and libraries and make the entire thing straight forward. The interesting part, then, would be in the distribution network that arose from programs following other programs. This could also be embedded into a person’s Twitter feed by allowing clients to ignore tweet payloads that were structured data.

Twitter Data proposes a way to annotate the data oriented parts of a regular Tweet in order to make it easier for machines to extract the data. Some people think this is a good idea, and some people think it’s a terrible idea. It’s easy to see the arguments on both sides. Pro, is that you could turn your Tweet stream into a way to deliver information about you to programs, and that Twitter Data would make it that much easier to do. The Cons (that I’ve seen so far) are that people don’t want to have this kind of data exchange mixed into their Twitter stream, or that parsing the natural language that appears in the 140 characters of a tweet shouldn’t be that hard.

So we have two dimensions (at least) to the problem that Twitter Data is trying to address:

  1. Is it a useful thing to have structured or semi structured information about a person included in their Twitter feed?
  2. If so, should that data be out of band, mixed in, or extracted (natural language processing)?

Independent of the merits of the specific Twittter Data proposal (and I definitely think that there are merits), I think that these two questions are worth some discussion and pondering.

Why I finally believe in hashtags

Published on April 25, 2009 in community, internet and tools. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now, but I’ve never really used hashtags much. I’ve never been much for doing the stuff it takes to get a highly promoted blog or twitter stream. I figure that if my content is worthwhile, that should be enough. At PyCon I found the compelling hashtag use case for me.

There were a lot of people using hashtags in their PyCon tweets, and Jacob Kaplan-Moss showed me Twitterfall, which made it easy to keep track of uses of the tag. That made it *much* easier to find the virtual twitter stream for PyCon. This was also true at Lang.NET, the DSL DevCon, and the MySQL conference. This week(end) I’ll be using hashtags to track the progress of JSConf.   From now on I’ll always use hashtags when I’m at a conference or event.

One reason that it’s taken me so long to get the hash tag thing is that I use Twitter primarily via rich desktop (or iPhone) clients. Until recently I wasn’t using clients that could do searching. I had tried TweetDeck, and it never stayed with me. When Nambu came along, I was pretty enthusiastic because it was a native TweetDeck. Unfortunately, I had crashing problems with it at Lang.Net (since fixed, I think), and I put it aside when I realized that Syrinx 2.0 had searches. While Syrinx doesn’t save searches across restarts, its memory use is tolerable enough to leave it running all the time, so it’s not a big problem, and I am hopeful that MRR will include saved searches in a future version. Commenters: yes, I tried Tweetie for Mac, and I didn’t like it. I love Tweetie for iPhone, though. Go figure.

Lifestreaming, round 2

Published on March 23, 2009 in internet, iPhone and Macintosh. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Macintosh

MRR Software has released a beta of Syrinx 2.0 just in time for PyCon this week (or ApacheCon EU or EclipseCon, if you are at one of those events). My biggest complaint with Syrinx 1.0 was that it was using up a lot of memory and CPU. That’s totally fixed in Syrinx 2.0. I’ve left Syrinx running for over a day with very little discernable growth in memory. I used to have to restart it several times a day. Scrolling and searching are both much faster as well. Retweet and URL shortening have been added, which pretty much takes care of me featurewise, although I’d like a retweet button in the button bar of a tweet, and I’d prefer bit.ly as the URL shortening service. Minor complaints to be sure. The last UI issue for me is that Syrinx 2.0 now expands the current tweet from it’s slightly compressed list element version. This is a problem for tweets that contain links (the best kind), because you have to click once to zoom the tweet, and then click again to open the link. I know that MRR is working on this one.

iPhone

Several week ago I also switch my iPhone client from Twitterific to Tweetie. I love everything about Tweetie except for 2 things:

1. Tweetie goes to the network all the time. This wouldn’t be a problem if iPhone latency was just a bit better.

2. I don’t like the way the Tweetie segments replies and direct messages. I like having tabs to see just those things, but I don’t like it that they no longer appear in the main view. Syrinx is doing it the way that I prefer.

My favorite features about Tweetie are:

1. Network lag aside, Tweetie is speedy.

2. The swipe actions, particularly favorites – I now favorite a lot more. This saves me from losing tweets with interesting links when I am in a hurry. I fave them on the phone and then read the faves from the desktop.

3. Instapaper support. I’m glad this is here, but I use it less than I thought I would, because of favorites

4. The landscape mode keyboard – This is taking some getting used to, but it’s good practice for iPhone 3.0

5. Ability to say how many tweets to load – good for making sure you don’t miss anything

6. Retweeting – too bad it doesn’t fit in the swipe bars.

There’s still no direct message rolodex, something that I am sure I will be wishing for this week at PyCon.   

At least I’ll be well armed for the next few months, where I’ll be at a number of conferences.