Disqus - Latest Comments for Edward Vielmetti

Re: Caught in Comcast's gears (Scripting News)

Edward Vielmetti — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:23:40 -0000

comcastrophe.

don't like it? run your own damn wires. keeping wires working is hard work.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Edward Vielmetti — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:11:32 -0000

good idea dave.

for travel planning I'd expect that you'd want to alert when the train is almost in Berkeley; I don't know what the almost metric is - it would depend on where you are - but knowing that the train is 10 or 15 minutes away so that you can hoof it is perhaps more usable on the street than knowing that it just left.

Re: Why was yesterday a Blue Thursday? (Scripting News)

Edward Vielmetti — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:43:42 -0000

Thursday was fine here Dave - I had my usual Thursday lunch w/26 people (just like the Thursday breakfast at Saul's) and people seemed to be in a good mood.

Re: Twitter API for the social graph (Scripting News)

Edward Vielmetti — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:09:37 -0000

Dave, I've changed my twitter name (from @edwardvielmetti to @vielmetti) because it made it more possible to have people type in the handle in finite time. It would have been a real drag to start over again from zero.

Re: The best way to read the NY Times (Scripting News)

Edward Vielmetti — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:57:22 -0000

If it was a teletype, Dave -

you wouldn't have to click on anything, just read
the teletype would ding when there was a breaking story
you could read lots of drafts of a breaking story in progress as they went on the wire
there would be periods of inactivity when you could ignore it
when there was news, you could hear that there was news by the sound of the teletype

Re: Breaking: Amazon Is Down For The Count

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:32:32 -0000

down at 2:31p Eastern.

Re: Google and the wires torpedo newspapers

Edward Vielmetti — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 07:53:26 -0000

This will only be good for newspapers like the Marquette (MI) Mining Journal who regularly write original local reporting for their area and don't rely on wire service filler copy to pad out their online pages.

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:16:43 -0000

twas ever thus; lots of people quit Usenet in a huff back in the day, with a grand exit and burning of bridges and retreat to closed networks.

"old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill"

Re: Can Your Programming Language Do MapReduce?

Edward Vielmetti — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:18:01 -0000

Phil -

The Hadoop implementation of MapReduce has a "Hadoop Streaming" piece that lets you use Unix shell scripts as the mapper and as the reducer in your code. I'm sure you take a performance hit, but as a way to start to think about taking dusty shell scripts and distributing them widely it's very intriguing.

Re: Andreessen’s Ning unveiled

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 17:22:41 -0000

My first reaction, not knowing that this was an Andreesen site, was "gee, these apps are derivative". Come on, Bulldogster? And how many applications do we actually need to tell us about restaurants in Palo Alto?

Re: Andreessen’s Ning unveiled

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 21:16:05 -0000

It's not just that the initial example apps are derivative and really don't show off any real new ideas. I'd give you plenty of leeway for building an application framework that made it possible or easy to recreate (or may rip off) hot or not or catster or what have you.

Not only are the example apps derivative but they're also way incomplete - restaurant reviews that let you enter restaurant locations but not edit them, one example.

But what's inside is (just) PHP!?! And not PHP with some IDE grafted onto it so that you could build new apps interactively or with some spiffy something (anything) on top. Nope, looks like plain old PHP with yet another applications framework to learn, and a small library of syntactic sugar so that 14 lines of PHP becomes 4 lines of Ning. The only thing resembling code sharing and community building of knowlege about how the system works is "clone this site", which means 6 or 9 or 12 months from now I can just imagine the spaghetti of minifeatures scattered all over the system without much in the way of ownership to guide them.

I really don't know who you think will jump onto this bandwagon. I know it's hot, and it will probably melt the ice sculptures at Web 2.0. I wish you luck.

Re: Blaine Cook leaves Twitter, takes the service with him

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:06:14 -0000

you guys have a short memory, don't you? yes you do.

blogger was similarly unreliable back in the day. it was awesome, and it sucked sometimes, but we loved it. (and it got a lot more reliable when it was swallowed up by the goog, but then you started to notice some of its limits).

systems that are up 99.999% of the time are quite simply boring. they disappear into the infrastructure, and there are no infrastructure heroes. twitter is no where near the boring stage, and so it should be expected to have some downtime, just so that people who are content with a 4 8s of reliability instead of 5 9s can do creative and fascinating things just to see if they can't do it.

Re: In the News…

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:27:39 -0000

Congratulations Todd!

Re: Unringing The Bell: Traction, ReTraction and Zero-Response Time

Edward Vielmetti — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:13:14 -0000

uh, hooray for the echo chamber?

it's deafening in here, between the sound of acorns banging on the roof and the caribou tramping going on.

Re: jon steinberg - Major kudos to balsamiq. Such a great prototyping...

Edward Vielmetti — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:13:45 -0000

the only thing I can imagine easier would be a twitter ui for this; e.g.

d twittertise at 8/29/09 8:43am happy birthday mom

however you'd still need the full screen UI for cases where the url was too long and the post was too long to fit.

Re: HowTo: River2 is a fresh start

Edward Vielmetti — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:41:54 -0000

Dave -

Trying to load http://annarbor.com/rss.xml and getting an error

Poorly formed XML text, we were expecting a tag. (At character #302.)

It looks like that page is a redirect to http://www.annarbor.com/rss.xml so I changed the URL and everything is hunky-dory, but you might throw on some low priority list the redirect handler.

Re: HowTo: River2 is a fresh start

Edward Vielmetti — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:50:48 -0000

500 Server Error

Can't target "prefs" because it doesn't specify a window.

when I hit http://127.0.0.1:5337/river2/prefs

Re: HowTo: River2 is a fresh start

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:08:00 -0000

There's some kind of Unicode handling that's not right; here's a piece from the Guardian

Oliver Stone: The truth about Ch√°vez. South of the Border is Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone's record of a trip to Venezuela to meet the president, Hugo Ch√°vez. Ahead of the film's premiere at the Venice film festival on Monday, Stone writes about his hopes for the film, and the future of US foreign policy in...

on this feed entry

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/03/oliv...

from here

http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/rss

Re: Fire Resources

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:00:29 -0000

I have a big collection of links including blog, twitter, radio, television, maps etc here:

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/11/san...

thanks

Re: How NOT to calculate ad revenue

Edward Vielmetti — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:32:55 -0000

ah, so the overwhelming assumption here is that you have too many page views and not enough good advertising to fill them, so you have to slot in crappy advertising to fill the holes, and maybe you'd be better off running PSAs or white space or attractive blocks of color or in-house t-shirt ads instead of the crappy ads just to make sure the crappy ones don't crowd out the good ones you really want to sell.

what's a friend worth if they don't click on your ad?

Re: Expressive Capital

Edward Vielmetti — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 21:11:44 -0000

hmm hmm hmm.

When I think about this, I think about people who have intense relationships with the tools they use to write - the fountain pen folks who wax lyrical in longhand about the tools they use, the guy in Japan who has found the exact brand of quadrille index cards to take notes on, and the some-time legion of Moleskine toting hipsters.

The bit of expressive capital that I sometimes have in my possession is the postcard with exactly the right image on the opposite side, so that the person who gets the card gets not just my message but the full impact of the picture too. (And of course the card is hand written and timed perfectly and worth keeping).

Nice catch.

Re: Sold Out! 10 million in 10 weeks

Edward Vielmetti — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:25:40 -0000

The fun thing about these patterns are that they are really, really old - I recognize at least a few of these behaviors from 198x Usenet (except of course with a lot more lag in the system).

The "deceptive navigation" pattern is the only worrisome one; what you are asserting is that successful applications consistently have a call to action that violates a user assumption about the nature of the interaction. I suspect that the non-Facebook best equivalent to that is the "click to accept license agreement that I didn't read".

Re: Top 15 Google Street View Sightings

Edward Vielmetti — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:23:47 -0000

Yahoo advertisement in Times Square:

http://flickr.com/photos/edward-vielmetti/52418...

Re: 2007/10/24/facebook-blackberry/

Edward Vielmetti — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:57:51 -0000

"sorry, your wireless sevice provider does not allow access to Facebook for your device" t-mobile 7100t wtf?

Re: 2008/06/02/gary-vaynerchuk/

Edward Vielmetti — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:17:33 -0000

If you forget a birthday, it's because your automated birthday-reminder systems aren't sufficiently finely tuned!

Re: 2008/06/02/goosh/

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:29:39 -0000

The API you are looking for is Jose Nazario's duckylib:

http://monkey.org/~jose/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:d...

which has a (real) command line interface and python bindings to a lot of web services.

Re: Outlining in MarsEdit

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 12:50:35 -0000

Thanks for the link Bill. I am happy to use new tools periodically for the very reason that the tools are new and that they by virtue of being new tweak new neurons in your brain to fire.

This is one of the reasons I switch back and forth from one piece of software to another and from small-format paper to large-format paper etc etc, just to make sure that things are different once in a while.

Re: Ed Vielmetti on 10 Things You Need To Know When You Start Your Next Blog

Edward Vielmetti — Thu, 03 May 2007 07:52:39 -0000

Thanks for the point of comparision, Bill - I'm sure I had read that some time before, and it's good to put the two side by side.

I'm totally confident in the "audience of one" approach to blogging, that's so much easier to put into your mind when writing than trying to put something together that a zillion people might or might not see.

Re: BSG Corners: A theory

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:52:00 -0000

bsg corners on a bookshelf:

http://ziemkowski.livejournal.com/262486.html

Re: BSG Corners: A theory

Edward Vielmetti — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:08:37 -0000

Google Adsense just announced a few new options for rounded corners in various forms of roundedness.

You will know that Web 3.0 has arrived when Adsense has a BSG corners option.

arrrr,

Ed

Re: Justice has a Call Number…

Edward Vielmetti — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:51:43 -0000

awesome!

Re: Can NOT participating in communities = Participation

Edward Vielmetti — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:12:47 -0000

Sean -

I'm always amazed at how organizations don't even listen to the people coming to their own web site (never mind conversations out in the wild). For most groups a steady and regular review of search keywords that bring people to them is an enlightening experience, esp. relative to the rank that they have for that term.

e.g. the manufacturer for whom terms related to "parts" got a substantial amount of traffic, but where their web site was on page 5 for search results for those terms - put two and two together and determine quickly that the relevant discussion is happening elsewhere.

Re: Twitter Needs an Offline Mode and an Open Client

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:16:35 -0000

When Twitter is down, I write down messages on a piece of paper until the urge passes. Most of the time the paper can be discarded.

Re: The Real Power of Personal Branding

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:46:59 -0000

Chris, I hope you're not saying "be a one trick pony", with some kind of undiluted personal brand that is so strong that people have a hard time seeing that there's a human being (with imperfections and foibles and uncertainties) hiding under that.

Frankly, I find the whole branding exercise to be faintly odious, as if I were being ask to construct myself as a new line of dish detergent ("now with ajax cleaning power"). I'm afraid that you are leading down a path toward manufactured authenticity, of calculated improvisation, of making yourself be easily digested into 140 characters and translated into HTML. I'm sorry, personal identity is a lot more complex than that.

Re: It’s the users, not the technology

Edward Vielmetti — Wed, 16 May 2007 11:56:27 -0000

Twitter already has a Jabber interface; that's the Google Talk IM interface to it.

If you have a Jabber client on your mobile phone, you can use Twitter from there and not pay per-message SMS charges.

As for the cost of replicating Twitter, there are a number of existence proofs for the ease of doing it; e.g. wamadu.de (a German language version). That one doesn't have every last feature mimicked, but it's close enough to be easily recognizable.

Re: Why I Unfollowed 45,000 People On Twitter

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:14:36 -0000

I did the same kind of thing last fall, and wrote about it as "twitter zero"

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/10/twi...

sadly I've backslid and now am back up to following a thousand people, which is harder to do than following zero people.

Re: Ideas triggered by Amazon buying Lexcycle

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:27:38 -0000

"allaboutthebookyouwant.com" can be similar to isbn.nu

"We offer a quick way to compare the prices of any in-print and many out-of-print books at over a dozen online bookstores. You can view the results with or without the shipping costs of a single book, and also find the fastest source for a book from ordering to delivery."

Lots of room for innovation in this world, especially if you come from the library (and not bookstore) world and can extend these resources to inter-library loan, netflix-style queued library checkouts, or even locate in a friend's library.

Re: Twitter: Show Me Added Value if You Want Me to Pay

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:23:15 -0000

Sell to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Comcast, NBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, or some other network.

The Blogger story is instructive; that system was never monetized in any meaningful way before Google bought it up. (and the Twitter history of intermittent downtime is eerily familiar to anyone who went through Blogger's early days).